This year (2025), the French National Assembly unanimously voted to posthumously promote Alfred Dreyfus to the rank of Brigadier General. Also this year, the Museum of the Art and History of Judaism in Paris opened an exhibit titled “Alfred Dreyfus: Truth and Justice.”¹

Why this surge in attention for a Jewish officer who served in the French military in the 1890s? Likely because the Dreyfus Affair was a polarizing cultural event that revealed antisemitic undercurrents in France and Western society at the turn of the 20^th century. And these undercurrents have again been gaining strength, not least in France itself.

For anyone not familiar with the Dreyfus affair, it’s a riveting story:

In 1894, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French army, was wrongfully convicted of treason for allegedly passing military intelligence to the Germans. As a Jewish person, he became an easy target for suspicion. Antisemitic newspapers and political groups used the case to stir up hatred, accusing Jews of being disloyal “outsiders” within France.

It was soon discovered that Dreyfus was framed. The true perpetrator was a certain Major Ferdinand Esterhazy. But justice did not prevail. Dreyfus was sent into solitary exile on Devil’s Island off the coast of South America—a dismal fate.

The Dreyfus Affair, as it came to be known, bitterly divided France. The “Dreyfusards” were pitted against the “anti-Dreyfusards,” exposing a vein of antisemitism that ran deeply through French society.

Then, in 1898, writer Émile Zola wrote an open letter to France’s president in defense of Dreyfus. It was splashed across the front page of the newspaper L’Aurore in bold type. For his efforts, Zola was convicted of libel just over a month later and fled to England. Death threats piled up against him. Four years later, he and his wife were found dead in their apartment under very suspicious circumstances.

Meanwhile, Dreyfus was retried in 1899 and found guilty—again! The convoluted story did not end until 1906 when Dreyfus was finally exonerated of the charges against him.

We live in another time of rising antisemitism.

The Dreyfus Affair may have touched my own family. My great-grandmother, Marie, was born around 1884 in Paris. She lived in the Jewish district, Le Marais, which I visited some years ago in a fruitless attempt to locate her house. She would have been around 10 years old when Dreyfus was convicted, 11 when he was sent to Devil’s Island. By 1902, she had emigrated from France to the United States. Did she move across an ocean and learn a new language because of increasing antisemitism? I don’t know. No one in the family ever said.

We live in another time of rising antisemitism. The catalyst—the excuse, really—is not now a French army officer but the nation of Israel. In another fifty years, it will surely be something else. It’s actually an anomaly when Jews experience little or no anti-Jewish feeling.

The post-World War II period has been described as a Golden Age for American Jews. That’s the time I grew up in. When I went to college in the early 70s at Syracuse University, I experienced virtually no antisemitism during my time there. The campus was a safe place for Jews; we went to Hillel not to escape to safety but simply because it was a place for Jews to be.

Not so for my grandfather. He was a dentist, and family lore said that he wanted to be a doctor, but “wasn’t good enough.” His college years were the 1920s, when quotas dictated how many Jews could be admitted to universities. Undoubtedly, it was the quota system, not his merits, that kept him out of medical school.

We don’t have quotas today, nor exclusions from country clubs. We no longer have “polite” antisemitism. What we have is something more sinister: an atmosphere of fear, especially on campuses; physical attacks on Jews and their places of worship; demonization of Israel, which spills ever so easily into demonizing Jews worldwide; and attacks on the homes of Jewish public officials.

Some examples: In 2018, Mireille Knoll, an 85-year-old Holocaust survivor, was killed in her Paris apartment. She was stabbed multiple times and then set ablaze.

That same year, in the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, a gunman killed eleven Jewish worshippers and wounded six more. It was the deadliest attack on a local gathering of Jews in American history.

This year, the home of Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro was set ablaze by an arsonist on Passover.

A few weeks later, two young staff members of Israel’s embassy, Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim, were shot to death in cold blood as they exited the Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C. It turned out that Yaron was a Jewish believer in Jesus and the friend of several of our staff in Israel.

I could go on and on with more examples. What we need to ask now is whether the Dreyfus Affair can teach us anything in a year in which Alfred Dreyfus is receiving some long overdue recognition. I think it can.

For one thing, today’s die-hard antisemites inhabit the same society as friends of the Jewish people—in the same way that Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards lived side by side in the 1890s. This means that those friends can make a big impact if they raise their voices.

It will take courage to stand in solidarity with Jewish friends.

Those who want to stand with the Jewish people can choose to follow the example of Émile Zola. You can write letters to the editors of local and national newspapers in support of Jewish people, especially when antisemitism makes the news. They may not appear on the front page in bold type, but they are a desperately needed voice right now. You can also show one-on-one support for Jewish friends or coworkers. A Passover or Rosh Hashanah greeting card can mean a lot; so can a conversation over coffee, asking how they are doing in light of all that is going on.²

In the current brew of hatred, those who take a stand with the Jewish people will likely make enemies of their own. Cancellation and even death threats on social media are sadly not uncommon. It will take courage to stand in solidarity with Jewish friends, neighbors, synagogues, and the Jewish community at large.

It took twelve years for Alfred Dreyfus to be cleared of the doctored charges against him. We pray it does not take another twelve years for the current voices against antisemitism to be heard.

Endnotes

1. In French, the museum and its new exhibit are known as the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire du Judaïsme and Alfred Dreyfus: Vérité et Justice.

2. For more ideas, see our article on 9 ways to fight antisemitism.

Photo: Avi1111 (Dr. Avishai Teicher), Monument Dreyfus (Tel Aviv) (30 Nov 2018), CC BY-SA 4.0.