Darmsteter went even further than a similar thinker, Joseph Salvador, in his total identification of France with Judaism. Moreover, he argued that France was a fulfillment of biblical teachings, that France and Judaism were one and the same, and that the French Revolution was a modern-day Exodus. The nineteenth-century Orientalist scholar James Darmsteter, himself a Jew, maintained that the ideology of the French Revolution was identical to the ideology of Judaism. 2 When Napoleon came to power, he implemented the 1791 resolution despite apparent ambivalence toward the Jews, 3 convening the Grand Sanhedrin (in August 1806), declaring Judaism one of the three official religions of France alongside Catholicism and Protestantism, and stating, “I want all people living in France to be equal citizens and benefit from our laws.” 4 The advocates of Jewish emancipation largely echoed the words of Stanislas Marie Adélaïde, the Comte de Clermont-Tonnerre, who on December 23, 1789, stated the now famous doctrine: “Deny everything to the Jews as a nation and deny nothing to them as individuals.” In other words, Jewish peoplehood was denied, and Jews were to be transformed from a “nation within a nation” into “individual citizens of the French state.” 1Ī decision on the status of Jews was postponed until September 27, 1791, when the National Assembly passed a motion giving them citizenship rights as individuals, with an attached clause requiring them to renounce the privileges they had held as a special group. Pressured to be twice as French and twice as patriotic as anyone else, they sought to assimilate themselves as fully as they could. Though formally emancipated by French law since the 1789 Revolution, French Jews remained anxious and insecure. If France was the cradle of modern liberalism and the Enlightenment, it was also a home for virulent ultranationalism and antisemitism. This article will explore the attitudes of Jews in France toward the accusations against Dreyfus and compare them to those of Israelis and Diaspora Jews toward the contemporary charges against Israel in the context of (1) Operation Cast Lead, (2) the BDS movement, and (3) former American President Donald Trump’s policy moves toward Israel and toward American Jews. The system was rigged against Dreyfus the Jew then, as it is against Israel, the Jewish state, today. Yet subsequent events have indicated that the restored Israel has not ended European (and indeed world) antisemitism, often cloaked as anti-Zionism. His idea of a restored independent Jewish homeland came to fruition in 1948. Theodor Herzl’s experience at the trial of Alfred Dreyfus (and earlier with antisemitism in Vienna) convinced him of the impossibility of Jews being accepted and receiving fair treatment in Europe and played an important role in his conversion from assimilationism to Zionism. Keywords: Theodor Herzl, Dreyfus affair, Zionism, Israel, antisemitism, Operation Cast Lead, BDS movement We examine this pattern with regard to attitudes toward three events that have confronted Israel in the early years of this century: (1) Operation Cast Lead, and the resultant Goldstone Report and retraction (2) the BDS movement and (3) former American President Donald Trump’s policy moves toward Israel and toward American Jews. This has evoked the same multiplicity of responses on the part of the world Jewish community as it did among French Jews at the time of Dreyfus. Although the reemergence of Israel (at least in Herzl’s eyes) was aimed at freeing Jews from such unjust accusations, the same European antisemitism has reemerged today toward Israel itself. Most stayed silent, waiting for the storm to pass over others were pro-Dreyfus (i.e., Dreyfusards), some of whom believed in the French state while others did not (espousing either Jewish nationalism within France or Zionism, initially two different movements) and some were anti-Dreyfusards. The false accusation, trial, and punishment of the innocent Jew Alfred Dreyfus in France during the 1890s led to various responses on the part of the French Jewish community.
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