In 1832, Duchess Marie Caroline of Berry—a Sicilian princess and the daughter-in-law of the deposed king of France—landed in Marseille in an attempt to overthrow the new king, whom conservatives and royalists tended to see as a usurper. The “Legitimists,” as her supporters were known, tended to be staunch Catholics and social and political conservatives who abhorred the French Revolution and anything that smacked of republican government. But her closest confidant during the two years leading up to the invasion was Simon Deutz, the son of France’s chief rabbi and a recent convert to Catholicism—who betrayed her at the very last moment, once it became clear that her plot had failed. Ethan Katz, reviewing a recent book about the relationship between Deutz and Marie Caroline, writes:
Deutz was demonized in the [aftermath of the attempted insurrection]. Despite his conversion, the conservative press repeatedly described him as a “Jew by birth,” “the Jew Deutz,” or “even the ‘odious Jew.’” The payoff he received inevitably called to mind the story of Judas and his betrayal of Jesus for 30 pieces of silver, reinforcing Christian stereotypes of Jewish treachery and greed. “We have a second Judas,” exclaimed the Legitimist newspaper La Quotidienne soon after the duchess was taken into custody. The famous French Romantic writer François-René Chateaubriand, an important supporter of the duchess, described Deutz as “the descendant of the Great Traitor . . . the Iscariot in whom the Satan had entered.”
The Judas story became an allegory for the widespread conservative perception that the French Revolution had made a disastrous error in granting Jews equal citizenship. Just as the duchess had trustingly brought Deutz, a commoner and a convert, into her orbit only to see him undermine her rebellion, generous France had brought Jews into the fabric of the nation and bestowed citizenship on them, only to see the Jews respond with treachery. Perceived as quintessentially French—in her indomitable courage, heroism, and patriotic spirit—despite her Italian origins, [she was born in Sicily], the duchess was seen as the polar opposite of Deutz, the ultimate foreigner.
Not long after Alfred Dreyfus was arrested in 1894 on trumped-up charges of espionage, the notorious French writer and editor Édouard Drumont, called “the pope of anti-Semitism” by many contemporaries, congratulated himself on his prescience: “Not only did Dreyfus’s treason not surprise me, it seemed to me quite natural. Dreyfus did what Judas did, what Deutz did.”
Read more on Jewish Review of Books: https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/jewish-history/11608/a-tale-of-two-exiles/