Join us on April 18th at 7 p.m. ET to hear Rabbi Diana Fersko and author Maurice Samuels in a discussion about antisemitism as part of our Unpacking the Book Series. Register here. Moderated by Stephanie Butnick, host of Tablet’s Unorthodox podcast. This event is in partnership with Jewish Book Council, the Jewish Museum, and Tablet Magazine.
A new biography of Alfred Dreyfus may strike some readers as unnecessary, even irrelevant. Wasn’t the Dreyfus Affair some old French case about a Jew who was persecuted and then vindicated? What more do we need to know? But by reading this concise new biography by Maurice Samuels, we realize how much the Dreyfus Affair has shaped antisemitism in the modern era.
Samuels gives us just enough information about Dreyfus’s life to be able to understand the issues he raises. Born in 1859 to a bourgeois Alsatian Jewish family in the textile manufacturing business, Dreyfus chose a career in the military. He studied in Paris and gained admission to the top schools, and meritocratic rules allowed him to advance up the military ranks. All went well — until it didn’t. One morning in October 1894, Dreyfus was accused of treason and thrown into military prison. He was tried, convicted, and deported to Devil’s Island, French Guinea. He endured that purgatory until 1899, when he was returned to France and eventually exonerated.
This is where Samuels begins to raise questions: about the role of antisemitism in Dreyfus’s prosecution, the degree of support he got from French Jewry, and the impact of his case on Jews worldwide. Samuels sets the scene carefully. After the French Revolution, equal rights were accorded to all men in France, meaning that Jews were no longer excluded from various occupations. This did not mean, however, that Jews were necessarily welcome. The same reactionaries who bemoaned the modernization and secularization of French society also resented the normalization of Jewish presence, especially in traditional enclaves like the upper ranks of the military. Although Dreyfus married Jewish, said Kaddish, and supported Jewish institutions, he didn’t consider himself particularly religious. He did know when he’d been discriminated against as a Jew, and he filed his protests in accordance with the proper protocols. Samuels portrays him as an integrationist who tried to fit into French society, who believed in the rule of law and the justice system. In Dreyfus’s upper-class Jewish circles, integrationists were fairly typical. Zionists, by contrast, argued that nations like France would inevitably turn against her Jews, so a Jewish homeland, Palestine, was the only answer. Then there were the French Socialists, split between those who advocated for Jews as another oppressed people, and those who called the Dreyfus Affair a bourgeois problem. Weren’t Jews, like Dreyfus, essentially capitalists?
Is it possible for any nation — France in the nineteenth century, or the US in the twenty-first — to fully embrace their Jewish citizens, or is antisemitism always hiding just under the rug? Is a Jewish homeland the only answer? In Dreyfus’s times, major factions of the Left considered Jews the oppressors, not the victims. The right wing, who were old money and Catholic, plotted revenge against Jews in their drawing rooms and smeared them openly in their tabloids. All around the world, Jews were becoming aware of each other — not because their rituals were similar, but because they knew that what was happening to Dreyfus could happen to them.
Doesn’t this all sound more like the twenty-first century than you expected? Samuels writes so well that you don’t feel hit over the head with the message. But once you look at this history, you understand the present with new eyes.
Bettina Berch, author of the recent biography, From Hester Street to Hollywood: The Life and Work of Anzia Yezierska, teaches part-time at the Borough of Manhattan Community College.
