Children of Israel: Proust and Jews

A persistent but usually subliminal theme in In Search of Lost Time- Jews, and anti-Semitism - curious because, maybe I'm wrong, but I thought that Proust himself was half-Jewish; if so, it's never acknowledged that either of Marcel's parents is Jewish - rather, Proust shunts off the Judaism onto other characters: his early best friend, Bloch, who never quite fits in socially, I wonder why, and to a lesser extent his 2nd best friend, Saint-Loup. In vol. 3, The Guermantes Way, there are some subtle taunts and allegations that Saint-Loup may be Jewish - and also, perhaps, his "mistress" and beloved, Rachel (with her O.T. name). It's really hard to known when anti-Semitic taunts are just made out of spite, or whether they're meant to define and isolate a certain set of characters. What's more evident, as a touchstone of anti-Semitism, is the Dreyfuss affair, a subject of much discourse and debate throughout: and there's a sense that those sympathetic to Dreyfuss, at least in Marcel's circle, may be either Jewish or ultra-liberal (an assumption we see all the time in the U.S. today, a coded anti-Semitism aligned with right-wing politics: it's Obama and those leftist intellectuals, read, Jews; or, seen in paper the other day, Tea Party convention speaker identifying himself as a Christian first, a conservative 2nd, ... - in other words, none of us are Jews). Saint-Loup's mistress, Rachel, is very pro Dreyfuss, but not all Dreyfussards are Jewish. Yet a Dreyfussard risks being "cut off" from the highest social circles; Marcel's family has a friend whom they barely tolerate, she's a complete bore, who at some point splits with the family altogether because of Marcel's fathers anti-Dreyfuss views. Throughout the novel there are the usual slights against Jews - about money, wealth, couth - often masked as political commentary on the Dreyfuss case. It's hard to know exactly where Proust himself comes down on this - it seems that his attitude toward Jews may be much like his professed attitude to homosexuals: despite Proust's own homosexuality, the homosexual characters in Lost Time (Charlus) come off as cruel, hideous; many of the heterosexual are masked versions of his own homosexual relationships (Gilbert, Albertine, others?). Similarly, Proust never touches on his own (half?) Judaism, and covers the anti-Semitism behind a mask of politics (Dreyfuss); admittedly, though, the Jewish characters are not stereotypical - most notably the social sophisticate in volume 1, Swann.