The Occulted Jew: Symbolism and Anti-Semitism in Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's Axël

The analysis of Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's Axël (1890) demonstrates that the intersecting religio-philosophical and occult discourses of the text and its tale of buried treasure encrypt within them the unspeakable saga of a Jew who infiltrated Axël's family generations earlier and whose Jewish identity was concealed. The haunting effects of the cryptic, transgenerational transmission of this family secret or "phantom" are decrypted from the language and behavior of the text's characters. The text is then revealed to inscribe within it a heretofore unrecognized racist anti-Semitism that reflects the emergent fear of the "invisible," assimilated Jew in late-nineteenth-century France. (ER)