The Dreyfus Affair And the (Not) Inevitable Road to Zionism

If we want alternatives to Zionism, we need to remember diaspora victories.

In the Anglophone world, the intertwined issues of Jewish identity and antisemitism are connected in public memory obsessively, and almost solely, to the Holocaust. Occasionally, perhaps, people also mention the blood libels of the Middle Ages, or the pogroms of Eastern Europe.

The Dreyfus Affair, however, is almost entirely forgotten. It is not a moment revisited in movies or television shows. Politicians do not reference it; there are no public museums in its memory; it is not a part of school curriculum. Even Jewish people hardly discuss it. I doubt one in ten Americans, of any ethnicity or religion, could even tell you vaguely who Alfred Dreyfus was.

The disappearance of Dreyfus memory is a real loss. That’s not because we need to remember antisemitism. We do, as I’ve mentioned, remember the Holocaust. The Dreyfus Affair, though, was a victory over antisemitism, and a victory particularly for the diaspora, in a way that World War II was not.

The Holocaust has largely been interpreted as an object lesson in the untenability of the diaspora, and the necessity of a Zionist Jewish ethnonationalism. The outcome of Dreyfus’ story is considerably more ambivalent. As such, it is worth revisiting at a moment when Zionism is busily and horrifically delegitimizing itself.

The Affair

Since, the outlines of the Dreyfus Affair are probably little known to readers, it’s worth covering them briefly. My discussion here, and throughout the essay, is mostly based on Maurice Samuels new excellent biography/history, Alfred Dreyfus: The Man At the Center of the Affair, part of the Jewish Lives series.

During the French Revolution, France put into practice its new ideals of liberty and equality by, among other things, making Jewish people full citizens of the republic. After legislation in 1791, Jews were suddenly—for the first time in any European country—able to live where they wished, attend the best schools, and work in every profession. The results were immediate and dramatic. Jews made rapid gains in political and economic life; some became quite wealthy and influential.

Among those wealthy Jews was the Dreyfus family. Alfred Dreyfus, born 1859, grew up, like most French Jews, with a passionate commitment to the French nation and to the principles of equality which had liberated them. Determined to serve his country, Dreyfus attended the French military academy. He excelled and became arguably the first Jewish officer ever on the General Staff. His future seemed bright.

And then, it all fell apart. In 1894, the French army discovered that there was a traitor on the General Staff who had been passing top secret information to the Germans. Dreyfus was accused of treason. The evidence against him was weak to nonexistent; his handwriting was said to match that on the recovered documents, even though it obviously did not. Nonetheless, he was arrested, tried in a sham military trial, and sentenced to life imprisonment. He was sent to the horrific penal colony on Devil’s Island in French Guiana. He endured tortures almost certainly intended to kill him. His wife, contrary to law, was not allowed to accompany him.  

Dreyfus was singled out because he was Jewish. The generals, once they had begun down the path of antisemitism, decided they could not turn back without undermining respect for the military. They forged more evidence, and stonewalled investigations as long as possible.

The Affair polarized sentiment in France, both on Dreyfus and on the place of Jews in French society. Liberal intellectuals like Emile Zola who believed in the Republic and a forward-looking, cosmopolitan, free and equal France sided with Dreyfus and demanded a new trial. The Catholic Church, the military, antisemites, and proto-Vichyites insisted that Dreyfus was guilty and should be punished—or, really, insisted that as a Jew he should be punished whether he was guilty or not. The hatred of Jews erupted into antisemitic riots throughout the country; Jews were beaten, their homes burned, their businesses destroyed. Several Jewish people were killed in Algiers, where there were violence against Jews occurred almost daily in 1898.  

Dreyfus was brought back for a new trial in 1899; he was convicted again despite overwhelming evidence in his favor, and eventually exonerated completely in 1906. He was restored to the rank of Major, and served with distinction in World War I. He died in 1935. Jewish people in France still leave stones on his grave.

The Dreyfus Affair as Zionist Parable

At the time of the Dreyfus Affair, France was the most progressive country in Europe. Its Jewish integration was considered a model.

It’s not a surprise, then, that the Dreyfus Affair riveted the attention of the world, and especially of the Jewish world. The Forward became the largest Jewish newspaper in the US largely because it satisfied an insatiable demand for news about the Dreyfus trial. Sholem Aleichem wrote a short story satirizing the obsession with the Affair in Russian shtetl’s.

Jewish people of every political persuasion tried to use the Affair to advance their own vision of Jewish life and a Jewish future. Many Jews were understandably horrified by the Affair and turned to Zionism as an alternative. Zionists deliberately worked to capitalize on this disillusionment. “We Jews have nothing to expect from this “civilized” Europe,” Vienna’s Zionist newspaper Die Welt wrote. Theodor Herzl, already a committed Zionist, disingenuously claimed that the Dreyfus trial had led him to believe Zionism was the only hope for Jewish people.  

Max Nordau, an Austro-Hungarian Zionist journalist, claimed that the Jewish diaspora was so intent on assimilating that it had failed to rally to Dreyfus. “This tragic Dreyfus case has become a shockingly precise measure of the degree which our weakness, faintheartedness, obtuseness and mutual alienation has attained,” he wrote. Norau’s argument was later picked up by Hannah Arendt, who linked it to her flawed contention that Jewish people were complicit in their own genocide in the Holocaust.

Samuels demonstrates that Nordau and Arendt were both wrong.  But their mythmaking linked up with antisemitic stereotypes of Jewish weakness and fecklessness, which became a staple of Zionist anti-diaspora propaganda.  

The Dreyfus Affair as antifascist victory

Most Zionist arguments (at the time and later) tended to ignore or downplay the end of the Affair, stepping around the fact that Dreyfus was in fact eventually exonerated. Liberal integrationists, on the other hand, saw in the Affair a good deal of hope—and they had a point.

That point isn’t “everything worked out okay in the end.” The Dreyfus Affair led to an ugly orgy of antisemitism, and Jews—Zionist or otherwise—were right to see that as frightening and dangerous. The Affair revealed that modern antisemitism was a powerful reactionary force, uniting the religious right and other nostalgic institutions like the military and monarchists with forces of populist hatred. The anti-Dreyfus movement was in many ways a dry run for twentieth century fascism; it demonstrated that antisemitism could be used to create a right movement which could feasibly challenge the liberal mass politics of the Revolution.

The Affair also, though, revealed that the fight against antisemitism could serve as a flashpoint to rally a broad left against the forces of populist reaction. If the Affair saw the birth of fascism, it also saw the birth of antifascism. And antifascism won.

The initial supporters of Dreyfus (contra Zionists and Arendt) were mostly Jewish—and mostly in fact Dreyfus’ own family, in particular his brother Mathieu and his incredibly determined wife Lucie. Though Jews, like everyone in France, initially assumed that the French military had solid evidence of Dreyfus’ guilt, as the truth came out, the Jewish press quickly came to his side. So did Joseph Reinach, a politician from the Basses-Alpes region of France. The Chief Rabbi of France, Zadoc Kahn, was a close friend of the Dreyfus family and worked diligently in private to overturn the conviction.

As Samuels points out, the most courageous Dreyfus advocate was Dreyfus himself. The military understood that the best way to end the Affair was to kill Dreyfus, and they kept him in horrific conditions. He was confined in solitary for essentially the entire five years of his exile; he almost lost the use of his voice. A light was kept burning in his room, which prevented him from sleeping and attracted flies. At night he was chained to the bed so he could barely move. Food was sparse and low quality. He suffered from malaria, dysentery, and fevers.  

Starving, sleepless, delirious, wasting away, ill, Dreyfus often wished for death. But he believed he had to stay alive until he could restore his own honor and the honor of France. At one point, the thoroughly secular and areligious Dreyfus hallucinated a voice. “Whatever tortures they inflict on you, you must march forward until they throw you in the tomb, you must remain upright before your executioners as long as you have the slightest force.”

Dreyfus was shy in public and did not express himself well or with force, and some contemporaries and some historians argued that he did not understand the stakes of the Affair he precipitated. Samuels makes it clear that this is so false as to be a slander. There is no question that the single most courageous advocate for Dreyfus—with the possible exception of his wife—was Dreyfus himself.

It wasn’t just Dreyfus and Jewish people who fought for Dreyfus though. The Affair energized every corner of the left, calling them almost uniformly to their best selves. Zola, for example, believed in a number of antisemitic stereotypes at the beginning of the Affair; his first article on the case argued that Jewish people had an innate talent for making money. From that inauspicious beginning he quickly became one of the most passionate gentile opponents of antisemitism in history; his famous 1898 pamphlet J’accuse was a devastating denunciation of the military coverup intended to force a number of generals to sue for libel. They did, and Zola was forced to flee the country—but not before opening the case again and ensuring Dreyfus’ retrial.

The political left in France was also, initially, wary of standing with Dreyfus because of antisemitism. For many socialists, Jewish people symbolized the banking industry and the upper class. Dreyfus, a wealthy Jew serving in the military, seemed the wrong man to rally working class parties.

But eventually Socialist leader Jean Jaurès, and others in his party, recognized that Dreyfus had become the man, and the issue, on which Catholic monarchist and capitalist forces had decided to fight for France’s soul. In 1898 Jaures gave a speech in which he denounced antisemitism as a threat to France; shortly thereafter he published a book defending Dreyfus and presenting the Affair as a matter of socialist solidarity.

Some on the left refused to join Jaurès, and the Socialists split. But as Samuels’ biography of Dreyfus notes, “Jaurès helped ensure that a large part of the political left in France would align itself with republican values and against antisemitism for decades to come.”

Diaspora for everyone

Contra Zionists, then, the Dreyfus Affair was not a story of unremitting antisemitism in the diaspora. Nor was it a story of weak self-hating diaspora Jews forced to turn to charitable gentiles for succor. Instead, the Dreyfus Affair is a story about how Jewish resistance and Jewish struggle catalyzed a broad ethnic, religious, and political coalition against antifascism.

The cause of Jewish rights, led by Jews, forced France to define itself through its treatment of its marginalized citizens, and create for itself an incipient antifascist identity.  According to Samuels:

the affair defused the time bomb of French antisemitic prejudice, or at least delayed its explosion, by mobilizing much of the French left against right-wing nationalism. The creation of organizations like the Human Rights League during the Dreyfus Affair helped form a bulwark against hatred, as did the courageous stance taken by certain Socialist leaders in defense of the Jewish officer.

The Affair, by rallying France against the forces of reaction, created a less hateful, less fascist France for Jewish people. But it also created a less hateful, less fascist France for non-Jews. The Nazis had to conquer France before the forces of reaction could establish their Vichy. Without Dreyfus, Hitler might well have had the collaboration of a fascist France, as well as a fascist Italy, Spain, and Japan, from the beginning of the war.

Zionists insist that diaspora can only mean weakness and failure; they argue that safety is only possible through a world of ethnostates, where each keeps to each. It’s a dream of purity as strength. But the promise and the hope of diaspora is that we build a better world not by retreating into homogenous walled encampments, but by standing in solidarity to fight for the rights of the marginalized and excluded, because only by doing so can we secure a better world for everyone.

The Dreyfusards were working for France and for Jews, most directly. But if their fight meant anything, it was also a fight for Black people, for LGBT people, for indigenous people, for Palestinians, for anyone targeted by the law for hatred, dishonor, torment, and death. Everyone’s  histories and oppressions are different. But the best message of the Dreyfus Affair is that we can only fight fascism when we recognize we are all in diaspora together.