The Blood of Lorraine (36 page)

T
HERE IS A VAST HISTORICAL
literature on the case of Alfred Dreyfus. Most of it focuses on what is known in France simply as “the Affair” (of 1898). However, the first trial did have important consequences for Jewish history. Dreyfus’s court-martial and public humiliation in front of a mob screaming “Death to the Jews” inspired the Austro-Hungarian journalist Theodor Herzl to found the modern political Zionist movement. Having arrived as a foreign correspondent eager to live in the land of liberty, fraternity and equality, Herzl left France convinced that the Jewish people needed to establish their own homeland.

To promote his anti-Semitic agenda, Edouard Drumont’s newspaper,
La Libre Parole
, gleefully exploited the bribery scandals surrounding the Panama Canal fiasco as well as the discovery of espionage in the General Staff of the French Army. His
La France Juive
(1886) went through more than two hundred editions. The illustration from his weekly described in the first chapter of this book and the famous illustration depicted in the Epilogue can be found in
The Dreyfus Affair: Art, Truth, and Justice
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987) edited by Norman L. Kleeblatt.

No one knows how many copies of Abbé François Hémonet’s hard-to-find
Nancy-Juif
(1892–93) appeared. Although information on the author is also scarce, we do know that despite its 308 pages, the priest claimed the work was “unfinished.” He also asserted, before a church court, that the book was the true cause of the charge of insubordination that eventually led to his being forced out of the priesthood.
Nancy-Juif
excerpts several articles by the “Titus” mentioned in the last few chapters.

Hippolyte Bernheim is another “real” character. The leading light of the “Nancy School” of psychotherapeutics, he used “suggestibility” during hypnosis to cure his patients and disagreed strongly with the methods of the now more famous Jean-Martin Charcot. The young Sigmund Freud visited and was influenced by both of these pioneering psychologists. Bernheim’s mentor in the techniques of hypnotism was the kindly old country doctor Ambroise-Auguste Liébeault who appears briefly in this book

The most relevant books on the history of Jews in France for this work are Françoise Job’s
Les Juifs de Nancy du XIIe au XXe siècle
(Nancy: Presses universitaires de Nancy, 1991), which includes a sketch of Grand Rabbi Isaac Bloch, and Freddy Raphaël and Robert Weyl’s
Juifs en Alsace. Culture, société, histoire
(Toulouse, Edouard Privat, 1977), which discusses the scorn for “Polaks.” There is a fine Jewish collection in Nancy’s Musée Lorrain. The biblical passage about a zealous Jew killing another Israelite that so startled Singer could well have been Numbers XXV, in which Phinehas saved Israel from a “moral plague.” Almost nobody in the past or the present would interpret this as a rationale for disobeying the great Mosaic prohibition against the taking of life.

Finally, two books can serve as background to the lives and work of the fictional Bernard and Clarie Martin. Benjamin F. Martin’s
Crime and Criminal Justice Under the Third Republic
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990) is an excellent introduction to the French legal system at the end of the nineteenth century. Jo Burr Margadant’s
Madame le Professeur: Women Educators in the Third Republic
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990) describes the training and travails of the women teachers who taught in the innovative public high schools for girls.

All translations included in this work are the author’s.