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Jewish history.org presents Rabbi Barrel Wine, "5,000 Years of Jewish History, One Video Clip at a Time." Clip number 67: The Dreyfus Affair.
Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish captain on the French general staff, was brought to trial for treason. He was found guilty by a French court martial on hooked-up evidence, on forged documents, and on false testimony. Nevertheless, people believed that he was guilty.
The Dreyfus Affair was the main event in Europe in 1893. Correspondents from all of the major newspapers in Europe converged on Paris to cover the Dreyfus trial. One of the correspondents was a Jew by the name of Theodore Herzl, who was a correspondent, playwright, and op-ed writer for a newspaper in Vienna, the New Free Press. The New Free Press was owned by Jews, but the Jews who owned it were very assimilated and, to a great extent, very anti-Jewish. Herzl was given the assignment to cover this trial. By the way, the New Free Press was the newspaper of record, so to speak, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Are there many books written comparing it to what, for instance, the New York Times claims to be in the United States today, which has a similar background: a newspaper owned by Jews, whose Jews are assimilated and not necessarily pro-Jewish or pro-Israel, and so on?
Herzl showed up, witnessed the trial, saw how Dreyfus was convicted, and heard 50,000 Frenchmen in the stadium shout "Death to the Jews." That was a shock to him, because he was an assimilated Jew who thought that by now all of that was over, that anti-Semitism was not going to exist anymore. Here in France, which stands for equality, justice, brotherhood, and everything else that is positive in the world, he heard the mob shout "Death to the Jews." That set him thinking, and he came to a conclusion. Why is anti-Semitism present? That is an old question. The rabbis of the Talmud said it is almost unavoidable, because the Jewish people are different. Not only are they different, but the Jewish people are the conscience of the world. Nobody likes a conscience. Nobody likes the people who are different, and nobody likes the stubborn people.
In any event, Herzl was coming from a different background and was unaware of the Talmud and the rabbis and all of that. In fact, his own son was not even circumcised and never had a bar mitzvah. Herzl came to the conclusion that the Jewish people are hated because they are abnormal. His definition of normal was that you have to have a country, you have to have a flag, you have to have an anthem, and later on you have to have an Olympic team. You have to be like everybody else. You have to be like, for example, Venezuela or Guatemala. Nobody hates Guatemala. Out of the germ of that idea, to somehow combat anti-Semitism, was born his idea of political Zionism, which was generated by the first Dreyfus trial.
To finish with Dreyfus: he was recalled. Émile Zola took up his defense. It became obvious that all the charges were trumped up. Dreyfus was brought back from Devil's Island, tried again, and again found guilty by the same anti-Semitic French general staff. But this time the country was so split that it became almost a point of revolution, and the French president pardoned Dreyfus. Dreyfus retook his commission in the French army, fought for the French army in the First World War, and died in 1935, never realizing what a focal point in Jewish history he was. As many times, the hero is unaware that he is the hero, and the villain is unaware that he is the villain.
I want to thank you for watching. My name is Barrel Wine. For more on Jewish history, go to jewishhistorydotorg.