History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

  Against this background of orchestrated hatred and slander, the events of 1881 in Russia, and their consequences, dealt a deadly blow to established French Jewry by giving ordinary Frenchmen, especially in Paris, vivid, ocular evidence of a ‘Jewish problem’. Over a generation, France took 120,000 Jewish refugees, more than doubling the size of French Jewry. These were poor, obvious, Ashkenazi Jews, of course, seemingly corresponding to the caricature Drumont and La Croix were peddling. Moreover, they were joined by a steady stream of Jews from the Alsace community, who could not abide the German occupation. They included the Dreyfus family who had come to Paris in 1871, but retained business connections with Mulhouse. They were fierce, almost fanatical, French patriots. Getting a commission in the French army had been the boyhood ambition of Alfred Dreyfus. It was a matter of tremendous pride to him that, after the general staff was belatedly reorganized to give it a wider social basis, he had been the first Jew to be selected for staff duties. But of course the patriotism of Alsatian Jews had its ironies. Like anyone else with the faintest German connections they were suspect persons in the France of the 1890s, a paranoid country, still smarting from defeat and territorial robbery, desperate to avenge itself and recover its lost provinces, yet fearful of further German assault. In January 1894 France signed the first secret military convention with her new ally against Germany, Tsarist Russia. This made the Jews still more suspect in French eyes, for they were celebrated for hating the Tsarist regime more than any other. The French Jews did their best. All the Paris synagogues offered up special prayers on the birthday of Alexander III, the most anti-Semitic of the Tsars. It made no difference. Every patriotic gesture the Jews made was received by the anti-Semites with implacable cynicism: ‘They would, wouldn’t they?’

  In July 1894, a spendthrift gambler, Major Count Walsin-Esterhazy, then commanding the 74th Infantry, offered his services to the German embassy. Next month he handed the embassy concierge a letter (the bordereau) listing certain papers he intended to hand over in return for cash. On 26 September it reached Major Hubert Henry, of the general staff ‘Statistical Section’ (a cover for counter-espionage). Despite its reorganization, the general staff was a morass of incompetence, the Statistical Section being the worst of the lot. It kept virtually no records or registers. It constantly fabricated documents to plant, but did not record them, and often confused false and real. On one occasion it sold an old strongbox; the buyer found top-secret papers in it. That was characteristic. If the Section had possessed a minimum of professional competence, the Dreyfus affair could never have occurred because Esterhazy was a phenomenally incompetent spy. All the internal evidence of the bordereau pointed to him. Little or nothing indicated that the culprit was a member of the staff. Some of it positively ruled out Captain Dreyfus. But the head of the section was Colonel Jean-Conard Sandherr, also an Alastian, but a German-hating, anti-Semitic Catholic convert. When Major Henry, another anti-Semite, produced Dreyfus’ name, Colonel Sandherr slapped his forehead and exclaimed: ‘I ought to have thought of it!’147

  Nevertheless, there was no anti-Semitic army plot against Dreyfus. All concerned acted in good faith. The only exception was Henry, who actually forged evidence against Dreyfus. The trouble was started by Drumont and the Assumptionists. It was the Libre Parole which first broke the story that a Jewish officer had been secretly arrested for treason. By 9 November 1894, weeks before the trial, it proclaimed that ‘toute la Juiverie’ was behind ‘le traître’. La Croix joined in the witch-hunt. Appalled, the leaders of the Jewish community, who included five army generals, tried to play things down. When Dreyfus was convicted and sent to Devil’s Island, they accepted his guilt; were deeply ashamed of it; wanted the whole thing buried. Dreyfus’ own family were convinced of his innocence. But they employed discreet lawyers, working quietly behind the scenes amassing evidence, hoping for a pardon. It was a typical and time-honoured Jewish reaction to injustice.

  However, Herzl was not the only Jew who was stirred to anger and action. Another was Bernard Lazare (1865-1903), born Baruch Hagani, a young Symbolist writer from Nîmes. He believed in total assimilation and was, if anything, an anarchist. Now, for the first time, he was stirred on a Jewish issue. He began to make inquiries but was given an icy brush-off by the Dreyfus family. He was revolted by the lack of Jewish outrage. It was, he wrote, ‘a deplorable habit from the old persecutions—of receiving blows and not protesting, of bending their backs, of waiting for the storm to pass and of playing dead so as not to attract the lightning’. His own inquiries convinced him Dreyfus was innocent and the victim of a frame-up. At the end of 1896 he published, in Brussels, a pamphlet, Une erreur judiciaire: la vérité sur l’affaire Dreyfus. It raised the anti-Semitic issue for the first time on the Jewish side: ‘Because he was a Jew he was arrested, because he was a Jew he was convicted, because he was a Jew the voices of justice and of truth could not be heard in his favour.’ To Lazare, Dreyfus was the archetype Jewish martyr:

  He incarnates, in himself, not only the centuries-old sufferings of the people of martyrs, but their present agonies. Through him, I see Jews languishing in Russian prisons…Rumanian Jews refused the rights of man, Galician Jews starved by financial trusts and ravaged by peasants made fanatics by their priests…Algerian Jews, beaten and pillaged, unhappy immigrants dying of hunger in the ghettos of New York and London, all of those whom desperation drives to seek some haven in the far corners of the inhabited world where they will at last find that justice which the best of them have claimed for all humanity.148

  Lazare did not stop with his pamphlet. He begged prominent Jews to take up the case and work for a revision. He made one early and vital convert: Joseph Reinach, the great Jewish lawyer. This tipped the scales for the Jewish community: the issue became serious. Many young Jews took up the cause, among them Marcel Proust: ‘I was the first Dreyfusard’, he wrote, ‘for it was I who went to ask Anatole France for his signature.’149 This was for the ‘petition of intellectuals’, to rope in prominent writers for the cause. It succeeded, in the sense that it got non-Jewish radicals interested. Among them was Émile Zola, then France’s most popular writer. He investigated the case, wrote an enormous article in defence of Dreyfus and gave it to the rising politician Georges Clemenceau, who ran the liberal paper L’Aurore. It was Clemenceau’s idea to print it on his front page (13 January 1898) under the headline ‘J’ACCUSE!’ That was the real beginning of the Dreyfus affair. Four days later anti-Semitic riots broke out in Nantes and spread to Nancy, Rennes, Bordeaux, Tournon, Montpellier, Marseilles, Toulouse, Angers, Le Havre, Orléans and many other towns. In France it was simply a matter of students and riffraff smashing the windows of Jewish shops, but in Algiers the riots lasted four days and involved the sack of the entire Jewish quarter. None of the ringleaders was arrested.

  It was exactly what the Jewish establishment had feared if the Dreyfus case was made into a major issue. But nothing could now stop the polarization. The army, asked to admit it had made a mistake, refused and closed ranks. When one of its number, Major Picquart, produced evidence pointing to Esterhazy, it was Picquart who was arrested and gaoled. Zola was tried and had to flee the country. In February 1898 the Dreyfusards formed a national organization, the League of the Rights of Man, to get Dreyfus freed. The anti-Dreyfusards, led by the writer Charles Maurras, replied with the League of the French Fatherland, to ‘defend the honour of the army and France’. Lazare fought a duel with Drumont (neither was hurt); there were at least thirty-two other duels on the issue, one Jew being killed. In the Chambre des Députés, in January 1898, there was an appalling mass fist-fight while Jean Jaurès was at the tribune and the mob raged outside. The diplomat Paul Cambon, returning to Paris from Constantinople, complained: ‘Whatever you may say or do, you are classified as a friend or an enemy of the Jews or the army.’150

  The Dreyfus affair convulsed France for an entire decade. It became an important event not just in Jewish history but in French, indeed in European,
history. It saw the emergence, for the first time, of a distinct class of intellectuals—the word intelligentsia was now coined—as a major power in European society and among whom emancipated Jews were an important, sometimes a dominant, element. A new issue was raised, not just for France: who controls our culture? The French proletariat sat solidly on the sidelines. The mobs were students and petit bourgeois. ‘I am bound to admit’, Clemenceau confessed, ‘that the working class appears to take no interest in the question.’151 But for the educated classes it became the only thing that mattered in life. A cartoon by Caron d’Ache showed a dining-room with all the furniture smashed and the guests fighting on the floor: ‘Someone mentioned It.’ Paris society, both aristocratic and bourgeois, divided into two camps. The battle has been repeatedly described, in Proust’s Jean Santeuil, Zola’s La Vérité, Anatole France’s L’Île des pinguins and Monsieur Bergeret à Paris, in plays by Lavedan and Donnay, by Charles Maurras, Roger Martin du Gard, Charles Péguy and Jean Barois.152 The ‘Faubourg’, the aristocratic quarter, led by the Ducs de Brissac, La Rochefoucauld and Luynes and by the Duchesse d’Uzès, subscribed overwhelmingly to the anti-Dreyfusard cause; they were joined by many writers, such as Paul Valéry and Maurice Barrès; the great painter Edgar Degas found himself at odds with all his Jewish friends. A breakdown of subscribers to the League of the French Fatherland (1899) showed that over 70 per cent were highly educated, composed (in order) of students, lawyers, doctors, university teachers, artists and men of letters; the names included eighty-seven members of the Collège de France and the Institut and twenty-six out of forty members of the Académie Française.153 The social headquarters of the anti-Dreyfusards was the salon of the Comtesse de Martel, the original of Madame Swann’s salon in Proust’s À la Recherche du temps perdu.154 They all believed strongly in a (mythical) secret organization of Jews, freemasons and atheists which they called ‘the Syndicate’. The Prince de Polignac used to ask Proust: ‘What’s the good old Syndicate doing now, eh?’

  On the Dreyfus side, there was the salon run by Madame Geneviève Strauss, the original of the Duchesse de Guermantes in Proust’s novel. Born a Halévy, the greatest of all Jewish-Protestant haute-bourgeois families, with links to the worlds of art, music and letters,155 she used her salon to organize the great petitions of intellectuals. Its hero was Reinach, now in charge of the Dreyfus campaign. He had, wrote Léon Daudet, ‘a voice of wood and leather and used to leap from chair to chair, in pursuit of báre-bosomed lady guests, with the gallantry of a self-satisfied gorilla’. But Daudet was a biased source. Proust put it more mildly: ‘He was comic but nice, though we did have to pretend he was a reincarnation of Cicero.’ Another Dreyfusard hostess, Madame de Saint-Victor, was known as ‘Our Lady of the Revision’. A third, Madame Ménard-Dorien (the original of Proust’s Madame Verdurin), ran a violently left-wing salon in the Rue de la Faisanderie known as ‘the Fortress of Dreyfusism’; it was there that the philosemitic conspiracy theory, of an (equally mythical) clerical-military plot, originated. But some hostesses, like Madame Audernon, enjoyed having both factions and listening to their rows. Asked by a rival, who had banned her Dreyfusard guests, ‘What are you doing about your Jews?’, she replied: ‘I’m keeping them on.’156

  But behind the social veneer, real—and for the Jews ultimately tragic—issues were taking shape. The Dreyfus affair was a classic example of a fundamentally simple case of injustice being taken over by extremists on both sides. Drumont and the Assumptionists flourished Dreyfus’ conviction and used it to launch a campaign against the Jews. The young Jewish intellectuals, and their growing band of radical allies, began by asking for justice and ended by seeking total victory and revenge. In doing so, they gave their enemies an awesome demonstration of Jewish and philosemitic intellectual power. At the beginning of the Dreyfus case, the anti-Semites, as always in the past, held all the powerful cards, particularly in the world of print. By a significant irony, it was the liberal press law of 1881, lifting the previous ban on criticism of religious groups and designed to expose the Catholic Church to journalistic inquiry, which made Drumont’s vicious brand of anti-Semitism legal. Press freedom, at least initially, worked against Jewish interests (as it was later to do under the Weimar Republic). Until the Dreyfus affair, the only Jewish attempt to answer La Libre Parole, a journal called La Vrai Parole (1893), was an embarrassing failure. At its outset, the press was overwhelmingly anti-Dreyfusard, for in addition to the anti-Semitic papers, which had circulations of between 200,000 and 300,000, the popular papers, Le Petit Journal (1,100,000), Le Petit Parisien (750,000) and Le Journal (500,000), backed the established order.157

  From 1897, with the founding of papers like L’Aurore and the all-woman La Fronde, the Jews and their allies began to hit back. They had of course the inestimable benefit of an overwhelming case. But their skill at presenting it grew progressively. It was the first time secular Jews had worked together, as a class, to put their point of view. They invoked the new media of photography and cinema. There were photographic action shots of the Algiers pogrom.158 As early as 1899 the pioneer cinéaste Georges Méliès made eleven short movies reenacting scenes from the affair; they provoked fights in the audience whenever they were shown.159 Gradually, the Dreyfusards began to tilt the media balance in their favour, as uncommitted newspapers and magazines swung behind them. Outside France, their capture of public opinion was decisive everywhere. Inside France, as their media power increased, so did their political influence. The affair throughout was propelled forward by weird accidents. The most important, and for the Dreyfusards their real breakthrough, was the sudden death of the violently anti-Dreyfus President, Félix Faure, on 16 February 1899. He had a cerebral haemorrhage while in flagrante delicto with his naked concubine, Madame Steinheil, and collapsed clutching her hair in a steely grip—it was her terrified screams which brought the staff rushing to his locked study, whose door they were forced to break down.

  After this, the anti-Dreyfusard front began to bend. Dreyfus was brought back from Devil’s Island, white-haired, malarial, scarcely able to speak. He was retried, convicted again, offered a free pardon which, under pressure from his family and the old Jewish establishment, he accepted. The men who were profiting from the Dreyfus campaign, the radical politicians like Clemenceau, the new intellectuals, Jewish and gentile, were furious. ‘We were ready to die for Dreyfus,’ wrote Charles Péguy angrily, ‘but Dreyfus himself is not.’160 Why should he? He seems to have realized, along with many older Jews, that the pursuit of the case à l’outrance was increasing, solidifying and would end by institutionalizing anti-Semitism in France. According to Léon Daudet, he used to say to the fanatics on his side: ‘I’ve never had a moment’s peace since leaving Devil’s Island,’ or ‘Shut up, all of you, or I’ll confess.’161 He even remarked, with heavy Jewish irony: ‘There’s no smoke without fire, you know.’ But the new power of the written word in alliance with the radical left was now out of control. It pushed on for revenge and total victory. It got both. The Assumptionists were kicked out of France. The left won an overwhelming electoral success in 1906. Dreyfus was rehabilitated and made a general. Picquart ended up Minister for War. The state, now in Dreyfusard hands, waged a destructive campaign against the church. So the extremists won, both in creating the affair and in winning it.162

  But there was a price to pay, and in the end it was the Jews who paid it. Anti-Semitism was institutionalized. Charles Maurras’s League went on to become, after the 1914-18 war, a pro-fascist, anti-Semitic movement which formed the most vicious element in the Vichy regime, 1941-4, and helped to send hundreds of thousands of French Jews, native and refugee, to their deaths, as we shall see. The victory of the Dreyfusards established in the minds of many Frenchmen the Jewish conspiracy as an incontrovertible fact. One need hardly say that there was no conspiracy, certainly no Jewish one. Joseph Reinach, who not only vindicated his client but wrote the first full history of the affair, showed in his sixth and last volume how much he d
eplored and feared the excesses of his own supporters.163 There was no master-mind. The nearest to a master-spirit was Lucien Herr, librarian of the ultra-elitist École Normale Supérieure, and he was the centre of a Protestant, not a Jewish, circle.164 Yet the demonstration of Jewish intellectual power which the affair provided, the ease with which Jewish writers now strode the French intellectual scene, the fact that nine-tenths of the vast literature which accumulated around the affair was Dreyfusard, all this disturbed Frenchmen who in general sympathized with the Jewish point of view. There is a significant passage in the journals of the Protestant novelist André Gide, 24 January 1914, about his friend Léon Blum, leader of the younger Jewish Dreyfusards and later French Prime Minister:

  his apparent resolve always to show a preference for the Jew and to be interested always in him…comes above all from the fact that Blum considers the Jewish race as superior, as called upon to dominate after having been long dominated, and thinks it his duty to work towards its triumph with all his strength…. A time will come, he thinks, that will be the age of the Jew; and right now it is important to recognize and establish his superiority in all categories, in all domains, in all the divisions of art, of knowledge and of industry.