The ‘Dance at Bougival,’ a masterwork by renowned artist Pierre-Auguste Renoir remains my favorite impressionist painting. I adore its intimacy, its romantic, dreamy representation. I also love Renoir’s equally remarkable work, ‘Blue and Rose.’ Painted in 1891, it’s a vivid portrait of two cherubic Jewish sisters, Alice 5 and Elizabeth 7 daughters of Louise and Louis Cahen D’Anvers the fabulously affluent, French banking family. The artist’s work however conceals far more than it reveals. Renoir was a “staunch, outspoken antisemite”. One of the girls in the portraits was eventually murdered in Auschwitz.

The House of Fragile Things, an unputdownanble work by author/historian James McAuley is a fascinating account of Jewish aristocracy, outlandishly wealthy, fervidly patriotic, Jews in 19th century France during the period known as La Belle Époque.” The eponymous “Israelites,” ---the Rothschild’s, the Camondos, the Cahen D’Anvers and the Reinachs --- all had a profound affinity for collecting French “objects d’art.” In particular they glorified the pre-revolutionary French past, collecting objects belonging close to Marie Antoinette, Madame Pompadour and all those “Louis” in the “ancien regime” the “old order“ that lasted from the 15th to the late 18th centuries.

Though the Jewish families were long established citizens of France, they incurred severe hostility earning the enmity from many critics to whom they remained foreigners, “inauthentically French,” forever ersatz. Author McAuley suggests the acrimony hurled toward these privileged families foretold the fate of 76,000 other French Jews less than a century later.

Ironically, the families had long, “ceased to think of themselves as Jewish in any significant way,” their Judaism had eroded to the point many converted, several intermarried. Their sole religion was France. Their sons fought and died for the Republic. All held sacred the “myth of emancipation” the promise of equality for every French citizen. Their faith in their essential “Frenchness” never faltered.

With the rise of nationalism, years before the scandalous Dreyfus affair, objects of French heritage became “imbued with national significance.” The Jewish families were attacked through the objects they collected, a phenomenon McAuley labels “material antisemitism.”

After a visit to a Rothschild “chateau”, art critic, Edmond de Goncourt, a vicious antisemite wrote, “it’s heartbreaking to find the harpsichord belonging to Marie Antoinette in Rothschild’s home” supporting his antisemitic canard, “Jews were unworthy custodians of the French material heritage.” Journalist Edouard Drumont, (some historians believe him to be “the intellectual precursor to Hitler,”) belittles the Jews writing in his vindictive screed La France Juive, “collecting French art is an act of Jewish violence and aggression.”

Why did the Jewish families continue to venerate the past? Would their collectables buy them social ascension, a sense of belonging? Was collecting, a retreat from their “illusion of power,” a physical connection to the past, a false “gilded” security? Today these very collections, donated to the state, glorify French museums and art galleries. Sadly, McAuley writes, “all that remains is the art,” a testament to the families’ patriotism but equally to the depth of their betrayal.