The following chapters are founded on the idea that a critical rethinking of Jewish assimilation in 19th-century France – or the process which has been interpreted as such – is important for an assessment of the moral legitimacy and practical wisdom of (re)introducing liberal-assimilationist discourses and practices in the European context. Rethinking Jewish assimilation will also help us trace assimilation's connections to secularisation in the France of the Third Republic. This will facilitate our understanding of the connections between secularism and assimilationism today. I try to contribute to such a rethinking of assimilation by scrutinising the ways in which assimilation's practical and discursive effects appear in Proust's oeuvre, and particularly in his novel In Search of Lost Time. This novel was written between 1909 and 1922. It allots a central place to the position of the Jews in the early French Third Republic (1870-1940), often in relation to the Dreyfus Affair (1894-1906). I read the novel in connection to three other kinds of sources: historical documents about the Emancipation of the Jews, the interpretation of French Jewish assimilation by prominent historians of French Judaism – most notably Pierre Birnbaum and Esther Benbassa – and the more general interpretations of the paradoxes of assimilation in 20th-century philosophy and sociology.

Arendt was one of Proust's first readers to consider him a central witness of the paradoxes of assimilation as they came to prominence within the French context.