Alfred Dreyfus: The Man at the Center of the Affair
The Dreyfus Affair in its political implications could survive because two of its elements grew in importance during the twentieth century. The first is hatred of the Jews; the second, suspicion of the republic itself, of Parliament, and the state machine.
—Hannah Arendt, Antisemitism in The Origins of Totalitarianism1
1. My Boyhood Dreyfus Lesson
If memory serves, and at my current age it may not be serving me as well as it used to, I first heard the name French Army Captain Alfred Dreyfus from a math teacher I had in junior high school, probably ninth grade. I do not remember the occasion, that is, why this teacher, who was not Jewish, was, in fact, an Italian Catholic, decided not to teach a class made up mostly of Black teens math on this particular day but rather launch into a lecture on Dreyfuss.
It must have been that José Ferrer’s I Accuse! aired the previous Sunday as the ABC Sunday Movie of the Week. (Ferrer directed and played the role of Dreyfus in a film based, in part, on Nicholas Halasz’s Captain Dreyfus: The Story of a Mass Hysteria, published in 1955.) It could not have been The Life of Emile Zola, starring Paul Muni in the title role, the only other movie that had a major dramatization of the Dreyfus’s case (told mostly from the perspective of Zola) that would have been available for television in the mid-1960s. Muni’s Emile Zola was too old, having been released in 1937. ABC Sunday Movie of the Week did not broadcast movies that were that old. Ferrer’s I Accuse! was released in 1958, so it had to be the one. Moreover, Ferrer’s film was more modern in an important respect: it strongly underscored that Dreyfus was a Jew, and that antisemitism was a major reason why Dreyfus was accused and found guilty of treason. Other than a brief shot of Dreyfus’s name on the list of the French Army’s general staff where his religion is listed as “Jew,” there is no mention in The Life of Emile Zola of Jews or antisemitism. The word “Jew” is never uttered. Placating Nazi Germany had something to do with sanitizing Jew-hatred from The Life of Emile Zola and, after Elia Kazan’s 1947 film, Gentleman’s Agreement, about antisemitism in America, the postwar American social problem film on “prejudice,” as it was called at the time, had become a bit of a thing. So, making a film as repressed about Jewish hatred as The Life of Emile Zola in the 1950s, after the Holocaust, could not have been justified or warranted.
He was completely innocent yet he was convicted on false evidence, a conspiracy by his antisemitic military superiors, imprisoned for five years in solitary confinement on Devil’s Island where his guards never spoke to him, torn from his wife and children. It was during this recitation about Dreyfus that I first learned the word antisemitism, not the first time I heard it but the first time I understood it.
In any case, I did not watch I Accuse! that Sunday, if indeed this film was aired then and did in fact trigger my math teacher, and I doubt if any of my classmates had. At 14 years old, we simply would not have been interested generally in a historical film, especially on such a subject: a French Jewish soldier of the late nineteenth century being tried for espionage. On the face of it, nothing about that would have intrigued me as a teenager.
The story our math teacher told of Dreyfus was fascinating, at least, to me. I did not know who Dreyfus was then, but after I never forgot his name. Our teacher told us that Dreyfus was a French soldier of Alsatian origin falsely accused of treason simply because he was Jewish. Because he was a Jew, the gentiles did not believe that he could ever truly be French, even though he was thoroughly loyal to his country. (When the 1870-71 Franco-Prussian War ended with Germany annexing Alsace, Dreyfus wrote in his memoir, Five Years of My Life, published in 1901, “my father chose to remain a Frenchman, and we were obliged to leave Alsace.”) But somehow he could never transcend being a Jew in the eyes of others. He could never be loyal to anything outside of being a Jew. He was completely innocent yet he was convicted on false evidence, a conspiracy by his antisemitic military superiors, imprisoned for five years in solitary confinement on Devil’s Island where his guards never spoke to him, torn from his wife and children. It was during this recitation about Dreyfus that I first learned the word antisemitism, not the first time I heard it but the first time I understood it.
But why would Dreyfus sell his country’s secrets to Germany? He was rich. Most people do that sort of thing for money. Our teacher told us Dreyfus was hated all the more for being a rich Jew. France did eventually exonerate Dreyfus and even awarded him the Legion of Honor but for me that hardly seemed to make up for the horrible injustice he endured. The story outraged me in a way that I had not expected it would. The lesson our teacher told us was that no matter how assimilated Dreyfus was, how French he was, or how loyal he was to France, the antisemites would always see him as an unworthy Jew. The Jew was always the scapegoat, he said. Of course, I was sure that if I had been in France at the time I would have been a Dreyfusard, as Dreyfus’s supporters were called. We always flatter ourselves by the assumption of our own righteous virtue, especially when it is not put to the test. The Dreyfus story, we were told, revealed how precarious assimilation was for racial and religious minorities. I wonder if my math teacher considered what lesson a roomful of Black kids, racial minorities to be sure, was to derive from the story of Alfred Dreyfus. Were we supposed to see ourselves in Dreyfus?
2. Nightmare Alley
Which virtues or which vices have earned for the Jew this universal enmity? Why was he ill-treated and hated alike and in turn by the Alexandrians and the Romans, by the Persians and the Arabs, by the Turks and the Christian nations? Because, everywhere up to our own days the Jew was an unsociable being.
Why was he unsociable? Because he was exclusive, and his exclusiveness was both political and religious, or rather he held fast to his political and religious cult, to his law.
—Bernard Lazare, Antisemitism: Its History and Causes (translated from the French), published in April 1894
Maurice Samuels’s Alfred Dreyfus: The Man at the Center of the Affair is another fine entry in Yale’s Jewish Lives Series, well-researched, skillfully written, reasonable-length biographies of notable Jews throughout history, aimed at the general reader. Samuels immediately introduces the contrasts that define Dreyfus: “Shy, serious, ill at ease outside his family circle, he rarely voiced his opinions on political matters. But through no fault of his own, he was thrust into the center of a controversy that divided the French nation and riveted the world. An ardent patriot, he was accused of committing treason. A law-abiding citizen, he suffered a colossal injustice. A discreet Jew, he became the emblem of antisemitic persecution.” (1)
Dreyfus believed in France and why not? As Samuels relates, in 1790, the Sephardim was given full French citizenship; the Ashkenazim in 1791. Revolutionary France was the first European nation to do this. (11) French Jews rose rapidly with their newly minted freedom. “By the 1850s, when Alfred Dreyfus was born, France’s Jews were the best integrated in the world.” (12) Dreyfus’s military career was proof of how integrated French Jews were. For instance, Jews were over-represented in the French army officer corps because the army had become a more meritocratic institution. (20) Indeed, the rise of French Jews can be partly explained by the rise of meritocratic systems of evaluation in modern France and increasingly less reliance on family connections and social class, although, of course, these patrician traditions, the cleric and royalist classes, died hard and far from completely. In 1893, Dreyfus became the first Jew to serve on the revamped General Staff, the holy of holies, because only the top graduates of the École de guerre could qualify for an appointment and Jews could compete alongside anyone else. Here were the values of the Revolution, of French universalism, that Dreyfus so fervently believed. In some sense, how Dreyfus came to be accused by his fellow officers of treason on trumped-up evidence had much to do with the clash between the efficient and ethnicity-blind meritocracy and the old corrupt, “racial” and “blood” system of privilege and patronage. In this sense, Dreyfus became a symbol of modernity. Samuels poses the question, Was French antisemitism partly rooted in the hatred of the integrated, “modern” Jew? (36) The irony is that as Jews grew more successful and became more prominent in progressive France, French antisemitism grew more intense, especially among those who felt left behind by the societal changes, reactionary France. “If you asked observers in 1899, at the height of the Dreyfus Affair, to predict which country was most likely to unleash a genocide against Jews, they would very likely have guessed France,” Samuels writes. (5) Dreyfus may have believed in France but it was an open question how much France believed in him. For some period of years, a good portion of France certainly did not believe him.
Samuels makes it a point to distinguish between the words “integrated” and “assimilated” to describe Dreyfus and French Jews like him. Dreyfus was an integrated Jew, not an assimilated one, according to Samuels pace Hannah Arendt. “Dreyfus never sought to hide his Jewishness, and unlike some of his fellow Jewish officers, he was not ashamed of it…” (30) Samuels continues, “Indeed, for the generations of Jews who integrated into French culture in the nineteenth century, Frenchness and Jewishness went hand in hand.” (28) “The French Revolution was ‘our second law of Sinai,’ according to Isidore Cahen, the editor of the French Jewish newspaper Les Archives Israelites.” (28) Dreyfus never mentioned his Jewish faith in his writings but he and his wife were practicing Jews, “and he was not afraid to stand up for himself as a Jew.” (31)
It was because Dreyfus was rich that somehow the injustice hit home vividly; for suddenly it occurred to many that if this could happen to a rich, integrated Jew, what worse injustice might happen to a poor one?
This leads Samuels to challenge Hannah Arendt’s characterization of Dreyfus as an “antisemite,” which he found “bizarre,”(30) because, according to Arendt, he was a bourgeois assimilationist, deracinated, estranged from his Jewishness. It was this alienation from Jewishness that made Jews, at least initially in the Dreyfus Affair, reluctant to support him; indeed, many were convinced of his guilt and felt especially bound to denounce him. Samuels argues that there was more Jewish support for Dreyfus than Arendt realized. But the weakness of French Jews concerning the Dreyfus Affair directly influenced urbane journalist Theodor Herzl, sparking the Zionist movement, which was largely supported, not by Jews, but by rich and powerful gentiles. Bernard Lazare, the scathing Jewish literary critic, might have been closer to what Arendt had in mind of the self-hating Jewish antisemite, as the above epigraph, a passage he was to regret having written, shows. He made this distinction between Israelites (with whom he identified) and Jews: The former “live decently side by side with their fellow countrymen from whom they do not in any way distinguish themselves…” The latter are “the dishonest, the mean, the rich, the orthodox, the voluntary pariahs”; these are the Jews.2 Hannah Arendt explained this bifurcation this way: “Conforming to a society which discriminated against ‘ordinary’ Jews and in which, at the same time, it was generally easier for an educated Jew to be admitted to fashionable circles than a non-Jew of similar condition, Jews had to differentiate themselves clearly from the ‘Jew in general,’ and just as clearly to indicate that they were Jews; under no circumstances were they allowed simply to disappear among their neighbors…. This actually amounted to a feeling of being different from other men in the street because they were Jews, and different from other Jews at home because they were not like ‘ordinary Jews.’”3 (A feeling somewhat analogous to this existed among many educated, middle-class, racially mixed Blacks in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, being inside and outside the group.)
At first, because of his wealth, Lazare had no interest in Dreyfus and assumed he was guilty. After Dreyfus’s imprisonment, his brother, Mathieu, visited Lazare, who joined the Dreyfusards, indeed, became, for at least a time, an ardent Zionist supporter. For Lazare, Dreyfus had “become a symbol, the incarnation of the pain and suffering of the Jewish people throughout the centuries.” Lazare’s conversion occurred before Zola’s J’Accuse (January 1898) which galvanized the Dreyfusard movement. It was because Dreyfus was rich that somehow the injustice hit home vividly; for suddenly it occurred to many that if this could happen to a rich, integrated Jew, what worse injustice might happen to a poor one?
French officer Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy, the actual traitor who wrote the incriminating bordereau (or list) that Dreyfus was accused of writing, was tried for treason and acquitted in January 1898 with cries in the courtroom of “Death to the Jews” because most people in France still believed that Dreyfus was guilty and were outraged by the movement to free him. Zola published J’Accuse immediately after Esterhazy’s trial, which sparked some of the worst antisemitic violence of the time. As Samuels writes, “Over the course of several months, no fewer than sixty-nine cities and towns in metropolitan France and colonial Algeria—including many locales with few or no Jews—witnessed anti-Jewish agitation that can be compared to the pogroms that shook the Russian empire in the 1880s…” (98) If there were doubts before about how antisemitism was driving the Dreyfus Affair, there could be none once the anti-Jewish riots started.
Yes, when my ninth-grade math teacher told the class Dreyfus’s story, I could identify with the rich French Jewish soldier. I felt the fear of being at the mercy of being a racial minority, no matter how integrated, how naively patriotic, a no-name Negro boy like Emmett Till, who could, if the right person said the wrong thing about you, see your entire life thrown into the maelstrom of Nightmare Alley.
