Familiar Jewish Scenes

Born in Alsace, Alphonse Lévy moved to Paris, where he studied academic painting with the French painter and sculptor Jean-Léon Gérôme. Beginning in the mid-1860s and continuing through the years of the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune, he published his political cartoons (under the pseudonym Saïd) in a number of Parisian journals, including Monde comique, Journal amusant, and L’éclipse. Lévy’s interest turned to Jewish subjects in the mid-1870s, and his caricatures of rural Alsatian Jews illustrated Léon Cahun’s La vie juive (Jewish Life, 1886) and Sacher Masoch’s Contes juives (Jewish Tales, 1888). In 1902, he published his own volume, Scènes familiales juives (Jewish Family Scenes).