Mass Culture, Mass Parliamentary Politics, and Modern Anti-Semitism: The Dreyfus Affair in Rural France

1992 ◽  
Vol 97 (1) ◽  
pp. 55 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy Fitch
Keyword(s):  
Mass Culture ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
Dreyfus Affair ◽  
Rural France ◽  
Parliamentary Politics

Judaism and Heterogeneity in the Modernist Long Novel

2015 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 357-379
Author(s):  
Jeremy Tambling
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
Marcel Proust ◽  
Carlos Fuentes ◽  
American Novel ◽  
Dorothy Richardson ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
Dreyfus Affair ◽  
Meaningful Category ◽  
Roberto Bolano

This paper explores how Judaism is represented in non-Jewish writers of the nineteenth-century (outstandingly, Walter Scott and George Eliot) and in modernist long novels, such as those by Dorothy Richardson, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Alfred Döblin, Robert Musil, and Thomas Mann, and, in the Latin American novel, Carlos Fuentes and Roberto Bolaño. It finds a relationship between the length of the ‘long’ novel, as a meaningful category in itself (not to be absorbed into other modernist narratives), and the interest that these novels have in Judaism, and in anti-semitism (e.g. in the Dreyfus affair) as something which cannot be easily assimilated into the narratives which the writers mentioned are interested in. The paper investigates the implications of this claim for reading these texts.

The Beilis case: Anti-Semitism and Politics in the Reign of Nicholas II

Slavic Review ◽  
1966 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 615-629 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hans Rogger
Keyword(s):  
Ritual Murder ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
Dreyfus Affair ◽  
A Charge

The Beilis case—a charge of ritual murder brought against an obscure Jewish clerk in July 1911 and tried before a Kiev jury in September 1913— has more than once been called Russia's Dreyfus Affair. As a shorthand summary, the comparison serves well enough. In both instances an innocent nonentity was plucked out of obscurity to become the object of a contest whose larger implications, while they agitated politics and opinion, escaped the victim or left him indifferent. Beyond this, points of difference loom larger than those of similarity.

The Dreyfus Affair and Durkheim’s Experience of Anti-Semitism

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pierre Birnbaum
Keyword(s):  
Emile Durkheim ◽  
Sociological Analysis ◽  
Explanatory Variables ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
Dreyfus Affair ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Sociological Method ◽  
Full Swing

This article emphasizes the importance of the Dreyfus Affair in the manner in which Emile Durkheim approached the subject of anti-Semitism between 1897 and 1899, while the Affair was in full swing in France. Although Durkheim was the founder of positivist sociology, disconnected from preconceived notions, he nevertheless courageously entered the fight to defend Dreyfus, both as a scholar and as a Jew. In a series of articles and letters, he reflected on the causes of anti-Semitism and proposed an interpretation of Jews as scapegoats, because in his view society’s suffering was resolved by ostracizing Jews as pariahs. But this interpretation is unsatisfactory. Based on impressions rather than on a sociological analysis conducted in accordance with his Rules of Sociological Method, Durkheim’s analysis of explanatory variables is not convincing and is oriented around psychological considerations rarely seen elsewhere in his work.

From Dreyfus in the Colony to Céline’s Anti-Semitic Style

2020 ◽  
pp. 68-94
Author(s):  
David Fieni
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Legal Status ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
Majority Population ◽  
Dreyfus Affair ◽  
History Of ◽  
French Colonial ◽  
Anti Jewish ◽  
The Way

Orientalist philology brought people deemed Semitic together under the rubric of Semitism, and it subsequently broke up this forced grouping into the distinct categories of Jew, Arab, and Muslim. Chapter 3 demonstrates how the Dreyfus Affair exacerbated tensions between Jews, Muslims, and European residents of French colonial Algeria at the end of the nineteenth century. It explores the history of philological Semitism, discusses the legal status of Jews and Muslims in Algeria, and summarizes how the Dreyfus Affair affected Algerian politics and business. In order to think through the stylistics of French colonial anti-Semitism, the chapter examines pro-Jewish and anti-Jewish texts from the Algerian press of the 1890s. It ends with a close reading of Céline’s Bagatelles pour un massacre, demonstrating the way that popular literary philology reveals a lasting fracture between Jews, Arabs, and Muslims, while also exposing a process of psychological minoritization of the French majority population.

‘This is why the Jews had their ghetto there’

The Marais ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 79-102
Author(s):  
Keith Reader
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
Short Novel ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Dreyfus Affair ◽  
Positive Light

In the first half of the twentieth century the Marais, by then a poor and severely overcrowded working-class quartier, became the area of Paris most closely associated with Jewish presence and culture. Anti-Semitism, as the Dreyfus affair showed, was rife in the France of the time, and is here traced through the writings of such figures as Charles Fegdal and Alexandre Arnoux. Texts presenting Jews in a more positive light, by such as Roger Ikor and the Holocaust victim Irène Némirovsky, are also considered. The non-Jewish Marais figures too through the poetry of Robert Desnos and Édouard Estonié’s appealing short novel L’Ascension de M. Baslèvre, and there is a brief overview of photographic representations in conclusion.

Acting the Dreyfus Affair: History and Theater in the French Classroom

PMLA ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 126 (3) ◽  
pp. 737-745
Author(s):  
Julie Fette
Keyword(s):  
Church And State ◽  
Third Republic ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Handwriting Analysis ◽  
French Society ◽  
Theatrical Production ◽  
French Studies ◽  
Military Justice ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
Dreyfus Affair

As a professor of French Studies, I had often wished to develop a course in which students could mount a play in French. Its pedagogical value seemed obvious: performing in a foreign language and managing a theatrical production could help students increase their knowledge of French society while improving pronunciation and vocabulary. However, my lack of expertise in the theory and practice of theater stymied me. I had also often longed to teach a course about the Dreyfus affair. The story of a French officer falsely convicted of selling military secrets to the Germans, which tore apart French society for a decade, it contains plenteous teachable issues about France: nationalism, anti-Semitism, the birth of intellectuals, treason and raison d'état, the rise of the modern press and public opinion, the separation of church and state, Third Republic politics, military justice, Franco-German rivalries, and even handwriting analysis. But I doubted that a French department would welcome a whole course just on the Dreyfus affair.

scholarly journals We Spring from that History: Bernard Lazare, between Universalism and Particularism

Religions ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (10) ◽  
pp. 322
Author(s):  
Joel Swanson
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Philosophical Tradition ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Textual Tradition ◽  
Jewish Thought ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
Political Response ◽  
Dreyfus Affair ◽  
French Republicanism ◽  
Modern Jewish Thought

This paper examines the evolution of Jewish identity in the works of writer and critic Bernard Lazare. It suggests that Lazare’s oeuvre elucidates one of the central tensions in modern Jewish thought: the division between those thinkers who use the reputedly universalist Greek philosophical tradition as a lens to analyze and critique Judaism, and those who use the Jewish textual tradition to challenge and reconceive non-Jewish philosophy. Lazare situated himself on both sides of this divide during his life. In his early work, he used the universalist, laical ideology of French republicanism to attack what he perceived as the inflexible, regressive, anti-modernist character of Talmudic Judaism. Lazare’s thought later shifted in the wake of his involvement in the Dreyfus Affair, and he sought to reclaim an ethnic, nationalist conception of Jewish identity as the source for a communal Jewish political response to rising anti-Semitism. Yet through a close reading of Lazare’s writings, the paper suggests that Lazare’s intellectual evolution was never as complete or totalizing as he perhaps wished. His earlier work occasionally used Jewish sources to critique philosophical universalism, while hints of philosophical critiques of the particularism of Jewish texts such as the Talmud remained in his later revalorization of Jewish identity. Lazare thereby reveals how universalism and particularism remain mutually implicated within modern Jewish thought. The paper thus suggests avenues for Lazare to be productively read within the broader canon of modern Jewish thinkers.

Excluded from Thought?

2018 ◽  
pp. 218-255
Author(s):  
Adrian May
Keyword(s):  
Identity Politics ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
Gay Marriage ◽  
Maurice Blanchot ◽  
Present Moment ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
Strategic Essentialism ◽  
Cultural Conservatism ◽  
Political Solidarity

This chapter takes a more critical stance towards the review to examine its cultural conservatism and reticence towards identity politics. The review’s literary tastes, largely shaped by the legacies of Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot, are shown to harbour a sense of artistic exceptionalism which often precludes representations of the everyday, and therefore also limits political solidarity with those usually defended by Lignes. Despite the racial or gendered exclusions it can produce, literary elitism or conservatism is in itself not necessarily criticised, but the hostility to mass culture inculcated by some aesthetic Marxist approaches is seen to be politically unhelpful in the present moment and other approaches to cultural politics in Lignes are sought. After Alain Badiou’s Circonstances 3 caused a row over anti-Semitism and the critique of Israel, it is suggested that the strategic essentialism of Judith Butler provides a more appropriate stance compared to Badiou’s strategic universalism. Lastly, Lignes’ virtual silence on gender and sexuality issues (a stance softening in recent issues) is contrasted to the Parti Socialiste’s progressive measures on parity, PACs and gay marriage.

Anti-Semitism and the Ideology of the Mexican Revolution

2010 ◽  
Vol 110 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claudio Lomnitz
Keyword(s):  
Mexican Revolution ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
Revolutionary Nationalism ◽  
Dreyfus Affair

This essay traces the development of the ideology that cast Mexico's prerevolutionary technocratic elite, the so-called cientííficos, as the masterminds of the country's ruination. It shows that anti-cientíífico discourse took the shape of anti-Semitic ideology, even though there were no Jews in the group. Anti-cientíífico rhetoric was first created by applying anti-Semitic invective taken directly from the Dreyfus Affair. The implications for Mexico's revolutionary nationalism are explored in the conclusion.

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