Identità ebraica e altri sconfinamenti: categorie sociali e ‘doppia appartenenza’ nella Recherche proustiana

Beyond its extensive presence in literature, the myth of the Wandering Jew can also be understood as a combination of symbolic elements shedding light on peculiar aspects of Jewish identity in European culture. This paper will focus on the representation of Judaism in Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913-1927), in which both assimilated Judaism and anti-Semitic prejudice are the subject of extensive consideration and in-depth analysis. The theoretical tools of Harvey Sacks’s Membership Categorization Analysis are used to interpret Jewish identity as a case of ‘double categorial ascription’. Sacks’s key concepts help analytically understand some distinctive traits that Jewishness shares with other stigmatized identities, homosexuality in particular. The momentous role that Jewishness and homosexuality play in Proust’s novel also allows to grasp their deep symbolic implications: the main argument shows how ‘double belonging’, besides entailing the stigma of ambiguous, hence unreliable identity, is also the ideal starting point for existential redemption through art.