Rose and Salomon Reinach and that Certain Special Something (Part 3 of 4)

Part 1, Part 2, Part 4

by Norman Simms (July 2018)

Professeurs de la faculté de médicine (Professors of the Faculty of Medicine), Adrien Barrère, 1904

She was a convalescent from smallpox—a disease whose prevalence at that period was a terror of which we at present can hardly form a conception.[1]

Reading Uterine Space

Perhaps the title of her thesis is a clue to the marriage of Rose and Salomon Reinach, their attitude to each other, and how they faced the increasingly hostile world as Jews. Contribution à l’étude Variole contractée par le fœtus dans la cavité uterine (Contribution to the Study of Smallpox Contracted by the Fœtus in the Uterine Cavity).[2] Rose Margoulieff may have been guided toward this topic of particular interest as a young woman who may already know that her future did not lie in motherhood or out of a concern for caring for the health of women who did have to confront the possibility of infecting their future infants with smallpox. In fact, the question of whether the disease (sometimes known as the “speckled monster”)[3] passed directly or indirectly from the maternal system into the organism of the foetus and its placenta seems to be one of the underlying questions in this study. The new germ theory proposed by Louis Pasteur as the origins of disease was still being tested, and it was not clear whether if the mother were stricken with it the child would be as well; and whether even if both mother and child had the disease it was the same specific type and developed in the same way. At the heart of the thesis, after what is called a review of earlier work in the field, Rose offers a series of specific cases which she has observed and meticulously recorded, at the very least under the nominal supervision of one of the doctors, such as Jean-Martin Charcot. Using variations on the passive voice—on a fait (it was done), nous avons vu (we have seen)—she maintains her objectivity, but not her distance, as the tiniest details indicate her interest both in the disease and in the patients.

If we read this thesis closely and are alert to nuances of personal interest in the condition of the mother and the foetus, as well as any other indications of something beyond the objective observations of a scientist—and of a student seeking to prove her knowledge and skills to those who would grant her the degree she sought—we may be able to extrapolate some qualities of her personality. In addition, as smallpox was known as “the Jewish disease,”[4] what Rose wrote about it and how she compiled her thesis may also give us hints at her attitudes toward Judaism, Jewishness and herself as a Jewish woman. After all, with one exception to be discussed in the last essay in this series, Madame Reinach has left virtually no other written record of her feelings and thoughts.

In her acknowledgment of thanks to her teachers and mentors in the faculty of Medicine, Rose gives attention to

notre excellent maître, M. Budin. C’est à sa libéralité que nous devons les observations originales qui sont la raison de notre thèse; nous ne saurions trop le remercier de sa bienveillance à notre égard, ainsi que de ses remarquables leçons à la clinique de la faculté quand nous avons en l’honneur d’être son élevé.[5]

our excellent teacher, M. Budin. It is to his liberality that we owe the original observations which are the basis of our thesis. We cannot thank him enough for his generosity to us, as well as for the excellent lessons at the faculty clinic when we had the honour of being his student.

Though the language is formal and formulaic, there is also a sense of sincere appreciation for Pierre-Constant Budin (1846-1907) Professor of Obstetrics and one of the founders of modern perinatal care, as well as a promoter of proper domestic hygiene and midwifery in Paris. His concern for her situation as one of the very few female students he would oversee at the faculty stands out.[6]

After a short list of other faculty members for whom Rose is thankful, she singles out Jean-Alfred Fournier (1831-1914), in highly flattering but still formulaic terms, and still subsuming herself in the “we” of her fellow students:

le professeur Fournier, pour les excellentes leçons qu’il nous a prodiguées et pour le grand honneur qu’il nous a fait en acceptant la présidence de cette thèse.[7]

Prof. Fournier, for his excellent lessons which he lavished on us and for the great honour that he gave in accepting the chairmanship of this thesis committee.

Fournier, one of the oldest researchers on the staff, was best known for his studies of syphilis and other sexually transmitted diseases.

Then Margoulieff thanks her friends, male and female, for their support, without giving any specifics as to who they are or in what way they aided her, though we may presume as a young foreigner in a strange city and as a rare female in the faculty, she may have well needed friendships and guidance of people her own age. That she may have felt in need of a different kind of help as a Jew in a time of rising anti-Semitism is for obvious reasons not stated in this document.

Que tous mes amis et amies qui m’ont aidé à faire mes études veuillent bien aussi recevoir le témoignage de ma vive reconnaissance et me meilleures remerciements.[8]

To all my friends, male and female, who helped me with my studies I wish them to also receive the witness of my sincere gratitude and thanks.

On the other hand, the very stiffness of expression—these are the memorized phrases one puts at the end of a business letter—and the lack of particular names may indicate a kind of ironic (if not sarcastic) comment on class-mates who were not very welcoming of this brilliant young girl from Odessa. Rose might have been off-putting herself, too, as a defence mechanism when she felt out-of-place and wary of the goyim in a time of danger. If she felt the coldness of the atmosphere at the university from her colleagues and from most of the professors, she may have welcomed the attention of the somewhat portly young man just a few years her senior who courted her and offered her a place in one of the great middle-class Jewish families of Paris. Rather than the voluble, effusive, overly emotional East European Jews that social historian Maurice Cuddihy imagines dominate the Ashkenazi stream of Judaism, Dr. Margoulieff may have remained cool and distant to most Parisians, except those that she and Salomon entertained at home. If Lucie Hadamard, when she married Alfred Dreyfus with all the quirks and faults in his personality, not only rose to the occasion when he was falsely arrested and shipped into perpetual exile,[9] but she drew on her own family’s rich Jewish heritage, both spiritually and culturally, to make a Mensch of him, a man who came to appreciate his own Jewish background and to enjoy literature, music, and the arts. Lucie Dreyfus, who had been somewhat shy and naïve when she married young and quickly had two infants, grew up under pressure to be the kind of wife and mother who could stand against a very hostile anti-Semitic world, presenting herself to government, judicial, and military officials on behalf of her incarcerated husband, while protecting her son and daughter from the dangers outside their door.

Rose’s thesis itself has a collection of case studies culled from a variety of sources published during the nineteenth century, most drawn from scientific journals written in French, but some in English, German and Italian. Not all the case studies are clearly dated. The most interesting, for our purposes, are those which come from doctors who she is associated with at the hospital, and often with whom she has either heard details, seen unpublished case notes, or observed while making ward rounds with them as a student. They are uneven in length and differ in style; all build up evidence of the main argument, that smallpox in the mother passes on to the foetus most of the time, and the contagion sometimes leads to death within the womb, to birth of a pustulous corpse, and more rarely to delayed onset of the disease days or weeks after what seems like a normal birth.

The discourse takes an objective position, using the various forms of on (one) or nous (we) to indicate the passive voice in French. Sometimes, however, the nous is ambiguous and thus may include Rose as a personal witness to the patients (mother and unborn foetus or neonate) and the progress of the illness. Rarely does the text have a more involved and more subjectively response in me (me or I) pointing to Rose as emotionally as well as professionally watching the disease run its course. The first time this happens is in Observation IX, but as that is credited to Dr. Chantreuil in the Gazette des hôpitaux, 1870, concerning a mother who gave birth to twins, it is also possible that the first person singular pronoun appeared in Rose’s source:

Le point intéressant de cette observation me parait être l’existence de pustules varioliques chez un des fœtus, et manquant complètement à la fois chez le jumeau et chez la mère.[10]

The interesting point about this observation seems to me to be the existence of smallpox pustules in one of the twins and its being at the time completely lacking in the other and in the mother.

As the text of Chantreuil’s report carries on with the normal “on peut” (one may) and “que nous venons de resumé” (that we just summed up), it may be that Rose did not notice the change in what she transcribes or, inadvertently, slipped in a personal remark in reaction to the evidence she is citing.

Almost immediately following, however, the thesis pulls back from this initial series of citations and paraphrases to sum up her work thus far: “Nous résumerons de la façon suivante les caractères essentiels de la variole du foetus…”[11] (We will now sum up the essential characteristics of smallpox in the foetus…). These remarks are her own extrapolation of generalizations possible but without absolute certainty, as these are the original contribution to the scientific community. This is where the examining committee will scrutinize her attitudes, methods and skills. 

The resumé leads up to a very interesting paragraph that serves as a transition into the second series of case studies, for this is where she seems to display her own subjective response, albeit cautiously and somewhat obliquely:

Mais, si la femme n’a pas la variole, quand le fœtus devient malade (comme dans l’observation que nous devons a M. Budin), ou si la mère n’a eu qu’une simple varioloïde (observation de M. Charcot) on voit les symptômes les plus graves se montrer chez la mère pendant la variole du fœtus, et l’on comprend à quel point le diagnostic peut s’égarer en pareil cas.[12]

But if the woman does not have smallpox when the fœtus becomes ill (as in the observation we owe to M. Budin, or if the mother only has a light smallpox-like condition (observation by M. Charcot), the most serious symptoms show themselves during the smallpox of the fœtus, and we can understand how the diagnosis can be led astray in such a case.

Here, citing two authorities who are close in time and place to her, Budin, her mentor at the faculty, and Charcot, the leading researcher at the hospital, Rose has to draw away from their conclusions cautiously, and she rationalizes their errors in diagnosis. What was taken in a strict sense as an either/or situation—the infected mother either does or does not pass on the disease to child in her womb and the foetus either does or does not become ill because the mother has smallpox—she takes as a more complex set of possibilities. Interestingly, as Rose ventures this critique of her superiors, she retreats into the formal one says/we say construct, instead of “I venture to conclude.”

In Observation X she marks the report on a woman who had smallpox during her pregnancy by Dr. Budin as “inédite” (unpublished), suggesting that she has been made privy to case notes or that he talked her through the details himself. As the report is dated to 1880, it is most unlikely she was a student when the female patient presented, or even had come to Paris yet. In the next two case studies, Rose also describes situations also in 1880 involving women treated at the hospital by doctors she is currently studying under, with another case from 1842 given at second or third hand. In these instances, Rose attempts to record more than the normal details recorded of the mother’s condition and the probable state of the fœtus, something not clear until there is an autopsy following an abortion, still birth, or death soon after parturition has occurred. The thesis begins to generate real or probable scenarios for the patient and her family: their marital status or lack thereof, the economic situation of the father, whether there are siblings to the affected infant, and when possible “d’un tempérament où prédomine évidemment le système nerveux,” (the temperament likely to be dominating the nervous system) in other words, the mother’s emotional and psychological state.[13]

These dramatic and emotional scenarios which contextualize the medical observations may or may not derive completely from Rose Margoulieff’s sources, but they are shaped and given special emphasis in her thesis. It seems not only important to know how many previous pregnancies or births the patient has experienced, or to list illnesses and injuries in her life time, but to take a more holistic (to insert an anachronistic term) interest in the presenting mother and her unborn child. The stage directions, as it were, can thus be specific as to the season, time of day, and meteorological conditions at the moment the patient appears in the hospital for treatment, and may sometimes record the woman’s running statements of what she feels as her condition worsens or begins to ameliorate over time. For example:

Au bout de cinq ou six jours de ce traitement, la malade se sent beaucoup mieux et pense déjà à sortir de l’hôpital. Ainsi la petite fièvre du soir avait diminué; les douleurs dans les reins et dans le bas-ventre avaient presque entièrement cesse, lorsque dans la nuit du 3 au 4 avril, la malade est réveillé tout à coup par une violence douleur siégeant au-dessus du pubis, douleur suivie presque aussitôt d’un écoulement assez abondant de sang par les partis génitales. Ces douleurs prennent bientôt le caractère de douleurs expultrices, et l’accouchement s’opère à une heure de l’après-midi le 4 avril.[14]

After five or six days of treatment, the patient felt herself much better and thought she was ready to leave the hospital. The light fever of the evening had diminished; the pains in her kidney and lower abdomen had almost entirely stopped, when suddenly during the night of 3-4 April, the patient was awakened by a violent pain located below her pubis, a pain followed almost at once by an abundant flow of blood from the genitals. These pains soon took the character of expulsive pains, and the birthing began at one o’clock in the afternoon of 4 April.

After several pages of closely-noted details of the condition of both mother and infant which have a similar sense of immediacy and emotional involvement with the event, Rose (following her source and her own inclinations) then turns to examine the smallpox itself, carrying on in this same excited vein:

Nous avons cherché à nous rendre compte de la composition anatomique de ces pustules. Voici ce à quoi nous sommes arrivé :

Si l’on enlevé l’épiderme de la périphérie de la pustule…[15]

We have sought to give an account of the anatomical composition of these pustules. Here is what we have arrived at:

If one lifts the epidermis of the periphery of the pustule . . .

Yet if the normalizing use of nous (“we”) sets Rose Margoulieff in the collective voice of the medical authorities she wishes to become herself, there are a few moments when it takes on a more personal note, when she places herself into an association (real or strategic) that offers protection against detractors:

Nous devons à l’obligeance de notre cher maître M. Budin, une observation des plus importantes a cet égard, et nous ne saurions trop le remercier d’avoir bien voulu s’en dessaisir en notre faveur.[16]

We must show our gratitude to our dear teacher M. Budin for one of the most important observations in this regard, and we don’t know how to thank him enough for sharing it to our advantage.

Then Rose adds as a transition into Observation XII (inédite):

Voici cette observation qui était rédigée avec les notes de l’interne du service, M. Buscarlet.[17]

Here is this observation which was released into our hands along with the notes of the service interne, M. Buscarlet.

The observation notes turn out to be as much a scenario describing the arrival of the patient, her treatment, and the eventual outcomes, as she is passed up the chain of command from one local doctor to another more senior physician, with each advising on the best care to be given, including directions on how a horse-drawn carriage should be arranged to transport the woman to hospital. The midwife notes a problem, calls in a local physician, who then has her taken to hospital, and then she eventually meets Dr. Buscarlot who takes charge. At that point, the narrative turns from the third person historical to the second person plural:

Quand nous la voyons à 3 heures ½, nous trouvons une femme pâle, les lèvres un peu décolorées, le pouls petit et assez fréquent, l’écoulement sanguin a cessé, le cordon très long présente à dix centimètres de l’orifice vulvaire un paquet de membranes emprisonnent un assez gros caillot, l’amnios[18] a donc été tiraille et décollé sur une assez grande étendue du cordon. Par la palpitation, nous sentons un utérus dur, rétracte, à deux travers de doigt au-dessous de l’ombilie et bien sur la ligne médiane.[19]

When we see her at 3:30, we find a pale woman, lips a slightly discoloured, pulse weak but rather fast. The blood flow had stopped, the cord very long and ran 10 cm from the vulva into a mass of membranes imprisoning a large clot, the amniotic sac being pulled apart through and come loose from for a lengthy section of the cord. By palpitation, we felt at two finger-breadths a hardened uterus, above the umbilicus and well into the median line.

Whether Rose Margoulieff as a medical student was actually there with the various doctors who examined the insides of the patient, or is distilling and paraphrasing the notes she has been allowed to peruse, she writes as though she were participating in the palpitating, insertion of fingers, and touching the internal organs of reproduction. Sympathy becomes empathy, and empathy dramatizes the encounter.

Maternal Feelings and Sexuality

Hermaphroditic Figure, Glozel and “The Hunter” (or “The Shaman”), Glozel[20]

Ever since it was discovered in 1924, Glozel has been a site of contention, and thus stands as point of disagreement over many matters, not only the usual scientific arguments over date, function, and place in prehistorical paradigms.[21] In particular, opponents who call the site a fraud and the objects found there forgeries and falsifications point to the varying dates assigned to the things found and the different parts of the site, the mixture of styles, materials and techniques used to carve, shape and model the assemblage, and almost go apoplectic at the kinds of scratches, lines and proto-alphabetic signs often inscribed on stone, bone and clay objects.[22] It was also alleged that the figures of hermaphrodites were patently false because they are unknown in any other prehistoric digs. “Dans le monde, on a trouvé aucun objet qui ressemble aux idoles bisexuelles de Glozel. ” (In the whole world no one has ever found anything like these bisexual idols of Glozel.) M. Sabète, in her study of ”Mythes de la fertilité [in Glozel],”[23] however, offers copious evidence that not only are there many such bisexual idols found across prehistoric Europe from Hungary to France, but also in a cluster of half dozen sites within walking distance of; and a variety of analogous types in Glozel, ranging from grotesque male/female genitalia shaped on a single object through statues and masks made in the form of a mebrum virile and scrotum with vulva and breasts also shown and on to symbolic representations of masculine and feminine features carved on to the bowls, fish-hooks, beads and pendants discovered in Glozel.[24]   

The most well-known example of the hermaphroditic icon appears in Renaissance depictions of Aphrodite rising from the sea, such as the painting by Sandro Botticelli. After Zeus emasculated his father Cronus, the ancient god’s genitalia fell into the sea, and out of the foam caused by this splash-down there appeared the goddess of beauty and fertility transformed from the original Father of the Gods’ organs of regeneration. Venus seems the archetypal Androgyne.

Other stories, as told by classical poets such as Ovid (for example, Salamacis and the Hermaphrodite in Book IV of Metamorphoses, or Caeneus and Caenis among the Lapiths in Book XII) and evidenced in the prevalence of the consolidation of female idols of Aphrodite/Venus and the masculine Hermes (a large block of stone with protruding phallus) to be found as boundary markers and apotropaic guardians at cross-roads, make the Hermaphrodite a familiar type in the ancient world. It is also noted in Roman travellers’ tales, anthropological collections of curiosities, and medical treatises as strange states of physical being—sacred doubleness (half and half, one plus one, radical otherness which may or may not cancel out any classification) of the genders, bisexuality, indetermination, confusion, and ambiguity in classificatory categories. In personal, intimate, and domestic life in the archaic and ancient worlds, the role of men and women could be specifically and definitively distinct and segregated, such as men in public affairs and women confined to the oikos or gynaceum, or there could be subtle blendings in different stages of life or under particular historical circumstances.

As we have noted, the marriage of Salomon Reinach to Rose Margoulieff created a strange mixing of fin de siècle types, with the husband’s fascination with the female company of aging lesbians and courtesans, and the wife’s childless status, her professional insistence on not specializing in women’s problems, and her role of Yiddisha Mama to the aging and weakening Salomon. There is also to be explored the bizarre matching of Reinach’s interest in the anthropology rather than the aesthetics of art history and young Margoulieff’s research into the aetiology of contagious diseases within the uterus. 

Art historian Remi Labreusse, commenting on a recent exhibition of carpets and carpet-making in European and Moroccan traditions, points to the need for the “viewer’s eye to look according to a centrifugal rather than a centripetal understanding,” adding that the “surface of the works ‘unlimits itself: [and] from now on, it unfolds in the space of the viewer.”[25] Such advice leads us closer to unpacking the problem of the certain special something between Rose and Salomon.

And then out of another seemingly un-attached context, though vaguely connected by location of shrines in Morocco, Henri Basset suggests how to examine the evidence and evaluate the difference between appearance and reality, surface and interior, conventional knowledge and special insight:  

Il y aurait d’ailleurs fort souvent impossibilité matérielle à pénétrer très loin dans la caverne, objet de la vénération populaire : elle peut être une petite excavation creusée dans une paroi rocheuse qu’elle n’existe pas du moins qu’elle apparaisse pas à nos yeux. Elle est article de foi, et cela suffit . . .[26]

Elsewhere it would be actually impossible to penetrate very far into the cave, the object of popular worship: it might be a very small excavation dug into a rocky area that could exist only in the mind’s eye. It is an article of faith. and that is sufficient . . .

It may be that in her thesis Rose Margoulieff actually assisted at two of the cases she described, although her years of training would have given her much more practical experience in human anatomy, observing patients as she followed the doctors on their rounds in the hospital, and beginning diagnoses and treatments under the supervision of her mentors. She certainly passed her medical degree and began her own private practice in Paris over the next few years. Though she did not specialize in women’s illnesses, and did not advertise herself as an obstetrician, she had more than enough knowledge and skill to probe the insides as well as the outsides of her patients. She knew that human bodies were places to be examined.

At the same time she emerged from the medical faculty with the title of doctor, there were others discovering the inner workings of the mind and the brain and the diseases that afflicted the persons inside those bodies. The mind is a space of feelings and thoughts, memories and dreams, speculations and suppressed ideas. Sometimes the more fanciful the other side of the mirror seems—the experience seems more insightful. Sometimes the more factual and material the experience the fewer points of contact with reality and reason. The term matrixial space has been developed by an Israeli-Belgian artist cum psychoanalyst, Bracha Ettinger, to designate a perspective on mind and brain development that goes beyond Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan to conceive of this place as one where emotional energies, memories of pre-verbal images and the creation of abstract ideas are not strictly separate stages. Rather, what Ettinger calls vibrating strings and throbbing threads of thought are stretched to their limits, intertwining, overlapping, even back-looping before they begin to pass through the border regions into regions beyond. Thus, there is also a whole new area of liminal tension and mutual influence, not one of hostility and violent competition.

Mare suckling her colt (top), Bone carving, Glozel and Decorated Bone Beads, Glozel

More than this, however, the notion of such a paradigm of mental growth—with stimulation and inhibition occurring in a Darwinian process of selection and re-creation—can have powerful metaphoric uses to imagine how symbolic languages are invented, social institutions founded, intellectual advances made. Robert Briffault, physician and novelist, as well as amateur anthropologist,[27] in the 1930s spoke of “uterine parentage” when discussing the matriarchal origins of civilization. “It is in the uterine family that the social organisation is based.”[28] The discoverers of the objects buried in Glozel saw in the drawings, carvings, and pottery figures a propensity to emphasize females as mothers and caring creators of culture and to stress scenes of birth and nurturance rather than hunting or warfare. Even ceramic statues of the male member indicate a post-coital relaxation instead of phallic aggression. Salomon Reinach was attracted to Glozel and remained a loyal supporter of young Emile Fradin against the slanderous attacks of his detractors in Paris. Professional integrity certainly drove Reinach to risk again his reputation to stand up for what he believed, not only in the sense of scientific consideration of the site at Glozel as prehistoric and not a fraud, but also his sense of Jewish justice and compassion for the unjustly accused and, let us add, a kind of paternal affection for the peasant lad, something we shall note later in Rose’s letters to young injured soldiers during the Great War.

Small beads with symbolic characters probably more for infants than for adult decorations, toy tools, and uselessly small weapons, miniature whistles and other musical instruments, all suggest that the site at Glozel was a place of education, a museum of domestic life, and a memorial to matriarchal society.

In other words, what was found at Glozel in 1924 and attracted so much attention and controversy was not just the bizarre mixture of objects dated to very distant time periods, or the strange alphabet-like markings on stones, etched on to reindeer horns and incised into clay figures, nor was it that the site lacked signs of habitation, the so-called tombs had neither very many human bones or funeral urns, and the tools, weapons, and other implements were useless in any practical sense because they were so small, like children’s toys or ritual offerings. Even more disturbing to the establishment in the Society of Inscriptions in Paris or the nearer universities in Cleremont-Ferrand and Lyons, was the fact (so it seemed) that the wrong people discovered the narrow chambers buried in the ground, claimed credit for the discovery, and made guesses as to what it all meant without the formal credentials to do so: Emil Fradin and his family of uneducated peasant farmers. Dr. Antonin Morlet, a fashionable physician in the spa town of Vichy and an amateur historian of the early Roman presence in the region. And Salomon Reinach, the Jewish outsider.

Secret Dreams and Enigmatic Smiles

Ce soir, comme j’étais allé passer une heure dans un café-concert, un acteur déguise en juif grotesque est venu débiter avec force gestes indécents une chanson obscène. Le public ne se tenait pas de joie, riait aux éclats, applaudissait avec transport. Cette farce grossière se répète tous les soirs, et c’est chaque fois le grand succès de la séance.[29]

Tonight, as I went out to pass an hour at a cafe-concert, an actor disguised as a grotesque Jew came to deliver with exaggerated indecent gestures an obscene song. The audience could not contain their mirth, exploded with laughter and wildly applauded. This gross farce is repeated every evening, and each time is the performance’s grand success.

In his two-volume Voyage en Orient (Voyage to the East), Joseph Reinach, who usually misses seeing or merely glances at the presence of the Jews in the places he visits—and for him “Orient” begins with a sail down the Danube, stops along the Bosporus, in Greece, the Adriatic coast and other spots in Ottoman Europe—this performance in a Bucharest nightclub seems worthy of his attention, not least because by the late 1870s the new model of racial anti-Semitism was beginning to made itself felt in Paris in novels, newspapers, and music halls. No wonder, then, Bucharest was known as “the little Paris of the east”! On this fact-finding mission associated with his position as an elected member of the National Assembly, when Joseph concludes his second volume with a final chapter on “La Question d’Orient en Orient” (The Question of the East in the East). On occasion he has seen Jews out of the corner of his eye, but they are strange and exotic people, not the kind he can identify with. Rather he sees things through the perspective of Christians in the region and with other Western travellers. The most explicitly Jewish reference in Chapter VII on the Oriental Question is a comparison between the lazy Greeks and other local groups to the New Testament figure of Lazarus who, when he came out of his tomb was harassed by the Pharisees, and yet “malgré eux, Lazare vecut et marche” (despite them, Lazar lives and walks).[30]

By the end of the century, the other two Reinach Brothers, Théodore and Salomon, who had joined in the Dreyfus cause, were involved in Jewish matters, from the Alliance universelle Israëlite through the Jewish Colonization Society and on to Herzl’s newly founded Zionist organization, as well as working with the Paris and French community’s charitable institutions and the intellectual agencies, such as the Revue des études juives. The least religious of the three brothers and the most vociferously anti-religious among them, Salomon seemed to care about Judaism rather than merely Jews and Jewishness, and went off-side with many of these groups because of his calls for internal reform of rabbinical beliefs and practices. Writing under various noms de plume, as well as in his own voice in his many articles and books, Salomon did not walk away from controversy—and never disavowed his principles. But did Rose, with whom he always remained loyal and supportive, agree with him or help him in these Jewish affairs?

(To be continued)

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NOTES

[1] Thomas Hardy, « The First Countess of Wessex », A Group of Noble Dames (1891) in The Melancholy Hussar and Other Stories (London: Collector’s Library, 2005) p. 263.

[2] Rose’s thesis is given passing notice by Francis A. Lynch in a review of previous studies to his “Dermatologic Conditions of the Fetus, with Particular Reference to Variola and Vaccina” Archives of Dermatology Syphilol. 1932;26:6, pp. 997-1019.doi:10.1001/ archderm.1932.01450030999006b online at https:// jamanetwork.com/journals/jamadermatology/ article-abstract/510168?redirect=true. “The name of the second dermatologic journal to appear in the United States was the Archives of Dermatology. The first one was the American Journal of Syphilogra.” According to Lynch, “The only review of fetal variola we have found was by Margoulieff, who reviewed fourteen cases and added two” (1008).  Surely, the thesis deserves enough attention as to warrant giving the author a first name or at least an initial letter; but this does not even appear in the footnote Lynch appends: “Margoulieff: Thèse de Paris, 1989; abstract, Jahresbuch über die Fortschrift Geburtshaft. und Gynäkologie  4:140.1890.”  I have expanded the journal’s title.

[3] For background to the effects of smallpox on women during the eighteenth century and from a more Jewish perspective, see Norman Simms “Signs, Ciphers and Sephirot in Mary Jones; ‘After the Small Pox’” Mentalities/Mentalités 20: 2 (2006) 34-45.

[4] Sander Gilman, “Genetic Diseases? Yes. But Must We Call Them ‘Jewish’ ? » Forwards (25 August 2006) online at https://forward.com/culture1471/genetic-diseases-yes-but-must-we-call-them-e2-80-98jew.

[5]²¹ Margoulieff, Contributions à l’étude, p. 8.

[6] René Logeay, « Bonheurs et malheurs de la clinique Tarnier » Communication présente à la séance du 23 juin 1984 de la Société française d’histoire de la médicine available online at http://www.biusante.parisdescartes.fr/sfhm/hsm/ HSMx1984.At the death of Dr.Stéphan Tarnier (1828-1897), founder of  « la nouvelle clinique d’accouchements de la faculté de Paris» in 1876,  was renamed the Tarnier Clinic.  Tarnier was succeeded in this position by Pierre-Constant Budin, and in due course J. Margoulieff became a moniteur or fellow of the Clinique d’accouchements.

[7] Margoulieff, Contributions à l’étude, p. 9.

[8] Margoulieff, Contributions à l’étude, p. 10.

[9] In what has been called the first biography of Lucie Dreyfus, Alfred’s young wife and mother of his two children is called a “heroine despite herself.” See Elisabeth Weissman, Lucie Dreyfus. La femme du capitaine (Paris: Textuel, 2015). Three years earlier I published  “Lucie Eugéne Hadamard, Madame Alfred Dreyfus: Jewish Mother and Wife,”  Queens College Journal of Jewish Studies. XIV (2012) 61-76 and in the next year Alfred and Lucie Dreyfus: In the Phantasmagoria  (Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing,   2013).

[10] Margoulieff, Contributions à l’étude, p. 33.

[11] Margoulieff, Contributions à l’étude, p. 34.

[12] Margoulieff, Contributions à l’étude, p. 35.

[13] Margoulieff, Contributions à l’étude, p. 38.

[14] Margoulieff, Contributions à l’étude, p. 40.

[15] Margoulieff, Contributions à l’étude, p. 42.

[16] Margoulieff, Contributions à l’étude, p. 45.

[17] Margoulieff, Contributions à l’étude. p. 45.

[18] Margoulieff, Contributions à l’étude. p. 45.

[19] Margoulieff, Contributions à l’étude, p. 47.

[20] Robert Liris, « Le symbolisme sexuel de certains objets de Glozel » in Nos ancêtres artistes : Chroniques de Glozel (Vichy : 1983) pp. 12-12.

[21] Alice Girard, “Soixante-treize ans de Glozelphobie anglaise” in Actes du 3^ème Colloque Glozel : Urnes et Vases Funéraire (Vichy : Centre International d’Etude et de Recherche, 2000) p. 11.

[22] One of the lengthiest statements of opposition which seems to be the foundation of most subsequent negative views is A. Vayson de Pradenne, “La deuxième affaire Glozel” L’Homme Prehistorique 14:12 (Decembre 1927) an extract from L’Opinion (28 Janvier 1928) 305-308. See Girard, “Soixante-treize ans de Glozelphobie anglaise” on the role played by this document.

[23] M. Sabète, « Mythes de la fertilité » in  Actes du VIIIe Colloque International : Les preuves de l’authenticité du site (Vichy: Centre International Etudes de et de Recherche  2005) pp. 16-20. See also J.-B. Pontalis, ed., Bisexualité et différence des sexes (Paris : Gallimard 1973).

[24] Sabète, « Mythes de la fertilité » Figures 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. and Girard, “Soixante-treize ans de Glozelphobie anglaise” Figures 13, 33, 38, 42.

[25] Cited by Salma Lahleu, Mouna Makouar and Alya Sebil” in their catalogue to the exhibition they curated, The carpet as Polysemic Notion (25 October 2016) available  online at Neil Phylip, The Hidden Matrix: Myth and the Human Mind.

[26] Henri Basset, Le culte des grottes au Maroc, thèse complentaire pour le Doctorat ès Lettres présentée à la faculté des Lettres d’Alger (Alger: Jules Garbonel, 1890) p. 8.

[27] M.F. Ashley Montagu, ed., Marriage Past and Present: A Debate between Robert Briffault and Bronislaw Malinowski (Boston, MA: Porter Sargent, 1956). The debate is based on a series of six BBC radio broadcasts made between 7 January 1931 and 11 February 1931 and simultaneously published in the The Listener.  In addition to Malinowski’s three talks attacking Briffault’s main thesis—an updating of the Swiss cultural historian Johann Jakob Bachofen’s 1861 Das Mutterrecht—Ashley Montagu joins in the debunking exercise in his Introduction and Notes to the edited version of the earlier BBC publication. Looking back on the nature of the debate and of the more conservative view by the older anthropologists, whose objections turned on the rise of Soviet social engineering and the modish materialism and women’s movement in the pre-pill era, the whole brouhaha seems almost laughable in its sexist naiveté.

[28] Robert Briffault, The  Mothers: The Matriarchal Theory of Social Origins (New York: Macmillan, 1931)    p.149.

[29] Joseph Reinach, Voyage en Orient, tome I (Paris: Charpentier, 1879 ; photo-reproduced by Elibron Classics at www.elibron com) p. 127

[30] J. Reinach, Voyage en Orient, II, p. 366.

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Norman Simms taught in New Zealand for more than forty years at the University of Waikato, with stints at the Nouvelle Sorbonne in Paris and Ben-Gurion University in Israel. He founded the interdisciplinary journal Mentalities/Mentalités in the early 1970s and saw it through nearly thirty years. Since retirement, he has published three books on Alfred and Lucie Dreyfus and a two-volume study of Jewish intellectuals and artists in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Western Europe, Jews in an Illusion of Paradise; Dust and Ashes, Comedians and Catastrophes, Volume I, and his newest book, Jews in an Illusion of Paradise: Dust and Ashes, Falling Out of Place and Into History, Volume II. Several further manuscripts in the same vein are currently being completed. Along with Nancy Hartvelt Kobrin, he is preparing a psychohistorical examination of why children terrorists kill other children.

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