The Dreyfus affair is customarily considered a turning point in the Jewish response to the “Jewish Question,” which, for this paper, will be defined as how Jews self-identified within the broader societies in which they lived and how they perceived their role in the modern European nation-state model. This event is oft unquestioningly assumed to have resulted in increased support for Zionism among European Jewry. Such an assumption, however, has not been broadly investigated in literature reviews, although individual reactions among European Jews have been chronicled. As such, the purpose of this paper is to evaluate the general reactions of certain subsections of European Jewry, namely French Jews, Jews living in Western and Central Europe, and Jews living in Eastern Europe, to the Dreyfus affair. Did it engender a massive shift towards Jewish nationalism and away from assimilationism in places where the latter had been the modus operandi of Western Jewish life for decades? Did it have any effect on the far-away Jews of the Pale of Settlement? Such questions, among others, will be evaluated throughout this study.
The Dreyfus Affair
The first point that must be reviewed is the case of the Dreyfus affair itself and the origins of French antisemitism, as, without this background, responses to the Dreyfus case would lack context and significance. Contemporary French antisemitism, understood as a modernized enmity towards the Jews through a legalistic basis, chiefly originated with Paul Bontoux, a previous employee of the Rothschilds, joining the Legitimist party and proclaiming a Jewish and Protestant financial monopoly. In attempting to break this alleged market control, he founded the Union Générale, an anti-Jewish banking organization, with the help of the Pope and other backers. However, in 1882, it broke down, causing massive financial losses that were attributed to the schemes of the Jews (Wolf). In response, preeminent French antisemite Edouard Drumont wrote La France Juive in 1882, bringing German antisemitic rhetoric and strategies into the French Republic. These ideas disseminated quickly throughout the clerical and aristocratic circles, so much so in fact, that Drumont was able to start a daily antisemitic newspaper called La Libre Parole by 1892. Drumont’s writings became particularly popular among the French army and caused the death of popular Jewish officer, Armand Mayer, during that same year (Wolf).
With this context known, it is possible to understand the circumstances that led to what followed, the Dreyfus Affair itself. In the year 1894, Alfred Dreyfus, a well-known Jewish staff sergeant, was arrested for treason owing to purportedly writing and sending documents to a foreign military. The antisemitic press headed by Drumont and his La Libre Parole quickly agitated the people and branded Dreyfus a traitor (Wolf). Other publications created a distinctly Catholic form of agitation, characterizing Dreyfus as a modern-day Judas (Kaplan and Lockshin 11). These documents were ultimately proven as a forgery, a process mired in difficulties as the writing had been recognized as Dreyfus’s. But this was the goal of those convinced of Dreyfus’s innocence, the Dreyfusards (Wolf). This section will be considered the first stage of the affair.
While not officially a Dreyfusard, a military superior, Colonel Picquart proclaimed that justice had not properly been pursued, but he was sent to Tunisia as punishment for questioning the fallibility of his antisemitic superiors. Consequently, the Dreyfusards became more convinced that a conspiracy was afoot (Wolf). The famous novelist Emile Zola was one such persuaded individual, and this conviction led to his writing of the now-famous text, J’accuse, in 1898. In this argument, he proclaimed the affair a “most indelible stain” on the French Republic that existed as “a vulgar treason” and an “impudent swindle.” He declared the event to be the result of an antisemitic conspiracy, with the true culprit, Ferdinand Esterhazy “sheltering behind the odious antisemitism, [from] which the great liberal France of human rights will die, if she is not cured of it (Zola).” For this publication, Zola was charged with libel and had to flee the country. In August of 1898, the documents were reexamined and Colonel Henry declared that the documents had been fabricated. The war office remained unbudged and opposed a reopening of the case. At this point, the case itself had been abstracted away from the innocence of Dreyfus, and the case became a symbolic point for antisemites, radicalists, socialists, and reactionaries (Wolf). Antisemitism was palpable, rumors of military plots swirled among the population, and some began to consider this a battle for the life of the Republic. Nonetheless, a retrial did occur in Rennes in 1899. Dreyfus’s innocence was proven without a doubt and yet the Rennes court-martial found Dreyfus guilty once again, albeit with a reduction in punishment (Wolf). This court decision marks the end of what will be considered the second stage of the affair.
The third and final stage of the affair began with the fallout regarding this decision. While most accepted Dreyfus’s innocence and lamented the court's decisions, the antisemites created an anti-republican plot, requiring a siege of their fortified location with over 5000 troops in November 1899. Tensions remained high until 1905 when it was demanded by Jaurès, a member of the National Assembly, that Dreyfus be freed to lower these tensions. This demand was received by the new minister of war, and on July 12, 1906, a new court proclaimed Dreyfus innocent, Esterhazy and Henry guilty, and their motivations stemming from covering their betrayal up through stirring anti-Jewish hatred (Wolf). With that, the necessary background for discussing the Dreyfus affair has been covered.
French Jewish Reactions
The first reactions that should be considered are the reactions of the Jews who lived in a newly transformed world, the Jews of France. The traditional sentiment held by historians regarding the reactions of French Jews is that they actively chose to be passive in response to the Dreyfus affair. For example, in Leon Blum’s 1937 writing on the event, Souvenirs sur l'Affair, he proclaims that “they imagined the antisemitic passion would be turned aside by their cowardly neutrality (Blum 97, qtd. in Hyman 345).” Despite his criticism later, Blum was one of those individuals advising that Jews remained restrained during the first years of the Affair (Kaplan and Lockshin 4). Hannah Arendt shared a similar view on the matter, stating that “the Jews, including the family of the accused, shrank from starting a political fight (Arendt 118, qtd. in Kaplan and Lockshin 4).”
This later notion that the Jews of France remained quiet and were content with the antisemitism they suffered is fundamentally untrue, but there was most certainly a period of dominant Jewish silence that roughly overlapped with the first and second stages of the Affair, possibly driven by doubts of his innocence. Responses did include being silent in the public eye, as even Kahn’s committee against antisemitism, which will be discussed shortly, did not become public until 1902. Unlike specific individuals of the time such as Bernard Lazare, who himself was an ardent Dreyfusard, most French Jews were too afraid of drawing attention to themselves and causing additional antisemitism as a result of their public outcry. While Lazare’s response to this event will be discussed more later, one aspect of his response will be discussed at present. Lazare, after being contacted by Alfred Dreyfus’s brother in 1895, wrote Une erreur judiciaire: la vérité sur l'affaire Dreyfus, or, in English, A Judicial Error: The Truth of the Dreyfus Affair. Within this composition, Lazare argued that Dreyfus had been a victim of judicial malpractice, mentioning only once the possibility that the verdict could have been the result of Dreyfus’s Jewishness: “Let it not be said that, having a Jew before us, justice has been forgotten (Lazare, qtd. in Lockshin 318).” This one sentence was enough to cause French Jews to reprimand Lazare, either out of fear for the potential repercussions of such an argument or out of them becoming “more jingoist than the French people of France (Lazare, qtd. in Kaplan and Lockshin 15).” Other Jewish responses involved the downplaying of the reality of antisemitism, changing their surnames, or converting to Catholicism (Heyman 347). This period of Jewish silence ended with the publishing of J’Accuse by the non-Jewish Zola, the help of other non-Jews like Jean Jaurès, the unsuccessful coup d'etat by the anti-Dreyfusards, and the failure of Dreyfus’s retrial (Kaplan and Lockshin 19).
These defeatist attitudes have been more thoroughly investigated and challenged with time and additional evidence, especially within the context of what could be considered the second phase of French Jewish responses. For example, the paper Univers israélite had been an outspoken critic of Jewish silence even before 1898-1899. In addition, by 1895, only one year after the start of the Affair, Yiddish-speaking socialist immigrants and local Jewish leaders, such as Zadoc Kahn, the chief Rabbi of France, worked together to found a committee against antisemitism, which, as mentioned previously became public in 1902 (Heyman 346). Jewish members of governmental organizations were also active in their defense of Dreyfus, albeit largely on a personal level using connections rather than publicly rebutting the claims. In Nantes, Jewish merchants publicly collaborated on a defense strategy, while elsewhere in France everyday Jews worked within the Republic’s systems to defend themselves (Heyman 347). This second phase of Jewish response was marked by the Jewish press and community at large speaking out more publicly as a result of rising anti-clerical and pro-Dreyfus attitudes among the non-Jewish populace (Kaplan and Lockshin 19).
With regards to the French Jewish population at large, it can be concluded that not much changed concerning their self-perception and position within French society. Assimilated Jews already believing in the Republic continued to do so, although perhaps with a renewed tinge of fear of Jew-hatred and a desire to reinforce the Republic’s ethics. No substantial changes were made in Jewish daily life despite their suffering of increased levels of anti-Jewish actions and no long-lasting distinctly Jewish organizations were formed.
From a contemporary observer, the matter had been thoroughly settled “with the approval of the great majority of French citizens,” and the most durable negative effect of the affair had been on the Catholic Church (Wolf). Even Dreyfus himself did not become a Zionist as a result of the events that transpired claiming that “Zionism, no matter how great its advantages may be for the scattered and long-suffering Israelite people, will perhaps not be realized in our generation as the unconditional and complete solution to the Jewish problem (Dreyfus).”
The Jewish Dreyfusards felt that the ideals of French Republicanism had to be bolstered and became extensively involved in the non-Jewish Ligue des Droits de l’Homme, or the Human Rights League, which was founded to promote such ideals (Hyman 347). Similarly, a famous French Jewish intellectual, Andre Spire, described his social awakening as a Jew occurring in 1892, not with the Dreyfus Affair, but with the publishing of La Libre Parole. He was not particularly fond of the wealthy Jews of France and, at first, was largely indifferent about Dreyfus’s arrest. While he eventually became a Dreyfusard during the third stage of the Affair, this action was the result of belief in the ideals of the French Republic and not at all the result of any “Jewish national sentiment,” of which he claimed to have none of at the time (Rodrigue 6).” As such, even though Spire eventually became a Zionist, it was not an immediate result of the Dreyfus Affair; instead, the Dreyfus Affair was likely one event of many that led him to this conclusion. A similar case involved French Jewish intellectual Edmond Fleg. Fleg had not written about the Dreyfus Affair until 1897, and during the end of that year, in a letter to his mother, he noted that he was beginning to believe in a greater idea of Jewish collectivity with opposition to assimilation and antisemitism. With this newfound passion for Jewish peoplehood, Fleg began to embrace Zionist ideas, only to step back and uncommit, instead finding himself stuck between his French and Jewish identities. As time went on, he did find himself more deeply involved with Judaism, but not always within a Zionist context (Rodrigue 10-12).
Other individuals like Léon Blum took the Dreyfus trial and the ensuing fallout as a sign to reinforce his commitment to Socialism. Julien Benda, another Jewish intellectual, was affected in a way that caused him to re-evaluate his own Jewish identity and commit to fighting hatred, and eventually fascism, in French society (Datta 129). From all of these characters, a picture of the Jewish intellectual response to the Dreyfus Affair begins to take shape. While it did not cause any of these individuals to immediately abandon any previous understandings of themselves or their position as Jews within broader French and European society, it did cause all of them to approach the event as Jews. For many, it may have been the first time this had happened, while for others, it may not have. Regardless, for most, it acted as but one stepping stone on a path to larger changes or rearticulations of the Jewish self but not as a catalyst for immediate and drastic change.
The most famous French Jewish intellectual upon whom the Dreyfus Affair had a catalytic level effect was Bernard Lazare. Even before the affair, Lazare had been deeply involved in Jewish literature, having written the debatably antisemitic 1894 treatise L’Antisémitisme: Son histoire et ses causes, or Antisemitism: Its History and Causes in English. In this book, he argues, among various other points, that Jewish difference and exclusionary habits drive antisemitism, and that eventually, antisemitism would disappear with Jewish assimilation, the dissolution of the differences between men, and the oncoming revolution (Lazare 175-183). So how was it that in the very same year, Lazare’s first reaction to Dreyfus’s arrest was that “Dreyfus appeared to [him] as the symbol of the persecuted Jew. He embodied in himself not only the centuries-old sufferings of this people of martyrs, but the present pain (Lockshin 309).” In fact, in an article he wrote only a month after Dreyfus’s arrest he proclaimed that he was mistaken in his belief that assimilation would halt antisemitism and that the Affair had proven his error (Lazare, qtd. in Lockshin 310). He continued to be deeply involved with the case, working with the Dreyfus family from 1895 through 1896 to publish A Judicial Error, as mentioned previously. In the original draft of this piece, antisemitism was thoroughly blamed for Dreyfus’s arrest and included the language of J’Accuse, years before Zola would write his famous piece (Lockshin 313). By 1896, Lazare, still deeply involved in the Dreyfus case, publicly reprimanded Drumont writing both as himself and as a Jew, something he likely would not have done before (Lockshin 317). In 1897, he published a second edition of A Judicial Error, which instead of relying on the facts of the case, explored how the trial was thoroughly tainted by antisemitism (Lockshin 322-323). With this massive shift in his understanding of both himself as a Jew and of antisemitism, he began a quick shift to Zionism. His writings developed an almost prophetic aura, as noted by Péguy, and deeply influenced Fleg’s early Zionism, and likely the Zionisms of others (Rodrigue 2,11).
Other European Jewish Reactions
France was, of course, not the only country whose Jews were shaken by the ripples of the Dreyfus Affair; for example, the Jews of the Western and Central European states like Great Britain, Germany, and Austria-Hungary were all in one way or another aware of the Dreyfus Affair. The first country that will be discussed in this paper will be Austria-Hungary. Largely speaking, the common Jewish opinion of this country is limited in its preservation, so the responses of the Liberal, Hungarian-speaking Jewish newspaper, Egyenlöség will be utilized. The Affair was spoken about quite often in this paper, by both Jews and non-Jews, commonly with a Dreyfusard perspective and a thorough belief in the role of Jew-hatred (Mezey, Gergely, Fleischmann, Lupovitch 402-404).
However, the Hungarian-Jewish response was more complex than simply taking the side of Dreyfus. At the time, this liberal Jewish population was largely Magyar nationalist, and they often took the affair not as a prophecy of what was to come in Hungary, but instead as an opportunity to critique France: “But isn't the central question before us who is the true criminal? … The way in which the system judged Dreyfus, which revealed itself in woeful criminal proceedings, is throwing a living world to the gospel of hatred that now rules the world… (Egyenlőség, qtd. in Lupovitch 402)." They also wanted to establish themselves as part of this rising homogenous nationalism and therefore sought to demonstrate Judaism as a part of this rising “Hungarian-ness” in the same way Protestantism and Catholicism were (Lupovitch 401). It must be noted however, that a need was felt to dispel rumors of a greater Jewish agenda in defending Dreyfus, with one author stating in his defense of Dreyfus that “any attempt to turn Judaism into a large interest group from these points of view bears the mark of Jew-hatred (Fleischmann).” Even though he treated the event as “exclusively a matter for France,” he also lamented that he had “dared to hope that the thread of the special history of the Jews in the cultured West had been broken,” but “the sufferings of Ahasuerus continue (Fleischmann).” Similarly, another editor's reaction was the publishing of an article that portrayed antisemitism as an eternal and medicalized form of hatred that would be ever present in certain parts of the world (Lupovitch 403).
While the opinions are clearly diverse, the viewpoints of these journalists, which both mirrored and shaped public opinion, suggest a mixed response. On the one hand, the affair was seen as a problem unique to the French, demonstrating the religious and moral corruption of France. On the other hand, the affair represented a deep-seated fear in the minds of European Jewry—that assimilation might not grant them a permanent safe place in society. Those fears, however, were not increased so much by the affair that Zionism was viewed as the only solution; for example, Egyenlöség never endorsed Zionism and remained invested in Magyar nationalism even after the affair (Lupovitch 395).
For Austro-Hungarian Jewish thinkers Max Nordau and Theodore Herzl, different responses were the case. Nordau had been deeply critical of France since 1880 and originally attributed the Dreyfus Affair to be the result of the failures of French liberalism, similar to the response of other Hungarian Jews (Lupovitch 396). Over time, however, this belief shifted to become the idea that the Affair had “crippled [the] solution of assimilation,” and that he needed to, “set out to seek another solution of the Jewish question (Nordau and Nordau 118, qtd. in Umland 36).” This solution became Zionism after he spoke with Herzl in 1896 (Umland 36).
Then what can be said about the contribution of the Dreyfus Affair to Herzl’s conversion to Zionism? Herzl was a highly assimilated Jew who had spent much of his life in Vienna, moving to live in France and being exposed to the Affair there as a journalist in the 1890s. Sometime between 1894, the start of the affair, and 1896, when he spoke with Nordau, his previous belief in the possibility of assimilation as a solution to the Jewish Question had faded completely (Lupovitch 396-367). The traditional understanding of Herzl’s conversion, as he stated in 1899, is that the Dreyfus Affair caused an immediate and potent re-articulation of both his own Jewish identity and his opinion overall about the position of Jews in Europe (Cohn 102-103). However, this conception is somewhat limited and revisionist, contradicting or missing significant evidence in favor of serving a more Zionist agenda for both Herzl and modern interpreters. Evidence for this revision can be seen in his writings on the initial trial in which he rarely mentions a Jewish aspect and focuses more on the xenophobia, chauvinism, and anti-German behavior of the French (Avineri 9).
Additionally, he rarely mentions Dreyfus in his hundreds-of-pages long diary. In contrast, he at length speaks about his skepticism in, and the fragility of, the European liberalism of the time. Most of his antisemitic experiences occurred during his time in Vienna, particularly relating to the success of Karl Leuger (Avineri 9-10). He continued, claiming in his diary that he would “fight anti-Semitism in the place it originated—in Germany and in Austria (Herzl, qtd. in Avineri 10).” Even his quest to answer the Jewish Question might have originated in 1882, as he suggested in his 1898 autobiography (Cohn 103). From his writings, it can be concluded that Herzl was already questioning the Jewish condition in Europe, long before the Dreyfus Affair occurred; as such, it is likely that the Affair did not cause an immediate re-evaluation of European Jewry’s place, but instead simply accelerated Herzl’s search for an alternative solution and lead to his writing the pivotal Zionist work Der Judenstaat. It is feasible that in his research for alternatives, he discovered the publications of writers from the Haskalah and the Eastern European Zionist movement (Averini 7).
The German Jewish response was largely similar to that of the Jews of the bordering Austria-Hungary—they considered the affair fundamentally French in the same way pogroms were fundamentally Russian (Lupovitch 397). This thought process allowed them to maintain their claim of fully successful assimilation despite an event that engendered the opposite feeling occurring so close to them (Lupovitch 397). The Allegemeine Zeitung des Judenthums, or the AZdJ for short, was a liberal German-Jewish publication that presented this argument commonly, proclaiming in 1894, “The military court condemns Dreyfus as a traitor, but… not Dreyfus but France is the traitor (AZdJ 24, qtd. in Lupovitch 398).” It also spent copious time lamenting the lack of response from liberal French papers in condemning the false charges (Lupovitch 399). As a whole, the German Jewish reaction did not entail a massive shift toward Zionism, instead favoring a leaning into the German identity, at least within the liberal population.
Broadly speaking, British Jewry's reaction was more melancholic and hopeless than that of German or Austrian-Hungarian Jewry. British society as a whole did not hear about the affair until 1897 and interest swelled after the publishing of J’Accuse in 1898 (Crotti 12-13). At large, however, the British sided with the Dreyfusards, with the public being known to cheer for Dreyfus and hiss at French uniforms (Crotti 16). Even Queen Victoria described the Affair as a “monstrous horrible sentence against the poor martyr Dreyfus (Buckle 396-397, qtd. in Crotti 16).” The establishment’s Dreyfusard position was likely not created out of a love for the Jews, but instead out of anti-France political sentiment, as Dreyfus’s Jewishness was practically erased from mainstream discussion (Crotti 17-20). Increasing Eastern European Jewish immigration to England and rising antisemitic or philo-semitic beliefs were present during the time of the affair (Crotti 15).
Such perspectives were perhaps the reason why British Jewry’s response was one of such distress. It was noted for its almost hysterical nature, as the fact that such an event happened in France was enough to warrant the idea that it could happen in England (Shane 135). Less than 3 months after Dreyfus’s arrest the general attitude was that while Dreyfus was innocent, it was largely one of incredulity and that the truth would prevail (Shane 140). When Dreyfus’s retrial found him once again guilty, British Jewish responses were significantly less candid. The Jewish Chronicle responded that “facts are nothing; justice is nothing; truth is nothing; hatred of the Jew and army idolatry is everything (Jewish Chronicle, qtd. in Shane 140).” The Chief Rabbi of England, Dr. Adler, proclaimed in his Yom Kippur sermon in 1899 that the Jews of Britain “must regard the events passing on the other side of the Channel as a handwriting on the wall (Adler, qtd. in Shane 140).” Later that year Adler advised Jews to be more careful such that an event like the Dreyfus Affair would not transpire in Britain. Israel Zangwill, who was originally a Zionist but later shifted his efforts to Jewish territorialism, noted that French antagonism to the Jews was beginning to occur in Britain (Shane 142). Another Zionist leader, Joseph Cowen, wrote in 1898 that ten years prior, “the French Jew was as proud of being French as the English Jew of being English and now see what has happened… at least Zionism gives English Jews something to work for (Cowen, qtd. in Shane 143).”
Many British Jews seemed to have a great anxiety towards the Affair and its potential to occur in England. While an increase in an individual's sympathy for the Zionist cause was one response, another response was extreme British patriotism. This reaction was often criticized by other Jewish authors, with writers for the Jewish Chronicle calling these undertakings “hysterical patriotism,” or writing that all such actions would “[serve] only to call attention to our racial exclusiveness and our social detachment which remain, our shouting Rule Britannia notwithstanding, and will remain as long as we are Jews (Jewish Chronicle, qtd. in Shane 144).” It can be concluded that the British Jewish reaction to the Affair was varied, as it was in most countries, but tended to be more embittered than in similar countries. In addition, it involved shifts towards Zionism—or general Jewish communal organization—and a distinctly powerful reevaluation of Jewish existence in their society.
Eastern European Jews were similarly enthralled by the Affair, but as their material conditions and circumstances were starkly different from their Western and Central European counterparts, this captivation took different forms. The Russian Jewish response was largely one of ideological affirmation, whether that be in secular Zionist beliefs, Socialist or Communist sects, or religious anti-assimilationist ones. For the religious, represented by the religiously-styled paper Machsike ha-Dat, the affair constituted an opportunity to admonish the injection of progressivism in religion. The suffering of a high-profile assimilated Jew such as Dreyfus provided them with an opportunity to criticize the assimilationist movement as a whole: “These [religious] innovations were a spider's web and [some] cried out against them, but none heeded their cry (Lupovitch 405).” That said, even these religious critics of assimilation still lamented the suffering of Dreyfus, even if they did hope this suffering might lead to Jewish dissimilation in the West (Lupovitch 405).
The secular, Hebrew-language paper, Ha-Melitz had a differing perspective, critiquing the case based on the French’s different reaction to the Dreyfus case and to the arrest of Herschel Schwartz. Only a month before Dreyfus’s Arrest, Schwartz, an Alsatian Catholic, had been arrested for allegedly selling military documents to the Germans. Unlike Dreyfus, Schwartz was not subject to the same vitriolic response, even though he was originally falsely accused of being Jewish, by the French press and public despite being of practically identical background outside of religion. For Ha-Melitz, this was surefire evidence of French society's antisemitism and the unfair suffering of the Jews (Lupovitch 405-407). Both of these papers shared one common response that likely reflected the opinions of their Russian Jewish viewership—the affair had affirmed their belief that assimilation was a trap and would not solve their Jewish Question (Lupovitch 404-407).
The Polish Jewish response was somewhat dissimilar to those of their brethren in Russia-proper. Russian Poland was a center of new Jewish politics, like bundism, Jewish socialism, territorialism, and Zionism that had lost faith in the old Jewish politic of assimilationist Western liberalism, and such beliefs were reflected in their writings on the Affair (Polonsky 22-24). Nahum Sakalow, a Jewish integrationist at the time who later became a Zionist, noted in 1899 that, “hysterical patriotism [had] not triumphed” because the Affair had been universalized (Sakalow, qtd. in Polonsky 25). The populist-leaning Yiddish paper Der Yid, had the viewpoint of the necessity for communal Jewish politics and action (Polonsky 25-26).
A short story by Sholem Aleichem describes well both the Eastern European Jewish interest in the Affair and their conclusion on the affair being one revolving around renewed attention on Jewish new politics and Jewish communal action (Polonsky 25). This composition, titled “Dreyfus in Kasrilevke,” focuses on the reactions to the Dreyfus Affair of the local Jewish community in Kasrilevke, Aleichem’s recurring Pale of Settlement anytown. During the first phase of the Affair, the community is largely unmoved by the event, saying “what won’t a Jew do to make a living,” or, when speaking to the futility of complete assimilation, “a Jew has no business climbing so high, interfering with kings and their affairs (Aleichem 111).” But once they heard it was an antisemitic conspiracy, “Dreyfus became a Kasrilevkite,” and the whole town’s Jewish community became deeply invested. Dreyfus, who had before only happened to be Jewish, became a Jew in the minds of Kasrilevke when they questioned how such a thing could occur in France (Aleichem 112). As more news came, Kasrilevke became willing to die for Zola and when Labori was shot, they thought of it as a shot at themselves (Aleichem 113-114). They prayed as a community for Dreyfus to have a successful retrial and freedom, but when he was again deemed guilty, they were beside themselves (Aleichem 113-114). If Aleichem’s depiction of his anytown can be considered indicative of the broader Eastern European Jewish reaction, it suggests that the Dreyfus affair did not cause such Jews to reevaluate their responses to the Jewish Question. Instead, as is also suggested by other sources, Eastern European Jewry’s reaction to the Dreyfus affair involved increasing their sense of Jewish communal identity while magnifying their existing political views and the divides between such views.
In Conclusion
All of these reactions from across Europe vary wildly, even within individual countries. In France, the Jewish general population’s viewpoint on their condition seemed to not change much at all, but its intelligentsia who were forced to address the event as Jews brooked an individual event on a road of re-articulation of their Jewish identities or intensification of their existing beliefs. Lazare, of course, is an exception. In Germany and Austria-Hungary, the Affair, despite primarily being viewed as a symptom of French society, did provoke fears of an eternal antisemitism, but not enough such that they fully re-evaluated their positions or, in some cases, changed at all. Even Austro-Hungarian Zionist thinkers like Herzl and Nordau did not become Zionists overnight as a result of the Affair. Instead, they had likely been concerned about the Jewish position in Europe prior to the Affair, and it only accelerated their search and helped them formulate their Zionisms. In Great Britain, where the fire of Jewish fear was stoked higher, a transition to a stronger Jewish self and communal identification likely occurred. Zionism and other Jewish new politics began to emerge, in part due to the Affair and the resulting trepidation. In Eastern Europe, where Jew-hatred was already felt as eternal, though currently wearing the new mask of antisemitism, and assimilation was considered folly, the Affair was still closely followed. There, it operated similarly to its functions among the intellectuals in France—increasing Jewish communal understanding and heightening existing beliefs.
This paper, in seeking to present a great breadth of Jewish perspectives over a great distance, suffers from losing both diversity and specificity of opinions as a result of selection limitations and choice. Nevertheless, an overall conclusion can still be drawn from these disparate and varying sources. The Dreyfus Affair was an event of considerable import to European Jewry as a whole; such a truth cannot be doubted. Despite this significance, the Affair was, broadly speaking, not as consequential in its shaping of the later politics of European Jews as it is typically prescribed. Its most common outcomes were relatively small levels of change or an amplification, or step on the road to amplification, of existing beliefs in assimilation, anti-assimilation, socialism, or other politics. Only in a select few individuals, specifically Lazare, and to a lesser extent Herzl and Nordau, did the Affair cause a drastic re-evaluation of Jewish life and belonging in Europe.
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