‘This is why the Jews had their ghetto there’

In the first half of the twentieth century the Marais, by then a poor and severely overcrowded working-class quartier, became the area of Paris most closely associated with Jewish presence and culture. Anti-Semitism, as the Dreyfus affair showed, was rife in the France of the time, and is here traced through the writings of such figures as Charles Fegdal and Alexandre Arnoux. Texts presenting Jews in a more positive light, by such as Roger Ikor and the Holocaust victim Irène Némirovsky, are also considered. The non-Jewish Marais figures too through the poetry of Robert Desnos and Édouard Estonié’s appealing short novel L’Ascension de M. Baslèvre, and there is a brief overview of photographic representations in conclusion.