Alfred Dreyfus
The Man at the Center of the Affair
In 1894, Alfred Dreyfus (1859-1935), a Jewish officer in the French military, was falsely accused of selling secrets to Germany. Over the next five years, as Dreyfus languished in prison on Devil’s Island, his wife and brother waged a battle to clear his name that divided France and riveted the world.
In Alfred Dreyfus: The Man at the Center of the Affair, new in the acclaimed Yale Jewish Lives series, Maurice Samuels gives readers new insight into Dreyfus himself. Drawing on an archive of more than 3000 documents and objects donated by the Dreyfus family, Samuels tells the story of Dreyfus’s early life in Paris, his promising career as a French officer, the false accusation leading to his imprisonment, the fight to prove his innocence that divided the French nation, and his life of quiet obscurity after World War I. Restoring the man himself to the center of the affair, Samuels emphasizes Dreyfus’s personal courage, heroic resistance to torture, and deep understanding of the historic importance of his case.
Analyzing Dreyfus’s complex relationship to Judaism and to antisemitism over the course of his life, Samuels argues that Dreyfus was not an “assimilated” Jew. Instead, he epitomized a new model of Jewish identity made possible when France became the first European nation to grant Jews full legal equality. Relying on Jewish newspapers in French, English, German, Yiddish, and Hebrew, this book also explores the profound effect of the Dreyfus Affair on the lives of Jews around the world.
Of the book’s relevance in our own time, Samuels writes: “The life of Dreyfus forces us to consider what it means when the institutions of liberal democracy come under assault and when half a nation commits to believing a lie. The life of Dreyfus also allows us to understand what it takes for truth to triumph, and how a nation can emerge from political crisis with its faith in its institutions intact. As antisemitism and right-wing nationalism stage a comeback around the world today, the affair has much to tell us not only about the causes of hatred, but also about the ways it can be resisted.”
©Michael Marsland
Praise for Alfred Dreyfus: The Man at the Center of the Affair
“A deeply sympathetic reexamination the life of Alfred Dreyfus and the role antisemitism played in the affair that enflamed the French Republic.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“An intimate portrait of the defiant rectitude of Alfred Dreyfus…. At a time when truth is flouted, bigotry rampant, and nationalism resurgent, Maurice Samuels provides an important account of a French society inflamed and divided by hatred of a deeply patriotic Jew. Exiled, abused, left for dead, Dreyfus never wavered in his fight for truth and a society of equal treatment for all. That fight continues to this day.”
—Roger Cohen, Paris Bureau Chief, New York Times
“The Dreyfus affair is one of the moments where both modern anti-Semitism and crusading journalism and mass protest were born. Maurice Samuels provides a complex, lucid, narrative retelling that will simultaneously enrage any reader and inspire them with its tales of the stubborn search for justice. Even if you’ve read about Dreyfus before, you need to read this.”
—Adam Gopnik, author of The Real Work
“In this pioneering biography, Maurice Samuels restores Alfred Dreyfus to the affair that bears his name. In doing so, he rehabilitates an often-disregarded form of modern Jewish identity and shows how one Jewish life could matter so much to so many others. A triumph.”
—Samuel Moyn, author of Liberalism against Itself
