The Dreyfus Affair (24 page)

Eventually Maître Demange himself was told of the perversion of the legal process by a colleague, Maître Albert Salle, who had heard about it from one of the judges. Demange demanded an immediate interview with the Minister of Justice, Ludovic Trarieux, who had already been told about the secret dossier by his colleague Gabriel Hanotaux, the Foreign Minister. It was Hanotaux who had consistently opposed the arrest and trial of Dreyfus but had been overruled by General Mercier: Mercier, in an attempt to win over Hanotaux, had shown him the letter mentioning ‘the scoundrel D.’. But even Trarieux, ‘a serious and scrupulous man’
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who was worried about the rise of anti-Semitism, did not feel that this ‘procedural irregularity’ was enough to cast doubt on the guilt of Alfred Dreyfus. Clearly, the traitor had to be punished, and the end justified the means.

2: Bernard Lazare

Disheartened, despairing of doing anything for his brother through discreet contacts with influential politicians, Mathieu now took up a suggestion made by the Governor of the Santé prison, Patin, and endorsed by his colleague Forzinetti, that he commission a professional journalist to go over the heads of the politicians to reach the wider public through the press. ‘It is before public opinion’, Patin told Mathieu, ‘that your brother’s cause must be defended.’
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Bizarrely, the first name suggested by Patin was that of Édouard Drumont, who, though undoubtedly a brilliant polemicist, had done much to stir up paranoid suspicion of Jewish officers in the French Army. A second name was put forward – that of the Jewish journalist Bernard Lazare.

Lazare Marcus Manassé Bernard had inverted his first and last names to produce the nom de plume of Bernard Lazare. He came from a Jewish family in Nîmes, in the south of France; like the Dreyfus family, the Bernards had established a successful textile business and, again like the Dreyfuses, were no longer strictly observant Jews but continued to keep the traditional Jewish holidays. As is apparent from his disdain for the Dreyfuses’ wealth, the young Lazare rebelled against his bourgeois background, moving to Paris at the age of twenty-one, enrolling at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, writing for the theatre and newspapers and declaring himself an anarchist. He defended the anarchists Jean Grave and Félix Fénélon with his pen, and in 1896 went as a delegate to the Socialist Congress in London where he attacked his fellow Jew, Karl Marx, as ‘a jealous authoritarian’.

Lazare was preoccupied with the Jewish question: he knew Theodor Herzl and also Achad Ha’am, one of the founders of the Lovers of Zion. The eruption of anti-Semitism at the time of Dreyfus’s trial exasperated him because he had believed that, with the decline of Talmudic Judaism, the phenomenon should also be in decline. This was the theme of his
L’Antisémitisme, son histoire et ses causes
(
Anti-Semitism: Its History and Causes
) which was published to critical acclaim in Paris a few months before the arrest of Dreyfus in 1894. The work was in some sense a riposte to Drumont’s
La France juive
, and though Lazare wrote that Drumont was ‘a historian of poor documentary evidence, a mediocre sociologist and especially philosopher’,
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Drumont praised his history as ‘a remarkable book, nourished with facts and dominated from end to end by a fine effort at impartiality, a discipline imposed on the mind not to yield to influences of race’.
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Lazare’s history appealed to Drumont because, while it lacked the abusive tone, fanciful historicism, scurrilous anecdotes and pseudo-scientific theorising of
La France juive
, it accepted a number of Drumont’s contentions. Why, asked Lazare, was the Jew ‘ill-treated and hated alike and in turn by the Alexandrians and the Romans, by the Persians and the Arabs, by the Turks and the Christian nations? Because, everywhere up to our own days, the Jew was an unsociable being.’
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He was more than unsociable; as a member of God’s chosen race, he believed himself superior to non-Jews, and the disdain Jews showed for their gentile neighbours inevitably made them disliked by the host communities when they settled abroad. Long before they were relegated to ghettos, the Jews themselves avoided integration and assimilation by their strict adherence to the Law.

A deep-rooted animosity towards the Christian religion was equally inevitable: ‘the development of the dogma of the divinity of Christ made a breach between the Church and the Synagogue. Judaism could not admit the deification of a man.’
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‘The Gospels must be burned, says Rabbi Tarphon, for paganism is not as dangerous to the Jewish faith as the Christian sects.’ The loathing of the Jews for the Christians was reciprocated by Christian loathing for the Jews: ‘Thus everything concurred to make of the Jew a universal foe, and the only support he found during this terrible period of several centuries was with the popes, who wanted to preserve the Jews as witness of the excellence of the Christian faith.’

Jews were confined to ghettos, which they often accepted and even sought in their eagerness to separate themselves from the world, to live apart without mixing with the nations, to preserve intact their beliefs and their race. Protected from extinction or forced conversion by the popes, they made themselves indispensable as moneylenders, a trade forbidden to Christians. ‘As possessors of the gold they became the masters of their masters, they dominated over them, and this was the only way to deploy their energy and activity.’
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The control of the purse strings of the European nations enabled this ‘energetic, vivacious nation, of infinite pride, thinking themselves superior to other nations’, to indulge a ‘taste for domination’, a taste which persisted after their emancipation at the time of the French Revolution.

What role did the Jews play in bringing that Revolution about? The Jews, wrote Lazare, ‘are not the cause of revolution’, but ‘the Jewish spirit is essentially a revolutionary spirit and, consciously or not, the Jew is a revolutionist’. The Jewish spirit was apparent ‘throughout the period of fierce revolt against Christianity which characterised the eighteenth century [and which] repeated concerning Jesus and the Virgin the outrageous fables invented by the Pharisees of the Second Century; we find them in Voltaire and in Parney, and their rationalist satire, pellucid and mordant, lives again in Heine, in Boerne and in Disraeli, just as the powerful logic of the ancient rabbis lives again in Karl Marx . . .’.
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‘In labouring for the triumph of liberalism, they were looking for their own good. It is beyond a doubt that the Jews, through their wealth, their energy and their talents, supported and furthered the progress of the European revolution. During this period Jewish bankers, Jewish manufacturers, Jewish poets, journalists, and orators, stirred perhaps by quite different motives, were nevertheless all striving towards the same goal.’

Having helped to demolish the old order – the
ancien régime
– the Jews sought to dominate the new.

As conquerors, not as guests, did they come into modern societies . . . They were not warriors . . . but they made the only conquest for which they were armed, the economic conquest for which they had been preparing for many long years. They were a race of merchants and money-dealers, perhaps degraded by mercantile practice but, thanks to this very practice, equipped with qualities that were becoming preponderant in the new economic system.
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This, to Lazare, was the source of the anti-Semitism that was now so virulent in France. ‘So long as landed capital remained the political power, the Jew was deprived of any right; the Jew was liberated on the day when political power passed to industrial capital, and that proved fatal.’ Having for so long constituted an alien and persecuted nation within other nations, the Jews were now able to dominate their former oppressors through their ascendancy in banking and trade.

Moreover, in modern society, where ‘Darwin’s principle of the struggle of life dominates’, the Jew has an advantage over his Christian competitor – the solidarity that exists among Jews. ‘In this daily struggle the Jew who, personally, as we have already seen, is better endowed than his competitors, increases his advantage by uniting with his co-religionists possessed of similar virtues, and thus augments his powers by acting in common with his brethren; the inevitable result being that they out-distance their rivals in the pursuit of any common end . . . This is the secret of their success.’

Jewish solidarity is all the stronger in that it goes so far back. ‘Its very existence is denied, yet it is undeniable. The links in the chain have been forged in the course of ages until the flight of centuries has made many unconscious of their existence.’ ‘The Jew, even though he may have departed from the synagogue, is still a member of the Jewish free-masonry, of the Jewish clique, if you will’; and ‘even the reformed Jew, who has broken away from the narrow restrictions of the synagogue . . . has not forgotten the spirit of solidarity’.
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What is notable about Lazare’s
Anti-Semitism: Its History and Causes
, given the role that the author was to play in the Dreyfus Affair, is the support it implicitly offers to those French generals such as Bonnefond and Lebelin de Dionne who thought that Jews should be excluded from the General Staff. If Lazare’s analysis is correct, they would form a clique whose first loyalty would not be to the nation state of France. ‘Though often exceedingly chauvinist,’ wrote Lazare, ‘the Jews are essentially cosmopolitan in character; they are the cosmopolitan element in mankind . . . and with the aid of their instinct of solidarity, they have remained internationalists.’
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Lazare’s analysis would also seem to support the views expressed in the Jesuit journal
Civiltà Cattolica
in 1889. The Jews, wrote Lazare, might not be ‘solely responsible for the destruction of religious doctrine and the decay of faith’, but ‘they may at least be counted among those who helped to bring about such a state of desuetude and the changes which followed’. And it is also true ‘that there were Jews connected with Free Masonry from its birth, students of the Kabala, as is shown by certain rites which survive. It is very probable, too, that in the years preceding the outbreak of the French Revolution, they entered in greater numbers than ever, into the councils of the secret societies, becoming, indeed, themselves the founders of secret associations.’
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To Lazare, the decline of religious belief was all to the good, and would lead in time to the Jewish assimilation and therefore to an end to anti-Semitism. ‘The Christian religion is disappearing like the Jewish religion, like all religions, which we may now observe in their slow agony. It is passing away under the blows of reason and science. It is dying a natural death . . .’
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So too Judaism: ‘the Jews are not as yet assimilated; that is to say, they have not yet given up their belief in their own nationality. By the practice of circumcision, by the observation of their special rules of prayer, and their dietary regulations, they still continue to differentiate themselves from those around them; they persist in being Jews.’
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But ‘the time will come when they shall be completely eliminated; when they shall be merged into the body of the nations, after the same manner as the Phoenicians who, having planted their trading stations all over Europe, disappeared without leaving a trace behind them. By that time anti-Semitism will have run its course.’

At the time of Dreyfus’s conviction, Lazare had written to his publisher, P.-V. Stock, that so far as he was concerned, ‘Dreyfus and his family are very rich . . . they’ll be able to take care of themselves without me . . .’ However, he had been riled by the venomous rhetoric directed against Jews at the time of Dreyfus’s arrest and trial; the case seemed to show that anti-Semitism in France, far from running its course, was on the increase and should be energetically opposed. In an article published in
L’Écho de Paris
on 31 December 1894, Lazare castigated those who were using the treason of Alfred Dreyfus as a pretext for a blanket attack on the Jews. Was Dreyfus innocent or guilty? When he met with Mathieu Dreyfus in the spring of 1895, Lazare had an open mind, but after seeing Commandant d’Ormescheville’s indictment with Alfred’s annotations he was persuaded that the prosecution itself was the product of prejudice.

It would later be said by the anti-Dreyfusards that Lazare, the champion of anarchists and socialists, was ‘bought’ by the syndicate – that he was won over to the cause of the bourgeois army officer by the retainer offered by Mathieu in exchange for his efforts on Alfred’s behalf. Daniel Halévy would describe Lazare as ‘a skilful business agent, an intermediary between the intellectuals and Jewish money’, and Louis Lucien Klotz would accuse him of ascribing Dreyfus’s conviction to anti-Semitism without evidence (both Halévy and Klotz were Jews);
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but to Léon Blum, the Jewish writer and politician who would one day become Prime Minister of France, Lazare’s commitment to the cause of Alfred Dreyfus was akin to a conversion. The scales fell from his eyes. Dreyfus had been convicted because he was a Jew and thus became for him the incarnation of the Jew oppressed throughout the ages.

The Jew was no longer, for Lazare, the arrogant and anti-social anomaly of his history of anti-Semitism but the aboriginal victim who must now abandon his ‘ancient tradition of humility’ and ‘ancestral pusillanimity’ and vigorously attack the anti-Semites who attacked him.
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This was not a struggle for the pre-eminence of his race or nation, but a pursuit of justice. ‘Just as science is the religion of the positivists,’ wrote Blum, ‘justice is the religion of the Jew.’
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