The Son of the Rabbi and His Daughter, Marriage at the Synagogue

The Jewish subjects depicted in Marriage at the Synagogue as well as in Dreamer of the Ghetto, painted the same year, represent anomalies within the oeuvre of the Christian artist Jacques Emile Blanche. Blanche, a wealthy society painter, traveled in the most sophisticated artistic, literary, and aristocratic circles in Paris, London, and Dieppe. His career is said to have begun in the company of Monet, Renoir, and Manet, and to have ended within the realm of the Bloomsbury set. Concentrating on portraits of these acquaintances in the bravura style of the French-based Italian Giovanni Boldini, his elite sitters included Proust, Henry James, Degas, Rodin, and Cocteau.

The depiction of the seemingly unsophisticated subjects in Marriage at the Synagogue is thus a radical departure from Blanche's usual interests. The sobriety of the father and daughter -- surprising for the joyous occasion indicated by the title -- their pale faces and the menacing guard who looms in the background add to the ambiguity of the scene. Their East European dress implies that they may be foreign-born and perhaps recent immigrants to France. While the two are hardly flattered by Blanche, the study is sympathetic and shows the artist's concern for his subjects' emotional state. It is possible that Blanche intended this as a social statement arising from French reactions to Hitler's rise to power. This could explain the guard's presence and the somber state of the protagonists. Hitler's racism and totalitarian regime had indeed greatly disturbed the artist. The year of this work witnessed the expulsion of three thousand foreigners from France and the establishment of new laws enforcing strict limitations on immigration. Blanche may also have been aware of the internal dissension among French Jews, which manifested itself in the way both Christians and Jews distinguished between the privileged status of native-born Israelites and the foreign-born Juifs.

Some of Blanche's ideas about Jews could have come in part from his intimate friendship with his next-door neighbors in Dieppe, the prominent Jewish family of the writer and librettist Ludovic Halévy. These Israelites, though known sympathizers with the plight of foreign Jewry, were themselves totally assimilated. (Their close friendship is chronicled in Degas's beautiful pastel, Six Amis à Dieppe, which includes among others, Ludovic and Daniel Halévy and Blanche.) Yet Blanche's own writings reveal a duality in his reactions to Jews. On the one hand, he considered them inbred and made negative mention of what he perceived as the Jewish manipulation of the art market; on the other, he regarded the large number of Jews in the Parisian art world at the time as a vigorous and noteworthy development.