The infamous Dreyfus Affair, which divided France and much of the world at the turn of the 20th century, became a metaphor for anti-Semitism and, in one of the most unlikely and ironic sequence of events in Jewish history, Alfred Dreyfus (1859-1935), a wholly assimilated Jew, played a critical, if unintended, role in the rebirth of the state of Israel.
After French Intelligence in 1894 intercepted a secret military document sent to the German military attaché, Eduard Drumont, founder of the anti-Semitic daily La Libre Parole, published a report accusing Dreyfus, the only Jewish member of the French General Staff, of spying for Germany.
Major Joseph Henry forged documents implicating Dreyfus and, after a secret trial, Dreyfus was convicted of treason on December 21, 1894, and sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island. He was paraded through the streets of Paris to mob jeers of “Death to the Jews” and was stripped of his sword in a humiliating public ceremony. Intelligence later seized a letter written by Major Ferdinand Esterhazy which clearly established that Esterhazy, not Dreyfus, was the German agent, but the French government squelched this evidence and Esterhazy was acquitted.
On January 13, 1898, Emile Zola (1840-1902), perhaps the most famous 19th century French author, published his famous J’Accuse!, in which he accused the government and the military with conspiracy and malicious libel against Dreyfus. (Zola escaped to England after he was convicted of libel for writing J’Accuse!) In 1898 the case was re-opened and Henry’s forgeries were detected; nevertheless, Dreyfus was again found guilty on September 9, 1899 and sentenced to five years in prison. This second miscarriage of justice evoked international condemnation and, finally, Dreyfus was pardoned (1906).
The Dreyfus Affair had a powerful impact on the outlook of world Jewry. In particular, Theodor Herzl’s confidence in liberalism, badly shaken when he personally witnessed Dreyfus’s disgrace, led him to the Zionist Idea. Jews everywhere realized that if such hatred of Jews in general – and against a wholly assimilated Jew in particular – could occur in France, the “homeland of liberty,” then Jews could not be safe anywhere and assimilation was no defense against anti-Semitism.
While these basic facts of the Dreyfus Affair are well known, few are aware of the affair’s fundamental role in creating the seismic split among the French Impressionist painters that led to the decline of the Impressionist movement.
The Impressionists differed in their political and social opinions well before the affair, and their varying attitudes toward France’s Jewish population proved to be one of the most divisive issues. In fact, anti-Semitism caused the first defection from the Impressionist movement when the deeply prejudiced Pierre-Auguste Renoir broke off all contact with Jews and ended his relationships with Jewish patrons. Rather than exhibit his work alongside Jewish Impressionist Jacob Abraham (Camille) Pissarro, Renoir refused to participate in the 1882 independent salon.
Although Renoir’s anti-Semitism manifested itself in the 1880s, it was not until the Dreyfus Affair a decade later that the “Jewish question” divided the rest of the country and, along with it, the broader Impressionist movement. Though some sought to portray Renoir as trying to carefully walk the “middle ground” between the pro- and anti- Dreyfusards, his own daughter, Julie, regularly portrayed him as expressing overt anti-Jewish views, ascribing statements to her father such as “the Jews come to France to earn money, but if there is any fighting to be done they hide behind a tree” and “the peculiarity of the Jews is to cause disintegration.” Much as the Nazis who followed him some 40 years later, Renoir characterized art of which he disapproved as “Jew art.”
