History of the Jews (68 page)

Nowhere was this feeling of growing security stronger than in France. There, Jews enjoyed the libertarian legacy of the 1789 Revolution. They were few in number. Ironically, France’s defeat in 1870, which cost her Alsace-Lorraine, had removed her largest and least popular colony of Alsatian, German-speaking Ashkenazi Jews. At the time of the Dreyfus case Jews in France numbered no more than 86,000 out of a total population of nearly forty million.
¹⁴⁰
The community was administered through the government-sponsored Consistoire Central, under the Ministère des Cultes, which laid down rules for the elections of rabbis, fixed and contributed to their salaries.
So French Judaism had some of the characteristics of a state church—and behaved like one. The ‘Prayer for France’ in its prayer-book read: ‘Almighty protector of Israel and humanity, if of all religions ours is the most dear to You, because it is Your own handiwork, France is of all countries the one which You seem to prefer, because it is the most worthy of You.’ It ended: ‘Let [France] not keep this monopoly of tolerance and of justice for all, a monopoly as humiliating for other states as it is glorious for her. Let her find many imitators, and as she imposes on the world her tastes and her language, the products of her literature and her arts, let her also impose her principles, which it goes without saying are more important and more necessary.’
¹⁴¹

When J.-H. Dreyfus was installed as Grand Rabbi of Paris in 1891 his theme was the links between ‘the French genius’ and ‘the fundamental spirit of Judaism’, especially ‘the moral affinities between the two races’, the French being ‘this elect people of modern times’. Rabbi Kahn of Nîmes called the French Revolution ‘our flight from Egypt…our modern Passover’. Rabbi Herrmann of Rheims said France was ‘designated by Him to direct the destinies of humanity…to spread throughout the world the great and beautiful ideas of justice, equality and fraternity which had formerly been the exclusive patrimony of Israel’. Rather like Reform Judaism in America, French Judaism did everything in its power to blend into the local religious landscape. Rabbis dressed almost like Catholic priests. They even considered holding the Sabbath services on Sunday. They had ceremonies for children very similar to baptisms and First Communions. Flowers on coffins, collection-plates, visits to the bedsides of the dying, singing, organs, sermons—all were modelled on Christian practice. It was estimated that there were only 500 true Orthodox Jews in the entire country.

The Jewish laity combined an equally low profile with unctuous patriotism. They competed energetically for the glittering prizes of the French state: admissions to the grandes écoles, the concours, the Academie, the Légion d’Honneur. ‘Frenchmen by country and institutions,’ wrote Léon Halévy, ‘it is necessary that all [French Jews] become so by customs and language…that for them the name of Jew become accessory, and the name of Frenchman principal.’
¹⁴²
‘Let there be neither Jews nor Christians,’ wrote Ernest Crémieu-Foa, ‘except at the hour of prayer for those who pray!’ James Darmesteter, who had risen to be director of the École des Hautes Études, argued in gratitude that Israelite and French cultures were essentially the same. The French Revolution had expressed the ideology of Judaism, and these two chosen peoples with their profound belief in progress would
bring about the Messianic Age which would take the form of ‘the terrestrial triumph of justice in humanity’. Such men argued that anti-Semitism was an alien German import, which could never gain anything but a superficial hearing in France.

That, alas, was far from correct. The nineteenth century was the great age of pseudo-scientific racial theories and the French played their full part in it. It is true that German philologists, exploring the origins of language, first distinguished between the Aryan or Indo-European peoples, with their roots in Sanskrit, and the Semitic peoples, with their roots in the Hebraic group of languages. But it was the French who popularized these notions, in the process confusing language and race. In 1853 the French diplomat Comte Joseph de Gobineau (1816-82) published his notorious
Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines
, which distinguished between Aryan virtue and Semitic (and Latin) degeneration. This became the handbook of the German anti-Semites and had an enormous influence on, for example, Richard Wagner. The opinionated polymath Ernst Renan (1823-92) was doing the same for the French, with his
Histoire générale et système comparé des langues sémitiques
, which won the Prix Volnay in 1847, and still more his
Vie de Jésus
(1863), the most successful book published in France during the entire century, read with smug satisfaction by anti-clericals and trembling guilt by Catholics. He believed that ‘the Semitic race, compared to the Indo-European race, represents an inferior level of human nature’; and his portrait of Jesus, the humanist hero, was dramatic precisely because it showed him ‘immune to almost all the defects of his race…whose dominant quality was, indeed, limitless delicacy’. Renan’s theory of Jewish racial inferiority was skilfully married to Toussenel’s theory of Jewish financial skulduggery by Edouard Drumont to produce his massive two-volume
La France juive
(1886), the most brilliantly written and plausible of all anti-Semitic studies. In a short time it ran into over a hundred editions and enabled him to found the Anti-Semitic League and his vicious daily paper,
La Libre Parole
(1889).

Hence the first layer of French anti-Semitism was pseudo-scientific. The second was envy. If the Jews were racially inferior, why were they so successful? Because they cheated and conspired. Jewish children of the
haute bourgeoisie
tended to carry off all the prizes. Years later, Julien Benda was to write: ‘The triumph of the Benda brothers at the
concours général
appeared to me one of the essential sources of the anti-Semitism we had to bear fifteen years later. Whether the Jews realized it or not, such success was felt by other French people as an act of violence.’
¹⁴³
The immensely clever Reinach brothers, the lawyer-
politician Joseph (1856-1921), the archaeologist Solomon (1858-1932) and the classicist Théodore (1860-1928), were another trio of prize-winning prodigies. They beat the French at their own academic-cultural game every time. Then, in 1892, the Panama scandal broke, an immense labyrinth of financial manipulation and fraud, with their uncle Baron Jacques de Reinach right at the middle of it. His mysterious death, or suicide, merely added to the uproar, and to the angry satisfaction of the Jew-baiters-so they cheated all along! The Union Générale scandal in 1882, the Comptoire d’Escompte scandal in 1889—both involving Jews—were merely curtain-raisers to this complex crime, which seemed to confirm the financial conspiracy theories outlined in Drumont’s book and gave
Le Libre Parole’s
‘investigative journalists’ the chance to break a new anti-Jewish story almost daily. After London, Paris was the centre of European finance and its bankers’ roll-call was studded with Jewish names: Deutsch, Bamberger, Heine, Lippmann, Pereire, Ephrussi, Stern, Bischoffsheim, Hirsch and Reinach (of course)—that would do to be going on with!
¹⁴⁴

There was a third, clerical, layer of French anti-Semitism. The official Roman Catholic hierarchy were in a confused state in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, locked in endless battles with the French state. They had little control over their clergy, still less over the religious orders, especially the Assumptionists, chosen and backed by the papacy to ‘re-Christianize France’ by organizing mass pilgrimages to Rome and new miracle centres such as Lourdes. The Assumptionists were founded in 1847 and were the first order to bring the methods of big business to religious revivalism. They hired special trains to assemble vast crowds of people. They founded an immensely successful publishing house, La Bonne Presse, and a mass-circulation daily,
La Croix
(1883).
¹⁴⁵
Like the Dominican and Franciscan friars before them, whom they resembled in certain ways, they needed an enemy. They produced three, all interconnected: Protestants, freemasons, Jews. As an ultra-Catholic conspiracy theory, the plots of the freemasons long antedated ‘scientific’ anti-Semitism, going back at least to 1789 in France. Much of masonic lore and ritual could be, and was, linked to Jewish kabbalah, in scores of Catholic pamphlets and books. And, since the Assumptionists believed that many Protestants had been secret Jews and
marranos
ever since the sixteenth century, it was not hard to tie all together in a satanic trio. When the Catholic banking organization Union Générale collapsed in 1882, the Assumptionists contended that it was the work of this conspiracy. They founded their paper the next year to fight it; and the year after, Leo
XIII
, their protector, formally condemned freemasonry as the work of the devil.
La Croix
pledged itself to fight ‘the trio of hate…which includes, one, Protestantism which wants to destroy Catholicism, the
soul of France
; Judaism which wants to rob her national wealth, the
body of France
; freemasonry, the natural compound of the other two, which wants
at the same time
to demolish the
body and the soul of France
!’
¹⁴⁶

Against this background of orchestrated hatred and slander, the events of 1881 in Russia, and their consequences, dealt a deadly blow to established French Jewry by giving ordinary Frenchmen, especially in Paris, vivid, ocular evidence of a ‘Jewish problem’. Over a generation, France took 120,000 Jewish refugees, more than doubling the size of French Jewry. These were poor, obvious, Ashkenazi Jews, of course, seemingly corresponding to the caricature Drumont and
La Croix
were peddling. Moreover, they were joined by a steady stream of Jews from the Alsace community, who could not abide the German occupation. They included the Dreyfus family who had come to Paris in 1871, but retained business connections with Mulhouse. They were fierce, almost fanatical, French patriots. Getting a commission in the French army had been the boyhood ambition of Alfred Dreyfus. It was a matter of tremendous pride to him that, after the general staff was belatedly reorganized to give it a wider social basis, he had been the first Jew to be selected for staff duties. But of course the patriotism of Alsatian Jews had its ironies. Like anyone else with the faintest German connections they were suspect persons in the France of the 1890s, a paranoid country, still smarting from defeat and territorial robbery, desperate to avenge itself and recover its lost provinces, yet fearful of further German assault. In January 1894 France signed the first secret military convention with her new ally against Germany, Tsarist Russia. This made the Jews still more suspect in French eyes, for they were celebrated for hating the Tsarist regime more than any other. The French Jews did their best. All the Paris synagogues offered up special prayers on the birthday of Alexander
III
, the most anti-Semitic of the Tsars. It made no difference. Every patriotic gesture the Jews made was received by the anti-Semites with implacable cynicism: ‘They would, wouldn’t they?’

In July 1894, a spendthrift gambler, Major Count Walsin-Esterhazy, then commanding the 74th Infantry, offered his services to the German embassy. Next month he handed the embassy concierge a letter (the
bordereau
) listing certain papers he intended to hand over in return for cash. On 26 September it reached Major Hubert Henry, of the general staff ‘Statistical Section’ (a cover for counter-espionage).
Despite its reorganization, the general staff was a morass of incompetence, the Statistical Section being the worst of the lot. It kept virtually no records or registers. It constantly fabricated documents to plant, but did not record them, and often confused false and real. On one occasion it sold an old strongbox; the buyer found top-secret papers in it. That was characteristic. If the Section had possessed a minimum of professional competence, the Dreyfus affair could never have occurred because Esterhazy was a phenomenally incompetent spy. All the internal evidence of the
bordereau
pointed to him. Little or nothing indicated that the culprit was a member of the staff. Some of it positively ruled out Captain Dreyfus. But the head of the section was Colonel Jean-Conard Sandherr, also an Alastian, but a German-hating, anti-Semitic Catholic convert. When Major Henry, another anti-Semite, produced Dreyfus’ name, Colonel Sandherr slapped his forehead and exclaimed: ‘I ought to have thought of it!’
¹⁴⁷

Nevertheless, there was no anti-Semitic army plot against Dreyfus. All concerned acted in good faith. The only exception was Henry, who actually forged evidence against Dreyfus. The trouble was started by Drumont and the Assumptionists. It was the
Libre Parole
which first broke the story that a Jewish officer had been secretly arrested for treason. By 9 November 1894, weeks before the trial, it proclaimed that ‘
toute la Juiverie
’ was behind ‘
le traître
’.
La Croix
joined in the witch-hunt. Appalled, the leaders of the Jewish community, who included five army generals, tried to play things down. When Dreyfus was convicted and sent to Devil’s Island, they accepted his guilt; were deeply ashamed of it; wanted the whole thing buried. Dreyfus’ own family were convinced of his innocence. But they employed discreet lawyers, working quietly behind the scenes amassing evidence, hoping for a pardon. It was a typical and time-honoured Jewish reaction to injustice.

However, Herzl was not the only Jew who was stirred to anger and action. Another was Bernard Lazare (1865-1903), born Baruch Hagani, a young Symbolist writer from Nîmes. He believed in total assimilation and was, if anything, an anarchist. Now, for the first time, he was stirred on a Jewish issue. He began to make inquiries but was given an icy brush-off by the Dreyfus family. He was revolted by the lack of Jewish outrage. It was, he wrote, ‘a deplorable habit from the old persecutions—of receiving blows and not protesting, of bending their backs, of waiting for the storm to pass and of playing dead so as not to attract the lightning’. His own inquiries convinced him Dreyfus was innocent and the victim of a frame-up. At the end of 1896 he published, in Brussels, a pamphlet,
Une erreur judiciaire: la vérité sur
l’affaire Dreyfus
. It raised the anti-Semitic issue for the first time on the Jewish side: ‘Because he was a Jew he was arrested, because he was a Jew he was convicted, because he was a Jew the voices of justice and of truth could not be heard in his favour.’ To Lazare, Dreyfus was the archetype Jewish martyr: