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Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, September/October 2006, pages 62-63 Israel and Judaism A Century Ago, Zionism Founder Herzl Misread the Meaning of the Dreyfus AffairBy Allan C. Brownfeld
IN JULY 1906, France’s Cour de Cassation (Supreme Court) overturned the treason conviction of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a French Jewish army officer who had spent five years on Devil’s Island for high treason and an additional seven years trying to clear his name. One hundred years later, it is useful to recall the Dreyfus case. It was, after all, while covering the Dreyfus trial that Theodor Herzl, a Viennese journalist and assimilated Jew, came to the conclusion that the emancipation of the Jews of Europe could not succeed and that only the creation of a state of their own would solve the “Jewish problem.” Herzl himself declared: “The Dreyfus trial, which I witnessed in Paris in 1894, made me a Zionist.” In fact, however, Herzl may have misread the Dreyfus affair and learned the wrong lessons from it. In September 1894, a concierge
and petty spy at the German Embassy in Paris discovered a military
memorandum, unsigned and without a named recipient, containing
promises of military secrets. She conveyed the documents to Hubert-Joseph
Henry, an ambitious commandant, who passed it on to his superiors
at the General Staff’s
Statistical Section, the division responsible for espionage. One
of these men, Colonel Fabre, claimed to recognize Dreyfus’ handwriting.
After officials consulted handwriting experts—whose conclusions
differed—Dreyfus Following two months of imprisonment, including solitary confinement and various forms of psychological torture designed to produce a confession, but which failed to do so, Dreyfus faced a closed-session court-martial. He was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island, off the coast of French Guiana. In 1896 a new head of the Statistical Section, Lt. Col. Georges Picquart, discovered evidence pointing to the real traitor. Placing letters written by an officer in the Statistical Section next to the military memorandum in question, Picquart saw that the handwriting matched exactly. He determined that the actual culprit was Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy, a notorious hustler with chronic gambling debts. Horrified that a traitor might still be at large and probably still selling military secrets to the Germans, Picquart confided his discovery to a few colleagues, whose help he solicited in planning a sting that would establish Esterhazy’s guilt beyond any doubt. Instead, however, they betrayed his plan to top officials at the General Staff, who—unwilling to have the truth of their incompetence and injustice revealed—quickly transferred Picquart to a dangerous post in Tunisia. Noted Ernst Pawel in The Labyrinth Of Exile: A Life Of Theodor Herzl: “Back in January 1895, near the end of his term as Paris correspondent [for Vienna’s Neue Freie Presse], Herzl had witnessed what then seemed the final act in the tragedy of Captain Dreyfus…It was Bernard Lazare…who patiently collected evidence of an anti-Semitic frameup and, in November 1896, opened a campaign to rehabilitate Dreyfus. A few months later, Major Georges Picquart, head of the Statistical Section of the General Staff, independently discovered the identity of the real traitor. Although himself an arch-conservative and avowed anti-Semite, Picquart nonetheless placed justice above personal prejudice and went public with his findings, a breach of military etiquette that earned him a court-martial, exile and persuasive death threats. Aroused by the blatant assault on human rights and republican virtue, Emile Zola…flung himself into the fray. It was largely his passion that rallied the intellectuals and hommes de letters to the Dreyfus case, for the first time giving these fractious individualists a sense of collective power and responsibility which outlasted l’Affaire and became a permanent feature of French politics.” “The Dreyfus affair convulsed France for an entire decade,” wrote Paul Johnson in his History of the Jews. “It became an important event not just in Jewish history but in French, indeed, European history. It saw the emergence, for the first time, of a distinct class of intellectuals—the word intelligentsia was now coined—as a major power in European society and among whom emancipated Jews were an important, sometimes a dominant, element.” Johnson elaborated: “The left won an overwhelming electoral success in 1906. Dreyfus was rehabilitated and made a general. Picquart ended up Minister for War. In 1895, Herzl was not to foresee the victory of the Dreyfusards…[whose] outright victory in France…reaffirmed the view that there at least the Jews could find not only security but opportunity and a growing measure of political and cultural power.” In the opinion of historian Philippe Landau, “The Dreyfus case was a disaster for French Jews, because they had by then nearly entirely succeeded in their integration into French society. But,” he acknowledged, “their integration resumed again afterward. Typical of their success were the Jews who became prime minister, such as Leon Blum (1936), René Mayer (1953), whose grandfather had been chief rabbi of France, and Pierre Mendes-France (1954). In a cover story on the anniversary of Dreyfus’ exoneration, the June 26, 2006 Jerusalem Report provided this analysis: “The late French-Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas was fond of recalling his father’s words, said before the family fled pogroms in their Russian homeland: ‘A country where people tear each other apart over the fate of a little Jewish captain is a country where we must go without delay.’ The country was France and the little captain was of course Alfred Dreyfus…[whose vindication], after many bitter recriminations and a wave of national soul-searching…exposed his innocence and the depths of French anti-Semitism at the time. It was the ultimate triumph of justice…and it served as a main catalyst for the migration of many thousands of Eastern European Jews to France. An expression was even coined at the time in Yiddish: ‘Gliklekh vi Got in Frankraikh’ (as happy as God in France).” Indeed, The Jerusalem Report went on to lament, the emancipation of the Jews of France was so successful that, after several generations, many families ceased to be Jewish: “At the time of the Dreyfus Affair, French Jews were still giddy from the effects of their emancipation. They were positively in love with the ideals of the French Republic, which had opened the country’s top schools and the civil service to their brightest sons.…Despite the liberty, equality and fraternity they enjoyed—or perhaps because of those very rights—there is very little left of the community Dreyfus emerged from. ‘The families behind the great Jewish fortunes—the Deutsch de la Meurthes, the David-Weils, the Achille-Foulds—they’re no longer Jewish,’ says Cyril Grange, a historian. ‘Among the banking families, only the Rothschilds have remained Jewish.’” When Bernard Dufournier, the first husband of Alfred Dreyfus’ granddaughter Aline, was appointed French ambassador to Lebanon in the 1960s, a senior official asked then-President Charles de Gaulle if it was a good idea to send to an Arab country an ambassador whose wife was Jewish. De Gaulle, whose own father, a high school teacher, had been ostracized by colleagues for being among the first to support Dreyfus in his hometown, icily replied: “Thank you. I know that Madame Dufournier is the granddaughter of a French officer.” The centennial of the 1906 decision to rehabilitate Dreyfus was marked in France with historical exhibits, learned seminars and the laying of the cornerstone of a Dreyfus museum at Medan, west of Paris. If former Culture Minister Jack Lang, who is Jewish, has his way, Dreyfus’ remains will be moved from the family tomb in Paris’ Montparnasse cemetery to the majestic Pantheon building in the heart of the Latin Quarter, resting place of such distinguished figures as Emile Zola and Jean Jaurès, his two greatest defenders. There is much irony in the fact that Theodor Herzl embraced the idea of Zionism as a result of the Dreyfus trial. As Professor Jacqueline Rose of Queen Mary University of London wrote in The Question of Zion, “It is a strange fact of Zionist history that the figure for launching Zionism as a political movement desired nothing so much as to be an emancipated, not to say assimilated Jew. ‘I am a German Jew from Hungary,’ Herzl announced in his speech to the Rothschilds in 1895, ‘and I can never be anything but a German.’…Herzl’s own relationship to anti-Semitism was ambivalent, to say the least: ‘What would you say, for example, if I did not deny that there are good aspects of anti-Semitism,’ he wrote in 1893 to his fiancé Julie Naschauer.“ For Herzl, who had little regard for Judaism as a religion, the Dreyfus case, together with the mounting anti-Semitism in the Hapsburg Empire, led to a theory of Jewish identity as forged not internally, but from the outside. “We are one people. Our enemies have made us one,” he declared—thus, the need for a Jewish state. For Herzl, moreover, Palestine was irrelevant. He would locate his Jewish state in any available geographic area. Basing his analysis on Dreyfus’ initial trial, not the furor it caused and the captain’s later exoneration, Herzl appears to have misunderstood what really was happening in France. Witnessing Dreyfus’ trial, Herzl formed his own view of what Dreyfus epitomized: “The Jew who tried to adapt himself to his environment, to speak its languages, to think its thoughts, to sew its insignia on his sleeve—only to see them ruthlessly ripped away.” Had Herzl waited for the rest of the story, and Dreyfus’ triumph, today’s world might be very different indeed. Allan C. Brownfeld is a syndicated columnist and associate editor of the Lincoln Review, a journal published by the Lincoln Institute for Research and Education, and editor of Issues, the quarterly journal of the American Council for Judaism. |
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