Émile Zola, the Cochonnerie of Naturalist Literature, and the Judensau

Scholars often identify pig images of Émile Zola during the Dreyfus Affair as an overt anti-Jewish motif meant to discredit the Dreyfusard cause. I will trace how Zola was identified as a Jewish cultural infiltrator throughout his controversial literary career, not just in the aftermath of J'Accuse . Medieval symbols of antisemitism, specifically those related to the motif of the Judensau (Jew-pig), had been recruited into the service of anti-naturalism as early as 1868, and three decades later these same symbols were merely reappropriated to represent Zola's Dreyfusism. I will consider the medieval, antisemitic pictorial sources that are drawn upon for the massive visual degradation of Zola, first as naturalist author of novelistic obscenities in the 1880s and then as a treacherous Christian supporter of Alfred Dreyfus.