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Epic Trials in Jewish History

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Contents

Introduction.....................xiChapter 1........................1Chapter 2........................17Chapter 3........................33Chapter 4........................39Chapter 5........................51Chapter 6........................69Chapter 7........................85Chapter 8........................101Chapter 9........................125Chapter 10.......................139Chapter 11.......................157Chapter 12.......................171Conclusion.......................189Bibliography.....................195

Chapter One

The court is impervious to proof. —Franz Kafka, The Trial

Have we enough courage to tell the truth?

There is no such thing as justice in or out of court. —Clarence Darrow, 1936

The Dreyfus trial in France in 1894 was perhaps the most significant political event in modern French history. A Jewish officer, Dreyfus, was a member of the general staff accused of selling secrets to the Germans. The impact of the Dreyfus affair still reverberates through contemporary France.

The Dreyfus affair, which began in 1894 in Paris, can be considered as one of the most important historical events of the modern era for the Jewish people and it has resonated as a seminal event in contemporary French history. The affair proved that even in an enlightened and liberal country like France, bitter anti-Semitism existed. For Theodore Herzl, an eyewitness and foreign correspondent, the trial became the final spark in his thinking to formulate a Jewish state.

For the people of France it became an event which lasted for almost a century. The reverberations of the Dreyfus affair can be found in Vichy France of the Second World War and perhaps even the anti-Semitism in France in the twenty-first century.

The Dreyfus case showed the importance of the freedom of the press and the significance of the rule of law over both the French army and the state.

On January 1, 1893, Alfred Dreyfus began a probationary term with the General Staff of the army, and while he was an artillery officer, he was rotated through various bureaus of the Ministry of War.

In late September 1894, certain documents were intercepted by French intelligence at the German embassy in Paris. A housekeeper who was secretly employed by French intelligence was cleaning out a wastebasket. She found papers which later became known as the Bordeaux. This term refers to secret lists and documents. This official form was addressed to a German officer named Schwartzkoppen. The contents of the file made it clear that the writer was both an artillery specialist and a member of the General Staff and only a person with this detailed and dual knowledge could have written the memorandum.

Handwriting experts and other investigators were called in. The personnel lists of the General Staff were scoured for likely suspects and the name Alfred Dreyfus, an artillery captain and a Jew from Alsace, stood out. Dreyfus's geographic origins implicated him as it was felt that due to the German association with Alsace he would have Germanic sympathies. Despite Dreyfus's intense patriotism and devotion to France, he was not well liked. He was independently wealthy due to a family inheritance and seemed aloof from his fellow officers, but the dislike was primarily because he was Jewish. By October 6, 1894, Dreyfus was under intense suspicion, and on October 15, 1894, he was accused of high treason and arrested. The Dreyfus affair, which was to paralyze the French nation for twelve long years, had begun.

One of the key aspects of the case was the intransigence of the French army. The honour of the French army was sacrosanct; it absolutely had to be held above the state. It can also be said that the French were still suffering the after-effects of their humiliating defeats at the hands of the Germans in 1870, when they lost the province of Alsace.

French Anti-Semitism and Historical Context

Alfred Dreyfus was being charged with treason at a difficult time for Jews. There were several scandals involving Jewish financiers. Following the Suez Canal's success, many investors bought stock in the French Panama canal project of the 1880s and lost all their money. This, of course, was blamed on the Jewish financial leadership of the project. It was revealed that Cornelius Herz and Baron Jacques de Reinach, both Jews, were involved in the instigation of the canal scandal. The economic depression of the 1890s further focused and fortified long standing anti-Semitic prejudices.

Edward Drumont wrote La France Juive, which was a best-selling polemic against Jews and captured public favour by attacking wealthy Jewish financiers like the Rothschilds, Ephrussis, and Bambergers. According to Drumont, these Jewish financiers had destroyed the traditional French virtues of loyalty, religion, responsibility, work, and thrift. The French Catholic Church reinforced these attacks by stating that the Jews espoused modernity and liberalism, two terrible defects in the eyes of the conservative church. Following the successes of his bestselling book, Drumont published a virulent anti-Semitic daily newspaper, Le Libre Parole.

This newspaper was instrumental in the affair as it persistently agitated the masses with its anti-Semitic diatribes. On November 1, 1894, a headline in Le Libre Parole read, "High Treason Arrest of the Jewish Officer A. Dreyfus." Public excitement, already raised to a high level, reached the boiling point. Popular anti-Semitism now permeated the Dreyfus affair, and the French Catholic Church continued to play a major role in the case. The Jews were depicted as a great challenge to both the Church and the faithful. La Croix, a popular journal of the Assumptionists (a right wing Catholic order), used the Jews as scapegoats for the alleged crimes of socialism, anti-clericalism, and materialism. A popular writer of the time, Maurice Barrès, concluded that Dreyfus was capable of treason because of his race.

Still another factor exacerbating this prevalent anti-Semitism was the large influx of Eastern European Ashkenazi Jews from the Russian empire, fleeing pogroms and other forms of violent anti-Semitism. These Eastern European Jews were alien to the French. For the most part they spoke only Yiddish and were not easily assimilated into the French milieu. Dreyfus's Jewish ancestry and the accusations that he was a traitor all seemed to solidify French anti-Semitic opinion.

Despite Dreyfus's protestations of innocence, he was quickly found guilty of treason in a secret military tribunal. This clandestine court-martial ignored both legal justice and fairness and Dreyfus was not even given the right to examine the evidence against him. While the judges seemed to pause over the evidence, Major Hubert Henry, a party to the conspiracy to pillory Dreyfus, gave the judges a further incriminating file that apparently contained a letter, dated May 1894 from the German military attaché, mentioning, "this scoundrel Dreyfus." To further compound the illegality of the court proceedings, Dreyfus's defence attorney, Edgar Demange, was not made aware of this secret dossier. General Mercier, Major Henry's superior, made every effort to ensure that Dreyfus would be found guilty. The military court...