Good article! The case was the subject of Robert Harris’ very good 2013 novel An Officer and a Spy, which told the story in the first person voice of Georges Picquart, the intelligence commander who established the truth (and was jailed by his superiors for doing so). Roman Polanski turned this into a movie that he called J’accuse! after Zola’s famous broadside—Polanski said he identified with Dreyfus as a victim of antisemitic prejudice though Dreyfus is not known to have drugged and had sex with an under age girl. I held my nose when in France and saw the film, which is in fact excellent. I don’t know if it’s had a US release. But all this celebration of Picquart has provoked a reaction: Philippe Oriol published in 2019 a revisionist account called Le faux ami du capitaine Dreyfus, the faux ami being Picquart who was through it all himself an unwavering antisemite (and opportunist). Fascinating stuff and, as you say, a rehearsal for worse things to come.
Great article, with some great context which I didn't know about. (I think there's a little typo where you meant to say "fascism" instead of "antifascism") I haven't read Arendt in a while, but as I recall her point is a bit more subtle and boils down to: if you depict your people as outsiders and as victims, you may create intra-group solidarity thereby but you also invite hostile groups to view you in a similar way, to your detriment.
Arendt said a range of things…but yeah, the argument that Jews are tribal and therefore brought antisemitism on themselves is antisemitic and ahistorical. Jews in Germany were thoroughly assimilated Ed, just for starters.
one correction. France was not the first nation to grant Jewish citizens citizenship in Europe.
The first was almost certainly Spain under the Umayyads in the 10th century. The Sephardic Jews enjoyed great freedom because of a great deal of tolerance. But any prince who "converted" to Islam, all of his subjects were automatically citizens such as citizenship was defined at the time. So Sephards in any aligned princedom would have been citizens,
But the real first citizenship was the Poland-Lithuanian alliance in 1569. Jewish people became important personages, and were granted full citizenship. While that would end 200 years later when Poland was partitioned, many Jewish persons remained and that is why more than half of the Jews in Europe at outbreak of WWII resided in Poland.
It's a bit hard to read this as quite the victory you describe while sitting in a France that is really at risk of electing a fascist government in the next 3 weeks. It was certainly a victory in the moment, but both anti-Semitism and fascism are alive and well in contemporary France and even potentially ascendant. And this even with more active (and more uniformly anti-Zionist) left than in the US. An enduring victory of the left over anti-Semitism would be a good argument against Zionism. A temporary one works much less well. Especially in a global environment of resurgent anti-Semitism.
I don't think Zionism is intended to defeat antisemitism. In fact, I think it is largely based in an acknowledgement that anti-Semitism is a permanent feature of the world. Roughly Zionism is the belief that Jews need a space they control since they will always be at risk in any space they don't control. I understand that you don't like the philosophy but pretending it fails because it doesn't do something it never intended to do seems bizarre. And I do actually think Dreyfus admits a Zionist reading you try to pretend isn't there. After all, at the time of the Affair, Jews were quite assimilated and the fact that Dreyfus occurred at all was viewed by many as a resurgence of pre-Revolutionary anti-Semitism. A resurgence that came as a surpise to many, including Dreyfus himself. And sure, a resurgence that was pushed back in France at that moment, but also one that was not pushed back in Germany 30 or so years later. The claim that Zionism hasn't kept Jews safe is also a bit of a weird one. A whole lot of Jews who left Europe for Israel after Dreyfus and before the Holocaust might disagree. Sure anti-Semitism was relatively quiet and relatively tamed in the post-WWII order. But the ongoing collapse of that order seems to be fairly clearly coupled with rising anti-Semitism that seems to me quite reminiscent of Europe in the early 20th century. It doesn't seem all that hard to me to imagine a fairly immediate future in which Israel will be the safer place to be a Jew. And fwiw, I really don't buy Dreyfus as a major cause of the relative strength of the French left. Drefyus occurs in the context already of both the French Revolution and the Paris Commune. The US Revolution was largely about the property rights of the propertied class, the French one was much, much more radical. The Left in France was stronger than in the US long before Dreyfus.
I mean, Zionism's most recent failure to keep Jewish people safe seems to be 10/7. And in general, Israel has never been a very safe place for Jewish people. It's a violent colonial project, and there has always been violent resistance.
Zionism sees every defeat in the diaspora as a refutation of diaspora, but the ongoing violence against Jewish people in Israel is never discussed in that way; instead it's framed as further evidence that more Zionism is needed. Similarly, the fact that Jewish people found refuge in diaspora, or that they won victories there, is pooh poohed as being insufficient or not permanent.
Like, do you want to move to Israel right now for "safety"? I sure as hell don't.
The French left is a legacy of the Revolution, arguably. the dreyfus affair was an effort to reverse that legacy, and to crush the left. had it succeeded, France would be very different, and much worse.
I agree I don't want to move to Israel today. As I've said before, I have many Israeli friends who are moving to the US exactly in reaction to October 7 and ensuing events. But as they do so and look realistically at our politics, they now seem to keep a foot in Israel to the best of their ability and I really can't argue with them when they do that. Safety is relative. It's going to take really a lot of events on the scale of October 7 to add up to the Shoah. Or even to add up to the pogroms my ancestors fled in Russia and Eastern Europe (mostly fleeing to the US, where anti-Semitism also existed but was less violent). Sure, I'd rather not live in a violent world, but if one views it as inevitable that we live in one, then it hardly seems absurd that one prefers to live in one fully armed. I'm not actually endorsing that view of the world or the Zionist instantiation of it, I'm just not on your page of viewing it as obviously wrongheaded. Nor do I have your faith that the US will be a safer place for Jews than Israel say 2 or 20 years from now. It might be, it might not be. And yes, absolutely Dreyfus was one of many attempts to roll back some aspects of the French Revolution. And the French Left has had a long history of resisting those attempts. Sadly a long history that has been troubled since the 1980s and that seems on the verge of dying this month. The rise and fall of neoliberalism in France seems to have done quite some spectacular damage to the French left, which seems in near total disarray at the moment. Replaying Dreyfus here now or ten years from now really could have a different outcome. France could really have a fascist government elected without a war come July. It seems slightly less likely than Trump winning in November, but not all that much less likely. Neither is inevitable, neither is anywhere near as unimaginable as I'd like them to be.
Also thinking about the demise of the French Left, I don't know that it is entirely fair to blame it on neoliberalism and its impact. The rise of multiculturism and certain kinds of anti-colonialism have also been unkind to the French Left. The traditional version of liberte, egalite, fraternite was in its own way quite intolerant of many kinds of difference. And so the traditional French Left had trouble joining with the broader modern left and that contributed to the fracturing and dissipation of the unity that fought back in the moment of Dreyfus. The Left that defended Dreyfus was very much a Left defending Jewish assimilation and not a Left defending the rights of Jews (or any other people) to live differently. Jews could be French but only if like Dreyfus they were French first and foremost. It really is not the Left you are hoping it was.
Maybe you can't, but I can easily imagine dystopic futures where Jews are safest in Israel. Safe at the price of committing great violence against other people, but safe.
I keep having this quote rattle around in my head "of course, Zionism hasn’t really kept Jewish ppl safe" because I think historically it's just wrong. You're welcome to your own beliefs about Zionism, but this one is factually wrong and I think it is important to keep track of facts.
Lots of Jews fled Europe between the world wars in the face of rising antisemitism. Their ability to flee to the US was restricted by the 1924 Immigration Restriction Act. Their ability to flee to British Palestine was also restricted for much of this period, but exactly because of Zionism, there was active and successful smuggling of Jews into British Palestine. From all over Europe. Hundreds of thousands of them. Who most likely would have died in large numbers in German camps or, in some cases, later in Stalin's gulags.
I don't think there is any plausible case that this number of lives saves doesn't dwarf the number of Jewish lives lost in all of Israel's wars since even if one includes all terrorist attacks globally motivated by Israel's existence.
So, in fact, yes, Zionism has historically made Jews safer. Whether you like it or not. Perhaps even because Zionism is a violent nationalist movement that was willing to violently break laws of several countries to smuggle Jews to British Palestine.
Whether or not Zionism makes Jews overall safer going forward seems to me very difficult to predict. You seem absolutely certain it can't possibly make them safer, but your belief in that seems based in a false belief that it has never made them safer in the past.
Maybe Zionism right now makes Jews a lot less safe. Certainly today Jews are at greater risk of violence in Israel than in the US or France. Is that going to be true in France in August or the US in February? Or in either country 10 years from now? I really don't know and I really don't think you know either.
I respect your opposition to Israeli violence, I respect your desire not to live in a violent nationalist world. But facts are facts.
Much more debatable is whether the violent nationalism of Zionism has made humans
safer. I don't know if one can make sufficiently realistic estimates of total lives lost and saved on all sides by Zionism. But I'm pretty good at eyeballing numbers and my guess is that it's at least debatable for now. But almost certainly not going to remain debatable
if the current violence in Gaza lasts long enough to lead to mass starvation. Which currently seems more likely than not. But that's not to the point, since your putative claim is about making Jews safe and not about making humans safe.
Some time ago I looked this up on Google out of curiosity. So the general story was familiar to me but all these details bring it to life.
Really like the broader distinction you drew between diaspora versus Zionism. Very helpful.
History is so messy, no wonder the right wing is always trying to simplify it down to their one story of endless personal threat.
Thank you for this beautiful post, Noah!
Wonderful piece! Thoughtful, detailed and encouraging
Good article! The case was the subject of Robert Harris’ very good 2013 novel An Officer and a Spy, which told the story in the first person voice of Georges Picquart, the intelligence commander who established the truth (and was jailed by his superiors for doing so). Roman Polanski turned this into a movie that he called J’accuse! after Zola’s famous broadside—Polanski said he identified with Dreyfus as a victim of antisemitic prejudice though Dreyfus is not known to have drugged and had sex with an under age girl. I held my nose when in France and saw the film, which is in fact excellent. I don’t know if it’s had a US release. But all this celebration of Picquart has provoked a reaction: Philippe Oriol published in 2019 a revisionist account called Le faux ami du capitaine Dreyfus, the faux ami being Picquart who was through it all himself an unwavering antisemite (and opportunist). Fascinating stuff and, as you say, a rehearsal for worse things to come.
I hadn’t realized Polanski made a film about it. But yes, pretty ugly that he’d claim he was the victim of prejudice.
Great article, with some great context which I didn't know about. (I think there's a little typo where you meant to say "fascism" instead of "antifascism") I haven't read Arendt in a while, but as I recall her point is a bit more subtle and boils down to: if you depict your people as outsiders and as victims, you may create intra-group solidarity thereby but you also invite hostile groups to view you in a similar way, to your detriment.
Arendt said a range of things…but yeah, the argument that Jews are tribal and therefore brought antisemitism on themselves is antisemitic and ahistorical. Jews in Germany were thoroughly assimilated Ed, just for starters.
good article.
one correction. France was not the first nation to grant Jewish citizens citizenship in Europe.
The first was almost certainly Spain under the Umayyads in the 10th century. The Sephardic Jews enjoyed great freedom because of a great deal of tolerance. But any prince who "converted" to Islam, all of his subjects were automatically citizens such as citizenship was defined at the time. So Sephards in any aligned princedom would have been citizens,
But the real first citizenship was the Poland-Lithuanian alliance in 1569. Jewish people became important personages, and were granted full citizenship. While that would end 200 years later when Poland was partitioned, many Jewish persons remained and that is why more than half of the Jews in Europe at outbreak of WWII resided in Poland.
It's a bit hard to read this as quite the victory you describe while sitting in a France that is really at risk of electing a fascist government in the next 3 weeks. It was certainly a victory in the moment, but both anti-Semitism and fascism are alive and well in contemporary France and even potentially ascendant. And this even with more active (and more uniformly anti-Zionist) left than in the US. An enduring victory of the left over anti-Semitism would be a good argument against Zionism. A temporary one works much less well. Especially in a global environment of resurgent anti-Semitism.
I don’t think there are complete victories. Part of the reason the left is stronger in France is the Dreyfus affair though, I think.
And of course, Zionism hasn’t really kept Jewish ppl safe, or defeated antisemitism, either in Israel if France.
I don't think Zionism is intended to defeat antisemitism. In fact, I think it is largely based in an acknowledgement that anti-Semitism is a permanent feature of the world. Roughly Zionism is the belief that Jews need a space they control since they will always be at risk in any space they don't control. I understand that you don't like the philosophy but pretending it fails because it doesn't do something it never intended to do seems bizarre. And I do actually think Dreyfus admits a Zionist reading you try to pretend isn't there. After all, at the time of the Affair, Jews were quite assimilated and the fact that Dreyfus occurred at all was viewed by many as a resurgence of pre-Revolutionary anti-Semitism. A resurgence that came as a surpise to many, including Dreyfus himself. And sure, a resurgence that was pushed back in France at that moment, but also one that was not pushed back in Germany 30 or so years later. The claim that Zionism hasn't kept Jews safe is also a bit of a weird one. A whole lot of Jews who left Europe for Israel after Dreyfus and before the Holocaust might disagree. Sure anti-Semitism was relatively quiet and relatively tamed in the post-WWII order. But the ongoing collapse of that order seems to be fairly clearly coupled with rising anti-Semitism that seems to me quite reminiscent of Europe in the early 20th century. It doesn't seem all that hard to me to imagine a fairly immediate future in which Israel will be the safer place to be a Jew. And fwiw, I really don't buy Dreyfus as a major cause of the relative strength of the French left. Drefyus occurs in the context already of both the French Revolution and the Paris Commune. The US Revolution was largely about the property rights of the propertied class, the French one was much, much more radical. The Left in France was stronger than in the US long before Dreyfus.
I mean, Zionism's most recent failure to keep Jewish people safe seems to be 10/7. And in general, Israel has never been a very safe place for Jewish people. It's a violent colonial project, and there has always been violent resistance.
Zionism sees every defeat in the diaspora as a refutation of diaspora, but the ongoing violence against Jewish people in Israel is never discussed in that way; instead it's framed as further evidence that more Zionism is needed. Similarly, the fact that Jewish people found refuge in diaspora, or that they won victories there, is pooh poohed as being insufficient or not permanent.
Like, do you want to move to Israel right now for "safety"? I sure as hell don't.
The French left is a legacy of the Revolution, arguably. the dreyfus affair was an effort to reverse that legacy, and to crush the left. had it succeeded, France would be very different, and much worse.
I agree I don't want to move to Israel today. As I've said before, I have many Israeli friends who are moving to the US exactly in reaction to October 7 and ensuing events. But as they do so and look realistically at our politics, they now seem to keep a foot in Israel to the best of their ability and I really can't argue with them when they do that. Safety is relative. It's going to take really a lot of events on the scale of October 7 to add up to the Shoah. Or even to add up to the pogroms my ancestors fled in Russia and Eastern Europe (mostly fleeing to the US, where anti-Semitism also existed but was less violent). Sure, I'd rather not live in a violent world, but if one views it as inevitable that we live in one, then it hardly seems absurd that one prefers to live in one fully armed. I'm not actually endorsing that view of the world or the Zionist instantiation of it, I'm just not on your page of viewing it as obviously wrongheaded. Nor do I have your faith that the US will be a safer place for Jews than Israel say 2 or 20 years from now. It might be, it might not be. And yes, absolutely Dreyfus was one of many attempts to roll back some aspects of the French Revolution. And the French Left has had a long history of resisting those attempts. Sadly a long history that has been troubled since the 1980s and that seems on the verge of dying this month. The rise and fall of neoliberalism in France seems to have done quite some spectacular damage to the French left, which seems in near total disarray at the moment. Replaying Dreyfus here now or ten years from now really could have a different outcome. France could really have a fascist government elected without a war come July. It seems slightly less likely than Trump winning in November, but not all that much less likely. Neither is inevitable, neither is anywhere near as unimaginable as I'd like them to be.
I don't have faith in the US future. I do think that if Jewish people aren't safe in the US, they won't be safe anywhere. The US is a global power.
Also thinking about the demise of the French Left, I don't know that it is entirely fair to blame it on neoliberalism and its impact. The rise of multiculturism and certain kinds of anti-colonialism have also been unkind to the French Left. The traditional version of liberte, egalite, fraternite was in its own way quite intolerant of many kinds of difference. And so the traditional French Left had trouble joining with the broader modern left and that contributed to the fracturing and dissipation of the unity that fought back in the moment of Dreyfus. The Left that defended Dreyfus was very much a Left defending Jewish assimilation and not a Left defending the rights of Jews (or any other people) to live differently. Jews could be French but only if like Dreyfus they were French first and foremost. It really is not the Left you are hoping it was.
Maybe you can't, but I can easily imagine dystopic futures where Jews are safest in Israel. Safe at the price of committing great violence against other people, but safe.
Hi Noah,
I keep having this quote rattle around in my head "of course, Zionism hasn’t really kept Jewish ppl safe" because I think historically it's just wrong. You're welcome to your own beliefs about Zionism, but this one is factually wrong and I think it is important to keep track of facts.
Lots of Jews fled Europe between the world wars in the face of rising antisemitism. Their ability to flee to the US was restricted by the 1924 Immigration Restriction Act. Their ability to flee to British Palestine was also restricted for much of this period, but exactly because of Zionism, there was active and successful smuggling of Jews into British Palestine. From all over Europe. Hundreds of thousands of them. Who most likely would have died in large numbers in German camps or, in some cases, later in Stalin's gulags.
I don't think there is any plausible case that this number of lives saves doesn't dwarf the number of Jewish lives lost in all of Israel's wars since even if one includes all terrorist attacks globally motivated by Israel's existence.
So, in fact, yes, Zionism has historically made Jews safer. Whether you like it or not. Perhaps even because Zionism is a violent nationalist movement that was willing to violently break laws of several countries to smuggle Jews to British Palestine.
Whether or not Zionism makes Jews overall safer going forward seems to me very difficult to predict. You seem absolutely certain it can't possibly make them safer, but your belief in that seems based in a false belief that it has never made them safer in the past.
Maybe Zionism right now makes Jews a lot less safe. Certainly today Jews are at greater risk of violence in Israel than in the US or France. Is that going to be true in France in August or the US in February? Or in either country 10 years from now? I really don't know and I really don't think you know either.
I respect your opposition to Israeli violence, I respect your desire not to live in a violent nationalist world. But facts are facts.
Much more debatable is whether the violent nationalism of Zionism has made humans
safer. I don't know if one can make sufficiently realistic estimates of total lives lost and saved on all sides by Zionism. But I'm pretty good at eyeballing numbers and my guess is that it's at least debatable for now. But almost certainly not going to remain debatable
if the current violence in Gaza lasts long enough to lead to mass starvation. Which currently seems more likely than not. But that's not to the point, since your putative claim is about making Jews safe and not about making humans safe.
Best,
David