On this day: Alfred Dreyfus is arrested for spying

Dreyfus was released in 1899 but not exonerated until 1906, when he was readmitted into the French army. He later served in the First World War.

At the retrial in 1899 a mob called for the “mass extermination” of the Jews. The case profoundly shocked a young Austrian journalist reporting on it for the Viennese paper Neue Freie Presse.

Theodore Herzl, credited as a father of Zionism and the man who went on to found the World Zionist Organisation in 1897, was that journalist. He wrote of Dreyfus as a symbol of the impossibility of the Jew to assimilate, “who tries to adapt himself to his environment, to speak its language, to think its thoughts, to sew its insignia on his sleeve — only to have them ruthlessly ripped away.”

What the JC said: There was an utter absence of motive for the betrayal alleged against Captain Dreyfus…the whole civilised world regarded him as a martyr to military and sectarian, a victim to the antisemitic agitation which had disgraced so many European countries…Dreyfus would not have been persecuted as he had been, were he not a Jew.

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