That anti-Semitic incident ― which became known in France as "L'Affaire" ― was the famous case of Alfred Dreyfus, a captain in the French Army who was falsely accused in 1894 of spying. This made the military the logical candidate for an anti-Semitic incident. One of its main enemies was the "Jewish influence" in French life. Stung by the anarchists and pacifists of the left, humiliated by its complete defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, the French army was frustrated, malevolent, and paranoid. "Nowhere was more popular than with the officer corps of the French army. Writes Berel Wein in Triumph of Survival (p. This was followed in 1892 by the founding of an anti-Semitic daily newspaper La Libre Parole. In 1886, a virulently anti-Semitic book La France Juive became the most-widely read book in France. Jewish organizations instigated a protest by British and American leaders (including President Martin Van Buren) that caused the Syrians to drop the charges. Pressured by French authorities, the Syrians would have tried these Jews on false charges had not the Jewish world reacted. ![]() Two died under torture and several others were permanently disabled one "confessed." In response to his accusations, the Syrian authorities seized more than sixty Jewish children to coerce their parents into confessing. It is shocking to learn, for example, that it was the French consul Ratti-Menton who brought a blood libel against the Jews in 1840, when a Capuchin monk disappeared in Damascus, Syria. Some of the worst cases of anti-Semitism before the rise of the Nazis in Germany were instigated by the French, whose country was the birthplace of the Enlightenment. ![]() But in the Western World the situation was different. Of course, in Russia and the Pale of Settlement of Eastern Europe, anti-Semitism never went underground (as we saw in Parts 56 and 57). (For a more detailed treatment of anti-Semitism in general, click here for the Why the Jews? seminar) In this installment we will briefly examine the anti-Semitism that ― with the coming of the Enlightenment in the 18th century ― hid itself under the veneer of "civil" society, only to bare its face of evil in the Holocaust.
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