Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters
By Louis Begley
Yale University Press, 272 pages, $24.00.
Convicted in 1894 of selling secrets to Germany, French army captain Alfred Dreyfus, the only Jewish officer trainee on the General Staff, was sentenced to perpetual imprisonment in a fortified enclosure on Devil’s Island, a rocky formation near French Guyana. Six weeks before his exile began, as he cried out that he was innocent and a French patriot, Dreyfus was forced to participate in “the Judas parade,” marching around the courtyard while just outside, a huge mob screamed, “Death to the traitor, the dirty Jew.”
The Dreyfus case has become an iconic episode in the history of antisemitism. “Everything related to the affair,” including forged evidence, perjury and stone-walling at the highest levels of the French army, Louis Begley reminds us, was “envenomed” by the scapegoating of Jews that followed defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870.
Begley, novelist and lawyer, argues, clearly and compellingly, that America’s “own Devil’s Island” in Guantanamo — and the subordination of civil liberties to national security following September 11, 2001 — makes it imperative that the “crimes of the Bush Administration” do not disappear, as did the crimes against Dreyfus, “under the scar tissue of silence and indifference.”
When the targets of injustice are “outsiders,” Begley maintains, their guilt is almost always taken for granted. Dreyfus’s prosecutors had no sense of solidarity with him as a brother officer. And as newspapers implicated all Jews in treasonous activity, French Jews, desiring “above all else” to be French, were passive — or they embraced the conviction as “definitive and just.”
Dreyfus himself retained his confidence in the army, “unwilling to think that his being a Jew was relevant to his case.” He “lowered his head,” persisting in the belief that he would be protected by the republic that had granted him citizenship. Released after five years on Devil’s Island, though broken in body, he resumed active service in an artillery unit.
The heroes of “Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters” are whistleblowers. Émile Zola’s courage in delivering un coup de poing (a hard punch) by putting the case before the general public, in his masterpiece of political literature, “J’accuse,” Begley points out, “cannot be over-stated.” Then at the summit of his career, the novelist put at risk his election to the Académie Française, a distinction he coveted to accuse the highest authorities of mistreating someone he didn’t know, someone from a community he didn’t care for. Convicted of libel in a case brought by the minister of war, Zola was sentenced to a year in prison. He fled to London, and upon his return he narrowly escaped assassination.
Less celebrated, but equally courageous, according to Begley, was Georges Picquart, a lieutenant colonel who discovered that his colleagues in the army, some of whom knew that the traitor was, in fact, Charles Marie Ferdinand Walsin-Esterhazy, had forged the evidence against Dreyfus. Engaged in a cover-up of his own, Picquart was cashiered from the army, arrested and imprisoned.
Begley insists that the analogies between the abuses of power in the Dreyfus case and those of the Bush administration are “irresistible.” For example, both Dreyfus and Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a Guantanamo detainee were imprisoned based on secret evidence that neither they nor their counsel knew about or could challenge. And administration officials in France and the United States “re-defined” or ignored the law and immunized themselves from prosecution in the name of protecting national security.
These actions would not have been taken, Begley believes, if the accused were not outsiders. Much as French citizens concluded that Dreyfus was a traitor because he was a Jew, many Americans decided that those held in CIA jails “were terrorists because they were Muslims.” That’s the reason, Begley suggests, that a poll taken days after Barack Obama’s election to the presidency found that only 29% of Americans wanted to close the prison in Guantanamo.
Begley’s prose is taut and clear, but perhaps a bit too self-assured. He’s right to draw connections between French antisemitism in the early 20th century and American anti-Muslim sentiment. But he does not explore the differences adequately. After all, the September 11 provocation was not “treachery”; the Guantanamo prisoners are not American nationals, and the American press was, until recently, rather compliant.
Although they are invariably shown “hooded, in black goggles, kneeling in neat rows with their hands hand-cuffed behind their backs,” Begley wants us to remember that the abstract figures in orange jumpsuits are “real men,” innocent until proven guilty, waiting for 21st-century Zolas and Picquarts to rise up against “abuse wrapped in claims of expediency and reasons of state” and “redeem the honor” of their nation.
Glenn C. Altschuler is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Professor of American Studies at Cornell University.
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Sorry, I dont have sympathy for murderers. It is a mystery that the Forward has forgotten what happened almost exactly 8 years ago today in its home city and has more sympathy for those who killed 3000 New Yorkers than for the victim. If Mr Begley hates America so much, let him leave for Iran. We are not a totalitarian state that wants to reign our dissidents in. Let them leave so America can be improved
The facts of the Hamdan case, that Hamdan was Bin Laden's driver have been disputed by nobody, unlike the facts of the Dreyfus case.
There's an interesting comparison between Begley and Dreyfus,though. Both suffered because of anti-semitism, and both tried there hardest to make sure their families were as Gentile as possible (Begley?).
see www.louisbegley.com/bio.htm
we accuse ourselves for having accused the accused for having accused those who have accused others for having accused, ad infinitum. who exactly is the accused here? and how accused are the accused? j'accuse the forward for accusing us into accusing ourselves into accusing others.
What's the term, "self-hating Jews"?
The Forward has a long and proud past, both in its Yiddish origins and in its English language successor.
Buy oy, what you have become! I thought that when the Yiddishist Workman's Circle joined with the lunatic Stalinist fringe from the 'Jewish Currents' crowd that that was the last straw.
Adolf Hitler liked dogs. He was a strict vegetarian, he didn't smoke, and he was exceedingly polite to women. He was loyal to his closest friends, even when they made mistakes big-time. He tolerated homosexuals in his organization as long as they stayed in the closet and were useful to him. And were pure Aryans, of cours. And, according to Mel Brooks, Hitler was a better dancer than Churchill.
I look forward to the Forward expressing its admiration for the late Fuehrer as your next hero. Its bound to come.
Abe Cahan and the men and women who put out the real Forverts must be doing backflips in their graves over what their newspaper has degenerated into.
Hershele
Here are those WHO really should sit in a dock for war crimes and aiding and abetting terrorism and Jew-hate.
Barack Obama, Joseph Biden, Hillary Clinton, James Jones, Rahm Emanuel, David Axelrod, Samantha Power, Eric Holder, Jeremiah Wright, Rashid Khalidi, Bill Ayers, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, practically the entire Democratic members of the Senate and Congress, the Baker Boychiks who served Bush I, Clinton, and now Obama, and Richard Holbrooke, appeaser of the Ustasha and the Balli Komebtar (look them up, that's whose side we took in Clinton's war against Serbia), the crew over at Kapo Junction aka J Street and their equally Soros-paid off friends at MoveOn.Org whose Eli Pariser 8 years ago begged us to consider the views of Osama Bin Laden while 3000 of his fellow citizens were as burned to a crisp as our people were at Auschwitz.
Not to mention Nazi collaborator George Soros, whose misdeeds were many times much worse than those of Bernie Madoff. But hey, the wealthy Libs who got burned by Bernie are too self-centered to point fingers at someone who burned America and who wants his Muslim friends to finish off what his buddies in the SS and the Arrow Cross began.
An indictment, Gitmo and more for all of the above. And for Lewis Begley, for smearing a REAL American President, not some child who sat in a pew for 20 years applauding someone, had he been white, would have justly been called a Nazi.
Hershele: I thing it was called "The Forvitz". Used to buy it at the newstand for my Dad. It was in Yiddish at the time. Couldn't belive what it tuned into.
I think the term has changed. It is no longer Self Hating Jew, rather it is now "Jew Hating Jew"
The Forward of my Zaydeh's time, the paper he avidly read, anti-Communist because the Socialists who ran it knew what Communism was all about, a paper brimming with love for the Jewish People and Jewish culture, would never have run this article, nor been a shill for J Street Kapos and Judenrat, or published the likes of guys like Fein, Altschuler, Alpher and other self-haters.
It has become more like the old JEWISH CURRENTS was, except that the not-so-ex Communists of the CURRENTS were more intellectually honest than guys like Fein or the J Street this current FORWARD never ceases to admire. If you're a self-hater who wants to stick it to Israel like Obama or blame Bush, not appeasing Liberals for terrorism, if you insist on giving a pass to a Nazi collaborator (well said Scott)Soros, your place is here.
B. Ellkier Your comments are so dispicable I have no idea where you are coming from. You certainly are not a Jew, having made those incitful comments, so I can assume you are a provacature of some sort.
Frank's comments are speaking of the Jews that want to remain as a people, whereas, you, coward, are hiding behind some grotesque assimilation that will never happen. If you are a Jew, those that hate us will get to your kind first because you have no self respect for who you are,and hide behind the comments you have made hoping for accomodation from the forces that want to destroy the Jewish People. I have nothing but despite for your kind.
As to Norman, I've called him out before. You are a coward, hiding behind the Leftist Jew Conspiracy to destroy Israel and the Jewish people. You are the kind of Jew that led the Jews of Europe to the furnaces without a whimper, except for Warsaw. Your kind will be the first to go as you have no self respect, and your enemies pick on these whimps fiirst.
As for the Forward, Frank has you pegged. As for the Book, only you would give a review of such trash as this author poses. As for the Bush Administration the author attacks, thank your lucky stars his administration saved this Country from further attack from our enemies.
I do appreciate the fact that the Forward does not edit out anything that is opposed to their agenda.
The facts don't add up.Why has no one been held to account for providing false info to 911 commission.No american could fly in aftermath of 911 but bin laden relatives were allow to fly out this is unheard of behavior.A IKE or FDR would have nailed bin laden yet we have not, why.The crooks and cowards call those who question nuts.Yet it is those who question the official story who are free men the other are slaves to their fear or corruption.It is not un-patriotic to want the truth to want those who took the lives of our country men held to account.
Except for a very brief period, Hitler was not a vegetarian; you could look it up. And the imprisonment--without charges or trial--and torture of men, many of whom were subsequently released (by the Bush administration) without a hearing or an apology, is a shandah--an utter perversion of the system of justice that Jews--and all human beings--should strive to uphold.