Léonce Rosenberg's Cubism: Jewish Mediterraneanism and the Question of Assimilation

Among the dealers of his time, Léonce Rosenberg stands out for being not just a businessman, but also an intellectual who produced a significant body of theories on art and aesthetics that he published from the late 1910s onwards. Moving from an examination of the large extant correspondence from the archive of his Galerie L’Effort Moderne and focusing on the letters exchanged between Fernand Léger and Rosenberg, partly still unpublished, the essay reconstructs a crucial political debate of the interwar period, which sought to geographically locate the sources of ‘authentic’ French culture and contemporary art in reaction to the massive influx of foreigners, including many Jews, into the country. Opposing a Mediterranean lineage of Semitic roots to a ‘Celtic’ or ‘Nordic’ civilization in shaping modern France, Rosenberg’s ideas shed new light on key issues regarding the identity of Israélites, or French Jews, such as strategies of assimilation or acculturation, the role of French republican universalism, or cosmopolitanism. The dealer’s interest in the history of ancient civilizations and religions influenced his profession, shaping his vision and promotional strategies of the Cubist avant-garde from the years of the First World War and through the 1920s, and became a way to define and negotiate his own Jewishness.