Evidence of Edgar Degas’ anti-Semitism can be found in his paintings, but they do not explain the motivation for his hatred. Why did a man with such a close relationship with a Jewish family become a virulent anti-Semite? Only by viewing Degas’ tenuous financial and social position and his obsession with joining the French aristocracy can we try to comprehend the reasoning behind his anti-Semitism.
Although Degas claimed to come from an aristocratic French family, his forbearers were neither aristocratic nor purely French. His paternal grandmother, from Italy, and his mother, born in New Orleans, gave him too much foreign blood to be accepted by truly aristocratic bigots (Baumann, 39). To appear more French, the Degas family used the last name de Gas from the 1840s to the 1870s, because the preposition “de” implied that the family name was derived from land holdings (Nord, 39). One family member even hired a genealogist to falsify a family tree supporting that claim (Nochlin, 159).
Rather than coming from a centuries-old estate, Degas’ family fortune was actually amassed less than fifty years before his birth through the ignoble practices of speculation and money changing (Nochlin, 158). According to the popular anti-Semitic rhetoric, Jews used the same “dirty” professions to cheat the public, gain unfair political power and usurp the privileges of the French aristocracy (Baumann, 39). Degas sought to differentiate himself from nouveau riche Jewish businessmen by demonizing all Jews. Linda Nochlin explained in her book The Politics of Vision, “Anti-Semitism served not only as a shield against threatening downward social mobility but as a mechanism of denial, firmly differentiating Degas’ fragile haut bourgeois status from that of the newly wealthy, recently cultivated upper-class Jews whose position was, to his chagrin, almost indistinguishable from his own” (Nochlin, 159-160). Like so many of his contemporaries, Degas convinced himself that all Jews were inferior so he could make himself feel superior in comparison.
His fragile self-worth was dealt repeated blows in the 1870s as the Degas family’s aristocratic ruse began to unravel. Degas’ father died in 1874, leaving the family on the brink of bankruptcy. Three years later, Edgar’s brother Rene left his blind wife, six children and mountains of debt in Paris and fled to New Orleans with his mistress (Lipton, 192). Out of duty and the desire to avoid scandal, Degas stretched his artist’s income to support his brother’s family and cover his debts. Suddenly, Degas saw his financial stability and aristocratic status slipping away (Lipton, 192). In her book Looking into Degas, Eunice Lipton wrote, “He was left more and more bereft of his former class position and the power it implied. Not only did he know that the world was changing but also he knew that the social influence of people like himself was shrinking” (Lipton, 194). Degas was experiencing what Lipton calls “status anxiety” (Lipton, 195). Even those with actual aristocratic pedigrees experienced status anxiety in the late nineteenth century, as they saw their political and economic power waning. The industrial revolution created a new powerful middle class and gave successful businessmen influence formerly reserved for France’s blue-blooded elite. The country’s upwardly mobile Jewish population was the perfect scapegoat for the scorned aristocracy.
For Degas, anti-Semitism served both as an antidote to status anxiety and as a tool to reaffirm his aristocratic status. Degas, who had learned from his family that class was more important than integrity or identity, turned to anti-Semitism to preserve his sense of worth. As Linda Nochlin wrote, “Although Degas was indeed an extraordinary artist, a brilliant innovator, and one of the most important figures in the artistic vanguard of the nineteenth century, he was a perfectly ordinary anti-Semite.” His art may have been motivated by aesthetic ideals, but his anti-Semitism was driven by ignorance and insecurity.
top left: Degas, Edgar. Self Portrait. Museu Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon, Portugal.
right: Degas, Edgar. Portrait of Rene-Hilaire De Gas (the artist’s grandfather). Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
bottom left: Degas, Edgar. Rene Degas in the Artist’s Studio. From www.earthimagebank.com/photographers/degasphotographs.