1 The latest example of this view is Norman Cohn’s Warrant for Genocide. The myth of the Jewish world-conspiracy and the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” New York, 1966. The author starts from the implied negation that there is such a thing as Jewish history at all. Jews are in his view “people who . . . lived scattered across Europe from the English Channel to the Volga, with very little in common to them all save their descent from adherents of the Jewish religion” (p. 15). Antisemites, on the contrary, can claim direct and unbroken lineage through space and time from the Middle Ages when “Jews had been seen as agents of Satan, devil-worshippers, demons in human form” (p. 41), and the only qualification to such sweeping generalizations that the learned author of Pursuit of the Millennium sees fit to make Is that he deals with the “deadliest kind of antisemitism, the kind that results in massacre and attempted genocide” (p. 16). The book also tries rather strenuously to prove that “the mass of the German population was never truly fanaticized against the Jews” and that their extermination “was organized and in the main carried out by the professionals of the SD and the SS,” bodies that “did not by any means represent a typical cross-section of German society” (pp. 212 ff.). How one wishes this statement could be squared with the facts! The result is that the work reads as though it were written about forty years ago by an unduly ingenious member of the Verein zur Bekämpfung des Antisemitismus of unhappy memory.
2 The quotations are all drawn from Jacob Katz, Exclusiveness and Tolerance, Jewish-Gentile Relations in Medieval and Modem Times, New York, 1962 (Chapter 12), an entirely original study, written on the highest possible level, which indeed should have exploded “many cherished notions of contemporary Jewry,” as the jacket claims, but did not because it was almost completely ignored by the general press. Katz belongs among the younger generation of Jewish historians, many of whom teach at the Jerusalem University and publish in Hebrew. Why their work is not more speedily translated and published in this country is something of a mystery. With them, the “lachrymose” presentation of Jewish history, against which Salo W. Baron protested nearly forty years ago, has indeed come to an end.
3 It is interesting to note that the first modem Jewish historian, J. M. Jost, who wrote in Germany in the middle of the last century, was much less prone to the common prejudices of secular Jewish historiography than his more illustrious successors.
4 Katz, op. cit., p. 196.
5 Ibid., p. 6.
6 Ibid., p. 7.
7 The only exception is the antisemitic historian Walter Frank, the head of the Nazi Reichsinstitut für Geschichte des Neuen Deutschlands and the editor of nine volumes of Forschungen zur Judenfrage, 1937–1944. Especially Frank’s own contributions can still be consulted with profit.
1 To the modern historian rights and liberties granted the court Jews during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries may appear to be only the forerunners of equality: court Jews could live wherever they liked, they were permitted to travel freely within the realm of their sovereign, they were allowed to bear arms and had rights to special protection from local authorities. Actually these court Jews, characteristically called Generalprivilegierte Juden in Prussia, not only enjoyed better living conditions than their fellow Jews who still lived under almost medieval restrictions, but they were better off than their non-Jewish neighbors. Their standard of living was much higher than that of the contemporary middle class, their privileges in most cases were greater than those granted to the merchants. Nor did this situation escape the attention of their contemporaries. Christian Wilhelm Dohm, the outstanding advocate of Jewish emancipation in eighteenth-century Prussia, complained of the practice, in force since the time of Frederick William I, which granted rich Jews “all sorts of favors and support” often “at the expense of, and with neglect of diligent legal [that is, non-Jewish] citizens.” In Denkwürdigkeiten meiner Zeit, Lemgo, 1814–1819, IV, 487.
2 ‘Jacob Lestschinsky, in an early discussion of the Jewish problem, pointed out that Jews did not belong to any social class, and spoke of a “Klasseneinschiebsel” (in Weltwirtschafts-Archiv, 1929, Band 30, 123 ff.), but saw only the disadvantages of this situation in Eastern Europe, not its great advantages in Western and Central European countries.
3 For example, under Frederick II after the Seven Years’ War, a decided effort was made in Prussia to incorporate the Jews into a kind of mercantile system. The older general Juden-reglement of 1750 was supplanted by a system of regular permits issued only to those inhabitants who invested a considerable part of their fortune in new manufacturing enterprises. But here, as everywhere else, such government attempts failed completely.
4 Felix Priebatsch (“Die Judenpolitik des fürstlichen Absolutismus im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert” in Forschungen und Versuche zur Geschichte des Mittelalters und der Neuzeit, 1915) cites a typical example from the early eighteenth century: “When the mirror factory in Neuhaus, Lower Austria, which was subsidized by the administration, did not produce, the Jew Wertheimer gave the Emperor money to buy it When asked to take over the factory he refused, stating that his time was taken up with his financial transactions.”
See also Max Köhler, “Beiträge zur neueren jüdischen Wirtschaftsgeschichte. Die Juden in Halberstadt und Umgebung,” in Studien zur Geschichte der Wirtschaft und Geisteskultur, 1927, Band 3.
In this tradition, which kept rich Jews from real positions of power in capitalism, is the fact that in 1911 the Paris Rothschilds sold their share in the oil wells of Baku to the Royal Shell group, after having been, with the exception of Rockefeller, the world’s biggest petroleum tycoons. This incident is reported in Richard Lewinsohn, Wie sie gross und reich wurden, Berlin, 1927.
André Sayou’s Statement (“Les Juifs” in Revue Economique Internationale, 1932) in his polemic against Werner Sombart’s identification of Jews with capitalist development, may be taken as a general rule: “The Rothschilds and other Israelites who were almost exclusively engaged in launching state loans and in the international movement of capital, did not try at all . . . to create great industries.”
5 The influence, however, of mercantile experiments on future developments can hardly be overrated. France was the only country where the mercantile system was tried consistently and resulted in an early flourishing of manufactures which owed their existence to state interference; she never quite recovered from the experience. In the era of free enterprise, her bourgeoisie shunned unprotected investment in native industries while her bureaucracy, also a product of the mercantile system, survived its collapse. Despite the fact that the bureaucracy also lost all its productive functions, it is even today more characteristic of the country and a greater impediment to her recovery than the bourgeoisie.
6 This had been the case in England since Queen Elizabeth’s Marrano banker and the Jewish financiers of Cromwell’s armies, until one of the twelve Jewish brokers admitted to the London Stock Exchange was said to have handled one-quarter of all government loans of his day (see Salo W. Baron, A Social and Religious History of the lews, 1937, Vol. II: Jews and Capitalism); in Austria, where in only forty years (1695–1739), the Jews credited the government with more than 35 million florins and where the death of Samuel Oppenheimer in 1703 resulted in a grave financial crisis for both state and Emperor; in Bavaria, where in 1808 80 per cent of all government loans were endorsed and negotiated by Jews (see M. Grunwald, Samuel Oppenheimer und scin Kreis, 1913); in France, where mercantile conditions were especially favorable for the Jews, Colbert already praised their great usefulness to the state (Baron, op. cit., loc. cit.), and where in the middle of the eighteenth century the German Jew, Liefman Calmer, was made a baron by a grateful king who appreciated services and loyalty to “Our state and Our person” (Robert Anchel, “Un Baron Juif Français au 18e siècle, Liefman Calmer,” in Souvenir et Science, I, pp. 52–55); and also in Prussia where Frederick II’s Münzjuden were titled and where, at the end of the eighteenth century, 400 Jewish families formed one of the wealthiest groups in Berlin. (One of the best descriptions of Berlin and the role of the Jews in its society at the turn of the eighteenth century is to be found in Wilhelm Dilthey, Das Leben Schleiermachers, 1870, pp. 182 ff.).
7 Early in the eighteenth century, Austrian Jews succeeded in banishing Eisemenger’s Entdecktes Judentum, 1703, and at the end of it, The Merchant of Venice could be played in Berlin only with a little prologue apologizing to the (not emancipated) Jewish audience.
8 The only, and irrelevant, exception might be those tax collectors, called fermiers-généraux, in France, who rented from the state the right to collect taxes by guaranteeing a fixed amount to the government. They earned their great wealth from and depended directly upon the absolute monarchy, but were too small a group and too isolated a phenomenon to be economically influential by themselves.
9 The urgencies compelling the ties between government business and the Jews may be gauged by those cases in which decidedly anti-Jewish officials had to carry out the policies. So Bismarck, in his youth, made a few antisemitic speeches only to become, as chancellor of the Reich, a close friend of Bleichroeder and a reliable protector of the Jews against Court Chaplain Stoecker’s antisemitic movement in Berlin. William II, although as Crown Prince and a member of the anti-Jewish Prussian nobility very sympathetic to all antisemitic movements in the eighties, changed his antisemitic convictions and deserted his antisemitic protégés overnight when he inherited the throne.
10 As early as the eighteenth century, wherever whole Jewish groups got wealthy enough to be useful to the state, they enjoyed collective privileges and were separated as a group from their less wealthy and useful brethren, even in the same country. Like the Schutzjuden in Prussia, the Bordeaux and Bayonne Jews in France enjoyed equality long before the French Revolution and were even invited to present their complaints and propositions along with the other General Estates in the Convocation des Etats Généraux of 1787.
11 Jean Capefigue (Histoire (les grandes opérations financières, Tome III: Banque, Bourses, Emprunts, 1855) pretends that during the July Monarchy only the Jews, and especially the house of Rothschild, prevented a sound state credit based upon the Banque de France. He also claims that the events of 1848 made the activities of the Rothschilds superfluous. Raphael Strauss (“The Jews in the Economic Evolution of Central Europe” in Jewish Social Studies, III, I, 1941) also remarks that after 1830 “public credit already became less of a risk so that Christian banks began to handle this business in increasing measure.” Against these interpretations stands the fact that excellent relations prevailed between the Rothschilds and Napoleon 111, although there can be no doubt as to the general trend of the time.
12 See Priebatsch, op. cit.
13 According to an anecdote, faithfully reported by all his biographers, Bismarck (aid immediately after the French defeat in 1871: “First of all, Bleichroeder has got to go to Paris, to get together with his fellow Jews and to talk it (the five billion francs for reparations) over with the bankers.” (See Otto Joehlinger, Bismarck und die luden, Berlin, 1921.)
14 See Walter Frank, “Walter Rathenau und die blonde Rasse,” in Forschungen zur Judenfrage, Band IV, 1940. Frank, in spite of his official position under the Nazis, remained somewhat careful about his sources and methods. In this article he quotes from the obituaries on Rathenau in the Israelitisches Familienblatt (Hamburg, July 6, 1922), Die Zell, (June, 1922) and Berliner Tageblalt (May 31, 1922).
15 “Wilhelm von Humboldt, Tagebücher, ed. by Leitzmann, Berlin, 1916–1918, I, 475.—The article ”Juif“ of the Encyclopédie, 1751–1765, Vol. IX, which was probably written by Diderot: ”Thus dispersed in our time . . .[the Jews] have become instruments of communication between the most distant countries. They are like the cogs and nails needed in a great building in order to join and hold together all other parts.”
16 Walter Rathenau, foreign minister of the Weimar Republic in 1921 and one of the outstanding representatives of Germany’s new will to democracy, had proclaimed as late as 1917 his “deep monarchical convictions.” according to which only an “anointed” and no “upstart of a lucky career” should lead a country. See Von kommenden Dingen, 1917, p. 247.
17 This bourgeois pattern, however, should not be forgotten. If it were only a matter of individual motives and behavior patterns, the methods of the house of Rothschild certainly did not differ much from those of their Gentile colleagues. For instance, Napoleon’s banker, Ouvrard, after having provided the financial means for Napoleon’s hundred days’ war, immediately offered his services to the returning Bourbons.
18 J. H. Hobson, Imperialism, 1905, p. 57 of unrevised 1938 edition.
19 How well the Rothschilds knew the sources of their strength is shown in their early house law according to which daughters and their husbands were eliminated from the business of the house. The girls were allowed, and after 1871, even encouraged, to marry into the non-Jewish aristocracy; the male descendants had to marry Jewish girls exclusively, and if possible (in the first generation this was generally the case) members of the family.
20 See especially Egon Cesar Conte Corti, The Rise of the House of Rothschild, New York, 1927.
21 Capefigue, op. cit.
22 It has never been possible to ascertain the extent to which the Rothschilds used Jewish capital for their own business transactions and how far their control of Jewish bankers went. The family has never permitted a scholar to work in its archives.
23 James Parkes, The Emergence of the Jewish Problem, 1878–1939, 1946, discusses these conditions briefly and without bias in chapters iv and vi.
24 Christian Wilhelm Dohm, Über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der luden, Berlin and Stettin, 1781, I, 174.
25 Wilhelm und Caroline von Humboldt in ihren Briefen, Berlin, 1900, V, 236.
26 For an excellent description of these civil servants who were not essentially different in different countries, see Henri Pirenne, A History of Europe from the Invasions to the XVI Century, London, 1939, pp. 361–362: “Without class prejudices and hostile to the privileges of the great nobles who despised them,. . . it was not the King who spoke through them, but the anonymous monarchy, superior to all, subduing all to its power.”
27 See Kleines Jahrbuch des Nützlichen und Angenehmen für Israeliten, 1847.
28 When the Prussian Government submitted a new emancipation law to the Vereinigte Landtage in 1847, nearly all members of the high aristocracy favored complete Jewish emancipation, See I. Elbogen, Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland, Berlin, 1935, p. 244.
29 This was the reason why Prussian kings were so very much concerned with the strictest conservation of Jewish customs and religious rituals. In 1823 Frederick William III prohibited “the slightest renovations,” and his successor, Frederick William IV, openly declared that “the state must not do anything which could further an amalgamation between the Jews and the other inhabitants” of his kingdom. Elbogen, op. cit., pp. 223, 234.
30 In a letter to Kultusminister v. Puttkammer in October, 1880. See also Herbert von Bismarck’s letter of November, 1880, to Tiedemann. Both letters in Walter Frank, Hofprediger Adolf Stoecker uni die christlich-soziale Bewegung, 1928, pp. 304, 305.
31 August Vamhagen comments on a remark made by Frederick William IV. “The king was asked what he intended to do with the Jews. He replied: ‘I wish them well in every respect, but I want them to feel that they are Jews.’ These words provide a key to many things.” Tagebücher, Leipzig, 1861, II, 113.
32 That Jewish emancipation would have to be carried out against the desires of Jewish representatives was common knowledge in the eighteenth century. Mirabeau argued before the Assemblée Nationale in 1789: “Gentlemen, is it because the Jews don’t want to be citizens that you don’t proclaim them citizens? In a government like the one you now establish, all men must be men; you must expel all those who are not or who refuse to become men.” The attitude of German Jews in the early nineteenth century is reported by J. M. Jost, Neuere Geschichte der Israeliten. 1815–1845, Berlin, 1846, Band 10.
33 Adam Mueller (see Ausgewählle Abhandlungen, ed. by J. Baxa, Jena, 1921, p. 215) in a letter to Mettemich in 1815.
34 H. E. G. Paulus, Die füdische Nalionalabsonderung nach Ursprung, Folgen und Besserungsmitteln, 1831.
35 For a clear and reliable account of German antisemitism in the nineteenth century see Waldemar Gurian, “Antisemitism in Modem Germany,” in Essays on Anti-Semitism, ed. by K. S. Pinson, 1946.
36 The only leftist German antisemite of any importance was E. Duehring who, in a confused way, invented a naturalistic explanation of a “Jewish race” in his Die Judenfrage als Frage der Rassenschädlichkeit für Existenz, Sitte und Cultur der Völker mit einer weltgeschichtlichen Antwort, 1880.
37 For antisemitic attacks on Bismarck see Kurt Wawrzinek, Die Entstehung der deutschen Antisemitenparteien. 1873–1890. Historische Studien, Heft 168, 1927.
38 Otto Glagau, Der Bankroll des Nationalliberalismus und die Reaktion, Berlin, 1878. The same author’s Der Boersen- und Gruendungsschwindel, 1876, is one of the most important antisemitic pamphlets of the time.
39 See Wawrzinek, op. cit. An instructive account of all these events, especially with respect to Court Chaplain Stoecker, in Frank, op. cit.
40 This proposition was made in 1886 in Cassel, where the Deutsche Antisemitische Vereinigung was founded.
41 For an extensive discussion of the “parlies above parties” and the pan-movements see chapter viii.
42 The first international anti-Jewish congress took place in 1882 in Dresden, with about 3,000 delegates from Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia; during the discussions, Stoecker was defeated by the radical elements who met one year later in Chemnitz and founded the Alliance Antijuive Universelle. A good account of these meetings and congresses, their programs and discussions, is to be found in Wawrzinek, op. cit.
43 The international solidarity of the workers’ movements was, as far as it went, an inter-European matter. Their indifference to foreign policy was also a kind of self-protection against both active participation in or struggle against the contemporary imperialist policies of their respective countries. As far as economic interests were concerned, it was all too obvious that everybody in the French or British or Dutch nation would feel the full impact of the fall of their empires, and not just capitalists and bankers.
44 Compare chapter viii.
45 See Paul H. Emden, “The Story of the Vienna Creditanstalt,” in Menorah Journal, XXVIII, 1, 1940.
46 See F. A. Neuschaefer, Georg Ritter von Schoenerer, Hamburg, 1935, and Eduard Pichl, Georg Schoenerer, 1938, 6 vols. Even in 1912, when the Schoenerer agitation had long lost all significance, the Viennese Arbeiterzeitung cherished very affectionate feelings for the man of whom it could think only in the words Bismarck had once uttered about Lassalle: “And if we exchanged shots, justice would still demand that we admit even during the shooting: He is a man; and the others are old women.” (Neuschaefer, p. 33.)
47 See Neuschaefer, op. cit., pp. 22 ff., and Pichl, op. cit., I, 236 ff.
48 Quoted from Pichl, op. cit., I, p. 26.
49 See especially Walfried Vernunft, “Die Hintergründe des französischen Antisemitismus,” in Nationalsozialistische Monatshefte, Juni, 1939.
50 See Chapter iv.
51 See J. de Maistre, Les Soirées de St. Petersburg, 1821, II, 55.
52 Charles Fourier, Nouveau Monde Industriel, 1829, Vol. V of his Oeuvres Complètes, 1841, p. 421. For Fourier’s anti-Jewish doctrines, see also Edmund Silberner, “Charles Fourier on the Jewish Question” in Jewish Social Studies, October, 1946.
53 See the newspaper Le Patriote Français, No. 457, November 8, 1790. Quoted from Clemens August Hoberg, “Die geistigen Grundlagen des Antisemitismus im modernen Frankreich,” in Forschungen zur Judenfrage, 1940, Vol. IV.
54 Marx’s essay on the Jewish question is sufficiently well known not to warrant quotation. Since Boerne’s utterances, because of their merely polemical and un-theoretical character, are being forgotten today, we quote from the 72nd letter from Paris (January, 1832): “Rothschild kissed the Pope’s hand. . . . At last the order has come which God had planned when he created the world. A poor Christian kisses the Pope’s feet, and a rich Jew kisses his hand. If Rothschild had gotten his Roman loan at 60 per cent, instead of 65, and could have sent the cardinal-chamberlain more than ten thousand ducats, they would have allowed him to embrace the Holy Father. . . . Would it not be the greatest luck for the world if all kings were deposed and the Rothschild family placed on the throne?” Briefe aus Paris. 1830–1833.
55 “This attitude is well described in the preface by the municipal councilor Paul Brousse to Cesare Lombroso’s famous work on antisemitism (1899). The characteristic part of the argument is contained in the following: ”The small shopkeeper needs credit, and we know how badly organized and how expensive credit is these days. Here too the small merchant places the responsibility on the Jewish banker. All the way down to the worker—i.e. only those workers who have no clear notion of scientific socialism—everybody thinks the revolution is being advanced if the general expropriation of capitalists is preceded by the expropriation of Jewish capitalists, who are the most typical and whose names are the most familiar to the masses.”
56 For the surprising continuity in French antisemitic arguments, compare, for instance, Charles Fourier’s picture of the Jew “Iscariote” who arrives in France with 100,000 pounds, establishes himself in a town with six competitors in his field, crushes all the competing bouses, amasses a great fortune, and returns to Germany (in Théorie des quatre mouvements, 1808, Oeuvres Complètes, 88 ff.) with Giraudoux’s picture of 1939: “By an infiltration whose secret I have tried in vain to detect, hundreds of thousands of Ashkenasim, who escaped from the Polish and Rumanian Ghettos, have entered our country . . . eliminating our fellow citizens and, at the same time, ruining their professional customs and traditions . . . and defying all investigations of census, taxes and labor.” In Pleins Pouvoirs, 1939.
57 See especially the critical discussion in the Nouvelle Revue Française by Marcel Arland (February, 1938) who claims that Céline’s position is essentially “solide.” André Gide (April, 1938) thinks that Céline in depicting only the Jewish “spécialité,” has succeeded in painting not the reality but the very hallucination which reality provokes.
58 See for instance René Pinon, France et Allemagne, 1912.
59 Some aspects of the Jewish question in Algeria are treated in the author’s article, “Why the Crémieux Decree was Abrogated,” in Contemporary Jewish Record, April, 1943.
60 The term is Stefan Zweig’s, who thus named the period up to the first World War in The World of Yesterday: An Autobiography, 1943.
61 For a wonderful description of the British state of affairs, see G. K. Chesterton, The Return of Don Quixote, which did not appear until 1927 but was “planned and partly written before the War.”
1 Although Jews stood out more than other groups in the homogeneous populations of European countries, it does not follow that they are more threatened by discrimination than other groups in America. In fact, up to now, not the Jews but the Negroes—by nature and history the most unequal among the peoples of America—have borne the burden of social and economic discrimination.
This could change, however, if a political movement ever grew out of this merely social discrimination. Then Jews might very suddenly become the principal objects of hatred for the simple reason that they, alone among all other groups, have themselves, within their history and their religion, expressed a well-known principle of separation. This is not true of the Negroes or Chinese, who are therefore less endangered politically, even though they may differ more from the majority than the Jews.
2 This surprisingly apt observation was made by the liberal Protestant theologian H. E. G. Paulus in a valuable little pamphlet, Die jüdische Nationalabsonderung nach Ursprung, Folgen und Besserungsmitteln, 1831. Paulus, much attacked by Jewish writers of the time, advocated a gradual individual emancipation on the basis of assimilation.
3 This attitude is expressed in Wilhelm v. Humboldt’s “Expert Opinion” of 1809: “The state should not exactly teach respect for the Jews, but should abolish an in-human and prejudiced way of thinking etc. . . . ” In lunar Freund, Die Emancipation der luden In Preussen, Berlin, 1912, II, 270.
4 J. G. Herder, “Über die politische Bekehrung der Juden” in Adrastea und das 18. Jahrhundert, 1801–03.
5 Herder, Briefe zur Beförderung der Humanität (1793–97), 40. Brief.
6 Felix Priebatsch, “Die Judenpolitik des fürstlichen Absolutismus im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert,” in Forschungen und Versuche lur Geschichte des Mittelalters und der Neuzeit, 1915, p. 646.
7 Lessing himself had no such illusions. His last letter to Moses Mendelssohn expressed most clearly what he wanted: “the shortest and safest way to that European country without either Christians or Jews.” For Lessing’s attitude toward Jews, see Franz Mehring, Die Lessinglegende, 1906.
8 See Honorc Q. R. de Mirabeau, Sur Moses Mendelssohn, London, 1788.
9 J. G. Herder, “Ueber die politische Bekehrung der Juden,” op. cit.
10 Johann Wolfgang v. Goethe’s review of Isachar Falkensohn Behr, Gedichte eines polnischen Juden, Mietau and Leipzig, 1772, io Frankfurter Gelehrte Anzeigen.
11 Friedrich Schleiermacher, Briefe bei Gelegenheit der politisch theologischen Aufgabe und des Sendschreibens jüdischer Hausväter, 1799, in Werke, 1846, Abt. I, Band V, 34.
12 This does not, however, apply to Moses Mendelssohn, who hardly knew the thoughts of Herder, Goethe, Schleiermacher, and other members of the younger generation. Mendelssohn was revered for his uniqueness. His firm adherence to his Jewish religion made it impossible for him to break ultimately with the Jewish people, which his successors did as a matter of course. He felt he was “a member of an oppressed people who must beg for the good will and protection of the governing nation” (see his “Letter to Lavater,” 1770, in Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. VII, Berlin, 1930); that is, he always knew that the extraordinary esteem for his person paralleled an extraordinary contempt for his people. Since he, unlike Jews of following generations, did not share this contempt, he did not consider himself an exception.
13 The Prussia which Lessing had described as “Europe’s most enslaved country” was to Mendelssohn “a state in which one of the wisest princes who ever ruled men has made the arts and sciences flourish, has made national freedom of thought so general that its beneficent effects reach even the lowliest inhabitants of his domain.” Such humble contentment is touching and surprising if one realizes that the “wisest prince” had made it very hard for the Jewish philosopher to get permission to sojourn in Berlin and, at a time when his Münzjuden enjoyed all privileges, did not even grant him the regular status of a “protected Jew.” Mendelssohn was even aware that he, the friend of all educated Germany, would be subject to the same tax levied upon an ox led to the market if ever he decided to visit his friend Lavater in Leipzig, but no political conclusion regarding the improvement of such conditions ever occurred to him. (See the “Letter to Lavater,” op. cit., and his preface to his translation of Menasseh Ben Israel in Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. Ill, Leipzig, 1843–45.)
14 See Heinrich Silbergleit, Die Bevölkerungs- und Berufsverhältnisse der Juden im Deutschen Reich, Vol. I, Berlin, 1930.
15 C. W. F. Grattenauer’s widely read pamphlet Wider die Juden of 1802 had been preceded as far back as 1791 by another, Ueber die physische und moralische Verfassung der heutigen Juden in which the growing influence of the Jews in Berlin was already pointed out. Although the early pamphlet was reviewed in the Allgemeine Deutsche Bibliothek, 1792, Vol. CXII, almost nobody ever read it.
16 Clemens Brentano’s Der Philister vor. In und nach der Geschichte was written for and read to the so-called Christlich-Deutsche Tischgesellschaft, a famous club of writers and patriots, founded in 1808 for the struggle against Napoleon.
17 Thus the Rothschilds in the 1820’s withdrew a large donation from their native community of Frankfurt, in order to counteract the influence of reformers who wanted Jewish children to receive a general education. See Isaak Markus Jost, Neuere Geschichte der lsraeliten, 1846, X, 102.
18 Op. cit., IX, 38.—The court Jews and the rich Jewish bankers who followed in their footsteps never wanted to leave the Jewish community. They acted as its representatives and protectors against public authorities; they were frequently granted official power over communities which they ruled from afar so that the old autonomy of Jewish communities was undermined and destroyed from within long before it was abolished by the nation-state. The first court Jew with monarchical aspirations in his own “nation” was a Jew of Prague, a purveyor of supplies to the Elector Maurice of Saxony in the sixteenth century. He demanded that all rabbis and community heads be selected from members of his family. (See Bondy-Dworsky, Geschichte der Juden in Boehmen, Maehren und Schtesien, Prague, 1906, II, 727.) The practice of installing court Jews as dictators in their communities became general in the eighteenth century and was followed by the rule of “notables” in the nineteenth century.
19 Johann Jacob Schudt, Jüdische Merkwürdigkeiten, Frankfurt a.M., 1715–1717› IV, Annex, 48.
20 Selma Stern, Jud Suess, Berlin, 1929, pp. 18 f.
21 Schudt, op. cit., I, 19.
22 Christian Friedrich Ruehs defines the whole Jewish people as a “caste of merchants.” “Ueber die Ansprüche der Juden an das deutsche Bürgerrecht,” in Zeitschrift für die neueste Geschichte, 1815.
23 A remarkable, though little-known, fact is that assimilation as a program led much more frequently to conversion than to mixed marriage. Unfortunately statistics cover up rather than reveal this fact because they consider all unions between converted and nonconverted Jewish partners to be mixed marriages. We know, however, that there were quite a number of families in Germany who had been baptized for generations and yet remained purely Jewish. That the converted Jew only rarely left his family and even more rarely left his Jewish surroundings altogether, accounts for this. The Jewish family, at any rate, proved to be a more conserving force than Jewish religion.
24 Briefe aus Paris. 74th Letter, February, 1832.
25 Ibid., 72nd Letter.
26 The “conscious pariah” (Bernard Lazare) was the only tradition of rebellion which established itself, although those who belonged to it were hardly aware of its existence. See the author’s “The Jew as Pariah. A Hidden Tradition,” in Jewish Social Studies, Vol. VI, No. 2 (1944).
27 It is not without irony that this excellent formula, which may serve as a motto for Western European assimilation, was propounded by a Russian Jew and first published in Hebrew. It comes from Judah Leib Gordon’s Hebrew poem, Hakitzah ami, 1863. See S. M. Dubnow, History of the Jews in Russia and Poland, 1918, II, 228 f.
28 This formulation was made by Karl Kraus around 1912. See Untergang der Welt durch schwarze Magie, 1925.
29 The title phrase is taken from a sketch of Disraeli by Sir John Skleton in 1867. See W. F. Monypenny and G. E. Buckle, The Life of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield, New York, 1929, II, 292–93.
30 Morris S. Lazaron, Seed of Abraham, New York, 1930, “Benjamin Disraeli,” pp. 260 ff.
31 Horace B. Samuel, “The Psychology of Disraeli,” in Modernities, London, 1914.
32 J. A. Froude thus closes his biography of Lord Beaconsfield, 1890: “The aim with which he started in life was to distinguish himself above all his contemporaries, and wild as such an ambition must have appeared, he at last won the stake for which he played so bravely.”
33 sir John Skleton, op. cit.
34 In his novel Tancred, 1847.
35 Sir John Skleton, op. cit.
36 Disraeli himself reported: “I was not bred among my race and was nourished in great prejudice against them.” For his family background, see especially Joseph Caro, “Benjamin Disraeli, Juden und Judentum,” in Monalsschrift fur Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums, 1932, Jahrgang 76.
37 Lord George Bentinck. A Political Biography, London, 1852, 496.
38 Ibid., p. 491.
39 Ibid., pp. 497 ff.
40 Monypenny and Buckle, op. cit., p. 1507.
41 Horace S. Samuel, op. cit.
42 Monypenny and Buckle, op. cit., p. 147.
43 Ibid.
44 Robert Cecil’s article appeared in the most authoritative organ of the Tories, the Quarterly Review. See Monypenny and Buckle, op. cit., pp. 19–22.
45 This happened as late as 1874. Carlyle is reported to have called Disraeli “a cursed Jew,” “the worst man who ever lived.” See Caro, op. cit.
46 Lord Salisbury in an article in the Quarterly Review, 1869.
47 E. T. Raymond, Disraeli, The Alien Patriot, London, 1925, p. 1.
48 H. B. Samuel, op. cit., Disraeli, Tancred, and Lord George Bentinck, respectively.
49 In his novel Coningsby, 1844.
50 See Lord George Bentinck and the novels Endymion, 1881, and Coningsby.
51 Sir John Skleton, op. cit.
52 Horace B. Samuel, op. cit.
53 Monypenny and Buckle, op. cit., p. 882.
54 Ibid., p. 73. In a letter to Mrs. Brydges Williams of July 21, 1863.
55 Lord George Benlinck, p. 497.
56 In his novel Loi hair, 1870.
57 Lord George Bentinck.
58 Monypenny and Buckle, op. cit, p. 1470. This excellent biography gives a correct evaluation of Disraeli’s triumph. After having quoted Tennyson’s In Memoriam, canto 64, it continues as follows: “In one respect Disraeli’s success was more striking and complete than that suggested in Tennyson’s lines; he not only scaled, the political ladder to the topmost rung and ‘shaped the whisper of the throne’; he also conquered Society. He dominated the dinner-tables and what we would call the salons of Mayfair . . . and his social triumph, whatever may be thought by philosophers of its intrinsic value, was certainly not less difficult of achievement for a despised outsider than his political, and was perhaps sweeter to his palate” (p. 1506).
59 Ibid., Vol. I, Book 3.
60 Yves Simon, La Grande Crise de la République Française, Montreal, 1941, p. 20: “The spirit of the French Revolution survived the defeat of Napoleon for more than a century. . . . It triumphed but only to fade unnoticed on November 11, 1918. The French Revolution? Its dates must surely be set at 1789–1918.”
61 The fact that certain psychological phenomena did not come out as sharply in German and Austrian Jews, may partly be due to the strong hold of the Zionist movement on Jewish intellectuals in these countries. Zionism in the decade after the first World War, and even in the decade preceding it, owed its strength not so much to political insight (and did not produce political convictions), as it did to its critical analysis of psychological reactions and sociological facts. Its influence was mainly pedagogical and went far beyond the relatively small circle of actual members of the Zionist movement.
62 Compare the interesting remarks on this subject by E. Levinas, “L’Autre dans Proust” in Deucalion, No. 2, 1947.
63 J. E. van Praag, “Marcel Proust, Témoin du Judaïsme déjudaizé” in Revue Juive de Genève, 1937, Nos. 48, 49, 50.
A curious coincidence (or is it more than a coincidence?) occurs in the moving-picture Crossfire which deals with the Jewish question. The story was taken from Richard Brooks’s The Brick Foxhole, in which the murdered Jew of Crossfire was a homosexual.
64 For the following see especially Cities of the Plain, Part I, pp. 20–45.
65 Cities of the Plain, Part n, chapter iii.
66 Ibid.
67 Ibid.
68 The Guermantes Way, Part I, chapter i.
69 Ibid.
70 Ibid.
71 Within a Budding Grove, Part II, “Placenames: The Place.”
72 Ibid.
73 Cities o) the Plain. Part II, chapter iii.
74 The Guermantes Way, Part II, chapter ii.
75 Ramon Fernandez, “La vie sociale dans l’oeuvre de Marcel Proust,” in Les Cahiers Marcel Proust, No. 2, 1927.
76 “But this was the moment when from the effects of the Dreyfus case there had arisen an antisemitic movement parallel to a more abundant movement towards the penetration of society by Israelites. The politicians had not been wrong in thinking that the discovery of the judicial error would deal a fatal blow to antisemitism. But provisionally at least a social antisemitism was on the contrary enhanced and exacerbated by it.” See The Sweet Cheat Gone, chapter ii.
1 The most extensive and still indispensable work on the subject is that of Joseph Reinach, L’Affaire Dreyfus, Paris, 1903–11, 7 vols. The most detailed among recent studies, written from a socialist viewpoint, is by Wilhelm Herzog, Der Kampf einer Republik, Zürich, 1933. Its exhaustive chronological tables are very valuable. The best political and historical evaluation of the affair is to be found in D. W. Brogan, The Development of Modern France, 1940, Books VI and VII. Brief and reliable is G. Charensol, L’Affaire Dreyfus et la Troisième République, 1930.
2 Written by two officers and published under the pseudonym Henri Dutrait-Crozon.
3 The Action Française (July 19, 1935) praised the restraint of the French press while voicing the opinion that “the famous champions of justice and truth of forty years ago have left no disciples.’
4 See G. H. Archambault in New York Times, August 18, 1945, p. 5.
5 The sole exceptions, the Catholic journals most of which agitated in all countries against Dreyfus, will be discussed below. American public opinion was such that in addition to protests an organized boycott of the Paris World Exposition scheduled for 1900 was begun. On the effect of this threat see below. For a comprehensive study see the master’s essay on file at Columbia University by Rose A. Halperin, “The American Reaction to the Dreyfus Case,” 1941. The author wishes to thank Professor S. W. Baron for his kindness in placing this study at her disposal.
6 Thus, for example, H. B. von Buelow, the German chargé d’affaires at Paris, wrote to Reichchancellor Hohenlohe that the verdict at Rennes was a “mixture of vulgarity and cowardice, the surest signs of barbarism,” and that France “has therewith shut herself out of the family of civilized nations,” cited by Herzog, op. cit., under date of September 12, 1899. In the opinion of von Buelow the Affaire was the “shibboleth” of German liberalism; see his Denkwürdigkeiten, Berlin, 1930–31, I, 428.
7 Théodore Reinach, Histoire sommaire de l’Affaire Dreyfus, Paris, 1924, p. 96.
8 Reported by Joseph Reinach, aa cited by Herzog, op. cit., under date of June 18, 1898.
9 That even Clemenceau no longer believed in it toward the end of his life is shown clearly by the remark quoted in René Benjamin, Clémenceau dans la retraite, Paris, 1930, p. 249: “Hope? Impossible! How can I go on hoping when I no longer believe in that which roused me, namely, democracy?”
10 Weygand, a known adherent of the Action Française, was in his youth an AntiDreyfusard. He was one of the subscribers to the “Henry Memorial” established by the Libre Parole in honor of the unfortunate Colonel Henry, who paid with suicide for his forgeries while on the General Staff. The list of subscribers was later published by Quillard, one of the editors of L’Aurore (Clemenceau’s paper), under the title of Le Monument Henry, Paris, 1899. As for Pétain, he was on the general staff of the military government of Paris from 1895 to 1899, at a time when nobody but a proven anti-Dreyfusard would have been tolerated. See Contamine de Latour, “Le Maréchal Pétain,” in Revue de Paris, I, 57–69. D. W. Brogan, op. cit., p. 382, pertinently observes that of the five World War I marshals, four (Foch, Pétain, Lyautey, and Fayolle) were bad republicans, while the fifth, Joffre, had well-known clerical leanings.
11 The myth that Pétain’s anti-Jewish legislation was forced upon him by the Reich, which took in almost the whole of French Jewry, has been exploded on the French side itself. See especially Yves Simon, La Grande crise de la République Française: observations sur la vie politique des français de 1918 à 1938, Montreal, 1941.
12 Cf. Georges Bernanos, La grande peur des bien-pensants, Edouard Drumont, Paris, 1931, p. 262.
13 Waldemar Gurian, Der integrale Nationalismus in Frankreich: Charles Maurras und die Action Française, Frankfurt-am-Main, 1931, p. 92, makes a sharp distinction between the monarchist movement and other reactionary tendencies. The same author discusses the Dreyfus case in his Die politischen und sozialen Ideen des französischen Katholizismus, M. Gladbach, 1929.
14 For the creation of such myths on both sides, Daniel Halévy, “Apologie pour notre passé,” in Cahiers de la quinzaine, Series XL, No. 10, 1910.
15 A distinctly modem note is struck in Zola’s Letter to France of 1898: “We hear on all sides that the concept of liberty has gone bankrupt. When the Dreyfus business cropped up, this prevalent hatred of liberty found a golden opportunity. . . . Don’t you see that the only reason why Scheurer-Kestner has been attacked with such fury is that he belongs to a generation which believed in liberty and worked for it? Today one shrugs one’s shoulders at such things . . .’Old greybeards,’ one laughs, ‘outmoded greathearts.’” Herzog, op. cit., under date of January 6, 1898.
16 The farcical nature of the various attempts made in the nineties to stage a coup d’état was clearly analyzed by Rosa Luxemburg in her article, “Die soziale Krise in Frankreich,” in Die Neue Zeit, Vol. I, 1901.
17 Whether Colonel Henry forged the bordereau on orders from the chief of staff or upon his own initiative, is still unknown. Similarly, the attempted assassination of Labori, counsel for Dreyfus at the Rennes tribunal, has never been properly cleared up. Cf. Emile Zola, Correspondance: lettres à Maître Labori, Paris, 1929, p. 32, n. 1.
18 Cf. Walter Frank, Demokratie und Nationalismus in Frankreich, Hamburg, 1933, p. 273.
19 Cf. Georges Suarez, La Vie orgueilleuse de Clémenceau, Paris, 1930, p. 156.
20 Such, for instance, was the testimony of the former minister, Rouvier, before the Commission of Inquiry.
21 Barrés (quoted by Bernanos, op. cit., p. 271) puts the matter tersely: “Whenever Reinach had swallowed something, it was Cornélius Herz who knew how to make him disgorge it.”
22 Cf. Frank, op. cit., in the chapter headed “Panama”; cf. Suarez, op. cit., p. 155.
23 The quarrel between Reinach and Herz lends to the Panama scandal an air of gangsterism unusual in the nineteenth century. In his resistance to Herz’s blackmail Reinach went so far as to recruit the aid of former police inspectors in placing a price of ten thousand francs on the head of his rival; cf. Suarez, op. cit., p. 157.
24 Cf. Levaillant, “La Genèse de l’antisémitisme sous la troisième République,” in Revue des études juives. Vol. LIII (1907), p. 97.
25 See Bernard Lazare, Contre l’Antisémitisme: histoire d’une polémique, Paris, 1896.
26 On the complicity of the Haute Banque in the Orleanist movement see G. Charensol, op. cit. One of the spokesmen of this powerful group was Arthur Meyer, publisher of the Gaulois. A baptized Jew, Meyer belonged to the most virulent section of the Anti-Dreyfusards. See Clemenceau, “Le spectacle du jour.” in L’lniquité, 1899; see also the entries in Hohenlohe’s diary, in Herzog, op. cit., under dale of June II, 1898.
27 On current leanings toward Bonapartism see Frank, op. cit., p. 419, based upon unpublished documents taken from the archives of the German ministry of foreign affairs.
28 Jacques Reinach was born in Germany, received an Italian barony and was naturalized in France. Cornélius Herz was born in France, the son of Bavarian parents. Migrating to America in early youth, he acquired citizenship and amassed a fortune there. For further details, cf. Brogan, op. cit., p. 268 ff.
Characteristic of the way in which native Jews disappeared from public office is the fact that as soon as the affairs of the Panama Company began to go badly, Lévy-Crémieux, its original financial adviser, was replaced by Reinach; see Brogan, op. cit., Book VI, chapter 2.
29 Georges Lachapelle, Les Finances de la Troisième République, Paris, 1937, pp. 54 ff., describes in detail how the bureaucracy gained control of public funds and how the Budget Commission was governed entirely by private interests.
With regard to the economic status of members of Parliament cf. Bernanos, op. cit., p. 192: “Most of them, like Gambetta, lacked even a change of underclothes.”
30 As Frank remarks (op. cit., pp. 321 ff.), the right had its Arthur Meyer, Boulangerism its Alfred Naquet, the opportunists their Reinachs, and the Radicals their Dr. Cornélius Herz.
31 To these newcomers Drumont’s charge applies (Les Trétaux du succès, Paris, 1901, p. 237): “Those great Jews who start from nothing and attain everything . . . they come from God knows where, live in a mystery, die in a guess. . . . They don’t arrive, they jump up . . ., They don’t die, they fade out.”
32 See the excellent anonymous article, “The Dreyfus Case: A Study of French Opinion,” in The Contemporary Review, Vol. LXXIV (October, 1898).
33 See Luxemburg, toe. cit.: “The reason the army was reluctant to make a move was that it wanted to show its opposition to the civil power of the republic, without at the same time losing the force of that opposition by committing itself to a monarchy.”
34 It is under this caption that Maximilian Harden (a German Jew) described the Dreyfus case in Die Zukunft (1898). Walter Frank, the antisemitic historian, employs the same slogan in the heading of his chapter on Dreyfus while Bemanos (op. cit., p. 413) remarks in the same vein that “rightly or wrongly, democracy sees in the military its most dangerous rival.”
35 The Panama scandal was preceded by the so-called “Wilson affair.” The President’s son-in-law was found conducting an open traffic in honors and decorations.
36 See Father Edouard Lecanuet, Les Signes avant-coureur de la’séparation, 1894–1910, Paris, 1930.
37 See Bruno Weil, L’Affaire Dreyfus, Paris, 1930, p. 169.
38 Cf. Clemenceau, “La Croisade,” op. cit.: “Spain is writhing under the yoke of the Roman Church. Italy appears to have succumbed. The only countries left are Catholic Austria, already in her death-struggle, and the France of the Revolution, against which the papal hosts are even now deployed.”
39 Cf. Bernanos, op. cit., p. 152: “The point cannot be sufficiently repeated: the real beneficiaries of that movement of reaction which followed the fall of the empire and the defeat were the clergy. Thanks to them national reaction assumed after 1873 the character of a religious revival.”
40 On Drumont and the origin of “cerebral Catholicism,” see Bernanos, op. cit., pp. 127 ff.
41 Cf. Herzog, op. cit., under date of January 21, 1898.
42 See Lecanuet, op. cit., p. 182.
43 See above, note 10.
44 The Jesuits’ magazine Civiltà Cattolica was for decades the most outspokenly antisemitic and one of the most influential Catholic magazines in the world. It carried anti-Jewish propaganda long before Italy went Fascist, and its policy was not affected by the anti-Christian attitude of the Nazis. See Joshua Starr, “Italy’s Antisemites,” in Jewish Social Studies, 1939.
According to L. Koch, SJ.: “Of all orders, the Society of Jesus through its constitution is best protected against any Jewish influences.” In Jesuiten-Lexikon, Pader-born. 1934, article “Juden.”
45 Originally, according to the Convention of 1593, all Christians of Jewish descent were excluded. A decree of 1608 stipulated reinvestigations back to the fifth generation; the last provision of 1923 reduced this to four generations. These requirements can be waived by the chief of the order in individual cases.
46 Cf. H. Boehmer, Les Jisuites, translated from the German, Paris, 1910, p. 284: “Since 1820 . . . no such thing as independent national churches able to resist the Jesuit-dictated orders of the Pope has existed. The higher clergy of our day have pitched their tents in front of the Holy See and the Church has become what Bellarmin, the great Jesuit controversialist, always demanded it should become, an absolute monarchy whose policies can be directed by the Jesuits and whose development can be determined by pressing a button.”
47 Cf. Clemenceau, “Le spectacle du jour,” in op. cit.: “Rothschild, friend of the entire antisemitic nobility . . . of a piece with Arthur Meyer, who is more papist than the Pope.”
48 On the Alsatian Jews, to whom Dreyfus belonged, see André Foucault, Un nouvel aspect de l’Aflaire Dreyfus, in Les Oeuvres Libres, 1938, p. 310: “In the eyes of the Jewish bourgeoisie of Paris they were the incarnation of nationalist raideur . . . that attitute of distant disdain which the gentry affects towards its parvenu co-religionists. Their desire to assimilate completely to Gallic modes, to live on intimate terms with our old-established families, to occupy the most distinguished position in the state, and the contempt which they showed for the commercial elements of Jewry, for the recently naturalized ‘Polaks’ of Galicia, gave them almost the appearance of traitors against their own race. . . . The Dreyfuses of 1894? Why, they were antisemites!”
49 Cf. “K.V.T.” in The Contemporary Review, LXXIV, 598: “By the will of the democracy all Frenchmen are to be soldiers; by the will of the Church Catholics only are to hold the chief commands.”
50 Herzog, op. cit., p. 35.
51 Cf. Bemanos, op. cit., p. 151: “So, shorn of ridiculous hyperbole, antisemitism showed itself for what it really is: not a mere piece of crankiness, a mental quirk, but a major political concept.”
52 “See Esterhazy’s letter of July, 1894, to Edmond de Rothschild, quoted by J. Reinach, op. cit., II, 53 ff.: ”I did not hesitate when Captain Crémieux could find no Christian officer to act as his second.” Cf. T. Reinach, Histoire sommaire de l’Affaire Dreyfus, pp. 60 ff. See also Herzog, op. cit., under date of 1892 and June, 1894, where these duels are listed in detail and all of Esterhazy’s intermediaries named. The last occasion was in September, 1896, when he received 10,000 francs. This misplaced generosity was later to have disquieting results. When, from the comfortable security of England, Esterhazy at length made his revelations and thereby compelled a revision of the case, the antisemitic press naturally suggested that he had been paid by the Jews for his self-condemnation. The idea is still advanced as a major argument in favor of Dreyfus’ guilt.
53 Herzog, op. cit., under date of 1892 shows at length how the Rothschilds began to adapt themselves to the republic. Curiously enough the papal policy of coalitionism, which represents an attempt at rapprochement by the Catholic Church, dates from precisely the same year. It is therefore not impossible that the Rothschild line was influenced by the clergy. As for the loan of 500 million francs to Russia, Count Münster pertinently observed: “Speculation is dead in France. . . . The capitalists can find no way of negotiating their securities . . . and this will contribute to the success of the loan. . . . The big Jews believe that if they make money they will best be able to help their small-time brethren. The result is that, though the French market is glutted with Russian securities, Frenchmen are still giving good francs for bad roubles”; Herzog, ibid.
54 Cf. J. Reinach, op. cit, I, 471.
55 Cf. Herzog, op. cit., p. 212.
56 Cf. Max J. Kohler, “Some New Light on the Dreyfus Case,” in Studies in Jewish Bibliography and Related Subjects in Memory of A. S. Freidus, New York, 1929.
57 The Dreyfus family, for instance, summarily rejected the suggestion of Arthur Livy, the writer, and Lévy-Bruhl, the scholar, that they should circulate a petition of protest among all leading figures of public life. Instead they embarked on a series of personal approaches to any politician with whom they happened to have contact; cf. Dutrait-Crozon, op. cit., p. 51. See also Foucault, op. cit., p. 309: “At this distance, one may wonder at the fact that the French Jews, instead of working on the papers secretly, did not give adequate and open expression to their indignation.”
58 Cf. Herzog, op. cit., under date of December, 1894 and January, 1898. See also Charensol, op. cit., p. 79, and Charles Péguy, “Le Portrait de Bernard Lazare,” in Cahiers de la quinzaine, Series XI, No. 2 (1910).
59 Labori’s withdrawal, after Dreyfus’ family had hurriedly withdrawn the brief from him while the Rennes tribunal was still sitting, caused a major scandal. An exhaustive, if greatly exaggerated, account will be found in Frank, op. cit., p. 432. Labori’s own statement, which speaks eloquently for his nobility of character, appeared in La Grande Revue (February, 1900). After what had happened to his counsel and friend Zola at once broke relations with the Dreyfus family. As for Picquart, the Echo de Paris (November 30, 1901) reported that after Rennes he had nothing more to do with the Dreyfuses. Clemenceau in face of the fact that the whole of France, or even the whole world, grasped the real meaning of the trials better than the accused or his family, was more inclined to consider the incident humorous; cf. Weil, op. cit., pp. 307–8.
60 Cf. Clemenceau’s article, February 2, 1898, in op. cit. On the futility of trying to win the workers with antisemitic slogans and especially on the attempts of Léon Daudet, see the Royalist writer Dimier, Vingt ans d’Action Française, Paris, 1926.
61 Very characteristic in this respect are the various depictions of contemporary society in J. Reinach, op. cit., I, 233 ff.; Ill, 141: “Society hostesses fell in step with Guérin. Their language (which scarcely outran their thoughts) would have struck horror in the Amazon of Damohey . . .” Of special interest in this connection is an article by André Chevrillon, “Huit Jours á Rennes,” in La Grande Revue, February, 1900. He relates, inter alia, the following revealing incident: “A physician speaking to some friends of mine about Dreyfus, chanced to remark, ‘I’d like to torture him.’ ‘And I wish,’ rejoined one of the ladies, ‘that he were innocent. Then he’d suffer more.’”
62 The intellectuals include, strangely enough, Paul Valéry, who contributed three francs “non sans reflexion.”
63 J. Reinach, op. cit., I, 233.
64 A study of European superstition would probably show that Jews became objects of this typically nineteenth-century brand of superstition fairly late. They were preceded by the Rosicrucians, Templars, Jesuits, and Freemasons. The treatment of nineteenth-century history suffers greatly from the lack of such a study.
65 See “11 caso Dreyfus,” in Civiltà Cattolica (February 5, 1898).—Among the exceptions to the foregoing statement the most notable is the Jesuit Pierre Charles Louvain, who has denounced the “Protocols.”
66 Cf. Martin du Gard, Jean Barois, pp. 272 ff., and Daniel Halévy, in Cahiers de la quiniaine, Series XI, cahier 10, Paris, 1910.
67 Cf. Georges Sorel, La Revolution dreyfusienne, Paris, 1911, pp. 70–71.
68 To what extent the hands of members of Parliament were tied is shown by the case of Scheurer-Kestner, one of their better elements and vice-president of the senate. No sooner had he entered his protest against the trial than Libre Parole proclaimed the fact that his son-in-law bad been involved in the Panama scandal. See Herzog, op. cit., under date of November, 1897.
69 Cf. Brogan, op. cit., Book VII, ch. 1 : “The desire to let the matter rest was not uncommon among French Jews, especially among the richer French Jews.”
70 Immediately after he bad made his discoveries Picquart was banished to a dangerous post in Tunis. Thereupon he made bis will, exposed the whole business, and deposited a copy of the document with his lawyer. A few months later, when it was discovered that he was still alive, a deluge of mysterious letters came pouring in, compromising him and accusing him of complicity with (he “traitor” Dreyfus. He was treated like a gangster who bad threatened to “squeal.” When all this proved of no avail, he was arrested, drummed out of the army, and divested of his decorations, all of which be endured with quiet equanimity.
71 To this group, led by Charles Péguy, belonged the youthful Romain Rolland, Suarez, Georges Sorel, Daniel Halévy, and Bernard Lazare.
72 Cf. M. Barrés, Seines el doctrines du nationalisme, Paris, 1899.
73 See Yves Simon, op. cit., pp. 54–55.
74 The faculty rooms of Rennes University were wrecked after five professors had declared themselves in favor of a retrial. After the appearance of Zola’s first article Royalist students demonstrated outside the offices of Figaro, after which the paper desisted from further articles of the same type. The publisher of the pro-Dreyfus La Bataille was beaten up on the street. The judges of the Court of Cassation, which finally set aside the verdict of 1894, reported unanimously that they had been threatened with “unlawful assault.” Examples could be multiplied.
75 On January 18, 1898, antisemitic demonstrations took place at Bordeaux, Marseille, Clermont-Ferrant, Nantes. Rouen, and Lyon. On the following day student riots broke out in Rouen, Toulouse, and Nantes.
76 The crudest instance was that of the police prefect of Rennes, who advised Professor Victor Basch, when the latter’s house was stormed by a mob 2,000 strong, that he ought to hand in his resignation, as he could no longer guarantee his safety.
77 Cf. Bernanos, op. cit., p. 346.
78 For these theories see especially Charles Maurras, Au Signe de Flore; souvenirs de la vie politique; l’Afjaire Dreyfus et la fondation de l’Action Française, Paris, 1931; M. Barrés, op. cit.; Léon Daudet, Panorama de la Troisième République, Paris, 1936.
79 Cf. Clemenceau, “A la dérive,” in op. cit.
80 It was precisely this which so greatly disillusioned the champions of Dreyfus, especially the circle around Charles Péguy. This disturbing similarity between Dreyfusards and Anti-Dreyfusards is the subject matter of the instructive novel by Martin du Gard, Jean Barois, 1913.
81 Preface to Contre la Justice. 1900.
82 Clemenceau, in a speech before the Senate several years later; cf. Weil, op. cit., pp. 112–13.
83 See Herzog, op. cit., under date of October 10, 1898.
84 “K.V.T.,” op. cit., p. 608.
85 Gallifet, minister of war, wrote to Waldeck: “Let us not forget that the great majority of people in France are antisemitic. Our position would be, therefore, that on the one side we would have the entire army and the majority of Frenchmen, not to speak of the civil service and the senators;. . .” cf. J. Reinach, op. cit., V, 579.
86 The best known of such attempts is that of Déroulède who sought, while attending the funeral of President Paul Faure, in February, 1899, to incite General Roget to mutiny. The German ambassadors and chargés d’affaires in Paris reported such attempts every few months. The situation is well summed up by Barrés, op. cit., p. 4: “In Rennes we have found our battlefield. All we need is soldiers or, more precisely, generals—or, still more precisely, a general.” Only it was no accident that this general was non-existent
87 Brogan goes so far as to blame the Assumptionists for the entire clerical agitation.
88 “K.V.T.,” op. cit., p. 597.
89 “The initial stimulus in the Affair very probably came from London, where the Congo-Nile mission of 1896–1898 was causing some degree of disquietude”; thus Maurras in Action Française (Jùly 14, 1935). The Catholic press of London defended the Jesuits; see “The Jesuits and the Dreyfus Case,” in The Month, Vol. XVIII (1899).
90 Civiltà Cattolica, February 5, 1898.
91 See the particularly characteristic article of Rev. George McDermot, C.S.P., “Mr. Chamberlain’s Foreign Policy and the Dreyfus Case,” in the American monthly Catholic World, Vol. LXVII (September, 1898).
92 Cf. Lecanuet, op. cit., p. 188.
93 Cf. Rose A. Halperin, op. cit, pp. 59, 77 ff.
94 Bernard Lazare, Job’s Dungheap, New York, 1948, p. 97.
95 Cf. Fernand Labori, “Le mal politique et les partis,” in La Grande Revue (October-Decembcr, 1901): “From the moment at Rennes when the accused pleaded guilty and the defendant renounced recourse to a retrial in the hope of gaining a pardon, the Dreyfus case as a great, universal human issue was definitely closed.” In his article entitled “Le Spectacle du jour,” Clemenceau speaks of the Jews of Algiers “in whose behalf Rothschild will not voice the least protest.”
96 See Clemenceau’s articles entitled “Le Spectacle du jour,” “Et les Juifs!” “La Farce du syndicat,” and “Encore les juifs!” in L’Iniquité.
97 Cf. Zola’s letter dated September 13, 1899, in Correspondance: lettres à Maître Labori.
98 Cf. Herzog, op. cit., p. 97.
99 Lazare’s position in the Dreyfus Affair is best described by Charles Péguy, “Notre Jeunesse,” in Cahiers de la quinzaine, Paris, 1910. Regarding him as the true representative of Jewish interests, Péguy formulates Lazare’s demands as follows: “He was a partisan of the impartiality of the law. Impartiality of law in the Dreyfus case, impartial law in the case of the religious orders. This seems like a trifle; this can lead far. This led him to isolation in death.” (Translation quoted from Introduction to Lazare’s Job’s Dungheap.) Lazare was one of the first Dreyfusards to protest against the law governing congregations.