3
France, Germany and the Jewish Community
Even at this early stage the case against Dreyfus revealed much about fin de siècle France. Defeat by Germany in 1870–71 had profoundly altered the balance of power within Europe. Since the time of Louis XIV, France had been among the dominant Continental powers. Although Napoleon had been beaten at Waterloo, much diplomatic activity in the first half of the nineteenth century still centred on containing France within its ‘natural boundaries’ – the Alps, the Pyrenees and the Rhine – and warding off the threat of its revolutionary values. But this appearance of strength was permanently crushed by Napoleon III’s catastrophic loss at Sedan on 1 September 1870.1 When news of the defeat reached the capital, Parisians rebelled, dissolved the imperial Legislative Assembly and proclaimed a Republic. Despite the enemy’s siege of Paris, Léon Gambetta, the regime’s new premier, made an audacious escape in a balloon and organized a provisional government in Tours. From there he managed to mobilize a patriotic levée en masse that fielded thirty-six military divisions from all over France. These, however, were also defeated and Paris officially capitulated on 28 January 1871.
A new National Assembly under Adolphe Thiers, dominated by monarchists, accepted the loss of Alsace-Lorraine as well as a requirement to pay Germany a heavy indemnity. When they heard the humiliating news, much of the Parisian population, including workers and middle-class Republicans, rose up and established the revolutionary Commune. At the beginning of April 1871, as the capital was bombarded by French government troops, civil war erupted. In the Bloody Week of 21 to 28 May, the troops from Versailles behaved with unprecedented brutality, ‘eradicat[ing] their own mark of shame’ by murdering the rebels in their thousands.2 The Communards, in turn, killed hostages and burned down the Hôtel de Ville and the Tuileries. Not since the 1790s had Europe witnessed so much civil violence.3
This was the ‘Terrible Year’ that shattered national myths of grandeur and cohesion and set off a dynamic of defeatist hysteria matched in the nineteenth century only by the American South after the Civil War. There were two conflicting consequences: on the one hand, military defeat was turned into spiritual triumph, as French spontaneity and idealism were contrasted with Prussian militarism and obedience.4 Across the political spectrum, polemicists and politicians of the new Third Republic paid homage to Joan of Arc, the young girl whose virtuous androgyny defeated the English foe in the Middle Ages.5 On the other hand, defeat created a sense of overwhelming inferiority, the shadow of German success influencing all subsequent projects for military, educational and social reform.
The regime consolidated during the 1870s, but the sense of vulnerability dissipated only gradually. Although the Republicans had triumphed, they remained watchful, fearful that they might be toppled by resurgent monarchists and the Catholic faithful.6 Such stability as emerged was compromised in the 1880s when ever more evidence of France’s relative decline stoked the emotional fires of revanche – the desire for revenge that concentrated specifically on recovering the lost provinces of Alsace-Lorraine. In industrial terms France fell behind both Germany and the emerging United States. The imperial policies of Premier Jules Ferry – a new invasion of North Africa and incursions into Oceania and Indo-China – suffered setbacks, especially against the British, who were continuing to extend their imperial dominion and commercial power around the globe.7
When corruption scandals brought down the government in late 1885, a new coalition of discontent emerged. Between 1886 and 1889 General Boulanger, a reformist and populist minister of war, nicknamed ‘Général Revanche’, harnessed national and radical passions across a wide political spectrum. He caught in his net an array of disenchanted Republicans and patriots, urban working-class and artisanal malcontents, as well as right-wing opponents of the Republic. For short-term advantage, radicals and socialists aligned themselves with royalists and Bonapartists, who provided most of the movement’s funding.8 Even more than Germany, Boulanger’s target was the inadequacies of the parliamentary system and the Republican constitution, which he held responsible for French weakness.
Although Boulangism came to nothing – the general botched his chance of a coup, fled to Brussels and committed suicide on the grave of his wealthy mistress in 1891 – the movement none the less represented an important political realignment that revealed the Republic’s fragility.9 Even after Boulanger’s collapse, it enjoyed no peace or security. Programmes to rebuild French power failed to achieve the desired military parity,10 and, as the only Republic in a continent of monarchies, France remained diplomatically isolated until 1892, when General de Boisdeffre concluded a surprise military convention with Russia. This diplomatic coup, while applauded as a necessary first step in building an alliance that would enable France to recover Alsace-Lorraine, still showed French weakness, as it was forced to rely on tsarist autocracy.11
The feeling of vulnerability meant that a climate of virtual paranoia pervaded the military establishment prior to Dreyfus’s arrest, and one way such fears manifested themselves was in an upsurge of spying. All governments in this period relied increasingly on espionage; after the Franco-Russian pact, the possibility of a war on two fronts led Germany to accelerate the pace of its spying, with men like Schwartzkoppen proving that French fears of infiltration on their own soil were not without foundation. The French countered by virtually besieging foreign embassies in Paris, recruiting manservants or maids who were ‘paid to steal anything that fell into their hands’.12
The French state had improvised a counter-espionage service within the army after 1871 and this expanded markedly under Boulanger. Even so, it had only a small staff, its duties were ill defined and it was nominally supervised by General Gonse, an expert in troop mobilization rather than in intelligence. Moreover, the curiously named Statistical Bureau competed in a crowded field. The Police and Sûreté nationale already conducted clandestine domestic surveillance in a country with a long history of monitoring and stifling political dissent, while the Quai d’Orsay had a specialist service that intercepted and deciphered diplomatic messages. The competition between the various espionage services contributed to the doubts of the young diplomat Maurice Paléologue about the Statistical Bureau’s evidence against Dreyfus.
The military operation was thus small, poorly controlled, resented by larger rivals and regarded as amateur. Lieutenant-Colonel Sandherr, the bureau’s head for eight years until his death in 1895, had spent most of his military career in ‘special services’. Of Alsatian origins, he spoke perfect German, and was an expert on German bridges and military manoeuvres.13 But men such as Henry who served beneath Sandherr had no such expertise. Henry spoke no foreign language and had a limited education; rather, he had secured his post because his superiors seemed to appreciate him as a vigorous man of the people. Because of officers like Henry, the bureau collected vast amounts of information, but it had none of the slickness of the heroes in the developing genre of espionage fiction;14 there were no developed techniques for analysing the material or assessing the credibility of the gatherers. Paléologue expressed his distaste for them:
The task of the Intelligence Service, which I had not ever yet seen up close, scarcely justifies the romantic and fascinating prestige it enjoys from afar. That the task should be the dirtiest, the most nauseating, permeated with imposture and deceit, well of course it is, congenitally so to speak…but what completely strips it of all glamour for me is that it has officers for its agents.15
Sandherr’s speciality was ‘the enemy within’, foreigners inside France and Frenchmen suspected of disloyalty. In close communication with Mercier, he saw suspects and perpetrators as much the same thing and developed lists of dangerous individuals that Mercier kept secret from fellow ministers.16 Like Henry, who later forged documents to add to the ‘secret dossier’ against Dreyfus, he was no great respecter of the law, and Mercier thought nothing of directing him to open private correspondence. Alsatians such as Sandherr (Mercier too had spent his childhood in Alsace) who had opted for French citizenship were hailed as superpatriots, but Sandherr’s lists reveal that he was especially suspicious of his Alsatian compatriots. He was not surprised when Dreyfus emerged as the culprit because he spoke French with a distinctly German accent and, of course, was Jewish. However much Dreyfus shared the revanchist values of this clandestine world, he was also its readiest victim.
The paranoia of surveillance provided part of the context for Dreyfus’s arrest, but even more important were the reforms of Charles de Freycinet, the first civilian minister of war, who restructured the General Staff along German lines in the late 1880s and 1890s.17 Previously, officers who graduated from the military academy of St-Cyr or the Ecole polytechnique moved on to the General Staff through a system of cooption. Reforms after 1880, however, dispersed graduates through the various army corps and denied them automatic access to positions in the headquarters. Marie-François de Miribel, appointed as chief of staff in 1890, intensified feelings of resentment by favouring the stagiaires, the twelve young officers rewarded with a place on the General Staff for achieving the highest marks in exams at the Ecole supérieure de guerre. Established in the late 1870s, the Ecole took selected candidates from both the Ecole polytechnique and the military academy of St-Cyr for a final tier of professional training aimed at producing staff officers to match those in the Germany military. Its two sources of students were, however, rather different: the Ecole polytechnique produced technical graduates (many of secular orientation) who entered state service, while St-Cyr drew many of its recruits from the Jesuit academy of Ste-Geneviève, widely seen as an outpost of Catholic and aristocratic reaction. Because of the emphasis on academic excellence, the Ecole supérieure de guerre tended to favour polytechniciens like Alfred Dreyfus.
Such reforms were not implemented seamlessly, however; in response, sympathetic superiors rapidly created an extensive patronage network to undermine the changes and get their favourites back to the elite, largely Parisian world that they saw as their due.18 When Miribel died unexpectedly on 12 September 1893, he was replaced by de Boisdeffre, who immediately sought to bring back the system of co-option, a move that attempted to marginalize the stagiaires.19
When Dreyfus arrived as a stagiaire, therefore, two systems with differing values coexisted in tension, with older officers using their powers of patronage to advance young men like themselves, and reformers such as Miribel favouring the meritocratic methods of the ‘modernizers’.20 Indeed, it is possible Dreyfus would have been eliminated from the General Staff even had he not been arrested as a traitor. When, for example, he took his oral examinations in 1892, the examiner, General Pierre de Bonnefond, gave him and another Jewish officer absurdly low marks, despite the excellence of their written work. Dreyfus complained to the head of the Ecole supérieure de guerre, General Louis Lebelin de Dionne, and, when de Bonnefond was asked about it, he explained unabashedly that ‘Jews were not wanted on the General Staff’.21 Although the head of the school apologized for de Bonnefond’s behaviour, the mark was not changed.22
Such incidents explain why Jewish middle-class families felt they needed to excel in competitive examinations, and were so deeply invested in the state’s meritocratic system.23 Despite de Bonnefond’s efforts, Dreyfus still managed to graduate in ninth place out of a class of eighty-one, a testimony to his exceptional brilliance even among this remarkable group. However, many of the very qualities that ensured him this success would ultimately tell against him; indeed, they eventually marked him out not as an officer worthy of promotion but as a likely spy.
Dreyfus did not realize that his intellectual curiosity, prodigious memory and Republican values might not endear him to his superiors, or that pride in his origins, and his family’s struggle to make their way in the world and to serve France, might be seen as arrogance. But Colonel Fabre, the head of the Fourth Bureau, thought him an ‘incomplete officer’ whose keen intelligence was negated by pretentiousness. ‘From the point of view of character’, Dreyfus was lacking; he did not have ‘the right manner of serving’ and was without ‘the necessary qualities to be employed in the General Staff of the army’.24 This negative report was damning in a milieu that set such store by ‘character’. When he wrote to Lucie from prison in December 1894, Dreyfus acknowledged that his personality had been a factor in his fall: ‘My slightly haughty reserve, my independence of word and judgement [and] my lack of indulgence all do me greatest wrong today. I am neither flexible, nor skilful nor flattering.’25
If officers in the General Staff veiled their anti-Semitism behind the appraisal of character, Edouard Drumont was very much more open. La Libre Parole reached a wide and varied audience that interpreted his passion as heroic outspokenness. He made his case by disdaining facts and by combining different, and often contradictory, strands of belief – Christian, scientific and occult – to project an overwhelming picture of nightmarish menace that was both satisfying and sometimes even titillating.26
His success took French Jews by surprise, even though there had already been earlier signs of the disintegration of the political values that had favoured their social rise. Everywhere in Europe an economic depression in the 1870s and 1880s coincided with the rise of socialism and nationalism, and all encouraged the growth of anti-Semitism. The weakening of liberalism produced new obstacles to Jewish acculturation (let alone assimilation and social mobility), while nationalist movements increasingly focused on the need to extirpate Jewish ‘cosmopolitan influence’ and financial power.
In 1882 the Union générale, a Catholic bank that had offered its small, devout investors the promise of riches, collapsed, a failure that was erroneously blamed on the Jews and not easily forgotten.27 Jewish financiers once again filled the popular imagination in the early 1890s when two Jewish bankers of German origin, Cornélius Herz and Baron Jacques de Reinach, were accused of the wholesale bribery of politicians in connection with the Panama Canal Company; the project was in severe difficulties, and the bribes had been related to the granting of a permit for a lottery to raise extra funds in 1888.28 The company collapsed anyway, and three quarters of a million French investors lost their investment. The revelations about the scandal confirmed the worst fears of a Jewish / Masonic ‘syndicate’ devoted to stripping ‘honest’ Frenchmen of their hard-earned savings.29 Accused of corruption in late November 1892, Baron de Reinach was targeted by Drumont, as well as by Maurice Barrès’s newspaper La Cocarde, as epitomizing the link between Jewish subversion, capitalism and the evils of Republican parliamentarianism. De Reinach committed suicide, while Herz fled to exile in England.
Jews could be cast as immoral capitalists; yet they could also be seen as dangerous advocates of revolution. The association of socialism with Marx – a German-Jewish import – and the growing prevalence of Jewish activists within the working-class movement strengthened fears of an internationale of Jewish revolutionaries bent on subversion. This negative portrait was strengthened when Eastern European Jews – unassimilated and often deeply religious – arrived from Russia after a wave of pogroms between 1881 and 1884.
The unique condition and history of Jews in France threw up peculiar tensions: nowhere else in Europe did Jews make such progress, but nowhere else did their visibility excite such a national crisis.30 The fantasies of Jews as rapacious financiers, socialist revolutionaries or side-locked Chasids veiled the deeper fear that France’s Jews (who were mostly modest in social origin) used the meritocratic system introduced by the Republic to deny bourgeois and aristocratic candidates access to the highest ranks of state service. Certainly the Republican reforms did allow Jews to become civil servants, university professors, admirals or generals out of proportion to their numbers.31 They were the ultimate Juifs d’état (’Jews of State’), the latter-day incarnation of the biblical Joseph.32 When in 1892 Drumont began to campaign against the three hundred Jewish officers in the army, the underlying theme was the ‘theft’ of position; the theft of state secrets was the logical next step.
Despite their tiny numbers, the Jews of France have received an inordinate amount of attention from historians in the last few decades. The first great study of Jews during the Dreyfus Affair, written by Michael Marrus in 1971, argued that the community practised a self-defeating ‘politics of assimilation’.33 Rather than asserting their Jewish identity when accused of subversion, the Consistory (the state institution that regulated Jewish Affairs) sought to avoid provoking anti-Semitism by constantly asserting their patriotism.34
Marrus stressed the almost redemptive quality of Bernard Lazare’s anti-assimilationist but humanitarian Zionism, a point that the Catholic poet and socialist Charles Péguy also made when he wrote admiringly of Lazare as a man who followed in the footsteps of the Old Testament Jewish Prophets. Péguy contrasted this Jewish ‘mystique’ with the pusillanimity of ‘Jewish politics’ (politique juive), the timid approach adopted by the officials and institutions of the Jewish community.35 For Marrus, the French community was utterly vulnerable to anti-Semitism because it rejected the self-determination that Zionism represented and instead attempted to unite French Republicanism and Jewish ethics. In his view Lazare was one of the few to see this as a mistake and to understand the ‘real’ implications of the Dreyfus Affair.
Since Marrus’s work, the political and historiographical climate has changed. Few now endorse his vision of Lazare’s Zionist eschatology and instead stress French Jews’ continued sense of marginality, especially after the return of anti-Semitism in the 1880s. Nor can the notion of ‘assimilation’ comprehend the complexity of the politics of identity that troubled Jewish psyches and communities in France.36 Most did not seek to erase their identity as Jews, even though they sought a place in the mainstream of French society. Lucie and Alfred married within their Judaeo-Alsatian world, and, while Alfred embraced secularism, Lucie retained her Jewish religious sensibility. On 30 December 1894 – only days after Alfred’s conviction – she went with the Dreyfus clan to the synagogue on the first anniversary, or Yahrtzeit, of Alfred’s father’s death and recited the Kaddish, the prayer of mourning, for their lost father.37 Their sense of loss was expressed in Jewish terms. Dreyfus himself admitted in a letter to Lucie that he had wept without restraint in thinking of it.38 The family’s private culture was still marked by Jewish practice, no matter how attenuated.
As the last restrictions were finally cast aside during the July Monarchy, Jewish communities were happy to have an official body, the Consistory, organize Jewish religious affairs and direct their schools. While German Jews looked to Protestant custom to provide a model for reform, French Jews often borrowed from Catholic institutional arrangements and liturgical practices. They retained Hebrew for public prayer (reformed Jews in Germany abandoned Hebrew altogether), just as the Catholics kept Latin for the mass, and other rituals were introduced into the Jewish liturgy to parallel Catholic baptism and confirmation.39
On the whole, though, they resisted conversion, with the news of only a few notorious cases – such as the Alsatian Ratisbonne brothers, who became devotees of the Virgin40 – reaching the public. Even those at the very top of the social hierarchy, like the Rothschilds, married other Jews. Despite their gradual social ascent, therefore, they felt they remained a minority and were wary of social condescension and exclusion. The small community knew it continued to be regarded as foreign, but it was also aware that slow progress was being made. While de Bonnefond’s outrageous ‘fixing’ of Dreyfus’s exam results showed prejudice was still rife, Dreyfus’s subsequent protest demonstrated that Jews no longer felt afraid to challenge it.
In contrast to the Consistory, which concerned itself with Jews inside France, the Alliance israélite universelle, founded in 1860, devoted itself to a defence of Jews around the world,41 a stance that exposed it to accusations of organizing a ‘syndicate’ to further Jewish interests. Its members had many of the cultural attitudes of the French community as a whole and saw it as their task to ‘enlighten’ Jewish communities in more ‘backward’ countries. Like the Catholic novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans, who thought Christ had turned away from the Semitic East to embrace the Celtic West, so acculturated French Jews wanted to divest Judaism of its ‘oriental’ taint.42 They wanted to lift their co-religionists out of a demeaning orientalism both in North Africa and in Russia, for they regarded the shtetl Jews of Eastern Europe with a mixture of repulsion and pity. They had little in common with poor brethren who spoke an alien, Germanic jargon, practised a strict dietary regime, and maintained the customs and costumes of religious orthodoxy.43 Indeed, when such people came to France as refugees from the pogroms, their arrival threw French Jews into disarray and resulted in hasty programmes to move them on to America as swiftly as possible.44
There is no doubt that Dreyfus’s arrest, condemnation and degradation were experienced by many Jews as a moment of intense shame. One distressed Alsatian Jew named Jules Meyer recorded how he had felt on the day of Dreyfus’s degradation. Only twelve at the time, he was a student in the Marais (the Jewish quarter of Paris) and on Shabbat went to the place Fontenoy to join the crowd that ‘was howling for the death of Dreyfus’. When he confessed at school that he had been present, the teacher ‘immediately became angry and reproached [him] for [his] lack of decency’ and then scolded him for not ‘hiding [at home] on this day of mourning!’ A few newspapers reported that Jewish schoolchildren had been raucous and had interrupted the ceremony’s solemnity. Although it was a ‘minuscule incident’, Meyer was still ashamed, and remained furious at the implication of collective guilt that both schoolmaster and anti-Semitic press had made.
Meyer went on to pen a portrait of Jews almost as anti-Semitic as those provided by the likes of Drumont: ‘being a Jew has always been for me a reason to feel inferior.’ He believed that ‘the Talmud had imprinted, engraved on the Jewish brain’, an undeserved sense of superiority vis-à-vis the ‘goy’. Jews were dangerous internationalists and anti-militarists as well as Zionists disloyal to France. They were sentimental villains who ‘spend their youth in love with women who are not of their race, seduce them, often have children with them, and leave them to wed Jewesses with dowries’. With such behaviour, they demonstrated their moral corruption, desire for lucre and disdain for others’ feelings. In effect, Meyer was inconsolable – ‘I no longer want to be a Jew, but a Frenchman and a man’– unable to reconcile Frenchness and humanity with his Jewish ‘taint’. He identified Alfred Dreyfus’s degradation as the moment when this inner conflict began.45
But not all Jews reacted with such self-loathing; while Marrus is correct that the Consistory never officially organized the Jewish community in the capital or elsewhere to resist, this institutional void did not mean that all were silent.46 Zadoc Kahn, the chief rabbi of France, balanced uneasily between intervention and restraint, trying to maintain his ‘neutral’ status as a clergyman and government functionary, while also speaking out when ethical issues and Jewish self-defence were at issue.
15. Zadoc Kahn asserts his Frenchness by wearing a clerical costume not dissimilar to that of a Catholic priest and sporting his medal of the Légion d’honneur, c. 1892
Also an Alsatian, Zadoc Kahn had the same multiple identities, loyalties and outsider status as his provincial compatriots, whatever their religion. He had demonstrated intellectual promise in his youthful Slavery in the Bible and in the Talmud (1867), which confronted the problem of slavery in Jewish Antiquity and used the most up-to-date scholarly methods to place the Talmud within the larger context of Roman law. Written just after the Civil War in America, when the issue of slavery was topical, the work showed his moral preoccupations and intellectual sophistication, a reputation that was reinforced when Ernest Renan, the famous author of the Life of Jesus (1863), came to his installation as chief rabbi in 1869.47
In his sermons Zadoc Kahn expressed horror at the Russian pogroms in 1882,48 but believed such violence impossible in France, ‘where we can be Jews without carrying the penalty of our origin’.49 The unique advantages French Jews enjoyed prompted him to aid persecuted co-religionists everywhere, and he had a major role in helping the Russian Jews who were flooding into France. Later he protested against the anti-Semitic violence in Algeria in early 1898 and linked the riots in North Africa to the massacre of Armenians by the Turks, an association that suggested the direction he feared the Affair might take.50
But he was constrained by his status as a fonctionnaire, or civil servant, and was always treading a tightrope: whatever he did tended to draw criticism.51 When he endorsed the Franco-Russian alliance, for example, many Jews attacked him for cowardice in the face of tsarist oppression. When he and Edmond de Rothschild founded agricultural communities in Palestine (they also encouraged settlements in Argentina),52 Theodor Herzl was unimpressed. A year after Dreyfus’s arrest, he commented on a meeting with the leaders of French Jewry: ‘As a body the French Jews are hostile to [Zionism]. I expected nothing less. Things here go too well with them to admit…thought of change.’53
As the polemics during the Affair intensified, the nationalist press also attacked Zadoc Kahn from the other side, caricaturing him as an ass, ‘sometimes attired in the costume of Mephisto’ and as the ‘inspiration of the Syndicate’.54 When riots erupted in France in January 1898, parliament considered reducing Kahn’s state salary. He was, moreover, accused of going beyond his remit by supporting Dreyfus.55 In the face of such assaults Zadoc Kahn, rather like Mathieu, felt obliged to proceed cautiously for fear of doing more harm than good. He hoped an effective defence of the Jewish community could be mounted by creating a pressure group modelled on the Association to Counter Anti-Semitism founded in Germany in 1891. He gathered Jewish notables from the worlds of finance, politics, science and law to form a Vigilance Committee on 27 December 1894, and the group had its first meeting on 10 January 1895, only a few days after Dreyfus’s degradation.
Narcisse Leven, one of the founders of the Alliance israélite universelle, was made head of the committee and worked closely with people such as Salomon Reinach and Isaïe Levaillant, the editor-in-chief of the Jewish newspaper L’Univers israélite and previously prefect of Paris.56 The object was to combat anti-Semitism during elections and to protest against the anti-Semitic press. Bernard Lazare also joined the group, which brought him into contact with men of very different political outlooks.57 But, like Zadoc Kahn, the committee was also cautious and wary of being accused of behaving like a syndicate. Some members refused to address Dreyfus’s case, while others wanted to act with other political groups to defend civil liberties in general to avoid seeming like a confessional lobby. Kahn, moreover, wanted the group to acquire official status to ward off further accusations of subversion.58
If the representatives of Judaism in France were more active than often thought, the response of the Jewish press was also not as timid as Marrus maintains.59 Jewish newspapers did not display any of the millenarian, prophetic or magical fears that suffused La Libre Parole; the mysticism of ‘oriental’ Jews was entirely absent, without a hint of messianic wistfulness. The journalism in the L’Univers israélite, and the Archives israélites testified to the hold of Franco-Judaism, with its loyalty to Republicanism, belief in international humanitarianism and emphasis on the principles of 1789.60 Authors continued to assert their superpatriotism and argued that their undying loyalty to their religion was proof of their loyalty to France.61
Desire to belong and fear of exclusion were equally matched, but this did not mean that contributors gave up the fight for justice. The diverse reactions that appeared in the Jewish press cannot be reduced to the pusillanimous ‘politics of assimilation’. The mainstream L’Univers israélite, for example, was appalled by the anti-Semitic outburst following Dreyfus’s arrest and praised the brave few who objected to condemning an officer who had not yet been tried.62 Contributors cited with hope the doubts expressed by some newspapers63 and, even after the degradation, insisted that ‘human judgements were too fallible to be absolutely convincing, with all due respect to the military judges.’64 Others refused to defend Dreyfus but were horrified that his Judaism should figure in his conviction.65 All found it hard to believe that a Jewish army officer could have committed treason and noted with urgent interest the September 1896 article in L’Eclair that stated Dreyfus had been convicted on the basis of secret documents.66 Across the board the papers were fascinated by Bernard Lazare’s first pamphlet and his conviction that Dreyfus was an innocent sacrificed. Far from cowering before the power of French military authority, L’Univers israélite criticized France for abandoning the humanitarian traditions of its revolutionary heritage:
If we were living in another era [and] if liberal sentiment had not disappeared from public consciousness, the declarations of L’Eclair would have aroused general indignation. Did not our fathers fight and suffer to prevent similar abuses? Did they not make the Revolution to suppress the lettres de cachet, to ensure the rights of individual defence, to prevent convictions without judgment?67
Like the rest of the French press, the L’Univers israélite awoke again to the Affair when the incorruptible Auguste Scheurer-Kestner became involved in 1897,68 certain that a man such as the vice-president of the Senate would speak out only if he was certain Dreyfus was innocent. It remained resolute despite the daily revelations of military machinations and anti-Semitic intrigue, warning against false hope that Esterhazy would be convicted but taking comfort in the belief that the ‘elite’ Republican world was with them.69 Later it remained optimistic on the grounds that ‘it will not be possible for truth to remain suppressed for ever and, when justice has its day, so will Israel.’70 The papers did sometimes venture to offer more general criticisms: when anti-Semitic rioting began in January 1898, one journalist upbraided his fellow Jews for their spinelessness, but also criticized the Republic for allowing the Jesuits and the Catholic Church to retain such influence.71 In his view La Libre Parole demonstrated how ‘Drumont was the puppet’, with the Jesuits ‘holding and pulling the strings [of the military and the clergy]’.72 Such attitudes showed how Jewish opinion was often little different from the Dreyfusand mainstream.