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Leora Auslander
Thus, the Marais in the center of Paris, the faubourg Saint Antoine to the east, and
Belleville to the northeast were home to many immigrants from Eastern Europe,
the ninth arrondissement had a large Sephardi population, the Latin quarter was
the choice of many Jewish intellectuals, while bankers tended to live in the wealthy
districts and suburbs to the west. Their dwellings ranged from the smallest and
dingiest of rented rooms to the most splendid of family mansions. These homes
were, of course, filled with an equally wide range of quality and quantity of
furnishings, clothing, musical instruments, paintings, sculpture, china, silverware,
and linen. There was, however, one striking similarity among these interiors.
The vast majority of Parisian Jews lived in emphatically French interiors.
Whether the choice was historicist pastiche – Louis XIII, Henri II, Louis XIV,
Louis XV, Louis XVI, or Empire – or real antiques, or modernist design, Parisian
Jews most often bought, sat at, slept in, and ate at furniture both made in France
and understood to represent their Frenchness. M. Roger Kahn, for example, who
lived in the nineteenth arrondissement, described his dining room as having been
furnished with a dining-room set in dark oak, in the Renaissance style, copied from
some of the furniture in the Musée Cluny. 20 This very ornate, heavily carved,
marble-surfaced set was given a firm location in the French past. The Musée Cluny
was (and is) the French national museum of the Middle Ages, and holds any
number of French national icons. Specifying that his dining-room set had been
based on an object in the Cluny, helped ground M. Kahn firmly in the French past.
Since the nineteenth arrondissement was a poor neighborhood heavily settled by
Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, M. Kahn may have been all the more
eager (whether consciously or not) to assert a connection to the French past in his
everyday life. It would, however, be wrong to imply that it was only those who
feared to be taken for an immigrant or who lived in a less-wealthy neighborhood
who chose French historicist furnishings. It was the style of choice for the vast
majority. For example, the wealthy household of M. and Mme Maurice Kron was
furnished in a combination of antique and historicist furniture and objets. Along
with a number of pieces identified as actually dating from the period of the
transition from Louis XV to Louis XVI, they had owned a living-room set made
in the appropriate style by the important Parisian manufacturer, Krieger. 21
Some furniture was given a spatial rather than temporal location in French
history. People who had migrated to Paris (or whose parents had migrated) from
elsewhere in France would often bring a reminder or two of their provincial
attachments with them. Furthermore, certain regions were known for cabinetwork
and for certain pieces. Normandy was held to produce superior wardrobes, while
Brittany was famous for sideboards. The late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries had, furthermore, seen a revival of regionalism and a new interest in
“folk” craft, producing a new market for both new and old products of France’s
provinces. Parisian Jews shared this taste for sprinkling the occasional provincial
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