The Dreyfus Affair, Public Opinion and Antisemitism: I

Abstract

This chapter discusses the Dreyfus Affair, the main public “event” around which antisemitic opinion crystallized in the 1890s. Indeed, it gave antisemitism a dramatic scenario and provided its proponents with a powerful and lasting myth of Jewish inassimilability and treason. There is little doubt that Alfred Dreyfus's arrest and condemnation stemmed from the anti-Jewish prejudice of the officer corps, and its attachment to “the legend of the Jew as Judas, of the Jews as the race of Iscariot, the race of traitors.” It is also clear that the explosion of the Dreyfus Case into the Dreyfus Affair, provoked in part by those convinced of his innocence or of the illegality of his trial, was largely the responsibility of an organized antisemitic movement and newspaper press. The chapter then looks at the police reports to establish a chronological account of the evolution of opinion during the Dreyfus Affair.