Jews, modernity, and the fiction of Ben-Levi

This article presents the work of Ben-Levi [pseud. Godchaux Weil, 1806-1878], who published a series of short stories in the Archives Israeites de France, the leading French Jewish newspaper, during the 1840s. One of the first Jews to write fiction in French, Ben-Levi offers a portrait of a community caught between tradition and progress. Combining the "realist" literary codes of Balzac with the "idealist" codes of Sand, his stories hold up a critical mirror to the assimilating Jewish bourgeoisie of the era and show how a reformed Judaism could help resolve the dilemmas of modernity. Ben-Levi's forgotten fictions reveal the agency and creativity of nineteenth-century French Jews in the face of momentous social change while also demonstrating the versatility of French literary models.