Marcel Proust the Jew Norman Simms Gaby Levin in Haaretz (5 May 2022) discusses a new book and an associated exhibition on the question of how Jewish was Marcel Proust. “How Being Jewish Changed Proust’s Life” seems a strange way to entitle the review, as though he were not partly Jewish through his mother all his life. Though baptized as Catholic, this did not seem to be highly influential, nor the fact that he was a homosexual. That was what he was. He belonged to a family of the upper middle--class, associated with salon habitués, knew a fair number of Jewish intellectuals, and, when Zola’s J’accuse appeared, he had no hesitation in joining fellow writers and artists (Jewish and not Jewish) in signing a petition calling for a retrial of the Jewish officer found guilty of treason. Without having access to the book under review, Antoine Compagnon, Proust du cote juif (Paris: Gallimard, 2022) and the exhibition at the Jewish Museum curated by Isabelle Cahn in Paris, it is not proper for me to comment on either, outside of what Gaby Levin writes. She has interviewed other Proustian experts in Paris (Natalie Mauriac Dyer) and Israel (Helit Yeshurin), and has access to other books, documents and exhibitions which I, of course, do not have. But it seems to me, looking at this distance, and after my own work on Proust and Dreyfus as well as other Jewish figures in France and elsewhere in Europe of the same period, that what Levin reports rings true. Marcel Proust was a secular man, didn’t care for religion as such, and was concerned in forging a new kind of fictional style that probed the nature of psychology and aesthetics, and especially the role of memory in modern consciousness. I do not find any reference in the review, though it might be there in the book an the Jewish Museum’s displays and catalogue, that Proust was influenced by rabbinical modes of storytelling and commentary, especially Talmud and Midrash. My own reading of A la recherché du temps perdu (In Search of or Rec90v erring Lost Time) suggested that he was aware of these modes of discourse. There certainly were French translations available and there were journals devoted to Jewish history and culture. In recent years, too, some scholars have looked at the influences of such Jewish stories of writing. That the great scven-volume novel has key characters based on Jewish people in his life—Swann, Marcel’s mother and grandmother—make sense if the author was aware of their Jewishness, no matter how assimilated they may have seemed; and he respects them, even while some minor figures come in for satirical effect in their supposedly typical lower middle class materialism and lack of refinement. He certainly also knew that assimilation, even conversion, was no protection for the anti-Semitism that was not only alive and well in fin-de-siècle Paris, but that would become more virulent in the next few decades. So rather than the question in implied in the title as to whether Judaism changed Proust’s life, we offer two alternative responses, since the fact that he was born half-Jewish did not change but made his life. .In the first case, what did change his life was the onset of acute asthma; it caused him do his best writing in a cork-lined chamber, sitting up in bed all night. In the second, the terms should probably be reversed and one should ask how Proust changed Europe’s modern self. Where would modern literature be without Marcel Proust and his fellow Jewish writers Franz Kafka, Albert Cohen and Elias Cannetti, let alone without Karl Marx, Albert Einstein and Aby Warburg?