The Anti-Semitic Moment: A Tour of France in 1898 (review)

In October 1894 a Jewish captain in the French army, Alfred Dreyfus, was accused of spying for Germany. On the basis of documents later proved to be forgeries, a secret military tribunal convicted him of treason and in January 1895 sent him to the notorious penal colony of Devil's Island in French Guiana. During the summer of 1896 a conscientious new member of the General Staff, Georges Picquart, discovered that the true spy was Major Ferdinand Esterhazy, an impecunious rake who was willing to exchange French secrets for German cash. To prevent Picquart from revealing this miscarriage of justice, his superiors transferred him to a dangerous post in Tunisia. The following year, however, Picquart managed to convey his findings to lawyers, politicians, and, critically, Mathieu Dreyfus, the defamed captain's brother, who publicized the case by formally complaining to the Minister of War. In January 1898 the great novelist Émile Zola added his prestige to the cause by publishing his famous "J'accuse," an open letter to the President of the Republic denouncing the army and declaring Dreyfus's innocence, a move that earned Zola a conviction for libel and forced him into exile in England. Yet the case for judicial revision only strengthened throughout the year, particularly after Colonel Henry, who had fabricated Dreyfus's handwriting, confessed to the forgery and committed suicide. In October the Cour de Cassation, France's highest court, agreed to review the case, and in June 1899 it declared Dreyfus innocent. The captain returned to France only to be subjected to a second court martial in which the military judges perversely ignored the evidence and convicted him again, this time sentencing him to ten years in prison. The President of the Republic pardoned Dreyfus, and in 1906 the Cour de Cassation revoked the second court martial and forced the army to readmit him, though no military tribunal ever reversed the 1894 and 1899 verdicts.

This sordid tale of military injustice might have been a footnote in French and Jewish history had it not served as the catalyst for a powerful outburst of anti-Semitic rage throughout France. A nascent anti-Semitic movement that had enjoyed limited success since the 1880s seized the case as an opportunity to propagate its message about the dangerous power of "the Jews." Most infamously associated with the yellow journalist Edouard Drumond, who identified Jews as a capitalist menace, the political anti-Semitism of the Dreyfus era attracted followers of practically all political stripes, from the republican left to the anti-republican clerical right. Rivals set aside their differences to attack a perceived common enemy, and the result was a seemingly endless series of demonstrations, speeches, and newspaper pieces in which Jews were denounced as vermin, bacilli, vipers, and other unsavory creatures bent on the destruction of France. Jews suffered threats, beatings, and the destruction of their property, and they had reason to fear a Russian-style pogrom.

This outburst, limited primarily to the year 1898, constituted a crucial moment in both Jewish and French history. It was while witnessing the events of that year that Theodor Herzl became convinced that the Jews could not be safe in the Diaspora and needed their own state. In retrospect, the anti-Semitic disturbances of the Dreyfus Affair seemed to foreshadow the murderous violence of the Vichy régime that would send more than 75,000 Jews to their deaths by following or even preempting German orders. In light of recent electoral successes of the anti-Semitic National Front party and an upsurge in attacks on synagogues and Jewish cemeteries since September 11, 2001, the Dreyfus Affair seems to mark a more endemic problem of anti-Semitism in French society. The prospect of a specifically French anti-Semitism is particularly troubling to a national self-image that normally draws on the memory of 1789 and the great principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity.

In spite of the importance of the...