Antisemitism in France and colonial Algeria

Abstract

ABSTRACTThere is a commonplace assumption that, in the twentieth century, antisemitism was an exclusively right-wing phenomenon. However, there was a strand of socialism that equated Jews and capitalism and, to that extent, was antisemitic. When Algeria became a colony of France, French antisemitism was exported there. In the first two decades of the Third Republic, some socialists saw antisemitism as a stepping-stone to anti-capitalism, and thought they could combine forces to overthrow the ‘bourgeois republic’. It was not until the summer of 1898, as the Dreyfus Affair exploded throughout France and colonial Algeria, and they feared that antisemites and the right were about to stage a coup, that socialists rallied to save the republic. Those who became Dreyfusards did so in defence of human rights and the universalist principles of the French Revolution. The antisemitic origins of the charges against Dreyfus were downplayed and some Dreyfusards continued to accept stereotypes about Jews. Other socialists who never became Dreyfusards condemned antisemitism when they discovered the Jewish proletariat. Yet their ‘anti-antisemitism’ reinforced the antisemitic stereotype that imagined a uniquely Jewish form of capitalism that was more virulent than other forms of capitalism. This failure to reject antisemitism in principle and provide a solution to the ‘Jewish question’ other than assimilation would later prove to be disastrous, indeed fatal to the Jewish working class, and continue to be a serious problem for France to the present day.