Despite the reversal of fortune experienced by the Modiglianis shortly before the artist’s birth, the degree of success they enjoyed had earlier been enough to impress his mother’s less mercantile family. When, in 1870, the fifteen-year-old Eugenia Garsin met her future husband, Flaminio Modigliani, who was twice her age, her family had long since moved from Livorno to Marseilles. And when, after a typical two-year engagement, the arranged marriage brought Eugenia to Italy for the first time, the youthful bride, while intimidated by signs of affluence, found her husband’s family “uncultivated, overbearing and authoritarian.” The Garsins, while less well-off, were liberal, cultivated, and intellectual. Eugenia’s family, even with their less observant religious training, provided Modigliani the foundation for his spiritual and philosophical artistic approach.

When Modigliani arrived in Paris in 1906, attired in Italian corduroy suit, red scarf, and brimmed hat, he was proud of his dual Italian and Sephardic roots, his intellectual upbringing, and the leftist leanings of his family. Although he had been raised in a cultured environment, reading Gabriele D’Annunzio and Friedrich Nietzsche, he was, after the unusually privileged Jewish community of Livorno, relatively naive as to the social realities of the rest of Europe. In letters written from Florence and Venice, before his move to Paris, Modigliani discloses a youthful artistic idealism that scarcely anticipates the melancholy that would, before long, enshroud his solitary portraits. His outlook nevertheless was both sparked and tempered by politics: at fourteen, he saw his brother Giuseppe Emanuele imprisoned for his Socialist beliefs.

Giuseppe Emanuele’s political activism testifies to the social immersion of Jews in the wake of Italy’s independence and reunification. The period’s emancipatory ideals, which were reinforced by his family, inform Modigliani’s attitude and sense of freedom, along with the generally more complex multiple national identity that most post-Risorgimento Jews felt. The artist’s explicit self-determination is doubly ironic when one considers his ostensibly obdurate artistic path, and the fictive populist niche and concomitant academic oblivion to which he has been relegated.

Modigliani’s exclusive practice of portraiture became a vehicle for his egalitarian vision, the democratic principles that underlay contemporary Socialist currents, which had been verbalized throughout his childhood. The philosophical context for such ideals may have been nurtured by his close relationship to his maternal grandfather, Isaac Garsin, who joined the Modigliani household in Livorno in 1886. Eugenia’s father read widely in literature and philosophy; was fluent in Italian, French, Spanish, and Greek; and spoke some English and Arabic. Her sister Laura, with whom she opened a language school in their home in Livorno, and who would later write sociological and philosophical papers with young Amedeo, introducing him to the writings of Nietzsche, Bergson, and the Russian anarchist Pyotr Kropotkin. According to numerous accounts, it was his grandfather’s intellectual eccentricity and his heroic accounts of the Garsin family lineage—going back to the seventeenth­century Dutch­born philosopher Baruch Spinoza—that Modigliani held dear, and that may have inspired his youthful artistic commitment.

These intellectual/religious individuals whom the Garsin family idealized—Spinoza, Uriel da Costa, and Moses Mendelssohn—questioned the inflexible a priori truths of organized religion in favor of interpreting spiritual values within a personal context. Spinoza contributed mightily to the secularization of Judaism and defended the cultural tradition of Jews. The sixteenth­ century rationalist da Costa, born to a Portuguese Jewish family who had converted to Catholicism, was himself a convert to Judaism who, after being excommunicated three times for his criticism of the faith, was publicly vilified; he eventually committed suicide. The German Jewish philosopher Mendelssohn was a leading force in the Haskalah movement of cultural assimilation during the eighteenth century.

This marked influence manifests well beyond the artist’s philosophical bent; it can be traced in his defiant nonconformity, in his stubborn character, in the idiosyncrasies of his oeuvre, and, especially, in the preponderance of the solitary figure. These historical proponents of religious and cultural free will, despite being reviled, cast aside the security of a “fixed” identity in favor of the right to question the artificial imposition or restriction of nationality or religion. They also contributed to the philosophical broadening of the civil status of Jews and Judaism, and laid the groundwork for secularism, a distinction between Jewishness and Judaism.

Before he found himself settled within the émigré artistic enclave of Montparnasse, Modigliani could not have foreseen the need to reassess his Jewish identity. Although coming to terms with his Italian Sephardic heritage was hardly a matter of balancing acculturation with the maintenance of tradition, it intersects perfectly with that period in which questions of national identity and of the “Jewish question” were being played out in the modern world, and in the city that harbored the first modern international artistic community. While his cultural, social, and religious identification was unique, the problem of distinguishing Modigliani’s position within the circle of Montparnasse is one that art historians and critics have neglected. Yet the question remains as to why so little attention has been paid to the matter of Modigliani’s individualism or, more pointedly, to how his complex sense of identity was challenged not in spite of, but as a result of, his racial invisibility in Paris.

With the exception of Chagall, Emmanuel Mané-Katz, and some lesser-known figures, most Jewish artists welcomed the freedom to assimilate. Modigliani goes against the grain of emancipatory secularism that characterizes the lack of Jewish self-consciousness in most Jewish émigré artists in Paris before World War I. But for Modigliani, such social conditions proved retrograde, and instead of expanding his range of subject, he restricted himself to portraiture; rather than assimilate, Modigliani “unmasked” his Jewishness by assuming the ideological position of the pariah.

The more he perceived the subliminal theme of race, the more focused and symbolic the artist’s method became. As Modigliani encountered fellow émigré artists, his hitherto latent Jewish identity became for him the subject of philosophical inquiry. It was with pride that his family claimed direct descendance from Spinoza. The Dutch philosopher perceived the inability of Jews to escape their condition, an impasse that in Modigliani is given literal, formal, and symbolic expression: literally, in the case of the caryatid locked in its column; formally, as in the 1915 Portrait of Juan Gris, with the embrace of elemental geometric forms within whose deceptively simple universality the artist introduces the specificity of the individual; and symbolically, in Modigliani’s real­life assumption of the role of pariah. For one who chose to be an outsider, who chose the antagonist role of the bohemian, who preferred not to be understood than to be perceived as a parvenu or assimilated bourgeois, who opined against those who arrogantly ignored history, and who came to declare himself as other in common salutation (“Je suis Modigliani, juif”), self-identification was extremely important. And in contrast to the Eurocentric, if not racist, views of his fellow Italians the Futurists, Modigliani’s appropriation of culturally diverse forms was precipitated by his own self-conscious status as other, specifically his own sense of exile and of the Diaspora that defined Sephardic Jews.