Alfred Dreyfus
Julien Benda’s scribes without Torah.
The French presidential candidate has sympathy for neither the victims of anti-Semitic violence nor the Muslim perpetrators.
A complicated relationship.
Alain Finkielkraut and Charles Péguy.
Blame the Jews and the bicyclists.
He managed to move from the craven to the courageous.
And look to its past.
Wichita in 1899 really didn’t like the verdict against him.
The 1890s Dreyfus Affair had its individual heroes, villains, and victims, but it cannot be dissociated from the wider French background of virulent anti-Semitism.
In his final ailment, Marcel Proust’s great fictional character Charles Swann reveals a solidarity with the Jewish people greater than his attachment to French high society.
“The most important thing about Herzl is not just that he was thinking about a state. . . . He saw that if you want. . .