ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that once Marcel Proust discovered the adequate means of treating Jewishness in his writing, Proust entered the time of La Recherche. Yet Proust makes the subject of assimilation and anti-Semitism, and the questioning of Jewish identity that they imply, one of the bases of his work. It is important to point out that for Proust the treatment of Jewish identity as a literary object was truly a terra incognita, a strange object, new in French literature. Proust's new contribution was to portray his Jewish characters with the goal of neither stigmatizing nor embellishing them, but rather of understanding and showing through them the difficulty of being Jewish or of Jewish origin in French society. When Proust makes Swann, and not someone else, give the young Narrator the engraving, and thus makes him think of Abraham, he conveys the representation of absolute paternal authority.
