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.

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.

Medieval Roots of the Myth of Jewish Male Menses

2000 ◽  
Vol 93 (3) ◽  
pp. 241-263 ◽  
Author(s):  
Irven M. Resnick
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Historical Fiction ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
Cultural Attitudes ◽  
Ritual Murder ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
Blood Libel ◽  
Anti Jewish ◽  
The Middle Ages

Good historical fiction reveals not only the realities of a particular epoch, but also its cultural attitudes. An excellent example is Bernard Malamud's The Fixer, which succeeds in disclosing the nature of Russian anti-semitism by artfully weaving together enduring themes of anti-Jewish Christian mythology—the blood libel and accusations of ritual murder—to illustrate the fabric of Jewish life in early modern Russia. Perhaps almost unnoticed in his work, however, are references to the myth of Jewish male menses. Consider the following passages from The Fixer, in which the Jewish defendant, Yakov Bok, is confronted by this bizarre contention:“You saw the blood?” the Prosecuting Attorney said sarcastically. “Did that have some religious meaning to you as a Jew? Do you know that in the Middle Ages Jewish men were said to menstruate?” Yakov looked at him in surprise and fright. “I don't know anything about that, your honor, although I don't see how it could be.”

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.

Nationalism and the ‘Jewish International’: Religious Internationalism in Europe and the Middle East c.1840–c.1880

2008 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 535-558 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abigail Green
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Central Place ◽  
Political Rights ◽  
Ritual Murder ◽  
Anti Semitism

Jewish cosmopolitanism has long assumed a central place in the ideology of anti-Semitism. Well before the publication of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” the idea of international Jewish solidarity served as an argument against Jewish emancipation. In Britain, Sir Robert Inglis famously opposed granting the Jews political rights because “[t]he Jews of London have more sympathy with the Jews resident in Berlin or Vienna than with the Christians among whom they reside.” Likewise, in 1840, the ultramontane Univers saw international lobbying on behalf of Jews accused of ritual murder in Damascus as proof that “the Hebrew nationality is not dead … What religious connection is there between the Talmudists of Alsace, Cologne or the East, and the Messrs. Rothschild and Crémieux?” That L'Univers saw this cosmopolitan fellow-feeling as an expression of Jewish national identity is irrelevant. The point is rather that for anti-Semites Jewish ‘nationalism’ was an inherently international force.

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.

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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