In the Context of His Times: Alfred Dreyfus as Lover, Intellectual, Poet, and Jew 9781618112378

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in the context of his times Alfred Dreyfus as Lover, Intellectual, Poet, and Jew

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Reference Library of Jewish Intellectual History

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in the context of his times: Alfred Dreyfus as Lover, Intellectual, Poet, and Jew Norman SIMMS

B o st on 2013 —3—

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Copyright © 2013 Academic Studies Press All rights reserved ISBN 978-1-61811-236-1 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-61811-237-8 (electronic) Book design by Adell Medovoy. Cover design from a woodcut by Martha Simms based on drawings in Alfred Dreyfus's prison notebooks. Published by Academic Studies Press in 2013 28 Montfern Avenue Brighton, MA 02135, USA [email protected] www.academicstudiespress.com

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Special thanks for their advice and support to Ira Bing, Maru Bing, Athena Chambers, Phyllis Chesler Norbert Col, José Faur, Nancy Kobrin, Robert Liris and, as always and, especially, Martha Simms.

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Table of Contents

Prologue. How to Read this Book

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Chapter 1. Through a Spinning Prism Lightly Part 1. Random Words of a Solitary Man Part 2. The Phantasmagoria of Anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism

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Chapter 2. The Ultimate Contraption Part 1. The Final Prison Cahiers: Nostalgia, Anxieties, and Reveries Part 2. The Jewish Syndic, Satan’s Synagogue and Cynicism Part 3. Through the Prism of Anti-Semitic Discourse Part 4. Dreyfus and Socially-Constructed Autism

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Chapter 3. Transcending Radical Solitude Part 1. A Poor Pedlar’s Bundle of Things Part 2. Dreyfus, Jewish Art and Midrashic Aesthetics

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Epilogue

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Appendix I. Persons Quoted and Discussed in Dreyfus’s Prison Notebooks Appendix II. Topics, Places, Themes and Events Discussed in Dreyfus’s Prison Notebooks Appendix III. Equations, Formulae, and Sketches in Dreyfus’s Prison Notebooks Appendix IV. Maths and Science in Dreyfus’s Prison Notebooks (by Ken MacNeil) Bibliography Index of Names Index of Key Ideas, Concepts, and Terms

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145 164 185 205

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363 372 379 382 383 405 409

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….les verres deformants qui interposent entre notre conscience et le monde extérnel… …distorting mirrors stand between our consciousness and the external world… —Octave Mirbeau1

Il y a plusieurs types juifs, mais malgré les croisements et les mélanges, on peut soutenir, contre Renan, que la pérennité de ces types est incontestable. Si, donc nous rectifions l’idée que philo et antisémites se font de la race juive, on peut dire que l’identité des origines, constitue déjà un lien entre les juifs. There are many kinds of Jews, but despite all the crossings and mixtures, it is possible to argue, against Renan, that the perenity of these kinds is incontestable. If, then, we correct the idea that the philo- and anti-Semites make about the Jewish race, we can say that the identity of their origins constitutes already a connection between Jews. —Bernard Lazare2

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Cited by Pierre Michel and Jean-François Nivet, eds., Octave Mirbeau, Combats esthétiques, I, 18771892 (Paris: Séguier, 1990), Introduction: “Mirbeau Critique d’Art,” 32. Bernard Lazre, Le nationaliosme juif. Publications du “KadimaH” No. 1 (Paris: Associations des Etudiants Israelites Russes, 1898), 2.

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Prologue How to Read this Book

Une pensée n’est pas la somme nue de ses mots. C’est précisément parce qu’on désire rectifier, contredire, raffiner, métamorphoser, améliorer en raturant ces mots qui l’exprimèrent et continueraient leur étrange œuvre alchimique sans la biffure qui les scelle sous la cire du silence.1 In the first of this series of books, called Alfred Dreyfus: Man, Milieu, Mentality and Midrash, I set forth, using a number of related metaphors, a way of passing the normative narrative2 of what happened to this 1

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“A thought is not the naked sum of its words. It is precisely because we desire to correct, contradict, refine, transform, ameliorate in rubbing away these words which expressed and continued their strange alchemical work without the blotting them out [for] that fixes them under the wax of silence” Stéphane Zagdanski, La mort dans l’œil: critique du cinéma comme vision, domination, falsification, éradication, fascination, manipulation, dévestation, usurpation (Paris: Maren Sell/ Diffusion Seuil. 2004), 283. Commenting on Plato’s two related dialogues, Republic and Timaeus, Zagdanski uses a metaphor of scribal corrections to a wax tablet or parchment roll. This headnote prepares the reader to follow the argument of my Prologue in its transition from Volume One to Volume Two of the series of studies on Alfred Dreyfus and the Affair that bears his name. This is my attack on the post-modernist use of narrative or journey or some other synonym that attempts, while at the same time as it disparages the Grand Narrative of history, to give each individual the pseudo-choice of their own destiny or karma. This kind of “agency” that all people have to take action from their own “positionality” actually locks them into a determined code of their “identity,” from which they cannot escape because there is no room outside the locus of ethnic, religious, or national genetics. The so-called journey follows a pre-established track of essential characteristics, the individual being the essence of the group. A recent study of antiSemitic and anti-Israeli attitudes found in Dutch school children saw in an official attitude the core of this post-modernist way of arguing. The 2004 report argued that “Teaching about the Second World War alone does not jibe with the reality perceived by a percentage of Muslim youngsters. That their ideas are sometimes shocking does not mean that one should avoid listening to them. By discussing the Middle East conflict, one interacts with their worldview instead of rejecting it. By giving them more knowledge of the region’s history and current events, one allows them an opportunity to moderate their viewpoints” (cited from Resultaten landelijke pilot 2008/2009 Tweede Wereldoorlog in perspectief, 4; in Manfred Gerstenfeld, “Anti-Semitism and Anti-Israelism in Dutch Schools” in Post-Holocaust and Anti-Semitism No. 110 [1 September 2011]). Gerstenfeld then explains why this approach “is highly questionable if not outright misleading”: it accepts as a legitimate worldview one based on ignorance and hatred and it assumes that providing more information can moderate the extremism and potential violence (as when one defines a “moderate anti-Semite” as one who does not want to kill all the Jews at once but spreads out the annihilation —9—

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young Jewish military officer through a series of lenses—seeing him (1) as a historical man caught up in circumstances that became more hysterical than historical; (2) as a figure swirling around in a milieu or festival that was more absurd and enigmatic than he could understand and that he himself called a fantasmagorie, phantasmagoria; (3) as a mind or mentality that was therefore confused and a soul that was troubled to the point of losing its memory and its reason because he had been set up as the “delegated madman” in the house of crazy mirrors that was fin de siècle France; and then finally (4) as a projected image through a cinematic lens or midrash,3 a way of seeing and of being seen on a screen between memory, existential experience,4 and speculative alternative possibilities in a reversible future, parsing, enhancing and fracturing the narrative we first began to evaluate as supposedly normative and historical.5

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over a number of years). Hence two very different kinds of perspectives on the world are treated as similar, a morality based on moral equivalence between inadvertent victims during a war and a targeted people in a preconceived policy of genocide are weighed together, and a complex regional issue juxtaposed to an ideological attempt to control the world are conflated. Sometimes a note is used to hint at a set of ideas to be slowly developed in the course of the whole book. For instance, here is what is said about the famous fable or myth of the cave in Plato’s Republic, wherein slaves are chained to benches and can only see shadows projected on a wall as objects are marched in front of a light-source from the bright world above and outside: “...à l’instar du mouvement de pantomime nomme kinêma, l’ éléeuthéria était le nom d’une danse, un divertissement donc, un amusement de galerie, au sens classique ou on parlait d’amuser un adversaire en détournant son attention” (at the beginning of the movement of a pantomime named kinêma, the éléeuthéria was the name of a dance, an entertainment, thus an amusement for the gallery, in the classical sense when one speaks of amusing an adversary where one speaks to divert his attention), Stéphane Zagdanski, La mort dans l’œil, 161. There is a subtle but profound distinction to be made between experience, in the existential sense, of an instantaneous sequence of events that are lived through (vécu) and the textualization of these events as memory and history, depending on whether the moments of experience are recollected and re-ordered in relation to the fullness of the mind’s development up to the point of remembering, fixed into an oral pattern recreated for specific recitations and performances, or set down in a written form and supposedly representative of the time of such an inscription. See André Hirt, “Astre sans Atmosphère,” Alea 9:2 (2007): 276-298. Hirt is discussing the way Walter Benjamin came to read Charles Baudelaire, so that his argument moves from a poet Dreyfus barely knew and seems not to have liked or understood to a philosopher-critic he could not have known about; see especially Hirt, “L’Astre sans atmosphère,” 283-284. But as can be seen in our study of the prison cahiers, these questions of historiography are implicit in Dreyfus’s attempts to make sense of the fantasmagorie he felt he was living in, the very term used both by Baudelaire and Benjamin. The problem to be addressed here is most complex since it involves the question of whether photography and cinema (an extension of the first as “moving pictures,” that is, the illusion of movement by the technique of showing a series of still pictures) can be considered as having a Jewish component. This does not mean that either the invention of the appropriate technology nor commercialized success needs to be attributed to Jews, something that would pander to two — 10 —

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In that first book in the series, I began to look at the various published and unpublished writings of Alfred Dreyfus. In doing so, it became apparent to me that he was someone far more interesting and imaginative than historians have considered him to be. Most scholars, in fact, have seemed almost ready to dismiss him as a rather boring, narrow-minded and unimaginative person, at best a professional soldier and engineer. What the letters back and forth to his wife Lucie while he was in prison reveal, however, is something quite unexpected: these epistles written during duress and under hostile censorship by the authorities open aspects of his character that he kept private before and after the long period of his ordeal, from 1894 through 1906.6 Not only

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slanderous myths, one that Jews are “smart” and are “successful businessmen” by nature. Rather, the problem in its widest sense is both epistemological and aesthetic—concerning the legitimacy of knowledge and the beauty or harmony of art with lawful justice. Daniel Kaufman refers in this regard to Daniel Morris, ed., After Weegee: Essays on Contemporary Jewish American Photography (Syracuse University Press, 2011) in a piece called “’After Weegee’ Defends Photojournalism,” subtitled “Daniel Morris’ New Book argues there is Jewish Photography” Jewish Ideas Daily (21 October 2011) online at www.jidaily.com/7K3/3 (accessed 04 November 11). Weegee is the professional name of Arthur Fellig. Kaufman opens his book reviews with a quotation from William Klein, who argued “that there were two kinds of photographers: ‘Jewish and goyish’.” Taking this rhetorical exaggeration as his starting point, as Kaufman shows, Morris distinguishes between photography that tells a story with political and ethical consideration that secularizes Jewish concern for Truth and Justice, while others tend to reflect the photographer’s investment in the status quo—or at least make a critique from inside the establishment from which Jews are always more or less excluded. This supposed Jewish “ethics of seeing” may seem rather tenuous because it is limited to American photojournalists, and the Jewish practitioners tend to be secular, Ashkenazi representatives of recently immigrant parents from Eastern Europe. Nevertheless, Kaufman and Morris, though they differ in emphasis, both open up two most interesting questions: first, they indicate that there is a Jewish way of seeing and a Jewish way of photographing and displaying pictures; and second, that Jewishness does not lie in the instrumentality of the apparatus nor technique of making photographs—or any pictures, for that matter—nor in the subject matter itself, since non-Jews may be involved in any of these operations and moral enterprises. The distinction has to be more subtle and, as Zagdansky shows, stems from the relationship of Jewish biblical modes of seeing, remembering and writing about what is experienced by sight and GraecoChristian philosophical-theological modes: a relationship is not that of opposites, as in Athens versus Jerusalem, but rather of a critical participation in formative rabbinical Judaism in the ambit of Hellenic and Hellenistic civilizations. Given that Dreyfus comments several times on photography and x-rays, as well as painting, these distinctions are relevant to understanding how and where he stood at the cusp of the crisis in epistemology and aesthetics between 1894 and 1906, the period of the long Affair that bears his name. In modern quantum cryptography, there are three nominal participants to the systems of encryption and decryption. “These systems can be thought of as a safe in which the message is locked by Alice with a key. Bob in turns uses a copy of this key to unlock the safe.... Alice encrypts her message, a string of bits ... She simply adds each bit of the message to the corresponding bit of the key to obtain the scrambled text ... It is then sent to Bob, who decrypts the message by subtracting the key.... Although perfectly secure, this system has a problem—it is essential for Alice and Bob to possess a common secret key.... If they used the key more than once, Eve could — 11 —

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do I now see Alfred as a sensitive lover, husband and father, but also as a Jew. Moreover, I see him and Lucie working together to communicate intimacies and spiritual concerns. As a matter of fact, and not just as a point of interpretation, it was through Lucie and her family that Alfred was introduced to both French culture in the sense of the fine and the performing arts and to Jewish civilization in the sense that her family had come to experience it in bourgeois Paris. Because of the difficulties of his upbringing, having been forced to migrate from his home in Alsace shortly after the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, when he was eleven years old, Alfred was raised by his older sisters and went to various boarding schools, until he left for the military academy or polytechnic. His parents and older brothers had remained behind in Mulhouse to look after the family business, so that it was not until he met and married Lucie Hadamard that he once again found himself in a warm Jewish environment and began to meet with the many artists, scholars and rabbis who constituted her circle of relatives and acquaintances. What his cahiers, or workbooks, kept at least in the last years of imrecord all of the scrambled messages and start to build up a picture of the plain texts and thus also of the key” (Nicolas Gisin, Grégoire Ribordy, Wolfgang Tittel and Hugo Zbinden, Group of Applied Physics, University of Geneva, “Quantum Cryptography,” Reviews of Modern Physics 74 [January 2002]: 148-149). Extrapolating from this highly technical and very contemporary paradigm, it is possible to assign Alfred and Lucie Dreyfus to the roles of Bob and Alice, while the whole censorship bureau of the French Army and State play the part of Eve. More interestingly, so that this does not come out as merely a far-fetched allegory, the paradigm has to be stage-managed to show that the secret key known to Alfred and Lucie is not at first recognized but created, as it were, under pressure, out of the memories they share of their Jewish backgrounds. It is also not created all at once, but piecemeal, gradually, out of what may be taken in the beginning to be random words, phrases, allusions and concepts, and then put together through repetitions of their own thoughts and those of the reciprocating communicating letter-writer. Eve, in the person of the guards who observe and report on the epistles written and received on Devil’s Island, as well as the prison authorities and the government officials in Paris, attempt to make sense of the messages going back and forth, most concerned that Lucie does not report on the increasing pressures applied by the Dreyfusards to bring about a revision of Alfred’s verdict of “guilty” as a spy and a traitor, and Alfred does not disclose too much of the details of his conditions and the tortures inflicted upon him. What the censors also attempt to discover in the letters, as in the cahiers Alfred writes, is incriminating evidence of the original allegations, since the whole first court martial was based on a tissue of lies, forgeries, innuendos, and perjuries, and of a secret Jewish conspiracy behind the growing support for Dreyfus in France and around the world. In their most fantastic misinterpretations of what Alfred and Lucie write to one another and what Alfred inscribes in his cahiers, the censors, in the part of Eve, think they see evidence of kabbalistic principles and signs of theosophical activity; ironically, Eve is more right than she knows, in that both Alfred and Lucie create a language of mystical passion and theurgical power that empowers them during the long ordeal, but that seems to evaporate quickly once Alfred returns to France and the couple are reunited in the bosom of the family. — 12 —

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prisonment, show to us is that Alfred was well-read in a large number of fields,7 and that he was critical and questioning of the books he wrote about, not all of which were sent to him by Lucie. On the one hand, as a consequence, we see that, aside from a few titles his letters to her ask to have sent to Devil’s Island, it was actually his wife who chose the books and journals, choices made out of her experience of discussing literature and history with him in their early years of marriage and out of her insight into the books he would gain most benefit from—not just the shorter, “easier novels” he requested and the popular middle-brow journals he enjoyed. When the censorship rules were tightened by the prison authorities so that she was not permitted to send him packages of reading material, Alfred would then begin to draw more deeply on his memory of books read in childhood and in his advanced studies at lycée and in the école militaire. But in the prison cahiers he does more than record his thoughts about history, science, technology, education and morals; or do exercises in translation to teach himself English; or run through many mathematical, chemical and physics problems. He also shows himself to be a creative person in two ways: on the one hand, discussing the importance of the imagination and writing several short prose poems of his own, and on the other, drawing thousands of small ever-elaborating figures or doodles. I hope that this new book will both help place Alfred in the context of the nineteenth century, proving him to be an educated and critical thinker, and to indicate that he was a Jew with the morality, ingenuity, and creativity that his people had begun to demonstrate to the rest of the world in his own birth century, and the one to come, with all its problems and disasters. As a lover, an intellectual, a poet, and a Jew, Dreyfus stands out now from the Affair in a way he did not before.8 Previously he was seen only 7

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See the Appendices at the end of this volume for a listing of the authors he comments on, the places and events he mentions. This should be ample proof that Dreyfus did more than read some essays by Montaigne, a handful of plays by Shakespeare, and a few articles in La Revue des Deux Mondes, as has often be supposed. “The psychology of intimacy sometimes is obliged to use mask and disguise in order both to veil and unveil,” Helmut Hatzfeld, Literature through Art: A New Approach to French Literature (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1952), 112. Hatzfeld is here talking about the Rococo of the French eighteenth century, but the sentiment will continue through the century, as it is an apt description of the love letters between Lucie and Alfred Dreyfus. If it is objected that my authorities and sources are not the latest, I hope it is obvious by now, first, that I do not find great sympathy for the theoretical penchant of most literary and art criticism, at least since the mid-1980s, and, second, that I seek out writers who are much closer in sympathy with Alfred — 13 —

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as the channel for events that blew up around him or as a cipher whose appearance in public often disappointed his supporters because of his rigidity and lack of passion. What has come into focus after close reading of the love letters to Lucie and the prison meditations does not make him one of the avant-garde in the fin de siècle. He does demonstrate, however, an ability to articulate a sensibility that had matured in almost every field during the more than hundred years since the Revolution of 1789: that maturity in Dreyfus was no longer the mainstream as the twentieth century opened—and would certainly be all but swept away in the conflagration of World War One. If he was not one of the advanced philosophers, artists, or critics of his time—that is, the kind of intellectuals who rallied to his cause as the Affair blossomed—was he one of the kind that tried to stem the tide of history, push back the social and aesthetic innovations? In a sense, Dreyfus felt, when he returned to France from exile9 and learned what had been going on and who his main allies were, that he had to confess to himself, were the case not against him, it is unlikely that he would have been a dreyfusard. Such a statement is, to be sure, hyperbole, as he would certainly never have been counted amongst the vicious anti-Semites, the retrograde monarchists or clerical party that opposed the ideals he devoted himself to and that kept him strong through adversity. Still, it is significant to see that, while he was supported by members of the so-called intellectual classes, artists, and literary people, for the most part those persons—writers like Emile Zola and Anatole France or artists like Camille Pissarro and Emile Gallé—were not the thinkers, poets, novelists, or philosophers with whom Dreyfus felt the most affinity or read before or during his incarceration or imagined in his mind. When he learned of their efforts later, he felt appreciative, even friendly towards those he met, yet there

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Dreyfus as he expresses himself in these lover letters and in his prison cahiers. Though I touch somewhat on questions related to art history and aesthetics in these two books, particularly when the discussion deals with the thousands of tiny drawings in the cahiers, I will address the question more extensively in the third volume. This kind of footnote lays out a claim to questions and analyses that do not always lend themselves to direct confrontation. In Hebrew, “exile” means primarily the Galut, the long period of separation from the Land of Israel that underlies the historical development of rabbinical Judaism. In more mystical terms, this separation is what happens when God Himself is apart from the Shekhina, the shadow or appearance of His consort or bride, a period that is experienced both as one of intense longing shared by those in the Galut and the Shekhina; it is the longing of a bride and a groom, a woman and a man to reunite in nuptial embrace, as Lucie and Alfred felt during their separation from one another. It is a time also of fecundation, creativity, and the joy of shared longings. — 14 —

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is no evidence that he sat down to read their books, listen to their music, view their paintings or glassworks, or appreciate their dramas. Though he certainly attempted to keep up-to-date in science and technology and the shifts in philosophy they implied, he did not enjoy or understand the modernist trends in the fine arts, music, or literary criticism; his tastes were decidedly for the mainstream writers and painters of his century. Especially for the authors in the first half of it. However, to have such tastes—and at the same time to be critical about them— did not make him unimaginative, dull or merely conventional. When he approaches the ideas and achievements of the nineteenth century, we observe that he does so as a thoughtful reader, and as a Jew more than an ordinary bourgeois—if not in the religious sense of a practicing orthodoxy, then in the cultural sense that had been taking shape since the Mendelssohnian Haskallah (or Jewish Enlightenment) and the liberal German Wissenschaft des Jüdentums (the science or systematic and secular study and appreciation of Judaism), that is, with a concern for justice and truth. This Judaism that he learned from Lucie was not the same as the traditional Alsatian Yiddishkeyt of his parents; for though her family also had roots in Jewish culture in that region, they had assimilated greatly into Parisian culture. The Hadamards had been more intellectual for centuries, both within Jewish traditions and within the new secularizing world of the Enlightenment, through their entrepreneurship as printers and booksellers. When they arrived in Paris, more than a generation before Alfred moved there, they had assimilated into the high French culture that was tolerant of Jews—and where French Israelites, as they called themselves, had been granted citizenship at the time of the Revolution and subsequently assimilated as individuals into a sophisticated, cultured and laicized version of Sephardic Judaism.10 One of the main troubles has been that scholars have not looked for evidence of Dreyfus’s Judaism because they have assumed that it was not there, that assimilation meant atheism and secularism; so they have not seen the clues or heard the echoes, have not looked for the books and 10 Though this resumé is a somewhat oversimplified history of the Jews in France, for a family arriving from the German-speaking lands to the east—especially, Switzerland and Alsace—the Napoleonic decrees and reforms seemed wonderful, nearly miraculous. Though the Jews had not been particularly safe during the Reign of Terror, by the end of the Revolution things had turned for the better; see for example, Robert Badinter, Libre et égaux . . . l’émancipation des Juifs 17891791 (Paris: Fayard, 1994). — 15 —

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ideas he could have known about on his own or through Lucie and her family. They also assume that because Alfred’s and Lucie’s families were from Alsace they would conform to Ashkenazi patterns of childrearing, domestic customs, and intellectual interests, even though they chose to live in a milieu that insofar as it was Jewish had been shaped by Sephardic French history during the course of the nineteenth century. In other words, it would not have been saturated with Yiddish language and culture, would not have followed patterns of husband-wife relations and private-public personalities, and would not have felt alienated in and kept aloof from the surrounding French version of modern European civilization in Paris.11 But all of the above, so far, still has too much of the historian about it, and so it does not reflect closely and clearly how this and my previous book were written, nor how the series is to be read. I cannot compete with the professional, academic historians, though I have relied on them greatly, because I have not had access to documents and archives, and thus not attempted to present to the reader new facts about Dreyfus or the Dreyfus Affair. My books are not even books in the sense of textbooks or scientific reports—that is, rational explanations and narratives of events. What I have set about doing, as already stated in the opening sentences of this prologue, is more than describing optics and festivals or use them merely as metaphors: what I have set myself the task of doing is to write and to read (in the active, dynamic sense of lernin, i.e., rabbinical questioning and debate with the text and with one’s study-partner) so that these pages become part of an optics of midrashic understanding through an enhancement of the text and a festival of participation in the processes of Jewish experience. That is why the reader of these books finds herself or himself encountering what 11  Some modern commentators argue that to speak of Jews, Judaism, and Jewishness as vital distinctions is hair-splitting and mere plays on words. But it is not hairs we are splitting but words, and the play is of the highest order, as in the way an orchestra plays a piece by Arnold Schoenberg or a theatrical company plays the tragedy of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Stéphane Zagdanski asks. “Estil possible, est-il raisonnable, est-il juste, a-t-on le droit de jouir en jouant avec les mots? Oui, répond le judaïsme, inaugurant du même coup une grandiose théologie de la métaphore. ‘Le style de l’histoire de ce peuple est lui-même un continuel miracle, qui porte le témoignage de la vérité des miracles dont il perpétue le souvenir,’ écrit Chateaubriand” (Is it possible, is it reasonable, is it just, has one the right to play in playing with words? Yes, responds Judaism, inaugurating at the same time a grandiose theology of metaphor. ‘This people’s style of history is in itself a continual miracle that transports within it the testimony of the miracles that it perpetuates in memory,’ writes Chateaubriand) (Balac et Balaam, 25, http://parolesdesjours.free.fr/balaam.pdf). — 16 —

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seem like repetitious passages, though the words or phrases or sentences or concepts or questions are not always exactly the same; to present the same givens of knowledge, what “everybody says or believes,” even if with some modification based on more or better information or a new perspective or critical formula, would be bland and repetitious indeed. The reader, to indulge me, must move back and forth from the main body of the argument to the footnotes—a space that is used not merely to signal my sources or to ask further questions, but to register the contexts in which the discussion of Dreyfus is to be placed. These contexts may not seem contiguous or relevant at first, or might seem merely forced on the basis of some fortuitous word or image repeated in each, but should come into focus, explosively and shockingly, as pertinent and illuminating, as well as constitutive and transforming. Thus, as I project these texts, these textualized rays or beams of memory and speculation through one another, like light rays through the double lenses of diffraction, the ideas, the words, the concepts, and everything that constitutes them begin to break apart into their formative elements. Such a prismatic double-diffraction does something more than fan out into a familiar spectrum of colours, ranging from the very edges of what can be seen to the luminal limits of what cannot be seen, from infrared to ultraviolet, as would happen with a single beam of light when it goes through a single Newtonian prism; in this paradigmatic tool of inquiry, the textual beams—and there must always be at least two, as there are two lenses, at least—pass into the substances of the other. They do this in varying degrees of intensity according to their own provenance and development through history; they are dynamic and reversible experiences. They are chains of explosive encounter, fracturing each particle of revealed textualization into further patterns of expression. There may be, as I have so often said over the past nearly fifty years, text and counter-text, when at least two legitimate, possible and persuasive narratives or modes of argumentation emerge from the diffractive process as juxtaposed versions, very close in content and shape, each one able to sustain itself on its own and yet claiming be to be a better, truer, more just version than the other; as a result the historian or maker of books can choose to publish one, while noting the existence of

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the other and explaining the reasons for such a choice.12 There may not be an absolute contradiction here, with one side simply cancelling out the other, or an interdiction proclaimed by the text which has become official, received and unquestioned by author; but there might be an ambivalence or ambiguity between them, so that it is not only difficult to decide between the options—it is, in fact, inadvisable, since each text on its own cannot sustain itself in practical or logical application. Yet without indicting the faith of a paradox, that suspends all questioning of differences and acceptance of the tension between the alternatives as the condition of being in the phenomena and experiences textualized, the book offers the grounds of compromise, a place of rest and peace, without the need to make a choice at all. Thus Catholics and Protestants cease their religious wars and accept that, after all, they can live with one another, allow the other to be professed so long as it does not infringe on the space of public action, and respect one another as variations on a single theme.13 12 There are even two kinds of delirium “le délire antilittéraire, projectif et mortifère des ennemis de Céline, délire grinçant, ‘discordance qui se veut elle-même discordante, qui jouit d’elle-même dans cette souffrance‘ (Nietzsche), couac des cervelles, gangue de la langue, canard de l’âme qui s’assimile à l’antisémitisme…, et le délire romanesque musical, grec, nietzschéen, talmudique, lequel analyse en dansant la cohérence du délire adverse” (the anti-literary delerium, projective and deadly of Céline’s enemies, a delirium that sets your teeth on edge, ‘a discordance that wills itself to be discordant, that revels in the suffering it causes’ (Nietzsche), harshly grating on the brain, riding roughshod on the tongue, quacking quackery in the soul, and so assimilating itself to anti-Semitism..., and the Romanesque, musical, Greek, Nietzschean, Talmudic delirium which analyzes through dance into an adverse state of mind), Stéphane Zagdanski, “Céline alone” (extrait de Céline seul) online at http://dl.free.fr/leTxHdtRE (acccessed 20 October 2011). Zagdanski shows how the Hebrew Bible, more intensely and with more meaning, plays out these textual juxtapositions, overlapping and interweaving through a variety of word-play, orthographic echoes and other onomastic devices, e.g. Ohola and Oholiba, Roboam and Jereboam, Omri and Zimri through Balak and Balaam. Unlike the Greek, particularly Platonic concept of language as a screen of projected secondary ideas, the Jewish mind grapples with language as the substance of the ideal that precedes shadowy idealized substitutions. This makes the anti-Semitism of Céline, as opposed to that of the vulgar, idiotic form of thuggery, a parody of Talmudic logic, a kind of satanic midrash or, rather, mishmash. In another place in this same essay, Zagdanski expostulates on the way rabbinic arguments masticate the words in its onomasticon. That is, chews up words like a caterpillar a leaf, to produce the silk of its own cocoon. For further elucidation of this contrast between kinds of textualization, see Norman Simms, “Fantasia, Enargeia, and the Rabbinical Midrash: The Classical Way to Read Jewish Texts” Literature & Aesthetics 19:2 (2009): 10-24, and “The Phantasmagoria of Anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism” Mentalities/Mentalités 24:2 (2010): 5264. 13 These themes are, as we have been arguing, the textualized ideas that our reading must diffract through the lenses of the critical rabbinical imagination. It is also likely that when Stéphane Zagdanski cites Gracian, that seventeenth-century Marrano or Crypto-Jew, he could be directing us on ways to read Dreyfus’s texts, including the multitude of variations in his doodles, and — 18 —

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Or there can be text and anti-text, again as a possible variation or long chain of possibilities, except now the two or more texts cannot sit comfortably together or engage in a polite or merely rhetorical conversation or debate. For the content and form, the very existence of one precludes the legitimacy and logic of the other; one would cancel out the other, and the book can at best or at most take note of the false existence of the competing textualization—as one may do in arguments over whether Dreyfus was guilty or not of espionage and treason. Some proponents of his sustained incarceration said that even if he were innocent, it would be better to keep that silent for the sake of the army and the nation, his own status being of no account in the greater debate going on. But when it came to the pardon granted after the second court martial, many of Dreyfus’s keenest supporters, like Clemenceau and Piquart, felt that he had betrayed them and the cause, and turned against him in order to pursue their own agendas of anarchy, socialism, secularism, and nationalism. Then the diffractions may produce a run of texts that relate to one another as text and non-text, where the very attempt to articulate or express any or all alternative modes of logical order, narrative progression, or moral interpretation must cancel out, assimilate into itself the constituent elements of the other in such a way that they cannot be recognized or grasped anywhere else or in any other context. They cannot be presented as competing alternatives, and hence the refusal of real scholarship to take something like Holocaust Denial as serious or the deeper sensitivities neither Alfred nor Lucie could be aware of in their own rabbinical traditions: “Noms, c’est justement le titre en hébreu du livre de l’Exode. Le texte de la Bible s’est diffracté en une kyrielle de noms, chacun d’eux étant comme une bulle de temps, c’est-à-dire une implosion dissolvante, le mot se divisant en lettres qui se démultiplient en mots qui se redivisent pepetuellement en lettres, et ainsi à l’infini. Un nom est-il un mot? Non, c’est une ‘hydre vocale’ (Gracian). ‘De chaque syllabe renaît une subtilité ingénieuse, de chaque accentuation nouvelle un trait d’esprit.’ Chaque nom est une sortie d’Égypte, une issue hors du temps figé des pharaons. Chaque nom est une chronique infinitésimale, une parole des jours. Parole des jours, c’est le titre des Chroniques en hébreu, le lieu par excellence des interminable généalogies bibliques.” (Names, that is precisely the Hebrew title of the Book of Exodus. The text of the Bible is diffracted into a litany of names, each of them like a bubble of time, that is to say a dissolving implosion, the word dividing itself into letters that ratchet down into words which perpetually divide into letters, and so on ad infinitum. Is a name a word? No, it is a “vocal hydra” (Gracian). “From each syllable is reborn an ingenious subtlety, from each new vocalization a brain wave.” Each word is an exodus from Egypt, a release from the Pharaoh’s congealed time. Each name is an infinitesimal chronicle of time, a word of days. Word of Days, that is the title of the Hebrew Chronicles, the place par excellence for those endless biblical genealogies) Balac et Balaam, 7. — 19 —

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engage it in an academic debate. Though Marcel Proust pointed out that after only a few years, many people could no longer recollect which side they had taken in the Affair or why they had taken such a position, the deep-seated issues remained alive, bubbling below the surface, ready to break out on a later occasion, while the psychological and intellectual understanding of Alfred Dreyfus was lost from view.14 If Alfred were indeed brought back into view, dredged up from old memories, and made the point at issue in the debates of the 1930s and 1940s, the apparent resolution as to his guilt or innocence would collapse into chaos and madness. And then again there is the tentative, speculative, highly subjunctive production of text and untext, a phenomenon that cannot form itself into more than an instantaneous possibility: for as soon as it seems possible to recognize a moment of experience, a patterned arrangement of facts or feelings, a logical or aesthetic connection, the textualizability vanishes, goes silent, ceases to exist and cannot be remembered, like a most vivid and tantalizing dream as one awakens. The black hole sucks 14

Though we intend in later works to explore further the relationship between Proust’s writings and those of Dreyfus, it will be sufficient now simply to point to the way in which Proust’s concepts of time and memory relate to Talmudic insights and concepts, as Zagdanski points out in Céline seul: “Le Talmud est à peu près bâti, conçu, comme les romans de Proust, tortueux, arabescoïde, mosaïque désordonnée. Le genre sans queue ni tête. Par quel bout de le prendre? Mais au fond infiniment tendancieux, passionnément, obstinément. Du travail de chenille. Cela passe, revient, retourne, repart, n’oublie rien, incohérent en apparence, pour nous qui ne sommes pas Juifs, mais de ‘style’ pur [pour] les initiés! La chenille laisse ainsi derrière elle, tel Proust, une sorte de tulle, de vernis, irisé, impeccable, capte, étouffe, réduit tout ce qu’elle touche et bave—rose ou étron. Poésie proustienne. Quant au fond de l’œuvre proustienne: conforme au style, aux origines, au sémitisme: désignation, enrobage des élites pourries nobiliaires mondaines, inverties, etc., en vue de leur massacre, Épurations. La chenille passe dessus, bave, les irise. Le tank et les mitraillettes font le reste, Proust a accompli sa tâche, talmudique” (The Talmud is to some extent constructed and conceived, like the novels of Proust, tortuous, like an arabesque or a confused mosaic. The species with neither tail nor head, how does one grasp it? But basically it is infinitely tendentious, passionately, obstinately so. The work of a caterpillar. It passes by, returns, turns around, goes again, never forgets, incoherent in appearance, for those of us who are not Jews, but “with style” for those who are initiated! The caterpillar, like Proust, leaves behind it a kind of tulle, glaze, iridiant, spotless, cunning, overstuffed, reducing everything it touches and slabbers over—a rose or a turd. Proustian poetry. As for the foundation of the Proustian work: it conforms to the style, the origins, the Semitisms: the choosing, the coating of the nobly rotten worldly perverted elites, etc., in view of their massacre. Purifications. The caterpillar goes beneath and slobbers over and makes them iridescent. The tank and the machine gun do the rest. Proust did his duty, talmudically) (“Céline Alone,” 27). A worrisome passage, indeed, but one which deserves to be unpacked at length, including following, as we later shall in another book, the metaphor of the caterpillar through the turns and twists of Jules Michelet’s Insects, that book that reveals the phantasmagoria of life just at and below the boundaries of the naked eye. — 20 —

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in everything. The focus, the black hole in the middle of the eye that is the window to the soul is also the foc or hearth, the heart of the home, the maternal centre of life.15 From a distance, the place of Dreyfus in the Dreyfus Affair cannot be found: there seems no case to answer, no logic to be argued over, no recognition of a reality to be contested: all seems as though both sides, dreyfusards and anti-dreyfusards, were tilting at windmills, caught up in a phantasmagoria16—all smoke and mirrors, eerie music and ventriloquism, illusion and delusion.

15 Shmuel Trigano discusses the meaning of the Scripture in Genesis concerning man created in the image of God: “Tselem, que l’on traduit par image, c’est un ‘instantané’ photographique, qui saisit un moment d’un être vivant et en acte. En hébreu modern, tsilum désigne justement la photographie…” (Tselem, translated as “image,” is the instantaneous photograph that captures the moment of living and in the act of being. In modern Hebrew, tsilum precisely designates a photograph) Le monothéisme est un humanisme (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2000), 50. 16 Italo Calvino, in one of his essays on Charles Fourier, remarks: “in Le Nouveau Monde amoureux he hints, as if speaking of a basic moral experience for him at having by chance discovered in himself an ‘amorous mania’; the pleasure of being present at and sharing in the lover play between two women, In the erotic phantasmagoria he constructed, lesbianism is surrounded by a particular kind of nimbus” (“On Fourier, II: The Controller of Desires” in The Literature Machine: Essays, trans. Patrick Creagh [London: Pan Books in association with Secker & Warburg 1989 (1987)], 241). Here the term phantasmagoria designates a kind of mania, or dream fantasy of sexual excess and perversion, surrounded by a halo of light making it at once moral and immoral, as well as spiritual and anti-spiritual. Meanwhile, Louis-Albert Revah, in his Freudian biography of Julien Benda speaks of the clash of nationalism and religion: “Il est vrai que, pour l’humanité, l’effet fut catastrophique. Mais au lieu de s’interroger sur les causes de cette évolution, parmi lesquelles figure en bonne place la ‘mort de Dieu,’ Benda ne sait dresser contre les passions humaines déchainées—‘si Dieu est mort, tout est permis’—que les productions de sa fantasmagorie, en quelque sorte, que brandir un sabre de bois. Sa méconnaissance de l’histoire va d’ailleurs pour nous à ce point que non seulement, à notre avis, la thèse de la Trahison des clercs, si on la prend dans sa globalité, est fausse, mais que c’est la thèse exactement inverse qui est vraie” (It is true that, for humanity, the effect was catastrophic. But instead of asking himself for the causes of this development, among which figures in a central place the [Nietzschian idea of the] “death of God,” Benda is only able to set himself up against the uncontrolled human passions the products of a phantasmagoria—“if God is dead, then everything is allowable”—and somehow or other to challenge them with [nothing but] a wooden sword. His misunderstanding of history go further than that for us at this point, [for] in our view not only is The Treason of Intellectuals false, but if one takes it in a universal sense, its thesis is the versy reverse of what is true ) [Julien Benda: Un misanthrope juif dans la France de Maurras (Paris: Plon, 1991), 205]). Here Revah uses phantasmagoria to name the category of useless, muddle-headed ideas that someone who doesn’t understand history tries to use against the profound situation of modernity, where religion and nationalism are not just incompatible philosophically but which, as in the phenomenon of Nazism, undermine totally all bases of moral and rational civilization. — 21 —

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Chapter One Through a Spinning Prism Lightly1

Thus, whereas peshat conveys the generally accepted sense of a text, derasha proposes an interpretation transcending the conventional meaning…. Derasha and peshat correspond to two types of perceptual processes. At one level of consciousness, the processing of data is conditioned by the cultural, psychological, and linguistic factors determining the sense of “reality” of the linguistic community. The result is a kind of “absolute experience” transcending analysis and interpretation. From this perspective, “perception” is a (special) type of “reading:” of a (special) “text” by a process shared by the entire community. —José Faur2 Come and see! This is the way of Torah: At first, when she begins to reveal herself to a human She beckons him with a hint [remez]. If he knows, good; If not, she sends him a message, calling him a fool. …. He approaches. She begins to speak with him from behind a curtain she has drawn, Words he can follow, until he reflects a little at a time. This is derasha. Then she converses with him through a veil, 1 2

Or “A Diamond Dreydel flashing Facets of Deceit.” José Faur, The Horizontal Society: Understanding the Covenant and Alphabetic Judaism (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2009), Section 2, Paragraph 9. — 23 —

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Words riddled with allegory. This is haggadah. Once he has grown accustomed to her, She reveals herself face to face And tell him all her hidden secrets,\ All the hidden ways, Since primordial days secreted in her heart [This is sod]. —Zohar on Exodus3 The iconography of the blind old Jew or the figure of Synagoga with her eyes bandaged was common in the Middle Ages, and expressed the Christian view that Judaism had lost its ability to see what was revealed, and thus been replaced by a new dispensation, triumphed over by the Church, the New Israel, and sent into the darkness of Exile, wandering away from its national territory and groping sacred institutions. Yet there was also a nagging suspicion among the intellectuals of Christendom that, despite his physical and moral blindness, the Jew still knew something secret hidden from the rest of mankind.4 Though he was a traitor to his nation and his uniform, Alfred Dreyfus was treated by his jailors as though he possessed a secret kabbalistic knowledge and could communicate in code to his wife and his allies back in France by some unperceived means, and thus he had to be watched twenty-four hours a day and everything he wrote carefully scrutinized. For this reason, after the shock of his being told he was a spy and a traitor, the trauma of his being found guilty and subjected to public degradation, and the ordeal of exile and separation from his wife and children, he suffered the daily humiliations of imprisonment and nightly nightmare of loneliness and silence. As Eva Hoffman points out, “trauma is suffering in excess of what the psyche can absorb, a suffering that twists the soul until it

3 4

Moshe de Leon, Zohar: The Book of Enlightenment, trans. Daniel Channan Matt (New York, Ramsey, NJ and Toronto: Paulist Press, 1983), 124-125. Gabriel Josipovici, “How to See a Blind Man,” a review of Steven F. Kruger, The Spectral Jew: Conversions and Embodiment in Medieval Europe (University of Minnesota Press, 2006) in TLS No. 5421 (23 February 2007): 8. — 24 —

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can no longer straighten itself out;”5 more than pain and humiliation, it is a form of soul-death. Dreyfus was alone, only able to communicate through letters, not always able to find books or magazines to read, except those in his memory; and so, though he exerted himself in every way possible to maintain his health and his sanity, to save himself from despair, he had what Hoffman describes as “the age-old Jewish awareness, no matter how subliminal, diluted, or irrelevant to current circumstances, that the political existence of one’s group is dependent on the good graces of others, that it remains, when all is said and done, provisional and precarious.”6 Crushed, humbled, insecure, whether all alone or trying to hold himself from flying apart when under the scrutiny of guards, judges, reporters and allies, Dreyfus nevertheless was misunderstood and misperceived, his individuality absorbed into the stereotyped picture of the rich and arrogant middle-class Jew. He was perceived, as the journalist for Le matin put it on 3 November 1894 under the headline “Le traître” (The Traitor): Il était d’une nature orgueilleuse, qui le portait à une ostentation continuelle et universelle. Il se fallait bien haut de son argent et de ses relations, avant l’Ecole une chambre ou il vivait.7

Introduction We have learned that two thousand years before the creation of the world the Holy One, blessed be He, played around with the twenty-two letters of the Torah and He combined and rotated them and made from all of them one word. He rotated [the word] frontwards and backwards through all the twenty-two letters…. All this 5 6 7

Eva Hoffman, After Such Knowledge: Memory, History and the Legacy of the Holocaust (New York: Public Affairs, 2004), 54. Ibid., 255. “He was of a proud nature, who carried himself with a continual and universal ostentation. He felt himself so haughty with his riches and his relations, in front of the Ecole [military academy] where he had a room to himself.” Cited in Eric Cahm, L’Affaire Dreyfus: histoire, politique et société (Paris: Livre de Poche, 1994), 22. — 25 —

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the Holy One, blessed be He, undertook, for He wanted to create the world by means of His word and the epithet of the great name —Sefer Hakhoni8 When Hebrew ceased to be a spoken language in common use among the Jewish people, even before the Fall of the Temple, the destruction of Jerusalem, and the loss of the legal archives Morasha that made the State possible, a new rabbinical tradition came into being, at first a purely linguistic phenomena, whereby the ever-shifting flux of linguistic changes were projected back into the sacred texts. In their dispersion, the Children of Israel had to form a nation-in-exile. Heinrich Heine put the idea poetically, that the Torah, the Book of the Law, became their portable state.9 Between the people and the text there was no longer a shared language, but a Hebrew that had to be learned, loshen kodesh, the sacred tongue, out from which they reached to converse with God, a new kind of mythical time and space transcending both the past and the future in a present of hyperspace and hypertime.10 Then the relationship 8

Cited in Elliot R. Wolfson, Through a Speculum that Shines: Vision and Imagination in Medieval Jewish Mysticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 137. 9 Max Harold Fisch, introducing Vico’s New Science, points out the way most European languages other than English use two words for “law,” as in Latin ius and lex, the first connoting “the legal order, structure, or system conceived as, ideally at least, a rational whole; law, therefore, by reason,” while the second “denotes enacted law, law which has been made law by the authority of some lawmaking body…therefore by will” (Introduction, The New Science, xxxii-xxxiii). José Faur argues throughout The Horizontal Society that in the Hebrew concept the Law, as revealed at Sinai in writing and continuously unfolding in rabbinical discussions as an oral Torah, does not bind the parties (God and Israel) by coercion or violence but by rational and conscious agreement, with both parties relating on a horizontal plane of rights and obligations. The nation comes into being by a compact or covenant and is constituted by the parties to that brit, constantly renewed in each generation, and the resulting “nation” does not require a specific territory or a particular center— city or temple—in order to function. 10 These patterns of thought come from José Faur, with whom I have been privileged to correspond closely over the past two decades, but because we have our disagreements, it should not be taken that what I present here is meant to reproduce unquestionably his version of Jewish theology and history. Given the nature of this book on Dreyfus, I have suppressed many details, condensed and reshaped long intricate arguments, and reinterpreted certain key features of Faur’s ideas. I also integrate other points of view, such as the more mystical patterns of thought taught by Marc-Alain Ouaknin and the historical close-readings of Jacob Neusner. From Neusner, the way of approaching the foundational documents of rabbinical Judaism requires that each be seen to have its own specific historical and ideological sitz im leben, context, responses, implicit and explicit to intellectual, political and spiritual contexts, and driving and shaping patterns of organization. For example, the compilers and editors of the Mishnah, though firmly placed in the milieu of Israel’s crisis of loss of Temple, State, and Territory, nevertheless does not address the historical events — 26 —

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and personages, does not seek to work out a theology of salvation for individuals and nation, or seem to address any real history at all; instead, according to Neusner, the Mishnah, with its focus on sanctification and eschatology, creates a new kind of reality in which it confronts the “problem of locating the regular and orderly” which seems to have vanished from the Jewish world entirely by generating a vision of the world in which by “the reduction of events to rules forming compositions of regularity “creates meaning:” (Neusner, “Beyond Myth, After Apocalypse: The Mishnaic Conception of History” Response 24 [1984]: 26). Consequently, “Israel’s ongoing life would override disruptive one-time happenings” (Ibid., 27). This, of course, is only a part of the development of rabbinical Judaism, with the sages and teachers of the next four centuries adding to the Mishnah new dimensions of commentary (gemarah) that eventually emerge as two related but separate Talmuds, one of the Land of Israel and one of Babylonia, each showing how the paradigms of the book published under the editorship of Rabbi Judah the Prince could, on the one hand, be adjusted and attached to the historical conditions of Jewish life in exile, dispersion, and minority status in lands where Jews have at best conditional autonomy and at worst live in constant insecurity and fear of further exile and dispersion, if not annihilation; and on the other hand, connected to the textual histories and ideological concerns of the ancient books that constitute the Tanach (or Hebrew Bible) and to the ongoing enterprise of midrashic flowering out of various midrashic texts that integrate Scripture and everyday life under the conditions of the post 69-70 CE world. In a sense, such as we have tried already to begin showing, the world of Dreyfus resembles the Jewish world after the Destruction of the Temple, the fall of the independent or at least autonomous Jewish State, and the loss of the national archives and historical basis for the Law and its applications in the Land of Israel; Dreyfus is falsely accused, illegally convicted, and inhumanely sentenced to permanent exile and torture on Devil’s Island, a place out of geography and a time out of history. He is faced with the greatest problem of all, more than preservation of his life and his physical health; the prevention of a descent into the inner anarchy and chaos of a soul without sanity. Only in his writings—the letters back and forth to Lucie, granted all their obstacles to normative communications in known time and space; and the filling of cahiers, in whatever way they developed in the first three years and were expressed in those books Alfred chose to censor out of public scrutiny—does he find the several means of giving meaning to a pointless existence. As Neusner says of the Mishnah, “Once history’s components, one-time events, lose their distinctiveness, then history as a didactic intellectual construct, as a source of lessons and rules, also loses all pertinence.” Such a history is replaced by another constructed reality, one in which “[t]he world is composed of nature and supernature. The repetitious laws that count are those to be discovered in Heaven and, in Heaven; creation and counterpart, on earth” (Neusner, “Beyond Myth, After Apocalypse,” 29). Dreyfus constructs two major bodies of text to give order and regularity to a life deprived of freedom of physical movement and intellectual connectivity with the people who make French civilization: he establishes a totally new kind of love relationship with Lucie and together they mutually create a universe of metaphysical domestic love and loyalty that exists outside of any poetic or novelistic models; he compiles a collection of literary, philosophical and historical commentaries, mathematical and chemical exercises, and thousands of drawn variations on a few basic geometrical patterns that turn the static drawings into the dynamic pattern of a controlled evolutionary outburst of energy. Hence, we can cite Neusner further on the Mishnah and its immediate contexts of Tosefta and Midrash, not because the Dreyfus case is substantially the same, but because the Jewish urgency and model of midrashic expansion was available to the Jewish prisoner as pain, humiliation and frustration drove him on to his own until then unexplored cultural potentialities: “History in the ordinary sense of the word is not merely rejected or ignored. It is transformed.… People who know what history really consists of will then recognize that sages make history. They make history in the thoughts they think and the rules they lay down. In such a context as this, there is a place neither for history nor an end of history, nor will the Messiah find his services required” (Neusner, “Beyond Myth, After Apocalypse,” 32). What Alfred Dreyfus could do on his own, or with some interactive help from — 27 —

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between pshat and drasha was reversed, making it necessary to apply the oral drasha to the written pshat of Holy Scriptures; and then, as José Faur explains, “the new semantic fluctuations were projected onto the mental apparatus of the public.”11 For those in the community who became disconnected with their own traditions, whose familiarity with the sacred languages became at best fragmentary and vague, the implicit patterns of thinking and reading (in the higher sense of interpretation, conversation, questioning and challenging of the text) remained, but without full or even partial understanding, since it was built into the way parents interacted with children, children with their relatives, and families with their neighbours. In this way, as one reads what Alfred Dreyfus composed under duress and in various intensities of despair, one should not be surprised by the errors and heretical statements he seems to make, but one may be legitimately surprised that he still thinks in rabbinical patterns at all. While he may be wrong occasionally and sometimes make outrageously un-Jewish statements, use a discourse more appropriate to Christian theology than Jewish custom, and overlook obvious avenues of argumentation that would give him greater consolation than the secular books he reads and comments on, so long as Dreyfus’s intentions are right his letters and essays are worthy of attention. The essential principles are more often than not in accord with talmudic ethics and practice. For example, as Faur says, “Fundamental to rabbinic discourse is a compatibility with other modes of human knowledge and intelligence.” Dreyfus’s insistence on justice, truth and moral character are more important than his casual use of terms such as “calvary” or “martyrdom” or his refrain-like moaning about the weakness and fragility of human body and mind. Why? Because, as Faur says, the “distinctiveness of Israel lives in its legal and political systems.”12 How could he have known any of this when he was not trained in a Yeshiva and probably did not study the Law on his own? This is because from the moment he was born and in the most intimate moments of his childhood he still lived with, spoke to, and thus learned Lucie in her therapeutic help in letter-writing, could not resolve the problem of his case back in Paris; it could not bring about the revision of his original court martial nor ensure that a second trial would find him innocent. Those things had to be done mostly by others, people, as Neusner says of the rabbis who compiled Talmud and the whole body of commentaries on the Law that saw Israel survive into the modern world, “exegetes of a remarkably subtle capacity”(Ibid., 35). 11 Faur, The Horizontal Society, Section 2, Paragraph 9. 12 Faur, The Horizontal Society, Section 2, Concluding Reflections. — 28 —

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from his parents, siblings, his own; and still later from Lucie’s family he inculcated the domestic patterns of behavior implicit in Jewish homelife for thousands of years. He would respond to the clues and process them in his heart and mind as best he could. The process of reading and thinking, that is, of midrashing experience, goes beyond the pshat, which is the conventionalized (“accepted”) meaning of texts taught in Jewish schools, synagogues and homes, that is, readings of the Law as interpreted by rabbis for ordinary life.13 Beyond that come the processes of interpretation called ramez, midrash (proper), and sod. Each ramez, r-m-z (‫)רמז‬, is a clue or hint or trigger that leads to and thus suggests pertinent contexts and resonates with other analogous uses of the word, the image or the concept being confronted for study or action. A person thus finds him or herself in a new situation, a new context through which he or she must try to find meaning, choose how to behave or from which he or she seeks a real or psychological escape. With midrash, m-d-r-sh (‫)מדרש‬, the Jewish reader seeks to create a possible scenario, a probable image of what was meant and could be meant in terms of his or her own problem area, and this can be expressed as a little anecdote or essay, a riddle or metaphysical conceit, explained as a parable or fable, a mashol, and unravelled in a moral or nimshol.14 Then, although sometimes understood in mystical terms as the opening of secret things by the bursting forth of divine enlightenment, sod, s-o-d (‫ )סוד‬can also be the construction of a meaning hidden in the letters, sounds, and shapes of the written words through rearrangement, different vocalizations, substitutions of numbers for letters, expansion of the root consonants into anagrams, or the condensation of sentences into single words.15 Through sod, one does 13 Maurice-Ruben Hayoun cites various rabbinical authorities to show that the synagogue, though it already existed before the Fall of the Temple in 19 AD, came into its own during the Babylonian Exile and developed in the absence of the Temple cult. It is called in one place in the Talmud “un temple en miniature” (a miniature temple) (La lituguie juive [Paris: PUF/Que sais-je, 1994], 23). In another place, it is compared to a kindergarten (23), but this reminds us of Lloyd de Mause’s comment that culture itself is the sandbox of civilization. 14 Speaking of Taine, Bourget indicates the importance of the exemplary anecdote above that of the abstract phrase, thus pointing Dreyfus, who has read these psychological essays, towards his own cultural roots in midrashic rhetoric: “L’anecdote soigneusement choisie tient dans ses pages la place de la phrase abstraite et sans contour saissable” (Essais de psychologie contemporaine, 10th ed. [Paris: Alphonse Lemree, nd], 217). 15 Paul Bourget on the poet Baudelaire: “Un style de décadence est celui où l’unité du livre se décompose pour laisser la place à l’Independence de la page, où la page se décomposer pour laisser la place à l’indépendance de la phrase, et la phrase pour laisser la place à l’Independence du mot” (A decadent style — 29 —

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not attempt to recontextualize, allegorize, or demonstrate alternative interpretation in application or practice: one discovers through dialogue with the text within the hyperspace of discourse itself the meanings that could not have been conceived in other historical times and other geographical places, or under completely different cultural conditions— but which were nonetheless always there in the originary moment of inscription. Such meanings or decisions cannot be transferred to other persons, times or places but have to be judged within the very crisis in which they are needed.

is one in which the unity of the book is decomposed to allow a space for the independence of the page, where the page decomposes itself to allow the Independence of the phrase, and the phrase to allow a space for the independence of the word) (Essais de psychologie contemporaine, 25). — 30 —

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Part 1: Random Words of a Solitary Man16

But the history of our thought is the most subtle part of that of our life, and whoever has ever tried to trace the development of his own mind must have found that it is as difficult a task as reading another man’s soul. —Ernest Dimnet17 In October of 1898, Alfred Dreyfus began the third cahier in the series of what are now his fourteen surviving workbooks from Devil’s Island. In this collection of materials, he takes a somewhat new tack, with a heavy concentration of essays on the men and women and the themes connected to the French Revolution of 1789. Among such often relatively lengthy essays, he intersperses a few other compositions, sometimes as brief essays on subjects already covered in the first two cahiers and sometimes as small citations of sayings by himself and others to sum up his position thus far regarding the new developments in his intellectual and emotional understanding of the world and the continuing distress at the lack of advancement in the pursuit of his release from prison and rehabilitation as a loyal officer in the French Army. When he examines the power of Napoleon’s eloquence or the rhetorical force of Danton’s ability to control the National Assembly, Dreyfus seems to be imagining himself in heroic positions, participating in the revolution itself and helping to frame and then instititionalize its highest ideals of Justice and Truth. He has his doubts about the soaring ambitions of great leaders, such as Napoleon, but he seems to identify 16 When he can finally give this title to himself, and put a name to this self-constructed persona of the man alone, Dreyfus has reached a point where he is ready to face up squarely to his circumstances, something he has not been able to do from the moment when the “self-conscious man in a state of panic” had been accused of treason and arrested. As Michael Burns puts it, “Everything about Alfred Dreyfus’s personality ill prepared him for that moment: his stiff military bearing and awkward manner; his monotone voice and inability to express himself without sounding detached, calculated, or self-possessed; and, perhaps most important, his discomfort in the presence of strangers, a timidity always hidden behind a rigid exterior” (Dreyfus: A Family Affair, 1789-1945, [New York: HarperCollins, 1991] 121). 17 Ernest Dimnet, Paul Bourget (London: Constable and Co., 1913), Chapter III. — 31 —

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with the struggles such men, and perhaps most of all those that Danton went through. Dreyfus too hopes that history will eventually be fair to him, first in soon proving his innocence from the crimes brought against him, and in the long run of recognizing and honoring his own heroic endurance of the unmerited punishments inflicted on him and his family. “I believe,” he writes at one point, “Danton will grow still further in the eyes of more impartial students of the French Revolution.”18 Then he turns to a more ambiguous figure of those heady days of the 1790s, Robespierre, who, though not a born orator, had an “eloquence [that] was cold, very laborious, very stiff,”19 using virtually the same words that later witnesses and newspaper reporters at Rennes, hostile and friendly, would use to describe Dreyfus’s own efforts to speak in his own defence and to control the rage within him.20 Summing up the character and personality of this firebrand of the Revolution, Dreyfus seems at the same time to condemn him and also express a wish to be in a position among the good officers to have helped protect the revolutionary principles from such a madman: The ambiguity lies not just in the historical facts of Robespierre’s role in the Revolution, and the way that it has been depicted and evaluated by historians, but also in the way Dreyfus attempts to write a fair account of the man and thus to reconcile his good qualities with his bad: Robespierre was a sentimentalist, a mystic, but one who related to the whole party and who wept at the cruelties committed by his enemies in this regard and those who obliged him to act. He was a dangerous maniac. For Dreyfus knew that he too was regarded as subversive to the state—and sometimes wrote home that had he himself encountered another man accused of the same crimes as he had been, the temptation would have been to howl against him as the crowds did when Dreyfus 18 Cahier 3, Fo14. All citations from the cahiers are taken from the transcribed pages in Cahiers de l’ile du Diable, ed. Pierrette Tirlais (Paris: Editions Artulis, 2009). 19 Cahier 3, Fo21. 20 Mathieu Dreyfus described his brother’s appearance at the second court martial in Rennes, the first time he or anyone of the family had seen Alfred in five years: “Sa faiblesse physique, l’émotion, ne trahiront-elles pas sa volonée” (His feeble physique and emotion, would they not betray his will?) (cited in Cahm, L’Affaire Dreyfus, 204) and Maurice Barrès spoke of him as a “guenille humaine” (a human ragdoll) (Ibid., 205). — 32 —

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rode through France on his way to exile—and he feared constantly that the charge that he was insane would prove all too true. For a brief while after this, Dreyfus turns his attention to an English politician, Sir William Pitt.21 What strikes him in regard to this able statesman is more than the power of his eloquence and his firmness in regard to principles, but also the way young William was aided by his father, Pitt the elder, Lord Chatham; a cooperation Alfred Dreyfus could now hope would obtain between himself and his brother Mathieu. In the course of the essay, however, the opening enthusiasm for Pitt grows cool and turns into near despair, as Dreyfus narrates the trajectory of the Englishman’s political career With tenacity and admirable courage, Pitt began the work and neither abusive dealings nor sinecures found favor in him. William Pitt was the first head of government who made the commercial system of the nation the principal object of his policy. This was the apogee of Pitt’s political career. The French Revolution broke out. Regicide was announced. Pitt threw himself into opposition against France and of all the accumulated property from his government’s first works, there remained nothing. Good men can, in the confusing swirl of history, reach wrong decisions, or even find poor policies imposed on them, so that their own careers and reputations suffer, or as Marc Antony might have said at the funeral of Julius Caesar, “The evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones.” Dreyfus, who worries about honor and reputation, longs for opportunities to prove himself, and shares the grief that engulfs the men he admires. Another person whom he admires, this time in the realm of philosophy, is Immanuel Kant, praising the German’s character and achievement.22 “Even after the evolution of ideas modified the absolutism of the last conception. Kant’s action was decisive in the history of human thought.” 21 Cahier 3, Fo22. 22 Cahier 3, Fo22 Vo. — 33 —

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In particular, Dreyfus says, probably again expressing a secret wish of his own: He had, in my view, seized with an unquestioned freshness the distinction between knowledge properly scientific and this which one may call philosophy, and above all possessed the esteem of moral life [emphasis added by Dreyfus]. The implication is drawn out on the back of this folio, where the author adds: “Kant’s morality is superior to the whole of his logic and to all his intellectual philosophy,” a statement that leads to a more general maxim, wherein Dreyfus seems to be trying to bolster his own morale under trying circumstances, i.e., to give himself the courage to soldier on in the cause of reason even when the whole world seems to have gone mad around him: Sometimes we deify individual reason when it seeks to dress up a system of life. Well enough, but we find something better. With nothing better, we must follow reason, even if it goes against ourself. The very halting expression and awkward syntax shows a man struggling to shape thoughts that are tangled in pain and humiliation. After a few false starts on other themes, such as an essay on Rousseau that cannot even extend to complete its first sentence,23 Dreyfus segues into a long series of accounts of the Mongol Empire and French imperial adventures in India.24 It is most likely that there are two primary motives for these sustained historical accounts: first and most obvious, as a military man, he is interested in the colonial wars in which France engaged herself; second, given his desire to understand the workings of governments and leading figures in political and military life, he follows the careers of various generals and kings, diplomats and merchant adventurers. Those reasons not being enough, though, it is possible to see a third, for with men such as Dupleix and La Bourbonnais, Dreyfus 23 Cahier 3, Fo24. 24 Cahier 3, Fo26, Fo26 Vo, Fo27 Vo, Fo28, Fo28 Vo, Fo30, Fo31. — 34 —

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could also indulge his meditations on the way strong wills collide with the vagaries of history, and the odd conjunction of forces stemming from diverse political systems and personality types. Fourth, I cannot but suspect that in just writing out the exotic names of people and places in the far-off lands of India and Central Asia, Dreyfus soothed his pains and could dream again like a small boy reading aloud the Arabian Nights. Then Dreyfus turns to thoughts on education,25 a major theme in his letters to Lucie as well, where he is specifically concerned with the upbringing of his son and daughter, but in the cahiers, he can reflect theoretically both on the content and methods of schooling and recall fleetingly his own youthful experiences. Even when he seems to be arguing in a purely abstract way, it seems evident that he is also always thinking of his own children and his own childhood. The goal of all education, he proclaims, is to make boys into moral men, a claim that here, as almost always in his little essays, excludes girls, whose education he only very rarely touches upon. The instructions Dreyfus wishes to see put into effect should be both by professional teachers at all levels, from primary through secondary schools through to great universities, and by parents and other guardians in the informal formation of a child’s moral character: “one must never omit giving him … the moral sentiment, inflexible and unquestioned.” Harsh as this discipline sounds to our contemporary more tolerant and liberal ears, Dreyfus’s strict views accord with most late nineteenthcentury thinking on education—as well as in most matters of social control—not least because of his soldierly perspective. But such strict views and such a felt need for the individual to be firmly in control of himself arise from the specific conditions in which he finds himself In the next little essay on history,26 which is shorter and more amorphous than many we have noted in the first two cahiers, Dreyfus insists that history is not only the most moving of all studies, but also the most moral: I know of no greater response, in the experiences which sometimes make one despair at the baseness of 25 Cahier 3, Fo32, Vo. 26 Cahier 3, Fo33 Vo. — 35 —

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the human spirit, I know of no greater response than work. Plunged into a subject which moves me, I forget everything, earth and air, to absorb myself wholly, heart and soul. The impersonal “one” of his passive construction should be read as the “I” of the despairing Alfred Dreyfus. History builds and strengthens his character in two ways: it teaches how others, great men, against great and sometimes unimaginable adversity, have fought their way through to influence the course of history and at the same time gain mastery over their passions and themselves; and it engages his attention, so that he can momentarily forget the horrible torments of his life, in exile, day and night. No better historian in these regards than Jules Michelet: When one reads Michelet, it seems that one hears cries of joy, of pain, of love, of hate, of hope, of disgust, as he emits in examining official documents that can seem to write his history. What a lyrical and trembling soul is the soul of Michelet. To anyone who reads Dreyfus’s own writings, surely he or she can hear those same cries, if not always sharp and distinct, at least implicit in whatever he inscribes on the pages of his letters home and his workbooks. Thus immediately after this little essay in praise of Michelet, Dreyfus attempts a translation of Shakespeare’s Othello,27 where the Moorish general screams out in jealous agony over the alleged infidelities of his wife Desdemona. What the actual tragic verses say is: I would have been happy had the whole camp, down to the least pioneer, tasted her charming body, if I had known nothing of it. Dreyfus’s English version based on his reading of someone’s French version is nearly correct:

27 Cahier 3, Fo34, Vo, Fo 35. — 36 —

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I have been [sic] happy if the General Camp Pione[e]rs all had [tasted] her sweet body: so I had nothing known. The important thing is why he chose this passage, this cri du cœur of an enraged outsider to Venetian romantic discourses. One might guess that Dreyfus was never fearful of Lucie having taken a lover back in Paris, but that he longed intensely for her body, something he only obliquely and hesitantly writes of in his letters, where he speaks in hints of embraces and kisses. More likely, even if it is more speculative, he is writing through the metaphysical language that he and she had developed: in their epistles in which she is manifest as his embodiment of Truth and Light, as his personal Shekhina, Alfred fears that the highest ideals she represents have been perverted by the same mysterious powers that he originally thought were mistakenly led astray through a judicial error but that he comes to suspect are a stronger and more devious force of corruption. Some more explicit hints of such a viewpoint emerge in the next little essay on Oliver Madox Brown, a minor English painter and novelist. Though it would have been nice for him to discuss the relationship between painting and literature, the focus seems to be on the character of the young man, and on his difficult childhood, a life cut off at the tender age of nineteen. “The child who lived little, found, however,” explains Dreyfus, “the means to leave an indelible impression of force and power.” This very Romantic wunderkind also displayed something in his personality that could be applied to Dreyfus:28 “The heredity of the imagination and nervous energy seems very marked in them,” meaning both the boy Oliver and his father, “the great idealist painter,” as well as his grandfather, the “epic physician.” If Dreyfus thought he had inherited from his parents and grandparents a disposition to hypersensitivity, he also writes about himself as having a poetic imagination along with his propensities to scientific method and logical thinking.29 When children 28 In fact, in the 1890s, all of France and probably all of Europe was in a state of nervous worries over the epidemic of anarchist terrorism and the imminence of revolution and war; on this “état de nevrosité permanente,” see Cahm, L’Affaire Dreyfus, 32. 29 Bourget writes of Stendhal that he had a vigorous temperament matched with a psychological imagination, well-prepared to represent still states of the soul (Essais de psychologie contemporaine, 270). For Dreyfus, we might say he had a rigorous training in the natural sciences and mathematics but a lively interest in the arts and psychology, and that he mediates between them by his own propensity to drawing doodles, and his discovery in himself of a mysterious kabbalistic imagination. — 37 —

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display such characteristics before they are mature enough to articulate them into objects of art worthy of their genius, they are often seen as “precious” and their talents taken to be “a naïve product of imitation and assimilation.” In such a statement, I seem to hear Dreyfus the child painfully aware that his own special qualities of mind are misunderstood by those around him; then, as he grows through adolescence and seems to be at last gaining the distinctions he deserves in the lycée and in the Army—high marks in science and then in the elite training school followed by a rapid advancement through the military ranks—when the sudden charge of treason blasts into his life, the charge of treason and his arrest, he is thrown back into a kind of infantile despair and rage, and then we can hear the earlier infantile cries re-emerging. The only way to reconstitute Dreyfus’s character unquestionably would be if we had some hard evidence of his childhood experiences, some little diary, some early letters from his parents or siblings, or some private recollections from Lucie of conversations she may have had with Alfred in which he told her his memories. Lacking those, we have to rely on controlled intuition, shaped by the subtlety of midrashic techniques of enhancement. In the next essay, Dreyfus returns to his meditations on persons and events of the Revolution of 1789 and slides from there into considerations of the American Revolution. In these seemingly general reflections on political matters, we will abstract some lines that may be rich in implications of another kind. In these kind of essays, when we can track down the anecdotes and speeches he cites, it is manifest that Dreyfus does more than paraphrase a single source that he happened to have available at the time, even if one were to recognize that he never copies slavishly but always reads with a critical eye. For example, in his discussion of Revolutionary heroes, though his main source tends to be Jules Michelet and occasionally Augustin Thierry,30 he imagines 30 Augustin Thierry, Preface to Letters on the History of France (1820) in Fritz Stern, ed., The Varieties of History from Voltaire to the Present (Cleveland, OH: Meridian Book/The World Publishing Company, 1964 [1956]). “There is no escaping the fact that, as concerns the history of France prior to the seventeenth century, public conviction, if I may use the expression, must be remolded from the bottom up. The various elements that constitute this conviction are either radically wrong or, at least, vitiated by some falsehoods” (65); and what is needed is a “re-education” based on the generals experience of the upheavals of the Revolution of 1789 and similar events—“scores of rebellions and conquests, of the dismemberment of empires, of the fall and restoration of monarchies, of popular revolutions and the consequent reactions” (66)—so that — 38 —

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things recalled from memory either of books read in school or from the testimony of the older relatives and teachers he knew in early childhood.31 This closely follows the remarks Michelet makes in the Introduction to Le peuple: I have made this book of myself, of my life, and of my heart. It is the fruit of my experience, rather than of my research. I have derived it from my observation, and of my intercourse with friends and neighbours; I have gleaned it from the highway: fortune loves to favour him who ever follows the self-same thought. Lastly I have found it, above all, in the reminiscences of my youth. To know the life of the people, their toils and sufferings, I had but to interrogate my memory.32 Michelet thus places, above archival documents, the voice of the people themselves, and as he says, “If one be not able to converse with Beranger, Lamennais, or Lamartine, we must go into the fields and chat with a peasant.”33 He also gives more credit to the men and women in the workshops and the streets than to those in drawing rooms and salons, and he calls these voices “living documents,” in the same way we today would describe the informants whose words are collected as oral history. In addition, Michelet does more than supplement or expand normal academic history to include those persons whose experiences are either overlooked altogether or abstracted to vague groups, such as classes and mobs; he looks within himself as the nearest, most trustworthy guide into what Lloyd de Maus calls “the emotional life of nations,” but in The People is described as “the fantastic, the violent, the whimsical, the exceptional”—that is, the inner life of humanity and its constituent cultures and civilizations. smoothed out propaganda does not represent the truth any longer. Like Michelet, too, Dreyfus challenges authorities based on the scientific method outlined by Claude Bernard, and insists on a sophisticated ability to doubt what is deemed to be “factual:” without submission of the data to comparative testing and analysis. (Bernard’s magnum opus which Dreyfus praises will be further discussed below.) 31 Cahier 3, Fo37 Vo. 32 Jules Michelet, “Introduction,” The People (24 January 1846) in Fritz Stern, ed., The Varieties of History, 109. 33 Michelet, The People, 100. — 39 —

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But the person referred to in this essay is probably the old man described by Ernest Renan in his Souvenirs d’enfance et de jeunnesse, a recollection Renan claims he took from the conversations he had with his mother.34 By melding together several sources of this kind, Dreyfus can add layers of textuality to his essays, in particular suggesting in the strata of personal reminiscence and rabbinical morality words and images that do not break through the surface of his narrative or commentary. In regard both to the French and the American Revolutions, and with the contextualization in the ideas, personalities and external forces pressing in on the main events and characters, Dreyfus has a tendency to sympathise with men and women who find themselves fighting an extra burden of prejudice, who find that their own best efforts are stymied by neglect or contempt from others who should be supporting them, and whose inner weaknesses emerge at a time when they should shine by the bravery and insight they have displayed in the past. Dreyfus also shows his desire to arrive at finding balanced conclusions, showing that some good always resides in whichever side seem to gain victory, even if the effects of their actions or failure to act result in the abandonment of an army they should have protected, the loss of territory or control to an enemy whose aims ensure the worst of futures to the nations they come to govern, and the overly harsh judgment against officers and officials who are scapegoated for the imperfections of sovereigns and statesmen who should have known better.35 He can sympathise as much with the American militias fighting against almost unimaginable odds, until aided by the late arrival of French support, as with the British troops shuttled about by incompetent generals and sadly underpaid by uninterested parliamentarians in London. One of the historical persons whom Dreyfus focuses on over several folios is Anne Robert Jacques Turgot,36 a man whose career shows how 34 Ernest Renan, Souvenirs d’enfance et de jeunnesse, ed. Laudice Retat (Paris: GF Flammarion, 1973; repr. 2002), 93-96. 35 Faur: “The imperfections in the world are not the effect of a subaltern god as per Gnostic theology, but the consequence of human failure to realize the ‘image of God’ (Elohim) within…. In Scripture ‘God’ is existentially always ‘in the making’…:”(The Horizontal Society, Section 1, Paragraph 2). 36 Cahier 3, Fo42, Fo42 Vo, Fo43. Turgot (1727-1781) was comptroller-general under Louis XVI from 1774 to 1776. After the Flour Wars broke out in 1775, Turgot issued his “Six Edicts” the next year, which among other things dissolved the guild system and eliminated the corvée. The king attempted to protect his minister from the rest of the landed interests in court and country — 40 —

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brilliance and loyalty can be crushed by both the ungrateful treatment by a monarchy that cannot accept constructive criticism and the inexorable forces of history that mean all the real reforms in taxation and internal trade policies set in place by this loyal aristocratic civil servant could never have deterred the revolution or opened up a career path beyond the limited parameters allowed to him. Like Dreyfus himself, Turgot’s life is filled with circumstances that would only permit a certain degree of success before the people he had to deal with shut down his efforts, insulting his character, and sending him into a form of exile, a forced retreat into private retirement after his brilliant career in public life. Turgot, firm to the end, waited until he was kicked out [of office]. He didn’t have to wait too long. Turgot retired and ended his career with an honorable and sad letter to the king: “My whole desire, Sire, is that you could believe that I have seen power, and that I have shown you its chimerical dangers. I wish that the times do not prove me correct. Turgot died in 1781. He never saw the Revolution. He had a presentiment; he had not been able to prevent it. The sadness of the rejected aristocrat is Dreyfus’s as well. Behind it perhaps stands the saying of Rabbi Shemayah in the Pirqe Avot: “Love work, hate lordship, and seek no intimacy with the ruling power” (I.11). A few folios away, Dreyfus cites a passage from Michelet to give more explicit sense of why he felt sad along with Turgot, a remark that he admires for the way the historian also catches the spirit of the times—“the emotion produced in the country”—in which the Minister of Finance fell from power, the people recalling their exhilaration when the “Six Edicts” were published: It was the Marseilleise of wheat Issued on the very eve of sowing, it decreed: “Sow! You are sure of selling. From now, you sell everywhere.” but was unable to stand up against Marie Antoinette, who acted as spokesperson for Turgot’s opponents. — 41 —

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The plough took wing and the oxen seemed to wake up again. Then, after several short essays on Renan’s Hymn to Athena, Shakespeare’s Richard III, Montesquieu’s Persian Letters and Spirit of Laws and Rousseau’s Emile, Dreyfus comes to one of the major essays in Cahier 3 dealing with the subject of education.37 This final composition in the workbook, insofar as we can read it, since some of the last words are covered over by drawings, he begins with a series of maxims linking intelligence and character-formation, such as: “Intelligence is nothing if it is not joined to character” and “It is by character that one imposes on and dominates the most critical situations.” In order to form such a moral character, “knowledge” is not sufficient because it is important to add the quality of “judgment,” and it is this judgment which a good teacher, and good system of education need to discover, enhance, and show how to apply.38 It is by this instruction that we learn to love both respect for reason and the seriousness of life. It is necessary that the child takes from the hand of the educator a moral sentiment, so as to be prepared for all experiences, and that life can then drive over him without altering him. It is not an education of facts or a catechism of rote answers in right 37 Cahier 3, Fo50 Vo. 38 On the difference between Jewish and Christian obedience to the Law, see Sarah Kofman, Le mépris des Juifs: Nietzsche, les Juifs, l’antisémitisme (Paris: Galilée, 1994): “…Nietzsche souligne que la différence entre le Grec et le Juif (et également le paulinien) est que le premier, par exemple Philon, admet que le péché est l’abandon conscient du noûs à la qualité mauvaise du corporel, tandis que pour les seconds, il y a une faute religieuse inhérente à l’homme sans qu’il en ait connaissance ni volonté. La résistance de l’homme intérieur, simplement grâce à la connaissance de la Loi et à la joie qu’ íl y trouve, ne suffit pas, reste totalement impuissante. Sainte Paul n’a pas pense comme les Grecs que le savoir et l’appréciation des valeurs suffisaient à rendre la volonté effective” “…Nietzsche emphasized that the difference between a Greek and a Jew (and equally a Paulist [i.e., a Christian]) is that the first, for example Philo, admits that sin is the conscious abandonment of noûs [mind] to the evil nature of the body, while to the second ones, sin is an inherent religious fault in men of which they have no awareness or control over. The resistance of the interior man, simply thanks to his knowledge of the Law and the joy he takes in it, does not suffice, and thus remains impotent. St Paul did not think like the Greeks that knowledge and practice of the [Stoic] virtues makes the will effective.” (35n3). (To know the Law is not enough; it must be understood through interpretation—and the interpretative act includes application, through adjusting the original circumstances of its promulgation to the requirements of the present in which the Jew lives and works.) — 42 —

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thinking that Dreyfus sets out here, but a vital relationship between a master, who, like a father, guides and inculcates in a young person by high moral example the basic principles of reason and respect: life is a serious business and adversity when it comes will roll over39 a man who has not fortified his soul. As he had already written in relation to Rousseau and Montaigne, “the acquisition of ‘knowledge’ tends to take education to the place which he holds above all, the formation of judgment and character.” Rabbi Nechunya, son of Hakkanah, said, Whoso receives upon himself the yoke of the Torah, from him the yoke of the kingdom and the yoke of worldly care will be removed; but whoso breaks off from him the yoke of the Torah, upon him will be laid the yoke of the kingdom and the yoke of worldly care. (Pirqe Avot, III.7) Replace Torah by Judgment, and justice40 and freedom will be the reward; for the kingdom read the powers of the state and for worldly care read exile and incarceration.41 The fourth cahier, written in less than two weeks that begin at the end of October and go to 11 November 1898, shows us a Dreyfus well into his stride on historical and moral topics. Among the new subjects he introduces in this workbook is his love for Lucretius’s De natura rerum,42 a classical text demonstrating the marriage of imagination and reason, art and science, and the creation of a sustained narrative of the creation

39 In other words, like a juggernaut. 40 Jean Jaurès calls Justice the “étincelle divine, qui suffira à rallumner tous les soleils” (the divine spark which suffers all the suns to light themselves from it) in La question religieuse et le socialisme; cited in Jaurès, Rallumer tous les soleils, ed. Jean-Pierre Roux (Paris: Omnibus, 2006). 41 Kofman explicates the Jewish condition under the duress of exile and dispersion, always dwelling as strangers in a strange land, and their safety and security never stable: “ … face à une nouvelle situation historique où ils risquaient de disparaît comme peuple, de perdre leur autonomie, ils préfèrent, d’une manière délibérée, être à tout prix: ce prix fut celui de renversement des évaluations. Leur intelligence, renforcé par la situation périlleuse où ils se trouvaient, comprit qu’ils pouvaient tirer parti des évaluations des décadents” “…faced with a new historical situation where they risked disappearing as a people altogether, of losing their autonomy, they preferred, very deliberately, to continue to exist at any cost, even if the cost were the reversal of the way others valued them. Their intelligence, reinforced by the dangerous circumstances they found themselves in, made them understand that they could take part [in history] only as decadent beings” (Le mépris des Juifs, 87-88). 42 Cahier 4, Fo 4. — 43 —

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and maintenance of the world without the need for revelation. 43 Not only does Dreyfus admire the poem, he also praises the man who wrote it, seeing in him the model of a historical figure who has achieved much and yet has also greatly suffered. With an impressionable soul of a poet, Lucretius had experienced more than anyone else of the terrors of human destiny [les terreurs de la destinée humaine]. He had found bitterness at the bottom of all voluptuousness, death at the bottom of everything—he threw himself at the foot of altars, and these altars remained deaf to his appeals. And when finally the philosophical notion of the world took possession of his soul, he embraced the new faith with all the ardor of a child, and as nature had endowed him with the gift of immortal song, he launched into the world the cry of deliverance, into the sky the cry of anger and defiance. Without a doubt, when we study these lines, we realize that Dreyfus must have felt the same way himself, hoping that the consolation of rational philosophy would come to him, and that his appeals to the powers-that-be in Paris, at the altars of justice, would no longer be met with a deafening silence—and he would have wished that he too, like the Roman poet, could shout his anger and defiance to the sky (un cri de délivrance, au ciel un cri de colère et de défi). Similarly, in a brief piece on Condorcet, it is possible for readers to extrapolate those missing features of Dreyfus’s personality and character the modern historians lament not having information on. In 1794 while in prison, Condorcet wrote Sketch of an Historical Portrait of the Progress of 43 By distinguishing between skeptics, who deny that there is certainty in any facts or opinions about them, and doubters, who keep questioning the facts and opinions against the certainties of mathematics and logic, Claude Bernard prepares the ground for Dreyfus’s own approach to a rigorous method that can cover all facets of reality, from chemistry and physics through technology and inventions, to art, history and literature. Says Bernard: “Nous pouvons suivre notre sentiment et notre idée, donner carrière à notre imagination, pourvu que toutes nos idées ne soient que des prétextes à instituer des experiences nouvelles qui poussent nous fournir des faits probants ou inattendus et féconds” (We can follow our feelings and our ideas, give free rein to our imagination, provided that all our ideas are only pretexts to do new experiments that allow us to have conclusive, unexpected or fertile facts) (Méthod, 53). — 44 —

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the Human Mind, a volume Dreyfus admires as a model of what someone in adversity might achieve, “a beautiful dream of an honest man” (le beau rêve d’un honnête homme). But also the prisoner writing his own cahiers knows all too well: arta longa, vita breva, “So much work in a short life.”44 The content of the Sketch to be sure is of interest, “a theory of progress unknown to Antiquity and to the Middle Ages,” but Dreyfus longs for the opportunity to make his sketches known to the world. More ambiguous, however, are Dreyfus’s feelings about Napoleon Bonaparte, because he believed, taking the phrase from Hippolyte Taine, that this great man “was egotism served by Genius, and one of the greatest of humanity,”45 and yet, as he will show time and again in his subsequent discussions, the ambitious Emperor was a danger to the people of France and to all of Europe. More developed on this page is his study of Souvorof, that is, Alexandr Vasilevich Suvorov (1730-1800), who, though an enemy of France, was a great soldier and instructor of military tactics at the basic level, and who at the age of seventy showed how a great man should behave in defeat. Can we not therefore suspect that Dreyfus has the traditional Jewish tendency to side with those beaten down by the world and yet who preserve their dignity and integrity to the end, rather than those who rise to untoward heights at the expense of multitudes of nations and of individual men.46 Thus he, appropriately, cites some lines from Virgil’s Georgics before beginning a major essay on Taine.

44 Walther and Metzger cite one of Vincent van Gogh’s letters: “I have only one belief, one strength: work. All that kept me going was the immense task I assigned myself.” They then paraphrase from Emile Zola’s Speech to You People: “Zola placed programmatic value on the idea of a regular quota of work for its own sake” (Vincent van Gogh: The Complete Paintings, trans. Michael Hulse. Köln [London: Taschen Books, 1990], 151). 45 Cahier 4, Fo 7. 46 André Gide recalls: “Edouard Simon was a Jew; but, except perhaps for his features, his racial characteristics could not, I think, have been less marked.… His day was spent in visits to the poor, interviews and engagements of various sorts. It was less, I think, the love of individual men that actuated him than the love of humanity at large and the still more abstract love of justice. His charity had the appearance of a social duty; and this is really a very Jewish trait” (If It Die…, trans. Dorothy Bussy [London: Secker & Warburg, 1951 (1950)], 205-206; originally Si le grain ne meurt, 1920). Gide correctly apprehends the essence of tsedakah, charity in the sense of a rabbinical mitzvah, acts of lovingkindness performed because they are part of the Law and understood as a means to tikkun ha’olam, not as purely spontaneous acts of individual grace. Jews are reminded often and insistently that they were once slaves in Egypt and have been strangers in a strange land, and hence to treat others as they wished to have been treated. However, in the doing of mitzvot, the Jew does not dully fulfill a legal obligation; a mitzvot, he enjoys this work (avodah) on behalf of God and believes that God in turn takes great joy in observing the good deed performed. — 45 —

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Felix, qui potuit rerum cognoscre causas, Atque metus omnes et inexorabile fatum Subjecit pedibus, strepitumque Acherontis avari Fortunatus et ille, deos qui novit agrestes, Panaque, Sylvanumque secum, Nymphasque sorores. He is happy who has been able to learn the causes of things and has set under his feet all fear, unrelenting fate and the noise of greedy Acheron. And he is also happy who knows the woodland gods, Pan and old Sylvanis, and the sister Nymphs. Virgil, too, admires the same kind of rational verse as Dreyfus did in Lucretius, and sees in this mode of imaginative writing the blend of science and poetry, and can thus face stoically the worst that the world has to throw at a man. The pastoral idyll may not be exactly what the prisoner dreams of, but it easily translates into his own nostalgic dream of returning to Lucie and the children and once more resuming his military career. In the essay on Taine,47 the focus is on the merits of his History of English Literature, with an emphasis on his insistence on facts and on writing in smooth style. Nevertheless, there is an incitement to contradiction in Taine: the qualities of an historian were not always fully met in his work, and yet what Taine teaches most importantly is that: Behind the actions of man, there is a man, and behind the visible man who acts, there is an interior man who thinks and wills. Because of this psychological approach, though it remains incomplete, Taine sees man as “[a] living being in which there is made a representation of things, this representation becoming an idea, this idea determining the will and finally becoming a decision.” Such a concatenation of rational steps at first seems to please Dreyfus. However, as he follows through in his Taine’s thinking, he sees that the processes by which man is differentiated from man are fraught with 47 Cahier 4, Fo 8. — 46 —

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dangers: the differences exposed are those of race, milieu and “the point where one has arrived at an epoch” (le point où on est arrive à l’époque), which would seem to refer to the stage of maturity of an individual more than evolution of a nation or a species. By race, Taine means, as other nineteenth-century thinkers did, something that included the idea of biological species but also a confusing mixture of nationality, language, and religion; one could speak of a an extended family as a race and thus of people who migrate from Europe to America as founding a new race because of the different attitudes and institutions they found. Taine sees the English race as not the same as the French, at the same time as he differentiates Europeans from Africans and Asians. Considering that, Dreyfus is where he is because of racial prejudice, or one might say religious bigotry, because the captain was by ancestry48 considered a liar and a traitor and because he belonged to the descendents of those who had killed Christ and would always be held to account. At this point, Dreyfus does not seem aware of the full implications of these muddled features of nineteenth-century racial theory, but does feel compelled to add to Taine’s threefold paradigm a fourth element, “something which Taine possessed, the individual role, the role of the artist, the guardian of the individual.” Because Taine did not list poetic tendencies among the qualities to be measured when studying the history of a nation’s culture, he was probably not aware that he possessed this quality. If he was not aware of it, it was a part of his mind that was not consciously aware of itself; that is, the unconscious. The ideas and memories which do not play a conscious role in a person’s thinking despite being active components, because they have never come to the surface of awareness as passions, fears, anxieties, and other organic impulses, or as repressed desires and hates, are consequently not recognized at all as shaping, driving, and censoring all the rest of the mind’s conscious ego. Dreyfus fears that his own mind will become detached, that he will be alienated from his self, that is, that most of his rational self will be lost in the dark hole of his madness and that he will say and do things he cannot control because some other part of his personality has taken possession of his soul. This nervous tendency, as he writes to Lucie, and as she already knows through experience, has 48 See, in addition to Lombroso’s typology of criminal races, casts and families, Emile Zola, Doctor Pascal (1893), trans. Vladimir Kean (London: Elek Books, Bestseller Library, 1957). — 47 —

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been there in him since childhood, and under the stresses and agony of his tormented life in prison have been made worse, hence his outbursts of rage, his periods of deep depression, his formidable need to talk out his pains, his efforts to write, figure and draw things that provide a rational frame and substance for his mind.49 Part of the self-applied therapy can be seen in the mutual support system Alfred and Lucie established over the years in their epistolary communications, sometimes reaching but never sustaining a metaphysical or mystical dimension of love. Another part appears in the obsessive writing, working out of formulas and doodling of non-representational pictures. Hence the long disquisitions of history, politics, aesthetics, philosophy, science, and dozens of other topics Dreyfus writes out in the cahiers for himself. Hence the importance of the literary citations in Latin, Italian, and other languages,50 where someone else’s words express what Dreyfus cannot bring himself to say openly. These oblique and sub rosa ways of communicating, encoding, and signalling by indirection sometimes involve putting on a grotesque mask, the image of precisely what the anti-Semites believe about the Jew, in order to put them off guard and devalue the language of hate or overturn it, appropriate it, and midrash history into new internalised experiences.51 In an essay entitled “The Words of Saint-Simon on Racine,”52 Dreyfus concludes with this motto and self-admonition:

49 Ouaknin points out that in Lurianic Kabbalah there are two specific processes in tikkun: one is the gathering up of all the divine sparks scattered after the breaking (shevira) of vessels and the shattered fragments of those vases in which the energy was being transported into the world of husks (klippot) in the primary act of tsimtsum (condensation); and in the second process, relevant to the situation of Dreyfus as a metaphor of his condition, was the reassembling or rehabilitation “des âmes saintes emprisonnées dans les ‘écorces’ et soumises à l’Anti-Adam” (of the saintly souls imprisoned in the ‘husks’ and under the control of the Anti-Adam) (Ouvertures hassidiques, 37). 50 Faur argues that in Jewish tradition multilingualism is not a mere decoration of style but an intrinsic means of articulating the road to Truth. In the Greek traditions, however, “[g]iven that speech is nothing more than a conglomerate of certain phonetic patterns, our ‘truth’ cannot possibly be expressed in a different language. By implication, those speaking a different language are inferior, exhibiting lesser standards of thought and humanity.” For Jews, on the other hand, the more languages the better; and each language is a “voicing” in a new, expansive way of that dynamic truth (The Horizontal Society, Section 1, Paragraph 2). 51 Kofman: “[The Jews] triomphèrent du monde en le dévalorisant…. Les Juifs, eux, volontairement, donnèrent l’illusion d’être de faibles, en prirent le masque pour pouvoir demeurer en vie…” (Le mépris des Juifs, 88). Unfortunately, the joke does not always work, and the Jew, like Dreyfus, finds his life twisted and turned by external forces, his feebleness a real weakness that he can barely overcome. 52 Cahier 4, Fo 12. — 48 —

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Thus all our dignity consists of thought. It is that which must comfort us, not space or duration. Let us labor to think well. But good intentions are not enough, and one cannot simply will oneself into rational thought and an effective style of writing. In the following essay on Rousseau’s “Politics,”53 Dreyfus is highly critical of the Romantic philosopher, seeing in his arrogant and obsessive individuality which frees man only into the tyranny of his own passions, a horrible contradiction to be eschewed: A “perfect,” omnipotent society is one where man is garroted and locked up, oppressed forever in his philosophical and religious beliefs. This must be precisely how Dreyfus feels in his prison cell about a government that has mistakenly charged him with treason and perversely persisted in treating him like an enemy of the state despite all his appeals for truth and justice. This is the flagrant contradiction in Rousseau, that a system of law and order operates by irrational beliefs and capricious outbursts of cruelty. Like too many others whose ideas have been embodied in the new order of France, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, though “a liberal at heart … proposes to us simply another despotism, one other than the one he knew, an absolutism that would be fatal.” Not only was Rousseau as an eighteenth-century man unaware of the inner contradictions in his philosophy, but he never guessed that the world is driven by unconscious forces, and those who try to understand or to describe the nature of that world cannot assume a conscious, volitional, and coherent rationality. The outbursts of eloquence or violence that seem unprepared for and out of character by great men and that shape the course of history are not accidents, Dreyfus comes to realize, but manifestations of this huge unseen current of impulses in individuals and in nations. He puts down the words of the poet Lamartine in order to articulate this insight: “Humanity does not live by ideas alone!”54 53 Cahier 4, Fo 12 Vo. 54 Cahier 4, Fo 14 Vo. This is the first line of a longer citation from Alphonse de Lamartine’s Patriotic Hymns. Dreyfus condenses and rearranges the whole poem. — 49 —

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To a great extent, for more than five years, Dreyfus had nothing else but silent ideas and written words by which to live, to preserve his sanity, and to maintain his determination to gain his honor back. On occasion he tried to divert his mind from the torments of imprisonment by lengthy meditations on heroic battles and imaginary voyages to exotic lands. He also sometimes liked to make lists of the names of generals, as though they formed themselves into a consolatory prayer or a hypnotic trance-inducing hymn: Bonaparte took with him his best generals—Barthea, Murat, Davout, Duruc, Bessière, Friar, Belliard, and his old companions-in-arms from the Italian Army, Kleber and Desaix, two of the most celebrated chiefs of the Army of the Rhone—his brother Louis and his son-inlaw Eugène de Beauharnaise… Napoleon’s Egyptian Expedition, the history of the Swiss republic and so on over many pages, and then he pens a long technical discussion on “The Mechanics of the Bicycle”, followed by “Scholarly and Scientific Creations of the of the Revolution,” which is really another essay on education, particularly Condorcet’s proposal for reform. The topics seem to grow out of one another, sometimes explicitly connected by words or images, sometimes apparently with no order at all, except in Dreyfus’s search for a hook to fix his wandering and distracted mind. Can this be summed up in the lines from Dante he cites in Italian:55 Per una ghirlandetta Ch’io vidi mi farà Sospirare ogni fiore… For each garland that I see every flower will sigh… He too tries to grasp every flower in the garden of his books and memories, hoping to find the truth and justice he so desperately desires. When Dreyfus begins an essay on Paul Bourget,56 one of the longest 55 Cahier 4, Fo 24 Vo. These are the opening lines of Dante’s Rime LVI, celebrating his first sighting of Beatrice in 1274 when she was still scarcely a child. 56 Cahier 4, Fo36, Fo36 Vo, Fo37, Fo38 Vo. — 50 —

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literary studies in the whole collection,57 he reveals something about his own education and childhood that historians seem to have overlooked. He not only has a lively sympathy for this author, he writes, …mais encore pour le fils de mon regretté professeur, avec lequel j’avais conserve de si bonnes relations jusqu’au dernier jour de sa vie. …but still more with the son of my much lamented teacher, with whom I maintained good relations until the last day of his life. Here Dreyfus tells us about his well-respected mathematics teacher and mentor, Justin M. Bourget (1822-1887), with whom he kept in touch until the pedagogue died.58 From this association with the elder Bourget, Dreyfus developed a special concern for the son, Paul (Charles Joseph) Bourget (1852-1935), author of poems, novels, and psychological studies of literature in particular, in fact, a critic strongly influenced by Taine. Dreyfus was not to know, while he was in prison, that Paul Bourget had drifted back to Catholicism, thus away from his freer and

57 Other essays will follow, as Bourget emerges as one of the surprise figures in the whole of the cahiers, that is, in Dreyfus’s secret intellectual life. Another surprise presence who slowly makes his presence felt is Félicité de Lamennais. What is surprising about both of them is not just that they are relatively forgotten figures when compared to those thinkers Dreyfus lists when he puts down his favorites and the most influential authors of his time—Taine, Renan, Michelet—but that both of them were reactionaries, men who began with some tendency towards science, secularism and rationality, but then turned, often more than once, towards authoritarianism, faith, and spirituality. 58 “Justin Bourget, born at Savas (Ardeche) in 1822, the son of a civil engineer of peasant origin, Judging from the catalogue of his scientific publications at the Bibliothèque Nationale, he was no ordinary professor….educated in Paris and who, like all professors, hoped to drift back to Paris…” (Dimnet, Paul Bourget). He co-authored with Charles Housel, Géometrie analytique à trois dimensions (Paris: Hachette, 1872), and then on his own Algèbre élémentaire (Paris: Librairie Ch. Delagrave, 1880), listing his honors on the title page as “Recteur de l’Académie d’Aix, ancien élève de l’Ecole normal supérieure, agrégé de l’université, Docteur ès sciences, Ex-Directeur des etudes à l’Ecole préparatoire de Sainte-Barbe.” — 51 —

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more excitingly adventurous youth,59 and become an anti-Dreyfusard60 or that he displayed suspicious traits of anti-Semitism;61 because of his special relationship with the author’s father, Dreyfus reads the son’s books with interest and treats them with reverence, even as he had enjoyed being taught in school by this man’s father. In this lengthy essay, Dreyfus chooses to follow closely, to the point of paraphrase, Bourget’s study of the literary historian Hippolyte Taine, and the two poets Charles Baudelaire and Victor Hugo, in his Essays in Contemporary Psychology. To begin with, Dreyfus presents the outline of Taine’s earlier scientific approach to history and literature based on race and Bourget’s more up-to-date psychological theories, bringing them to the fore, forming what Dreyfus calls “the new element of objectivity (cet élément nouveau de l’objectivité): If I wish to study the personality of a great writer, I do not proceed otherwise than a chemist placed before [an unknown] gas or a physiologist studying a [new] organism. I will prepare, by way of observation, a list of small facts that constitute this writer, and from this list once prepared, I will determine, by induction, the dominant facts which command the others (here is the personal part, no longer the exclusive domain of science, personal observation), just as in a great tree the largest branches dominate the others. These few initial generating facts once found, 59

This so-called “awakening from Dreyfusism” occurred, of course, while Alfred Dreyfus was in prison and reached its climax in 1899, with the publication of Bourget’s novel Le Disciple, a time when the captain’s attentions were firmly fixed on his rehabilitation; afterwards, as with virtually all of his intellectual interests in culture, science, philosophy and religion, there is no manifestation in any of his extant or published writings. Le Disciple seemed to break with Bourget’s previous leanings towards science, rationalism and democracy, offending readers like Herbert Spencer who had always praised the author. The conservative Catholic novel came hard on the heels of the most violent and extreme days of the Dreyfus Affair, “during which intellectual disorder ran riot and we saw the heyday of uncontrolled speculation—[and] effectually took the band off his eyes” (Dimnet, Paul Bourget, Chapter VII). 60 Bourgeois says that Bourget’s anti-dreyfusard feelings were as mild as his hatred of the Jews, being of the old-fashioned Catholic religious kind and not the modern racial variety that leads directly to Nazi street gangs, “Paul Bourget ne s’abandonne jamais à l’antisémitisme tellement répandu à l’époque dans les rangs républicains“(Paul Bourget never abandoned himself to the anti-Semitism widespread at the time in the republican ranks): “Paul Bourget: Littérature engagée”. 61 André Bourgeois, “Paul Bourget (1852-1935) ‘Literature engagée,’” hit.parade, andre bourgeois.fr/ paul_Bourget (accessed 24 December 2010). — 52 —

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it remains to attach to them to the others again, those that would be the most highly placed in the hierarchy of causes. This particular imagination of man is due to heredity. In the individual, it is a question then of determining his race. The development of a race itself takes into account the special conditions of milieu. Arriving at this level, it is possible to mount even higher still and to connect [these chosen little facts whose trail we have followed] to one supreme fact, the general law of the mind. From this cited passage of Taine’s fervent disciple, Dreyfus believes he can now understand Taine and Bourget’s new psychological method, because the Essais de psychologie contemporaines are in themselves a great model of critical study, revealing in their author his own artistic spirit.62 In his Preface, Bourget writes The processes of art are analyzed only insofar as they are signs. I have wished to draw up some notes able to serve as a history of the moral life of the second part of the nineteenth century. This “moral part,” of course, is the psychological dimension, but it is more than the components of the old moral philosophy taught in the universities; there are the new aspects of depth psychology developed from Nietzsche through to Bourget—whom, by the way, Nietzsche read and admired for his insights into the human mind.63 This shows Dreyfus to be, if not on the cutting edge of these new objective sciences of psychology—he does not seem aware of Freud and other psychoanalysts— at least able to synthesize critically the authors closest to the formation of a new kind of inward-turning literature. Yet there are two sticking points. The first is the awkward term “race,” which we have already begun to show does not always, at least not strictly, connote the kind of racist thinking characteristic of the Comte 62 Dimnet argues that these essays are neither as coherent in their approach as many would claim, nor as original as they first appeared to be (Paul Bourget, Chapter III). 63 As Paul Bourgois puts it: “Paul Bourget était admiré par Nietzsche et cela n’est peut-être pas aussi surprenant que l’on pourrait le penser. On trouvera dans ses romans certaines traces de l’affirmation d’un inconscient qui n’est nullement la révélation de Freud”(Paul Bourget: “Littérature engagée”). — 53 —

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de Gobineau or Edouard Drumont at his most obscene. Rather, it means something closer to what today might be called developmental psychology—at once a study of how groups develop their particular personalities over longer or shorter periods of time (in other words, principles of heredity as a factor in refining the species characteristics of all peoples), and also those kinds of psychiatry that take in the way genetic potentialities are expressed in individuals through environmental factors, including parental influences, illness, accidents, and social circumstances. Second, we consider the word “objectivity,” something Dreyfus himself tries to modify by suggesting that he can accept Taine and Bourget provided “we add these three fundamental causes in the individual,” factors peculiar to the artistic temperament: race in the sense of heredity of families, developmental changes in sensibility of seeing, perceiving, and articulating those modes of remembering and reproducing such impressions, and an aesthetics of the beautiful as a moral, ethical, and intellectual category of thought. In this manner, “the processes of art can be analyzed as signs,” not things in themselves taken at face value, but as complex, deeply layered phenomena in need of interpretation.64 What Taine began to formulate and Bourget gave a more powerful method to,65 Dreyfus here attempts to refine still further by adding, without perhaps being fully aware of his antecedents in rabbinical writings, a Jewish approach. In fact, Dreyfus never mentions such a possibility. He cites as alternatives writers such as Renan, whose boutade about criticism replacing direct reading of works of the human spirit began all the meditations on beauty and art throughout the cahiers, and only mentioning the Bible when he can include it in a pairing with Homer. When the focus of this long essay turns from Taine to Baudelaire, however, Dreyfus tries to argue with Bourget about the powerful influence of this poet. Of this poet, especially his Fleurs du Mal, Dreyfus confesses, “I have never so much as tasted it,” but he gathers from the passages cited by Bourget in his essay and his critical remarks that “everywhere in his work [there is] a sense of putrescence.” Nevertheless, 64 Ouaknin writes: “l’homme se construisant continuellement par l’interprétation, son devinir n’est pas possible que dans l’inlassable succession du faire du dé-faire du sens, du lire et du dé-lire du texte” (Man is constructing himself continuously by interpretation, his future is only possible in the tireless succession of making and un-making of sense, of reading and un-reading of the text) (Tsimtsoum: Introduction à la meditation hebraîque [Paris: Albin Michel, 1992], 84). 65 Dimnet calls Taine “a dear friend of Bourget’s” (Paul Bourget, Chapter IV). — 54 —

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writes Dreyfus, “Let us see how Bourget applies his skills of analysis to this bizarre and enigmatic poetic nature.” From the start, then, Dreyfus has a distaste for this kind of late Romantic melancholy and decadence, an approach to life contrary to his own struggle to maintain his integrity and optimism in the face of real psychological depression and excruciating daily physical torments. The prisoner tries to be patient and understanding: Certainly, Baudelaire is a pessimist. Like Lamenais [sic], the poet could have said: “I was born with a wounded soul.” And here, Bourget enters into admirable consideration the disastrous development of the pessimism in contemporary souls. The pessimism of the century is a fact of life Dreyfus concedes, and Bourget attempts to understand how it came about and what its effects are on the culture of the age, as well as on individual poets such as Baudelaire. That does not mean he has to admire the artists who bring this sickening perspective to bear on their world, nor to take the critical assessment of their worth holus bolus. Dreyfus brings in Lamennais to show that a great man can rise above the adversities of his youth, set aside his pessimism along with his wounds, and develop more fortitude than those who wallow in their own pains. In fact, so disgusted is he by Baudelaire and the critical judgments of the literary historians that Dreyfus finally says: the conditions posed by Taine, applied by Bourget, do not explain everything [n’expliquent pas tout]. Each one of us sees the world through a prism of his personal temperament [à travers le prisme de son temperament personnel] and the dream of a totally objective creation does not exist [et le rêve d’une creation tout objective n’existe pas]. The prism, we might suggest, is the kaleidoscope the prisoner writes about in his journals later, or the phantasmagoria through which illusions are projected. Dreyfus is not always a sharp and resolute thinker, and perhaps it is because he has such a personal attachment to Paul Bourget through his father that he takes this independent but still fuzzy stand vis-à-vis so important an influence on his intellectual life. In regard to Bourget’s comments on Victor Hugo, the prisoner of Devil’s Island commends the Romantic poet’s declaration from early in his career for “la liberté dans l’art,” freedom in art, which is not the same — 55 —

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as “l’art pour l’art,” art for art’s sake, the one being a claim to develop one’s craft, one’s tastes, and one’s critical understanding of products of the human mind without the constraints of ideological doctrine and aesthetic dogma, while the other is an excuse for solipsism and narcissism, where anything goes. The twin principles of the Ideal and the Truth still obtain for Dreyfus in his conception of the Beautiful, if not for a more pessimistic and cynical world: The beauty of the Idea, joined to the beauty of the form, constitute for a man, in whatever order of ideas where he chooses to exercise himself, the expression of the ideal of Genius. This takes us right back to one word to give Beauty its character. [Emphasis is Dreyfus’s own.] Unfortunately, the final paragraph to this essay is incomplete, and Dreyfus crosses out these two lines: La formule de Hugo “la liberté dans l’art” était forte, c’est-àdire que chacun était libre d’apporter le témoin [?] des idées qu’il jugeait utile en respectant l’art. Mais les deux formulas ancienes […] Hugo’s formula “freedom in art” was strong, that is to say, that each person was free to bear whatever witness to ideas that he judged useful in respect to art. But two ancient formulas… One can only guess what classical mottos he would have cited here. Instead of those missing mottos, Dreyfus begins an essay on Shakespeare’s As You Like It66 and the importance of poetry and nature, asking whether the moral lesson to be found in the dramatist is not that “nature is a great and unique consolation.” But then, swerving away from the optimistic pastorale of the Renaissance, where the goal of all the “moral virtues … that seize the heart and soul of man, goodness, cordiality, love, and pity” can be located, Dreyfus decides that “logically … the best talisman to find in nature is unhappiness.” In the play, through 66 Cahier 4, Fo 38. — 56 —

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Jacques, “the sympathetic misanthrope,” Shakespeare reveals an ultimate truth: If he had not thus also experienced unhappiness, if he had not known the deceptions of intelligence, the corruption of the human heart, he would not have understood moreover the price of a fountain’s purity and the peacefulness of its waters, the price of candor and of a good intuitive faith. For the suffering prisoner, this is a lesson well worth knowing, and, from his own happiness and his need to fight through a tendency towards melancholy and misanthropy, he has to search for the talisman of intelligence to find the consolation of philosophy—in Taine, again the subject of his next little essay.67 “Ever since Taine wrote his admirable book On Intelligence,” Dreyfus begins, the whole world has learned how to think in a critical way, using a method—and then nothing is simpler: from a novelist’s notebooks (carnets) through judicial and medical writings, one feverishly collects data and then comes to a conclusion… but, says Dreyfus, Naturalism has failed. And so has Taine’s method: he has failed to reveal individual nature, the creation of a resolute character, the genius’s intense ability to create, and, in words he underlines in his manuscript: “genie de l’intériorité de la creation,” the deep creative inwardness of genius. Taine may be able to show that a writer like Shakespeare is determined by race, milieu, and moment, but he is unable to explain “la grandeur de l’écrivain,” the grandeur of the writer. What Taine lacked in his method of analysis, however, will be found in Michelet: “La faculté d’intuition, la force de sympathie,” the faculty of intuition, the force of sympathy.” For this reason, while Taine can arrest out attention by his intelligence, Michelet grabs us by the very profoundest fibers of our soul, “jusqu’aux fibres les plus profondes de notre âme.” Then a Latin line from Cicero,68 perhaps one of the two missing mottos left out of the explication of Hugo’s thoughts on freedom in art:

67 Cahier 4, Fo 39. 68 Cahier 4, Fo 40. — 57 —

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Omnes clari et nobilitate labores fiunt tolerables. All pains, when accompanied by glory and sympathy, become bearable. This is immediately followed by a short paraphrase and discussion on education from Montaigne, and immediately another motto from Cicero: Nihil est turpius, quam cognitioni et perceptioni assertionem approbationemque praecurrere. Nothing is more shameful that to make an assertion and a decision before perception and knowledge. These Latin tags warn Dreyfus to accept the sufferings in his life as educative, and to learn to hold his tongue until he has thought through carefully what is happening to him and what its implications are. After several other brief starts at essays, even letters to the administration of the prison on hints from Lucie of advances in his cause, and fragmented lines of verse from poets like Lamartine and essays of Montaigne, he exclaims:69 Je vais échapper au flux de mes pensées par moyen habituel, le travail, le meilleur dérivatif à tout. I am going to escape from the flux of my thoughts by the usual means, work, the best relief of all. The word he uses here, dérivatif, is somewhat odd. It is an old fifteenthcentury French word, literally “to be taken out of the stream or gutter,” normally used, as it would seem here, to mean a diversion, a divertissement, a distraction from something onerous or unpleasant. It would be usual to think of needing a relief from work, a distraction from tedious labor, a little pleasant interlude in the midst of a stressful activity; but Dreyfus means that he needs to find relief from the horrible torments of imprisonment, the mind-shattering experiences of endless isola69 Cahier 4, Fo 46. — 58 —

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tion, silence, alienation from everyone around him; and for this medical counter-irritant or révulsif, revulsive, something to suddenly draw blood away from the infected area of the body. His normal medicine is work, again, to be taken at first as writing of his essays, his study of books, his critical and synthesizing thoughts on the persons and ideas he is dealing with; but, as we have noted several times already, the Hebrew sense of avodah brings to mind the performance of necessary tasks by a craftsman or servant (levi) or priest (kohan) in the Temple, such work being a religious service, efficacious in more than a merely utilitarian manner. It is the work one owes to God and to one’s own self as an active, dynamic partner in Creation with the Deity. Dreyfus needs to focus his attention away from the contextual acts of others which seek to drive him mad, and from the disintegration of his mind. Yet while most of the time he can put aside those distressing pains and humiliations in the writing of his cahiers as intellectual exercises of several sorts, from time to time, as in this moment of candor, his personality breaks out—he reacts openly to the torture, he recalls flashes of memory from his past, and he reveals the man all his critics, friendly and hostile, either lament he hides from some misplaced sense of military duty or he never had at all. Just a page later, however, there appears another chink in his zinc armor:70 Je n’arrive plus à dormir—la pensée de ma chère femme, de mes enfants, de tous, s’est tellement ancrée dans ma tête, qu’elle ne saurait plus en sortir. Je voudrais avoir un pouvoir surhumain pour pouvoir jeter un coup d’œil sur ceux qui me sont si chers. I have come to the point where I can no longer sleep— the thought of my dear wife, my children, all of them, they are so anchored in my head that I cannot get them out. I wish I had a superhuman power to be able to look at those who are so dear to me. It is as though here the boundary between his letters to Lucie and his intellectual notebooks crumbled, or the damn burst from within his soul to let these emotional longings splash out on the pages of his cahier, 70 Cahier 4, Fo 47. — 59 —

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and the repressed “I” (ego or moi) of the man replace for an instant the critical “je” or “on” of the anonymous critic or historian. That opening having been made and two further personal outbursts of pain following, it is not long before a third appears on the page:71 Je suis toujours sous le coup de l’émotion que les chères lettres de ma chère Lucie m’ont produites—émotion bonne et douce—; comme je voudrais de tout mon cœur, de toute mon âme, lui apporter le concours de toutes mes forces, de toute ma volonté, pour abréger, ne fût-ce que d’une heure, son attente, demander à ceux qui m’ont fait condamner l’appui de leur autorité en forçant assez leurs sentiments de droiture, d’équité, de loyauté. I am always reeling in the shock of an emotional blow that the dear letters of my dear Lucie produces in me—a good and tender emotion—as I would carry to her with all my heart, all my soul, and all my strength, all my will, in order to reduce, even if it were only for one hour, this waiting, to demand of those who have condemned me to bear this burden by their authority in forcing their sense of legality, fairness and loyalty. The syntax is a bit crabbed and turgid at the end as he tries to balance two great emotional wishes: to be close to Lucie and the children again, even if only for a brief space of time, and to bring the powers-that-be who have condemned him back to their senses. Then comes a horizontal stroke that usually marks the end of one composition from another in the manuscript, a group of illegible words rubbed out, eighteen drawings and another brief outburst that is itself crossed out, though still legible, a desperate howling in the wind: Je n’ai pas encore reconquis le bonheur. I have not yet re-conquered happiness.

71 Cahier 4, Fo 48. — 60 —

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He tries everything then—Latin mottos, a brief essay on Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor, mathematics, drawing doodles, problems in physics, a disquisition on French economics in the eighteenth century, little statements like “La surété de jugement fait la force de caractère” (The certainty of judgment creates strength of character), and a somewhat strange English expression: “But to be.”72 The final try to come to grips with this problem, at the very end of the fourth cahier, is a little essay he entitles “atheisme…” in lower case and with the ellipsis of trailing off a thought.73 He speaks of the sensations that reach the mind as facts that lead, through the processes of cogitation in the brain, to thoughts of infinity, but Condillac himself did not know how to travel this lonely road to trace out the rational steps necessary. The philosopher, like Dreyfus and every man or woman in his or her own time and milieu, is limited and cannot take the true measure of the facts that pour into the mind, so that all systems seem dependent only upon discrete facts, ignorant of the implicit dynamic and pulsating paradigms of their own mentality. Though Dreyfus stops there, he has already given enough hints for us to guess what it is that would lead us from this dark hole of meaninglessness (atheism) to order and beauty: interpretation by midrash. Cahier Five covers four days, 11 to 14 November 1898, and consists of twenty pages of text. Though there is much to be discussed here, my focus from now on will be almost exclusively on the personal, aesthetic, psychological, and Jewish aspects of Dreyfus that emerge,74 either through the breach made in the dam of silence he had maintained fairly consistently through most of Cahiers 1 to 4 or through what precipitates out of the textual matters like little bubbles of insight. Thus, for instance, in a short essay that begins with some words on the Committee of Public Safety and the Terror during the 1789 Revolution,75 the prisoner veers and writes:

72 Cahier 4, Fo50. Perhaps he is reminded of Hamlet’s speech, “To be or not to be.” 73 Cahier 4, Fo50 Vo. 74 Michael Burns says of Dreyfus that when he arrived in Paris to take up his new duties in the Army and was faced by a body of colleagues whose backgrounds, interests and prejudices all threaten him: “As the son of devout Jewish parents and the husband of a woman whose faith was genuine and intense, he would not curry favor at the expense of his family’s honor” (Dreyfus: A Family Affair, 100). 75 Cahiers 5, Fo 2 Vo. — 61 —

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I recalled a few days ago that there were in certain tragic circumstances words which denote a character with more force than many thoughts, or many previous facts. In inscribing this critical observation, Dreyfus uses a somewhat archaic expression: “que moult de pensées, ou moult faits antérieurs, this repeated term replacing the more common beaucoup or even très, as though it were calling attention to something inside the mere expression of the thought and suggesting more to the argument to hand. The little paragraph stands between the discussion of political terror and an analysis of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. In the examination of the eponymous hero’s words about his wife’s death, news of which catches him off guard, and he says: “She should have died hereafter,” given in French on the folio as “Elle aurait pu mourir un peu plus tard” (She could have been able to die a little later), a form of understated flippancy characteristic of the tragedy reaching its climax.76 Hence Dreyfus continues his critique: This brief phrase, not only does it depict the state of despair Macbeth is in, that is, it renders (rend) the whole act, does it not also throw a true light (une vrai lumière) on the whole moral being (l’être moral) of this poor egotist, this powerful assassin and yet deprived of energy (si dépourvu d’énergie)? The clumsiness of his syntax and the awkward choice of his words also does precisely to his own text what he claims is going on in Shakespeare: the words and the deeds they depict are not close cousins or transparent mirrors to one another—they create a rending (a ripping) of the sense to allow sense otherwise occluded to leak out, qualities in the moral psychology, what is also, beyond Taine and Bourget, a depth psychology. These never quite apt words and tonalities, however, do reveal a sys76 Shakespeare does something similar in the delaying prating of the watchman at the gate or the discordant cries after the slaying of a child during the uprising against Macbeth, “my little chick.” These shifts in tone mark the dramatist’s unwillingness to abide by the classical seriousness of tragedy, as put forth in Sydney’s Apologie for Poesie, for instance. They are also characteristic of rabbinical wit. Dreyfus’s sensitivity to the tonal changes suggest he is more attuned to Jewish tradition and pre-modern generic theory than most of his contemporaries. — 62 —

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tem of signs inter-inanimating77 each other, rays of invisible light that become visible (true) as they pass through pairs of lenses,78 constantly rotated in a kaleidoscopic tube of inquiry, and driven by the hypersensitivity of nerves that deprive Macbeth of his energy but exacerbate the (nervous) sensibilities of author and reader. Then the prisoner draws a horizontal line and doodles eleven pictures79 before he writes this very personal statement, somehow drawing together the preparatory remarks on the Revolution and his sensitive reading of a Renaissance tragedy:80 77 This is an expression from one of John Donne’s metaphysical poems about lovers’ eye-beams intertwining as they pass from the one to the other and, in this conjugation, producing “babies”(little images of each other) in their eyes. The Ecstasy ....... Our hands were firmly cemented With a fast balm, which thence did spring. Our eye-beams twisted, and did thread Our eyes upon one double string; So t’intergraft our hands as yet Was all the means to make us one; And pictures in our eyes to get Was all our propagation. ..... When love, with one another so Inter-inanimates two souls, That abler soul, which thence doth flow, Defects of loneliness controls. ..... 78 Zohar on Genesis: “Rabbi Judah said: “If it were completely hidden/ the world would not exist for even a moment!/ Rather, it is hidden and sown like a seed/ that gives birth to seeds and fruit./ Thereby the world is sustained./ Every single day, a ray of that light shines into the world/ and keeps everything alive,/ for with that ray the Blessed Holy One feeds the world./ And everywhere that Torah is studied at night/ one thread-thin ray appears from that hidden light/ and flows down upon those absorbed in her” (52). 79 Zohar on Genesis, Jacob’s Journey: “Inside the hidden nexus,/ from within the sealed secret,/ a zohar flashed,/ shining as a mirror,/ embracing two colors blended together./ Once these two absorbed each other, all colors appeared:/ purple, the whole spectrum of colors, flashing, disappearing./ These rays of color do not wait to be seen;/ they merge into the fusion of zohar” (75). 80 Of the time he spent living and working with Vincent van Gogh in Arles, Paul Gauguin writes: “In spite of all my efforts to disentangle from this disordered brain a reasoned logic in his critical opinions, I could not explain to myself the utter contradiction between his painting and his opinions” (The Intimate Journals, trans. Ruth Pielkovo, ed. Kaori O’Connor. [London, Boston, Sydney and Henley: KPI, 1985 (1923)], 10). At first that is how the mélange of the cahiers appears, but careful reading and contextual re-readings make the task less a mystery than Gauguin found; if he thought he was going mad, Alfred actually did not, though he was not an ordinary man and — 63 —

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L’oubli et le silence sont la punition qu’on inflige à ce qu’on a trouvé laid ou commun dans la promenade à travers la vie Forgetting and silence are the punishments that are inflicted on what one has found ugly or common in the promenade across life. In this cri du cœur, Dreyfus uses a familiar formula of Jewish longing during Exile—“If I forget thee, o Jerusalem…”—and inserts the dissonant term promenade for a more appropriate term such as journey or pilgrimage. Life has become a punishment for Dreyfus, to be sure, but what has he forgotten and what silence has he been guilty of? The journey through life is certainly no fashionable promenade along the Champs Elysée or through the Bois de Boulogne, enjoyed by the dandies and their mistresses back in Paris that Paul Bourget or Marcel Proust write about. Nor is it a holy voyage to the Promised Land or some sacred shrine, such as Lourdes or Santiago de Compostella. The next composition starts off as a critique of Helvetius’s Spirit of Laws81 as something “arrachées à tous les philosophes” (torn from pages of other enlightened thinkers), then suddenly slides into a different topic, emphasizing precisely what constitutes the insane phantasmagoria of the case against Dreyfus—an elaborate hoax of which he has no way of knowing while in prison, except by inference and intuition, all the while maintaining the self-delusion of a judicial error by well-intentioned fellow officers: the viability of documents, their forgery, the blindness of those who read them in good and in bad faith: A la doctrine qui dira que la réunion de documents, l’imitation aveugle de la réalité sont les seuls éléments, je répondrai qu’il est vrai qu’il est impossible de négliger le document humain, mais que cette opération secondaire sera absolument insuffisante si on ne possède pas l’art, le génie, la faculté créatrice. To the doctrine which speaks of the unity of human his brain was more than ordinary. 81 Cahiers 5, Fo4. — 64 —

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documents, the blind imitation of reality are the only elements, I would respond that it is true that it is impossible to neglect the human document, but this secondary operation will be absolutely insufficient if one does not possess the art, the genius, the creative faculty. This is a question of a coherence and continuity of philosophical argument from the various thinkers of the Enlightenment, as though Helvitius’s works were not a randomly put together omnigatherum (amalgame) of assorted pages, but a grand synthesis of always-compatible texts in one great march towards the Truth. Do philosophes blindly imitate one another, advancing less as individuals than as a self-correcting cohort? Dreyfus rejects this kind of abstractive determinism.82 There is a coherence in the products of the human mind, but in no simplistic way; anyone who attempts to make a synthesis—as he is in his own amalgam of diverse texts—must have three qualities: the art, which is both a craftsman’s skills in working with the material to hand (technē) and the 82 Speaking of the writers on aesthetics of previous generations, Julien Benda comments: “Marquons, d’ailleurs, leur haine contre le déterminisme psychologique et, plus généralement contre tout déterminisme. On sait leur adoration pour cette philosophie qui veut que le phénomène psychologique ne soit déterminé, ni par l’hérédité, ni par le milieu, ni par aucun élemént extérieur à lui, mais uniquement par lui-même: qui veut, en particulier, que l’oeuvre d’art, ou même de pensée speculative, pour peu qu’elle soit géniale (mais le romantisme n’en considère pas d’autres), ne dépende aucunement des conditions socials et politiques parmi lesquelles elle naît, mais ‘uniquement des personalités qui surgissent à une moment donné’, qu’elle soit donc ‘absolument imprévisible’ [Bergson]” (Belphégor: essai sur l’esthétique de la présente société française, 2ème ed. [Paris: Emile-Paul Frères, 1924], 68-69). “Let us note beyond this their hatred of psychological determinism and even more generally against all determinism. Their adoration is known for this philosophy which argues that psychological phenomena are not determined, either by heredity or by milieu, or by any element exterior to itself, but solely by itself; which means in particular that a work of art or even a speculative thought, less so if it were ingenious (but Romanticism has never considered anything else), does not depend in any way on the social or political conditions in which it was born but ‘uniquely on the personalities who surge up at any given moment,’ from which they are ‘totally unexpected’.” This argument based on Bergsonian dynamics goes against Taine’s determinism, though it in itself at the end of the nineteenth century had been, as Benda puts it, “l’occasion, pour les âmes romantiques, d’éprouver de grands émois” (Belphégor, 70) “the occasion for the same Romantic souls to experience grand emotions.” Because Taine is strongly felt and contested in Dreyfus’s writings, it is important to note further, along with Benda, that “dans la repudiation du déterminisme de Taine, on a repoussé la determination du moi par le milieu, mais on a conservé la determination par le passé (‘les morts nous gouvernent’), et aussi celle de la race. C’est que celles-là sont des themes lyriques, des occasions d’émoi, ce que la première n’est point” (Belphégor, 70); “in the repudiation of Taine’s determinism, they also repulsed the determinism of the self by the milieu, but they conserved the determinism by the past (‘the dead rule over us’), and also that of race. It was these that were the lyrical themes, the occasions for emotion, for which the first was not at all.” — 65 —

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sensibility of an artist who appreciates beauty and harmony of matter and form; the genius, which is the capacity to see deeply and extensively the whole picture, the world-view or Weltanschauung, so that everything gathered is put into its proper place and in due proportion and perspective; and the creative faculty, which is more than a je-ne-sais-quoi—it is a divine-like vision of how to work beautifully to create beauty that participates in the higher moral truths. This leads to a further argument against art-for-art’s sake because an art that seeks only to cover the void (l’art qui couvre le vide) is really no art at all. As with Victor Hugo’s bombastic poetry, it is all sound and fury signifying nothing. It is thought, Dreyfus urges, that makes art, the thought of a genius, and thought in perfect expression. Hence his conclusion:83 La beauté se réunit donc dans cette double formule, dans les deux concepts: l’Idéal et la Vérité. Beauty is united thus in this double formula, these two concepts: the Ideal and the Truth. From this, it is an easy glissando to his next little essay on music, a topic he has not touched on before, except sometimes hidden in his metaphors of harmony and composition.84 Here in this same little es83 Cf. Benamozegh’s statement: “And the work of man has characteristics which make it superior even to nature, for nature is a simple, direct effect of God’s creative act, and in a sense perfecting this act itself. The creative principle in free, self-conscious man proceeds with the work of Genesis, and it must exult in precisely this human freedom, which is true freedom only because it interrupts the chain of natural causes and effects, breaking its continuity. It is a permanent miracle…” (Israel and Humanity, trans. Maxwell Luria [Mahwah, NY: Paulist Press, 1995], 198). 84 Music, as we shall discuss more extensively later in this book and in those to follow, is not the purely emotional experience of the Romantics, the non-verbal experience par excellence; it is, as Ouaknin begins to indicate, the vibrations of words detached from the words themselves but yet continuing to transmit and develop the intellectual and spiritual energies of their original embodiments. (See Ouaknin, Tsimtsoum, 147.) Liturgical reading and rabbinical study are not conducted in a silent, inner, private space, but chanted (according to the formal cantillation marks provided along with the pronunciation guides in study-texts), in a public space of communal dialogue and prayer (and performed to accompanying movements and gestures, davening (up and down) and shuckling (back and forth) and other bodily motions appropriate to different texts and occasions), and thus an entire choreographed ritual, allowing for spontaneous melodies, insertions into discussion and songs, and personal petitions and questions. According to Ouaknin: “En accomplissant un geste rituel, le juif crée cette jonction du réel et du langage et ‘se branche’ sur l’infini du Nom, qui n’est pas seulement un mot mais l’énergir même du langage et de la parole” (In accomplishing — 66 —

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say, he then indicates what sets his mind going, since he has no access to real musical performances and can at best turn to his memory for the sounds he wishes to discuss, proving that at least to some extent he attended some concerts in Paris with Lucie, and that he had entered into discussions at a somewhat professional level with performers, perhaps friends of Lucie’s or his own family,85 making this a highly significant not just of his tastes in art but of his private experiences outside of the military sphere and the little domestic scenes at the fireside with Lucie: Je lisais, dans une de mes revues, que l’on avait donné de nouveaux des parties des Maitres chanteurs de Wagner. Je me souviens surtout de l’ouverture des Maitres chanteurs—que j’ai entendue à plusieurs reprises. C’est un art magnifique. Il vous donne comme une oppression de songe, comme un cauchemar. Je ne veux pas revenir sur des discussions aussi vives qu’animées que j’ai eues souvent avec des parents fervents musiciens et qui en étaient arrivés à admirer davantage la virtuosité que la symphonie, l’harmonie ou la mélodie. Que m’importe qu’un musicien ait résolu de grandes difficultés, qu’il ait montré une grande habilite? Ce que je lui demande, c’est une impression et qu’elle soit heureuse. Une musique que je ne comprends pas, si savante qu’elle soit, ne saurait m’être agréable. Mais j’estime qu’une musique peut être très savante et Wagner est une preuve éclatante, et procurer d’inoubliables jouissances. Mais Mozart lui aussi a du sens pour nous, et ses tendres ardeurs, ses préciosités charment sans, il est vrai, intéresser autant l’intelligence que les productions de Wagner. I read in one of my magazines that they have given a new [performance] of parts of Wagner’s Meistersinger. Above all I remember the overture to the Master Singa ritual gesture, the Jew creates this juncture between reality and language and “branches himself out” to the infinite Name which is not only a word but the energy itself of language and of speech) (Tsimtsoum, 149). 85 Burns, A Family Affair discusses the Hadamard household and family; see chapter on Lucie’s homelife and education. — 67 —

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ers—which I heard several times in performance. It is a magnificent work of art. It gives you the oppression [sic] of a dream, a nightmare. I don’t want to recall the lively discussions I had with relatives [who are] fervent musicians and who had come to admire above all the virtuosity of a symphony [orchestra], the harmonics of a melody. What does it matter to me if a musician solved some great [technical] difficulties, that he achieved a high level of skill? What I ask of it is the impression and that it be a joyful one. Music that I don’t understand, no matter how erudite it might be, will not please me. But I do appreciate that a musician can be highly educated and Wagner is a striking proof of that, and he can bring about unforgettable joy. But Mozart also gives us pleasure, and his tender passions, his delightful and intricate affectations, it is true, interest us more than all the grandiose productions of Wagner. A first reaction to this statement would be that Dreyfus has very average bourgeois tastes; he doesn’t really appreciate the technical complexities of music and looks only for superficial impressions when he listens to it being played.86 Nevertheless, what is most important here is that Dreyfus has gone to concerts often, has discussed performances with Lucie’s relations who are professional musicians, and understands that there is more to music than an emotional response. He finds Wagner’s music oppressive, overbearing, and he does not appreciate his con86 Be that as it may, if Dreyfus and his family grew up with musical discussions and performances at home and in concert halls, they also participated in Jewish rituals in synagogue and in their own homes, so that what Idelsohn applies: “…the Jewish public…[desired] a music which should express the sentiments of the Jew, interpret his ideals, his wishes, and his hopes as a Jew, give tonal expression to his pains and sorrows, release him from the weight of his heavy burden as an oppressed and disenfranchised human being, and interpret that glorious past from the Exodus from Egypt to the Fall of the Temple. The Jew demanded that the chazzan [synagogue cantor and musical director], through his music, make him forget his actual life, and that he elevate him on the wings of tines into a fantastic paradisiacal world, affording him a foretaste of the Messianic time in the heavenly Jerusalem” (A.Z. Idelsohn, Jewish Music in its Historical Development [Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981; orig. 1929], 192). Fuller discussion of Dreyfus’s artistic tastes, not least in literature and paintings, will be dealt with in the third volume of this series. — 68 —

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versations at the Hadamards, where he meets with his wife’s sophisticated and aesthetically-sensitive relations. More to his taste are the compositions of Mozart, whose tenderness and charm show as much intelligence as the elaborate and noisy pomposity of Wagner’s operas. The essay then wanders a little, with Dreyfus saying that he also reads the latest poetry in the magazines that come to him, indicating that, though he may have all political news censored by the officials who watch his every step, he does have the ability and interest to keep up with the arts, as he does with technology and science. Sometimes the topics run into one another and form a muddle, explicable only at a distance when we can place them into the larger picture of his developing critique of modern ideas and sometimes, when the circumstances and his state of mind allow, he can shape well-formed little essays. In a critique of Pierre Loti’s Ramuntcho, which he re-reads,87 in comparing his own exile on a small island with the romantic and exotic experiences of the travel writer, Dreyfus breaks out into a very subjective paragraph: Despite the migraines [céphalgies] that follow, I prefer intellectual work than my baseless obsessions (idées fixes et sans fond) that destroy (se brise) my brain, than this inactivity, my whole being stretched or strained apart (l’être tout entier au loin), than these sleepless nights— this idleness finally, and I cannot know or imagine (connais) greater torture, I cannot imagine above all a greater torment than being stretched on a bed without sleep [the last nine words rubbed out in the manuscript] Note again the rare and somewhat technical term for his headaches, not migraines or mals de tête, but céphalgies; as though needing to distance himself from his mental anguish and torment and at the same time calling attention to something more in his sufferings than a physi87

Cahiers 5, Fo5. This novel by Pierre Loti was published in 1897, suggesting that Dreyfus was able to keep up with many current works of fiction as well as other topics, so long as they did not deal with his case or the emerging Affair. It is a tale of the Basque country and a band of smugglers, written as a response to the dim view of nationalism presented in Barrès’ Les Déracinés, a novel Dreyfus wished he could read in its entirety but only could have extracts printed in magazines. See below Cahier 6, Fo25. — 69 —

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cal pain. He accepts the penalty of these recurrent headaches, however, in preference to the anguish of the obsessive ideas beating inside his brain, the endless idleness of his tiny enclosed hut and the lack of conversation with a single human being, and the actual torture of being stretched out on his bed, his limbs shackled, throughout the long and sleepless nights.88 He can know (that is, imagine) nothing worse. For this reason work is a welcome and happy distraction, allowing a forgetting of pains and humiliations—and then suddenly he speaks, uncharacteristically, of the passage of time and his efforts outside the cahiers, of the motivation for his efforts: In the last few days, when more than ever my thoughts have been with my dear wife, my dear children, all those who are dear to me, when I can share all their joy, their goodness, I trick (trompe) the length of the hours and the waiting with a single distraction, that which always has been my preferred distraction, my favorite, work. What happiness at last it will be for my dear ones, for them to see the end of all their sufferings. All these intellectual studies form a jeu d’esprit to fool the oppression that hangs over him, to deceive himself by making him believe time is disappearing.89 Another glimpse into the scene in which his intellectual work occurs appears in an essay he calls “Histoire Philosophique. Guizot. Toqueville.”90 In this brief disquisition on philosophical history, he remarks: “je ne me souviens plus du titre exact” (I can’t remember the exact title), an indication that he does not have a large library of books to consult, depending on occasional magazine articles and on mostly on his prodigious memory. Michael Burns describes what titles he might have kept in his hut,91 but neglects to consider how quickly paper turns to 88 The two years of being shackled to his bed each night was not merely a cautionary move by a nervous prison warden or government, but the product of pure hatred. As Cahm puts it: “c’était une mesure de haine, de torture, ‘ordonnée de Paris par ceux qui, ne pouvant frappe rune famille, frappent un innocent parce que ni lui ni sa famille ne veulent, ne doivent s’incliner devant la plus épouvantable des erreurs judicaires qui ait jamais été commise” (L’Affaire Dreyfus, 65). 89 Or a trompe l’oeil , an artistic optical illusion. 90 Cahiers 5, Fo7. 91 Burns, Dreyfus: A Family Affair, 203ff. — 70 —

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mush in the tropical heat of Devil’s Island. When he comes to discuss Ernest Renan again, in particular the Histoire des origines du christianisme and Histoire d’Israël,92 he does not take the opportunity to talk about Judaism. He credits him as being a great philosophical historian and praises him because “Il donne le contact et le secret de l’âme” (He gives one contact with and [reveals] the secret of the soul [of the people he writes about]). That Dreyfus has deliberately suppressed part of his argument here is suggested by the saying from La Rochefoucauld he cites after a horizontal line, eight doodles, another horizontal line and seventeen more drawings: Les vertus se perdent dans les intérêts comme les fleuves. Virtues lose themselves in [self-] interest as in rivers. The motto appertains primarily to the cynical views of the seventeenth century moralist where “interests” refers to private desires and secret agendas; but, read more intently in the context of the workbooks, these self-interests are those of sufferings and frustrations of the self that disappears into the flux of time. If one cannot speak the truth openly of one’s own identity and way of evaluating the world, one can at least mark out the space where those private interests lie hidden—in the secrets of the soul. A similar clue as to the situation of composition comes through when Dreyfus headlines another rather long composition, Bourget.93 He recalls that the last time he was discussing de Toqueville’s essays on the American character, he was led inevitably to bring up his former teacher’s son, the popular novelist Paul Bourget. Having no access to the older writer, he will study at length the new book Outre-Mer by the younger man, even though that volume is more a collection of travel notes than a coherent study of another civilization. What Dreyfus would have preferred to do, when he had the earlier study in hand, was re-read it and analyze it carefully. In other words, even when he has procured certain books, either from Lucie or from the prison library, he has not been allowed to keep more than a very few volumes in his hut, and even those he owned were subject to the destruction by humidity and insects 92 Cahiers 5, Fo 8. 93 Cahier 5, Fo9 Vo, Fo10, Fo10 Vo, Fo11, Fo11 Vo, Fo12, Fo12 Vo. — 71 —

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over mere weeks. Hence the double disappointment: not having de Toqueville still in his possession and finding Bourget’s notes inadequate to his purposes. He gives a précis and sometimes a paraphrase of Outre-Mer, at least of the first volume, and comments on the writing style as attractive but not worth discussing at this time. Further, as Bourget himself points out, in these notes he has put down first impressions and allowed them to stand, though after several months of travelling around the United States he refined and corrected those earlier judgments, Dreyfus also wishes that this travel writer had a more generous and tolerant view, instead of his tendency to identify with the upper classes and to express his conservative Catholic views. However, when commenting on the report of schools in America, Dreyfus breaks through his critical discourse to provide a further glimpse into his own childhood experiences, one of the rare revelations of his childhood experiences: When one gives a report of personal memories of college, at this boarding school which I hated (à cet internat que j’abhorre) these buildings that look like barracks, it is impossible not to report that the child raised in these gloomy buildings must be impoverished in his physiology, exasperated in his nervous system, deprived of the joys of spontaneity. A reaction was produced several years ago already against our deplorable school system—I don’t know whether this movement still continues, has become stronger. I have already said it, the end of the educators is not only to make scholars, it is to make men who understand the seriousness of life, who have in themselves such a moral sentiment […] What we see here in this outburst of memory is the residual rage at the poor schools he attended as a lad,94 leading to an additional set of 94 While this reaction appears often among the diaries, memoirs, and novels of the period, it is not fully a cliche, but a significant glimpse into Dreyfus’s own personality. Cp. Michele B. Squires, ed. and trans., Marcel Schwob Digital Collection. MA Thesis (Salt Lake City, UT: Brigham Young University, 2008). Mayer-André-Marcel Schwob (1867-1905) was a descendant on his mother’s side of Jewish Cayms (later Cahun), who fought in the Crusades with Saint Louis. His father was a diplomat who spent ten years in Egypt. These early letters were written while the future writer was a student preparing for entry into university; there is one explicit mention of Schwob’s — 72 —

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comments to those given by Bourget. Like many other boys sent away to board in rural secondary institutions after the Franco-Prussian War, Dreyfus complains that the atmosphere was heavy, the discipline strict, the teaching not always up to standard95—although, as with his own experiences under Justin Bourget, many young men report later on the powerful influence of certain instructors in the final years of lycée, when the students were introduced to philosophical and literary concepts by top scholars waiting eagerly for their promotions to schools in Paris. For Dreyfus, it was chemistry and mathematics, and, on the model of his older brother Mathieu and the urgings of his sister Henriette, he chose to enter the élite school for a military career. The two main deficits of the late nineteenth-century high schools in France were the gloomy, regimented way of teaching and the sapping of spontaneity from the enthusiastic young minds. In particular, Dreyfus calls attention to the wasting of a boy’s good health and the creation of nervous temperaments, conditions he recognizes in his own body and mind. A few pages later in this same long essay on Bourget, Dreyfus writes that in France a boy who has pursued his studies through to the baccalaureate is unprepared to gain his daily bread and therefore has an urgent reason to make his fortune and that of his family. Unlike the typical American schoolboy, who learns both a set of practical skills and good work habits to go out into the world, for young men leaving those internats or boarding establishments, Toute une gymnastique morale ou intellectuelle luis est nécessaire pour s’adapter aux réalités qui environnent.

family’s Jewishness, in a letter of 11 November 1882, when he says that a certain teacher at the lycée “savait aussi que j’étais juif” (93). There are a few allusions in oblique terms that break through his secular and Christian discourses to show that Schwob belonged to the intellectual, assimilated Jewish middle class in France. For example, on 15 November 1883, he remarks that a cousin is ill and that the Chief Rabbi will soon be visiting her (134). For biographical details, see Squires introduction, 11-15; also notes for the Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, http://lib. byu.edu/marcel_schowb/biograophy_eng (accessed 26 January 2011). The “Lettres Parisiennes” dealing with the Affair were published in Paris by Hobouc in 2006. 95 Maurois explains that “The Year of Philosophy in the life of a young Frenchman was, in my time [in 1901, a generation after Alfred Dreyfus went to school] the year of intellectual puberty. One can see in Barrès’ Déracinés the significance for him and his friends of their encounter with the philosopher Burdeau, and in the biographies of Proust the role played by the philosopher Darlu in the formation of Proustian doctrine” (Call No Man Happy, trans. Denver and Jane Lindley [London: Jonathan Cape, 1943], 38). — 73 —

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A whole moral or intellectual athletic regime is necessary for him to adapt to the realities of the world around him. On the other hand, still following Bourget’s report, Dreyfus sees that the American schoolboy emerges naïve in worldly affairs, timid in articulating himself and unconscious of the ideas and culture that form civilization. Such young graduates explain why America has not yet produced a mature literature. It also explains the differences between New World and Old World concepts of democracy. In the United States, individuals have to be vigorous and intense if they are to succeed in achieving their goals in life. In France, where everything is centralized, people come to be dependent on the government and hold it accountable for everything, and hence engage in long political debates—often ending in violent revolutions. Near the end of this cahier, after a variety of interesting and seemingly disconnected little essays, in the midst of a long discussion on Philosophical Physiology96—that is, the attempt to explain the causes, implications, and meanings of evolution—Dreyfus complains: When one does not have all the documents to hand, a parcel here, [another] there, it is difficult to give a very exact idea of the works. However, [two words rubbed out] it is by the whole of the works of such and such a writer that one can better judge and make something, each time that one speaks of the writer, to grasp what he has written, no life of man suffices for such a task. One has to do the best one can, to be sure, but the results are never fully adequate, no matter how much intuition and rational speculation in which one engages. Thus, on the next folio, he also laments the pitifulness of his scribbles: Et quand j’ai bien fini de barbouiller du papier, de dérider ma pensée, toute mon être, cœur, âme se reporte vers à ma chère femme, mes chers enfants, vers les miens, à ces jours de détente et de bonheur qui vont suivre tant de jours de peines 96 Cahiers 5, Fo18 Verso, Fo19, Fo 19 Verso. — 74 —

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et de souffrances, à ces jours de repos que vont suivre tant de longs jours d’éprouve… And when I have really finished this daubing on paper, of cheering up my thoughts, my whole being, heart, and soul will report to my dear wife, my beloved children, all those who are mine, that these days of detention and of happiness which are going to follow these days of pain and suffering, these days of rest that are going to follow so many long days of testing… Almost breathlessly, as his syntax hops across the page, he tries to give a coherent statement of his feelings at the moment. He fills up pages with splotches and splattering of ink, ideas and images, and thus the very prose becomes confused, as we can see here. He is full of hope and expectation: the end is almost in sight, but words fail him, he says, when he thinks of this conclusion to his misery. Another grief: he has reached the end of his blank pages, the workbook is filled up, and then suddenly he notices an early page left blank, so he can go back to scribble on it.97 His thoughts lack real order, he lives in the moment— an existential moment out of ordinary measurable time; but, he hopes, as in palaeontology, there will be a progressive development of both physical organs and of the mind, of its sensibility, intelligence and creative activity.98

97 The mystical tradition, according to Ouaknin, believes that “each letter is a world, each word a universe” (Tsimtsoum, 99), so that we might be tempted to see in Dreyfus’s hysterical confusions here a descent into primal chaos (tohu-bohu) to rediscover an open space in which to write his letters and words, and thus to fill up the world and the universe with the missing sense of his own nervous disease. For man does not live passively in a world already set out in its divine perfection and which determines the course of his life, but, just as he must always be creating and learning the languages of his mind, so he keeps creating and perfecting the world that he was born in an explosion of energy: na’aseh v’nichama, “let us do and then we shall understand,” or as Ouaknin paraphrases the passage: “Fabriquons d’abord les mots qui nous permettent de les entendre” (Let us first create the words which permit us to understand them), and these words so constructed are “works of art:” “Le ‘mot-oeuvre d’art’ est caracterisé par une ‘irréducibilité’ au monde” (The word-aswork of art is characterized by a certain “irreducibility” in the world”) (Tsimtsoum, 103). 98 Cahiers 5, Fo20 Verso. — 75 —

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Edifices of Enchantment The more I studied both history and men, the clearer it became to me that civilizations, as Valéry says, are “edifices of enchantment.” The acceptance of conventions gives rise to a reign of order, and under the shelter of these conventions liberty flourishes. —André Maurois The seventh workbook was written during the next two weeks, from 14 to 29 November 1898, but with twice as many folio pages. Dreyfus continues as before writing about and exploring the nature of historiography, new scientific methods and literary ideas. The critical and subjective voice mingle more, the prisoner expressing comfort in historians he likes, such as Fustel de Coulanges,99 and he regrets the trends in public taste he fears will undermine morality and order in the state, two “edifices of enchantment,” fearing they will be replaced by the kind of morbidity and grotesquery described in Hoffman’s novels and pseudo-scientific essays.100 The heterogeneous content can seem to skitter around the pages, often separated by of the obsessive drawings that fill up folio pages and puzzle anyone who examines the manuscripts. Dreyfus also pens, from time to time, short prose poems, depicting— that is, truly attempting to paint in words—beautiful scenes of nature: e.g., “Une heure au coucher du soleil.”101 In this cahier, too, he begins to write out long lists of English locutions with their French equivalents.102 Though there are several opportunities implicit in the essays he writes to make comments on Jews and Judaism, including anti-Semitism,103 Dreyfus seems oblivious to the evidence of bigotry and stupidity in the 99 100 101 102 103

Cahier 6, Fo2, Fo2 Vo. Ironically, “Fustel de Coulanges” will later be given as the name of an extreme anti-Semitical and anti-Dreyfusard political club. Cahier 6, Fo6 Vo. Cahier 6, Fo3. Cahier 6, Fo5, Fo5 Verso. Neither Dreyfus nor his friends, it seems, could face up to the awful truth that anti-Semitism lies outside the realm of any rational inquiry, and what the Affair was really about, when you look at it from the point of view of the men and women involved, is not politics or economics or religious bigotry, but something frighteningly flawed at the heart of civilization itself: “Where Israel is concerned, truth and reason are totally suspended. Irrationality and hysteria rule instead” (Melanie Phillips, The World Turned Upside Down: The Global Battle over God, Truth and Power [New York and London: Encounter Books, 2010], 71). — 76 —

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persons and events he is writing about, as in his description of the first meeting between Nietzsche and Wagner.104 Though there are a number of hints he receives from Lucie at this time that the efforts for a revision of his trial are beginning to gain traction in Paris,105 Dreyfus sedulously avoids dealing with the issues or wrestling with his own increasing impatience and frustration by writing out pages and pages on the French colonial war in Tonkin or the politics of the French Revolution of 1789, theorizing technical improvements for the construction of inclines on railway lines or improvements to public health. Even when he reads selections from Barrès’s novel Déracinés,106 where he is drawn to the problem of boys uprooted by the 1870 war from their ancestral home in Lorraine and their bright young teacher in a rural lycée who awakens philosophical enthusiasms and inspires them to go to Paris and make themselves part of the French intellectual life there, Dreyfus does not have any personal reminiscences or subjective comments. This seventh workbook covers the two-week period 26 November to 11 December 1898 and contains only twenty folios. There are a few interesting points made, casually, in the midst of the main topics Dreyfus is dealing with here. For example, while writing about a popular painting by Ernest Meissonier entitled “1805,”107 he deals with the historical content rather than painterly technicalities of the craft or the aesthetics of the composition, the word “impression” is used— mais ce qui donne l’impression d’une œuvre exacte et forte, c’est l’aspect que Meissonnier [sic] donne… The impression Dreyfus speaks of, however, is merely his own emotional response to the painting and not that of an artist who seeks, in his own sensitivity to the light and colors of the scene he is depicting, a way of expressing some deep personal quality in himself. By choosing this popular artist rather than one of the more modern Impressionists or post-Impressionists, Dreyfus shows his own apparently conventional tastes, but not necessarily his lack of awareness of the radical shifts in 104 Cahier 6, Fo 6, Fo 6 Verso. 105 There are a few fragmentary beginnings of draft letters to Lucie and government officials on this matter, but nothing is developed in this cahier. 106 Cahier 6, Fo 25. 107 Cahier 7, Fo 2. — 77 —

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aesthetics and perception in his own time. When in this same essay he uses the word “beauty,” it is not in reference to pretty pictures or other moving works of art; rather it is to the beauty of Napoleon’s tactics and manipulation of his troops, things that make him admire the “genius” of the great general. Hard on the heels of this little essay on war paintings and military strategy, there is a little discussion of chickens.108 In this description of closely-watched domestic fowl, as his observation moves from their appearance to their psychology—“À quel instinct pervers obéissent ainsi ces bêtes irresponsables, ordinairement si douces et si placides entres elles?” (What perverse instinct do these irresponsible beasts obey, ordinarily so gentle and so peaceful amongst themselves?)—the suspicion I have (or should I say “impression”?) is that he must be writing a parable or a prose poem, not a scientific report on one of the very few natural scenes he can still witness in his enclosed life on Devil’s Island. Mais n’est-ce pas aussi une loi pareille qui, tout aussi étrange, actionne les hommes, soulève leurs mauvais passions, les réduit à sa tourmente mutuellement d’une manière tantôt sournoise, tantôt hardie, ouvrant la blessure dont l’autre souffre? For is there not a similar law, itself as strange, motivating men, unleashing their evil passions, reducing them to mutual torment as cunning as rash, opening the wound suffered by another? In this barnyard cruelty of squabbling chickens, does he not see an image of his own condition, being pecked by those charged to protect and take care of him? This is the law of nature in its most Hobbesian form: not the survival of the fittest but the wanton and motiveless villainy of Iago and others whose own pleasure in life seems to be in inflicting harm on others, especially the weak, the vulnerable and the wounded. But any personal application of this parable or fable is delayed several pages, until he writes, as though in the voice of Montaigne talking about the machinations and cruelties of Roman politicians, about the mad 108 Cahier 7, Fo 2 Vo. — 78 —

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perversities of human behavior.109 At the end of his paraphrase of Montaigne’s essai, Dreyfus adds his own motto, modelled on the classical authors he admires and on the seventeenth and eighteenth-century philosophes whose somewhat consolatory cynicism he relishes: Plusieurs choses nous paraissent plus grandes par imagination que par effet. Many things seems larger to us in imagination than in effect. Then, in the course of many short essays on a range of philosophical, historical, and scientific topics, he inserts more proverbs, some from the ancients, such as Seneca, and others of his own composition, a phenomenon that becomes more evident from now on in all the cahiers; he also will start to gather up these sayings and entitles them “Propos d’un Solitaire” (Random remarks of a Lonely Man). Thus a cluster of three goes like this:110 Nulla placida quies est, nisi quam ratio composuit. La veritable tranquillité est celle que nous a donné la raison. Vertitable peace of mind comes from what is right or reasonable. On nous propose souvent des images de la vie que le proposant n’a nulle envie de suivre. Often those who suggest pictures of the life [we ought to lead] have no intention of following [their own suggestions]. Another parable or mashol (to use the Hebrew term for something between a terse proverbial anecdote and a narrative commentary) worth 109 Cahier 7, Fo 4, Fo 4 Vo. 110 Cahier 7, Fo 7 Verso. — 79 —

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discussing Dreyfus entitles “À propos d’Ève—fantasie” (Concerning Eve—a Fantasy).111 Dreyfus imagines a young and pretty woman, like a member of the court of love in Boccaccio’s Decameron, who argues dramatically, like a lawyer, that there is no logic behind the alleged behavior of Eve towards Adam in the Garden of Eden. Such a report, she contends, is “inadmissible” because no woman would ever, consciously or unconsciously, do such things as Eve is accused of doing; and she would certainly never, before marriage, display such flagrant immodesty. Not at all, fi! Never, I object: Bah! But if she did, well, think of how indecorously she was plucked from Adam’s side, and doesn’t that excuse her actions? The teasing depiction of this female advocate on behalf of her ancestress then continues, and so continues to show Dreyfus’s clever sense of humor, albeit with a tinge of typical nineteenth-century condescension towards women. Since she was our mother, Dreyfus makes this charming lawyer say, with all the silliness and contradictory logic a female was still reputed to have, surely she could not have been different from us. Indeed. Yet elsewhere in the biblical text, Eve shows nothing but maternal feelings, just as “we” mothers do today, and therefore—this is the impeccable reasoning Dreyfus attributes to his protagonist—when she was a young girl, as she surely was so soon after her birth from Adam’s rib, would she not display the same attitudes we see today? Alors, pourquoi n’aurait-elle pas eu, de même, les délicats sentiments de la jeune fille, puis de l’amante? Or, l’attitude qu’on lui prête d’éducatrice amorceuse me choque et nulle femme ne l’admettra. Well, why would she not have, in the same way, the delicate sentiments of a young girl, then of a lover? So the attitude one gives her of an amorous school teacher shocks me and no woman would admit it. However lame this joke may be, it shows several important facets of Dreyfus’s character. One, of course, is his wit and ability to tell an amusing and dramatic anecdote. Second is his familiarity with ancient literature, which allows him to parody the style and situations of 111 Cahier 7, Fo 15. — 80 —

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Boccaccio and probably Balzac (from Les Contes drolatiques). Third is his knowledge of details of the Hebrew Bible, whether he actually read it in Hebrew, or studied it in a French translation, or only knew it from commonplace paraphrases.112 The Miscarriage of Cells He had ended up by formulating what he called his hypothesis of the miscarriage of cells. Life is movement and, as heredity is propagated by movement, the cells, during the process of multiplication, jostled each other, were in constant conflict with each other, until they reached their final positions determined by the individual hereditary impulse…. Nevertheless, he was doubtful of the validity of the theory of atavism; in spite of a striking example of his own family, he believed that resemblances cease at the end of two or three generations because of accidents, interferences, a thousand possible combinations. Thus, there was a perpetual process of becoming something different… —Emile Zola, Doctor Pascal113 This brings us to Cahier Eight, dated 11 to 30 December 1898 and noted by the Supreme Commandant of the penal colony L. Danjean as containing fifty folios in manuscript. Locked in his increasingly confined quarters, in his little cell, like Pascal’s lonely soul swirling in a vast universe of introspection and self-doubt, Dreyfus continues to fill his workbooks, the more so as his ability to walk around in the 112 How ignorant people can be aware of biblical allusions came home to me recently when watching old clips of Groucho Marx’s You Bet Your Life, a popular television quiz show of the early 1950s, when a school teacher and an engineer failed to know the answer to the question: What is the journey of the Children of Israel from Egypt to the Promised Land known as? The answer: The Liberation Voyage to Lebanon. But even more insidious was the comment on the radio news in New Zealand in the 1970s when the Russian cruise-line Lermontov sank in the dangerous waters of Cook Straits during a terrible tropical storm; the reporter breathlessly shouted, “This is the greatest shipping disaster since Noah’s Ark!” As will be shown soon, Dreyfus had ample opportunity to absorb the rhythms and patterns of biblical and rabbinical storytelling. 113 Emile Zola, Doctor Pascal (1893), trans. Vladimir Kean (London: Elek Books, Bestseller Library, 1957), 33.This was the last novel in Zola’s Rougon-Macquart series. — 81 —

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daylight hours when his is not locked into his bed, is curtailed due to the inconvenience this causes to his guardians. What is left is to scribble this and scribble that, hoping his brain will not explode, a perpetual process of trying to become something different than an isolated and a solitary man, and not the comic figure in Georges Méliès’ early silent film, which Dreyfus, of course, could not have seen at this stage in his ordeal. In an essay on Beethoven’s Heroica Symphony,114 Dreyfus has an opportunity to bring together three themes from earlier parts of the collection: music, genius and heroic virtues. With no attempt at an examination of the technical virtuosity or aesthetic dynamics of the musical composition, he does try to show how a genius like Beethoven could be inspired by the 1789 Revolution and by the ambitions of Napoleon to transform his awe into a work of art. Yet there are no advances in theory beyond the use of a few general terms—admiration, hero, ardor; and all turns to an anecdote (mashol) demonstrating the musician’s superior moral stature to that of the Emperor. For when Beethoven, who had dedicated his new score to Bonaparte, learned that the great general had proclaimed himself Emperor, contrary to the ideals of 1789, the German musician tore off the title page and wrote in the title La Symphonie héroïque, taking the adjective in an ideal rather than a specific sense—the most noble and most generous aspirations of mankind, precisely those qualities no longer recognized in Napoleon. However the prisoner on Devil’s Island may have learned of this episode in Beethoven’s career, he seized upon it to make a point, which he left unstated; and yet it is implied in the condemnation of an individual who betrays both the ideals of which he had seemed to be the best embodiment in history and, more significantly, a set of ideals too easily betrayed by men who hypocritically still profess those ideals in words, through high-minded institutions and glorious actions that oppress and torture someone like Alfred Dreyfus. Realizing this, all Dreyfus’s long descriptions of Napoleon’s career and words of praise for this or that particular quality in him never depart from the insight into the failure at heart of the French Revolution and why it has not achieved its true resolution. Like Julius Caesar or Alexander the Great, whose careers Dreyfus also follows at some length, the Corsican leader ultimately went too far in his ambitions and had to 114 Cahier 8, Fo 21 Vo. — 82 —

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be cut down to size, whether by external powers or by some weakness in his own mind or body. Another essay takes up the topic of portrait painting, “In Regard to an Exhibition of Portraits of Women and Children,”115 probably an exhibition he read about rather than one he recalls from memory,116 although it is probable that Lucie and he had discussed art and history together sufficiently for her to know his tastes and so send books that would interest him. This discourse begins in the style of Montaigne, with an anecdote and a moral question: Comment doit-on peindre les femmes? Se demandait un jour Léonard de Vinci, et il se répondait à sa question en disant qu’il fallait qu’elles fissent paraître dans leur air beaucoup de retenue et de modestie. How do you paint women? One day Leonardo da Vinci asked himself this, and he answered his own question by saying that you must make them appear with their air of great reserve and modesty. The question is not one of painterly technique or of aesthetic composition but of social values and moral principles: the ideal, and therefore the appropriate representation of any woman as the embodiment of conventional beliefs. But the answer Dreyfus makes in his essay is also historical: what Leonardo was concerned with makes sense only if one knows how women were depicted before him, before the Renaissance, in, say, the primitive tradition of Botticelli. This leads to an almost technical discussion of prevalent modes of composing a portrait: Le visage était en générale posé de manière à donner une attitude simple et douce, souvent même de profil pur, car rien n’est simple et sérieux comme un profil. Mais, même de face, les portraits de femmes gardaient le même aspect modeste et recueilli.

115 Cahier 8, Fo 38. 116 Burns suggests that Lucie sent Alfred several histories of art. — 83 —

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The face in general was posed in such a way as to show a simple and pure demeanor, for nothing is as simple or as serious as a profile. Yet even in full face women’s portraits retain the same aspect of modesty and control. The ideal was in every instance to reveal the essence of this ideal of femininity, as an aristocratic and Christian conception, not to delineate the particularities of an individual historical person, not her real being of flesh and blood with her own thoughts and feelings. Only much later, in our day, Dreyfus argues, have painters hoped to simulate reality, “une pose affecté.” Toujours aussi, les femmes nous présentent leurs mains, car si on n’y lit pas l’avenir, on y lit la race et la beauté. Also always women display their hands to us, for if one cannot read their future there, one can read their race and beauty. The statement is, of course, vague and ambiguous, at best a merely tantalizing fraction of a whole historical aesthetic, upon which Dreyfus can touch lightly because, for him, as for his assumed readers (if he has such an assumption—or more likely, let us say, his agreement with some recently read or long ago recollected conversation on art with Lucie or someone else in the family), it depends on a shared set of attitudes that do not need to be spelled out. Such assumptions would include: (1) that painting is an exercise by men, whose gaze controls the appearance of the female subject and (2) that women are by nature different from men in their signifying role in society; and one might add (3) that the viewer of such portraits, the “we” who we observe, are also male. A further comment here on the word “race” (in French and in English) stands for what we would call “heredity,” or even “social standing,” rather than a strictly biological notion of evolutionary species, although in the 1890s, as one may see in Zola,117 it could also mean, fairly commonly, something 117 In Doctor Pascal, Zola writes, showing his protagonist epitomizing the science of heredity in the last half of the nineteenth century: “Starting from Darwin’s pangenesis, with his gemmules, he had switched over to Haeckel’s perigenesis, via Galton’s stripes. Then, in a flash of intuition, he had foreshadowed Weismann’s theory, which was to become generally accepted, and had postulated — 84 —

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like our current sense of “genetics.” Thus the “future” that a woman’s hands in a painting refers to is her own developmental biography—her health, her marital condition, or her achievements in society. This leads Dreyfus to ask another question, this time a kind of moral-aesthetic question: Le peintre nous montre ainsi les femmes en général, dans le plus beau moment de leur destinée, tandis que l’Histoire nous les montre jusque dans leur fin souvent insoupçonnée, et qui vaut mieux ici, de peintre ou de l’historien? If the painter here shows us women in general, in the most beautiful moment of their destiny, while History shows us them to their often unsuspected endings, and who is worth more here, the painter or the historian? The “here” of the conundrum would seem to be the specific imagined or recollected exhibition in some magazine he has just read that will be a show of modern portraits of women. Is it the duty of art, he is asking, to present things as they are in nature and thus in the very flux and corruption of real life, or to filter out the ephemeral and the accidental so as to allow a higher, truer essence to shine through? This is how Dreyfus answers his own question: J’inclinerais plûtot pour le peintre. C’est peut-être le sens du mot si riche et si exact de Delacroix: “Le poète se sauve par la succession des images, le peintre par leur simultanéneité.” I would incline more towards the painter. Perhaps this is the sense of the very rich and exact saying of Delacroix: “The poet takes refuge in a succession of images, the painter in their simultaneity.”

the existence of an extremely elevated and complex substance, the germinative plasma, a part of which is always handed on, unchanged from generation to generation, from each individual to each new individual…. But, on almost every occasion, the living reality contradicted theory. Heredity, instead of being resemblance, was merely an attempt at resemblance, thwarted by circumstances and the environment” (32-33). — 85 —

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The statement is confusing, both in what Delacroix is cited as saying and in what Dreyfus is trying to explain. First of all, the traditional118 opposition of creative art to history is based on what seems to be the argument so far, that where the historian is limited to the facts of a person’s life, the “poet,” in the sense of creative artist, is free to rearrange or delete unpleasant and ugly facts in order to present an exemplary ideal, either of what is to be emulated or to be eschewed. Second, another conventional119 argument contrasts narrative literature to the visual arts in regard to the way a storyteller can enumerate a series of actions following the logic of cause and effect and revealing the development of character, military strategy or political intrigue, whereas a painter has to show a historical scene with all its facets visible at once, either through different parts of the canvas representing different moments in time and space120 or implied in background details that indicate the consequences of an action caught in a single posture of intense happening.121 There is even a third possible contrast here, between prose and verse; that is, between the prosaic language of ordinary, mundane experience versus the exalted language of poetic effusions. Given his circumstances, Dreyfus has no need to present himself as a coherent critic of art or an art historian, but what is important for us to see is that art does matter to him, and if he prefers a moral art that upholds old fashioned ideals rather than his own contemporary radical changes in aesthetics and morality, that should neither surprise us nor make us assume he was, as so many historians seem to assume, uninterested in culture. He does come down very strongly on the side of the poetic, that is, the imaginative, rather than the prosaic, or the merely rational or ordinary. He was not alone in these clearly sophisticated but nevertheless conservative and increasingly outmoded attitudes. Suddenly, after a few remarks on Louis Pasteur’s scientific work and 118 That is, found in classical treatises and Renaissance essays, from Cicero to Sir Phillip Sydney, for instance. This is precisely the kind of academic classicism the Impressionists, Post-Impressionists and other Modernists were trying to break away from, and which, as we shall show in a long discussion on why Dreyfus preferred Meissonier rather than the artists we now consider the major painters of the nineteenth century: see the third volume in this series. 119 For instance, Lessing’s Laocoön. 120 For example, a painting of Christ’s Resurrection showing him simultaneously being led to the Cross in one quarter of the canvas, on the Cross in another, then rising into the heavens through the upper part of the picture. 121 For example, a picture of Napoleon leading his troops into battle in Italy, while on the horizon can be seen the Arc de Triomphe later built in Paris. — 86 —

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its implications for the future of public health,122 there is a different voice represented on the page;123 Dreyfus copies out a message he has received, which resonates with ironic implications pertinent to the kind of writing he has been engaged in for the past several years in the exchange of letters with Lucie and in the cahiers he has been filling with diverse materials: Le gouverneur fait connaître au Déporté Dreyfus que c’est à lui de rédiger lui-même les cablegrams qu’il désire envoyer à son avocat ou à sa famille, que l’ad [ministration] les enverra traduits en mots du code aussi fidèlement que possible, mais qu’elle ne peut pas et ne veut pas se charger de résumer sa pensée, de crainte d’en modifier le sens. The Governor makes known to the Deportee Dreyfus that it is up to him to prepare himself cablegrams which he desires to send to his lawyer or his family, that the administration will send them translated into code as faithfully as possible, but that it cannot and will not be empowered to transmit his thoughts, for fear of modifying the sense. Dreyfus probably sees in this formal directive some kind of horrible and perverse practical joke being played on him, some (hopefully) last piece of cruelty, and some unconscious act of prejudice by the agents of the state. The good news is that the road towards the revision of his trial is opening up, and the avenue towards rehabilitation has been laid out. He is asked, however, to prepare his own messages to his advocate or to his wife. On the one hand, the sadistic quality shows through in the expectation that he can, without knowledge of all that has transpired on his behalf during the previous five years, do any more than repeat what he said at the first trial or sent in his subsequent written appeals to members of the government. On the other, the ambiguous “or” may suggest, as in the placement of the choice of contacting his legal adviser before writing the good news home to Lucie, that such a choice can be 122 Cahier 8, Fo 39. Note that there are three full folio pages of his obsessional drawings. 123 Cahier 8, Fo 41. — 87 —

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made—or even desirable. Had the Governor had any sympathy at all, knowing full well the contents of the letters sent between husband and wife, he would have changed the order to “sa famille” and then “son avocat” and put between them “et” (and). Most important of all in Dreyfus’s transcription of this little notice from the prison administration is its remark on ciphers and responsibilities. Though the code being talked about here is likely the Morse Code used for sending telegrams, it could also be a reference to some more specific encrypting used in the French diplomatic and colonial services. Whichever it may be, the resonance in which such a term is used calls to mind—our own, as well as Dreyfus’s—the entire ambiguous level on which he and Lucie were forced to conduct their correspondence, and perhaps as well the efforts Alfred had to take in compiling and composing his cahiers to keep his most personal emotional fears and anxieties from rising too often to the surface. It is therefore ironic and revealing for the governor to warn the prisoner that the administration could not take responsibility for the correct transmission of “sa pensée,” as though they had not over the past more than four years been engaged in trying to decode and monitor those thoughts and feelings—and whenever they thought they suspected something that was sensitive to national security or likely to encourage either the wife or the husband to be optimistic, the censors would interfere with its delivery to the designated addressee. Finally, as we have indicated several times already, the whole of the Affair rested on false readings, misinterpretations, forgeries, perjuries, and totally made-up allusions to mysterious incriminating documents. Near the end of this same cahier, Dreyfus again addresses himself to the external status of his case and puzzles over the documents that have been sent to him for assessment and comment.124 In reading these comments, as his syntax begins to break down, it is possible to see the mix of rising anger and manic optimism about the proper resolution to his case, which soon gives way to frustration and rage as Dreyfus realizes what kind of insidious game the Army is still playing: In the document which has been sent to me by the [military] Court, I have noticed the faults (défaillances) 124 Cahier 8, Fo 48 Vo. — 88 —

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which have profoundly hurt me, but I have stated not without some pleasure (bonheur) that these moral flaws or failings of conscience (défaillances) have been corrected (châtiées). The army must be not only a school of duty, of honor, but still more a school of high morality, and it is not by suppressing (étouffant) history that this high morality can be maintained—for everything finally will be known [i.e., the truth will out]—but by beating down without pity these failures (défaillances) whenever they are produced. Though we can see here in the repeated use of the word défaillances, with various connotations (fault, failure, weakness),125 it is best to cite the second part of this little composition in French so as to better see what is going on in it. Interestingly, we should also note that while Dreyfus believes the Army should stand corrected for its procedural weaknesses, the term he uses is châtiées, punishment, from the Latin castigare: but this word can also, on the one hand, slide from a corrective act (as in calling a prison a correctional institution) to one of mortification or humiliation, and thus to castigation or public shaming; on the other hand, by a slight hint from scientific etymology of châttier to word-play through letter manipulation, to shifting the semantic zone of chatière, a cat-door, a trap for felines, to that of chat à neuf queues, a cat-o’-nine-tails. Dreyfus may be just on the verge of seeing that the General Command in 1894 is in need of a scapegoat or of a cat to whip, chose him as their designated spy-traitor, laid a trap for him, and then bagged their cat. The more they felt him slipping through the cat door through the efforts of Lucie, Mathieu and the other early Dreyfusards, the more they were étouffant les histories, gagging or choking on the stories, suppressing the truth. What the judges and politicians should 125 Défaillance enters French first as a medical term to describe the failure or weakening of an organ, then develops as a loss of strength and becomes a state of illness. By extension, it becomes any weakening of powers or an incapacity causing a person to fail to carry out his public duties. It thus gains the legal sense of default in the execution of a contract. Here Dreyfus sees the Army seeming to confess to its failure to pursue the case against him according to the law—the famous judicial error he and his supporters assumed was the central problem. That it was a more systemic weakness based on private interests and ideological exploitation only gradually comes to the surface as more and more officers in the General Command and in government are implicated in the forgeries, perjuries and arrogant self-protection of one another. — 89 —

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have been doing, these self-proclaimed guardians of the nation’s honor and integrity, however, is to beat down (frapper) the real défaillance or, better yet, the defaillants, the defaulters, the forgers, perjurers, and cheats in their own ranks. Unfortunately, for too many years in his unendurable solitary confinement and enforced silence, it is Dreyfus who feels étouffé, choked, and he who is being un-done (de-faillé), fainting and losing his mind. Nor should we neglect the reference to the “school of duty,” wherein the military authorities treat him again as a disobedient, fractious and unwanted student in their midst. Now he goes on to write of the diamond:126 Il en est ainsi d’un diamant qui, brut comme taillé, a la même valeur intrinsèque, mais qui, après avoir été façonné, acquiert une lumière et un éclat incomparables. It is thus with a diamond which, uncut or cut, has the same intrinsic value, but which after being fashioned, acquires an incomparable light and brilliance. The metaphor of the diamond belongs to the very stuff of romantic writing, and always seems ready at hand to mark the hero or heroine in love. Balzac, for example, describes the young innocent and earnest lover Emmanuel this way: “His purity of soul shone like a flawless diamond…” 127 But Dreyfus’s analogy almost seems to come out of the air and does not have a logical connection to what he has been talking about in the first two sections of the essay. The comparison to a diamond may arise from Dreyfus’s conversations with Lucie’s father and brothers in the jewelry business, diamond cutters,128 and the brilliant or uncut stone cut 126 There are two words in Hebrew for diamond, one for the shape, and one for the precious stone: ‫ יחלום‬y-ch-l-m, not used in the Bible but close to the Talmud term ‫יחר‬-ch-r, to glitter, be showy, proud or aristocratic, but also hiding in itself ‫ יחל‬y-ch-l, to wait for or hope. In addition, as Lucie’s father, David Hadamard, was a diamontier, a diamond merchant in Paris, the object, term, and allusionary system also includes his wife and Dreyfus himself in its compass. 127 Honore de Balzac, The Quest for the Absolute, trans. G. S. (London and Toronto: J.M. Dent and New York: E.P. Dutton, 1927 [1908]), 147. On page 148, the figure opens out: “Emmanuel’s affection expressed itself with the natural grace that is irresistible, with the delicate and delightful wit that reveals fresh phases of deep feeling, as the facets of a precious stone set free all its hidden fires; the wonderful devices that love teaches lovers…” 128 See my article “The Jew, the Jewels, and the Jeweller: Daniel Defoe’s Roxana” Transversal 2(2002): 19-33. — 90 —

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into a shining diamond with a multitude of facets is the light (lumière) of his life, Lucie, his brilliant, clairvoyant and glorious wife, his Shekhina.129 A scientist knows that the same carbon atoms compose a diamond whether cut or uncut, but it is the artistic crafting of the stone that gives it value and beauty, releasing as it were the hidden light that breaks forth from it. The only way we can decipher this mashol or exemplary tale, this witty conceit,130 is by understanding that when the prisoner receives news of a revision of his trial, thanks to the support of his Lucie, his brilliant jewel, his wife who has been formed and educated in her family of jewelers, then he can break out of the darkness of his cell, as the truth explodes from the darkness of ignorance, as the originary sparks are drawn out from the sitra acha, the other side of evil and superstition. But observe how Dreyfus here draws out the moral, the nimshol, from his little parable or mashol: Tel doit en être de l’armée, et dans un ordre bien inférieur, c’étaient déjà les principes que j’appliquais dans mes modestes fonctions d’officier de troupe. Bon, juste pour les bons serviteurs, prêt à leur prêter tous les secours, moraux et matériels, impitoyable pour les mauvais serviteurs, qu’il n’y a qu’à briser et à jeter dehors. L’armée doit être comme un diamant dont on élague les parties brutes pour en faire ressortir l’éclat et la grandeur, dans toute leur pureté. So it must be with the army, and on a lower level [of conception]; it was already these principles which I applied in my modest functions as an officer of the line. Good and just towards the honest troops, always on the ready to give support, moral and material, pitiless to disobedient soldiers, who one only had to break and dismiss [from service]. The army must be like a diamond from which one cuts away the rough parts so as to throw into relief the brilliance and the grandeur in all their purity. 129 According to Isaac Luria, “the divine Shekinah dwells among us only when we are joyous” (cited in Idelsohn, Jewish Music, 205). 130 Notice too that a parable is secretly hiding inside this incomparable jewel. — 91 —

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The superficial interpretation of his analogy is that the army must do for itself as a whole what he, as a humble officer had to do with his small troop of men, polish the behavior of the good men and get rid of those who were insubordinate or incapable of obeying orders; in this way, the army is like a diamond—it must keep cutting away the rough bits and ejecting the unprincipled. What Dreyfus is calling for is a general purge of the officers who betrayed the honor and integrity of the Army, and therefore of France, so that he can return to his rightful place and shine in his career. When Dreyfus returns to this same subject of responding to the now increasingly urgent demands for him to prepare notes to send to his advocate in Paris, the brief text appears well into the next workbook,131 one that had opened with a discussion of the relationship between modern pessimism and ancient Greek tragedy, and which proceeded, as usual, through many short essays on diverse topics, more and more of them tinted with a concern for politics. This short “response” to the cable about his “interrogatoire” is, for instance, bracketed between a paraphrase from Montaigne on the Emperor Maximilian and a virtually epigrammatic statement on the essential quality of education being the formation of good judgment and another on politics being better when concerning the great needs of a nation instead of petty personal squabbles—because it should be a very delicate art of divination. Yet of the twenty-four leaves in Cahier 9, and covering the entire month of February 1899, well over half of them, recto and verso, are filled with his doodles. The very last leaf, on its verso, contains two short essays, one on strong souls whose experiences are like a war, the battlefield of which is their conscience wherein their courage must be unshakeable; the other a saying of Montaigne which seems to sum up the whole workbook: Si nous amusions parfois à considérer et à employer le temps que nous employons [sic] à contrôler autrui et à connaître les choses qui sont hors de nous, que nous employassions le temps à nous sonder nous-mêmes, nous en tirerions grand profit et utiles leçons…

131 Cahier 9, Fo31 Vo. — 92 —

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If we sometimes amuse ourselves by considering and employing the time that we employ [sic] to criticize others and to know about things outside of ourselves, if we could employ the time to sound our own depths, we would be able to gain great profit and useful lessons… This kind of introspection is something that, paradoxically, Dreyfus finds most painful, because the world outside him on Devil’s Island is hostile and uncomfortable, and the people and ideas further away, which really interest him and he wishes he could enjoy again, have been reduced to ghostly memories or words transcribed on pages of a letter or a book. The work he performs cannot really be considered an employment since it serves no useful or public purposes. This is the tragedy, this the cause of his pessimism, that he is a creature of a politics he can no longer understand or control. Cahier 10 runs from 1 to 16 March 1898 and consists of twenty leaves, and it is in this workbook that he begins to collect his short sayings under the rubric “Propos d’un solitaire” or “Idle or Random Remarks of a Solitary or Lonely Man.”132 At other times he uses the even more selfabasing title “Menus propos d’un solitaire” (Small or humble remarks of a Solitary).133 Instead of isolated epigrams, mottoes and apothegms, whether his own or taken from famous authors, given mostly in French, but occasionally in Latin or Italian, he now presents them in clusters, though not always giving them a formal title or nominating himself as the Solitary. It will soon be possible to stand back from these hundreds of short sayings and extrapolate from them a general picture of his most intimate and painful thoughts, as though what is projected from these rambling remarks are the layers of discourse he cannot really articulate otherwise. Most of the sayings are familiar from the previous nine workbooks, or are variations with some new content, a new subject or a new authority mentioned or implied. Occasionally, there stands out a comment that seems more explicitly personal, such as:134

132 Cahier 10, Fo2. 133 Cahier 10, Fo16, Fo16 Vo. One could expound further on this pseudonym and its tradition in Spanish and Sephardic literature of the Soledad, with its Pascalian resonance of the isolated figure of man confronting a large, almost limitless universe. 134 Cahier 10, Fo2 Vo. — 93 —

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Dans les heures noires, la musique, comme le sourire de la femme, console In the black hours, music, like a woman’s smile, consoles. The black hours are the long painful nights shackled to his bed, his head filled with melancholy worries and frustrations. The woman smiling is Lucie at home, in his memory, playing the piano. This is his only rest and place of refuge. Or in another moment, two lines from Alfred de Vigny give him some cold comfort in the gloomy darkness of his near despair: Le juste opposera le dédain Et me répondra que par le froid silence. The just man will oppose disdain And will only respond to me with a frozen silence. But whether it is in a short and cryptic Latin tag—Sic non vobis (This is not for you) that may echo one of the most profound and mysterious sayings in the Pirqe Avot: If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And being for my own self, what am I? And if not now, when? (I.14) or in a more sustained little essay, as that below, Dreyfus has reached a point where his thoughts are random only in the sense that he does not have the patience or the freedom from excruciating pain to set them down into a coherent system, a philosophy. Yet that philosophical system has been taking shape in his mind for the past several years, and deserves to be elucidated through interpretation, “A propos des oeuvres à thèse”: On Literature With A Thesis It is a sentiment natural to man, it is a revolt against injustice, against force—so long as the sentiment remains — 94 —

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within limits, there is nothing to be said [against it]— but too often, this sentiment degenerates into a revolt against power, against greatness, then finally, it descends further and further into the depths and becomes a revolt against beauty, against genius, against the mind, against all noble morals, this sentiment, in becoming so base, eventually becomes evil and vile. That is why one must condescend to those below [one], support them morally as well as materially. That will make them strong, that will make them better. Dreyfus seems to be arguing against the kind of naturalistic, committed novels that were written in the cause of socialism and anarchy in the fin de siècle, not because he does not have sympathy for the wretched of the earth or wish to see liberal ideas replace regressive tyranny, but because such books, when following their own perverse logic, become anarchic and nihilistic. The sentiment he approves of as a natural one is also one deeply embedded in Jewish tradition, of identifying with the downtrodden and the defeated, the strangers in a strange land, the slaves to the system of whomever is in power and abuses that power. He also holds this sentiment because he is such a victim of political abuse and a prisoner in a jail run by sadistic bureaucrats. Then in the last words of this cahier, following the prison administrator L. Danjean’s signature indicating receipt of the document for inspection and storage—the remainder of the page is filled with eighty-seven doodles and verso with eighty more—he makes another of his heart-felt statements and does so writing lengthwise across the page: Celui-là ne se trompe pas qui, en vivant, déclare sa foi en l’Idéal. Faire de la Vérité le but de la pensée, du bien la fin de l’action, le Vrai étant d’ailleurs exclusif du miracle, le bien exclusif de l’égoïsme. Whoever does not fool himself, living, declares his faith in the Ideal. To make Truth the goal of one’s thoughts, good the goal of action, the Truth being elsewhere exclusive of a miracle, the good exclusive of egotism.

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Dreyfus is making a subtle distinction here between la Vérité and le Vrai, one being an ideal of honesty and frankness, of speaking without deception or dissimulation, the other an ideal of reality and genuineness.135 Somehow, without his being aware of the words and images bandied about back in France in the course of the Affair, especially after Zola’s famous J’accuse, wherein the nature of Truth was proclaimed and parodied on both sides,136 Dreyfus feels compelled to make this distinction in regard to what are usually unproblematic synonyms. It would have been a miracle had he known about this leap forward in his case.137 He wants his Truth to come without miracles, alluding to the iconic self-definition of Jesus Christ as the Truth and the Way, this religious type being veritas incarnate, and for that reason a matter of faith, rather than of reason or commonsense. He also wants the Good to be an ideal without egotism, that is, of a charity or love that shows itself true to itself because it is not a sham of generosity and a mere show of public conscience. This other ideal of the True conforms to what science and common experience learn and understand, not what is expected, conventionalised, and institutionalised. Both types of truth are good as an ideal, though the world claims the contrary in its hypocritical or cynical disdain for anything but melancholy hard-headed and hard-hearted realities; and the believer in such an Ideal should not consider himself a dupe and give up in despair. 135 And yet, as José Faur points out, “Dissimulation is the art by which the author hides his presence” and following Rabbi Judah ha-Levi “the God of the Hebrews is everywhere present and everywhere hidden” (The Horizontal Society, Section 1, Paragraph 2). There is then a bad dissimulation, which seeks to bamboozle and humiliate victims, and a good dissimilation, which seeks to protect and help people work their way out of difficult situations. If God is the author of the Book of Nature, explains Faur, still following rabbinical authorities: “The Supreme Writer is also the Supreme Master of Dissimulation, even in the midst of the most portentous ‘revelation.’ The rabbis taught that after splitting the sea at the Exodus, the waters returned to their original condition, thus concealing the miracle.” One is reminded here of a rather popular British Jewish novelist saying in an op-ed piece in The New York Times just before Hannukah of 2010 that he could find nothing exciting about the Jewish holiday compared to all the glitter and joy in Christmas; he was taken to task in Jewish magazines in print and online for displaying his ignorance and bad taste—and for missing out the way in which the Divine miracle of the eight days of holy oil remaining alight came after the recapture of the Temple from the Seleucid Greeks, that is, for the witty way in which the first humans fought for their freedom and won, and then God signalized his approval by the miracle. 136 One of the last novels completed before his death was based on the Dreyfus Affair and is entitled Vérité (Truth); it is discussed at length in the third volume of this series. 137 Faur: “This is the place to point out that Maimonides uses the Hebrew ‘‫’אלפ‬, generally translated as ‘miracle,’ as something ‘unpredictable’…or something ‘difficult to anticipate’…” (The Horizontal Society, Section IV, Paragraph 46). — 96 —

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Part 2: The Phantasmagoria of AntiSemitism and Anti-Zionism138

Nec fuit in illa civitate quod aspiciens id esse crederem quod esset, sed omnia prorsus ferali murmure in aliam effigiem translate… “Nothing I looked at in that city seemed to me to be what it was; but I believed that absolutely everything had been transformed into another shape by some deadly mumbo-jumbo...” — Apuleius139 I staggered through a world whose signs remained as inscrutable to me as Etruscan script. Unlike the tourist, however, for whom such things may be a piquant form of alienation, I was dependent on this world full of riddles. — Jean Améry140 If all the mad things in the world were given the right to free passage through the landscape of the Affair, the endless nightmare141— more than twelve years, as Dreyfus keeps reminding us, from 1894 to 1906—came unannounced, unceremoniously on a Sabbath morning, 13 138 This section of the chapter appeared in a slightly different format in the special number of Mentalities/Mentalités 24:2 (2010) dedicated to the analysis of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, and continues and refines the argument begun in “Satanic Midrashim: or, The Abuse of History,” Mentalities/Mentalités 21:1 (2007): 32-47. 139 Metamorphoses (The Golden Ass), Book II: 1, ed. and trans. J. Arthur Hanson, Loeb Classical Library, vol. I (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1989), 58-59. 140 Améry, At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities, trans. Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella P. Rosenfeld (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980 [1966]), 47. 141 Right from the first day he was abstracted from his normal bourgeois life, Dreyfus “had to struggle to distinguish nightmares from reality” (Burns, Dreyfus: A Family Affair, 127). But as we keep trying to demonstrate throughout this book, the distinction between the one and the other was not simple at all: the reality of his life had become a cauchemar, and the sanity and self-control he sought was a dream-wish he had to construct, a counter-contraption to that which sought to reduce his life to a nullity, to turn his intellect into detached nonsense, and his ideals into claptrap. — 97 —

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October 1894. From that moment on, nothing was as it had seemed to be. Why was he called on the weekend, why to appear in his civilian suit, why to take down in dictation such bizarre words? It was more than the world turned upside down: everything was inside out and backwards as well. The arrest and imprisonment of Alfred Dreyfus was a bolt out of the blue, an unexpected and unaccountable happening that shocked and startled his wife, his close relatives, and those people in the Jewish community who knew him. After he was deported to Devil’s Island, only Alfred remained in the dark about the plans and developments undertaken on his behalf. His wife Lucie was left to face up to the transformations in their life, and with the help of Mathieu Dreyfus and other old and new friends of the family, she tried to orchestrate the actions that eventuated in the Affair, even though by the second half of the 1890s they were spinning out of her control. As we will show, though she did not seem to play more than an ancillary role in the life of Alfred once he was out of France, Lucie was actually vital to his view of reality, and she helped to shape his actions and thoughts. The roles she played were not always realized by Alfred or those friends and relations in Paris. This is partly because they could not see these functions, some of which were long-term relationships with Alfred in regard to his intellectual and cultural interests, others of which belonged to the encoded words and oblique signals of love she could pass on through her letters. A few even more indistinct Jewish influences had come out of her family background and flowed on to her husband, keeping alive and enhancing aspects of his own religious heritage that he and his siblings may have thought they had all but left behind once they matured. But her role is also partly unseen because historians are not prepared to see it, and give other explanations to the way Lucie and Alfred communicated with one another. In both cases, we suggest, the absence of overt expressions and the overlooked lines of alliance can be explained to a large degree by the shock of the charge of treason against the young officer and by the perhaps more shocking appearance of so much anti-Semitism breaking out in France. These traumatic events forced the couple and their close supporters to hide their individual fears, private anxieties, and cultural strategies of coping from one another and from the general public, and certainly from official spies—and even from always suspicious allies. While it gives some perspective to look back at the Dreyfus Affair through the hindsight of — 98 —

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the Holocaust of the 1940s and the recent re-emergence of a worldwide war against Jews, Judaism, and the State of Israel, another less controversial way of understanding what was really going on can be achieved by examining the books, newspapers and pamphlets by the Jew-haters published in the years just before, during, and shortly after the Affair.142 To read the brochures and books of anti-Semites in any age, let alone our own, at first is to enter a bizarre world of outright lies, half-truths, and subtle distortions, although, on second glance—in those discourses that seem not to be totally repellent and insane—it is to be led to doubt one’s own sanity, to question everything one thought one knew or had been taught, and to wonder where in the world one might actually have fallen.143 But what is it to be sane or mad, to read or to be ridden by a nightmare? Too many casual, careless and therefore trivializing comments are made about the psychotic nature of Judeophobia. One must deal with these issues of mental illness, and particularly of collective insanity, with finesse and caution, basing one’s diagnoses on scientific data. Dreyfus was both fearful of going mad in the conditions of his exile, and was aware of many of the developments associated with what was then still called moral philosophy, if not with those medical techniques subsequently known as psychology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis. Similarly, all too facile remarks are made about what constitutes reading— the actual way in which books are processed through the mind, the way their contents act on consciousness and unconsciousness, the manner 142 Speaking of how the new technology of communication changed both the speed at which what were known as “magnetic” inter-relationships could be spread and the actual content of the “opinions’ put into the minds of the crowds who constituted the “nation” in the late nineteenth century through the mass-circulation newspapers, telegraphic wires and telephones, Gabriel Tarde says the most outstanding example of the crisis such an unparalleled phenomenon created was the Dreyfus Affair; cp. L’opinion et la foule, 39. On similar change in the concept of “people,” as distinct from the older notion of “nation” or smaller groups within the various constituent elements of that nation (aristocracy, bourgeoisie, peasantry, clergy, knights, etc.) see Jules Michelet’s introduction to The People (1846), extracts of which are reprinted in Fritz Stern, ed., The Varieties of History from Voltaire to the Present, Chapter 7 “History as a National Epic: Michelet,” 108-119. According to Vico’s Principi di Scienza Nuova, “a nation is assumed to be isolated from other nations, not to insure purity of racial stock, but to insure that its system of institutions shall develop independently of every other” and is thus constituted “genetically by a system of institutions continually changing, whose changes are due not to external influences but to internal stresses” (The New Science of Giambattista Vico, xxiii.). 143 Norman Simms, “Anti-Semitism: A Psychopathological Disease,” Chapter Two in Judaism and Genocide: Psychological Under-currents of History, Volume IV, ed. Jerry S. Piven, Chris Boyd and Henry W. Lawton (Writers Club Press, 2002). — 99 —

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of remembering and thinking critically about what is perused. As we shall see, for instance, while on Devil’s Island, Alfred Dreyfus had very few books with him and he complained about this lack of reading material, and yet his cahiers show him recollecting scores or even hundreds of books and articles he had read and had discussed with Lucie, as well as ones he had studied in school before becoming a military officer. Thus the nightmare—this is the word he often used in his journals and letters to designate what had happened to him and what he was suffering—is again not merely an ad hoc allusion, but has to be examined closely to see what constituted such a vivid and frightening experience on the liminal grounds between consciousness and unconsciousness, and particularly in the context of Jewish traditions and culture.144 I am reminded of the old story of the two Yiddish writers who met in the Warsaw PEN Club some time in the late 1930s. The first pokes his friend and asks, “Why do you read the fershtunkeneh [stinky] Nazi press everyday? Doesn’t it make you sick?” The second responds, looking over the pages of Der Sturmer, “Oy Givalt! You are telling me? I used to read the Jewish dailies all the time, and it made me sick to see how poor and persecuted we are, and how the rest of the world treats us like dirt. But now I read strictly the German National Socialist newspapers because they make me feel better.” “Feel better,” said the first friend, “ffeehh! what do you mean?” “Just look here and here and here,” he said, pointing to various screaming headlines and gross caricatures in the Nazi rag. “They tell me we are rich and powerful, control the professions and the press, and are better off than the German middle class. Nu, so why shouldn’t I feel better?” Epistemological Contraptions Une machine moins parfaite se survit, au fond, par une sorte de metempychose, dans la machine plus parfaite et plus complexe en apparence ou à certains égards l’a tuée… 144 Benmozegh argues thus: “If human thought has its sole source in an unending communion with the Absolute, it is inconceivable that this cause and continuous intercourse should not vastly enlarge the sphere in which man’s action has significance. We have spoken elsewhere of concentric rings of consciousness, one inside the other, extending all the way to divine Consciousness, which embraces all. If that is true, we can surmise how high the influence of man can rise—man, who, as some theologians have suggestively called him, is a thought in the mind of God—free to cooperate with the universal order or to contend with it” (Israel and Humanity, 195). — 100 —

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“A less perfect machine survives fundamentally, by a sort of transmigration of souls, in the more apparently perfect and complex machine or from some angles by killing it…” — Gabriel Tarde145 We will take such an intellectual then, a man who can recite great poetry by the stanza, who knows the famous paintings of the Renaissance as well as those of Surrealism, who is familiar with the history of philosophy and music, and place him in a borderline situation, where he has to confirm the reality and effectiveness of his intellect, or to declare its impotence: in Auschwitz. — Jean Améry146 Like Jean Améry, who was educated, cultured, sophisticated and on the way to great successes in his life when the Nazi Holocaust began, Alfred Dreyfus found everything called up short, knocked off its balance, and unbelievably absurd. Poetry became twaddle. Music became cacophony. Art became splotches of ugly color. Philosophy became ideology. All that he had faith in—the French Army, the French State, the institutions of French Justice—failed him. Instead of order, reason and logic, there was only noise, static and claptrap. In order to describe the old-fashioned machinery that grinds out all the claptrap, however disguised as reason and scholarship it may seem, we need to dredge up some old terms; first of all, contraption. This is not only because such an old-fashioned word forces us to confront, inside its orthography and sound-structure, the traps and contrariness in its very construction, but also because it makes us realize that we are talking about something clumsy, clunky, and inefficient; an old-fashioned machine that produces lies, half-truths and half-baked truisms. In our time, to be sure, the electronic media have taken over the production of the archaic ideologies of Jew-hatred, making the surface textures seem clear, efficient and realistic. But once we subject them to careful analysis, the 145 Gabriel Tarde, Les lois de l’imitation: etude sociologique (Paris: Ferlix Alcan, 1890; repr. Elibron Classics Replica Edition, 2005), 203. 146 Améry, The Mind’s Limits, 2. — 101 —

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stench of old bodies, excrement, and prejudices sweeps out into the world again. Edmond Picani wrote some years ago, “Let us put on the legal and socialist agenda, which is no longer a bugbear, but a vast scientific institution where keen advocates of justice of all classes meet and work—ANTISEMITISM!”147 This contraption of Judeophobia is metaphorically the bugbear, the monster always lurking in the dark recesses of the human soul, the crazy-work machinery of despotic nightmares and the institutionalized argument, the ideology tricked out as though it were ordinary commonsense, morality and political correctness, while it is also the underlying, unconscious seething—unformed, chaotic, and anarchic—primeval bigotry and hatred rationalized into a discourse of human rights, anti-globalism and socialism or liberalism. And as Jean Améry avers that cruelty and torture by the Third Reich was not “an accidental quality” but its very “essence,”148 so too for Dreyfus, try as he might to keep denying it to himself, the cruelty and torture he underwent was not an “accidental consequence of ä judicial error” but the very essence of the thing—the thing being the phantasmagoria that ground out day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, the claptrap of anti-Semitism. Both were examples of what Améry, following Nietzsche calls, “a festival of cruelty.”149 Ideology and Myth: Enargeia What we have tried to do, then, is to bring our contemporaries to life for posterity in a speaking likeness, by means of the vivid stenography of a conversation, the physiological spontaneity of a gesture, those little signs of emotion that reveal a personality, those imponderabilia that render the intensity of existence, and, last of all, a touch of that fever which is the mark of the heady life of Paris. —Edmond and Jules de Goncourt150 147 Cited in Joël Kotek, Cartoons and Extremism: Israel and the Jews in Arab and Western Media, trans. Alisa Jaffa (Edgware, UK and Portland, OR: Vallentine Michell, 2009), 152-153. 148 Améry, The Mind’s Limits, 24. 149 Ibid., 68. 150 Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Pages from the Goncourt Journals, ed. and trans. Robert Baldick — 102 —

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The term ideology, in this context, refers to a mass (or a mess) of pseudo-ideas that seems to be the underlying, unquestioned (and unquestionable) expression of the existing social and intellectual order. Unlike myth, to which it weaves in and out like carolers in a medieval village carole or snail-dance, wherein the discourse appears in narrative and imagistic terms—this is how it is done because this is how it was done ab initio by those who established the paradigms of behavior and morality, and this is how it appears to us because we all agree in our collective visions and our public dreams; and yet ideology seems to be spoken discursively as what we have been told to do in natural laws, basic regulations, and age-old customs or traditions time out of mind. Myths can be attributed to specific shamans, prophets, saints and heroes, while ideology is always attributed to unnamed sources who pass on their knowledge from father to son and mother to daughter through the generations in rhythmic maxims, soothing proverbs, and otherwise and political sayings. But as we can infer from the Preface to their Journals published in 1872, the two Goncourt Brothers aimed to describe the new realistic discourses—we might call them novelistic, if there were any coherence to that generic title itself. The new species of narrative, then still a mode of rhetoric, sought to persuade its audience, whether readers or listeners, in the common-room of their own silence or in the shared theatre of declamation and harangue, that what the fabulous and vibrating words transmit is persuasive, real and true. The handbooks of antiquity called this facet of oratory enargaeia, a term translated usually as vivid speech, convincing writing, lively and powerful discourse.151 Somehow, for each new generation, the language of persuasion of this sort, be it homiletic, political, fictional or novelistic, stages an act of rhetorical magic:152 it turns the sound and appearance of words—sometimes having lost any (New York: New York Review Books, 2007 [962]), Preface, xxxi. 151 There is a tendency nowadays for the electronic entertainment media to warn their viewers that what follows are “graphic images,” as though images could be anything else! What they mean, naturally, is images that are disturbingly true to life, even exaggeratedly so by the enhancements of computer-generated graphics. 152 Duclert quotes from Stephen Wilson, who sees “dans l’antisémitisme une reaction de type magique au changement et aux tensions qu’il engendrait…” (in anti-Semitism a reaction of the magical type to the changes and tensions that it engendered) in L’affaire Dreyfus, nouvelle édition (Paris: La Découverte, 2006 [1994]), 96. — 103 —

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recognizable meanings over the course of time out of mind—into mental images, and these trance-inducing pictures at once force out prior external sensations and internal memories in order to occupy the space of what is apparently experienced as true and, at the same time, to reshape the reception and recollection of such secondhand reality and dream to conform to this vivid and iterative pattern. These are supposed to be the imponderables, weighty and beyond question. They are, unfortunately, not what they seem, and the gravitas they project is a puff of hot air, the traditional truisms mere illusions and maggoty lies. To understand them it is necessary to recognize they are lines with spaces in between to be read through, figurative statements to be traced out and colored in, and oblique, ironic hints to be followed like an unwinding clue into the black hole of the Labyrinth. Listen to the words of the Zohar on Joseph’s dream:153 Since everything is contained in a dream, as we have said, All dreams of the world follow the interpretation of the mouth. They have established this based on the verse: “As he interpreted for us, so it came to pass” (Genesis 41:13). Why? Because a dream includes illusions and truth, And the word rules over all. So a dream needs a good interpretation. On the one hand, then, the predominant fiction of the novel and historical, sociological and philosophical writings that are modeled on them. Rather, it is a persuasive illusion of truth and reality, that is, at least for the moment. Thanks to its conventional selection of details and its stylized creation of background, it confirms the way things have seemed to be, still are, and must always be. On the other hand, so lively is this enhanced inscription or stenography, with its configuration of reflective shorthand signs, that most of the audience, most of the time, do not realize they are being hoodwinked or bamboozled. When the virtu153 Zohar, 81. — 104 —

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osity is part of a pleasant entertainment, not much harm is done; and, indeed, at times, much good in the way of understanding and insight can be accomplished. However, as in the specific discourses and imagery of Judeophobia, when the trick deludes, deceives, distorts, and discombobulates the world and the ideas about it that we have learned to test by experience and reason, then we are dealing with archaic myths longbubbling in the lowest depths of modern people’s unconsciousness and pernicious pseudo-sciences and duplicitous illusions of liberalism. That is why the literary historian and psychologist Hippolyte Taine, in the introductory chapters of the second volume of his influential study De l’intelligence, speaks of the mind as a grand theatre of illusions, specifically “an internal phantasmagoria.”154 But what do Edmond and Jules de Goncourt mean by the “imponderables that render the intensity of existence”? If these products of the je-ne-sais-quoi stand outside normal linguistic words and cultural images, are they part of the ineffable qualities of the air and light the artistic movements of the late nineteenth century were seeking to depict, a grasp of existential, impressionistic and symbolic realities within the temperament of the painter or sculptor or musician, or the regions of dynamic reality outside, below, or beyond the world of positivistic science and bourgeois materialism, or the powerful impulses, instincts and drives of the unconscious, preconscious, and what Freud would eventually term the id?155 They also are close to what at around this very same time in the late 1890s Aby Warburg was calling Pathos Formeln, passionately-charged triggering devices that ignite remembered codes of memory and explode new meanings into current moments of transitional crisis.156 If the ideal of the late nineteenth-century aesthetic, anthropological, and psychological theories are by definition and in essence irrational, uncontrollable, and anarchic, where does that leave those who would live and die by reason, order, and justice? As the thinkers and public of Europe in that period wrestled with this dilemma, they found themselves 154 Hippolyte Taine, De l’intelligence, deuxième partie: Les diverses sortes de connaissance, deuxième édition (Paris: Librairie Hachette, nd), 35. 155 The id was the IT of its time. 156 Christopher D. Johnson, Memory, Metaphor, and Aby Warburg’s Atlas of Images (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012). This is a topic to be discussed more fully in a projected study on The Jewish Imagination and How it Challenges and Transforms the World. — 105 —

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both fascinated by the new vision and the freedoms it promised, and were frightened, anxious, and threatened by these facets of themselves exposed in a variety of new ways—their bodies in x-rays, their minds in depth psychology, their relationships in sociology, and their institutions in revolutionary slogans—so much so that they could sometimes only see or imagine or think of themselves as dangerous others, more enemies within than external national foes, that is, as Jews. To understand these problems of rhetoric, truth, and witness, at least in the way they manifest themselves in Dreyfus’ writings, it is necessary to pick up again the concept of melitza, ‫מליצה‬, of the rabbinical practice of eloquence through imitation of and participation in God’s voice speaking a beautiful truth. David Nieto, a contemporary of Giambattista Vico, author of The New Science, who comes very close, as José Faur points out often, to the rabbinical concept of eloquentia (melitza) as more than beautiful speech or an enhancement of the truth, and more indeed that riddles, codes and conceits. It is a way of speaking and a way of critically listening, so as to discern and see through the eloquence of the other side, which is false and deceitful, ugly; it is a body of knowledge that is dynamic and sensuous, which the speaker embraces and is embraced by, so as to produce new aspects of the truth, beautiful children; a refuge, a womb, and sacred space, not a cell of private meditations or a dungeon of suffering, but a domestic home and hearth, a place where love is made by husband and wife, by couples, family, and community. In Faur’s words, explaining why one speaks of “a disciple of the sages” in the plural: The plural is of the essence. Only a student that had been exposed to more than a single school of thought could develop a critical judgment of his own that would permit him to persuade and be persuaded. This is why “the disciples of the sages” are described as those “promoting peace in the world.” 157

157 Faur, The Horizontal Society, Section IV, Paragraph 46. — 106 —

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Phantasmagoria, Kaleidoscope, and Mazurka In the Christian phantasmagoria of the Middle Ages, the Jew was the Antichrist, a poisoner of wells, a sorcerer, the devil in human form. — Arieh Stav158 Over a hundred years ago, a French professional anti-Semite, Edouard Drumont, in his best-selling compendium of ignorance and hate, France juive (Jewish France), echoing Hegel, claimed that the Jew, “irresistible and hidden, precipitated out of nature” by prodigies of astuteness and patience, is able to impose himself onto other people’s social life, and yet this personified other can be chased out at any moment “by some invisible force.”159 This basic trope of the “mysterious world,” a traditional social sphere theatricalized by the Jews that Drumont constructs throughout his anti-Semitic discourses is also extended to the distortions imposed on the true France. For this rhetorical figure, he drew specifically on the experience of various public and private theatres in mid-nineteenth century Paris—ranging from suburban circus tents and fairgrounds stalls through small-scale neighborhood halls and side-alley performance rooms, all the way to large purpose-built boulevard theatres. Particularly in the professional music halls Jews helped to revitalize popular entertainment; they were often, though not always, the entrepreneurs who opened these establishments with varying degrees of sophistication appealing to many levels of society. Jews were also represented disproportionately, but hardly as a majority, among the artists, from directors and playwrights through conductors, musicians, actors, singers, dancers, cosmeticians, costume designers, and stage designers. Such popular entertainments appealed to the emerging Jewish middle and upper classes, as Drumont purported to envisage, as well as to the general Parisian public. They were part of the machinery of construction for new ways of seeing, imagining, feeling, thinking, and acting in the 158 Arieh Stav, Peace: The Arabian Caricature:` A Study of Anti-Semitic Imagery (New York and Jersualem: Gefen, 1999/5759), 25. 159 Edouard Drumont, France juive (Paris: Marpon & Flammarion, 1886; reprinted online by Internet UUURGH [www.uuurgh.net], 2008) Vol. I, orig. p. 122 ; repr. p. 64. — 107 —

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world. Where Schopenhauer and Baudelaire theorized these new ways of perception, recollection, and artistic practice in terms of anti-bourgeois elites160—and so were as much theories rejected by decent, lawabiding, hard-working ordinary French men and women as too much to comprehend—the playwrights, music directors, comedians, and magicians reshaped the imagination of everyday life. They took advantage of new lighting techniques, new inventions like photography and the telegraph, and new concepts of space, time and motion.161 Drumont, nostalgic for the good old days of Church, Monarchy, and moral purity, held the makers of these entertainments, the Jews, responsible for the downfall of civilization, without being able to see in his own actions and productivity a perversion of traditional values and principles even more pernicious and dangerous.162 For what propelled the success of secular entertainment and celebrity and the shift in taste to popular, rather than classical, modes of performance were the developments in the medium of print, especially the mass-circulation newspapers and weekly or monthly magazines, of which many were illustrated, first with lithographs and later with photographs. These were the media, as we have said, that Drumont himself played an inordinate role in creating. Significantly, in this development of mechanical images and the messages they purveyed—as they so often do in modernism’s advance, when new modes of production and communication open opportunities, so long as there is a high risk and a need for ready cash (because they are always forced to be the outsiders, 160 Octave Mirbeau, Combats esthetiques, I. 1877-1892, ed. Pierre Michel and Jean François Niver (Paris: Seguier, 1993), “Mirbeau critique d’art,” 25. 161 These new technologies at first only enhanced existing machines and their associated mentalities, making communications, travel and transportation faster, but they soon opened up new possibilities of what to speak about and see, where to go and how long to stay or to encompass more places in one’s experiences, and what to think about, feel, and recollect; then there emerged unexpected transformations, creating in each individual and in larger and larger groups, epistemological crises—within one generation and across the generations—so that what was seen no longer matched with what one thought or felt one was seeing, and so forth. In our later book we shall explore how Dreyfus’s violent extraction from the normality of his life and the familiarity of persons, places, things and ideas exacerbated for him the more general feelings of discomfort and exhilaration that constituted these epistemological crises. 162 Bourget, “Une pousée colossale d’imagination d’une part, et de l’autre à son service une enttente positive et calculée de la réalité ambiante…” (Outre-Mer: Notes sur l’Amerique, tom. I. [Paris: Plon-Nourrit, ed. def., 1906], 174). “A gigantic thrust of the imagination on side and on the other at his service a positive and calculated understanding of the surrounding reality…” Recall that Dreyfus read and commented at length on this book by Bourget. — 108 —

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in many senses of the word)—Jews predominated. Many of the Jewish proponents of these commercial developments were indeed recent immigrants from lands to the east, especially the Prussian-German, Austro-Hungarian, and Czarist Empires, and thus they had no organic foothold in French culture when they sought to earn a living, or merely to continue living at all. Often these newcomers were belatedly emerging from their own medieval religious culture into secular modernity. Not bound to ancient family and professional categories of thought in France or other modern nations, the throngs of young and ambitious Jews surged ahead in cities like Paris and Berlin in the new climate of freedom following the Revolution of 1789. They were still forbidden entry into Christian trade associations and craft guilds, as well as professional associations by antiquated anti-Jewish regulations. However, the field of popular entertainment, traditionally marginal—that is, considered shady and criminal by the upstanding citizens of the land—was apparently the only possible place that would offer a general and generous welcome to the non-Christian “other.” Though it is alleged in Drumont’s tedious France juive and similar reactionary media that this alien “invasion” was part of a world-wide Jewish conspiracy to take over and transform French taste and to substitute an effeminate, luxurious, and morale-sapping Hebrew version, the truth was, of course, quite different, given that very little of what actually was written, performed, or valued in these new theatrical enterprises was particularly Jewish in any religious or cultural way. That is, unless, following Drumont, one counts as Jewish or Semitic all processes of modernizing and internationalizing art that occurred throughout Europe in the wake of the 1789 Revolution, itself an event that was precipitated by the explosive conjunction of Enlightenment and Romanticism, neither of which in its core values was particularly amenable to Jewish modes of thinking or feeling, and indeed, more often than not, expressed hateful attitudes towards Jews and their traditional culture, insofar as the luminaries and the poets and artists could imagine Judaism at all. Nonetheless, although the first waves of Jewish immigrants to France from German-speaking and Slavic nations to the east brought their own cultural baggage with them, the second wave and the later generations began to drop their peddler’s bundles at the wayside. They started to create new perspectives and tastes of their enthusiasm and their angst. France, with its tumultuous and confused surges of freedom and cre— 109 —

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ativity, tyranny and repression, tossed up ideas and events that permitted Jews to develop, invent, and exploit a range of self-expression and popular enthusiasms based not on any specific rabbinical precedents or ghetto traditions but on the individual thinking and feeling of the opening Jewish minds. This kind of surge of creativity and inventiveness would happen many times in new industries and media later on, and in other geographical locations, such as film-making in Hollywood or television-production in New York or London. Drumont expressed this phenomenon in distressingly blunt language, stressing his biases: in entertainment and in warfare, you always find the Semite163 in all these modernized specialist affairs. On the other hand, categorizing the Aryan-Christian everyman, he exalts the unreason of the blood, the soil, and the folk, thus prefiguring the petty postcard painter from Vienna named Adolf Schikelgruber who came to Munich to make his marks: “The Aryan slashes with his sword or fires his gun but doesn’t understand the chemistry.”164 Drumont’s repetitious arguments in France juive are, to anyone looking closely at his sources and methods, a hateful hodgepodge of claptrap and twaddle. Not only does he revel in citing Jewish authors,165 when he can find them in books and journals, albeit quoting out of context, in order to bolster his pseudo-case, but he confuses classical rabbinic texts, legitimate historical studies, ephemeral newspaper reports of events in progress, and heated polemical speeches in the National Assembly with ribald jokes, fictional exempla, current anecdotes, comic scenes on the popular stage, and endless nonsense from other anti-Semites like himself. This farrago of materials confirmed to him and to those imbecile readers who made France juive one of the best-sellers of the fin de siècle, all the worst of the slanders against Jews confected for the previous three thousand years, and let him construct a veritable source-book for the Jew-haters of the coming twentieth century. No wonder the 1930s Yiddish author sitting in the Warsaw PEN Club preferred to read about a powerful, all-influential Jewry than the grim, hopeless people his own 163 By Semite he means not only Jews and Arabs or Muslims, but all peoples of the East, ancient and modern. 164 Drumont, France juive, I, 89; 179. 165 As we have found and pointed out often in this book, we have to be thankful for inane minds like Drumont’s for making available lengthy passages from otherwise inaccessible books. Drumont, France juive, I, 89; 179. — 110 —

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fellow writers had to report on! No wonder the modern or post-modern reader, confused already by the fall of well-shaped ideologies and master-narratives or myths, holds his or her head in despair! The Eternal, the Infernal and the Internal Jew …the complex dialectical relation of anti-Semitism to modernity still awaits its historian. —Robert Wistricht166 For all his apparent successes, however, according to the anti-Semites who blared their pet-hatreds through the press, the Jew167 is constitutionally (racially) incapable of acclimatizing to modern France.168 The government’s official agent, Maurice Paléologue, who reported back to Colonel Sandherr on how he felt sympathy for Dreyfus at the ceremony of degradation, even to the point of being sure now that the officer was innocent, was told in words that could have dripped directly out of Drumont’s poisonous pen: “It is clear that you do not know the Jews,” responded the officer. “The race has neither patriotism, nor honor, nor pride. For centuries they have done nothing but betray.”169 Whatever he or she does, the Jew—the individual stereotype prevails over even the collective figure or the mixed populace—“mixes into the plots, fomenting civil wars and foreign wars,”170 and followers of Drumont still find a Semitic, Mosaic, Israeli or Hebrew conspiracy or hidden force behind every military, political or commercial catastrophe 166 Robert Wistricht, “Adaptable Hate,” a review of Hyam Maccoby, Antisemitism and Modernity: Innovation and Continuity in The Times Literary Supplement No. 5424 (23 February 2007). 167 That is, not so much this Jewish individual, or that family or community, but a consolidated, embedded “idea” of the Jew, a grotesque stereotype; and when particular historical names were used, it was still to project metonymic entities, exemplary figures, caricatures, wax figures, zinc marionettes or shadow puppets. 168 Drumont, France juive, I, 93 ; 185. 169 Burns, Dreyfus: A Family Affair, 152. 170 Drumont, France juive, I, 103; 209. — 111 —

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in recent history.171 But no matter how or where involved in the destruction of traditional France—the Belle France of the sacred Monarchy, the Holy Mother Church, the Glorious Army, and the solid and pure countryside of the French race172 and language—or contemporary Europe and America, the infernal and infidel Jew is always duplicitous, conniving, manipulative, cunning, untrustworthy … serves his own ends, which means not only the individual selfishness of the capitalist, but that of his people who, in Drumont’s eyes, are directed by the rabbis and the Talmud to enhance their wealth and influence at the expense of Christians—that is, of Aryans. In a way, then, paradoxically and not merely ironically, the Jew was seen as the mirror-image of the Jesuit; “the Jesuit personifies the 171 In almost every other case of racial bigotry and stereotyping, the scapegoat figure seems inferior to the threatened population; only in the case of Jews is the conspiratorial other categorized as dangerously intelligent, clever, and supernaturally powerful. 172 Usage of this word in European languages was common in the nineteenth century in a more fluid and vague sense than we are used to since the horrors of the Nazi regime. Race can be used as a synonym in a non-systematic way for nationality, ethnicity, cultural group, language community, or even for an individual family, clan or tribe. Though it sometimes has biological value, where the organic is confused with the social traits or personality profile of a population, more often race is something relatively unfixed and non-sustained, insofar as small towns or areas develop racial characteristic over relatively short periods of time and then develop variations, even new qualities, after traumatic events, large-scale immigration or migrations. It is only when the term becomes inextricably linked with “the blood” as a physiological factor in the formation of personalities and is taken to determine aptitudes, attitudes and intelligence—out of the control of any individual or small group—that it takes on increasingly political implications, as in the division of humanity into specific races in a hierarchy of genetic ranks from savage to civilized. In his unsophisticated grab-bag of facile statements, Drumont creates a popular lexicon of antiJewish stereotypes that pulls ahead of most scientific—or pseudo-scientific—racial discourses, such as eugenics, criminal typologies, degenerate families, and so on. As an expert on French conservatism, Prof. Norbert Col, points out, some of the intellectuals prominent in the antiDreyfusard camp, who espoused anti-Semitic ideologies during the Affair, found themselves forced to retract or reverse their positions on racial theory when they began to see the practical consequences in the rise of racial politics in Russia, Germany and Austria; this was more likely to occur among right-wingers—monarchists, Catholic mystics, and military idealists—as were Maurras, who was occasionally mixed in his attitudes, Léon Daudet, who had some Jewish friends but waited until after Kristallnacht before speaking out publicly against Nazi extremes, and Barrès, who of the three mentioned here is the only one Dreyfus seems to have read and written about in his prison notebooks—than with the leftwing socialists and anarchists who had adopted the Dreyfusard banner as a means of fighting the power of the Catholic Church, the Army and the Boulangists or Bourbonists. A mystic like Bernanos, rather than Péguy, always praised Drumont, although it may be, as Col writes, that it was “the Drumont a friend of the poor and supporter of the Commune over the bourgeois repression.” In other words, not all anti-Semites come in the same colors, and many could have Jewish friends or wives, and the same caution is needed before dismissing them all out of hand—and throughout their careers—as there is needed when considering “intellectuals.” — 112 —

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French ésprit [mind as well as spirit] at its best, its good sense, its love of letters, its intellectual equilibrium.”173 The good old-fashioned Frenchman, in Drumont’s view, precisely because he was so pure and faithful in his thinking and feeling, was naïve and gullible, easily duped because he was unsuspicious of duplicity and deception, and fell prey to the Jewish tricksters.174 Caught up in the revolutions of the nineteenth century, with its industrialization and shift to the cities, especially Paris, Frenchmen and French women unwittingly succumbed to the immoral blandishments of the phantasmagoria, that is, they thought they were bamboozled and discombobulated by the great Zionist duping machine, not the claptrap of anti-Semitic newspapermen and politicians.175 The Great Zionist Duping Machine Rien n’empêche de supposer malgré cela que chaque apparition dans cette fantasmagorie soit produite et déterminée même par une autre, qu’elle travaille même à en amener une autre, —Gabriel Tarde176 This kind of deception and self-blindedness has to be understood as 173 Drumont, France juive, I, 128; 262. 174 Drumont, France juive, I, 191; 401. Ironically, we should remind ourselves, the Jesuits had been ousted from France because of their untoward influence in politics and education; and in Eugene Sue’s interminable novel Le Juif errant (The Wandering Jew), it is the Achasuerus figure who arrives just in time—having completed his millennial wanderings in atonement for failing to recognize or help Jesus on the way to his crucifixion—to rescue the sacred nation of France from a nefarious Jesuit plot. What eventually became The Protocols of the Elders of Zion began as a series of anti-Jesuit slanders and anti-Napoleon III satire. 175 A poster in 1898 after the Zola Trial proclaimed: “Les Juifs, après nous avoir ruinés, divisés, deshonorés, sont en train de chambarder la France pour le plus grand profit de la vouterie universelle. Eh bien, unisons-nous pour chambarder l’omnipotence juive. Et en attendant de bouter hors de France les Juifs, ces parasiters dangereux, detruisons par tous les moyens leur influence.” (The Jews, after having ruined, divided and dishonored us, are about to sack France for their own great profit by their universal ways. Well, let us unite to crush the Jewish omnipotence. And while we are waiting to boot these Jews out of France, these dangerous parasites, let us crush them with their own methods) in Pierre Birnbaum, Le moment antisémite: Un tour de la France en 1898 (Paris: Fayard, 1998), 59. 176 “Nothing prevents us from supposing despite that, that each appearance in this phantasmagoria must be produced and determined itself by an another one, and that it works even by leading to another.” Tarde, Les lois de l’imitation, 5. — 113 —

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both a product of deliberate efforts to avoid all the social and political confusions caused by the advancements in science and technology that are evident in modernity—telegraph, rapid transport, mass media—and as a more profound interior experience of discomfort and anxiety. Thus on the one hand, the Jew was seen as the outsider, like the Bosh and the swarthy Levantine or Oriental barbarian who threatened to overwhelm or swallow up all of France, and the “ennemi intérieur”—the enemy within.177 In these ways, the anti-Semitic bigot views Jews, individually and collectively, as part of a nefarious plot, cogs whirling about the flywheel in an eternal contraption set up to entrap and grind to dust other peoples, and agents of demonic forces such as those described in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This contraption moreover works through unnatural, abnormal means, “by a sort of singular hallucination,”178 says Drumont. In other words, he conceived of the Jew as a carnival illusionist, a stage hypnotist or mesmerizer, a music-hall prestidigitator, a professional magician, and the Jew’s chosen field of activity is nothing less than a phantasmagoria. Let me cite the key passage in France juive where Drumont speaks of this outrageous phenomenon: Cet art spécial aux Juifs est tout modern, puisque la presse y joue le principal rôle, et, néanmoins, rappelle ces évocations du Moyen Age, ces fantasmagories qui faisaient apparaitre, devant le regard des êtres qui avaient des formes humaines, qui marchaient, qui parlaient, et qui, cependant, étaient pas des réalités. Il y a la comme un mélange des artifices magiques et des procèdes du puffisme contemporain, en ce qu’ils ont de cynique et de plus adroit, de plus grossier et de plus malin—comme une collaboration du grand Albert et de Barnum, comme une alliance entre Merlin, le vieil enchanteur celtique, et Goudcheau le Juif, marchand de confessions d’aujourd’hui.179 This art specific to the Jews is completely modern, since the press plays a principal role in its success, and nev177 Duclert, L’affair Dreyfus, 10. 178 Drumont, France juive, I, 140; 288. 179 Drumont, France juive, I, 253; 543. — 114 —

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ertheless it recalls those displays in the Middle Ages, those phantasmagoria which appeared to make visible beings with human form, who walked, who spoke, and who, however, were not real at all. It was like a mélange of magic tricks and the products of contemporary advertising, with all its cynicism and technology, more in bad taste than wicked—like a combination of Albert the Great and P. T. Barnum, a mixture of Merlin the Celtic enchanter and Goudcheau [Rothschild] the contemporary Jewish merchant of confessions. Though he means only to stigmatize the so-called Jewish monopoly over the press in France and elsewhere in Western Europe by conflating the American circus impressario and the founders of the Rothschild banking family, Drumont exposes his key metaphor for the way Jews take control of all aspects of Christian civilization. Significantly, too, Drumont tries to explain the phantasmagoria in phenomenological and psychological terms, by stressing its reliance on “suggestion” or “hypnotism.”180 There are, then, weaving throughout his long study of how France has already been taken over by the Jews, two kinds of explanation: on the one hand, there is a sinister, universal characteristic of the Semitic people, something biological and psychic or mystical, which allows them to communicate secretly with one another across time and space and thus to insinuate their way into other communities in order to enrich themselves and protect their interests, a something which is close to animal magnetism or mesmerism insofar as it generates a duplicitous control over the society they have infiltrated; and other hand, an equally malevolent but conscious and willful goal, backed up by Talmudic and rabbinical directives, to undermine the masculine strength and resolve, the morals and the physical health of the host nations in which Jews find themselves by the accidental forces of nature and the twists of history. At one point, too, Drumont inserts into a footnote a telling citation from Leibnitz as though it pulled together these two explanations for Hebraic power in the world: “Entre la langue et le caractère d’un people, a dit très justement Leibnitz, il y a la même

180 Drumont, France juive, I, 253; 543. — 115 —

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relation mystérieuse qu’entre le lune et la mer.”181 More historically, the place and performances that gave the phantasmagoria its specific popularity in nineteenth-century France are described by Henry Matthew Ridgley: In the height of the French Revolution … a Belgian optician, named Etienne Gaspard Robertson, arrived in Paris, and opened a wonderful exhibition in an abandoned chapel belonging to the Capuchin Convent. The curiosity-seekers who attended these séances were conducted by ushers down dark flights of stairs to the vaults of the chapel and seated in a gloomy crypt shrouded with black draperies and pictured with the emblems of mortality.182 It is possible already to note several key factors in this description that will be exploited, not just by professional illusionists who used his work as a model for their own phantasmagoric shows, but by men like Drumont, who found it a fascinating source of imagery in their anti-Semitic discourses. These methods have recently been translated further into the mechanisms of the electronic media of film, television, and digitized communications. First, a phenomenon that had been around for millennia as a small-scale set of tricks and a paradigm for ecclesiastical objects and paintings associated with hellish scenery and apocalyptic visions, the phantasmagoria was now commercially consolidated into an elaborate theatrical event, occasioned by the revolutionary enthusiasm and anxieties of the 1790s in Paris. The evidence is there even earlier, of course, and it shows that the concept, if not always the word, was a part of the thinking deep within the unconsciousness of European art, sometimes, of course, bursting out into what has been seen as grotesquerie and demonic nightmares. For example, art historian Julien Bell, in considering pre-modern painters such as Hieronymus Bosch and Matthias Grunewald, notes that both infernal and apocalyptic visions and depictions of the suffering of 181 “Between the language and the character of a people, Leibniz has justly said, there is the same mysterious relation as between the moon and the sea.” Drumont, France juive, I, n. 254, 263; 567. 182 Henry Ridgley Robertson, “Introduction: The Mysteries of Modern Magic,” in Albert A. Hopkins, Magic: Stage Illusions and Scientific Diversions, Including Trick Photography (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1897; reissued 1967), 7. — 116 —

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Christ and other saints in their imitation of his passion could be seen as part of a phantasmagoria.183 For these artists, sometimes working to traditional paradigms of ecclesiastical concepts of hell and damnation, sometimes—especially later—moving towards secular and individualized visions of grotesque and fantastic torments of body and soul, saw an extensive otherworldly contraption of evil, or at least of self-imposed guilt, spewing forth a universal theatre of cruelty in which men and women were forced to enact a horror-show as unwilling and usually non-comprehending players. Through the illusion of a carnival of damnation, a procession of torture and humiliation, these pre-modern painters laid the groundwork for the more dramatic political productions of the coming age. This is particularly true insofar as this static, two-dimensional and silent version of the phantasmagoria, precisely in its consolidation of ancient and medieval disguising tropes—the vast array of masquerades, allegorical jousts, and mystery plays differ from what is coming by the very fact of their inclusion within ecclesiastical, courtly, and civic rituals—point towards an independent, bourgeois, and commercialized entertainment. Whereas this consolidation itself may be termed an imitation of the ingeniously complex and multi-layered conceits of the Baroque period, or what Titian called poesia,184 the later theatrical artistes—the professional magicians, prestidigitators and illusionists—sought flashing lights and subdued spectacles,185 a musical atmosphere, i.e., evocative and mimetic sound, physical sensuality and psychic suggestibility, along with exciting stage action and voluble audience reaction. This approach would climax in the development of films at the end of the nineteenth century.186 From the 1890s on, moreover, pseudo-documentaries, spectacular newsreels with overly-exciting music and cajoling voices, led straight on to television “infor-tainment” and digitalized confabulations of poisonous slander. The magic of the silver screen did indeed teach the world how to see and feel in new ways. Unfortunately, these 183 Julien Bell, Mirror of the World: A New History of Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 2007), 189. 184 Ibid., 189. 185 Daniel Halévy, writing in Nazi-occupied Paris in 1941, recalls how the Dreyfus Affair had been “une admirable spectacle polémique” (“an awesome polemical spectacle”) (Péguy et les Cahiers de la Quinazaine [Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1941]), 99. 186 Jacques Deslandes, La Boulevard du cinema à l’epoque de Georges Méliès (Paris: Les Editions du Cerf, 1963); Gerard Lenne, La Cinema fantastique et ses mythologies (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1970); Paul Hammond, Marvellous Méliès (London: Gordon Fraser, 1974). — 117 —

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were not always cogent perceptions nor humanist emotions. It is out of these artificial and artistic developments, too, that there emerged a new technology of satirical caricature and political cartoons,187 that is, of grotesque and debasing line-drawings, by which first the inner otherness is exposed in allegorical form and later the racially-degraded physique of the Jew is unmasked and shown in all its ugly deformation. Instead of humor, the new drawings sought to induce derision and hatred. In place of caricature and exaggeration, the so-called cartoonists aimed at dehumanization and total alienation. Second, therefore, developing in that atmosphere of excited and excitable sensibilities of the French Revolution, Robertson sought to meet the needs of large crowds in search of new secular, non-courtly entertainment. Throughout the nineteenth century, secular circus parades and side-shows, as well as urban carnivals and fairground entertainment, could, on a positive side, lead towards Chataqua instructional extravaganzas, while at a more dubious level foot-stomping camp-meeting religious revivalist hucksters prepared for political rallies—the massinduced trances of the twentieth century in Nazi Germany, Communist Russia and Maoist China. The grand phantasmagoria would, as we shall see, modulate into the ultimate contraption of festivals of hate and a national killing feasts. Note here how Phyllis Chesler describes one of these (for us) contemporary bloody spectacles of injustice and insanity. She is recalling what happened on 12 October 1999, when two Israeli reservists, Vadim Norzhich and Josef Avrami, were caught in the West Bank town of Ramallah, having inadvertently strayed close to Yasir Arafat’s headquarters. I will never forget that day. That was the precise moment—and it preceded 9/11 by eleven months—that I knew, really knew, that the bloody beast was back, that we had entered an era of unending bloodshed. Over and over again, the footage was shown of the murderers who tortured, mutilated, and disemboweled the two Israelis, 187 The term cartoon, originally an artist’s line drawing of characters and objects to work out the design of a painting or fresco, has come to mean a childish storybook based on color-pictures and balloon-dialogue. These comic books have still more recently been transmogrified into adolescent and adult animated novels. Anti-Semitic caricature hardly fits the categories of artistic sketches or children’s fiction. — 118 —

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smiling like madmen, proudly displaying their hands smeared with Jewish blood. And how the Palestinian crowds cheered for them I watched them all, dancing in the blood of my people, partying like ghouls. No broadcaster, no well coiffed Talking Head drew back in horror. They showed the scenes but did not condemn them. The international human rights activists and intellectuals remained silent, as did the entire United Nations.188 There is no clearer description of a contemporary Phantasmagoria than this. Chesler’s account superimposes the performance itself in all its grotesque, archaic and psychotic reality, the various levels of spectators, from the Palestinian mobs and the supposedly humane and moral reporters and film crews to the United Nations, the intellectuals of the West and the whole modern world, and then her own memory of what she saw, how she felt, and how she now places the entire multi-layered phenomenon into Jewish history. By repeating the words “I knew, I really knew,” she emphasizes the quality of enargeia, vividness in the experience, in the sense of passing through an epistemological crisis. From then on, no doubts could remain; the world had to be seen in a way that was now swept clean of pious hopes, logical doubts that the impossible had indeed happened—the bloody beast of anti-Semitism was back. Third, in our running commentary on the historical development of the Phantasmagoria at the height of the French Revolution in 1794, Robertson found in the abandoned Capuchin Convent an apt setting, one made familiar by more than a generation of Gothic novels and graveyard poetry. Then Evans goes into more specifics of the performance. An antique lamp, suspended from the ceiling, emitted 188 Phyllis Chesler, “Opinion: October 12th—A Day of Infamy” Arutz Sheva (12/10/2010), http:// www.israelnationalnews.com (accessed 14 October 2010). It should be recalled that the original story was broadcast by Italian television, the European reporters depending on Palestinian cameramen—the condition for Westerners being able to operate in Palestinian Authority territory; when the reporters returned to Italy and tried to condemn the murderers, they were told their jobs were on their line, as any negative comments would end the network’s access to Palestinian news. — 119 —

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a flame of spectral blue. When all was ready a rain and wind storm, with thunder accompanying, began. Robertson extinguished the lamp and threw various essences on a brazier of burning coals in the center of the room, whereupon clouds of odiferous incense filled the apartment. Here one can see that, in addition to the expected smoke and mirrors of the stage illusions, there are added mood-setting music, suggestive sound-effects, exotic smells, and an increasing expectation of the purely marvelous.189 Suddenly, with the solemn sound of a far-off organ, phantoms of the great arose as the incantations of the magician. Shades of Voltaire, Rousseau, Marat, and Lavoisier appeared in rapid succession. This projection of familiar historical faces on to the smoke-incensefilled chamber proves the climax of the Phantasmagoria. Later, professional magicians would improve on Robertson, thanks to advanced inventions and techniques, so that the images cast by the magic lantern190 would become more dynamic, increasingly reaching culmination in the various versions of cinematography available in the final decade of the nineteenth century. But it was more than the mobil189 Paul Hammond, in Marvellous Méliès, cites André Breton on the difference between the marvelous and the fantastic: the “marveilleux has never neen better defined than being in complete contrast to the fantastic” because “ le marveilleux indicates an harmonious, parallel world whereas the fantastic (fantastique) refers to the shock experienced when abnormal, monstrous forces emerge to disrupt the equilibrium of normal, everyday reality. The imaginary erupts into the real and thereby puts reality on trial. The marvelous presents us with the impossible happening in a world where impossibility is the rule, while the fantastic presents us with a world where impossibility is outlawed. The fantastic seems to emerge in the eighteenth century because a scientific conception of the world began to predominate: the more the universe was rationalized, the greater heights the Romantic imagination reached. The marvelous, on the other hand, existed long before this period…” (9). Dreyfus found himself in a world of impossibilities obeying laws that were impossible to rationalize. Rather than providing cathartic laughter, this phantasmagoria of Jewhatred threatened to make him lose his mind by increasing the nervous tensions in his soul. 190 Proust: “… in that restaurant where I had dined with Saint-Loup one evening when he was on leave ... in a mysterious semi-darkness, as of a room during a magic-lantern show, or of the filmprojection hall of one of the cinemas to which men and women diners would soon be hurrying” (Finding Time Again, 42). — 120 —

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ity of the pictures and their reproduction in various poses and actions that fascinated later audiences; it was the formation of story-lines, plotted scenarios, and eventually speaking voices, rather than the voicedover patter of the magician-narrator. For Méliès, the favorite technique of his cinematic phantasmagoria was “the denial of expectancy and the exploration of the dynamic instant between the anxiety of dislocation and the release in the ensuing humorous ‘dreamlike image.’”191 For Dreyfus, however, nothing could be expected any longer but the unexpected, and there was no release from the nervous tensions building up in his mind, except that alternative reality he created for himself in his letters and cahiers.192 Meanwhile, back in the 1790s, when the Robertson production was over, having displayed the heads projected into the smoke-filled chamber by magic lanterns, the maestro would usually declaim something 191 Hammond, Marvellous Méliès, 90. 192 At this point, readers should keep in mind two subtle shifts in sensibility that were occurring— changes that were not yet clearly defined or steady in their constitution. First, there are the two kinds of determinism that play through Dreyfus’s life and writings—the determinism in a good sense that Barnard and other nineteenth-century scientific philosophers discussed in regard to the powerful certainty of natural laws that both define the parameters of human experience and the substance of choices available to men and women; and determinism in the bad sense that either hedges in human thought and action by strictly external paradigms of control, whether rational or arbitrary, but outside of questions or modifications through appeal or luck, such as the iron laws of Hegelianism or Marxism, or emanates from racial, biological and Darwinian patterns of progress or degeneration. Second, there are the different senses of reality or realism, whether matters of the substantial and concrete “facts” out of which experience is felt or recollected or as matters of the stylistic representation of experience, denying even the possibility of objectivity and certainty, all things seen, felt and remembered being subject to constant shifting of styles and tastes, so only a large amorphous product of illusion or delusion. For on the one hand, the century of Dreyfus was that in which positivistic and experimental science, as well as photographic reproduction of things seen—or increasingly, never before seen—and novelistic and journalistic reports wished to strip away the last vestiges of rhetorical flourish and idealized reconstruction clashed with the recognition, sometimes regretfully and sometimes enthusiastically, that realism, objectivity, and certainty were impossible, and that even the conscious mind was not only a small fraction of how one apprehends and acts on the world, but that what one has assumed one could apprehend through the senses and test by experimental logic was more likely than not distorted by the very processes of being in the world. See, for example, James Huneker, Promenades of an Impressionist (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1910), 10. On Cézanne he says: “His landscapes are real, though without the subtle poetry of Corot or the blazing lyricism of Monet. He hails directly from the Dutch… Yet no Dutchman ever painted so uncompromisingly, so close to the border line that divides the rigid definitions of old-fashioned photography—the ‘new’ photography hugs closely the mellow mezzotint—and the vision of the painter. An eye—nothing more, is Cézanne. He refuses to see in nature either a symbol or a sermon. Withal his landscapes are poignant in their reality. They are like the grillage one notes ancient French country houses—little caseate cut in the windows through which you may see in vivid outline a little section of the landscape. Cézanne marvelously renders certain surfaces, china, fruit, tapestry” (8). — 121 —

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to the effect of: “I have shown you, citizens, every species of phantom, and there is but one more truly terrible speaker on the fate which is reserved for us all,” at which point, according to Evans, who is following Robertson’s own memoirs in this account, “a grinning skeleton stood in the center of the hall waving a scythe.”193 Though a rather banal conclusion to the performance, it nonetheless indicates that there was a simple morality behind the public show. Despite the revolutionary tendency to substitute a religion of Reason for the Church, which was felt to have been discredited by its association with the now overthrown monarchy and by its own decadence, channeled through its Jesuit institutions, Robertson’s bourgeois taste still demanded the old iconography of Death-cum-Time as fitting closure to the production. In the course of the nineteenth century, impresarios like Prof. Pepper and, later, George Méliès194 would add technical improvements to the Phantasmagoria, leading towards motion pictures, but the psychological and moral implications of the elaborate illusion remained at best implied in its public performances, the deeper aesthetic significances brought out in more sophisticated painterly, literary, musical, balletic, and operatic versions, often experienced through allusion and analogy rather than imitation or description.195 Aggression against Truth and Justice Méliès’ substitutions are irrational and therefore perplexing. He called them “mystical.” We would call them cryptic. It is interesting to note that the substitution cipher is an important device in cryptography (secret writing); one set of letters to stand for another.

193 Robertson, cited in Evans, “Introduction: The Mysteries of Modern Magic,” 7. 194 “Georges Méliès devient un cinéaste engagé…et sou l’affaire Dreyfus l’emprunte soudain en importance sur toutes ses féeries” (Jacques Deslandes, La Boulevard du Cinéma a l’Epoque de Georges Méliès [Paris: Les Editions du Cerf, 1963], 13). 195 Proust: “‘But meanwhile, I said to Jupien, this house to us is something else entirely, it is worse than a madhouse, because here the madness of the inmates is staged, it is played out, it is all on display. It is complete pandemonium” (Proust, Marcel. In Search of Lost Time. 6 vols. Translated and introduced by Ian Patterson. Vol. 6, Finding Time Again [London: Penguin Classics, 2003], 140). — 122 —

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—Paul Hammond196 To do their jobs, journalists employed both the camera and the computer, and , with the help of portable satellite dishes and video phones, “streamed: or broadcast their reports from hotel roofs and hilltops, as they covered the movement of troops and the rocketing of villages—often (unintentionally, one assumes) revealing sensitive information to the enemy. One upon a time, such information was the stuff of military intelligence acquired with considerable effort and risk; now it has become the stuff of everyday journalism. The camera and the computer have become weapons of war. —Marvin Kalb197 The phantasmagoria at the end of the nineteenth century was, before it was a metaphor of perplexity, profusion, and pandemonium, a purpose-built or fully-adapted theatre for the performance of tricks and illusions, with hidden corridors, elaborate machinery hidden in the wings, trapdoors and elevators to carry persons and objects up to and down from the stage, complicated machinery run by pulleys, water or sand-driven screws and later by electricity, banks of mirrors, and refractive and semi-transparent glass set up at diverse angles, tables and chairs with hollow legs and surfaces filled with invisible cords and wires, smoke-producing engines and magic lanterns to project colored lights and images painted or etched onto glass. This kind of phantasmagoric production also requires a corps of trained technicians, performers, and managers. It also needs an excited and excitable audience who understand the conventions. Jacques Deslandes says when audiences first saw moving pictures on film they could not distinguish what they saw on the screen from the reality around them, and even began to take the cinematic experience as more true than what they perceived with their own 196 Hammond, Marvellous Méliès, 97. How cryptic or kabbalistic Dreyfus’s substitutions may have been is unclear, although he was posted to the Intelligence Service to learn the workings of a spy network and counter-intelligence system. 197 Marvin Kalb, The Israeli-Hezbollah War of 2006: The Media as a Weapon in Asymmetrical Conflict. Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy. Research Paper Series 29 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of Government, February 2007): 4. — 123 —

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eyes. They saw the artificial images the way children or schizophrenics see the world.198 So far as Drumont and his ilk were concerned, these theatres of illusion were a virtual monopoly of the occult Jews199 he feared by night and day. Adding insult to injury, anti-Semites noted that many—they said all—manufacturers and purveyors of liturgical or cult objects and ornaments for the Church and its faithful were Jews, thus transforming the ecclesiastical enterprise of sacred France into an Israelite enterprise and a Hebrew farce.200 Now, given this nightmarish fantasy confected of fear, anxiety, self-projection, and archaic iconography, the phantasmagoria is a multi-media extravaganza, sometimes pretending to be a purveyor of accurate reporting, capturing events, like wars and incursions, in medias res, and providing a world-wide audience with pictures and words that supposedly keep everyone informed, with the result being that information has lost its contents and its contexts, and confusion reigns.201 But it was not only in the new theatrical displays of jerky and silent motion pictures that the shift in mentality and imagination was occurring. It was also through the mass-media of newspapers, illustrated magazines, photo-engraved postcards, wax museum displays, and other new inventions of trance-inducing escapism. The sense of discomfort also occurred in the music halls, the lighted fairways, and the universal exhibitions and world fairs. The crowds found their eyes blurry and confused, their sense of harmony disturbed, and their hold over reality slipping. Contemporary descriptions of seething crowds of young people stirred up by the Dreyfus Affair point to the loss of direction and the self-mesmerizing effects of all these dislocating phenomena. Trying to exploit this large-scale sense of unease, the clunking, imperfect contraption, still hidden inside the slick façade of a perfect international network, is really only an old-fashioned and pre-modern factory of lies 198 Deslandes, Le Boulevard du Cinéma, 61. 199 Drumont, France juive, I, 179; 377. 200 Drumont, France juive, I, 187; 395. 201 Everything in the post-modernist ideology is equal to everything else, because there are no general truths and everyone is entitled to his or her own point of view, unless, of course, if they are Americans or Israelis, in which case they are by definition wrong. If this seemed to be the way the media worked during the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah War, then it was even more so during Operation Cast Lead, Israel’s invasion of Gaza to stop Hamas rockets being sent to Israel day after day, year after year. For a public that has cut itself off from historical contexts and hunkered up in superficial platonic caves, the whole world has become a madhouse, a kaleidoscope of instantaneous pseudoexperiences, and a phantasmagoria reflecting endlessly back into itself. — 124 —

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and distortions, serving to defeat the strength and integrity of our most cherished values, using child-actors202 to impersonate victims of aggression and dragging corpses from mortuaries to display supposed massacres. In 1864, Fustel de Coulanges wrote, “Man may, indeed subdue nature but he is subdued by his own thoughts.”203 In our day, Marvin Kalb writes, “a closed society can control the image and the message that it wishes to convey to the rest of the world far more effectively than can an open society…[a]n open society becomes the victim of its own openness.”204 How could this be? [The Durban Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Intolerance held in 2001] represents a turning point. It is one of those moments in the history of ideologies and attitudes of mind, when humanity makes an abrupt shift from one way of thinking to another. —Joël Kotek What the anti-Semites imagined was not merely a magnification or distortion of Jewish presence and activity in Europe in the years following the gradual liberation of Jews from discriminatory laws and confinement to specific areas of social, professional, and commercial life, but something far more fantastic: a Phantasmagoria.205 Today, this same 202 Lists of the names, birth-places and ages of those rioters arrested during the anti-Semitic manifestations in Paris during late 1898, after Zola’s trial, show that most were young men between 14 and 24 years old. The anti-Dreyfusards out on the street were not the activists and intellectuals of the monarchist, clericalist and pro-army right, but excitable youths who inebriated themselves by collective shouts, breaking store windows and beating up old men and women they thought looked like Jews. The smaller groups of pro-Zola dreyfusists were more purposeful and organized in their parades. 203 Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City: A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome, trans. Willard Small (1873) (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1956), 132. Fustel de Coulanges was one of the favorite historians of Alfred Dreyfus while he was imprisoned on Devil’s Island. 204 Kalb, The Israeli-Hezbollah War, 5. 205 Romain Rolland has one his protagonists, Olivier, remark: “If we were so unfortunate as to have the Jews driven from Europe, we should be left so poor in intelligence and power for action that we should be in danger of utter bankruptcy….their expulsion would mean a more deadly drain on the blood of the nation than the expulsion of the Protestants in the seventeenth century” (Jean — 125 —

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old-fashioned apparatus once powered by smoke, mirrors and pulleys, magic lanterns, and ventriloquism—sometimes by wax museums, postcards, lithographic newspapers, and freak-show devices—is performed by operators using hand-held electronic media to create digital illusions of sound and sight. The cross-over between this historical and phenomenological approach to anti-Semitism and the contemporary contraption called antiZionism is best explained in a statement made by Yonith Benhamou and Antoine Cheltiel in an essay called “Anti-Zionism versus Pro-Palestinianism in France”: Obviously, nobody hates the Jews, but the “Zionists”— which in a few years became a loathed term, a slanderous insult, a synonym for all the evils in the world: capitalism, imperialism, colonialism and racism. The compulsive hysteria provoked by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict reminds us of the feat accomplished more than a century ago by a Jewish captain called Alfred Dreyfus, who for 12 years managed to capture the emotions and concerns of a nation, and to split the French population. Indeed, today, in the same way, anyone in this country, any individual, whatever his/her historical knowledge or political background, already has an opinion on the matter and claims he would be able to discourse learnedly about it.206 The historical analogy is rather brief and understated, to be sure, but some key phrases need to be isolated and discussed, so as to bring out the way in which the contrap- tion—the ideological machinery of antiJewish attitudes—is made manifest in a phantasmagoria such as we have described in this chapter.

Christophe, trans. Gilbert Cannan [New York: The Modern Library, 1938; orig. 1910], Vol. II, 385). 206 Yonith Benhamou and Antoine Cheltiel, “From Paris, with Love: Anti-Zionism versus ProPalestinianism in France,” The Jerusalem Post (6 May 2010), http://www.jpost.com/Features/ InThespotlight/Article.aspx?id=174785. — 126 —

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Dreaming Blind: Synagoga and Sin This is the direction in which the poor, blind, foolish Jews go, with the result that they cannot and will not understand what belief and good deeds are … In their explanations and proofs of their baseless faith and exegesis, it does not appear that they still have the Holy Writ in their hands, but it is like something they dreamt some thousands of years ago, according to which they grope along, like a blind man for a wall. —Johannes Buxtorf207 Much of this section of Chapter One has centered on the last years of the nineteenth century in France and the important role played by an otherwise unimportant man, Edouard Drumont.208 His journalistic spread of anti-Semitism consolidated and focused much that had always been there in the region of ignorance and loathing, but he gave to it the impetus and the spin that made it general currency, available for Nazi and Soviet propagandists in the twentieth century, and Islamo-Fascists and their western dhimmi followers in the twenty-first. An early form of pseudo-Judeophilia can be seen in the writings of Johannes Buxdorf (1564-1629), and then in a line of others, sometimes Christian, sometimes Jewish, whose twisted sympathies for the poor, foolish, self-blinded Jews address the non-Jewish audience with a more or less almost-understood version of Jewish history and theology.209 The errors in this supposed sympathetic and pitying view of Jewishness derives from the essentially Christian filter through which all is passed, and the dour, humorless literalism of its renderings of rabbinic discussions and jokes. For Jewish members of this gang, there are those whose upbringings either gave them a totally negative understanding of Jewish beliefs and practices, a washed-out version of liberalized Judaism 207 Johannes Buxtdorf, Synagoga Judaica (Juden-Schul), trans. Alan D. Corre; https://pantherfile. uwm.edu/corre/www/buxdorf/ (accessed 21 December 2003), 17-18. 208 See Hannah Arendt’s judgments on Adolf Eichmann, the exemplary figure of the banality of evil. 209 Faur, The Horizontal Society. Prologue: “For better or for worse, the primary structure of Judaism is not theological. The term does not exist and it cannot even be coined in classical Hebrew. This is not to say that the Hebrew Scripture and rabbinic texts are not bursting with concepts that one can treat theologically and philosophically” (note: because I am working from the author’s final drafts I cannot give page numbers to the printed edition, and only refer by chapter and section number). — 127 —

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more socialist than halachic, or a morally lazy and frightened apprehension of principles and rational methods beyond their ken.210 When such self-loathing and defensive ridicule plays out on the vaudeville stage, the movie or television screen, or the side-tables of a bar-mitzvah reception hall right next to the chopped-liver mountains or ice statues, it is one thing; when it enters the political arena, grabs the opinion columns of newspapers, or parades on the street in favor of the delegitimation of Israel, it is quite another kettle of fish altogether, and rather a stinking concoction at that.211 All these formations are, to say the least, deficient in historical knowledge, rational thinking, political sensitivity, respect for traditions of social justice, and basic humanity. As we have shown, Edouard Drumont gives one of the most extensive descriptions of the Phantasmagoria, one which matches with modern reconstructions of those in use at the end of the eighteenth century.212 Today, of course, there is no need for smoke, mirrors, and magic lanterns. The Phantasmagoria can be seen in the way in which various hoaxes have been foisted on an unsophisticated public, as well as on ideologically self-blinded media experts, through such unreal occurrences as the shooting of Mohammed Duras (the little Palestinian boy purportedly shot on a Gaza street while cowering behind his father, but whose wink after the supposed event has been captured on film—and whose body has never been found), the mythical massacre at Jenin (in which village hundreds of innocent civilians were purportedly killed by the IDF and bulldozed into mass graves by Israeli soldiers, but where in reality a closely fought urban battle took place wherein less than fifty Palestinians were killed, more than three quarters armed militants, along with twenty-seven IDF fighters), or the hallucinated genocide in Gaza City (during operation Cast Iron, at which time Hamas leaders directed operations from hospitals and schools, forced civilians on rooftops to avert Israeli bombings, and in which only a few streets were 210 Melanie Philipps calls this projection, the Freudian phenomenon whereby all the ill-feelings of apprehension, uncleanness, anxiety and humiliation are evacuated from the inner-self of an individual and thrown on to an other, whether a scapegoat, pharmakos, or poison-container. Gabriel Tarde would call this inverse imitation. 211 Norman Simms, “The Little Old Jew at the Bridge, or The Dependence of God on Jewish Jokes and the Place of Witzenschaft in Modern Jewish Fiction,” Journal of Literature & Aesthetics 8:2 (JulyDecember 2000): 37-49. 212 Duclert cites the view of Trarieux who categorized the machinations arrayed against Dreyfus as “le simulacra de justice” (L’affaire Dreyfus, 39). — 128 —

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affected, most of the city remaining a model of modernity, and where Gazans enjoy a general standard of living higher than that of Turkey or Syria, and whose population continues to grow). Islands of Inanity Je vois l’artiste, devant cet être, s’efforçant de lui dérober ses secrets. Je le vois contemplant cette énigmatique, et pourtant nue dans son âme comme dans son corps, malgré, non pas aucune ruse, mais l’extrême mobilité de sa fantaisie qui précipite et brouille perpétuellement le kaléidoscope de ses pensées, unité nuancée d’une succession de contradictoires caprices qu’on croirait simultanéité, tant des un aux autres le passage est rapide. I see the artist, before this being, forcing himself to give up its secrets. I see him contemplating this enigmatic child [of nature], and yet as naked in his own soul as in his body, despite, not by any trickery, but through the extreme mobility of his fantasy which leaps about and tumbles the kaleidoscope of his thoughts, a subtle unity and a succession of contradictory caprices that are believed simultaneous, as well as those others whose passing is rapid… —Paul Gauguin and Charles Morice213 We have not detailed the specific instances and the ways the deceptions were carried out. In the Dreyfus Affair, the technologies of the nineteenth-century phantasmagoria were plain to see, and resemble those of our own day, albeit without the slickness of instantaneous electronic transmission. Today the techniques of computer graphics simply enhance the photographic illusions, and the superimposed false documentation; all it takes are propagandists who can doctor pictures, mislabel events and persons, crop and distorted contexts, and thus dupe the public after fooling newspaper editors and journalists into believing 213 Paul Gauguin and Charles Morice, Noa Noa (1899),English trans. 1919, Project Gutenberg, 7. — 129 —

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what never took place at all. How this trickery and deception, including self-deception, take place are never fully grasped in most of these studies. For instance, Joël Kotek, citing Ouriel Reschef, argues that “images created in times of crisis reveal something about the personality of those who produced them, but little more than a hallucination about the subject. Just as the dream is the main pathway to gaining access to the unconscious of the dreamer, but gives us little or no information about the contents of the dream.”214 But this kind of pseudo-psychoanalytic statement, when it doesn’t explain what is meant by “personality,” remains almost meaningless, just as the assertion that dreams tells us more about the dreamer than they do about what is dreamt sounds quite fatuous, if not quite inane. Yet Reschef is cited further, to some greater consequence this time: …in times of crisis—war, revolution, civil war, the psychological currents of thought (stereotypes, dreams, myths) work their way up to the threshold of consciousness and burst out in cartoons. Under extreme duress the quagmire of the soul is stirred up by the upheavals and convulsions caused by events. It leaves the lower depths to rise up towards the surface where it shows through, and then sinks back again once the turmoil has subsided.215 This kind of Jungian approach is certainly intriguing, but actually part of the problem itself. In the first place, it is not that the unconscious stores in a common lumber-room of humanity’s dark side the “stereotypes, dreams, myths” to be awoken in times of crisis, but that the creation of these psychic images are the disturbances that bring about revolutions, wars, and other crises. They are created and recreated generation after generation by dysfunctional parenting and other psychological crises, and the only way to be rid of them would be through long-term revolutionary changes in social relationships, domestic politics, child rearing and education. If the imagery and themes of anti-Semitism are stored anywhere it is in the discourses of pseudo214 Kotek, Cartoons and Extremism, xx. 215 Ibid. — 130 —

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rationality and religious bigotry. In France, later in Germany, and now in Muslim dictatorships, these stereotypes are deliberately dredged up and published in the press and broadcast on television, and they work because the societies are disproportionately full of very sick and mentally disturbed people. Two recent studies of popular culture also suggest the mechanism which, while not certainly all there is to say,216 offer probable-seeming explanations. One way can be seen in the normal lapses in the connectivity of mental focus, while the other appears to be a more social-epistemological problem. This last aspect emerges in the wake of transformations in the way young people (and not only them) gather, process, and come to understand information. Thus, first, a large proportion of the educated general public, and of the intellectual elite (the so-called chattering classes) especially those who work in and for the media, behave like the students in the classic psychological experiment who did not see an actor dressed in a gorilla-suit standing in the midst of a crowd of ballplayers they were asked to examine closely. We suggest that the media mayvens and their gullible readers see only what they expect to see and do not perceive what is in front of their eyes. This is a phenomenon called “inattentional blindness.”217 It has, we are arguing, a moral dimension, as well as a psychological dimension. And yet it is not merely a trick of the mind to overlook the obvious. There is something more sinister involved, a combination of mental “shallowing” brought about by a lowering of educational standards and cheapening of critical faculties, partly by over-reliance on electronic media—computers, iPods,

216 Though some of the studies referred to in this chapter speak of unconscious powers unleashed from the depths of the violent and irrational darkness of anti-Semitic minds and able to engage powerful, albeit confused responses, among contemporary Western intellectuals, mainly in the media and the universities, the essential components of psychohistory are not touched upon: such as infantile traumas caused by sexual abuse by parents and other intimate care-givers, dysfunctional family politics and consequent gender distortions, group fantasies encoded into mass entertainments, such as popular films, television and newsprint dissemination of pseudonews, sports extravaganzas and pop-music concerts. In other words, the psychic mechanisms by which bigotry, fear, hatred, self-loathing and projected loss of self-control are passed on contagiously generation after generation are barely touched upon. It is difficult to make nonspecialist readers comprehend the enormity of the psychotic state of civilization itself, let alone un-civilizations and anti-civilizations currently threatening our world once again. 217 Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, The Invisible Gorilla and Other Ways our Intuitions Deceive Us (New York: Crown, 2010), 7. This book and its implications were discussed more fully in the opening pages of the first volume of this series. — 131 —

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cell-phones, texting devices, and so forth218—and partly by the promotion in academia, and now seeping through the rest of culture, of postmodernistic philosophies.219 In a sense, this is the cause and the effect of what is known as post-modernism. I have hinted all along the way that what happened in Dreyfus and the world around him was a new way of thinking and new way of seeing, as well as feeling, as the imagination (l’imaginaire)220 of the western world shifted on its axis, not just once or twice, but again and again, like a kaleidoscope, at first so that it only seemed a new way to see and think, but then, suddenly, in a series of ground-trembling catastrophes from the 1890s through to the 1990s and beyond, it became clear that inside those apparently old ideas and feelings, as under the coating of seemingly new perceptions, memories, and anxieties, something new was being produced. This is best explained in the language of Aby Warburg’s Nachleben, the after-life of triggering-device imagery, Pathos Formlen, memory units created—to insert psychohistorical terminology to explain the developmental evolution of the neuronal and endocrine system—in the originary days and weeks of infanthood through the mother-child gaze, exacerbated by repeated acts of domestic violence and abuse, and obsessively acted out in political and social crisis. There was more than a kaleidoscope being turned around in its tube of mirrors and refractive lenses;221 there was also another myth218 Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains (New York and London: W.W. Norton and Co, 2010). 219 Phillips, The World Turned Upside Down, 279ff. 220 This term brings together—or rather, does not allow to fly apart—the image-creating and processing faculty of the mind, then techniques and strategies of memory formation for individuals and groups, and the modalities of various arts, popular and elitist, within a culture. 221 Faur looks at rabbinic tradition to see the difference between our modern western sense of “speculation” that comes from the Latin speculum, a looking-glass or a mirror and the Hebrew version of that root specularia that means a brilliant or not brilliant reflective or refractive mirror, one that can show the image of God as seen through the mystical realm of prophecy and the stained or tarnished looking glass that projects distorted and partial images that cannot be trusted. “The rabbis taught that Moses could not possibly look directly at God; the temuna is not the “shape” of God, rather it is His reflection as projected onto the specularia” (Faur, Golden Doves with Silver Dots, 128). Then, following the nineteenth-century Italian chacham Benamozegh, he points out that “speculum is related to species (both these terms stem from the Sanskrit spaç ‘to look’; hence speculum ‘looking glass,’ ‘mirror’ and species ‘a sight’ (and therefore, that which appears as outwardly familiar). Likewise, Hebrew lexicographers noted that the root of temuna is MUN from min ‘class,’ ‘species.’ Thus, temuna is the outer form exhibiting the inner characteristics of the species” (Faur, Golden Doves with Silver Dots, 128). The discussion goes another step further: “Unlike Western thought in which ‘face’ is associated with ‘exteriority’ and is therefore visually exposed, in Hebrew panim ‘face’ means ‘interiority.’ The ‘face’ is perceived through the (inner) — 132 —

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creating machine at work, a diabolical phantasmagoria. In fact, from another angle the whole idea of the Phantasmagoria can be compared to that of the Gesamtkunstwerk, or the search for a whole, synthetic art-work, particularly in the sense of a theatricalised, ritualized crowd experience.222 Though mostly associated with Wagnerian opera and its Nordic temple-theatre home in Bayreuth, this phenomenon was a goal of various artists and thinkers of the nineteenth century in their search for an ideal return to “the world we have lost,” that world of small towns, rural virtues, craftsmanship, and wholeness of sensation; in other words, the antidote to the Industrial Revolution, urbanization, commercialisation of life and culture, and bourgeois impersonalism or alienation of the human soul from its environment. The irony of the poetic search,223 however, was that the more artists and their patrons developed secessionist groups and artisan workshops to counteract mass-produced art and dwelling-space, the less anyone but rich and powerful elites could afford to support and own such individualized objects and designed structures. The result was, with rare exceptions of true artistic achievement, such as Gustav Klimt, a variety of monstrosities: either the grandiose and deadly mass displays of architecture and spectacle exemplified in Hitler’s Nuremberg rallies, or the reduced, concentrated, and internalised solecism of the selfish ego. As Herman Bahr put it in Das unretteres ich (“The Ego Cannot Be Saved”): “We seek above all the synthesis of the external and the internal world and ego, the wildest force (brutal and unrestrained) and the most fragile, over-sensitive refinement.”224 For different reasons, Friedrich

psychological expressions such as anger and sadness; it is dynamic and subject to constant change. In order to perceive the ‘face,’ one requires active interpretation rather than passive ‘looking’…. The ‘face’ can actually be perceived through ‘speech’ (qol) alone.” (Faur, Golden Doves with Silver Dots, 129). No wonder Dreyfus’s face or appearance so disturbed and confused his friends and enemies alike; they thought they could read his character in his face but they saw nothing but a distorted image, something seen through a glass darkly and not face to face. They never listened to what he said, what he wrote to Lucie or in his journals and workbooks. They could never get inside his skin. 222 Esther da Costa Meyer, “Gesamtkustwerk. or the Politics of Wholeness” in Natter and Grunenberg, Gustav Klimt: Painting, Design and Modern Life (London: Tate Liverpool, 2008), 25-31. 223 Benda: “On n’a peut-être pas assez remarqué que, bien avant 1914 et alors qu’elle n’avait aucun sens de la gravité de l’heure, soc société française ne connaisait plus l’ironie” (Belphégor, 130-131): “It has not been adequately remarked that, well before 1914 or with sufficient gravity at the time, that French society no longer understood irony.” 224 Cited in da Costa Meyer, “Gesamtkunstwerk,” 29. — 133 —

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Nietzsche225 and Sigmund Freud quickly lost their enthusiasm for this ideal, probably sensing in its development the kind of totalitarian states characteristic of the twentieth century—and even the meaningless nihilism of post-modern art. Esther da Costa Meyer explains the term, citing Eric Michaud: … Gesamtkunstwerk responds to the divisions of the modern world “by means of the unity of a great body, at once organic and mystic.” Against the historicity demanded by democracy, it presents “the phantasm of an end of history” … the dream of the Gesamtkunstwerk was corruptible, a siren’s song that continues to seduce.226 The seduction of the siren’s song—or as we see in Dreyfus’s Paris, the swan’s song of Proust’s novel of forgetting and remembering—could be the need to run away from what seemed like a corrupt, spoiled, and suffocating Europe to find an exotic place where the dreamed-of holistic life could still be found intact. But it was not just dreamers, like the late-romantic and post-impressionist painter Gauguin travelling to the South Seas and hoping to discover his long lost primitive self, his Rousseauist or Nietzschian savagery. Unlike Pierre Loti, whose exotic and lush travel books were far more popular, Gauguin did not merely indulge himself in sensuous narcissism. A true artist, he had been seeking the essence of art in Brittany and medieval paintings before he went to Martinique and Tahiti. Gauguin also studied Japanese print-making, as well as sculpture and pottery, in order to evoke from himself and from the aesthetic currents sweeping around him at the end of the nineteenth century in Western Europe new ways of seeing, depicting and feeling the world, a search, in a sense we shall discuss later, also shared by Dreyfus. However, for Dreyfus the exile to a tropical island was not voluntary, and the search for meanings in life 225 In a negative view, Jonah Goldberg says: “Without the standards of the Enlightenment, we are in a Nietzschian world where power decides important questions rather than reason” (Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning [New York: Doubleday, 2007], 282). Goldberg conveniently forgets the anti-Semitism and irrationality of the Enlightenment, which was a concomitant to its philosophical dreams. What Nietzsche describes as the conditions of our existence is not exactly what he wants. 226 Da Costa Meyer, “Gesamtkunstwerk,” 31. — 134 —

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and in books was a desperate consequence of his hardships. We need to distinguish carefully between the philosophical intellectualism and aesthetic exploration of new ways of seeing and feeling in out of the way places and in distant times and cultures from the more superficial, proto-fascistic mysticism—or rather mystifications227—in Pierre Loti’s mushy travelogues, in Madam Blavatsky’s absurd spiritualism, and in Frederick Nietzsche’s egotistical ravings, Richard Wagner’s and Carl Jung’s racist theories. It was in these more popular or more hate-driven systems where we find the early sounds of the Germanic Wandervögel who marched along similar forest paths singing the Horst Wessel anthem.228 In the other nightmare version of the Gesamtkunstwerk or the Phantasmagoria we also see the search to obliterate individual sensibility and reason in the Dionysian frenzy of the mass, the power of the regimented crowd, the all-powerful state embodied in the Führer and his huge torchlight rallies: where architecture, sculpture, light and sound, carefully synchronized thanks to modern technology, embodied the Nazi goal of politics re-conceived as a work of art … the goal was not the synthesis of the arts per se, but this ductile and docile crowd of thousands molded to specification by its dictator artist.229 It is nothing more nor less than the impossible dream and reality of the Holocaust, of the Durban Conference and the terror attacks of 9/11, or later in Madrid, Bali, Mumbai … For as Gauguin and his Symbolist poetic friend Charles Morice put it in Noa Noa: Soit, et je sais que deux paires d’yeux ne virent jamais identique la même réalité. Encore est-il des limites à l interprétation de l’art. Ici je sensé qu’elles sont franchies. Il y a plus d’invention que d’imitation, plus d’arbitraire despotisme que de fidélité, et j’ai, des lors, le droit de discuter le caprice qui 227 Interestingly, and ironically, Octave Mirbeau tends to use the word “mystification” to designate the true mysteriousness of art, its religious tremendum mysticum. 228 Phillips, The World Turned Upside Down, 227. See also Da Costa Meyer, “Gesamtkunstwerk,” 31. 229 Da Costa Meyer, “Gesamtkunstwerk,” 31. — 135 —

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groupe des fantasmagories de songes sous cette étiquette: Tahiti!230 There is something terrible, a despotic and arbitrary quality to this caprice of unreason and naturalistic feelings— today we would speak of false consciousness, fauxtography, self-deception, and of hatred of western civilization, rejection of science and the Enlightenment, anti-globalism and anti-Zionism, fascination with the fanaticism and terrorism of the Islamicist mass-murderers.231

230 “So be it, and I know that two pairs of eyes will never see the same identical reality. Yet are these the limits of the art of interpretation? Here, I sense that there are breakthroughs. There is more of invention than of imitation, more arbitrary despotism than fidelity, and I have, for that reason, the right to discuss the caprice that groups these phantasmagorias of dreaming under this label: Tahiti!” Gauguin and Morice, Noa Noa, 10. See Richard Noll, The Jung Cult: Origins of a Charismatic Movement (New York: Free Press/Simon & Schuster, 1997 [Princeton UP, 1994]). 231 Duclert prints a letter from Emile Duclaux which speaks quite openly of the clash between civilization, science, and reason and the absurdity, superstition, and unreason that constituted the anti-Dreyfus camp’s muddled thinking: “Je pense tout simplement que, si les questions scientifiques que nous avons à résoudre, nous dirigions notre instruction comme elle semble l’avoir été dans cette affaire, ce serait bien par hazard que nous arriverons à la vérité. Nous avons des règles tout autres, qui nous viennent de Bacon et de Descartes: garder notre sang froid, ne pas nous mettre dans une cave pour y voir plus clair, croire que les probabilités ne comptent pas, et que cent incertitudes ne valent pas une seule certitude. Plus, quand nous avons cherché et cru trouver la preuve décisive, quand nous avons même réussi à la faire accepter, nous sommes résignés à l’avance à la voir infirmer dans un procès de révision auquel nous présidons nous-mêmes. Nous voilà bien loin de l’affaire Dreyfus; et, vraiment, c’est à se demander si l’Etat ne perd pas son argent dans ses établissements d’instruction, car l’esprit public est bien peu scientifique” (L’affaire Dreyfus, 40). (I think quite simply that, if the scientific questions we had to solve would have directed our investigation as it seems to have done in this affair, it would be purely by chance that we would reach the truth. We have very different rules which come to us from Bacon and Descartes: to keep ourselves calm and dispassionate, to believe that probabilities do not count, and that a hundred uncertainties are not worth a single certainty. More, when we searched and believed we found decisive proof, when we even succeeded in making it acceptable, we were resigned in advance to see it weaken in a process of revision over which we ourselves would preside. In this instance, we are very far from the Dreyfus Affair; but, truly, we have to ask ourselves whether the State has not wasted its money in its schools, for the public mind shows very little understanding of science.) — 136 —

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Chapter Two The Ultimate Contraption

Il est plus aisé d’entendre le sens du mot dilettantisme que de le définir avec précision. C’est beaucoup moins une doctrine qu’une disposition de l’esprit, très intelligent à la fois et très voluptueuse, qui nous incline tour à tours vers les formes diverses de la vie et nous conduit à nous prêter à toutes ces fromes sans nous donner à aucune. It is much easier to understand the sense of the word dilletantism than to define it with precision. It is much less a doctrine than a disposition of the mind, very intelligent, at the same as very voluptuous, which inclines us in turn to various forms of life and leads us to borrow from all these forms without giving ourselves to any. — Paul Bourget1 Ceci n’est pas un pipe. — René Maigritte. This is not a book. — Paul Gauguin

1

Essais de psychologie contemporaine, 59. Coming from Italy, where the word suggested the delight of a non-professional in the tastes and achievements of the professional artist, dilletante gradually also took into itself the connotations of the aesthete and the dabbler, but not as strongly a negative sense as it gained in English where it came to mean false taste and pretentiousness. It may be argued that Dreyfus is a dilettante in the good sense of a man interested in many things but with professional training or practice in only a few. — 137 —

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This is not a history book. This is not a philosophical treatise. This is not a sociological report. So what is it? Do you really want to know? Yes. A midrash. Introduction Le voyage est possible si la conscience accepte la discontinuité de ses perceptions, si elle accepte brisures, fractures/, en un mot: si elle est ouverte a une Révélation. The journey is possible if the conscience accepts the discontinuity of its perceptions, if it accepts breaks and fissures, in a word: if it is open to a Revelation. —Marc-Alain Ouaknin2 The contraptions of the old-fashioned, pre-modern French state kept churning out forged documents, perjured statements, deep-seated illusions, and spontaneous self-delusions of evidence against Alfred Dreyfus; and all this claptrap—this showy, brassy, insincere, and confused noise was only a coup de theatre, and yet it was as real as the shackles that bound him to his bed or the palisade that blocked him from gazing on the sea—was played out over and over again in the phantasmagoria of the Dreyfus Affair.3 This pretence at normality was madness pretending to be sanity, prejudice wearing the mask of justice, lies decked in the robes of truth. Where was this seen before? In the 2 3

Marc-Alain Ouaknin, Lire aux éclats: Eloge de la caresse (Paris: Lieu Commun/Quai Voltaire/EDMA, 1992 [1989]), 355 “On September 6, adhering to the rule of silence and not responding to the prisoner’s demands for an explanation (‘you are driving me to the grave!’), they forced him into the ‘double buckle.’ He was just recovering from his most severe bout of malaria, and now, for more than forty nights, in torrid heat, with spider crabs, mosquitoes, and ants crawling over his body, he was immobilized, his ankles raw and bleeding…. A thick double fence, seven feet high, with planks hewn from the walaba wood of French Guiana, surrounded his cabin. Blocking the light and air from his window, it cut off his view of the sea, his one ‘supreme comfort’” (Burns, Dreyfus: A Family Affair, 181). — 138 —

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Archangel Gabriel’s fecundating eyebeam, twisted into a rope of light and gliding down from his celestial perch across the painted distance of illusion into the perfect womb of Mary, passing as light passes through a glass, but in enigmata, so that all that could be seen was what could be seen in darkness, in dark conceits, until it was proclaimed to all the world that Verbum caro factum est, the Word of God has inhabited the flesh of man, the corpus of a Jewish man imprisoned behind the walls of the uterus of insane history, sterile and unclean. And thus the Light of the World was no longer one with the bright solar beams exploding out of the distant stars filled with gaseous and atomic energies to make life possible on earth but only among the dark spots so intensely bright they can never be seen, the invisible shimmery horns on a prophet’s brow, the sparks scattering after the vessels of creation shattered, thence to be hidden in the darkness of a small prison hut on a lonely island in a tropical seas forlorn where the poor Jew eternally sits in his camera oscura waiting for release and scribbling, doodling his geometric hopes, while learning to see, now that he has lost his pince-nez, with new artificially sensitized inward-gazing eyes, his sight cathected by the obvious madness of his situation, so that for a moment or two, in the gloom and the glimmer of the magical night, he may perceive the host of invisible letters flashing on the horizon of his dreams.4 4

Taine writes that “notre perception extérieure est une rêve du dedans qui se trouve en harmonie avec les choses du dehors; et, au lieu de dire que l’hallucination est une perception extérieure fausse, il faut dire que la perception extérieure est une hallucination vraie” (our external perception is a dream of the inside which finds itself in harmony with the things outside; and, instead of saying that an hallucination is a false perception of the external world, it would be better to say that the external perception is a true hallucination) (L’Intelligence, II, 13). But a little later, he cites a personal letter from Flaubert: “N’assimilez à celle de l’homme vraiment halluciné. Je connais parfaitement les deux états; il y a un abîme entre eux. Dans l’hallucination proprement dite, il y a toujours terreur; vous sentez que votre personnalité vous échappe; on croît que l’on va mourir. Dans la vision poétique, au contraire, il y a joie; c’est quelque chose en vous. Il n’en est pas moins vrai qu’on ne sait plus ou l’on est.” (Don’t confuse it with a truly hallucinating man. I know perfectly well the difference between the two states; there is an abyss between them. In the hallucination properly spoken there are always terrors; you feel your personality is running away from you; it is as though you were going to die. In the poetic vision, on the contrary, there is joy; it is something inside yourself. It is no less true that that one no longer knows who one is) (L’Intelligence, I, 60). Clearly, there are times when Dreyfus fears that he is falling apart, going out of his mind, and hallucinating the nightmare of his torments; and other times, thanks to his writing, when he can transform the hallucination into a poetic vision and take pleasure in the metaphysical world he discovers in the space where he communicates to Lucie and where his readings and memory of books provide an alternative reality. It is as though he wrote out a pair of spectacles, or a stereoscope, through which he could both see his own inner experiences and look out into the madness of the historical world on Devil’s Island and back in France; cp. Taine, L’Intelligence, I, 74. These faculties are not, however, primitive features of the — 139 —

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Nil actum reputans, si quid superesset agendum. (Lucain)5 Thinking that he has no recourse to action, if something remains to be done. So the isolated Israelite, the no-man-island, makes a short incomplete list6 of what he wants to be delivered: savon papier sel (soap, paper, salt), that is, something to purge himself, something on which to project his thoughts, and some tears to wash away his grief.7 John Donne said in

5 6 7

mind where Dreyfus regresses to escape the horrors of his life, but highly sophisticated techniques of introspection and visualization he reproduces inadvertently from kabbalistic excercises. The simulacra hallucinatoire spoken of by Taine (L’Intelligence, I, 127) than the speculum of rabbinical midrash. Dreyfus’s supersensitive nerves, exacerbated by the shock and torment of his ordeal, created the conditions in which, thanks to Lucie’s intelligent and sensible support, he could maintain his sanity and develop his intellectual insights. Cahier 14, Fo5. Cahier 14, Fo1. Again, in his desperate jottings we catch a glimpse of Dreyfus walking through the terms laid out by Taine in On Intelligence, but also, given his later date and his sensitized mind in a continuing trauma, he also goes far beyond that positivistic thinker’s paradigms (I, 209). Where Taine can speak of two faces in the conceptions produced in the mind by its relation to external sensations and internal activity, Dreyfus conceives of the mind as multifaceted and dynamic, more than a diamond sparkling in the light or a kaleidoscope endlessly giving variants of its fixed number of shining particles. At worst, Dreyfus responds with a hallucinatory counter-phantasmagoria to the cruel and insane distortion of his realities performed by the agents of his beloved France for their own insidious and invidious purposes, and at best, a different phantasmagoria of creative thinking where science, morality, and poetry project themselves into a clarifying, selfcorrective future. Dreyfus neither follows mechanically the imitative model of Taine or the more sociological paradigm of Gabriel Tarde, but rather generates an explosive overflow of thoughts and feelings, at the same time coursing outwards into the empty blackness of insanity/inanity and condensing, concentrating, and consolidating his cultural past, personal present, and metaphysical future—a wonderful dream so long as it lasted, and that was only until he was finally returned to France, his family, and his ordinary life, for he never returned to the visionary experiences of his lettres or his cahiers. In this, we have to be cautious when reading B. G. Rogers, “Proust and the Nineteenth Century”: “Underlying most of Taine’s writings is the notion that the human being is the product of a predetermined equation between physical and psychological phenomena, a theory that owes not a little to the equally widespread positivistic ideas also current in the second half of the century” (in Quennel, Centenary Volume, 133) because the key words, like physical, psychological, and positivism, are open to many interpretations. If we always go by what later authorities have chosen to assume were the most important or useful ideas, we would also overlook psychological and sociological thinkers like Gabriel Tarde and Paul Bourget, who in their own time played more significant roles in the minds of poets, novelists, and artists than Emile Durkheim, Henri Bergson, and Sigmund Freud; cp. Anne Henry, “Le kaleidoscope,” Cahiers Marcel Proust 9, Etudes proustinnes 3 (1979), 29. Thus Henry’s assessment of how Tarde’s individualist dynamics shows men drawn by desires more than ideas as the driving force in imitation, the mind serving as an internal photographic plate or cliché (33). On why Tarde’s ideas and role in the development of interactionist sociology and interpsychic psychology did not gain sufficient traction to play a role in subsequent twentieth-century science, see Ian — 140 —

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a sermon, “No man is an island, no man stands alone”; and the isolated philosophe Blaise Pascal mused “Everyman is an island, every man stands alone,” for each modern soul finds itself alone in a tiny cell in the midst of the cold and empty universe, sits lost in thought and in silence contemplating the vast wordlessness of everything; or put differently, every man waits in penitence, every modern man and woman must work hard, each must learn to read the text of memory and listen to the echoes of the remembered text: until, at last, one can allow his secret self to speak the whole truth, suppress the debilitating lies and the outrage; for virtues are only powerful when they depend on, give weight to, and support character, the just and moral man. Semper veritas. Forever the Truth. Truth and Justice: truth is justice. But the awful truth, the awefilled truth is otherwise for those wise enough to read— …cinq années d’atroces tortures physiques et morales…les tristes jours…cruelles déceptions…cette longue suite de souffrances…trop angoissante…trop tristes…immérité martyre… pire supplices…une monstruosité…tant de secousses…l’atroce erreur judicaire… le spectacle douloureux…iniquité… le supplice intérieur…un crime sans mobile…un cauchemar…Quel horrible martyre…Je suis le prisonnier moral de cette atroce situation…crime de forfaiture des faux, d’usages de faux, de faux témoignes et de mon horrible captivité…une étrange aberration d’esprit…le supplice le plus atroce…8 …five years of atrocious physical and mental torture … days of sorrow … cruel deceptions … this long chain of suffering … too anguishing … too sad … unmerited … sorrow … worse martyrdom … tortures, a monstrosity … too many pressures … the atrocious judicial error … the dolorous spectacle … iniquity … the interior torture … a motiveless crime … a false charge of breach of duty, of false acts, of false witnesses and of my horrible captivity

8

Lubek, “Histoire de psychologies socials perdues: le cas de Gabriel Tarde,” Revue française de sociologie 22 (1981); 361-395. This and the following mass of citations are drawn from diverse pages in Dreyfus’s published writings, and thus begin to amalgamate his scattered thoughts into a coherent system of philosophy. — 141 —

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… a strange distortion of the mind … the most atrocious torture of all … For what reason? For what lack of reason? … le Juif … sa religion Sémite … la tourbe antisémite … la presse réactionnaire … supercheries … falsifications … dissimulation … Esterhazy … Une main criminelle avait substitué, par une grabbage et une retouche, la fausse initiale D à l’initial réel P, afin de pouvoir m’applique la pièce … forfaiture … calomnie … cette légende imbécile … la déraison humaine … … the Jew … his religion … Semite … the anti-Semitic mob—the reactionary press … trickery … falsification … dissimulation … Esterhazy … A criminal had had substituted, by manipulation and displacement, a false initial D by a P, so that I am implicated in the crime … breach of duty … calumny … this idiotic legend … human madness … Then, having listened to the sparks and gathered them into a twisted eyebeam of truth, now pay attention to the words of Paul Bourget, speaking ostensibly out of the nineteenth century’s fashionable pessimism:9 C’est Lamennais qui s’écria un jour: “Mon âme est née avec une plaie.” Baudelaire aurait pu s’appliquer cette phrase. It était d’une race condamnée au malheur. C’est l’écrivain peutêtre au nom duquel a été le plus souvent l’épithète de “malsain.” Le mot est juste, si l’on signifie pa là que les passions du genre de celle que nous venons d’indiquer trouvent malaisément des circonstances adaptées à leurs exigences. Il y a désaccord entre l’homme et le milieu. Une crise morale en résulte et une torture du cœur… 9

Paul Bourget, Essais de psychologie contemporaine, 11-12. — 142 —

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It was Lamennais who declared one day: “My soul was born wounded.” Baudelaire could have applied this phrase to himself. He was of the race condemned to unhappiness. He is the writer to whom most often the epithet “malsain” has been given. The word is proper if by it is meant that these sort of passions just indicated are found in circumstances uneasily adapted to their exigencies. There is a disharmony between man and his milieu. A moral crisis ensues and a torture of the heart… It would be all too easy to re-read this rhetorical heartfelt cry in terms of Dreyfus, since we have already seen the basic words, concepts and syntactic devices used and applied to him, not last because malsain is a Hebrew word adapted to Romance languages, and in Spanish particularly where, thanks to the Inquisition, it designates a spy from the midst of one’s community rather than a paid informer or “familiar” of the Holy Office. Lamennais was one of the failed religious leaders of the century whom Dreyfus related to with ambiguous approval, and Baudelaure a poet who, in his essay on Bourget, he chose to distance himself from, thus indicating his own attraction to the features of the conventionalized brooding melancholy he needed to control in his own mind. Hence we could paraphrase the earlier paragraph: The man born with a wounded soul could also be Alfred Dreyfus. He belonged to a race condemned to unhappiness, as Jews were in their long history of exile and persecution. He suffered from self-betrayal, in the sense of assuming he could assimilate himself to and be accepted by the Army and so by France, without noting the depths of Judeophobia all around him. There is indeed an uneasy lack of harmony between the man and his milieu, as well as between his mentality and his midrashing personality, which eventuates in a moral or psychological crisis and torture of heart and the body, metaphorical and all too real…

— 143 —

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Part 1: The Final Prison Cahiers: Nostalgia, Anxieties, and Reveries

Exile and homelessness, and the pain caused by exile, were the true hallmarks of the artist, according to Nietzsche. —Ingo Walther and Rainer Metzger10 The eleventh cahier was written in barely four or five days, from 16 to 20 March 1899, and contains twenty leaves, only one page being filled with drawings. It contains many columns of formulae and equations, mostly dealing with problems of geometry and physics, and a few lists of English locutions with their French equivalents. There is one relatively short collection of sayings entitled “Menus propos” (Humble Remarks). In the extended descriptions of military campaigns, Dreyfus comes to the conclusion that “war is surprise and one cannot force or govern events” and a good leader must remain calm, be prepared for the unexpected and act with lucidity of mind.11 When he discusses moral values, however, as in his little essay on Henri Lacordaire (1802-1861),12 the terms of reference he uses seem to come from Catholicism rather than Judaism.13 Morality must be a work of good value, effort, labor, 10 11 12 13

Walther and Metzger, Van Gogh: The Complete Paintings, 636. Cahier 11, Fo 2. Cahier 11, Fo 4. Here is what Léon Bloy had to say, first, about Lucie Dreyfus: that “Mme Dreyfus que personne n’aide ‘porter sa croix’,” (to bear her cross) and then about the newspaper that supported Dreyfus strongly and published Zola’s impassioned J’accuse: “Remarquons, en passant, qu’a l’Aurore, il n’est ordinariement, parlé que de ‘croix’. De ‘calvaires,’ de ‘calice à boire,’ etc.” (“let us remark by the way that it is usual to speak of the ‘cross,’ ‘calvary,’ ‘to drink from the chalice,’” Je m’accuse [Paris: Edition de “La Maison d’Art,” 1900; repr by La Bibliothèque libre online at Wikisource, 29). In other words, not only were the Dreyfusards forced by the nature of their language to speak in Christian terms, but so too did the Dreyfus family and their relatives, without any specific intentions to conceive of Alfred’s conditions as Christ-like; but nevertheless, at a deeper level of discourse, in the resonant Nachleben of the terminology, Alfred and Lucie could work out and play with the sacred agony, transmute it to their own condition, and express themselves in a way that was multivalent and protective, reassuring and reconstitutive of their love. — 144 —

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perseverance; morality, which must resign itself to the inherent evils of existence, without letting itself be beaten by them, seeking, on the contrary, for remedies that could [four words rubbed out in the manuscript] to prevail against them. To the inevitable evils of humanity we must not contribute a doubt and despair, but combat it with the arms of reason and conscience, clarified by the teachings of the past. Though he himself would reject the notion of an inherent evil (original sin) in humanity and will see in honest, true work the road to salvation, enhanced through midrashic concepts of zekhut, the patrimony of each Jew in the heritage of the national stock of good deeds, Dreyfus stays within the parameters of the Christian texts available to him—and which he feels most appropriate for his censors to read. What Dreyfus comes back to again and again, no matter what the specific terms—and despite the contradictions in any supposed philosophical system—are what moral qualities does a great leader need, usually military and occasionally political; the primary goal of education as the formation of good character through the teaching of judgment and logic; and the expansion of paradigms for literature or science to include the dynamic properties of every individual and the powers of the imagination.14 In fact, he comes to parse the concept of the imagina14 Imagination has traditionally been understood as either a faculty of the mind like fantasy that thinks in terms of pictures rather than words, of illusions rather than rationalities, and thus stands opposed to logos, the verbal logic that virtually equates with mathematical certainties, or as a synonym for creativity and poetic extravagance rather than prosaic and propositional statements. But it can also be a category of mind concerned with challenging and refining received opinions, perceptions, and so-called natural ideas, and thus it should be classed with rabbinic wit. Ouaknin explains, following Heidegger: “La lecture talmudique représente en fait une expérience poétique qui essaie de saisir le balbutiement du langage et du monde qui se créent, qui tentent d’éclore dans la lumière.... La lecture talmudique, à oppose du logos grec, ne cherche pas a recolter, à mettre a l’abri et à conserver” (Lire aux eclats, 151-152): “Talmudic reading represents in fact a poetic experience that tries to grasp the stuttering of language and of ther world which creates itself, which attempts to warm itself in the light . . . Talmudic reading, as opposed to Greek logos, does not seek to gather together, to pout in a shelter and to conserve.” Rather, Ouaknin goes on, “La lecture talmudique est une opération de dissémination qui restitue la vie, le mouvement et le temps, au cœur même des mots; c’est ainsi qu’elle les constate comme des œuvres d’art et les soustrait aux risques de l’idole…. La lecture brise l’instance du sens et tous les éléments des textes, les mots, les syllabes, les consonnes, les voyelles se répondent et se parle entre eux” (152): ”Talmudic reading is an operation of dissemination that restores life, movement and time, at the very core of words; it is thus that it confirms them as works of art and supports them in the risks of idolatry…. The reading breaks the instance of sense — 145 —

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tion so as to see that in individual minds, whether as practical leaders of men or as artists creating beautiful objects, there are different kinds of knowledge—intuitive, systematic, pathetic—and so different avenues to reach the ideals of truth and goodness. The education of children— and he must always be thinking of little Pierre and Jeanne back home with their mother Lucie—occupies his mind many times, with society and civilization depending on the success or failure of such efforts, both by parents at home and by professional educators in schools and universities. Not only can a person’s achievements in life be measured in what they do and say as adults, but also in the style in which they articulate those actions and speeches they learned to articulate as children. It is thus by helping young minds to gain control over their feelings, thoughts and words that they can go into the world prepared to meet all exigencies, many of which will be, as Dreyfus knows all too well from personal experience, mysterious, dangerous, frightening and cruel. Such a guidance into maturity is more important than the teaching of any fixed body of knowledge or memorized catechisms of unprovable or arbitrary truisms. Semper veritas (the truth always) is his primary motto, but his most important theme is that L’intelligence ne suffit pas sans le caractère et c’est par le caractère qu’on gouverne la fortune. Intelligence does not suffice without character and it is by character that one governs the future. Cahier 12 covers the period from 20-31 March 1899 with twenty folio pages, all but six completely filled with Dreyfus’s obsessional arabesques, and even the pages with text have only short pieces of writing, the rest of those pages completely scribbled over. The first written composition is an untitled prose poem:15 Quand la nuit se fait d’argent bleu, avec à l’horizon une légère bande d’or éteint qui disparaît bientôt dans les profonand of all the elements of texts, words, syllables, consonants, vowels responds to them and speaks between them.” 15 Cahier 12, Fo 6 Vo. — 146 —

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deurs des eux, laissons le silence et la paix des choses descendre lentement en nous. When the night becomes a silver blue, on the horizon a light band of extinguished gold disappears at once in the depths of the waters, we allow the silence and the peacefulness of things slowly to descend on us. A short romantic reverie, as Dreyfus enters the dreamy world of nostalgia and fantasies, as we know that he had been so placed in his little incommodious hut, surrounded by a tall palisade, so that he could not enjoy this familiar sight of sunset, this composition offers a small window into his poetic soul, a glimpse as unfamiliar as it is a marvel to all who have studied the Affair. Then come thirty-seven doodles, a full page of drawings, and on the next verso a paean to Liberté (Freedom), in its own way an almost lyrical effusion.16 This set-piece speech piece is inscribed on a page with twenty-three doodles, a full page of drawings, and is followed then a short exclamation on the Love of Humanity Aimer l’humanité, l’effort vers le bien, vers le vrai, même dans les formes qui répugnant souvent le plus à notre particulière nature. To love humanity, the effort towards the good, even in forms which disgust us in our most private nature. This cuts through its own formulaic words and phrases to express an idea of love that forces the issue: the icon of Humanity does not only manifest itself in beautiful ways—sweet, docile, charming and picturesque—but as also as an image that is ugly and disgusting, and the more so it is, the more one must love this ideal. Thus there is a double distorting mirror playing back against itself two versions of what humanity consists of. Dreyfus does not lose his critical perception of the world. Then, many leaves later, in a modernization of Montaigne’s Letter to his Wife,17 Dreyfus expresses his longing to be with his own beloved 16 Cahier 14, Fo32 Vo. 17 Cahier 13, Fo10 Vo. — 147 —

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and idealized Lucie and grow old gracefully with her. Without saying so, Dreyfus also praises this icon of womanhood by entering into the matrix of classical and Renaissance authors who have written to their spouses. However, as we have indicated by pointing to the many pages of drawings, these few little essays and poems occur in the midst of some crisis in the writer’s soul, making this cahier perhaps the most troubling in the whole collection. The workbooks that follow are never again as terrible or as mysterious: the lengthy essays on a variety of historical, scientific, and philosophical topics re-appear, along with various mathematical equations. Only a few occasional pieces of private discourse break out from the deliberately controlled surface of these texts. For instance, after a short discussion of the English novelist George Eliot, he writes:18 Les observateurs ironiques des petitesses et des laideurs de la nature humaine ne peuvent pas s’empêcher de sourire de pitié quand on étale devant eux des sentiments aussi naïvement dévoilés. Ironic observers of the pettiness and ugliness of human nature cannot prevent a smile of pity when they display before us such naively naked sentiments. Rather than being depressed by scenes of human misery which modern naturalistic novelists put before us or being roused to righteous indignation by similar exposés in social action pamphleteering, Dreyfus stands back with a somewhat bemused and sympathetic smile. This is because, we may opine, he is not an objective observer looking down from his comfortable bourgeois apartment on the little people below on the street, but a traumatized victim of state terrorism, far away in a horrible exile. The archaic ironic smile comes only when he gazes at the poor and miserable folk he is supposed to admire or laugh at, not only at the images of pitiful humanity, but more when he examines the writers who attempt to describe what they can never really understand. This is quite uncanny. This mixture of disinterest, pity, and ironic laughter also appears in a 18 Cahier 13 Fo13 Vo. — 148 —

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comment Dreyfus makes in the little essay dedicated to Milton’s Paradise Lost,19 and in these remarks we hear echoes of the first comments he had made on the falseness of critics like Hippolyte Taine, who value their own abstract racial theories over direct experience of the imaginative products of the human mind: It is more important, it is more just to try to understand this poem than to classify it, to explicate rather than to judge it, taking into account at the same time the genius of the poet, his completely individual creative powers, rather than the permanent conditions so well established by Taine, of period, country, and surrounding ideas. Not for Dreyfus the pseudo-scientific racism of nineteenth-century thinkers, with their absurd theories and their rationalistic paradigms, but the genial, humane, and relaxed approach of Montaigne, this is what Dreyfus seeks—in both what he reads and in how he writes; though he does not always have the opportunity to choose his own books and must take the few titles that come his way and the few journals sent to him, along with the memories of the many books he read as a boy at home, studied in school, and shared in evening moments with his young wife Lucie, nor does he always have the leisure and equanimity of mind to compose essays with the skill and calmness of his chosen model. When he can, though, Dreyfus prefers to write about scientific advances and about literature, painting, music and the other arts, though, since the times are often inauspicious and not conducive to inner tranquility, he also compulsively fills pages and pages of his cahiers with accounts of military campaigns and political intrigue. Writing a brief essay on one painter, Meissonier,20 in the manner of Montaigne, he easily broadens the scope and takes in literature, ancient and Renaissance and Enlightenment authors, as well as other painters, such as Delacroix. The starting point may be an article he reads in a review, from which his memory is set in motion, and the ideas flow by a kind of associationism that follows the natural course of development of the 19 Cahier 13, Fo18. 20 Cahier 14, Fo 2. — 149 —

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underlying philosophy of life he has been developing under pressure throughout his five lonely years of imprisonment and exile. As we saw in his earlier essays on photography, Dreyfus’s interests in science and technology were not separate from his philosophical and cultural concerns. Yet it is not always easy to see how he can use the paraphrase of a very technical discussion of some new advance to express at the same time a more psychological and emotional set of thoughts. In his essay on x-rays, the first hint21 that something more than scientific curiosity is at work comes in the title itself, “Les rayons X et la photographie de l’invisible” (X-rays and Photography of the Invisible”).22 Another hint comes when we read: La photographie de l’invisible n’est pas seulement en effet une expérience curieuse, mais la preuve des modalités de l’énergie autres que celles qui étaient connues jusqu’ici. Photography of the invisible is not only in effect a curious experiment (experience), but the proof of modes of energy other than those which we have known until now. William Conrad Röntgen, the discoverer of this phenomenon, not knowing what to call the new kind of light ray or energy he had found, put the mark of its unknown nature into what should have been a temporary designation (although some scientists named the discovery after Röntgen himself). But the interest of Dreyfus shows itself to be more than in the discovery of a form of invisible energy until then unrealised—and those days at the end of the nineteenth century vibrated with breakthroughs in quantum physics and theories of a reality much wider and deeper than anyone had ever suspected before—but also in the construction of an apparatus to utilize these polarized x-rays to see inside the organic carapace of living organisms

21 Readers should recall that reading by hint (ramez) is one of the four processes in midrashing texts and history. Rather than searching for symbols to be decoded, as in an allegory or a parable, the exegete follows signs pointing either away from or deeper in the letters, word or phrase, concept, or image being studied, that is, questioned and challenged. 22 Cahier 14, Fo3. — 150 —

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or other familiar objects.23 The excitement is not centred on the medical potentialities of this discovery or even on the solution of a problem in how to manipulate cathode rays. The world of nature, Dreyfus now believes, contains a whole realm of energy and material that can now be explored. The very idea of an unexpected and invisible world that is not mystical or mythical but natural gives urgency to approaching all sorts of topics with a courageous new impetus—to discover the unconscious forces of morality, psychology, and creativity. A second follow-up essay on x-rays appears a few folios later, using the same title as the first.24 Now Dreyfus begins to draw out the implications from the hints mentioned before. He writes, “La transparence n’est qu’une chose toute relative” (Transparency is only a relative thing), with all the suggestions about scientific and philosophical reality ready to explode from this fantastic idea. The way in which the human eye sees is not the same as the way the marvelous apparatus uses a cathode ray. The spectrum of visible colors runs out at both ends to different kinds of suspected invisibility, the ultraviolet and the infrared; but the artificial machine for seeing, the x-ray, does not have the same limitations, although it was at the time still primitive and had developed only one of the many directions that suddenly start to seem possible. Dreyfus looks beyond the moment of uncanny discovery into a not very distant future that lies beyond imagining.25 A third essay on x-rays shows how important and fascinating Dreyfus found the topic.26 Here he separates out six elements in the discovery, 23 James Huneker writes: “Taine it was who voiced the philosophy of Impressionism when he announced in his Philosophie de l’Art that the principal personage in a picture is the light in which all things are plunged. Eugène Carrière also asserted that a ‘picture is the logical development of light.’ Monticelli before him had said: ‘In a painting one must sound the C. Rembrandt, Rubens, Watteau, all the great ones sounded the C.’ His C, his key-note, was the magic touch of luminosity that dominated his picture” (Promenades of an Impressionist, 21). From now on, after the new photography replaces the old, that is, the realization that cameras see more and other than the naked eye enhanced by mechanics, the dictum will be that light in all its prismatic complexity replaces the painting—means we can no longer trust either our naked eyes or a mere photograph. 24 Cahier 14, Fo6. 25 Just as light and shade cannot be contrasted once we recognize that shadows are a form of light and light a blending of various shades of color passed through a prism, so we have to take into account that in Hebrew—not just a language but a category of thought and way of thinking, and consequently a body of rabbinical knowledge and traditional ways of processing it into practice— “light” (or) signifies both “brilliance” and “secret” (both having the numerical equivalent of 207) as in the name of the kabbalistic midrash Zohar, The Book of Brilliance; see Ouaknin, Lire aux eclats, 147. 26 Cahier 14, Fo9. — 151 —

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the first three being of a strictly technical nature describing the nature of the rays, the apparatus constructed to manipulate them, and the manner of developing and fixing the pictures produced. The last three are more speculative or philosophical. Element four Dreyfus claims has to do with the difference between natural perception by the eye and artificial seeing through an apparatus like the x-ray machine.27 The fifth is that this discovery is for people of the late nineteenth century as striking as the discovery by Gilbert of electricity as a distinct mode of energy, and by Volta of galvanism as a means of producing and applying electricity. Then comes number six: Ce qu’il y a de certain, c’est que le champ ouvert par la découverte de M. Röntgen aux exportations médico-chirurgicales est particulièrement étendu et s’étendra chaque jour davantage. What is for certain is that by M. Röntgen’s discovery opened the field to medical-surgical explorations [and that field] particularly is extending and will continue to be extended every day. In still another untitled continuation of this discussion of x-rays,28 Dreyfus goes on to say that it is important first of all to understand what is meant by cathode rays and how they are separated out by a Crooke’s tube. He then adds an underlined section: “La télégraphie optique sécrète” (Secret Optical Telegraphy). It is most likely that Dreyfus is here thinking of some device already in use by the military to send messages by optical means, rather than the usual tapping of coded telegraphic messages over electrical wires. At one time armies would communicate by using mirrors to reflect light. Now in more sophisticated times, they use electric generators to send interrupted beams of light. For Dreyfus, the optical telegraph is very simple to construct, as it consists of a transmission post with some source of light and another post conveniently situated to receive these flashes. The secret needed by 27

Huneker: “Let us drop this old aesthetic rule of thumb and confess that during the last [nineteenth] century a new race of artists sprang up from some strange element and, like flying-fish, revealed to a wondering world their composite structures” (Promenades of an Impressionist, 24). 28 Cahier 14, Fo17, Fo17 Vo. — 152 —

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the military to prevent the enemy from intercepting their messages consists of a conventional alphabetic code whose messages are encoded into flashes of light of varying length that can easily be perceived and deciphered at the other end.29 However, he muses, this kind of coded visual transmission is not as easy as one thinks, since there remain technical problems with sending and receiving the light signals under real-life conditions during wartime. It would be best, therefore, to develop some kind of polarized light because ordinary perceptions by the naked eye are subject to limitations of geography and atmosphere. What is needed, therefore, is a second level of artificial lens to supplement and correct the normal way of seeing and an apparatus to send polarised light and to receive these luminous pulsations, perhaps by a series of receptor crystals; and then, to maintain the necessary secrecy by having a way to extinguish the pulsations almost as soon as sent and received.30 The development of this more intricate technology forms the other strategic sense of secrecy Dreyfus is thinking of: a way of sending signals the other side does not know about or cannot receive without special equipment. The juxtaposition of this speculative essay with that describing the way a cathode ray works suggests that there is more to the subject than technology or strategic issues. In each instance, he argues inferentially, normal, organic ways of seeing have to be supplemented by some technological advance, and each advance of this sort opens up other possible ways of seeing the world that were previously unknown—and moreover of conceiving of the world as consisting of more facets of reality than were previously possible to imagine. Once we can accept that what we see is not all there is to reality, or even that seeing is not the primary organ of perception and the 29 Zohar on Exodus: “Now they came forth, these carved, flaming letters/ flashing like gold when it dazzles./ Like a craftsman smelting silver and gold:/ when he takes them out of the blazing fire. All is bright and pure;/ so the letters came forth, pure and bright/ from the flowing measure of the spark” (119) and then this hymn on the flashing fire that inscribes the words of the revealed Torah: “When these letters came forth, they were all refined,/ carved precisely, sparkling, flashing./ All of Israel saw the letters/ flying through space in every direction,/ engraving themselves on the tablets of stone” (120). 30 The phenomena associated with lens to focus, enlarge and project images form part of the language of kabbalistic mysticism and aesthetics; see Norman Simms, “Miniaturization: The Mystery of Micrographia and Related Topics” The Glozel Newsletter 2:3 n.s. (1996): 2-5; and more recently “Archaic Minds and Miniaturization: Glozel” in P. Chenna Reddy, ed., Exploring the Mind of Ancient Man (Sangham Vihar: Research India Press, 2007), 65-87. — 153 —

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universe consists of far more modalities of energy and material—it will not be too far into the future that someone will propose that energy and material are only two variations of the same process of being—then almost everything (if not actually everything) that has been assumed as natural, logical, true, and real has to be re-examined, re-evaluated, and re-conceived. Hence again the implicit logic of many of Dreyfus’s citations of mottos and the formulation of his own dicta, such as this one he takes from an ancient Greek source: “Les hommes sont tourmentés par les opinions qu’ils ont des choses, non par les choses elles-mêmes.” Men are tormented by the ideas they have of things, not by the things themselves. Thus to a greater extent than anyone has probably suspected, Alfred Dreyfus’s little sayings about the soul resisting easily physical suffering but not moral pressures belong to this category of speculative ideas on relativity and the reversibleness of energy and mass (E=mc2), as his rejection of positivistic notions of racial typology and nationalistic paradigms of literary criticism. Similarly, in his lengthy disquisitions on political or military leaders and their sufferings, Dreyfus tends to look at those silent, inner moments for clues to the meaning of history. He also begins to think of his painful condition31 not merely as a telescope or microscope revealing satirical perspectives as Swift conceived them in Books I and II of Gulliver’s Travels—where the pettiness of the political and social worlds of early eighteenth-century England was magnified to grotesque proportions, and the grandiose claims of the rich and powerful were reduced to laughably small dimensions—but in terms of more complex critiques of how and therefore of what we can see and imagine, as evidenced in Books III and IV of that same early eighteenth-century pseudo-travel book. With Gulliver’s landing as a marooned captain in a cluster of bizarre islands, which act as satirically charges lenses (or metaphors) to refract the various scientific and philosophical speculations of the Enlightenment 31 Huneker on Piranesi: “The eye [is] gorged by all the mystic engines, hieroglyphics of pain from some impossible inquisition” (Promenades of an Impressionist, 75). — 154 —

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into a crazy series of rational schemes that lose touch with humanity, or his experience on an island where horses can talk and think rationally but lack any human sympathies, while the creatures in human form and motivated by human passions appear to be beastly and ignorant savages, both these last books of the satire show how European pride in its modern accomplishments is at best misplaced and the real world, especially in all those places hitherto unimagined, and enforce a total reassessment of what it means to be human and what is considered to be real. What was changing in both the mentality and the sensorium of Europeans, first in intellectuals, then in artistic performers, and finally in the general public—though sometimes, of course, there were overlaps and alterations—was that ideas, which had been mnemonic images in the mind to be deconstructed and put together by the rules of a rational rhetoric, became abstract, dependent on mathematical constructs, and so thin they could barely be imagined anymore; ideals lost their philosophical arguments of persuasion and were increasingly shouted in the streets by huge mobs of excited people who were then transformed into a marching armies of murderers; and religious experience was thinned down from institutionalized ethical systems and myths to be allegorized in scholastic arguments to emotional moments of ecstasy, private codes of anxiety and desire, and eccentric forms of spiritual solecisim. Efficacious technologies became commercial successes and subject to political ideologies; democracy, instead of sharing out access to the art treasures and philosophical insights of ancient civilizations, flattened out the grounds and calls the remaining shards and pulverized dust art. Jörg Heiser thus argues in these terms: As Thierry de Duve has observed, in the early 20th century there occurred a shift in aesthetic judgment that replaced the classical Kantian “this is beautiful” (on which Schiller is built) with the Duchampian “this is art” (or, “this is an idea”) as the depiction of art. Roncière renders this shift invisible. He notes that the incorporation of the “low” into aesthetic production had occurred already in the 19th century, when the artistic regime had demonstrated the correlation between the dignity of a subject matter and its mode of representation that had been in place — 155 —

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before. Suddenly, everything could be seen as beautiful: “a display of prints or fish, the feelings of a simple creature, or an adultery in a small provincial town are as receptive for beauty as the figures of the Olympian gods.32 In this light, in which everything shifts in the way the imagination sees and relates to reason, the accusations, arrest, and judgment against Alfred Dreyfus cannot be sustained as simple judicial errors or merely as a conspiracy of the arrogant, but expose a much more radical flaw in the glass through which the prisoner, his family and friends try to see what went wrong and how to right those wrongs. Just as Marcel Proust discovered, through the eyes and memories of his protagonist, Marcel, that the inexorable transformations of history and the inevitable processes of forgetting seem to bring life to a grotesque and meaningless end, except through the dynamic agency of artistic creation, whether through music or painting or the writing of an almost endless novel, so, we might say, that Dreyfus has discovered—fitfully, to be sure, and not in a way sustainable after the crisis of his Affair has passed—that writing to Lucie and filling his cahiers with essays, equations and doodles can establish a hyperspace of sanity, survival and ideal meaningfulness. Styles, Tastes and Predilections In the year 1863, [Prof. Pepper, manager of the London Polytechnic Institute] invented a clever device for projecting images of living person in the air. —Henry Ridgley Evans33

32

Jörg Heiser, “Sight Reading: Do Philosophers Understand Contemporary Art,” Frieze: Contemporary Art and Culture 125 (September 2009): 99. 33 “Introduction: The Mysteries of Modern Magic,” in Albert A Hopkins, ed., Magic: Stage Illusions and Scientific Diversions, 8. Evans goes on: “The illusion is based on a simple optical effect. In the evening carry a lighted candle to the window and you will see reflected in the pane not only the image of the candle but that of your hand and face as well. The same illusion may be seen while traveling in a lighted railway carriage at night; you gaze through the clear sheet of glass of the coach window and behold your double traveling with you” (8). — 156 —

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The Kabbala teaches that there is generally balance in our world, forces of both light and darkness, good and evil. Darkness serves but one purpose: to be transformed and converted into light. —Rabbi Dov Wagner34 Just as he had some cahiers where he could hardly bring himself to write a single word and with whatever oppressive or depressive moods weighing in on him he could do little more than fill his pages with the crazy drawings that remain to be discussed, there are times, again perhaps out of some manic anticipation of imminent release, which hindsight lets us see as a matter of months or weeks, when Alfred Dreyfus writes fullblown essays on his tastes and predilections in literature and the arts. This mature vision appears often in the second half of the fourteenth and last cahier. He speaks, for instance, of how his tastes differ from those of most other people, thus meaning that he cannot indulge himself in the foolishness of the world.35 Then, he begins an essay with the statement that “Purely literary works are only interesting in a mediocre way” and explains that it is only “sensitive to the power of thought … It is thought which, above all, gives value to a work.”36 And by “thought” he means ideas, and yet “Ideas alone do not suffice. It is necessary to know how to decide, to wish, and to act,” that is, in books he looks for a way of engaging with the processes of cognition and cogitation, with weighing up and measuring choices, and reaching decisions. A page later, starting again and tackling the problem in more detail, Dreyfus begins: 37 Works of the imagination only interest me in a moderate way. The works are only valuable by the force of the thoughts they express. The form or style only has the beauty of expression of the thought. Thus each particle of thought previously written is now expanded and 34 “Sept. 11 and the Jewish Approach to Tragedy,” Chabad-Lubavitch Media Center (12 September 2002), http://www.kabbalaonline.org/KabbalaWorld\11.09.2002 (accessed 12 September 2002). 35 Cahier 14, Fo31. 36 Cahier 14, Fo31 Vo. 37 Cahier 14, Fo 32. — 157 —

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refined, as Dreyfus meditates and works out his ideas. The more he does so, the more it seems that his own thoughts take on the caste of the talmudic arguments he has hinted at, echoed and at best only seemed vaguely aware of in the previous workbooks. As he goes over the recent writers he has been reading, he holds them against this unstated—and perhaps unrealized—standard. The rabbis argue that a person who knows the Law but does not practice it is as one who did not know the Torah at all. Art for art’s sake or style for its own beauty do not please Dreyfus. Art, for him, is the quality of mind and heart that creates its own beauty and enhances the beauty of cleaving towards the divine.38 It is the pledge, the token, the indwelling representative of the beauty that cannot be imitated in the Greek sense of mimesis and which Plato found so philosophically disturbing. Otherwise it is like the desperate and foolish crafting of the Golden Calf, as the Zohar figuratively says:39 Moses said to himself, “Since Israel has dealt falsely with the Blessed Holy One and exchanged His Glory, let His pledge be placed in the hands of a trustee until we see with whom it remains.” Like the authorities who have shaped thought patterns long before he was born and whose impressions provide the contours of his own reasoning, Dreyfus argues—without any conscious intention or perhaps even unconscious direction other than that which remains charged with primal energies of their creation as discourse—in such a way as to revise carefully what he was struggling towards in the last two efforts, navigating between the heretical belief that the image is the thing it represents, which is idolatry, and the belief that there is no other reality to represent than the mutable, fragile and ephemeral world we can perceive:

38 Zohar on Exodus, The Old Man and the Beautiful Maiden: “We have learned that the Rainbow took off her garments/ and gave them to Moses./ Wearing that garment, Moses went up the mountain;/ from inside it he saw what he saw,/ delighting in the All, up to that place” (123). 39 Zohar on Exodus, God, Israel and the Shekhina, 155. The passage answers the question of why Moses pitched his tent (mishkan) outside of the camp, and does so by explaining why Moses entrusted the Law embodied in the Shekhina in the hands of Joshua as a token or pledge (mashkon) his trustee, the text playing on the same root sh-k-n, ‫שקן‬, to dwell, to be in or take the place of. — 158 —

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And ideas should be expressed in view of practical realizations and final determinations. It is necessary to know how to decide, to will and to act. Having achieved this new sharpness of thought and expression, he can attack more bluntly not some general foolishness in the world or second-rate, highsounding but actually shallow literature, but “the trade in pseudo-literature” because “It is a sickness that should be severely repressed.” What he cannot bring himself to say, if in fact he was able to articulate or imagine the precise nature of the sickness that is rotting away the core of his own civilization and the horrible alternatives bubbling up to the surface from the deepest cesspools of irrationality, racial hatred, and economic ideologies, of course, is anti-Semitism, the scourge of the twentieth century—and the symptom of all its ills.40 Shifting from literature and style for a moment, Dreyfus writes on an essay on “True Liberty”41 in which he declares such a liberty to be other than “uncontrolled license”: True liberty, fertile liberty, is that which, beyond strict obligations of social solidarity, assures to each one the liberty of his person, his thought, his family, the right also to breathe a healthy and sane air. This is the freedom he longs for, the release from physical and moral torture, the right to think and feel in an atmosphere untainted by racial hatred and social tyranny. The basis for his Ideal of Liberty comes from science, and he cites scientist Louis Pasteur on the need for fearless and determined courage to follow reason wherever it leads, not in a way that loses itself in abstract generalizations, but which is always grounded in solid, practical concern for the health and safety of mankind. Out of this credo of the great scientific hero, Dreyfus bursts into his own all but explicit credo of Jewish faith: 40 Melanie Phillips, The World Turned Upside Down; the whole burden of her book makes this point. 41 Cahier 14, Fo32 Vo. — 159 —

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Long unmerited sufferings dissipate illusions, but they do not weaken the [mental and physical] faculties of strong minds. On the contrary, they develop with more power these faculties so as to permit them to understand better and to love better, all that is true, all that is good. Unlike in Christian thought, it is not that suffering is a humbling experience that prepares the humiliated soul to receive the unmerited grace of a divine messiah. This Jewish suffering, rather, sharpens the mind, makes it acutely aware of what is valuable in the world, what is true and worth fighting for and loving. Dreyfus then repeats this statement of his beliefs word for word, and begins to discuss the nature of colonialism.42 This essay takes a moderate position, first looking at what colonialism meant in ancient Rome and then how Montesquieu conceived it in the eighteenth century. For this is no sentimental or superficial picture of oppressed people being invaded, conquered and exploited by thoughtless, ruthless and arrogant nations. Like the Romans, so the French, colonists begin with an honest wish to engage with other peoples, to help them assimilate into the stronger civilization, become active partners in trade and thus in a political process that is slow and gradual, the colonizers learning and growing with the colonized. Yet Dreyfus well knows there are abuses, such as the whole enterprise of Spanish conquest in the New World, and also that other European nations have misused their superiority in arms and manufacturing. But abuse of power does not discredit the ideal of colonialism itself. Had the Spanish Empire not sought to eradicate the civilizations they encountered, they would have gained great practical advantages through cooperation with new peoples and new ideas, as would have the rest of Europe. Liberty in this perspective is a gradual historical process of engagement between different nations, peoples, and ideas. The ideals Dreyfus pursues are not static, fixed eternal ideas, but practical ways of understanding and ways of loving others in a dynamic process of mutual enhancement. Further essays in these last folios penned during his exile deal with 42 Cahier 14, Fo34. — 160 —

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literary figures, such as Balzac, national histories of nations such as France, and the moral problems posed by classical thinkers, such as Tacitus. Then comes a pair of sayings which are lyrical and epigrammatic. First: Chaque bête, chaque fleur est une âme à la nature éclose; tout est sensible; dans tout être, dans toute plante, un mystère d’amour repose. Each beast, each flower is a soul born into nature; everything sensitive, in every living being, in every plant, the mystery of love in repose. This seems a pantheistic idyll, a view that all living beings are sensible, feeling, hiding in themselves the mystery of love. But like his evening reveries and nostalgic poems of an innocent nature, the theme here is part of a larger and more complex view of the world. Thus the second of the aphorisms runs: Quand arrive le soir, laissons la paix et le silence des choses descendre lentement en nous. When evening comes, let us allow the pace and silence of things to descend on us slowly. These moments of calm and peace are rare enough, so when they do come, we should enjoy them—Dreyfus is talking to himself, he is reassuring himself that there may be some hope, but if not, well, at least he can enjoy an evening, a moment, before the next storm blows up. Towards the end of an essay on the novelist Joseph de Maîstre,43 wherein the importance of small facts are discussed as important in the composition of a novel and in the education of a person, sliding into some remarks on the Goncourt Brothers, who turned the small facts of their social experiences into beautiful literary records, their famous collaborative journals, Dreyfus comes to a personal statement:

43 Cahier 14, Fo47. — 161 —

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Quant à moi, j’estime que relever ainsi pour chaque grand esprit les petites particularités absolument insignificantes de sa vie, sont des petites drôleries auxquelles un homme d’esprit ne saurait se complaire. As for me, I reckon that to take the measure of each great mind [one must focus on] the little absolutely insignificant particularities of his life [because it is one of] the little absurdities that a witty man can take great pleasure in. Actually, the sentence is cramped and twisted and perhaps more revealing of his deeper thoughts than he realizes. The small facts he mentions can also be the casual words, the minor and seemingly meaningless gestures, quirks, lapses, and absurdities in the make-up of a person’s personality and ordinary behavior that most reveal his truest inner being. This what Freud saw as the auxiliary paths than run alongside the royal road to the unconscious (dreams), because jokes, slips of the tongue and similar inadvertencies are also products of dreamwork—condensation, displacement, projection, splitting, etc. The ancient and medieval rabbis, too, whose patterns of thought deeply influenced Freud in his conceptualization of psychoanalysis, conduct their midrashic explorations of the text by shifting the focus away from the ostensible surface meanings of the narrative or formal argument and on to matters as trivial as misspellings, duplications, odd syntactic glitches, unusual or archaic words and the shape, sound, and volume of letters and phrases. The modern novel creates a matrix of realism through the compilation of such apparently insignificant drolleries, and hence José Faur’s insight that the modern genre most like Scripture is the novel, with the proviso, that is also Dreyfus’s, that poorly written literature is also the place into which and also out of which all the absurdities, mental illness and spiritual confusions of contemporary life find their manifest expression. The very last written composition in this fourteenth folio and thus at the end of the whole surviving corpus of such prison workbooks comes in the form of a citation from Blaise Pascal with Dreyfus’s own corrective comment:

— 162 —

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De Pascal: “L’âme humaine a des profondeurs mémorables.” Il eût mieux fait de dire que le cœur humain avait des profondeurs incommensurables. By Pascal: “The human soul has memorable depths.” It would have been better to have said that the human heart has unmeasurable depths. Not the soul but the heart, not memory but an unmeasurableness in the hazy liminal zone between primary experience and emergent language as passionately charged metaphors: Dreyfus shifts the focus to his own deep pains and to the infinite profundities his emotional life, his heart.44

44 Idelsohn: “Of far deeper significance is the truth that genuine music is the offspring of profound emotion: of exaltation, pain, or joy” (Jewish Music, 194). “For genuine music is the tonal expression of the life and struggle of a people or of a group which has created ideals of its own, an outlook of life of its own. as the result of its life, its convictions, its faith” (195). — 163 —

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Part 2: The Jewish Syndic, Satan’s Synagogue and Cynicism

…commenting on the Dreyfus affair in France, the leading Social Democratic newspaper [in Vienna] the Arbeiter-Zeitung, or Workers’ News, praised Emile Zola’s defense of the Jewish army captain wrongly convicted of espionage, but added: “Behind Zola’s courageous and high-minded attack march the whole dubious band of Jewish parasites who greedily hope for their personal whitewash, and from it, opportunities for new misdeeds.” — Peter Singer45 There is a glaring shameful and painful aspect to any study of Alfred Dreyfus and the Affair: this is that hindsight shows us that everything—and not merely some things, or some incidental factors in the Zeitgeist or Weltanshauung—that happened because Alfred Dreyfus was a Jew, but those who suffered and were his supporters in medias res could not or would not see the anti-Semitism as more than a petty annoyance and tried to explain away the mystery of his arrest and the cruelty of his treatment with other reasons. In point of fact, what looked like a resolution and a rectification of the judicial errors turned out to be at best a temporary illusion, and at worst a great delusion. The events in the 1930s and 1940s were the worst that the anti-Semites perpetrated against the Jews. In France, those bigots who resisted the evidence of the truth that cleared Dreyfus of all the charges against him, and their disciples, who still simmered with resentment at his pardon, his rehabilitation, and his receiving of the Legion of Honor, wreaked their revenge against the memory of Alfred Dreyfus; they sought out members of his family and the intellectuals who came to 45 Peter Singer, Pushing Time Away: My Grandfather and the Tragedy of Jewish Vienna (Sydney, NSW: Fourth Estate/HarperCollins, 2003), 63. — 164 —

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their aid with the intent to murder them. And yet, when we examine the documents written during the Affair and afterwards published by these same Dreyfusards, there is very little in their letters, journals, and notebooks to show that they were aware of this bigotry or that they were aware of its possible consequences. From the very beginning in 1894, with rare exceptions—the symbolist poet and anarchist Bernard Lazar and the chief rabbi of France Zadok Kahn stand out—it is hard to find anyone else involved who owns up to his or her Jewishness or to the nature of the forces of anti-Semitism arrayed against them. Dreyfus and his family and friends seem virtually oblivious to these self-professed anti-Semites and to their visceral hatred as particularly relevant to the struggle. The popular nationalist newspapers braying in their headlines and the screaming crowds in the street seemed in no doubt of what was at stake, however.46 Individuals and groups outside of France also often recognized the essential shape of the affair as a campaign against all Jews and a scapegoating of one Jewish military officer. But why not the Dreyfusards?47 With rare exceptions, almost everyone in Europe in the nineteenth century was in one way or another an anti-Semite, sometimes with hardly an awareness of what they meant when they spoke of Jews as dogs or thieves or cheats, sometimes with quite deliberate racial slurs and slanders intended. John Huneker reports, almost casually, that for

46 Pierre Birnbaum, Le moment antisémite: un tour de la France en 1898 (Paris: Fayard, 1998) gives us a detailed account day by day, sometimes hour by hour, of who the persons involved were (names, ages, places of birth and occupations), what they chanted and wrote on their signs and posters, where they marched and what they did on each street or boulevard in Paris and other major cities and towns of France; thee details are based on police records, newspaper articles, and a vast array of other mostly overlooked archival records of the period. What Birnbaum attempts to do in his book, solely on the basis of words—he offers no illustrations, maps or reproduction of documents—is what Georges Méliès found himself able to do in cinema for the first time ever, that is what Paul Hammond describes in Marvellous Méliès: “the exploration of the dynamic instant between the anxiety of dislocation and its release in the ensuing humorous or dreamlike image” (90), except, of course, that the mobs of anti-Semitic youths and their cries and actions were more grotesque than humorous and the dream more like a nightmare of violence and hatred than the film-maker’s attempts at entertainment. 47 Romain Rolland: “But in the little town where they were, as the Jews are everywhere and always— by the mere fact of their difference of race which for centuries has isolated them and sharpened their faculty for making observation—they were the most advanced in mind, the most sensible of the absurdity of its moldy institutions and decrepit thought. Only, as their character was less free than their intelligence, it did not help them, while they mocked, from wanting to turn those institutions and ideas to account than to reform them,” Jean Christophe, Vol. I, 398. — 165 —

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Chopin48 all music publishers were “animals” and they were always trying “to Jew” him in their deals. More specifically, “Thalberg was not only too much of a technician for Chopin, but he was also a Jew and a successful one. In consequence, both poet and Pole revolted.” “After all,” Hunker says in explanation, “Chopin was very Polish,” as though that settled the matter.49 A few pages on, this same American biographer of the pianist composer says, “He did not hesitate to lump them all as ‘pigs’ and ‘Jews.’”50 Or when speaking of George Sand’s daughter Solange, we are told that even her admirers could not help speaking of the “curved Hebraic nose of her mother and her coal black hair.”51 While other artists, critics, and thinkers of the period could both make such remarks without much thought about how it may affect the Jewish listeners or pass on the comments with at best a mild snigger at both the speaker and the target of the slur, there were sufficient numbers of Judeophobes who took their hatred of Jews quite seriously and showed no compunction at observing the pains they caused, feeling that these Semites were unwanted, unwelcome and unassimilable in Christendom. Thus for Alfred and Mathieu Dreyfus, or the Reinach Brothers, or the other Dreyfusards who desperately tried to make themselves believe the whole affair was about the great ideals of freedom and justice and the truth,52 as well as about the honor of the army or the nation. Either dismissing or overlooking entirely the words and actions of active anti-Semites, I can only feel pity for them. There is no way I can view what happened except through the lens53 of the Holocaust and 48 Much more so than his contemporary Franz Liszt, though for reasons to be discussed in Volume 3 of this series, he was labeled as the greater Jew-hater, next to Richard Wagner; but it was Liszt’s long-time Polish girlfriend and future mistress of Wagner, who sneaked the vicious diatribes against Jewish musicians. Too much of a gentleman to blame the noble lady and also backed into an invidious corner of public-relations, Liszt found he could not disavow the odious remarks. 49 James Huneker, Chopin: The Man and his Music (1900: reprinted by Dover Publications, 1966), 10. 50 Ibid., 19. 51 Ibid., 22. 52 Faur: “The rabbis designate the liberty proposed by the Tora[h] and pursued by the Jewish people herut (‫)תורח‬. It is not wanton freedom but liberty under the Law…” (The Horizontal Society, Section 3, paragraph 12). 53 This metaphor of the “lens” is no casual matter but essential to our whole way of trying to take the various projections of light emanating from the external world of the historical milieu, the interior activities of human experience and its memories, and the mythoi and logoi of rabbinic interpretative technologies and let them pass simultaneously (or as closely as possible) through the same prisms, so that the light can be diffracted, that is, broken up in to its constituent elements, then recombined to form new, unexpected images—which begin to become clear and recognizable when contextualized by Alfred Dreyfus’s own writings. Just as the photographic — 166 —

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other unbelievable and impossible events that have since occurred. I am a Jew, after all. A Dialogic Interruption You: Look at that! It seems that you put into long footnotes a whole stream of little essays that are almost more interesting than anything you say in the body of your text. I know you have tried to justify yourself as a neo-midrashist several times already, but I am still not sure I understand you, your methods or your lens and the way it was focused and coordinated in enlarging or reducing the size and speed of capturing persons, places, things and events on chemical plates or film to reveal aspects of reality never before seen or understood or as the direction of cathode rays through an x-ray machine exposed inner objects and events until then unimaginable, so too the midrashic technique should open up aspects of Dreyfus the man, his milieu and his mentality, of not quite unsuspected, then at least not taken as significant before. Jacques Deslandes, in La Boulevard du cinema à l’époque de Georges Méliès, argues that the first sustained motion-picture shows gave audiences both the shock of the absolutely new, as they were seeing their world as children or schizophrenics do (61), and a cachet of absolute authority, thus forcing newspaper reporters and editors and then novelists and critics to imitate these new sensations which had overwhelmed and in many ways cancelled out previous manners of registering what was or was not “real” or “realistic” and shifting the disposition of such a reality, with traditionally central persons and objects shifted to the margins and those from the fringes or under the shadow of insignificance into the center of focus; these verbal, typographic and layout techniques extended and increasingly made invisible the radical shifts in epistemology and aesthetic sensibility (61). Spectators, readers, and people in general had to learn how to see in a new way, how to focus their eyes and their attention, not to look after mimetic clarifications of an original object or scene, but to construct out of atomic particles of artificial imagery and rhetorical discourse vivid sensations that at first they could not see or hear at all, rejected as nonsense and confusion, and that they feared would harm their sensorial or their mental equilibrium. This is a series of epistemological events occurring in the public space of popular entertainment and reception of news that had already begun for elites in the Impressionist revolution of the 1860s, as Pierre Francastel says: “Il n’y a nulle absurdité à affirmer que, jusque dans leurs oeuvres les plus révolutionnaires, les artistes de 1880 se servant en partie du métier de leurs prdécesseurs. N’ayant pas de technique fixe, ils ont recours pour s’exprimer à un mélange de procédés anciens” (Nouveau dessin, nouvelle peinture, cited by Deslandes, Georges Méliès, 72): “There was no absurdity to affirm that, until then in their most revolutionary works, the artists of 1880 did not serve in part taken from their predecessors. Not having any fixed technique, in order to express themselves they had recourse to a mix of precedents from the ancients.” To a great extent, once Dreyfus was sent to the prison island on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean he was only to be seen and heard through vague and artificial fragments, if at all; while he himself, in the silence and isolation of his prison cell, was forced to recreate a new time, place, and image of himself through the absurd fragments and the once insignificant particles of his conscious and unconscious memories. For as Gérard Lenne says in Le cinema fantastique, “Le silence conduisait à exacerber un délire exclusivement pictural, empruntant ses formes aux appearances du rêve” (15): “Silence was conducive to exacerbate the exclusively pictorial delirium, borrowing its forms from the appearances of a dream.” — 167 —

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sources, let alone follow your bizarre way of arguing. You are also engaging in pipul, trying to distinguish between different kinds of ideas and personalities, especially the anti-Semites, as though all this could explain why Alfred Dreyfus and his family and friends did not recognize the totally irrational hatred of Jews as the root cause and sustaining reason for the whole Affair.54 Me: Let me set out my justifications in more detail. There is more than one reason, and each one seems to me to be more convincing than the other. But you have to be prepared to recognize the evidence as existing in a very different plain of experience than most historians—if not virtually all scholarship—has worked. That is, you have to be prepared to see that the statements are not factual communications but hints, clues, signs of something that the authors themselves do not really know they are transmitting, though the surface may be disgusting and dangerous enough on its own. You: Go on. I will bite my tongue for a few minutes anyway. Me: Thank you. First of all, these Jew haters, in all their irrationality and fanaticism, dig out the Jewish authors who otherwise are unavailable outside of specialist libraries in France. They are diligent little imps. Second, today they make available online many horrible hate-filled books, pamphlets, and essays from the Vichy period and before that back to the Affair itself, and thus help to make explicit what was often just hinted at in earlier liberal newspapers and scholarly articles. Do you see what I am getting at? You: Granted that these insidious little imps—these Holocaust Deniers, neo-Nazis and anti-Semites—do a lot of research for you inadvertently, don’t you think you give them too much publicity? They love that, and in fact that may be their main motivation these days. Me: Hold on a moment. I won’t concede that that is their primary 54 On the subtle and not so-subtle methods of obfuscation used today to excuse and deny antiSemitism, see Clemens Heni, “Support of Suicide Bombing against Israeli Jews is ‘Not Necessarily Antisemitic’? A Short Portray[al] of a typical German Scholar on ‘Peace’ and anti-Semitism,” Human Rights Service (1/2/2011), http://www.rights.no/2011/01/not-necessarily-antisemitic/ (accessed 1 January 2011). — 168 —

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motivation, though I am sure they are just waiting to pounce if in any way I provide them with a hesitation or a concession for the sake of argument. They get enough publicity and backing as it is from the ignorant, the naïve, and the pro-Palestinian factions in the media and in the universities of the West. Nor will I accept that their sources are out of date and hence irrelevant. But this is not the book to discuss the worldwide war against the Jews and the huge propaganda machinery wheeled out to promote the destruction of Israel, which is just another name for wanting to kill all the Jews that Hitler wasn’t able to exterminate.55 You: But you have to admit… Me: No, I don’t have to admit anything here. Besides, I want to get back to my list of reasons for citing the anti-Semites. They include more than these contemporary avatars and the heirs to the Jew-Haters active just before, during and right after the Dreyfus Affair. While so many of the Dreyfusards tried to play down the fact that Alfred and his family were Jewish and that mobs out in the streets of every French city and town and many in Algeria were braying for Jewish blood—the polite arguments for revision of the trial tended to turn on an appeal to French justice, to a sense of bourgeois decency, and a belief in republican democracy, as well as truth and honour and so on—I want to show that the Affair really was about what Drumont and his cohorts always said it was: what they called “Jewish France,” and the way Jews came to symbolize and embody everything about modernity, capitalism and secularism that they hated and feared. You: You don’t really believe that a pack of howling idiots in the street were responsible for the foolish behaviour of the French High Command or the politicians inside and outside the National Assembly? Me: Yes and no. No, because that would make the tail wag the dog. Most of the anti-Dreyfusards were educated men and women. 55 See the specials issue of my journal that focused on the ways anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism manipulate the press and the academic elites these days: Mentalities/Mentalités 24:2 (2010); the ten contributors, including myself, look at these issues closely. — 169 —

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They were professionals, educated elites, and clergymen, good honest middle-class Frenchmen. They too were intellectuals, not just the Dreyfusards. I won’t dismiss them as fools and idiots or see the whole Affair as a nebulous and ephemeral explosion of stupidity. But yes, too, in the sense that what the crowds out in the street were screaming and painting on their signs and banners was just a popular version of what was being debated in the Assembly, promoted in the newspapers, given a more respectable veneer of culture in the literary and artistic salons, and was located right in the very heart of French civilization. You: Again, I will bite my tongue. Go on, and let me see how far you can run with this ball. Me: There is not that much more to say before the book takes over and explains things as it will, drawing from different authors, weaving a texture or a matrix in which the Dreyfus Affair appears—and it appears in a new light, in this way. That is what I mean by midrashing. You: I can’t stand it. Let me break the vow of silence I have just taken. Tell me how and why? Me: The Affair appears in a new light because this texture or matrix should better be thought of as a lens—but not as in camera or even an x-ray machine, but some other kind of contraption that chops up sensations of perception and flashes of memory, reassembling them into a very different kind of moving and three-dimensional image. I have used a variety of metaphors for such a machine that sees, that thinks, that articulates the noise and confusion of the Affair. It was a phantasmagoria, a mazurka, a great festival of Jew Hatred.56 Yes, that is what is said. Please don’t groan. You: How about a muffled laugh? A snigger? 56 Lenne, Le cinema fantastique: “Si l’invention du cinema marque une étape decisive dans l’histoire de l’humanité, c’est que l’écran est un nouveau miroir, mais un miroir vivant, échappant à toute controle…” (84): “If the invention of cinema marks a decisive step in the history of humanity, it is because the screen is a new mirror, but a living mirror”; and then, indicating how Plato’s static contrast between the real and the ideal becomes a dynamic process of mutually mimetic forces interacting against one another, Lenne writes, “La métamorphe n’est donc qu’un mode de dédoublement, et chaque fois qu’il y a transformation s’oeuvre un conflit entre les deux parties adverse d’une personnalité” (89): “The metamorphosis is thus only a mode of doubling, and each time that there is a transformation it opens itself to a conflict between the two contrary parts of a personality.” — 170 —

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Me:

Whatever. Listen, please. The anti-Semitic authorities which I have been citing—not just because I don’t have other access to the Jewish and Dreyfusard materials these Jew-haters have somehow ferreted out, and not just because they are obsessive, sensitive and alert to the currents of real opposition to everything Dreyfus and his friends were made to represent during the Affair, but above all because they alone were able to articulate the fears and frustrations, the hopes and dreams, and the deepest anxieties in the principal figures on both sides, of the period, its mentality.57 You: And you explain this how? Me: As I do all the time, with difficulty, with a disregard for the niceties of your academic protocols, with chutzpah. In other words, I try to midrash the documents and the historical acts, and try to show that the Affair itself is an inadvertent midrash on the developing modernity in Western Europe during the last quarter of the nineteenth century and another kind of midrash, perhaps we might say prophetic or proleptic, on the Vichy Regime and then even the Shoah. You: You mentioned midrash before, and you have used the word both as a noun, which is familiar to me, but also as a verb, and that kind of throws me. It’s one of your own inventions, isn’t it? Me: Yes. You caught me out on that. But not really. Well, I am confused now. Let me start again: I have been using that term in quite a number of books and articles the last few years. Others also have done the same, although they have their own 57 The whole Dreyfus Affair, one might say, was an affair of smoke and mirrors, of illusion, delusion, and hysteria. The Army and the judges, lawyers and witnesses against the Jewish artillery captain made liberal use of forgeries and rumors, tricks of intimidation and played on the suggestibility of the officers and officials who could not bring themselves to contradict, let alone doubt, the authority of their superiors; these anti-Dreyfusards were either dupes, charlatans or naïve players in a theatre of absurdity they only sometimes realized they were taking part in. The closest anyone at the time of the Affair seems to have come appears in Proust’s long novel, about which Peter Quenell in the name of Marcel Schneider says: “Proust’s view of the aristocracy … had a romantic and phantasmagoric, rather than a realistic colouring” (“Introduction” to Peter Quennell, ed., Marcel Proust, 1871-1922: A Centennial Volume [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1971], 11). In fact, A la recherche du temps perdu, like the Affair, consists of a “world beyond our own immediate ken. The whole world is a baffling maze of illusions. Only the artist can provide a golden clue that may ultimately lead us through the labyrinth” (20-21). But whereas Balzac wrote about Les illusions perdus, Proust wrote about—and Dreyfus lived through—illusions imposed and authoritatively claimed to be reality and truth, as well as justice. — 171 —

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variations. But then you—come on, admit it—you really don’t read what I write, do you? Or if you do, you don’t pay close attention? You: Funny, even as you berate me you treat me like your most eager fan. Actually, I am your only fan. In fact, in this crazy version of a dialogue, I am just another part of you, the part that you imagine an unsympathetic reader will be like. Me: Let’s not go into that. Aside from a few friends who have read the manuscript as it was taking shape, and who told me they were fascinated by it, I am not expecting to hit the Bestseller List. Let me tell you about midrash the noun and then midrash the verb.58 You: I’m listening. 58 At this point though I am tempted to cite further from Ouaknin’s books to show the kabbalistical aspects of the approach to language that I am convinced Dreyfus had implicitly because he had imbibed them somatically with his every breath as a child, it seems better to refer to Gabriel Tarde to show that a contemporary scientific source can serve just as well: “Une l’angue, considerée dans son evolution vivante, n’est qu’une somme d’actes de foi en train de croître, on ausi bien, ajoute-le, de deminuer … A chaque mot nouveau qui se forme, cette somme de croyances augmente; à chaque mot ancien qui tombe en desuetude, elle diminue” “A language, considered in its living evolution is only the sum of its acts of faith in course of growing, and one may also say, of diminishing. When each new word is formed, this sum of beliefs is augmented, when each ancient word falls into desuetude, it diminishes” (cited by Henry in Quennel, Marcel Proust, 59-60): Thus language can act like a seismograph to register the rise and fall of beliefs in the social space of ideas. More modern thinking argues not so much of a scroll of automatic pen marks showing small tremors, major earthquakes and long periods of relative calm, but of transformations in the way thought itself is constituted, how the contours of the mind change to accommodate to pressures external and internal, and how thoughts and feelings are recognized, related and recalled. Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brain (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Co., 2010), remarks, in the words of Elizabeth Eisenstein in The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979): “As language expanded, consciousness deepened … Like painters and composers, writers were able ‘to alter perception’ in a way ‘that enriched rather than stunted sensous response to external stimuli, to the varieties of human experience’” (Carr, The Shallows 75). In specific neuroscientific terms, “The hippocampus seems to act as something like an orchestra in directing the symphony of our conscious memory” (Ibid., 188). The musical analogy can carry over, as Virginia Spate indicates in “Transcending the Moment in Monet’s Water Lilies” (in Ronald Brownson, ed., Claude Monet, Painter of Light [Auckland, NZ: Auckland City Art Gallery, NZI Corp. Ltd, 1985]): “When seen together these variations on a restricted theme emphasise the abstract, ‘musical’character of these series, yet the very abstraction also intensifies one’s awareness of the intensity and subtlty of observation in each painting. The central paradox of Monet’s painting is nowhere more clearly exemplified than in the Warer Lilies, which are both ‘abstract’ and accurate, dream-like and intensely familiar” (32). Putting aside tautologies and redundancies, the passage makes clear that at the same time as Dreyfus was suffering intense torture and self-doubts, he was experiencing an epistomoplogical crisis that he was able to come through thanks to his intellectual, scientific, and aesthetic exercises. — 172 —

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Me:

Sometime I will have to discuss sarcasm with you, too, but now on to midrash. It’s a Hebrew word used by the great teachers, sages and rabbis and is related to the term derash, sermon or explanatory homily. So it is a form of explaining a sacred and authoritative text. You can follow that much, can’t you? I have said it often enough. You: This is all standard stuff. Go on—because I know you’re just itching to try to undermine my knowledge-base, as the students say these days. Me: I doubt if anyone says that nowadays, especially not students, who are known for saying nothing, but let’s get on with the discussion. Historically, then, a midrash is a particular genre of rabbinical exegesis: it is what they discuss and debate when they try to understand and apply the Law, and they can argue towards the halacha, the justification for the performance of mitzvoth and the other peculiar extensions of those prohibitions and commandments to do things in such a way as to build a wall around the Law, in other words to keep you from drifting away from a strict performance of the rule or being seen as likely to do so. This is the oral Law, oral because it is not fixed into a sacred text, and consequently keeps expanding and self-correcting. You: I accept this too. There seems nothing controversial about this. All very banal. Me: Okay. Moving on now, midrash can also be seen as something as more than historical, that is, it is a form of writing about ancient rabbinical texts which does not exist only within published collections of rabbinical writing. In the latter part of the twentieth century, it was clear to Jewish and non-Jewish literary theorists that many authors of secular literature were adapting their style and themes to that of the sages who constructed those original midrashim. Once modern readers started to do that, ordinary readers—or at least those specialized lecturers and publicists we call reviewers and literary historians—could call the parables of a writer like Kafka by this old rabbinical name. Even more, a new theoretical perspective developed in which other works of art—music, painting, sculpture, dance, architecture—could be seen as midrashim as well. You: I am sure that that is what happened. But the result is, if you — 173 —

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excuse me for saying so, that the word midrash has become meaningless. Worse, once the links to rabbinical discipline and knowledge were loosened, this kind of midrash slid into a category that makes it no different from, on the one hand, Christian exegesis, homiletics and liturgical art, and, on the other, virtually any kind of secular art with a pretension at tendentiousness, allegory or parody. In other words, my dear friend, it is on the way to becoming a meaningless term, a cipher, X or Y that means whatever you want it to. Me: I won’t argue with you on that. If, as all too often happens, critical language in the post-modernist world becomes detached from historical reality and from deep knowledge, which I would take as being moral and concerned with truth, then, of course, you are right. It is precisely what happens to other buzz words, like icon and discourse and trope and God knows what else. But— You: Here it comes again. You are going to twist the argument away from common sense and throw it off into some chaotic ocean of Jewish mysticism. Me: If that’s the way you see it, fine. All I ask is for you hold your peace long enough for me to spell out what I want to say…. Well, do you have any objections? You: Very funny. You know what I will say, so I don’t have to. Tell us what you think you have to. Me: There are two points that I will make, and then I too will shut up and let the book roll on, and somehow I trust the discourse (to use the word we both have problems with) will take my argument back to Dreyfus and to the Affair. The first point is, to catch up with what I was trying to say before, there are three other interpretative methods that go along with pshat. You: Wait. You never mentioned that before. You started to explain about derash, and then you—well, you went all over the place. Actually, yes, you did give me very cursory captions, but they made no sense to me like that. Me: Let me start over again then. The rabbis refer to four stages or processes or places where the midrash occurs and they use a mnemonic to coordinate their discussions. They refer to PaRDeS, a word that is like Paradise, but this four-consonant word when voiced as pardes means an orchard. It is made up of — 174 —

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the initial letters of four words: pshat, ramez, derash and sod. The four initial letters are peh, resh, dalat and saddi, represented as p-r-d-s. Let me write it out in Hebrew letters for you: ‫פרדס‬. When I have set out briefly what these four words signify I will come back to show how the newly formed anagram PaRDeS is more than relevant to the whole phenomenon. Do you follow me so far? You: No trouble. I am not asleep yet. Please carry on. Me: Pshat is the first of the interpretative models. It is not, however, as some critics assume, a literal reading of the target text, analogous to the litera or historical level in medieval Christian exegesis. A literal reading, mikra, is what is created when the alphabet letters in a Hebrew or an Aramaic text are voiced, that is, when vowels are generated so a word or a phrase may be voiced. It is what children learning to read are taught to do. Once you can turn voiceless consonants on the page into words you can begin to work out their grammatical functions, their idiomatic sense, and their meanings as the names of persons, places, things, actions. First comes peh or –p- ‫פ‬. The pshat interprets the text that is thus seen for the first time. But it is an interpretation taught to the children learning to read and prescribed for those who have neither the time nor the capacity to engage in a dialogue with the text and the people engaged in arguing with one another. Thus, pshat is a conventional reading, one that confirms the Law as it understood as halachah within an institutionalised Jewish community. It may not be literal at all, and the sense taught may indeed seem quite contrary to a common sense or historical reading. Are you still awake? You: Quite. I am finding this interesting so far, but I am also, thanks to my experience of talking with you, wary of where this may all lead. I can’t see Alfred Dreyfus anywhere on the horizon. Me: The second letter is the anagrammatical PaRDeS is –r- resh ‫ר‬ standing for remez, which means context—and some other things that will be explained later in the course of the book. For the moment, let us say that this process of interpretation requires that the reader think of other places and times in sacred writing where the same or similar words, phrases, images, actions, and persons occur. Then the reader can start — 175 —

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to wriggle about the text to make it fit in a different context or interject the sounds, sense, and allusive meanings of the alternative contexts into the one being studied. Ambiguities, contradictions and gaps in one text, which is now either juxtaposed, superimposed, or amalgamated with the logic, narrative progression or psychological development of the other, so that the sense starts to become more coherent and logical, the apparent incompatibilities resolved or transcended, and the lacunae of all sorts are filled in You: Wow. I sure hope all this will be gone over and explained in more detail and with examples from Dreyfus’s life and works later. Me: You mean you didn’t read chapters II and III in the first book, Alfred Dreyfus: Man, Mileiu, Mentality and Midrash, and chapter I of this volume? I am not trying to teach you something new, just to sum up and focus what has gone on before. You: Can’t take a joke, can you? Do you want me to go back and read everything again, and then give you my own resumé? Me: Let me go on to the third letter and concept in this series. The dalet ‫ ד‬or –d- stands for derash. And before you get all excited, I will tell you that, yes, this is the same word for the whole phenomenon and process. Here, though, it has a more specialized meaning. It functions to designate a third kind of interpretation that draws out of and away from the sacred text to provide a variety of explanatory enhancements: parables, anecdotes, riddles, jokes, allegories, cautionary tales and so on. These consist of masholim, a mashol being pretty much what a parable or fable means: roughly speaking, a short narrative involving a very limited set of characters operating in small geographical space and covering a short period of time. They usually begin with the question, “What is this like?” or assume that this question has been asked. Where remez tries to see the problematic target text in relation to other texts in the same or related books, the derash is more creative, speculative, fantastical. You: I can’t honestly say I follow you all the way in this, but do get on because, I must admit, it is very interesting. I also suspect that it is time for you to surprise and shock me, as you always do. — 176 —

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That’s fun, but not when your surprises insult my intelligence or my sense of propriety. Me: I will try neither to disappoint you nor cause you to blush—or go red in furious rage. You: When you say that, I start to worry. Go on, please. Me: Saddi or ‫ ס‬-s- is for sod and sod is a secret, what is concealed, occluded, repressed, not yet expressed or expressible. The secrets here are not political or economic. They can, though, stretch way out of the realm of ordinary day-to-day experience into that of the heavenly halls and especially the throne room of the ineffable, nameless God, just as they may return to the originary moments of creation, those points of powerful proto-time when the drama of being broke out of the eternal, infinite peace of pure divinity and the paradigms of the universe expressed themselves in the explosive dimensions of a chronotope, a space-time continuum. Mostly, though, the occlusion performs its generative friction against the daily rituals of the commandments set forth in the primary texts of the tradition and thereby as they revalorise and recontextualize the Law and associated customs. You: Please. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. What you are saying is either the most arrant, errant nonsense or it is an overpowering, world-transforming insight—an ecstasy of… I give up, I cannot find the right words. Me: That’s for you to decide. I have just a few more words on this matter of sod and then, well, then I stand back and let the book take over. You: Gadzooks! Me: That is a very profound remark. I will take it as permission to continue. You may call it ecstatic and so on, but the methodology involved in this form of rabbinical exegesis—and we may as well nominate it more correctly as kabbalistic—is exciting but I wouldn’t find it so irrational as you seem to do. The sages would rearrange the letters, substitute words, juggle the sentence structures, reassemble the grammatical relations, and do a myriad of other things to squeeze out of the text statements that they truly believed were there all along. What strikes me the most about this is that in other interpretative techniques— — 177 —

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the three already mentioned—the original material is juggled about, displaced, allegorised, joked with, but here in sod, in this secret method of unpacking the text, the assumption is that it is now possible to see right into the mysteries. They open up like a little cake in a tissaine, just as Proust described the moments of re-awakening a dormant memory, watching it expand, a flower unfolding into forgotten, unexpected and otherwise unimaginable shapes.59 You: Excuse me. I don’t want to call you up short in mid-flight of your soaring imagination, and in fact I know you will continue this excursion, if not right now, then later, in one form or another, elsewhere in this book.60 But, my friend, you have one last point to make and I don’t want you to miss out on the opportunity of my extraordinary patience. You wouldn’t want that, would you? Me: Clever you. It’s too late to climb back up into the clouds now, where Aristophanes placed his risible version of Socrates—or where the new, excited aviators placed themselves, as Marcel Proust saw happening for the first time in the years prior to World War I: something that made him do more than wonder at the technology of his era. It made him ponder the whole shift in perspective through which the world of our experience can be seen So, yes, you’re right. But not completely. The last point I want to make is the most important for understanding the Dreyfus Affair. Dreyfus was like Proust in many ways, without 59 Sherban Sichéry in “Israel’s Way,” his reading of Proust’s novel and the author in terms of their Jewishness, argues that “Proust’s pessimism was no doubt rooted deep in his unconscious memory—the ancestral memory of a race that, age after age, has suffered unending persecutions” (in Quennell, Marcel Proust, 81). But this lachrymose view of Jewish history and its effects on individual Jews has a somewhat sentimental, that is, superficial aptness; it overlooks not only the liveliness of Proust’s awareness of Jews, their culture and history, from his mother and grandmother and the whole of the Weil family, in contact with whom the young boy grew to manhood, but also the pertinence of anti-Semitic activities and words both in Eastern Europe throughout the late nineteenth century and in France since the 1870 debacle. Sichéry continues with his assessment of Proust’s Jewishness, something always available to help shape our views of Dreyfus’s character and reactions to his ordeal: “At the time of the Dreyfus Affair, his attitude would be sensitive, vigilant and sympathetic, but exempt from fanaticism…. With incomparable humour, he analyzes both the supporters of Dreyfus and his opponents, showing the futility, stupidity, the egotism, the inconsequence and the absurdity that prevail in both the warring camps” (85). 60 There were many more of these digressions and insertions in earlier versions of this book, but they have been pulled and reserved for the next books that develop my study of Dreyfus in the context of his intellectual readings. — 178 —

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You: Me:

You:

Me:

You: Me:

You:

Me: You:

the disgraced becoming a great novelist. They both lived in cells where they created new kinds of worlds out of their memory. That will be in your next book, won’t it? Maybe. There is too much to say. But now back to the topic. All these four stages in exegesis, this mystical entry into the magical Paradise of rabbinical creativity, is that at certain times of crisis—and we will indeed have to talk about what this means—certain people, intentionally or inadvertently, that is, consciously or unconsciously, as individuals or as intimate particles of a collective mentality, midrash their lives. This is exactly what I have been waiting for. I wasn’t quite sure of when or where or what it would be, but now that you put the idea into words, I recognize it as the goal of all your ramblings so far. Well, you’re going to be disappointed. Why? Because I cannot explain all this myself. The book itself must take over. And if you remember, I said that it wasn’t a book in the modern secular Christian sense. I said it was a midrash, a text that lives by weaving in and out and diving down deep inside other texts. Did you really expect me to remember all that and know what it means? Please explain. All I can do is to remind you of what I said some time ago: that on that very day when Alfred Dreyfus was invited to return to the offices of the Statistics Department where he had only recently been posted, in mufti and on a Saturday, and to write out a letter and he felt his hands start to tremble, from that moment on, the good captain sleep-walked out of his normal life and into a wholly different region of reality, a nightmare. That’s when the midrashing begins and that’s when the mentality of France and of modernity starts to explode into a new grotesque shape and then it deflates and disappears. What I want to ask now—maybe I should have stopped you long ago to pose the question, but I get caught up in your arguments, and want to make sure I understand them as far as it is humanly possible. What is the question burning away at your insides? Simply this—though, God knows, nothing with you is ever simple—why have you decided to intersperse in this book — 179 —

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about Dreyfus all those quotations from novelists, historians, philosophers, popular songs and anything else that came into your head, and, of course, once you answer that, tell me what I am supposed to represent in these little conversations, of which this is the last surviving example? Me: That’s two questions. You: There could be more. I am not going to let you slip away with your subtle and devious answers. At least tell me why the dialogue form? Me: There is no simple answer. I am tempted to say: “Because I like it.” What does that mean? you will ask. Because it gives me a chance to say something in a new way and not get bogged down in the trap that is there if I were trying to write one more book on Dreyfus and the Affair. Enough of them, and I have no special access to libraries as my overseas colleagues do. In fact, I have no colleagues near by to whom I can direct questions or try out arguments. I just have to make them up. Besides, I am far from the first to write in dialogue form. I was particularly struck by Julien Benda’s book Dialogues à Byzance, which he published in 1900. Also, take a look at his Belphegor: Essai sur l’esthètique de la société française (second edition November 1918), started in 1914 and completed when the Great War ended. The now conversational mode is there, too, in Charles Peguy’s Notre Jeunnesse. It is a traditional, honourable mode. From antiquity through to the eighteenth century dialogues, conversations, and epistolary exchanges were common ways to present all sorts of learned ideas, to spread out different points of view, to imagine straw men and straw women, with allegorical names, or historical characters, or just fictional voices. You: And classical Greek and Roman dialogues, like Plato or Xenephon? Me: If you will. However, I don’t imagine developed dramatic scenes and actions. You: Don’t you? True, you haven’t inserted stage directions and there is no description of the contextual events to our discussions. However, I don’t feel like a disembodied voice and when I look around myself there is a pretty concrete and familiar world. Me: Perhaps to you that is the way it seems. My gut feeling is that — 180 —

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our readers would not feel the same. You: No? That does not please me at all. And, so then, tell me, my friend, why have you chosen me to play this role as your interlocutor? You are always talking about the rabbis, and I would have guessed that you wanted someone who was au fait with talmudic, midrashic and kabbalistic writings. Or did you choose me precisely because I don’t know much about those traditions and because, frankly, you wanted to engage with someone who tends to be secular, at times even atheistic, and often enough working within the post-modernism you seem to despise so hotly? Me: You are very warm here. I wanted someone who would, as you more often than not do, play along with me, tolerate my outbursts, and argue against me without pulling rank or grinding me down with his own outbursts of superior knowledge. Do you see what I am driving at? You: Precisely. You want the perfect reader embodied in me. But I am part of you, don’t forget that. Me: Right. I don’t want the acquiescence of Socrates’ dialogue partners who quickly buckle under and start to answer him obsequiously with, “Indeed, Socrates, you are right and I am wrong” or “I acknowledge that I did not know what I was talking about” and that sort of muck. I want someone like yourself, who has good questions and can occasionally put me off my balance, make me think harder than I would in a private meditation, and to give the effect of a real conversation with a learned, wise, and sympathetic colleague. That’s why I invented you or dragged you up out of my mind, something like the younger scholar I used to be or wanted to be. You: You mean I am not really real? Didn’t you at least model me on some real people or maybe some interesting characters in a novel by a substantial author? Me: So far as I am concerned, my friend, you are my friend, I hope, you are real, real in the sense that you have become a new part of myself¸ something more than a memory, or reflection or a projection. You consolidate in your voice my own hesitations, doubts, apprehensions and the aspirations I once had to be a recognized, respected scholar. — 181 —

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You: You don’t want me to really respond to that, do you? Me: No, it would be too painful, and I will respect you all the more if you will retain your silence. There are enough readers out there who will be thinking what I am pretty sure you want to say. Here are some other things to say about the way in which this book midrashes the phenomena of Dreyfus the man (in his family and milieu) and the Affair (the Dreyfusards and their allies and the issues stirred up and developed). You: Is there any other choice but to hear you out yet again? Me: You are a real jokester, aren’t you? But I do enjoy your teasing. So let’s go on. First of all, I mentioned before that the kind of dialogue we are conducting was probably more related to a rabbinical conversation in the Talmud than to the dramatic constructs in Plato or other classical authors, but I would not want to exclude Boethius’ De consolatione philosophiae, because this Consolation, though—or perhaps because—likely to be Christian, works in a way that strikes me as useful and illuminating. Similarly, whatever its filiations with ancient Greek tradition, the Book of Job develops through an elaborate and poetic set of dialogues, debates, and antiphonal voices.61 Second of all, what I see as happening in the Dreyfus Affair, particularly as it develops outside of and beyond the immediate experiences of the good captain himself, reminds me of certain eighteenthcentury English novels, not least Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe62 and Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa. You: What are you going to talk about here? I really don’t see the point. Me: I have told you already several times that this book does not pretend to be another history of Dreyfus or the Affair and it is neither a political, sociological, or psychological analysis. There are already enough, if not too many of those kind. This book aims to uncover the history of mentalities evident in the man and the issues stirred up around him—of the themes that cre61 André Comte-Sponville, in “La leçon d’Alfred Dreyfus,” Cahiers dé l’île du Diable, calls the Affair at once a Greek tragedy that ends well and a secular and republican Book of Job (241-242). 62 For a discussion of Defoe’s novel in terms of autistic thinking, see Karl Menninger, with Martin Mayman and Paul Pruyser, The Vital Balance: The Life Process in Mental Health and Illness (New York: The Viking Press, 1967; by Menninger alone, 1963), 258-259. — 182 —

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ated his extraordinary walking out of normative history, as it were—and of the different kinds of context that formed a matrix or verbal lens through which the phenomena can be understood. You: But what does all this have to do with Boethius or with Defoe and all those other texts? I can perhaps follow you when, to set up a Jewish perspective, you talk about Talmud and Kabbalah, but not these other authors and books. Me: Yes, I see how it could confuse you. If you work within a conventional or post-modernist set of paradigms of historiography or discourse analysis, there is no doubt my methodology and the theory behind it will make no sense to you at all. You: So, should I leave right now? Me: Calm down. I am not throwing you out. There are a few places in the autobiographies of writers who, while themselves not involved in the Dreyfus Affair—they were too young, or not even born—make some pertinent generalizations about the period in which Dreyfus was subjected to his personal hell and the French nation split apart over the rights and wrongs of the case. Because these authors—and here I think in particular of important and, in their time, popular writers like Stephen Zweig and André Maurois—are not professional historians or social scientists, and hence do not think and write in scientific terms, and indeed tend to make their comments in the deeply emotive and poetic language that cuts to the quick of the age they are describing, I feel attracted to their words and feel I ought to meditate upon them. You: This is surely another of your ploys to avoid the hard slog of scholarship, isn’t it? You think poetic or rhetorical style is the equivalent of a sound rational argument. I will hear you out, as I have no choice, being confined to your dramatic control over my voice in this book, but I don‘t like it, and I can assure you I will not be swayed by such cultural fantasies. Me: OK, I will shut up, and we can both slip back into the text of the book. Still further in orientating ourselves properly to discuss the Dreyfus Affair and the persons and events attached to it, comes the problem of — 183 —

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anti-Semitism. Since we now once again live in a world saturated with blood libels, mad theories of Jewish conspiracies, and the all embracing notions of Jewish contamination of culture, politics, and history, our approach to the catastrophic breakout of the Affair requires that we neither misconstrue, nor trivialize, nor displace the Judeophobia that permeates the persecution of Alfred Dreyfus.

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Part 3: Through the Prism of Anti-Semitic Discourse

Anti-Semitism is an inglorious side in French conservatism. — Norbert Col63 My good friend Norbert Col, who teaches at the Université de Sud Bretagne, and who writes on both French and British conservative thinkers, reminds himself and me “that the complexity of the subject demands extreme tactfulness and scholarship in order to highlight how dangerous the loose association of judéité (Jewishness) and the ‘antiFrance’ was.” This refers not just to Charles Maurras (1868-1952), but to those other intellectuals on the right from the time of the Dreyfus Affair through the dangerous years of the 1930s and 1940s, and even long afterwards, when they had to see their own tendencies towards anti-Semitism in the aftermath of the Shoah.64 But as we read through what Maurras or Daudet wrote, it is possible to wonder how sincere they were in their hesitations about falling into Germanic anti-Semitism. On the one hand, their praise for assimilated Jews who publicly dissociate themselves from their own families and religious heritage come too close to the sort of suspicious version of “Some of my best friends are Jewish,” meaning they are only willing to accept as French those Jews or Bosh who demonstrate sufficient self-hatred to confirm the anti-Semites own prejudices; and on the other, they also remind us of the so-called “moderate” Islamist, moderate in the sense that he or she does not want to kill all the offspring of pigs and monkeys at once, but is willing to begin with the Zionists, then the Israelis, and only then all the Jews. These discussions with Norbert Col, Robert Liris, and others65 are a 63 Norbert Col, personal communication (6 April 2010). 64 Much of the relevant information concerning individuals, groups and events is summed up neatly in Sarah E. Shurts, Redefining the “Engagé”: Intellectual Identity and the French Extreme Right, 1898-1968 (PhD thesis, University of North Carolina, 2007). 65  These are my overseas (France, Israel, America, Australia, etc.) friends and colleagues, the contacts that are not to be found close at hand. Our communications are usually by email. While I deeply appreciate their guidance, corrections and sources of information, I alone am responsible for the shape and veracity of the results. — 185 —

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constant reminder to me, as I write this book, not to fall into the trap of dismissing all the anti-Dreyfusards as racial bigots and proto-Nazi thugs. In the same vein, my readings of the parliamentary debates during and right after the Affair, and the newspaper reports, essays, and other documents of the controversies between Catholic, Socialist, and Anarchist writers that occurred in the wake of the struggle to bring justice to Alfred Dreyfus and his family, serve as a warning not to idealize the politicians and authors on the left, as though they were always purely disinterested partisans of the high ideals of the Enlightenment and republican virtues. A literary example of the kind of moderate anti-Semite, that is, a Judeophobe who does not want to kill all the Jews at once, appears in the writings of Honoré de Balzac. One passage, expressed in a somewhat ironically and humorously Rabelaisian style, describes an aged Seneschal, in his early nineteenth-century collection of Contes drolatiques: He only persecuted the Jews now and then, and when they were glutted with usury and wealth. He let them gather their spoils as the bees do honey, saying that they were the best tax-gatherers. And never did he despoil them save for the profit and use of the churchmen, the king, the province, or himself.66 For this kind of comical bigot, so long as Jews are useful and know their place, they can be tolerated, and used as a cash-cow; otherwise, they are quite expendable. Similarly, there are moderate, somewhat harmless anti-Semites who can have individual Jewish friends, but dislike the very idea of Jewishness and Judaism, find the practicing Jew67 an annoyance, a disturbance on the smooth surface of social civility, and, especially in difficult times, a convenient scapegoat, the butt of humor. Sometimes assimilated, assimilating and converted Jews go along with these criticisms and half-heartedly express them as well.68 Even more than that, 66 Honoré de Balzac, Droll Stories, Contes Drolatiques (1832) (originally published in London, 1874; now New York: Random House/Modern Library, nd), “The Venial Sin,” 26. 67 You should hear what they say about the Jew who dares to defend his life, or an Israeli his country. 68 The old anecdote goes: A certain Leon Bloomfeld, after conversion to the Episcopalians known as Noel Meadows, woke up on Sunday morning to find his wife standing over his bed wagging her fingers. “You forgot again!” she said. “Forgot what?” he responded through his still half-shut eyes. “Leon, it’s Sunday and you go to Church,” she said. “Oy givalt,” he shouted, slapping himself on the — 186 —

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as we are attempting to show in this book, what Dreyfus lived through was an experience of realizing and coming to embody the Jewishness of his own mind and approach to language and culture that his assimilated career made him forget but which his arrest, imprisonment, exile, and torture forced him to understand, at least partly, since, of course, Alfred was no yeshiva bucha (student of the Talmudic academy) living out the traditions of life-long rabbinical study and, most significantly, there is no genetic, biological code of midrashing he could have inherited. As we shall show, he grew up in a fairly old-fashioned Alsatian Jewish family, yet was forced by circumstances of the Franco-Prussian War to move into the metropolis of France and make himself into a Mentch (a proper modern young man). Wer ist Loos und was ist los? Where is Loos and What’s the Matter? R. Hattim Palaggi (1788-1896), one of the foremost rabbinic authorities in modern times, pointed out that “humility” (’anava), which is a much-prized virtue in Jewish ethics, “must be reserved for internal relationships among us, between a Jew and a Jew.” A Jew, however, should not treat a gentile as an inferior but as an equal, even when dealing with the highest aristocracy. “However, when I find myself in the company of the gentile aristocracy,” he wrote, “I feel a great aristocrat myself… because we are the children of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” 69 Another variation on the scale of moderate Jew-Hatred70 appears in what the famous Austrian architect Adolf Loos said to his third wife, the Jewish photographer Claire (Klara-Franziska) Beck: “I am an anti-Semite. All Christians should marry Jews and vice versa… I am on my secforehead, “a goyisha kupf!” 69 Cited in José Faur, A Jewish View of Christianity (forthcoming), Section III paragraph 21, from R. Hayyim Palaggi, Birkat Mo’adekha le-Hayyim, vol. 2 (Izmir, 5611/1851), 143d. 70 We have to be careful not to confuse the jocular teasing in expression of such moderates with the serious racial hatred in action that may seem to hide itself behind a calm and smiling mask. — 187 —

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ond Jewish wife.”71 Two matters are of interest in this apparently casual remark. First, there is the remark itself. Second, there is the way it is handled in the historical accounts of Loos’s role in the history of Austrian and European architecture. Thus, what is most interesting here is not just Loos’s own deep involvement, emotionally and intellectually, with the Jews of Vienna, but the centrality of their place in pre-Nazi Austrian

71 Cited by Beatriz Colomina, “Sex, Lies and Decoration: Adolf Loos and Gustav Klimt,” in Natter and Grunenberg, Gustav Klimt, 239n17. The original remark appears in Claire Loos, Adolf Loos privat, ed. Adolf Opel (Vienna: 1936). Her book, reprinted in Böhlaus in 1983 should be examined to expose the way in which subsequent scholars, many imbued with post-modernist disdain for Jews and thus for textual and historical integrity, have misconstrued what she and her husband actually said. Frau Loos in her private history of her husband wrote in the one-page chapter called “Loos and the Jews”: “The Jews have created [heraufbeschworen] Anti-Semitism, since they say ‘we are the chosen people’!” Such a statement, if taken seriously and literally, of course, is an old calumny, but for those in the know, as Adolf Loos was, along with his Jewish wife, also part of a running joke among Viennese insiders. Loos had so many Jewish friends, patrons, and collaborators, not to mention wives, that his own sense of humor was the kind Sigmund Freud would have included in Jokes and Unconscious. In another instance, Loos wanted to be asked to come as a witness at a Jewish wedding of one of his Viennese students. This was not allowed, he was told, since he was a Catholic. Loos shook his head in surprise. A Jew can act as a witness at a Christian wedding, he said, so why can no Christian act as a witness at a Jewish wedding? This rebuff obviously pained as well as puzzled the world-famous architect, but it probably made him more aware of two related factors: first, that a Jewish wedding is much more of a national-legal contract than a Christian marriage ceremony in a church, and so only those persons who are covenanted to adhere to the Law can serve as formal witnesses under the hupa (wedding banner); and second, even among his assimilated friends, there was a certain point beyond which all Jews, more than moderately sensitive to their vulnerable minority status in Vienna, conducted the important events in their lives according to the Mosaic Law. Then comes the passage already indicated where Loos seems to voice typical Mitteleurpaische Judeophobia: “Once he said to me,”—writes his wife Claire, not citing a letter, as Colomina claims: “I am an anti-Semite. All Christians should marry Jews and the reverse. In four hundred years there would be no Jews… I already have a second Jewish wife…” This remark has been sometimes interpreted as “facetious.” It should be seen, through a darker lens, though, in the light of the prohibition of intermarriage that was about to be promulgated in Nazi Germany’s racist exclusionary laws. Real anti-Semitism deals in crimes against the most basic freedoms of individuals, and when the Nuremberg Laws were carried to their fullest Jews were no longer considered to be human beings. That little spritz of witz from Loos is at once another light-hearted self-mocking joke but also a plaintive cri du coeur, similar, perhaps, to Freud’s complaint that he wished there were more non-Jews in the psychoanalytic movement, which was gaining the reputation—and hence the resistance of the wider community—of being a Jewish Science. Unfortunately, in his own grasping for respectability, Freud chose Karl Jung to be his public gentile spokesman. See Richard Noll, The Jung Cult: Origins of a Charismatic Movement (New York and London: Free Press/Simon & Schuster, 1997 [Princeton University Press 1994]) and Frederic V. Grunfeld, Prophets without Honour: A Background to Freud, Kafka, Einstein and the World (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1980 [1979]). Also see my review of Christian Witt-Dörring and Paul Asenbaum, curators, Vienna Art & Design: Klimt, Schiele, Hoffmann, Loos, Shofar 31:2 (2013): 172-174. — 188 —

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culture and society.72 If the active, supportive role Jewish culture played in Loos’s career and in the development of Austrian culture throughout the last years of the nineteenth century and early years of the twentieth is ignored, belittled or denied, then the picture of Loos and the history of modern European architecture are completely distorted.73 Then, still further on in the one-page chapter in her private history of Adolf Loos, Claire Beck-Loos says, “Many Loos students, students who have worked with him for years, are Jews. Loos said: I would have liked more Christians among my students, and where possible aristocrats. Aristocrats have an inborn Culture, so it stands to reason they would make good architects. But when they sink into poverty for some strange reason they become chauffeurs!”74 When Burkhardt Rukschcio and Roland Schachel, in their Adolf Loos: Leben und Werk, cite the words of Loos’s wife, they give his witty remark a literal twist by not providing any context and deleting the punch-line to his joke.75 It seems that they can’t distinguish between what is a Witz spoken facetiously and what is said to be taken at face value. Loos was speaking rhetorically to an imagined audience, many of them his own circle of Jews who could make distinctions which are more subtle than the persons now fumbling to interpret his words. It is not just a mild example of Incidentalism,76 however, since 72 For an interesting essay that sets Loos into relationship with the Viennese intellectuals Yehuda Safran, “Adolf Loos: The Archimedean Point,” an introduction to the Arts Council Exhibition, The Architecture of Adolf Loos (London: 1987), 26-35. 73 In other words, it is one thing—and by far the most important—to consider the murder of Jewish artists and patrons, along with the destruction, theft and dispersal of their collections, and another to study the lasting consequences to the history of art and culture of these losses, and the forgetting—in official historical books, museum catalogues, university courses, popular handbooks, and general knowledge—of what really happened to shape modern painting, architecture, literature, film, and civilization. This is no joking matter. 74 Background to this joke appears in Friedrich Nietzsche who, according to his biographer Curtis Cate (Friedrich Nietzsche, Overlook T.P., 2005), as cited by Barry Rubin, “contrasted ‘the positive breeding’ of aristocracies to the negative ‘taming,’ castration, and emasculation of the strong by insidious ‘underdogs.’” Or, in Nietzsche’s own words: “Christianity, growing from Jewish roots and comprehensible only as a product of this soul, represents a reaction against the morality of breeding, of race, of privilege—it is the anti-Aryan religion par excellence”; and, unlike his Nazi lapdogs, who misunderstood him at every turn, Nietzsche despised the Aryan traits and, pretending to be of Polish descent, chose to live in Switzerland; see Rubin, “The Strangest Antisemite of them All” (Gloria Center). 75 Salzburg/Vienna: 1982, 295. 76 The concept of “incidentalism” was explained in the first volume as being modelled on the Occidentalism of some nineteenth- and twentieth-century historians who seek to investigate the real nature of European civilization, and sometimes the way it is conceived in the postcolonial world, and of Orientalism, the academic, politically-correct myth of Edward Said and — 189 —

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the distortions reveal the same vicious hatred of Jews in pre-Anschluss Austria that led to the destruction of Jewish culture and to its continuing appropriation, physically, morally, and intellectually, to this very day. Of course, like Charles Swann in Proust’s A la recherche, many cultured and ambitious Jews of Vienna felt themselves deeply assimilated into the dominant culture, if not actually converted to Christianity, largely as a result of the ingrained anti-Semitism that formed part of the very identity of the majority Catholic population of Austria. For instance, one of Loos’s staunchest friends, Karl Kraus, a witty, cutting satirist newspaperman—he produced Der Fackel single-handedly and gave lectures to enormous crowds in Vienna—had been born into a fine old rabbinical family but gave up his Judaism in the late 1890s for strategic reasons.77 Though hardly a forerunner of another Austrian anti-Semite, Adolf Schikelgruber (aka Hitler), born of dubious parentage with his own pretentions to art and architecture, Kraus, like Voltaire, provided too much ammunition to the National Socialists to be accepted as a misguided critic of Jewish bourgeois foibles. In short, we have to watch out for both the sparks hiding in the dark corners of the other side, and for the unctuous words of those who claim to be friends and allies of the Jews, as well as, of course, those who are genuine supporters but who just don’t understand and make errors of judgment that can be very dangerous.78 What does that mean? his disciples who derogate the study of Oriental languages and cultures in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as though motivated by racial bias and colonialist ambitions, as well as by twentieth-century scholars who are implicated in some Zionist-American plot to conquer the world. Incidentalism, then, is what happens when Jews are all but brushed off the main pages of history and treated as only “incidental” to the grand events or almost air-brushed out of history altogether. The virtual disappearance of Alfred Dreyfus—certainly, Alfred Dreyfus the Jew—is a good example of this process. 77 Harry Zohn, ed., In These Great Times: A Karl Kraus Reader (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984 (Montreal: Engendra Press, 1976). 78 Based on works such as Stefan Zweig’s autobiographical The World of Yesterday (Hallam Edition. London and Toronto: Cassell and Co., 1953 [1943]) and the essays collected by Peter Weibel and Friedrich Stadler in Vertreibung der Venunft: The Cultural Exodus from Austria (Vienna: Löcker Verlag, 1993), it is possible to extrapolate the general atmosphere of fear and intimidation obtaining in Vienna during the 1930s. See also Arthur Schnitzler, Jugend in Wien: Eine Autobiographie, ed. Therese Nicvki and Heinrich Schnitzler (Frankfurt-am-Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1981). The Nazi Anschluss and the consequent and almost immediate ethnic cleansing of Vienna included rendering Vienna Jüdenrein, and of its diverse Jewish provenances (or cultural heritages, not only from within Yiddish-speaking lands, but also Western-orientated and Sephardi Jews), its rich and creative “otherness.” A component of this Judeophobic strategy was the Aryanization Act by which legislation Jews were ungracefully prised from their businesses and homes which had to be turned over to proper Germans or Austrians. This ethnic cleansing had financial and culturally — 190 —

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This brief excursion into Viennese cultural history at a similar moment in time—the decades just prior to and after the Great War—has a certain relevance for our study of the Dreyfus Affair. Partly, as shown above, because anti-Semites and philo-Semites79 often, for diverse but strategic intentions bound together. the Nazi-Catholic union in Austria set out to distance valuable assets from their Jewish ownership and their connection with this other or andere so that the non-other could live in them, claim them as their own physically and, increasingly, as an invented, fraudulent intellectual and cultural mythology. As has been demonstrated, all Loos’s Jewish clients’ houses were expropriated in this way and allocated to “Aryans.” What is fascinating is the Aryanisation of the Loos phenomenon, wherein his literary and architectural oeuvre is, in certain circles, still going on today (See Stephan Templ and Tina Walzer, Unser Wien [Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, 2001]). Emanating from Viennese Loos-researchers and a set of self-confessed post-modernist inter-referential fellow travelers, the underlying ideological process transfers the attribution of ideas, patronage, and ownership from Jewish circles to non-Jewish phantoms. For examples see the essay discussed in a previous note by Beatriz Colomina. The original remark we showed was first printed in Claire Loos, Adolf Loos Privat. Those who attempt to present Loos as an outright anti-Semite can only do so by excising the conversational recollection of Loos’s wife Claire out of its context and claiming it as having come from a letter he wrote rather then in a conversation, thus stripping Loos’s huge Jewish social and intellectual milieu. It also creates a de-contextualized post-modern and politically-correct construct whose apparent ambition is to fabricate an acceptably recognizable Loosian “andere” closer to the mythology that might be Colomina’s. However, Columina’s modus operandi has a precedent in post-Holocaust Vienna: Rukschcio and Schachel. They also, it seems, tried strategically and selectively to attribute to Loos a fictitious anti-Semitism through the reformatting of context and in the decontextualized substance of Loos’s own remarks. These authors present Claire Beck-Loos recalling Loos writing “I would have liked more Christians among my students, and where possible aristocrats. aristocrats have an inborn culture, so it stands to reason they would make good architects.” But Rukschcio and Schachel then conveniently trim off the punch line of that sentence, which was the crux of his wit, the very essence of Loos’s joke: “but when they [the aristocrats] sink into poverty, for some strange reason they become chauffeurs!” These contemporary Austrian authors leave out the final sentence. Why? Could it be they are attempting to portray Loos through a skewed context, one that is as ridiculously amputated in its conception as the fragmented sentences they construct to support their effort. Claire Loos, a Jew, was murdered in a Nazi death camp for no other reason than that she was a Jew. We cannot bring her back to life, but we can bring her writings—like those comments of Loos and other Jews and their real friends—by respecting their intentions, their contexts, and their achievements. The task of textual and historical clarification and correction, since it will not come from such shortsightedness or deliberate obfuscation, rests on western scholars who ought to know better than to leave out the presentation of context when analysing victim texts. Decontextualization— the very opposite of a Jewish midrashic interpretation of documents and historical events— creates a vacuum, a black hole, in which the society that colluded in the murder of the author of that very text pretends to wash itself clean of guilt and fill in the gaps left by the murdered and missing Jews by inserting its own ghosts and pseudo-revenants. Isn’t this what post-modernists usually mean by the death of the author? If Nietzsche said God was dead, the neo-Nietzschians say the Jews who died in the Shoah never lived, and therefore their ideas, texts, plans, and houses belong to somebody else. 79 Philo-Semites are persons who claim to be great supporters of Jews and Israel, but who have trouble seeing Judaism as something other than a residue of Old Testament beliefs and practices and rabbinical culture as at best a quaint and peculiar irrelevance or annoyance in the modern world or as a necessary prelude to the moment of mass conversion which heralds the triumphant — 191 —

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hardly opposite reasons, cannot understand Jews and Judaism. It is not only that they lack or misunderstand contexts, but also that they process facts and expressions through non-Jewish filters. In other words, they are not looking to pick up allusions, hints, and oblique statements, to take language as the substance of reality—because language as written expresses (that is, presses out) in a literal and metaphorical sense what is real, true, and historical in experience—which is the way Jewish discourse historically tends to communicate what it has to say; and they tend, therefore, to mismeasure and overlook what they are reading, or hearing, or seeing, or even experiencing.80 Unfortunately, all too often in countries where assimilation has placed significant numbers of Jews outside of their own cultural milieu and educational disciplines, this inability to understand the Jewish world also finds its way into Jewish books and essays. That done, the anti-Semites take hold of the negativity and the confusion for their own purposes, gloatingly pointing to their authorities—Jews.81 Robert-Louis Liris82 at first dismissed the whole idea of a strong basis return of their Savior and the inauguration of the messianic age, signaled in the Rapture when Jews will gleefully go to their own destruction in the final combat with Gog and Magog. By treating Jews as different in a spiritual and social way, the philo-Jews can be as hurtful as the anti-Semites. How often have I met “friends of Israel” or Fundamentalists who, finding out I am a Jew, have rushed to shake my hand and congratulate me on—I have never actually figured out what—because if I cannot run away, I at least turn off my attention. 80 Watch how the post-modernist linguistic preference of “referencing” elides all the specific variations of remez: allusion, echo, annotation, hinting, reference, metonymically participating in, imitating from afar, parodying, paralleling, etc. Contexts, pretexts, and intertexts disappear when others of these neologisms replace ordinary terms. The tendency is to make one thing “impact” another and thus removing the concrete distinction between a passive and an active event, an intellectual or emotional influence and an accidental encounter. 81 It has been pointed out several times in this book already that anti-Semitic writings can prove most useful in understanding the Dreyfus Affair. First, because they correctly indicate the centrality of Judeophobia as a driving force in the Affair, whereas most of the Dreyfusards deny there is anything involved but a question of truth and justice. Second, because these Jew haters cite Jewish sources often unavailable elsewhere and so provide a deeper context into which to place the actions and words of the major players. Third, because the misunderstandings and distortions displayed in such hateful documents can alert us to problems not fully articulated or only vaguely hinted at in the official papers of the various military, judicial and political institutions involved in the debates. See David Nirenberg, “Anti-Judaism as a Critical Theory,” The Critical Review, The Chronicle of Higher Education (28 January 2013), www.chronicle.com/article/Anti-Judaism-as-aCritical/136793. 82 Liris is one of the founders of the French Society for the Study of Psychohistory and the Centre International d’Etudes et de Recherche (St Etiens). These comments derive from several personal email messages we exchanged in late July 2010, but are based also on our long friendship and collaboration over Glozel, going back into the late 1980s. A new documentary film known simply as Philippe Pétain, produced by Paule Muxel and Betrand de Solliers, was released in Paris in late — 192 —

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for anti-Semitism in regard to the rural regions of central and eastern France. Having closely studied the people, events, and mentalities associated with Marshal Pétain and his collaborationist government in Vichy—the closest town to Glozel, and a center of Nazi activities and Gestapo officers during World War II—Liris argued that the country folk attached no symbolic meaning to Jews or Judaism; there were throughout the Massif Central many families who hid Jews escaping from the German-occupied parts of northern France. At this point in his argument, however, when I asked further questions about what happened during economic and political crises, Liris conceded that during the Dreyfus Affair itself there was indeed an anti-Jewish movement in public opinion in what he calls “the deep country.”83 While we can explain such negative feelings with the conservative Catholic beliefs, the traditional monarchist tendencies, and the resentments of peasant homes against what the anti-Semitic press of such journalists as Edouard Drumont exploited in his anti-Semitic and anti-Dreyfus campaigns, it would not be easy to dismiss a continuation of such prejudices thirty to forty years later, that is, at the time when the discovery of Glozel became a point of national controversy, known as the “War of the Bricks” or “The Second Affair.” But, still hesitating, Liris went on to say that in the late nineteenth century in the region around Vichy, including the hamlet of Glozel, citing his father in this regard, the country folk would, if anything, see in the Jewish people and their religion a nation more ancient than their own, and hence deserving of respect, and a faith out of which their own Catholicism arose, and hence the source of all their rituals and beliefs. In a way, this attitude matches what Ernest Renan recalls from his own childhood experiences, and is reflected in books such as The Life of Jesus, wherein, though there is often a misunderstanding of essential Jewish beliefs, customs, and history, November 2010; it is available on DVD through Arte France Editions. It features interviews with Robert Liris, as well as showing photographs from his private archives. 83 However, see the statistics and conclusions drawn by Stephen Wilson, “Le Monument Henry: La structure de l’antisémitisme en Franc, 1898-1899,” Annales, Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations 32:2 (1977): 265-291. Analyzing the subscription lists of individual and group donations for a monument in honor of Col. Joseph Henry, who committed suicide after being revealed as the forger of many of the documents in the Dreyfus Affair, Wilson shows that most of the antiDreyfusards, many of whom were also anti-Semites, were to be found in the large and middlesized provincial regions of France, rather than in the small towns, villages and regions of the nation. — 193 —

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an attitude that condescendingly accepts Jesus himself as a Jewish reformer and sees the dislikeable traits in the contemporary Jews of his acquaintance as the product of a difficult and degrading life in exile. In a way, too, the young Bernard Lazare’s History of Anti-Semitism takes a somewhat similar stance, albeit beginning with a socialist-anarchist opposition to the successful merchant and banking sectors of modern Jewry in France in the late nineteenth century. Briefly put, then, unlike the vicious merging of aggressive nationalism and pseudo-scientific racist ideology to be found in Germany during this period, the antiJewishness in most Frenchmen, including many assimilated Jews, was much milder, less systematic, and likely to allow for many personal friendships, even marriage, between Jews and Christians. To explain in part at least this apparent disjunction between the anti-Jewish tendencies during the Dreyfus Affair and their apparent absence during the Glozel Affair, Liris indicates that what Judeophobic feeling there was to be found among the peasantry was probably based on economic insecurities rather than on racist theories. For that reason, despite all the efforts of the Vichy government to spread Nazi antiJewish propaganda, the local population overwhelmingly sympathized with any victims of the Germans, including Jews from Paris—or even from lands to the East. Philippe Pétain, the World War I hero whom people were willing to believe—and deluded themselves into believing— was not a creature of the Nazis or a doddering old fool unaware of what was going on in the world, but an active hater of Jews. In October 2010, the lawyer Serge Klausfeld, on behalf of an anonymous donor, deposited in the Shoah Memorial in Paris a document dated October 1940 in which, with his own hand, the head of the Vichy regime crossed out the qualifying phrase in the German order for deportation of Jews that would have exempted those naturalized before 1860, thus ensuring that all Jewish citizens of France, as well as more recent refugees from the Third Reich, would be sent to the extermination camps in the East. This shows that Pétain personally hardened the already despicable antiJewish directives, and because of that it is more difficult than ever to dismiss the nagging suspicion that there was more anti-Semitism in the soil of France than French pride wants to admit or accept.84 Or as 84 “Comment Pétain a durci le statut des juifs d’octobre 1940,” Liberation.fr (4 October 2010), http://www. liberation.fr/politiques/01012293934-comment-petain-a-durci-le-statut-des-juifs-d-octobre-1940 — 194 —

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Stephen Wilson puts it, “What the [Dreyfus] Affair reveals … is the wide extent and great importance of anti-Semitic prejudice in France, latent, but ready to manifest itself when circumstances allowed or encouraged it.”85 While we want to argue that anti-Semitism by itself was deeply embedded in French and other European cultures long before the Dreyfus Affair, and continues after, it is not hatred of the Jew as a person or a religious devotee which is the deepest aspect of this most ancient of prejudices, and it is not merely political or social, let alone economic, circumstances that trigger its emergence from collective nightmares and unconscious feelings into explicit words, images, and acts of violence. These are all active factors, some more than others in different places and times, and they are usually recognized as such, even if the formulation of which is most prevalent or least likely to be a triggering cause at such and such a moment remains open to dispute. What remains to explain is the longevity of the prejudice that outlives all sorts of historical transformations: it therefore must be located in some other sphere of experience than the usual positivistic and (accessed 4 October 10); the original article appeared on the Associated Press (AP) wire service in an abbreviated version and without photographic reproduction of the document, which was printed in The New Zealand Herald on 5 October 2010 under the title “French Role in Holocaust.” Further details appear in the report by Devorah Lauter, “Draft of anti-Jewish measure changing views of Vichy head” (6 October 2010), Jewish Telegraphic Agency, http://www.jta.org/news/ article/2010/10/06/2741166/draft-of-anti-jewish-measure-changing-views-of-vichy-head (accessed 8 October 10); this version emphasizes questions raised by “younger historians” on the integrity of the handwritten comments changing the “Statute of Jews.” According to Lauter, “Historians do not contest the authenticity of the document, but experts disagree on who authored the dits. Did Pétain himself handwrite the corrections, providing unprecedented confirmation and new clues about the Vichy leader’s personal anti-Semitic zeal? Or did technocrats simply jot down demands from one or several other leaders bent on toughening the text during a Cabinet meeting devoted to the law two days before its enactment?” Serge Klausfeld believes the changes stem from Pétain himself. But another objection resides in the anonymity of the gift of this document to the Paris Holocaust Museum, since in matters such as this provenance is a key factor. Moreover, “Even it was the hand of Pétain himself,” objects Annette Wieviorka, “we don’t have information on the conditions in which he made these corrections to the statute … We don’t know if he was alone, or if it’s his own work.” Though these doubts may seem legitimate, particularly in the light of all the forgeries, perjuries, misappropriations, and other duplicities riddling the Dreyfus Affair, there is a point at which “deconstruction” goes too far and the truth is lost in a fog of quibbles. See Norman Simms, “A Cycle of Judicial Memory and Immoral Forgetting: Vel d’hiv 1942,” Shofar 30:12 (2012): 123-137. 85 Stephen Wilson, Ideology and Experience: Anti-Semitism in France at the Time of the Dreyfus Affair (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1982), 5; cited in Linda Nochlin, “Degas and the Dreyfus Affair: Portrait of the Artist as an Anti-Semite,” Chapter 8 of her The Politics of Vision: Essays on Nineteenth-Century Art and Society (New York: Harper & Row, 1989), 166n32. — 195 —

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rational historical ones. Why, for instance, is it possible to find antiSemitism continuing in lands that have been ethnically cleansed, such as Poland, or virulently articulated in countries where Jews have never lived, such as Japan? On the one hand, because modernity—however conceived to fit the circumstances of a culture or a nation—itself cannot be a device that explodes the resistance to change that surges forth as anti-Semitism; this underlying Judeophobia has existed without the particular configuration of social, political, and religious circumstances that are used to explain the phenomenon in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—and now, unfortunately, in the twenty-first century as well. On the other hand, taking as a clear case the France that existed at the time of the Dreyfus Affair, the modernity that threatens the Jews precisely because they are so involved in its formation and seem to benefit so greatly by the opportunities it offers needs to be examined in other terms than usually expressed: we must focus on changes in the way Europeans—educated elites and popular crowds— came to see, feel, think, and express themselves. The most outstanding difference between France and Germany in regard to anti-Semitism is that when the equivalents of Kristalnacht were about to break out, the French police protected Jewish lives and property: they did not stand back or participate in the pogroms. But even then, these kinds of social and political changes in mentality in themselves are not the substance nor the source of the energy of Jew-hatred. Something more than taste or style is going on. That is, the tensions breaking into actions and institutional changes during the Dreyfus Affair were articulations or expressions of something happening deeper in the collective psyche, something that drives the anti-Semitic surges. These changes in the paradigms of mentality occurred because of even more profound and more dynamic shifts in the way personalities are formed—in physiology as well as in psychology, in foundational conditions that stimulate and inhibit the neuronal and hormonal configuration of the foetus and infant, in the expression of genetic inheritance through chronic proclivities, through traumatic accidents and deliberate acts of abuse, and through social events that create the environment in which children grow, are educated, and develop their adult personalities. Yet these kinds of causal features are precisely those that are hardest to ascertain because they are not experienced in conscious ways, do not register in normal accounts of child-rearing — 196 —

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practice, lie outside the domains of most historical studies, and appear at best in fragmentary, oblique and distorted forms in private writings, such as diaries, letters, and introspective essays, and in certain types of literature developed mostly in the period we are most concerned with in this book. They also appear in highly encoded forms in some of the newer artistic and musical discourses of the late nineteenth century, often hidden under the cover of primitivism, impressionism, expressionism, and similar reactions against classical and academic art. As far as the evidence for racism and assimilation in the Jewish general public and the intellectuals of the fin de siècle, it is certainly true that much that we would consider unacceptable in thinking about race, culture, and religion formed part of ordinary men and women’s conceptualizations and attitudes that shaped and filled key words covering slightly different semantic space than we would map out following the horrors of two world wars and the Holocaust itself. Assimilated Jews themselves often indulged, more often in private than in public, in remarks that show they agreed with the aspersions cast on their co-religionists, at least among the Ostjüden (the recent immigrants from Eastern Europe who spoke Yiddish and behaved in the pre-modern style of shtetl-dwellers) although very few took any active part in the development of anti-Semitic newspapers, political parties, or street actions. As has been shown in recent studies of Franz Kafka, both in regard to his alleged conversations with Max Brod or his private letters and diaries,86 his attitude towards Jews, Judaism and even Zionism were ambiguous and confused. What Mark Gelber calls the uncertainty in the “particularist markers”—of his Jewish interests and attitudes, as well as his identity and relationship with parents and friends—in his stories, journals, letters and conversations “makes Kafka particularly susceptible to different interpretations and ascriptions.” A similar issue arises in considering the Jewishness of Alfred Dreyfus’s writings, especially the prison cahiers, and the almost complete absence of any “particularist markers” such as explicit reference to Jewish writers, institutions, practices, and values or more than a few rare and oblique allusions to anti-Semitism as a factor in his trial or the Affair occasioned 86 Mark Gelber is cited in Elif Batuman, “Kafka’s Last Trial” The New York Times Magazine (23 September 2010), http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/26/magazine/26kafka-t.html?_ (accessed 4 October 2010). This article deals with the legal wrangle over possession and disposition of the Kafka archives in progress in Tel-Aviv. — 197 —

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by his two court condemnations, deportation to Devil’s Island, or sustained legal and political efforts to gain complete exoneration and rehabilitation. The Art and Aesthetics of Anti-Semitism At nightfall, deputies unlocked his leg irons, threw his macfarlane over his shoulders, and tried to hurry him past the stations arrival gate. But the mob, now armed with lanterns, pushed forward to separate Dreyfus from his guards. “Into the water!” they shouted. “Death to the traitor! Death to the Jew!” Beaten with canes and fists, spat upon and struck by a French officer using the butt of his saber handle, Dreyfus did not try to escape.87 Just as Alfred Dreyfus himself may not have become a Dreyfusard had the Affair developed around someone other than himself, given the deep-seated differences he had with many of the people, parties and ideas thrown up in his defense during the last and most acute years from Zola’s J’Accuse (1898) to the granting of the pardon after the Rennes trial in 1899, so too not everyone calling him or herself a Dreyfusard during the Affair or even afterwards can be trusted to have acted or written with the purest of motives or with a full awareness of their own motivations. This means that to understand the Affair properly and fully it is important to keep in mind that a phenomenon such as this neither splits the nation down the centre, with a good (liberal, modern) side made up of the newly-named intellectuals88 standing up for a revision of the case against Alfred Dreyfus and a bad (reactionary, traditionalist) side made 87 Burns, Dreyfus: A Family Affair, 158. 88 This emergent self-conscious group of the so-called intelligentsia (to use a Slavic term) would have before seen themselves as medical or legal professionals, journalists and editors, teachers and upper bureaucrats, clerics and even clerks, with more in common among larger groups of religious, regional or commercial interests than as a coherent body of individuals. The term “intellectual,” shifted from adjective to noun, sounded grotesque, an ugly neologism to most readers, and the group it purported to designate as a unified, politically active movement was not acceptable to all educated, articulate, literary, and politicized persons opposed to Dreyfus. How inadequate the term was can be seen in the third phase of the Affair, after the second condemnation at Rennes, when the Dreyfus camp began to fissure on political, social, and philosophical grounds. — 198 —

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up of anti-Semites, priests, monarchists, and time-serving bureaucrats and careerist military officers. After all, we need to recall that from the perspective of some artists, for instance, such as Paul Cézanne writing to his son in 1906, “the intellectuals in my country [are] a pack of ignoramuses, cretins and rascals.”89 On 28 January 1898, Camille Pissarro wrote to his son Lucien during the Zola trial that “everyone declares that the government is in the right and that Zola should have minded his own business.” A few days later, he exclaimed on the spread—not the diminution or the awakening into enlightenment—of madness among writers, critics, artists, and other intellectuals: The newspapers report that Huysmans has definitely entered the religious fold…. I ran into Blanche, he has become religious and anti-[S]emetic! All cracked. He seeks to revive what was so well done when it was believed in, but today this has no use for anyone; yes, it has, has value for deceiving poor simpletons. We shall see many others like them, all those who have turned up their noses at our age and who have nothing inside!90 In these letters to his son, Pissarro both reported the spread of antiSemitism and the luring away into the reactionary camp of many old friends and acquaintances he thought he could trust—at least, trust to be sensible intellectuals—and yet, at the same time, reassuring both himself and Lucien, he wrote on 22 February 1898, Don’t worry any more about the Zola case. No new anti-Semetic outbursts. Anti-Semitism is now condemned even in the Chamber of Deputies: it is propagated only by immature idiots who do not even shout any longer. The government is mighty sick of the whole affair, but does not know how to dispose of it; people are beginning to reflect.91

89 Rachel Barnes, Cézanne; Artists by Themselves (Australia: Angus & Robertson, 1992 [orig. 1990]), 38. 90 Pissarro, Letters to his Son, Lucien, ed. John Rewland with Lucien Pissarro, trans. Lionel Abel (Santa Barbara and Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith, 1981 [Pantheon Books, 1944]), 413. 91 Pissarro, Letters to his Son, 416. — 199 —

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At best, perhaps, living from day to day in the fevered atmosphere of the Dreyfus Affair, someone like the Sephardic Jew Pissarro could try to fool himself into believing everything was getting better and would turn out well, but we find that the more we study the people and events involved in the Affair, the less simple it seems, and the more insidious the implications. For in mid-November of 1898, Pissarro had to report to young Lucien in England that things were actually not at all going well. His letter, however, is full of contradictions, indications of seething hatred on the streets and in the press, denials of government complicity or threats from the army and the church, and an overall and perhaps desperate desire by the father to keep his son from worrying too much: Hôtel du Louvre Paris, November 19, 1898 My dear Lucien, You need not worry about my safety here. For the moment we have to deal with nothing more than a few Catholic ruffians from the Latin Quarter [in other words, students and professors from the Sorbonne!] favored by the government. They shout: Down with the Jews!92 but all they do is shout [unfortunately, this was not true; there were shop windows broken and passersby beaten up]. The healthy majority has come to its senses and understands that the object of the shouting is to overturn the Republic, or rather to make the Jesuits absolute rulers. [Behind the street mobs lies the deep-seated antipathy between modernism and anti-modernism, not so that anti-Semitism is a mere epiphenomenon, but so 92 This reality of the anti-Semitic mobs so denied or trivialized by almost all the inner circle of Dreyfusards is made clear in another of Anatole France’s parodic tales, “Crainquebille Submits to the Laws of the Republic”: “This poor old man believed himself guilty of having mystically offended Constable 64, just as the little boy learning his first Catechism believes himself guilty of Eve’s sin. His sentence had taught him that he had cried: ‘Mort aux vaches!’ He must, therefore have cried ‘Mort aux vaches!’ in some mysterious manner, unknown to himself. He was transported into a supernatural world. His trial was his apocalypse” (in France, Crainquebille, Putois, Riquet and other Profitable Tales, 33). Read for vaches (cows), Juifs (Jews). — 200 —

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that Jews will be the scapegoats for both forms of extremism.] I believe and hope that in the end free men will have the upper hand, [A naïve hope.] Yesterday, at about five o’clock, while on my way to [the art-dealer] Durand-Ruel, I found myself in the middle of a gang of young scamps [probably lycée students] seconded by ruffians [street thugs and political hatchet men]. They shouted: Death to the Jews! Down with Zola! I calmly passed through them and reached the rue Lafitte…. They had not even taken me for a Jew… [But if they had, he doesn’t say what would have happened.] In the next part of his letter, the artist describes to his son the reactions against the anti-Dreyfusard feelings throughout the country, but doesn’t seem to understand that the agitation by the left-wing supporters of Dreyfus led not towards a liberal reform of the government, the army, the church and the state, but towards further extremist violence in which, as almost always, the Jews get crushed down in the middle. He virtually self-diagnoses his and France’s problem as a failure of the imagination, an epistemological crisis, a radical instance of méconnaissance: Protests against the verdict in the Dreyfus case abound everywhere. All the intellectuals protest, and there are the socialists who organize meetings; the day before yesterday the socialists and the anarchists made a terrible row against the meeting of Rochefort and the Jesuits. Who could have imagined such behavior from Rochefort? The idiot, he lost his bearings this time. France is really sick, will she recover? We shall see after Zola’s trial.93 (emphasis added) Thus we have to search for both (1) complexity, meaning a lack of clear-cut and consistent motivations and understandings, and hence to recognize the dynamics of the whole Affair as a dramatic and spectacular series of overlapping events; and for (2) sincere and intelligent minds 93 Pissarro, Letters to his Son, 430-431. — 201 —

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taking positions of opposition to the Dreyfusard cause on grounds that were not necessarily spurious, specious or cynical but possibly skeptical, cautious or relativist. That said, though, I want to pursue the search into the aspects of the Affair that arise from and impinge upon the emotional life of Alfred Dreyfus and his family, upon the Jewishness of their imaginations and thinking processes, and on the aesthetic and literary contexts in which the phenomenon took the forms that it did. Only because of what happened to him could Dreyfus be considered “typical”; before that event, he was an ambitious young man on the way up. Afterwards, though he served in World War I and yet stayed clear of almost all public life, he was troubled by nightmares and fears of the rising tide of anti-Semitism: he had been transformed by the ordeal of his arrest, trial and exile to Devil’s Island—and very briefly, in his cahiers, as we have started to see, became capable of articulating the profound changes in thought and feeling that constituted modernity with all its dangerous self-contradictions and blind-spots. It is mostly—one is tempted to say “exclusively”—in the anti-Semitic press of the period and the following decades that the deepest meanings of the Affair were actually discussed. There are several senses of “deepest meanings” that I wish to explore here. The most important focus, however, is not on the opponents of Dreyfus, who are determined to hide their own manipulation of evidence, including the production of forgeries and the orchestration of perjured witnesses, and the panoply of media distortions and other propagandistic tricks. It is more on the failures of the Dreyfusards themselves to grasp the essential features and contours of the Affair, to bend language and gestures to their own ideological aims, and, especially among the late-comers to the cause, who joined the bandwagon in a rush of expediency and opportunism, to seek a variety of hidden advantages at the expense of judicial truth, Alfred Dreyfus’s health and career, and the future implications of these dream-like maneuvers. First of all, there are the matters that the major players in the Affair tried to cover up for a variety of reasons, such as political tact and strategy, embarrassment at the exposure of either financial or intimate details of relationships between various members of the family and other persons inside and outside the Jewish community. This is a version of secrecy played out in different political and social spheres. Such secrecy may be considered censorship, denial, and outright lies and tricks. — 202 —

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Second, the Dreyfus and the Hadamard family and their closest relatives, as well as the newly constituted class of intellectuals, the liberal and socialist press, for a variety of their own reasons, not always consciously motivated, tried to gloss over or repressed the fact that the central problem in the Affair was all about a maligned Jew, not necessarily the themes they chose to debate or denounce, such as republican ideals versus traditional values of a reconstituted monarchy, modern secularism and science versus ecclesiastical control over education and marriage. Third, we not only have to know our enemy, as the saying goes;94 we have to know that enemy’s innermost thoughts and feelings, motivations, and matrix of emotions—in other words, the fears, anxieties, ideals, dreams, misperceptions—all that hatred and rage that sometimes manifests itself in street protests and political action or, far more insidiously, seethes below the surface of French public life and discourse until it breaks out into the events of the 1930s and 1940s, a time when the ideas and the persons apparently shunted to the side by the Affair’s conclusion return with a vengeance in the rise of French Fascism and the Vichy Regime. Because the guilty parties in the Army or the government went unpunished, aside from a very few individuals who went into self-exile or had the dignity to commit suicide, and because the dominant politicians who came into power on their Dreyfusard credentials actually worked against the grain of the republican and moral ideals they had seemed to espouse during the latter stages of the Affair, the essential causes of the crimes committed against Alfred Dreyfus and his family were never dealt with in an institutional, legal, or political way. Thus they were ready to spring forth once the circumstances were again ripe: that is, in the midst of economic crises and the external threats from Nazi Germany, when the political factions themselves were at an impasse 94 We should not, however, take the easy slide into the cartoon character Pogo’s comment, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” Such cynicism overlooks real differences, complicities and culpabilities. Yet we should not be surprised either that there was also a fear of the enemy within—within our assumptions, thinking processes and aesthetic tastes. This is why Aby Warburg and his theories of the schizophrenic nature of modern society will become so important in one of our future studies; he like Dreyfus went through—to—Hell in order to see more acutely the dynamic potentialities, good and bad, of modern society. This is very different from Emile Durkheim’s experiences and the radical overhaul of pedagogical methods used in the Sorbonne and elsewhere in France after the Dreyfus Affair. That too is another story. — 203 —

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where they could not address the urgency of those two major problems. In the mid-1930s, then, despite all the seemingly important changes in France since 1894, and particularly the trauma of World War I—such as the revolution in transport and communications occasioned by automobiles, aeroplanes, illustrated newspapers, and radio, on the one hand; and the separation of Church and State and the advent of stronger socialist and liberal unions and parties, on the other—the mentality of the people was similar to that in the fin de siècle period. Instead of a large proportion of the population able to mobilize and agitate in the defense of one Jew—something often spoken of to mitigate the effects of the ordeal Alfred Dreyfus went through—very few Frenchmen and women could organize resistance to the deportation of Jews to the Third Reich. Certainly, a significant minority did act to protect their Jewish fellow citizens, hiding them, enabling them to escape to neutral and later Allied nations, and keeping the faith with traditional French moral values. But most, even when they fought against the German Occupation, did not make the effort necessary to save French and other Jews in either the Nazi zone or the Vichy area of the nation.

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Part 4: Dreyfus and Socially-Constructed Autism

Y aurait-il, dans certaines douleurs trop prolongées, une véritable lésion de nos nerfs ou de notre cerveau, et qui, même cicatrisée, laisserait après elle la trace sensible que laisse une blessure fermée trop tard? —Paul Bourget95 It is our conclusion that autism is not a “regression,” but an expression of a common though minority contemporary physiological/neurological profile now becoming more prevalent because of specific kinds of influences, largely environmental. — Andre Lehman96 What Andre Lehman sees as the driving force behind the waxing and waning of autism in societies, especially in our contemporary civilization, is the “rise of patriarchal structures.”97 In our view, as we shall try to show now, several modifications have to be made to explain the appearance of Alfred Dreyfus as autistic: (1) the fact thatafter 1894 his pre-existing tendencies were exacerbated by the high degree of nervous tension imposed on him by his arrest, imprisonment, isolation, and physical torment; (2) the causative factor for Dreyfus was not so much the “patriarchal structures” of his society—the state and particularly 95 Paul Bourget, La Terre Promise (Paris: Alphonse Lemettre, 1892), 47. “And there would be in certain pains that last too long a veritable lesion in our nerves or in our brain, and which, even if scarred over, would leave after itself a sensitive trace like a wound closed too late.” 96 Andrew Lehman, “Origins of Autism: What Causes the Condition to Wax and Wane,” Origins Forum, http://www.orginsofautism.com (12 September 2003). 97 Lehman: “The majority of individuals in contemporary societies are living within patriarchal structures and are highly lateralized, narratively focused, right-handed, hierarchically inclined humans which is a deviation from the traditional matriarchal physiological/neurological type, characteristics of which are found in individuals diagnosed as autistic. The traditional matriarchaltype features brains that are less lateralized within the two hemispheres often being of similar size, males that are associative thinkers not narratively organized, individuals who are frequently left-handed or ambidextrous, and non-hierarchically organized men who are maturationally delayed compared to their patriarchal social structure relations.” — 205 —

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the army—but the alienation from those institutions to which he had felt himself particularly loyal and through which he identified himself, the tensions that emerged alongside the conditions of withdrawal, silence and obsessive self-analysing; (3) the counter-measures he took, sometimes alone and sometimes in concert with Lucie, to avoid the lapse into real autism, which he avoided through composition of his cahiers, wherein verbal essays, mathematical formulae, and drawings balanced themselves out in a sustained but relatively short-term projection of his component energies onto an external brain; and (4) where Lehman speaks of “cultural selection,” we see “social selection”—or even unconscious decisions taken by military, political, and journalistic agents to stigmatise Dreyfus as “a delegated madman.” One of the few contemporary novelists and psychologists that Dreyfus admired—partly because the novelist’s father had been Alfred’s teacher in secondary school—Paul Bourget, suggests, perhaps only metaphorically, in one of his narratives of love that sustained mental experiences of pain are deeply embedded in the physiology of the nervous system and in the brain itself. Though Dreyfus may have leaned towards a strict positivism in his views of science, especially medicine, which would include the moral philosophy of his time—with moral still carrying much of its classical sense of mental, emotional and intellectual matters—he nevertheless constantly returned to the theme of the importance of the artistic soul and spirit. These last two French words (âme, esprit) embrace much more than their modern English equivalents, with neither being restricted to the realm of theology or mysticism, and encompassing a quality English would separate out in multiple terms such as mind, wit, sense, and consciousness. Thus, when thinking through his own moral condition on Devil’s Island, Dreyfus would see his nightmare circumstances as being compromised of the sensory deprivation of exile, isolation, and humiliation, on the one side, and on the other—not so much a level of experience as a sense of the other side of a moebius strip or a kabbalistic sitra acha—damage to his nervous system and his brain, to the cognitive and the affective faculties of his mind. Avner Falk gives a quick two-page resume of the Dreyfus Affair and, despite the topic of his book, A Psychoanalytic History of the Jews, makes no attempt to see it in any psychological or psychiatric terms or subject it to psychoanalysis. Nevertheless, in a virtually passing remark, — 206 —

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he makes one of the most important categorizations about the entire Affair, pointing out what most historians overlook: “The Dreyfus affair was very emotional.”98 This is similar to what Lloyd de Mause says in The Emotional Life of Nations,99 that almost no chronicler or interpreter of history ever deals with the emotions: they can, for instance, write screeds on war and never mention fear or hatred. For most historians, then, not only do great and small events seem to occur in a neutralized space where adult men parry and thrust with ideas, where women and children disappear at best into the shadowy margins of the portraits painted, but where none of those grown-up players ever seem to have had childhoods and memories, conscious and unconscious, of their births, parents, siblings, and childhood fears and anxieties.100 Consequently, when Falk points out, however cursorily, the “emotional life” of the Affair, it is no small matter. This passing remark is in many ways the Open Sesame of the history of Alfred Dreyfus, his family and friends, as well as of his enemies and opponents. But although Falk does not engage in any discussion of the Affair taking into account the emotional factors involved in it, in his resume of the events, he indicates some of the key factors that need to be taken into account: Dreyfus was kept in solitary confinement, barred from seeing his wife, family, and lawyer, was court-martialled, convicted on 22 December [1894] of treason to France, and sentenced to life imprisonment.101 (Emphasis added) If we were to put aside the external force that isolated him from family and friends, humiliated him into a status of degradation and shame, and prevented both him from understanding what had happened to him 98 Avner Falk, A Psychoanalytic History of the Jews (Madison, Teaneck, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press and London: Associated University Presses, 1996), 669. 99 Lloyd de Mause, The Emotional Life of Nations (New York and London: Karnac, 2002). 100 Huneker, citing Macular on Impressionism: “Shadow is not absence of light, but light of a different quality and of a different value. Shadow is not part of the landscape where light ceases, but where it is subordinated to a light which appears to us more intense. In the shadow the rays of the spectrum vibrate with a different speed” (Promenades of an Impressionist, 100). In the shades or shadows, among the ghosts of the past and the impressions of the present, there are realities that can never be seen in the bright glare of the sun. 101 Falk, A Psychoanalytic History of the Jews, 668. — 207 —

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and others from comprehending what he wished to say, we would soon have to conclude that he looked and experienced the world as if he were autistic, and that perhaps he was. André Comte-Sponville gives a few provocative hints about Alfred Dreyfus; that he was born into a family at once “easy and loving,” that “he was a dreamy child who did excellent and long studies,” and that he was more “an intellectual than a military man.”102 He also writes that when Dreyfus returned from his years on Devil’s Island and received his pardon, he met some of his old professors; those former teachers— omitting names—who had become engaged on his behalf during the Affair were surprised and disappointed to find Alfred “singularly disengaged.” Though his Dreyfus Intime is a propagandistic work, almost hagiographic, it nevertheless chooses to highlight qualities in Alfred’s childhood experiences and personality development that accord with patterns set out by Lehman in his evolutionary (Lamarkian) model103 of social autism. For example, it is said: “Without constant exposure to the primary features of the matriarchal world, the neurological structure of a child organized physically, mentally, and emotionally to experience the world in that way will languish.”104 However, in Dreyfus’s case, there 102 Comte-Sponville, “La leçon,” 243. 103 Lehman: “… Lamarckian evolution … occurs over a single lifetime—evolution that follows an already created channel—a genetic history of maturational delay and acceleration dug by millions of years of sexual selection …” (“Origins of Autism”). It would be more apt today to speak of genetic expression triggered by environmental factors and their hormonal reactions. Lehman: “The eight primary environmental variables influencing testosterone levels are: light, diet, body fat, alcohol and drugs, tobacco, touch, physical activity, and stress.” In Dreyfus’s case we can say: he was often deprived of light because of the confined, shaded space of his imprisonment; his diet was inadequate and unfamiliar; he lost a great deal of body weight, as well as losing his hair, his rigid posture, and returned to France in 1899 a broken man; he probably had little or no access to alcohol and received only rare prescribed drugs; his list of desiderata in the workbooks includes cigarettes and he was known to have been a heavy smoker before he was arrested; the only touch he experienced was the mechanical imposition of the iron shackles in the evening that kept him in a stiff posture all night, and he is likely to have longed for the warm embraces of his family, the cuddles of his children and the sexual intimacy of his wife; a vigorous man who enjoyed horseback riding most days and taking long walks in the evening, he was severely restricted in his movements throughout the five years of incarceration; stress was the major factor—and Lehman, like other theoretical scientists, creates paradigms based on variations of modern, middle-class conditions, hardly factoring in crisis situations, social violence, and war. They do not consider acts of cruelty, injustice, and political machinations to maneuver individuals and small groups into positions where they are made to act out—the theatrical metaphor is appropriate—roles that seem to be cathartic for the organizers of the spectacle and the audiences who often do not know they are watching a phantasmagoria and not reality. 104 Lehman, “Origins of Autism.” — 208 —

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was more than his own propensities towards a very mild version of autism in his separation, first from his mother herself and then from his motherland, there are also the dialectical pressures of French institutions—Church, Army, Government—which find themselves being divorced from their traditional bases, roles, and influence and striking out to scapegoat, isolate, and destroy the other, that is, the projected image of their own discomforts and humiliations. H. Villemar offers specific details, though without providing documentation.105 He tells us that Alfred’s mother had a difficult time at the child’s birth and suffered long afterwards, something that would have caused distress to the infant who could not bond closely with his main caregiver, as the task of bringing him up was left to his older sisters.106 There was nothing in his childish behavior to hint at the indomitable will and energy he would later demonstrate.107 He was docile and softspoken, showing none of the egotistical traits usual in boys.108 The older young Alfred grew, the more he gained a reputation for standing up for justice and honor, earning the nickname of Don Quixote.109 At the same time, though, he was shy and stiff in front of strangers, yet he fought against these weaknesses and was brave and expansive in the family. This created a character that only seemed paradoxical; an awkward appearance and yet a vigorous heart within.110 Villemar seems at times almost hagiographical in his description, but nonetheless provides sufficient details to allow analysis of Alfred’s personality in the context of later descriptions of the man. Thus, after the major trauma of his birth 105 H. Villemar (the pen-name for Jules-Ernest Naville, 1816-1909), one of the pamphleteer Dreyfusards, wrote Dreyfus Intime (Paris: F.-V. Stock, 1898) at the height of the Affair. It is in a certain sense propaganda, to be sure, almost hagiographic; but that would not explain why those details that expose Dreyfus’s shy and withdrawing, almost feminine (in the nineteenth-century sense) hesitation to assert himself are chosen to characterize his youngest experiences. 106 “Sa mère ayant été longtemps souffrante à la suite de sa naissance, ce furent ses sœurs qui se partagèrent la douce tache de l’élever et de lui donner ses premiers leçons” (Villemar, Dreyfus Intime, 7). 107 “C’était un enfant blond, fin, délicat, chez lequel rien n’annonçait la volonté, l’énergie indomptables qui seront plus tard les traits distinctifs de son caractère” (Ibid, 7). 108 “Il était extrêmement façile, aimant, d’un naturel et si peu égoïste qu’il ne se montra jamais personnel a un âge ou presque tous les hommes le sont” (Ibid, 7). 109 “Tout petit déjà. Il avait des idées exagérées d’honneur, de justice, idées qui, s’accentuant avec le temps, lui firent donner plus tard les siens le surnom de Don Quichotte.” (Ibid, 8). 110 “Très réservé en présence d’étrangers, il devenait expansif au milieu de sa famille ; il était à la fois fier et timide ; ces deux dispositions, contre lesquelles il eut de bonne heure à lutter, lui donnaient un air de raideur qui n’était qu’apparent ; sous ces dehors un peu froids se cachait le cœur le plus vibrant, le plus sensible qui ait jamais battu dans une poitrine d’enfant” (Ibid, 8). — 209 —

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and the extended period of his mother’s illness, he suffered another shock at the age of eleven when his elder sister married,111 thus leaving him, and in a child’s eyes abandoning him. To that sense of betrayal was soon added the German victory in 1870, with the annexation of Alsace from France, and the Dreyfus family’s decision to flee and seek refuge in Carpentras in the south.112 Though Alfred missed the actual action and violence of the German invasion, the father’s plan to divide the family, so that the younger children went to live in France and the older boys remained in Mulhouse to help run the Dreyfus factory, resulting in a set of new separations, must have deeply affected the sensitive and highly nervous youth.113 As we saw in his remarks made in the cahiers about the unhappiness he experiences in the internat, the boarding school where he was sent, it is now possible to suggest that his previous comfort in the care of his sisters was rudely ended by this time away from home.114 Homesickness and disorientation were the obvious conditions of his years in the lycée; less visible were the deeper wounds in his soul and his longing for female support, as well as guilt for having occasioned his mother’s long illness and eventual death. It is not likely that “mal du pays” was the sole reason for his violent illness that forced him to be sent home to Alsace, as Villemar suggests;115 but rather, the same neurasthenia of which he wrote in his letters to Lucie, both those during their courtship and then later during his years of imprisonment. The split between the old mother country he longed for deeply, as it stood for the maternal care he missed and the sisterly warmth he had enjoyed, and the new love for France, not yet consummated in his scholarly achievements and early successes in the Army were confusing and painful for the adolescent Alfred. After a short time home in Alsace, the German authorities expelled him as an alien, this act fueling his desire not only for la revenche, revenge against the invaders, but to be a part of the reconquest of the beloved homeland.116 Once again in France, he was again in the care of his oldest sister, Henriette (Yetti), married to Joseph Villabrègue, thus creating 111 Ibid. 112 Ibid., 9. 113 Ibid. 114 Ibid. 115 “Au bout de quelque temps, il fut pris d’un mal du pays si violent que, sa sante s’altérant, il fallut le rappeler en Alsace” (Ibid.). 116 Ibid., 10. — 210 —

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the tension between the harshness of boys’ school to prepare for the examinations to enter the Ecole Polytechnique and the brief respites with this woman who replaced his mother and attempted to give him a sense of the previous simple life, affection, and intimacy he sought desperately.117 In the same year that he came to know and then to marry Lucie Eugenie Hadamard, Alfred’s mother died, so that his period of mourning coincided with his courtship to this young, intelligent, and talented young woman.118 After his two years of special training in the military academy, in 1892, Lucie became pregnant with their first child, Pierre. Ironically, the birth of this baby was difficult, and both mother and child were weak and ill, thus adding to Alfred’s nervous worries.119 Then a further loss compounded his sense of isolation, loneliness and vulnerability: in 1893 Alfred’s father died.120 Though the birth of a daughter, Jeanne, gave the couple some joy, at the time of his arrest, both Lucie and Alfred had little apparent moral or physical strength to confront the ordeal that lay before them. What pleasures they had in life came from the domestic home and the support of the two families, from both the Hadamards, who had been established in Paris for a generation before Lucie was born, and Henriette and Joseph and their home in the south of France where Alfred and Lucie would often go for holidays and relief after the ordeal of the exile and struggle to clear Alfred’s name. Each one of these little facts are vague hints, and each aperçu cries out both for substantiation and for interpretations. The substantiation requires evidence from his biography that is mostly hidden or highly suspect; the interpretation we will follow, as we have already begun to, follow from the man to the milieu through mentality and by means of midrash. Only then, and even then only hesitantly, can a reader start to understand the functioning of the letters to Lucie and the complex materials scribbled into the prison notebooks as primary evidence of 117 He longed to visit with “l’une ou l’autre de ses sœurs, se retremper dans la vie simple, la vie d’affection, d’intimite qui avait pour lui un attrait tout particulier” (Ibid., 11). 118 Ibid., 13. For more on Lucie, see Norman Simms, “Lucie Eugéne Hadamard, Madame Alfred Dreyfus: Jewish Mother and Wife,” Queens College Journal of Jewish Studies, which is expanded in the third volume of this series. The discussion in that next book also expands on the character and family of Henriette and her husband Joseph Valabrègue. 119 “Sa jeune femme fut gravement atteinte dans sa santé à plusieurs reprises, ses jours mêmes furent en danger; son fils, ne délicat, lui causa les plus vives inquiétudes pendant les premiers mois qui suivirent sa naissance” (Ibid., 14). 120 Ibid. — 211 —

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Alfred’s personality and intellectual and moral character. Only then should we dare to examine the descriptions of him made by outsiders, whether his family and friends, his supporters who never knew of him before the Affair and his enemies who scrutinized him for confirmation of their prejudices, the reporters and historians who thought of themselves as objective and concerned only with the truth; for these attempts to write down what he looked like, how he behaved, and what they felt or thought about him as they looked across various distances of time and space are constructs about the object of their interest, if not revealing the observers themselves. Some of the reports made by prison officials on what they saw the prisoner doing and what they read when they examined his letters, journals, and workbooks composed in the hut on Devil’s Island are given by Mauricette Berne in the new facsimile edition of the Cahiers.121 In this way many new little facts can be known—for example, that at first he kept drafts of his letters, then began to burn them; he worked long hours each day on his journals and then his workbooks, after which, before the new regime of shackling him in bed began, he loved to walk along the beachfront and watch the sun go down—and indications of what the guards, the warden, and the colonial officials reported on what they could make of his behavior and his scribbles.122 Berne cites some of these reports verbatim, particularly from a document dated April 1897: …he begins them [the letters] again and again two or three times, making changes to their shape … he reads a great part of the day, glances through his mail many times each day, smokes a lot, walks about … he smokes and reads … during the day the deportee reads and draws architectural ornaments … His occupations consist of reading, gardening, copying the drafts of letters and drawing architectural motifs, always the same… 123 Though according to the harsh regime set out for him Dreyfus was neither spoken to and seems to have given up speaking aloud, in December 121 Mauricette Berne, “Lire, écrire résister, survivre à l’île du Diable,” in Cahiers, 245-249. 122 Ibid., 246. 123 Cited in Ibid. — 212 —

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1897 he was ill, and when a doctor came to examine him, he is reported to have said, Docteur, je suis à bout de forces, ce que je crains le plus, c’est de perdre la tête. Or je préfère mourir plutôt que de perdre la raison et de divaguer. Je m’en vais. Je vous demande donc de me donner les moyens de me soutenir pendant un mois encore. Si, alors, je ne reçois de nouvelles de ma famille, si aucune décision n’est intervenue sur ma situation, ce sera la fin; je ne crains pas la mort…124 Doctor, I have reached the end of my tether, what I am most afraid of is losing my mind. Well, I would rather die than lose my reason and lose touch with reality. I feel it happening already. So I beg you, give me something to keep me going for one month more. If at that time I receive no news from my family, if no decision is reached on my situation, that will be the end. I am not afraid of dying. After Alfred Dreyfus was taken back to France in mid-1898 for the rerun of his court martial, the Director of the Prison Administration noted that he had thirty cahiers “received as by a certain ritual.” Of these, the first twelve contained “fragments de brouillons de letters et dessins géometriques ou cabalistiques” (fragments of draft letters and geometrical and kabbalistic drawings) and those that follow until his departure in August 1898, “fragments de letters, des problèmes algébraiques, des dessins cabalistiques ou cabalistiques ordinaires … copies d’ouvrages” (fragments of letters, algebraic problems, kabbalistic or common kabbalistic drawings … copies of works). Except in a most superficial way, the officials quite clearly did not know what Dreyfus the man was all about and they could not see him in any milieu that made sense to them, let alone comprehend what he was doing in his letters, journals, and workbooks. They were mostly hostile, as well as uncomprehending. Nevertheless, their misapprehensions are our only clues or hints from anyone but Dreyfus himself as to who he 124 Cited in Ibid. — 213 —

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was and what these documents were, how they resonated in his mind, his memory and his mentality.125 These men of the prison administration on the Iles de Salut, of the colonial government in French Guyana, of the ministries back in Paris could not envision the context in which the small facts of Dreyfus’s life make sense as signs of his inner experiences. Nor could they see beyond their own prejudices, and yet in those ignorant and bigoted comments we have the beginnings of a body of evidence that cannot be found elsewhere. For, to a large degree, these external aspects of himself—his pacing, his smoking, his scribbling— are projections of his mental experiences; they are, in other words, like dreams and jokes and slips of the tongue—hints to be analyzed, challenged, questioned, discussed, interpreted, midrashed. That his life as a prisoner was anything but normal is a huge understatement, and no one can hope to investigate his behavior or state of mind under those conditions as though they constituted ordinary representations of his mind and character. But how abnormal is the picture that emerges? Is it a total falsification of his real mind, soul, heart, imagination, intellectual self? Is it a distortion, a tangled mess of threads that can be untwisted by running the fragments of light (sparks in black holes, golden doves with silver dots, fiery letters swimming upwards into the bright darkness of eternity) through various lenses? Do we need a new kind of optical machine (such as photography) that fixes images that are constantly in a state of flux, forming and reforming themselves through a constant dynamic of movement through various distances; or a machine that sees the invisible (such as an x-ray apparatus) by making the superficial covering transparent, so as to register the shape of things unseen below and within, and allowing what has always been unimaginable, inconceivable, and unspeakable to be imagined, conceived, and articulated; a machine that can slow down the speed of timelessness in the dream of his torments so that the meaningful little processes of reaching after reason can be glimpsed (as in the high-speed photography developed by Edouard Muybridge and others showing how wrong everyone has been since the dawn of time on what horses at gallop actually do with their legs); or a machine that thinks (such as 125 As early as 21 February 1895, when Lucie was allowed to meet with her husband for last time before he was shipped off to Devil’s Island, when she asked for permission to hold Alfred’s hand, the prison director denied the request: “Piqué feared that the Jewess might transfer information through some kind of ‘cabalistic sign’” (Burns, Dreyfus: A Family Affair, 163). — 214 —

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an electronic calculator or a word-processor) that can coordinate and trace out lines of affiliation and implication beyond normal mental operations, thus making clear what was previously only a blur or a static hum? But all these kinds of contraptions are not up to the standards necessary for the subtle and nuanced perceptions required in our analysis; are they, as a matter of fact, ill-conceived and part of the failure of the imagination?126 Has anyone really advanced beyond what Taine says in The Philosophy of Art? The modern method, which I strive to pursue, and which is beginning to be introduced in all the moral sciences, consists in considering human productions, and particularly works of art, as facts and productions of which it is essential to mark the characteristics and seek the causes, and nothing more.127 In his subsequent volumes of “racial analysis,” Taine will deal with “positive facts open to observation.”128 He honestly believes that photography, standing in for all other modern appliances and techniques of rational scientific investigation, “is the art which completely reproduces with lines and tints on a flat surface, without possible mistake, the forms and modeling of the object imitated.”129 This kind of systematic positivism is worse than inadequate: it just doesn’t fit. Dreyfus himself knew that and commented at length about the differences between what the naked eye could see, what the apparatus could reproduce, and what was only hinted at and needed to be brought into the field of inquiry and discussion by other means. Because the reach of the imagination failed constantly after the supposed end of the Affair, no one has been able to ask the right questions, nor to see what actually goes on in the letters and workbooks. That is why we turn to the rabbis, using authorities such as José Faur to help us, not because the ancient Jewish sages were always right—but because they knew they were not, and they keep demanding that old assumptions be questioned and challenged 126 Norman Simms, “Representations of Nature Limited and Unlimited: A Speculative Essay,” Literature & Aesthetics 21:2 (2011): 1-25. 127 Hippolyte Taine, The Philosophy of Art, trans. John Durand (New York: Holt & Williams, 1873), 37. 128 Ibid., 39. 129 Ibid., 52. — 215 —

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and new interpretations be generated from old texts: As with the Book, there is a constant tension between the universe as God’s ideality (“the golden doves”) and the actual creation (“silver dots”). This tension is resolved in infinite variation: the individual act of creation is repeated in endless variations. Divine Providence is to creation what derasha is to the Book.130 For that reason, Faur tells us, “there are no autonomous, abstractly disconnected subjects or concepts that can only be examined in pristine intellectual isolation”131 and, as we have already noted, “[t]he ultimate object of reading is not to discover the mind of the author, but to generate meaning.”132 With a man like Dreyfus, who is reticent throughout his life to express private thoughts and to expose his memories of childhood and private life, we are forced to take his writings, his Book, as evidence of his mind, heart, and soul in the sense of their meaning, a meaning constituted by the dialogue we enter into with his own midrashing (our term for a more expansive concept of derasha than Faur uses).133 It is therefore our contention that when Dreyfus spent his five years in prison, especially on the outcrop of rock in the Atlantic Ocean, his deserted island, he was recapitulating, with no intention and very little awareness, the experiences of his ancestors bamidbar, in the desert and in the word, during Exodus. The word m’dabar, to speak, and the noun “word,” dabar, are fundamental to such an approach because a word in Hebrew is less a thing than an action, something in progress, in the act of becoming. To go into the desert is to go into the word, or rather the going into the word is the going into the blank space where the processes of speech, thought, imagination, interpretation, and truth can be generated. The Desert, like the “blank space” of the rabbis, is an essential element of writing. “That space, that white interval, “wrote [the early twentieth-century Jewish-French 130 131 132 133

José Faur, Golden Doves with Silver Dots, xxii. Ibid., xxvi. Ibid., xxvii. Faur: “Derasha is a creative composition of the reader functioning as an écrivain” (Ibid., 13). — 216 —

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poet, Edmond] Jabès, “far from separating one word from the other, unites them.” In fact, Desert is the very condition of speech: “The word cannot dwell except in the silence of other words. To speak is accordingly, to lean on [sic]134 a metaphor of the desert, a space of dust or ashes, where the triumphant word is offered in her unrestricted nudity.”135 Alone, silent, and tortured into confusion and perplexity—his speech and reason contracted into the empty spaces of blank pages he felt he must fill with words, numbers, and drawings—Alfred Dreyfus feared he would go mad otherwise.136 As Faur says, describing the Hebrew people fleeing the ignorance and superstitions of Egypt and frightened of the empty ghostliness of the desert, “le champ du midrash,”137 where they received the written Law, which they could not understand until they created the oral Law of which there might be no end: In order to safeguard the reader from being trapped by “the insane game of writing,” a commentary” cannot be permitted to become a “book”: the oral Law is not be read semantically.138 134 That is, to depend on. 135 Faur, Golden Doves with Silver Dots, 4. 136 Xavier de Maîstre in his Voyage autour de mon chamber, though the circumstances were radically different in many ways, writes in regard to his manservant and himself: “… et, dans les circonstances malhereuses où nous vivions ensemble était pour nous une nouvelle patrie …” (… and in the unhappy circumstances where we lived together it was for us a new country …) Chapter XXI, 61. But in this new world of confinement and enforced meditations, the author feels himself to be “rien qu’un fantôme, une ombre, une vapeur qui se dissippe dans les airs…” (nothing but a phantom, a shade, a vapor who dissipates into the air…) Chapter XXI, 62. 137 This is the name of a French group who regularly publish an online series of essays and occasional printed books on the way in which the New Testament, in particular the Gospels, are nothing less than midrashim on books of the Hebrew Scriptures, the primitive Christian motivated by a misunderstanding of the language and the culture of the Jewish community out of which these messianic and apocalyptic anxieties and aspirations were first formulated in Aramaic and Hebrew. For a firsthand account of how one of the primary figures in this group first encountered the phenomenon of midrash, see Sylvie André, “‘Et c’est ainsi que Yavhe est grand’: Chronique de ma rencontre avec le midrash,” Le Champ du Midrash, http://www.lechampdumidrash.net/articles. php?lng=fr&pg=62&prt=2 (accessed 08 January 2011). For further discussion on this group and their findings, see my Festivals of Laughter, Blood and Justice (London, ON: Sussco, 2008). 138 Faur, Golden Doves with Silver Dots, 16. — 217 —

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What causes this perplexity to the person lost in the desert, isolated in the middle of nowhere without a guide? The Rambam’s or Maimonides’s Guide for the Perplexed, Dalat al-Hai irin in the original Arabic and Moreh Nebuchim in the Hebrew translation, confronts this issue: for what the title envisions is a roadmap for the person lost in the desert: ”Ha’ira is the specific function of the Desert,” to lead the traveler astray, to turn a purposeful journey into a wandering, as happened when the Children of Israel wandered for forty years in the Sinai Peninsula; God “perplexed” them (hayyar), led them astray, or as one might say now “defamiliarized” them, that is, transformed the familiar into the uncanny, so that they could not make correct judgments and reach effective decisions. The dalalat is a signpost or an index, rather than a person with experience who acts as a guide or trustworthy text as a roadmap to this perplexity which in itself “was the effect of divine lutf ‘guidance with cunning benevolence’.”139 The Rambam’s book is a collection of hints and directions on how to interpret such hints. The perplexity we face when trying to read Dreyfus’s written texts is that they are not conceived semantically. How can a collection of sayings that are written not be read semantically? First of all, to do so would create a book like all other books made by humans and thus be an idol, whereas the Book of the Law appeared by revelation, inscribed by the visible voice of God. Idolatry is madness: it makes one not only lose one’s way in the mind but lose one’s mind, and in the place where the mind once was there is an illusion or a delusion, that a metaphysical reality has come into existence and may be described in a narrative, with characters, time and place, that is, a myth.140 139 Ibid., 75. 140 After his degradation, when he was taken back to his cell at Cherche-Midi, “He hurled himself against the wall, as he had done on the night of his arrest, and beat his head and limbs ‘like a madman.’ One guard seized him by the waist and tried to calm him, but without success. Having come to his trial meticulously clad in his finest dress uniform, he was taken back across the deserted street at midnight with his officer’s cloak wrapped around his arms like a straitjacket, the hood pulled over his head. ‘My only crime is to have been born a Jew!’ he cried out to Forzinetti as he had done two months before” (Burns, Dreyfus: A Family Affair, 141). This cry of desperation from Alfred, one of the very few times, as we have pointed out, when he identifies himself as a Jew, are echoed by his sister Rachel Dreyfus Schil in a letter to the Minister of War, General Auguste Mercier, also echoing other key words used in the letters of Alfred and Lucie: “Think of the martyrdom of this man, for whom the only crime is to have been born a Jew; think of the horrible agony of his wife and family, all of whom are good French men and women” (Ibid., 143). — 218 —

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One cannot find the truth in it because, as Faur explains, it must be transparent and interpretable, not opaque. Emet is transparent, to be trusted on faith. From the point of view of semiology, the opacity of any given entity is a state prior to interpretation, not an absolute condition. Before being decoded an entity is opaque. “Reading,” which is the decoding of an encoded message, means that significance has thoroughly permeated the script and rendered it transparent. Therefore, “opacity” is synonymous with “uncoded.” 141 Neither Dreyfus’s mind nor his writings are transparent to one another: they are not opaque, but translucent, in other words, some kind of light shines through, some sparks are already hidden in the darkest places and can be extracted gradually, put together into patterns of light, and the text begin to yield sufficient clues for analysis and interpretation. The word for interpretation in classical Hebrew, peter (pitaron)/pesher, contains another figurative way of understanding the phenomenon; it …implies the notion of compromise. Interpretation involves the integration of various elements. In Hebrew, it also means “lukewarm.” In a sense, interpretation: may be conceived as blending different elements, as when mixing hot and cold water. Thus “to interpret” is to integrate two or more signs and make a “compromise: which contains them all but is identical with none of them, just as lukewarm water is neither hot nor cold.142 Another figure we have used is that of the shadow, which is neither the complete absence of light nor the black substance of something interfering with the passage of light, but rather, as the Impressionists knew and tried to make in their paintings, a different play of light, a colorful blending (compromise) of light, things and the passage of time. For this colorful, delightful and playful image to appear, animated and 141 Faur, Golden Doves with Silver Dots, 27. 142 Ibid., 28. — 219 —

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disappearing into its own shadows, it must be conceived of as having volume, all the spatial dimensions of geometry plus the chronological and moral dimensions of organic evolution and development, psychological and cognitive maturation, and aesthetic refinement. “The truth is successive; discontinuity or interruption is essential to its very structure.”143 Opinions formed by Dreyfus’s fellow students when he was a young cadet indicate that he may have already developed outward symptoms of a tendency toward autism, and these signs became more acute later, under the pressures of his arrest and incarceration, and particularly during the five-year ordeal on Devil’s Island. In his military training, it was noted—and sometimes made a point of complaint by envious students and in a report by his commanding officer—that Alfred was introspective, held himself aloof from his peers, and did not spend his after-class hours of recreation with the others. If these were symptoms of an autistic personality, then they were very slight and did not at all demonstrate any real disability. His arrogance and haughtiness was clearly only in the eyes of certain beholders. Similarly, in his career as an officer, while an unprejudiced observer would see him as quite sociable—becoming engaged to Lucie Hadamard, participating in family celebrations with her and his own family, and enjoying a normal middleclass life in Paris—the envious and prejudiced anti-Semitic witnesses reported a life that seemed a strange mixture of withdrawal, snobbishness, and reluctance to share the leisure activities and camaraderie of the young Catholic officers, and a reputed secret life as a gambler, drunkard, womanizer, and general immoralist. These characteristics, presumed to be indicators of his Jewish inability to “be one of us,” were picked up and exaggerated by Drumont and other anti-Semitic journalists and shouted aloud in the streets as the anti-Dreyfus legend. As more sympathetic commentators, including film-makers, playwrights, and novelists have shown, these seemingly paradoxical and suspect features of his personality—putting aside completely the obvious slanderous lies about his licentious private life—may be explained as characteristic of an assimilated Alsatian Jew cautious in his displays of public emotions, a happily married man with two children with a comfortable life outside of the bachelor quarters of the other officers, 143 Ibid., 36. — 220 —

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and an intellectual whose interests were based on his scientific and cultural pursuits. It may be, as we have suggested on the promptings of Nancy Kobrin, that there always were latent propensities towards autism that were brought out into the open with the shock of the arrest. This is perhaps made evident, first, in the moment when, called back to his office after hours and out of uniform, he was asked to write out a dictated letter. There is a sudden moment when Dreyfus begins to tremble, stops inscribing the words read out to him, and stares vacantly into space through his spectacles. Without comprehending the nature of the threat posed by this unusual situation, and certainly not suspecting a setup to trap him in some unknown way, Alfred does regress into a momentary withdrawal from emotional engagement with his surroundings. A little while later, a second, more acute appearance of the symptoms of a mental illness manifests. This time, taken to prison, where he is held under constant inspection, Dreyfus is seen to roar in rage, to bang himself against the bars of the cell, and to lose all control over his facial muscles. Certainly, his anger, frustration, and fear are understandable, but these displays of totally unexpected wildness hint at a long-term condition kept under clear control throughout his adult life.144 To the commandant of the Cherche-Midi Prison, who viewed these behaviors, they seem evidence of Dreyfus’s innocence rather than his guilt, indicative of man unprepared to be accused of criminality and treason completely outside his intentions and character. The officer judges, based on his experience as a prison guard, that men really guilty of the charges brought against Dreyfus would have prepared themselves for the rigors of incarceration and would have comported themselves in such a way as to maintain a posture of self-control in order to project a self-image of stoic endurance or indifference.145 When Alfred Dreyfus was brought back from his exile for the second court martial in Rennes, a return from what was supposed to have been perpetual incarceration on Devil’s Island, he appeared to the jeer144 At this point, psychologist Nancy Kobrin comments on Dreyfus’s condition as described here: “HE MUST HAVE HAD HUGE LEVELS OF ANXIETY PRIOR TO THE OUTBURST BUT [they] WENT UNDETECTED. YOU KNOW HOW HARD ANXIETY IS TO NOTE.” (The uppercase lettering here belongs to Kobrin, in a personal email communication.) 145 Again, this paragraph anticipates in very condensed form the analysis of reports and memories that are discussed at length in Volume III. — 221 —

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ing crowds gathered in front of the city’s lycée, where the trial was to be held, as a broken man. Those journalists who had never seen him before, those curious onlookers who had known him briefly from the period of his first trial and then degradation, and those members of his family and his few close friends were all shocked to see what five years of solitude and enforced silence had done to him. Though Alfred made some attempt to stand tall and speak out in his own defense, for the most part he looked anything but a hero of the great cause that had been fought on his behalf: he seemed to have aged far more than five years, was mostly bald, walked haltingly in a stooped manner, and could barely croak a few words in public. Again, while his family and friends understood and sympathized with what he had undergone and tried to see in him the strong young man and loyal friend he had once been, hoping his return to France and his rejoining of the family, if not also the army, would quickly bring back much of his health and inner pride, the anti-Dreyfusards, particularly the anti-Semites among them, saw what they wished to see—a broken, bitter, twisted old Jew, a traitor crushed by guilt and shame.146 Yet even among his ideological enemies, those 146 In his novel Monsieur Bergeret in Paris, trans. B. Drilling (London: Bodley Head, 1925: 1921), Anatole France has his titular character M. Bergeret argue against socialism with Panneton de La Barge, who responds cynically by defending the Army against Dreyfus: “This campaign in favour of the Traitor, obstinate and enthusiastic as it is, whatever may be the intentions of its leaders, has a certain visible and undeniable effect. It weakens the army and injures its chiefs” (49). To which the hero replies that the Army would be better served if its leaders were honest and the citizens more concerned about the truth: “After all, if crimes have been committed the evil is not that they should be made known but that they have been committed. They have concealed themselves in their entire enormity and in all their deformity” (49). But La Barge, like all good patriotic know-nothings, declares: “Don’t let us speak of the Affair … I know nothing of it.; I wish to know nothing … Commandant Le Barge, my cousin assured me that Dreyfus was guilty. That affirmation was enough for me” (50). A chapter later, meeting with a socialist, M. Bergeret is told that it is time to get at the capitalists, beginning, of course, :with the Jews (65), since, if the Affair teaches us anything, “It’s a sure thing that the middle classes are rotten. The Dreyfus case showed that plainly enough” (66). Anatole France’s gentle and pleasantly eccentric Latin professor come to Paris then concludes with a ringing comment: “you do not know that those who have suffered imprisonment, outrage and exile, for justice’[s] sake, have honored their country in the act. You do not understand” (68). In the next chapter, giving France an opportunity to parody the petite bourgeoisie of small towns in their attempt to grasp the issues in the Affair, indicating too all the contradictions and confusions their efforts entailed, he has his “Monsieur Mazure, a keeper of departmental archives” come to Paris on official business. “Monsieur Mazure was greatly perturbed by the Affair. Being both by persuasion and temperament a Jacobin and a patriot, after the manner of Barère and Saint-Just, he had joined the Nationalists of his own department, and in company with Royalists and clerics, his bêtes noires, he had, in the superior interest of his country, uplifted his voice for the unity and indivisibility of the Republic. He had even become a member of the league of which Monsieur Panneton de La Barge was the president…” (79). Mazure too — 222 —

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who believed him guilty, but not because he was Jewish and therefore part of a secret “syndicate” or conspiracy, began to feel pity towards this rather grotesque figure who emerged from the darkness of exile into the glare of publicity. His red hair was now mostly gone and what was left had turned grey. He no longer wore a lorgnette, but plain rimmed spectacles. He could hardly stand tall, stooped and weak as he was, and moved with a jerky pace. At only one point, when General Mercier made a condescending and fatuous statement pretending that he wished he could be sympathetic to the broken man before the court martial, Dreyfus’s eyes flash with their old life and he rises from his seat to answer the bigot, but that moment soon passes.147 Can this be taken as further evidence of his autism, the technical word now expressing not so much a pathological and clinical condition as a social stigma and psychohistorical role projected on to him by a very sick political and penal system in France at the end of the nineteenth turns out to be a know-nothing when he addresses his friend Bergeret: “I am a patriot and a republican; I do not know whether Dreyfus is guilty or innocent. I do not want to know; it’s not my business. He may be innocent, but there is no doubt that the Dreyfusistes are guilty. They have been guilty of a great impertinence in substituting their own personal opinion for a decision given by republican justice. Besides, they have stirred up the whole country” (81-82). By the end of the chapter, Bergeret can conclude: “The Affair has revealed the moral sickness with which our fashionable society is afflicted, just as the vaccine of Koch discovers the lesions of tuberculosis in an infected organism” (87). By Chapter X, the characters of this novel begin to intersect with those from The Amethyst Ring, as France continues his satirical exposé of the tragicomical farce that the Affair would be, were it not for the undulating waves of anti-Semitism the Republic rests on, as much among Nationalists, Royalists, Church-supporters and Socialists and Anarchists (93). In the barracks of the cavalry, for instance, on a back wall, “held in place by pins, was a caricature of Joseph Reinach as a gorilla” (103). Joseph lacrosse, a little later, among the anti-Semites, becomes enraged. “He cried out against the Jews, Protestants, Republicans and Ministers. He would like to flog them in public, and bathe them in vitriol. He waxed eloquent and broke into the pious language of the Croix,” a tirade that runs: “The Jews and Freemasons are ruining France, ruining us, eating us up. But patience! Wait until after the Rennes trial, and then you see how we will bleed them, split them up, smoke their hands…” (125-126), concluding with “The Dreyfusards will be trampled in the streets. Loubet will be roasted in the flames of the Elysée, and none too soon either” (125-126). And so the novels goes on, part comedy and part tragedy, as Anatole France, through his Monsieur Bergeret, exposes the rot and bigotry in France, coordinated to the last stages in the Affair, the calls for revision, the obscene judgment at Rennes, and the weak granting of a pardon instead of an exoneration of the Jewish scapegoat. Even when the evidence against Dreyfus had been totally discredited, the other side persisted for all sorts of cynical and mendacious reasons in refusing to look truth in the face. Bergeret, that is, Anatole France, says then: “There is very little change in the general state of mind. The ignorance of the public is still almost complete. There have been none of those sudden changes of opinion on the part of the crowd which are so amazing when they occur” (147). 147 Volume III examines this scene and contextualizes Alfred’s outburst with the fiction of horror tales of the late nimneteenth century. — 223 —

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century? According to one of the standard dictionaries used in France, Le Petit Robert, the term “autisme” did not enter the French language until 1927, derived from autismus in Greek, for “withdrawal or folding into the self” (repliement sur soi-meme), and hence a detachment from reality, a condition often characterized by schizophrenia.148 The origin of the term autism has been credited to Eugen Bleuler (1857-1939)149 in 1912, although he posited this kind of undirected autistic thought as the opposite or complement to directed or intelligent thought, a distinction elaborated upon by Jean Piaget (1896-1980) in The Language and Thought of the Child (1926):150 Autistic thought is subconscious, which means that the aims it pursues and the problems it tries to solve are not present in consciousness; it is not adapted to reality, but creates for itself a dream world of imagination; it tends, not to establish truths, but so to satisfy desires, and it remains strictly individual and incommunicable as such by means of language.151 In other words, according to Alexander and Selznick, autism represented a normal, alternative mode of thinking in cultures that had developed differently from those we consider “modern.” Such thinking is characterized by unconscious, symbolic thoughts that are more archaic and less influenced by “reality”152 than what Bleuler, Freud, and their peers understood as “civilized.” Such an anthropological and philosophical distinction, making it virtually a synonym for “primitive thought,”153 on the one hand, and 148 Paul Robert, ed., Le Petit Robert: Dictionnaire alphabétique et analogique de la langue française, dixième édition sou la direction de A. Ray et J. Rey-Debove (Paris: Le Robert, 1989), 133. 149 Franz G. Alexander and Sheldon T. Selsnick, The History of Psychiatry: An Evaluation of Psychiatric Thought and Practice from Prehistoric Times to the Present (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 253254. 150 Jean Piaget, The Language and Thought of the Child (New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, repr. 2001). 151 Cited in Section 69, “Autistic and Egocentric Thought,” in Chapter XIII, “Thinking” of Eugene L. Hartley, Herbert G. Birch and Ruth E. Hartley, eds., Outside Readings in Psychology (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1955), 559. 152 Alexander and Selznik, The History of Psychiatry, 254. 153 See, for example of this anthropological perspective, Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, Primitive Classification, trans. Rodney Needham (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963). — 224 —

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“symbolic thought,”154 on the other, however, does not square with contemporary clinical descriptions of autism. Nevertheless, what Freud’s early Swiss collaborator Bleuler was aiming at in his essay on “Two Principles of Mental Function”155 can perhaps indicate that the term (also called “dereistic”)156 introduced within a decade of the Affair may have those deeper anthropological and philosophical dimensions that are useful in the psychohistory of what happened to Alfred Dreyfus. Yet there is also a tradition, not too far removed from these more scientific perspectives that view autism in the light of negative or regressive modes of thinking, which, on the contrary, tends to see the condition, though debilitating for ordinary, even bourgeois life, as a mark of genius. Such a way of evaluating what late nineteenthcentury psychiatrist John Hughlings-Jackson termed the “doubling of consciousness” also comes very close, as Oliver Sacks points out, to “precisely this characteristic that Proust holds to be the most valuable … involuntary recall, erupting or conjured from the depths”157 of the unconscious memory; this is something we shall examine later when we compare Dreyfus and Proust. Ever since the 1940s, the clinical use of the word autism158 in psychology or psychiatry stresses the behaviour of young children who have difficulty processing external signals from other people, acting consequently in socially inappropriate ways in regard to emotional relationships, this disconnection with ordinary interpersonal actions may lead to angry rages, violent words and deeds, and to a pre-occupation with daydreams and hallucinations not distinguishable from reality. There are no clear agreed-upon causal factors for this mental illness, nor are there specific cures or treatments.159 One of Oliver Sacks’ case 154 See, for an example of this philosophical perspective, Ernst Cassirer, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. III, The Phenomenology of Knowledge (1927), trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957). 155 Cited from E. Bleuler, “Formulations Regarding the Two Principles of Mental Functioning” (1911) Collected Papers in J.C. Flugel, Man, Morals and Society (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1945), 262. 156 E. Bleuler, “Das Autistische Denken” Jahbuch fur Psychoanalystische und Psychopatjhologische Forschungem (1912) cited in Flugel, Man, Morals and Society, 262. 157 Oliver Sacks, An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales (New York: Picador, 1995), 156157. 158 Robin Dunbar, Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1996), 88. 159 Nancy Kobrin comments at this point: “It also tends to be treated as a neuro-logical developmental problem. I wonder if he had Asperger’s—high functioning autistic?” — 225 —

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studies deals with a patient whose autistic experiences consisted “of vivid, isolated moments, unconnected with each other or with him, and so devoid of any deeper continuity or development.”160 The disorder may arise because of genetic or environmental factors,161 or more likely a combination of the two. Some researchers theorize that onset of autism can occur through trauma of either a physical or psychic nature. Others have spoken of chemical imbalances arising from many of the artificial foods ingested by mothers or the easy accessibility to young children of toxic additives in their “junk food.” It has also been suggested that the contemporary near epidemic in advanced western nations may be due to such factors as over-stimulation of the brain from electronic media. The problem here, then, is not to set up a contemporary twentyfirst century scientific description of autism according the psychiatric protocols, except as a way of establishing some of the defining characteristics of the disorder as one part of a metaphoric construct, but rather to take this set of descriptors as a way of analyzing a social phenomenon. The real question will therefore not be to submit a single historical person, Alfred Dreyfus, to a medical examination in absentia—like some of the quacks in the nineteenth century who still advertised that they could both diagnose a patient simply on the basis of a letter from themselves or a relative or even from a strand of hair mailed to them, and prescribe a course of pharmaceutical treatments, claiming to deal with a person who exists for us merely in books—but to see how this person was, on behalf of a hostile community or suite of communities, from the small circle of fellow officers in the High Command, out through the circles of other military, political, social and religious groups, a designated a victim, traitor, source of infection. Our decision to call this designated role—“the designated mad person” is Jean Maisondieu’s term for describing how dysfunctional families delegate one among themselves to play this role in order to save the rest from embarrassment, take the blame which makes them feel more comfortable, and receive the treatment that they are afraid to undergo162—that of the autistic child means only that it gives us a lens 160 Sacks, An Anthropologist on Mars, 191. 161 Dunbar, Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language, 88. 162 Jean Maisondieu et Léon Métayer, Les thérapies familiales, 2eme éd. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1994), 8-9. — 226 —

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through which to examine the behaviours Dreyfus exhibited and then to turn that lens around to see that the image produced was a reflection (or refraction) of what was at fault in the France of the late nineteenth century. There are three ways to go about analyzing the personality of a human being we cannot meet in person but only through books without overstepping the bounds of professional integrity, that is, falling into the trap described above. The first way is to read how his contemporaries described his character as an adult, and what they ascribed to his childhood experiences to explain his behavior through the ordeals of sudden arrest, humiliating trial and degradation, suffering a long exile in isolation, a second insulting court martial, and the agonizing acceptance of a pardon instead of exoneration—almost inadvertently what these commentators of the fin-de-siècle were attempting to do, either in praise of the man’s stoical and heroic forbearance during the Affair or in denigration of his supposedly Jewish cowardice and antisocial behavior. The second way is to find out how other historical (or fictional) figures had their personalities shaped by circumstances (their home life, the schooling they underwent, the general features of the social environment), contemporary to him and sharing many other characteristics of experience, including both biographical or autobiographical accounts and fictional documents such as novels and short stories. The third way is to look closely at the reports of how he appeared to those people attending the second military trial in Rennes, a moment when, for most Dreyfusard and anti-Dreyfusard journalist, he was in the public eye rather than standing in the press and other media as an abstract symbol of a cause. Using these methods we shall try to show that there were indeed symptoms of autism in his infantile life, those symptoms being expressed and exacerbated by a series of traumatic changes in his family situation, and yet only perceived as debilitating by negative rhetoric. Though he was always shy, sensitive and introspective as a boy, he shared many of these qualities with other men who grew up at the same time, even more so among those, who, like himself, were sent to the infamous boarding schools of the period, whose family lives were disrupted by the War of 1870, the necessity of uprooting from German-speaking Alsace to Francophone territories, and the difficult adjustment of a young Jew in a series of Catholic institutions. Despite all these tendencies towards autism, at worst Dreyfus emerges as a — 227 —

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man with a very mild case of Asperger’s, probably no more than other people who choose professions related to mathematics, engineering, and the military because of their rationalism, impersonal paradigms of behavior, and structured or disciplined social relationships. The worst descriptions of Dreyfus at the Rennes trial arise from the shock of seeing his weakened health after five years of imprisonment and loneliness and from the expectation by his enemies that he would be a broken man, a caricature of the traitor they believed him always to have been. For if Dreyfus became, in the words of Robin Dunbar, “a social isolate,”163 he was not merely withdrawing into himself—and there is no doubt that he had a fully developed “self” into which he was withdrawn, as well—because of some genetic flaw, childhood illness, or adolescent experience; it was because he was sent away from France and his family for legal, political and ideological reasons—somebody else’s reasons, not his own. Why did these other Frenchmen and women decide that, for their own sake—to save the Army, the Church, the Nation—they needed to exile him to Devil’s Island for the term of his life? Take here the condition described by Karl Menninger, and note how we will insert in square brackets new forms of the key terms he uses in order to adjust them better to Dreyfus’s situation: When the real world is shut out [accusation, arrest, courtmartial, degradation, imprisonment, exile], when the normal sources of energy [restriction of movement, in a cell, on a tiny island, in shackles on a bed], nourishment [prison fare, exacerbated by tropical heat and humidity, lack of sanitary facilities], stimulation [no companions, no conversation], new information [censorship of letters, interference with normal flow of correspondence], correct bearings [humiliation and lack of rapport], and the like are in any way diminished, there is a partial or threatened closure of the ego system [breakdown in physical health, atrophy of muscles, slowing of speech]. Autistic processes increase, and, allowed to develop, autism is penultimate to death.164 163 Dunbar, Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language, 88. 164 Menninger, The Vital Balance, 175. — 228 —

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And what are these autistic processes? According to Menninger: The cognitive processes become snarled, confused and poisoned. Emotional reactions are inappropriate and exaggerated. Behavior becomes unpredictable. Productivity falls to near zero. Linkages with the outside world are severed. There is a retreat into a self-created “autistic” world, which has been called by various sensitive writers “the outward room,” “the closed door,” “the forbidden path,” and “the world next door.”165 Since the conditions described here only fit Dreyfus in a metaphorical sense, if at all, and rather are to be seen as a projection of and by the world around him, we have decided to speak of such autism as a moral lens, an apparatus through which the inward condition of the society around him in France is refracted to create a conceit—a phantasmagorical emblem of that sick society. The lens to be constructed in this study will consequently be made from what is said in the anti-Semitic and anti-Dreyfusard literature— from the press through polemical to cultural writings of both a popular and elitist form—because there, rather than in the liberal, socialist, and anarchist media, where the realities of the Affair were diverted to general and abstract principles of patriotism, justice, rationality, and scientific secularism, the expression of a range of anti-modernistic ideas and feelings were woven together in a bizarre manner: though in individuals and in specific sources, such anti-modernism had been embedded in its own legitimate and coherent matrices, by the end of the nineteenth century these forces—for the ancien regime, even to monarchism, for the Roman Catholic Church, for the honour and discipline of the army, and for a view of France that was rooted in the provinces and in medieval ideals of racial and cultural purity—constituted a form of autism, a social disease characterized by deafness, blindness, inwardness, and insensitivity to the actual changes that occurred in France and among its diverse populations. Even if there were some susceptibility in Alfred more than in his siblings or peers in school or the army, the environmental factors charac165 Menninger, The Vital Balance, 254. — 229 —

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teristic of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century cannot offer any direct insight into what may have caused autistic symptoms in Alfred Dreyfus during the last three decades of the nineteenth century. Nor is there any evidence of a similar condition in his brothers and sisters, or in his parents or grandparents. Thus, while there may have been some abnormality in his birth or early infancy, all we can say is that by the time Alfred was an adolescent he was showing a degree of introversion that was exacerbated when he left home and lost touch with his familiar Jewish circle of relatives and friends and instead began to study for his military career in French schools with a preponderance of Christian, particularly Catholic, young men from rural France. To go into greater detail, Alessandra Piontelli has shown, in a case study of a young child who was almost aborted while still a fetus in his mother’s womb, that the fears and anxieties experienced in that primal experience, were not only still evident in his post-natal behaviours, particularly his withdrawal into a near perfect silence, but that, because his mother and father, and also his own physical and other medical professionals called into assess his condition, failed to diagnose the cause and nature of his illness, the symptoms were exaggerated, and young Thomas developed more and more into what everyone of his caregivers expected of an autistic child.166 Once Pionetelli was called in to examine the boy, she observed that he was not presenting with all the symptoms of autism, but rather displaying characteristics of an individual re-enacting the trauma he had undergone prior to birth. Through close attention, care, and love, she gradually brought him to express “his intelligence, his perceptions and his speech,” which had been seemingly lacking in the child, and establishing an intense relationship with him.167 In this instance, the parents and doctors who first saw and judged little Thomas did not set out to create autism in him; indeed, they were loving and concerned caregivers. But inadvertently, by missing the signals in his actions—such as crumpling newspapers into a ball, as though he were projecting out of himself the aborted foetal material he might have become had his parents persisted in their original plans—all these adults did precisely that: they imposed on him the role of autistic 166 Alessandra Piontelli, From Fetus to Child: An Observational and Psychoanalytic Study (London and New York: Tavistock/ Routledge, 1992), 220-224. 167 Ibid., 220. — 230 —

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child. They saw what they thought was there, acted accordingly, and the child became what they expected. In the case of Alfred Dreyfus, however, those who took control of his life—the fellow officers in the general command, the prison officials and the politicians who created a unique regime of isolation and held him in silence for nearly five years— traumatized and re-traumatized him, until he could almost not behave in any other way than as an autistic individual. He regressed to a status of foetus: not, of course, totally, as he did have several lifelines to reality. Fragmented and irregular as the letters from his wife Lucie were, they allowed him to engage in a form of proxy communication with her, partly doing what autistic persons do who have sufficient engagement with the social world, as in Asperger’s Syndrome, he mimicked her statements, and then reached out to her through repeated formulaic affirmations168 of his innocence, love, and loyalty to the republican virtues of France.169 If this is the case, even assuming that it was not until he was forcibly 168 Faur: “Repetition here does not imply an identical reproduction of an original thing or event. Rather, it involves change and transformation and therefore encoding and decoding…. Thus the original is always changed: the encoded message is not identical with the original” (Golden Doves with Silver Dots, 52). Each time Dreyfus repeats his own words, concepts and images or repeats those of Lucie, he does more than ensure they are fixed into his memory or confirm that what either one sees in the letter of the other is what they both meant; they also transform, those messages into ritual patterns, steps in the mazurka of their love, and show how they can be performed again and again in new circumstances, always seeming to be the same but never identical, and therefore always fresh and pulsating with generative love. Even more startlingly, as we follow Faur’s lead in this analogy: “transformation is not effected by reaching into the past from the perspective of the present, but rather by having the future anticipate the past and transform it before it becomes real” (Ibid., 58). What Alfred sees in the nostalgic recreations of scenes of his domestic life and love with Lucie and the children is determined by what he had actually experienced with her in that life before the Affair began but is anticipated by the future happiness which is to be achieved through the difficult struggle for justice and truth, that future assuring the resolution to their current tensions; and this through the medium of the repetitions in both the letters and the cahiers. 169 From Nancy Kobrin, this remark, on an early draft of the discussion so far: “This is excellent, Norman—I think it adds another important dimension plus I was thinking—the thing about the army is that it would attract those who like to work with hard objects etc—all the military stuff. Big toys.” Not only that, but as Dunbar points out, “Asberger’s people are often very good at mathematics … probably because they can think clearly in the abstract and not become confused by emotional and other irrelevant associations” (Dunbar, Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language, 90). Note that it was his older married sister Henriette who urged adolescent Alfred to join the army: as someone from the family who could be part of la revanche, the revenge to regain from Germany the Vaterland, the Fatherland, the motherland of Alsace for la patrie, the feminine homeland. Joseph Valabrègue’s family had military officers from amongst them ever since the Revolution of 1789 and hence it was deemed an honourable profession for a Jewish young man, unlike the negative feelings of East European Jews subject to harsh and demeaning recruitment into the Czarist armies. — 231 —

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exiled, isolated, and subject to a continuous series of demeaning and humiliating traumas that Dreyfus moved beyond merely tending towards an autistic personality, it was still only while he was suffering these projections of other people’s individual and collective mental illness that he could be said to have those “high-functioning” qualities Hans Asberger included at the low end of psychological and social debilities.170 When the court reporters and witnesses in the lycée in Rennes where the second court martial took place reported that Alfred Dreyfus seemed like the worst representative of his cause because he was “remote, inaccessible, unresponsive”171—they wanted to see him weep, rage, and shout out his innocence—they were looking into a mirror of their own powerlessness, guilt, and incomprehension. More on the Phantasmagoria and the Mazurka One minute freed from the order of time has recreated in us, in order to feel it, the man freed from the order of time….But this optical illusion which brought back to me a moment of the past incompatible with the present could not last. The scenes played out by our voluntary memory, of course, can be prolonged, as they require no more effort on our part than leafing through a picturebook. — Marcel Proust172 Not only was the experience of arrest, imprisonment, and isolation a form of autism, imposed on him by the state, although partly built on pre-existing propensities in his character, these same phenomena can be seen as a type of phantasmagoria. To say this arises from something more than a need, in hindsight, to organize the diverse details in the record, as much from the perceptions of those who witnessed the scenes, wrote about them, and entered them into the history of France at the beginning of the twentieth century, but also the paradigm was already 170 Sacks, An Anthropologist on Mars, 235. 171 Sacks, An Anthropologist on Mars, 237. 172 Proust, Finding Time Again, 181. — 232 —

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being used by the anti-Semitic press and other reactionary, regressive media in Europe. The anti-Dreyfusards thus called on a tradition of mocking Jews and saw their allies as fantastic, grotesque and derisory figures, Jew-hating qualities they could draw from a range of classical, medieval, Renaissance, and later texts, actual performances in the legitimate theatres of the period and the popular entertainments of a less savory type. Although not every detractor or supporter of Dreyfus would be aware of the developed and elaborate conceit of the phantasmagoria, they would be involved through a variety of allusive means, such as synecdoche, metonymy, metaphor and so on. The question that comes up here turns on whether we treat the phantasmagoria of anti-Semitism itself as an elaborate contraption, set up to fool the anti-Semites through a variety of self-delusions and misapprehensions of what was happening in France and the rest of Europe as modernity swung more steeply into the upward curve that would become the twentieth century, or take it as an elusive will-o-the-wisp churned up out of the swamp of bigotry as we turn the pages of old books too quickly, find dust in our eyes sparkling with real lights in the distance on which we cannot properly focus (orblutes),173 and so, as much as the men and the women involved in the Affair on both sides, miss the point altogether. W. F. Apthorp, for example, writing about Chopin, describes the situation thus, and we have only to substitute words like justice or politics for music to be pointed in the right direction: The entrancing phantasmagoria of picture and incident which we think we see rising from the billowing sea of music is in reality nothing more than an enchanting fata morgana, visible at no other angle than that of our own eye. The true gist of the music it never can be: it can never truly translate what is most essential and characteristic in its expression. It is but something that we have half unconsciously imputed to music: nothing that really exists in music.174 Phantasmagoria was the term used for a magical show based on an 173 To be discussed in the Epilogue to this book. 174 Cited in Huneker, Chopin, 40. — 233 —

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optical illusion developed in the last decade of the eighteenth century. It was a live performance, in a specially prepared venue, leading an audience through a near-trancelike journey from the outside, where normality ruled, although these spectators would already be anticipating the advent of the weird and the mysterious, to the inside, darkened, veiled, and suffused with eerie sounds. With smoke and mirrors, magic lanterns playing their images on solid, diaphanous, and obscure hangings, the magician told his story and moved the audience into a state of wonder and fright. Through the nineteenth century, more advanced versions of such apparati and purpose-built theatres, planned with secret corridors, virtually invisible ropes and pulleys, and other devices were to appear in Paris and many cities and towns in France and elsewhere. There were also side-show entertainments at fairs, small stalls set up in the alleys and passageways of urban conglomerations, and an increasing variety of so-called wax-museums, freak-shows, and wonder-cabinets. Phantasmagoria is also a term used by Hippolyte Taine in his study of l’Intelligence to describe the inner metaphysical space of the mind where hallucinations and other images are stored, scrambled, and re-imagined. However, we have also introduced another term, mazurka, also available to use as an analogy and a figure of speech to approach the ins and outs of the Affair, and also to describe the kind of involved communication between Alfred and Lucie Dreyfus in their letters to one another during his long years of imprisonment. The metaphor of the Polish dance allows a more social and interactive perspective. In addition to the passages earlier cited from Liszt’s musical biography of Chopin, we can go to the development of those passages in Huneker’s Life of Chopin.175 Like the Polonaises, which Chopin masterfully transmuted from the national song-dances of his native Poland to cater to the tastes of midnineteenth-century Paris, the Mazurkas are virtuoso compositions that bring into western Europe many characteristics of Eastern European cultural history, such as the vigorousness of the female dancers and their role in courtship, in both senses of the word, the intrigues of aristocratic houses, and the sexual games played between men and women on the dance floor176 in coded manoeuvres and gestures, and the 175 Huneker, Chopin, Chapter XIII: “The Mazurkas—Dances of the Soul,” 112-123. See further discussion in Volume III. 176 Sichéry: “All these queer associates are busily coming and going, jostling and rubbing shoulders in a sort of crazy dance, which transforms a night of Sodom into a contemporary Walpurgisnacht. — 234 —

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special tonality of such musical games embodied in the Slavic word zal. Huneker, following Liszt, defines the term: “Zal, a poisonous word, is a baleful compound of pain, sadness, secret rancour, revolt.”177 Though Huneker sees the concept specific to the Eastern lands, where it arises from the “mad lyrism” expressed by members of “oppressed nations” in the “mentalions of their spleen,” he also recognizes it as closely related to the melancholy expressed in poets such as Baudelaire. What none of these artists or critics seem to see is that zal is also a conduit through which another oppressed nation could manifest its own melancholy sufferings mixed with ironic wit. Liszt and Chopin are both178 too antiSemitic to recognize in their definitions qualities that they find repulsive when evident in the Jewish character or achievement: ”excitement, agitation, rancor, revolt full of reproach, premeditations of vengeance, menace never ceasing to threaten if retaliation should even become possible, feeding its meanwhile with a bitter if sterile hatred.”179 Of course, applied to the letters of the Dreyfuses, we would have to refocus some of these terms, so as to turn reproach and hatred, for instance, into reflexive words, and note the deliberate lack of reproach Alfred and Lucie remark in one another concerning the perpetrators of the persecution against them. The Affaire Dreyfus has to be seen in a number of overlapping or interweaving contexts, some of which have been already been attempted as we turned the kaleidoscope around and around, but still need to be amplified from the most important of all, the Jewish perspective. We want to see the whole ordeal of Alfred and his family as part of the new imaginative experiences developed in the 1890s by the impressionists and other modernist painters, musicians, dancers, and authors. These ways of looking at the Dreyfus Affaire will then be answerable to Jewish ways of seeing, remembering, and acting on historical events.180 Proust is saved from alarm or disgust by the satirical verve he owes to his Jewish descent” (Quennell, Marcel Proust, 96). 177 Huneker, Chopin, 116. 178 See note 48 of this chapter, in which Liszt’s anti-Semitism belongs more to his mistress than to himself. 179 Liszt cited in Huneker, Chopin, 116; for a similar remark from Niecks in Huneker, Chopin, 123. 180 Ouaknin: “Enseignement premier du Talmud sur la lecture: ne pas lire des mots, mais lire des lettres! Chaque mot est une phrase. Un mot est toujours plus qu’un mot. Il s’agit de prendre le texte ‘à la lettre.’ Mais ne pas prendre au mot!” (Lire aux éclats, 54): “The first lesson of the Talmud on reading: don’t read words, but read letters! Every word is a phrase. A word is always more than a word. It is a question of taking the text ‘by the letter.’ But not to take it by the word!” Then he continues: — 235 —

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Rather than a biography of the man or an analysis of the trials and tribulations the Dreyfus family went through, this book has tried look at the events in two ways and then attempted to assimilate them into several speculative discussions. Innumerable books and articles already exist which parse the intricacies of the accusations, the trials, and the surrounding efforts in the press and in politics to work through the crisis in French society. There are, though, short articles and passing references in a number of books which do indeed attempt to see beyond the factual history of the case and to grasp the imaginative, existential, and mythic dimensions of the whole episode in French, indeed, in European history as it passes through the fin de siècle into the modern world of the twentieth century. But there is virtually nothing written that I have been able to find which treats the whole Affaire Dreyfus as a Jewish event, not merely an anti-Semitic episode prefiguring the Holocaust and laying the groundwork, through Theodor Herzl’s reportage and change of heart about assimilation, for political Zionism and thus the foundation of the State of Israel. If the Dreyfus Affair had happened five hundred years ago or two hundred or ten thousand, then we would feel more comfortable about using paradigms of myth, iconography, and ritual. The virtue of chronological distance and hindsight makes it seem proper to rub out many of the surface details of personality, economic circumstances, and political nuance in order to see the narrative and iconographic patterns shaping and substantiating the events. When close in time and space, as in this instance a little more than a century ago and in a modern, urban, industrial society like France, everything seems too complex and confused to stand back and measure the deepest dimensions of historical power. Nevertheless, as a psychohistorian and a midrashing poet, I have approached the people and events in a way that focuses on their fully or partly hidden symbolic meanings, as though they were continuous with the arts and philosophies of the period. I have examined not the whole of the Affair, in its public and private “La lecture est rire and jeu, pratique ‘poétique’ au sens ou il lui revient d’éveiller et de réveiller (dans la parole) toute la signification temporelle de la langue, d’en attaquer les sédimentations sémantiques pour entendre quelque chose des objets du monde” (54): “Reading is laughter and play, practical poetics: in the sense that it returns to awaken and re-awaken (in the word) all the temporal signification of language, in attacking the semantic sedimentation to understand something of the objects of the world.” — 236 —

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manifestations, but its emotional, spiritual and moral dimensions as a Jewish experience, and therefore as a series of events that are experienced, remembered, and recorded in the same way as other political, intellectual, and religious catastrophes are midrashed—refined, imagined, and evaluated as part of Jewish tradition. On the one hand, to many Jews in French society who belonged to the educated and often quite assimilated middle classes—as opposed to the more recent immigrants from the East who were still in the early stages of changing themselves into Frenchmen and women, socially, economically and culturally—the whole Affair was an awkward, embarrassing, and annoying intrusion into their self-perceived place in modernity. Though they may have wished in private for the release and revindication of Alfred Dreyfus, they were not prepared to take a public stand, which would have called attention to themselves as Jewish, and therefore as a group who had to confront the whole suite of slanders paraded in the newspapers and in the streets year in and year out. For this reason, the few Jews who did enter into the fray as full-fledged Dreyfusards, whatever their personal knowledge of or commitment to Jewish traditions, enacted almost unconsciously a collective process of midrashing. On the other hand (and as many hands are necessary to deal with complicated phenomena), it is precisely in the absurd, archaic, and blood-curdling screams of the anti-Semites that the Jewishness of the whole Affair is made most clear, that the identity of the key players is never allowed to be obscured by polite and desperate masks in a formal allegorical drama of secular French ideals, and that the intentions and consequences of the Dreyfusards, covert and overt in their beliefs, is registered as a collective midrashic event. The result of our midrashed reading of the Affair merges with the contextualization of the case into art history and the transformation of the modern European imagination. These midrashim are not, of course, the traditional explanatory, exegetical narratives and riddles found in rabbinical collections. One of the midrashic exercises engaged in by the small percentage of Ashkenazi Jews from Alsace and Lorraine in France during the period of the Affair was the creation of a narrative history of themselves as completely assimilated into the nation. This process of inscription was sometimes in the books and articles they wrote in great profusion, but it was also to be found in their career paths, in their notable service to the State in politics, culture and intellectual life, and in the works of art they — 237 —

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created, patronized, and admired in a great variety of ways. We will see, however, that to a large degree this story turns out to be not so much false in the sense of a deliberate lie imposed on the world, but rather self-delusive, weak in its long-term effects, and eventually almost lost in the subsequent tides of history—a history that unfortunately turns out to be much more according to the dream fulfilment of the anti-Semites whose writings and ravings at the time seemed ephemeral and trivial in its absurdity. We are not saying that the Dreyfus Affair was the key agent of the late nineteenth century that informed, shaped or greatly influenced the shifts in imagination—aesthetic taste, conceptual apprehension in art, or specific content—but rather that the Affair in itself was developed, perceived, and remembered in terms that were part and parcel of that imaginative shift made manifest at the end of the nineteenth century in the various art movements activated in Paris. But we are saying too that when we examine the various accounts given, of the trials themselves, the treatment in Devil’s Island, and the surging of the hate-filled crowds in the street or the bizarre social encounters someone like Proust describes in his long novel, we find both explicit words and verbal descriptions which speak of drama, tragedy, nightmare, and absurd behaviours and implicit, inadvertent, and perhaps unconsciously repressed indications of performances that are far more impressionistic, simultaneist, and dada-esque than imagined. Indeed, we need to use our imagination— and all the tools of cultural anthropology and aesthetic analysis—to tease out and expose the hidden dimensions of the whole Dreyfus Affair.

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Chapter Three Transcending Radical Solitude

Visible social phenomena appear to be the result of an immense, unconscious working, that as a rule is beyond the reach of our analysis. —Gustave Le Bon1 Love work, hate lordship, and seek no intimacy with ruling power. —Pirqe Avot (Ethics of the Fathers) I.102 Before we can conclude this book, which does not reach any conclusions about Alfred Dreyfus or the Affair that bears his name, we have to tie up some loose ends, or rather, we have to shake out the pedlar’s sack and see what items remain there which we have not touched upon, or that we have started to discuss but left suspended for a more auspicious time, and catch a glimpse of other ideas that disappear almost as soon as we touch them. Then we will start to treat of the most elusive of all the topics in the whole corpus of Dreyfus’s writings, the crazy and obsessive doodles in his cahiers; but that is a task that requires the setting out of something like the history of Jewish artists in the late nineteenth century, the aesthetics of beauty within Judaism,3 and the description of those drawings—a still yet impossible duty to perform because no one has yet made available (outside of the manuscript books themselves in the BNF) all the pages upon which they appear, not even considering that most of the cahiers were held back and probably burnt by Alfred 1

2 3

Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, trans anon. (London: Ernest Benn, 1896), 9. Le Bon (1841-1931) first published La psychologie des foules in 1895 at a time when Dreyfus was languishing in his solitary confinement on Devil’s Island. Siddur: Sephah Emeth (Speech of Truth): Order of Prayers for the Whole Year, Hebrew and English (New York: Hebrew Publishing Company [1953]), 231. In the opening pages of the Zohar it is said: “The communion of Israel is the body/ who receives the soul, the Beauty of Israel./ So She is the body of the soul./ The soul we have mentioned is the Beauty of Israel/ who is real Torah” (44). — 239 —

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Dreyfus. So, although I intend to come back to this great problem in a series of future studies, for the sake of rounding out this current book In the Context of His Times, it may be possible to suggest certain new explanations for the doodles—or rather, to suggest ways in which they can be seen in new intellectual, psychological and aesthetic contexts.

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Part 1: A Poor Pedlar’s Bundle of Things

The task of the historian, Benjamin insists, is “to brush history against the grain.” — Richard Leppert4 We must understand that even the views of the most intelligent people cannot be trusted when their personal desires block the truth. Not only does their intelligence not keep them from erring, but they use their intelligence to mislead others into accepting their foolish conclusions as if they were based on the most rigorous logic. — Rabbi Eliyahu E. Dessler5 Shake, shake, shake: out they tumble, the topics we overlooked in earlier chapters, and then those we started and did not complete, and then the fleeting images that can hardly be recognized before they reach the table for inspection. The epistles that Lucie and Alfred wrote to one another, what are these little gems, objects of art, fragments of an intimacy so vague and mystical? The philosophical and literary essays, the scientific experiments, the mathematical exercises, the endless drawing of non-representational figures, they are rich in implication, resonant with allusion and echo, and hint of a whole world of intellectual and cultural flux in the second half of the nineteenth century, and thrust a scattered light into the still obscure picture of the twentieth. And the ideas, the feelings, the unformed implications of a Judaism and a Jewishness in Alfred Dreyfus he was hardly aware of, how do they reshape everything we have always thought we knew about him and what he was to himself,

4

5

Richard Lepert, “Introduction” to Theodor W. Adorno, Essays on Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/9275/9275.intro (accessed 29 July 2004). Eliyahu E. Dessler, “Strive for the Truth: Parashat Korach” cited by Ellen Horowitz, “The Lustick Files: A Guide to Intellectual Fools,” The Hallowed Halls of Academe, EEJH (22 June 2004) http:// www.campus-watch.org/article/id/1202 (accessed 23 June 2004). — 241 —

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his family, his friends, his allies and his enemies?6 To what can we compare these letters between Alfred and Lucie Dreyfus, as they reach across time and space7 not merely to communicate 6

7

When you read, for instance, the lengthy and developing theories on art and literature in newspaper reviews, exhibit catalogues, and political writings of Octave Mirbeau, collected and presented by Pierre Michel and François Nivet under the title Combats esthetiques, it is striking how many of Mirbeau’s principles of art criticism and history, as well as his ethical and moral concerns are similar to those you find in Dreyfus’s own writings from the years of his ordeal. Though the army captain obviously does not have the professional writer or critic’s training, experience, and concerns, nonetheless Mirbeau is not all that different in what he looks for, likes, and thinks important in art and artists. Both men are what the French call engagé, that is, active in ideas that have meaning and influence outside the mere expression of an artistic soul seeking to create itself through the process of creation in whatever medium or form they choose; the musical composition or the objet d’art and the novel or poem should, they believe, be part of a collective and inter-generational dialogue or debate about civilized life, and this not present itself as a religion of nature or aestheticism. Unlike Mirbeau, Dreyfus, as a Jew, and thus outside of the mainstream of French and European society at the end of the nineteenth century, confronts these principles and ideals at a different distance; not one that he chooses as a point of ideology— Mirbeau’s anarchism, for example; a distance that has been imposed by age-old circumstances of exclusion and hostility, only superficially ameliorated, as the Affair itself demonstrates. Thus even though Dreyfus shares so much with Mirbeau, whatever he may want to feel, believe or do in his life or particularly in his approach to culture and art, he suffers substantial constraints—not merely existential angst. And whereas Mirbeau can slide easily through his heritage of Christian imagery and concepts to prop up his revolutionary insights, Dreyfus is, first, always an alien in this same semantic zone that provides ready language, imagery and topoi to his written thoughts and, second, has an alternative not open to Mirbeau—his Jewish heritage. If nothing else, such a burden of civilization gives a different valence to expressions that are found in Combats esthetiques when we apply them to Dreyfus; for example, this statement cited by the editors in their introductory essay: “l’ironie des siècles” (I, 21). For Mirbeau, concerned with wiping away the thick layers of varnish and dust that cover great works of art in museums in order to find a refreshed and new approach to painting by going outdoors and changing the colors and composition of the canvas, the irony of the centuries is something that contemporary artists and critics can fight their way through by an act of the will; but for Dreyfus, the Jew, as well as the man alone, without qualities in the eyes of the world, the burden of the past is not something easily or desirably to be sloughed off, and the irony resides in a complex relationship of remembering and restoring through adjustment to modern conditions. In his presentation speech of the Nobel Prize in Literature to Henri Bergson in 1927, Per Hallström remarks that for the French author, “time is conceived not as something abstract or formal, but as a reality, indissolubly connected with life and the human self. He gives it the name ‘duration,’ a concept that can be interpreted as ‘living time,’ by analogy with the life force. It is a dynamic stream, exposed to constant qualitative variations and perpetually increasing … it is nothing but an application of the form of space. Mathematical precision, certitude, and limitation prevail in this domain” (“The Nobel Prize in Literature 1927,” http://www.nobel.se/ literature/laureates/1927/press). As provocative as such remarks may be in relation to Dreyfus’s circumstances, we cite them more to show the contrast than the likeness to the kind of thoughts and feelings manifest in the prison cahiers. The Nobel Committee may have admired Bergson as a literary figure, but they could not really argue for his scientific credentials; and when they spoke of a “crisis … provoked by the heavy atmosphere of rationalistic biology that ruled toward the end of the last century,” they adapt a stance in sympathy with the post-World War I reaction against reason and enlightened thought in general prevalent in the great ideological dictatorships — 242 —

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and reaffirm their love and faith in one another, but to create an enduring, constitutive and transformative relationship beyond temporality and geography? If Reiner Stach is correct to say that “reading [Franz] Kafka’s love letters [can be taken] as a key to his mind,”8 it is even more true in regard to Alfred Dreyfus, where there is no body of published (and unpublished) literature—stories, novels, poems, essays—to interpret: until the appearance of the prison cahiers at the end of 2009. Yet even then, Dreyfus comes to our attention as a historical figure not as a writer, certainly not as a philosopher or a novelist. My argument in this book has been that if we can read the letters as a key to his mind and if at the same time we can now read his prison workbooks as an externalisation of his mind, then Alfred Dreyfus will be worthy of attention as a writer, that is, as a thinker; just as critics now realize that Vincent van Gogh’s epistles to his brother and other persons constitute both a major historical archive for understanding his artistic development and as a literary corpus thanks to his candid style and clarity of expression. The epistles exchanged between Theodore and Vincent was more than a way for both brothers to keep in contact with each other or to allow one to check on the health and circumstances of the other; in fact, as Walther and Metzer put it, “[it] was only in his parallel activities of writing and painting, both of them addressed to a single person, Theo, that Vincent van Gogh saw significance in his own existence,”9 while Theo was able to give the support that transformed his own role as an associate art dealer into a knowledgeable advocate for his brother and a school of other artists.10 So dependent had Theo become that when Vincent finally emerging in the 1920s and the popular attraction to mythic thinking. For men like Dreyfus, the advance of science, with the promise of dynamic new ways of thinking through quantum physics, breakthroughs in theoretical cosmology, and technical advances in optics, all were too exciting to throw over in favor of nebulous and romantic ideas such as those Bergson espoused. 8 See Steven G. Kellman’s review of Reiner Stach, Kafka: The Decisive Years (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2005), http://forward.com/articles/1858/reading-kafkaes-love-letters-as-akey-to-his-min/ (accessed 30 December 2005). 9 Walther and Metzger, Van Gogh, 26 10 Walther and Metzger: show how different the brothers were when we compare them to the husband and wife Alfred and Lucie Dreyfus: “… Vincent considered his brother the owner of his paintings, while Theo for his part saw himself as a trustee—though both of them sensibly refrained from dwelling upon the exact details of ownership. The arrangement itself (which they both observed to the letter, without discussing it at any length in their correspondence) was the result of profound differences between the two brothers. Vincent had lost the alter ego he had always assumed Theo to be. He blamed his brother for own alienation from their parental home …” (Van Gogh, 126) — 243 —

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shot himself, he could not bear to live outside of the deep connections the letters had established.11 But whereas the lives of the two brothers ended violently and madly, at its height the communication between them was always asymmetrical, even as it maintained the sanity of each in a rich and various mode of self-creativity. For Vincent, the letters he wrote and the paintings he made were not only for himself, but for Theo as well, and yet they were above all “two sides of the same coin. They were parallel forms of an almost uncontainable passion for selfexpression.”12 Most important of all, Walther and Metzer argue, given the very differences in their personality and careers: In van Gogh’s own playing with the nuances of natural and artificial description we can clearly detect his aim to give the language of his letters a flexibility and immediacy beyond statements of personal involvement, to take his bearings from the eloquence of writers such as Zola. It is that eloquence that gives van Gogh’s letters the literary value widely ascribed to them.13 In a somewhat, but certainly not exactly analogous way, both Lucie and Alfred Dreyfus established a highly charged metaphysical space in their communications, allowing Alfred to endure the most horrible nightmare existence possible, and also allowed him to focus his intellectual energies in the composition of his cahiers, while for Lucie the part she played in the letter-writing at once sustained her in her loyalty to her husband and permitted her to act as his virtual therapist and comforter. Since the husband and wife did not share an interest in art as a means of shaping and achieving a career in painting or the promotion of a specific movement in the arts, they were able to draw on hidden 11 Like Lucie Dreyfus, Theo van Gogh has not received full attention, either because the “other” one of the pair has been thought of as relatively passive or marginal to the enterprise of their letter-writing or because the real dynamics of the exchange between two people—whether siblings or a married couple—has been missed out altogether. This has resulted from the letters of the presumed minor partner being missing or remaining unedited and causes the complete correspondence to have been published only in highly selected formats. For more on Vincent’s brother, see Marie-Angélique Odanne and Frédérique de Jode, Theo: The Other Van Gogh, trans. Alexandra Bonfaite-Warren (New York: Magowan, 2004). 12 Walther and Metzger, Van Gogh, 25. 13 Ibid., 25. — 244 —

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resources they did share, although they had probably never discussed them before, and in many ways were unaware of the potentialities in this cultural treasury they found themselves calling on. Merely to call it Jewish or to cite relevant passages from rabbinical books does not constitute proof, only implication. This would be no more than when Vincent tells Theo that he feels nostalgia for home, and yet instead of yielding to my homesickness I told myself that home, the fatherland, is everywhere. Instead of succumbing to despair I decided on active melancholy, insofar as being active was in my power, or to put it differently, I put a melancholy that comes and strives and seeks before a despairing melancholy of gloomy inaction.14 In other words, where in the vagueness of their backgrounds could these two young assimilated Jews have conceived of the techniques of mutual cures for their troubled souls? What would be their equivalent to such an active melancholy and realization that home is everywhere? Above all, how did Alfred and Lucie reproduce an ancient pattern of behavior in order to make these discoveries within their own intellects and emotional attachment? To put this set of circumstances and actions on a somewhat grander scale—to compare the small with the great— the allusion can be followed to Jewish messianic mythology based on Lurianic images and characters of repeated, ongoing creation and recreation: The messianic aim is to fill anew the open void with the divine influx (Shefa) which is found beyond nature, while preserving the boundaries of nature. This is intended to change the relationship between creator and creatures, insofar as this leads to the integration of the creator into the creation. This idea is defined in Habad teaching by the expression “Dirah ba’tahtonim” (a dwelling for the divine below).15 14 Ibid., 57. 15 Alon Dahan, “R. Menahem Mendel Schneerson’s Messianic Teaching” a review of Elliot R. Wolfson, — 245 —

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Though neither Alfred nor Lucie were brought up in Hasidic or kabbalistic households, the influence of Lurianic ideas by the end of the nineteenth century had so permeated the everyday prayers and customs of Jewish homes, as well as the liturgy of synagogue practice, that they seemed normative aspects of the whole tradition. In the epistemological crises of their lives, wherein the normative values of French civilization were no longer felt to be adequate—despite all their asseverations to the contrary—the couple experienced their own love in their letters in terms of a withdrawal of meaning and security from their loves, a vast void opening up in social and cultural values and relationships with the non-Jewish world around them, a breaking apart of the primal energies that drove them more and more back into their own Jewishness, and the discovery, partial and confused as it actually was, of a sense of something divine in this mutuality of passion for Truth and Justice. In his prison workbooks, moreover, with its threefold division into essays, equations, and drawings, Alfred Dreyfus composed something like the visible patterns of mystical composition characteristic of Jewish tradition. Within that kabbalistic tradition,16 Nadine Shenkar points out, The Sephirot constitute ten basic principles which are recognizable in the complex and disorderly multiplicity of human life and are capable of unifying them and endowing them with meaning and fullness.17 Outside of the enclosed and secluded communities of mystics Open Secret: Postmessianic Messsianism and the Mystical Revision of Menahem Mendel Schneerson (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009) on H-Net Review http://www.h-net.org/reviews/ showrev.php?id=29591 (February 2011). 16 Not too fine a point to it, given that there can be said to be several traditions of Jewish mysticism, some distinguished by their subject matter, e.g., those concerned with the opening chapters of Genesis or the chariots of Ezekiel’s vision, read as the palaces, tents, or halls of Heaven; and others by their primary authorities, e.g., Moshe de Leon’s original redactions and compositions under the rubric of Zohar, the Great Ari’s teachings on condensation of the divine and the shattering of the vessels of primary energy, or the more modern Hasidic variations, such as Dahan discusses. 17 Nadine Shenkar, “The Pomegranate Carpets and the Kabbalah” from The Garden of Pomegranates on Danon Gallery at http://www.danongallery.com/melograni/pomegranates3.asp. Shenkar’s muystical visions arise from the twelfth-century Sephardic Zohar and its expansions. Her generalizations assume a continuity and coherent development that is perhaps more wishful thinking than historically accurate, but is “close enough” for our current purposes. — 246 —

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where individuals and small groups prayed and practiced together, meditating, chanting, and performing strange tantric-like exercises, the larger community absorbed their ideas—the esoteric images as common decorative designs, the bizarre motions as normative cultural gestures and facial expressions, the theurgical chants as wordless melodies, nigunim, and the meaning of the whole complex philosophy as naturalized attitudes and conventionalised patterns of thought and feeling. Shenkar goes on to say: In Jewish mysticism there is no separation between worlds, where the whole of creation, visible and invisible, is viewed as a great mesh which connects all entities, particularly by means of words and their endless combinations. From a kabbalistic standpoint, the most common representation of this conception— writes [Gershom] Scholem—is to be found in the Hebrew writings of Moses de Leon. He loves to present this thought by using the simile of the chain and the individual links which compose it. In this chain, the parts of which represent the world from top to bottom, there are links of differing degrees, some deeply hidden and others externally visible; but none of them truly has a separate existence. The image of the chain in carpets stands as further abstraction of the same idea, namely the contiguity and continuity of all worlds on which the light of creation shines.18 These essential designs vary throughout the lands of the dispersion, sometimes more or less explicit, sometimes hidden in what seem to be meaningless decorations on cult objects (spice jars, hannukiot, calendars, etc.). As Shenkar puts it, “Authority no longer lies in the single and the unchangeable meaning of divine communication, but in its boundless flexibility.”19 If we wish to understand both the endless pages of the cahiers covered with Dreyfus’s doodles as a form of carpet design20 or 18

Shenkar, “The Pomegranate Carpets”; see her drawings of sample carpet designs. These designs are similar to the manuscript pages reproduced in Benjamin, Towers of Spice, esp. Plate XVII on p. 35. 19 Shenkar here is following Gershom Scholem, La Kabbalah e il suo simbolismo (Torino: 1980), 18. 20 Burns, Dreyfus: A Family Affair, 201. — 247 —

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the whole of the workbooks as variations of such mystical writing, then we have to see how and why the archaic and traditional ideas could come into the exile’s mind. In traditional Jewish schools, the yeshivot, students “learn” together, in the sense of reading through texts aloud in pairs or small groups, raising questions and arguing about the answers among themselves, as well as with older guides and teachers. This kind of study is thus both active and social. One does not withdraw into oneself, to some quiet, private space of intellectual contemplation (Denkraum), or even walk silently up and down a room or a street, working out in one’s head difficult passages in the holy texts and working one’s way through them by recalling all the analogous passages, alternative usages of words and figures of rhetoric, the necessary commentaries, and the range of compendia one wishes to consult. Instead, along with at least one study partner, or in a larger group sitting and standing around a table in which the Talmud or other rabbinical book is placed, the relevant page opened so that all can see it, read it from either side and even upside down, each points with his finger at the specific letter or word or phrase, moving around the central passage to the various annotations and discussions ranged around it, and argues aloud, speaking not in rancour or despair, but eagerly in the traditional tonalities of such a yeshiva debate, knowing that all points of view, when for the sake of heaven, are valid, though some more pertinent and cogent than others. Thus study is mutual learning, an exercise and also a possession of the text—and being possessed by it—the object being not so much to reach a final decision, as to come to understand the nature of the thought processes evoked by the text, this process being ongoing and thus connecting one’s own mind and soul with all those who been in the conversation before and will continue on to the end of time, even through the coming of the Messiah and the sanctification of the world anew. And as one learns with his partners, performing these joint and mutually enhancing exercises, full of repetitions and reiterated questions, those with experience and authority—the elder students, the rabbis, the rosh yeshiva, the head of the school—walk from group to group and table to table, listening to what they are saying, adding a word or two, usually a question they hadn’t thought of, pointing to an aspect of the text they have overlooked, citing an ancient commentary outside the regular anthologies. — 248 —

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These authoritative figures form the second concentric circle of listeners, after the partners themselves, conceived of as the actual persons in the room on such and such a day, but who, when they speak, as to do the learners, speak in the words and with the authority of the voices textualized on the pages before them from the dawn of time itself in the persons of the Patriarchs, the Prophets and the Sages of Tradition, and in the words and understanding of their argument to be transmitted to the next and all following generations down to the end of time. Also included, always implicitly, embodied in the entire conglomeration, always close and yet apart only in the essence of its being, is the ultimate listener and participant, God in all his unknowable eternality and infiniteness. While that kind of learning-relationship in the rabbinical schools provided an implicit model for Alfred and Lucie’s letters21 and for the strategies each assumed to achieve their goals in the discovery out of the impasses of their situation and to escape from the threatening forced ranged against them all hidden in dark and sinister enigmas and nightmares, the circumstances in which they wrote were hardly conducive to the goals at which they thought they were aiming. Later, when the letters would be published in their various editorial selective versions from 1898 onwards, the auditors and spectators conceived would be those from whom they expected sympathy and support in petitioning for a retrial, if not at once at least eventually through the evocation of positive emotional responses and then intellectual assent to the arguments propounded. Until that moment, however, as the epistles were being written and posted between themselves, Alfred and Lucie were aware that outside of their own paired communications, there 21 Though Alfred was educated to be “modern and assimilated” by going to a formal French-Jewish elementary school in Mulhouse, where he lived until the decision to leave Alsace in 1871 following the Prussian victory the year before, his older brothers had had a more old-fashioned cheder experience, and the young Alfred would have seen and heard the boys studying at home in Yiddish, along with the entire Ashkenazi ambiance of his father’s style of living. He attended a French boarding school with his brother Mathieu at first, but then was sent off for secondary schooling on his own. However, after an unhappy trial year in a Swiss German-speaking gymnasium, Alfred returned to France for lycée in Paris, near his sister Henriette’s home. Similarly, Lucie Hadamard had a mixed upbringing, albeit with the modifications needed to contextualize a Jewish girl’s training in Paris. Lucie received home-schooling from tutors and from her father and mother, while her brothers went to French schools, and she was given Hebrew prayer books (siddurim) and French moral manuals approved by the Chief Rabbi to read, with oral instruction on how to conduct herself as a proper Jewish mother and homemaker—in addition to her learning French culture, piano-playing, and deportment commensurate to her upper-middle-class station in life. — 249 —

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were other potential and actual readers. On the one side, to be sure, their parents and siblings and perhaps one or two congenial friends; as Lucie shared the letters she received with these intimate relations and passed on to Alfred the comments and reassurances of love and loyalty they were not allowed to send. However, on the other side, all too ready to pounce on any infraction of normal prison regulations or to trespass the special conditions set down for the imprisonment of the convicted traitor, there were the readers assigned by the governor of the penal colony and his minders and masters back in Paris, that is, the censors charged with monitoring what the epistles said and what they might have implied. Although neither of the letter writers could always control their emotions or restrain their attempts to reach out through the handwritten words on the page to embrace the other with encouraging news and appeals to their deepest and most internalised Jewish understandings of how to grapple with adversity, each had to attempt, whenever possible, to suppress those impulses, to speak at best in oblique and allusive terms—precisely the so-called kabbalistic secrets the anti-Semitic guardians of French nationality were seeking to expose in the Jewish traitors as evidence of the conspiracy against Christendom. Again and again, as Alfred acknowledges to Lucie receiving letters from other members of her and his own family, he says he cannot bring himself to write to them and begs her to pass on his thoughts and feelings. Alfred also worries that it is only with her that he can express himself at the right level to maintain the composure necessary under the conditions of constant censorship in which his textualized every experience becomes a sign of deeper meaning. Lucie, he believes, usually by implication, but occasionally by oblique or explicit statement, can transmit what lies deeply hidden within his letters because he can trust her insight and intuition, their shared memories of warm and happy domestic life and intimate love, to translate his words into the messages the brothers and sisters, their spouses and children want desperately to hear from and about him. Moreover, when the children, Pierrot and little Jeanne, are too young to write themselves, Lucie undertakes to write on their behalf, thus setting the model of such mediation of his words to their childish understanding and their infantile babbling to articulate statements of love and longing. Both Lucie and Alfred Dreyfus feared that they were confronted by a great hostile and unsolvable enigma in their lives. Something had — 250 —

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happened, perpetrated by a person or persons thus far unknown, to change everything in and about their lives. At first they assumed it was an error, a case of mistaken identity by the officers charged with identifying a spy in the central intelligence command, and then an even greater judicial error made in the proceedings of the court martial against Alfred; and then, slowly and gradually, often against their will to have faith in the French system of justice and ministers of the government itself,22 they began to suspect another kind of trick played against them, some enormity beyond their comprehension. They wanted to unveil this mystery, solve the puzzle, unlock the secret—the metaphors mount up, as they wrack their brains to deal with this vast machine grinding away at their lives, this intricate machination … this contraption, as we have chosen to call it, and then to pick on the term Alfred used later, the fantasmagorie. To what can we compare the fifteen cahiers Alfred allowed to survive from his days on Devil’s Island, those subject to his own self-censorship? They are not quite modern children’s scrapbooks or workbooks, fashionable commonplace books of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, florilegia and posies. They are not diaries or journals with regular chronological entries or confessional account-books containing reflective meditations. They are almost sui generis, heterogenous compilations of diverse modalities of written material. They could perhaps be considered maps of his mind, both as he wished to be seen by himself and others, and as he sought to discover what and who he was.23 They could be considered somewhat controlled images of his intellectual aspirations as he remembered them and as he now tried to reconstruct them. The full problematics of their designation, however, has to be put 22 In one of his satirical tales called “Jean Marteu,” Anatole France makes the character Monsieur Bergeret explain that “There are just laws. But law having been instituted for the defence of society, in its spirit cannot be more equitable than that society. As long as a society is founded on injustice the function of laws will be to defend and maintain that injustice. And the more unjust they are the worthier of respect they will appear. Notice also that, ancient as most of them are, they do not exactly represent present unrighteousness but past unrighteousnesses which is ruder and crasser. They are monuments of the Dark Ages which have lingered on into brighter days” (France, Cranquebille, Putois Riquet and other Profitable Tales, trans. Winifred Stevens [London: The Bodeley Head, 1925 (1916)], 203). This kind of cynical rationalization—the law must protect society from its own weaknesses and the assimilated enemies at its core—was characteristic of many liberal and even Jewish anti-Dreyfusards. 23 Christopher Columbus kept two sets of ships’ logs, one to show his fellow officers aboard ship, and one to work-out the real details of the journey of discovery and its meaningful patterns of revelation. — 251 —

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off to another time.24 Unlike other contemporary books on the Affair, mine is less interested in the historical facts of the case that the official documents support or the private threads spun out by various parties to the events, than in the hidden but substantial nature of the experience itself, its pattern of tension-filled mentalitis. Hence my goal is to look to ideas, words, concepts and books in the matrix of the players just before, during, and a few years after the phenomena. This means fictional along with philosophical books, imaginative writers and social scientists, writers involved on both sides of the Affair, and contemporaries who remained aloof, indifferent, or seemingly ignorant of the tumultuous happenings around them. But some of the writers who later became involved can help us understand the man, his milieu and mentality not only when they address specifically the events and personages of the Affair—Anatole France, Marcel Proust, and so on—but in two other ways: first, in books which do not at all deal with the issues of the Affair, these authors demonstrate how the same ideas, images, characters, and situations appeared and were managed so as to form the matrix in which Dreyfus would experience his ordeal or the others see and react to that ordeal; and second by demonstrating how Dreyfus’s near contemporaries or progenitors or subsequent generations experienced the world, in which our hindsight lets us see analogies, in ways so different from his own conceptions, affective and cognitive, that what he writes and draws stands out, crying for notice, even when we cannot understand or explain his words or actions. In a novel published in 1886, and so composed at least eight years before Dreyfus’ arrest, the son of his former teacher at lycée and mentor with whom he kept in touch until his imprisonment, a man somewhat Alfred’s senior on his way to becoming a well-known fictional author and psychological essayist, Paul Bourget25 writes about a woman who gives in to her passions and engages in an adulterous love affair with her husband’s best friend from adolescence, and about the young aristocrat who becomes her lover and almost goes through a crisis of conscience 24 Volume III will pick up this discussion again. 25 According to Michel and Nivet, Bourget had been a close friend of Octave Mirbeau and the radicals during the 1880s and early 1890s, but his reactionary ideas distanced himself from the anarchists, to the point where Bourget became one of their favorite têtes de Turc (targets), particularly after he published his Essais de psychologie contemporaine (Combats esthetiques I, notes, 455). — 252 —

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as he realizes the harm he has done to the couple. To a great degree, of course, Bourget’s novel, Crime d’Amour,26 has absolutely nothing to do with the Dreyfus Affair, let alone with Alfred and Lucie Dreyfus, or any of the political issues raised by the arrest and condemnation of the Jewish captain. Nevertheless, and perhaps precisely because there is no specific or contingent connection between the work of fiction and the historical object of the Affair, what is written about by Bourget can offer an insight into the mentality of the milieu into which Alfred and his wife were plunged by the endless lies of that Affair. Thus, in his thoughtless pursuit of his own pleasures, the idle baron, Armand, ruins the marriage and lives of his friends; and when each of them in turn come to speak of their anguish and pain to him, the aristocratic rogue is struck by the effect of his actions, at first unable to grasp correctly the sincerity or intensity of their feelings. Once he sees that the love affair will cause him more trouble than the sexual pleasures are worth, he decides to end his relationship, calling this break a sacrifice to his own honor, in other words, cynically trying to convince himself of his own innocence, loyalty, and dignity. These rationalizations deserve some scrutiny: How keenly he had made her feel the arrogant outrage inflicted by his honor as a man, for it was in the name of this honor that he had sacrificed her. Ah! Had he loved her, how lightly he would have held this honor, just as she had lightly held her own; but how could he have loved her since from the very first he had believed her guilty of deception?27 For Armand, all women are by their nature—a concomitant of their sex—deceivers, social manipulators, and practiced seductresses. Hence, when Helen Chazel insists on her love for him and on the utter sincerity of her insistence that Armand is her first lover outside of wedlock, Armand treats this as irrefragable or irrefrangible proof of a double deception, first that she can love any man at all in such a romantic way and second that she can extend the game of duplicity to both her lover 26 Paul Bourget, Crime d’Amour, trans. Anon. (New York: Ace Books, 1953). 27 Ibid., 104. — 253 —

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and her husband, Alfred.28 Helen’s pleas of innocence do not strike the baron as anything but part of an elaborate charade, which includes the language and the imagery of a pseudo-religion of female deception, iniquity and martyrdom. “She was like one under sentence of death who is willing to die, but whose worst agony is the powerlessness to exclaim before death: ‘I am innocent.’”29 All this, as the narrator describes Armand’s egotistical self-delusion, is nothing but a sham image of an “hideous injustice” enacted by Helen, so that “the mortal crises through which she was passing” was mere “drama,” but, the narrator explains, revealing the supposed reality underlying this delusion, “he had no suspicion of the drama that was being enacted in this distempered soul.”30 The baron’s troubled conscience, insofar as it can be credited as more than mere affronted honor in that superficial sense of aristocratic entitlement, contrasts sharply with the “mad and morbid thought” that comes to obsess Madam Chazel. The more Helen was sensible of having been irredeemably misunderstood, the more a frightful attraction impelled her to become just the opposite of what she had formerly been. A vertigo seized her, and, as it were, a delirious longing for degradation.31 This onset of madness surely is no more than the novelist’s own romantic exaggeration in what is not much more than a somewhat salacious work of fiction, hardly his best creative work, which was to come later in the next century, and not really to be associated with his own more philosophical writings on contemporary psychology. Still, this outline of the process of mental illness afflicting the guilt-ridden wife, which leads inexorably to her physical illness and eventual demise, provides an interesting analogue to what happened to Alfred Dreyfus and his wife, and a contrast to the processes by which they maintained their loyalty and faith in reason, justice, and love. Like Alfred, whose 28 In normal terms, the coincidence of the fictional husband’s name with that of Captain Dreyfus is without meaning, but in terms of the psychohistorical and midrashic lens through which we are examining the historical object of the Dreyfus Affair, the coincidence is significant. 29 Bourget, Crime d’Amour, 104. 30 Ibid., 105. 31 Ibid., 106. — 254 —

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behavior was monitored by his military guards after his arrest, the moral crisis—and we have already discussed how the word moral in the nineteenth century still kept much of its classical sense of psychological, epistemological, cognitive, and mental processes—Helen “began to exhibit strange phenomena of nervous gaiety”32—with “nervous” also straddling the semantic zone we use to designate emotional and hormonal phenomena. The Eternal Jew in Time’s Cul-de-sac Un jour, l’éternel juif-colporteur—il écume les îles comme les continents—arrive dans le district avec une boîte de bijoux en cuivre doré. “One day, the eternal Jewish peddler—he skims over islands as he does continents—arrived in our district with a box of gold-colored copper jewelry.” — Paul Gauguin33 In bono et in malo, for better or for worse, as a welcome figure or horrible spectre, the Eternal or Wandering Jew permeates the imagination of the late nineteenth century, even turning up in Paul Gauguin’s tropical paradise of Tahiti.34 Exotic and foreign, this caricature of the poor undying Hebrew wanderer haunts not only poetry and novels, but also shows up in travel literature, romantic and sentimental newspaper reports, and political propaganda.35 Real Jewish men and 32 Ibid. 33 Gauguin et Morice, Noa Noa, 52. On Charles Morice (1861-1919) see Mirbeau, Combats esthetiques, II, 356, n. 4. 34 Mirbeau writes in L’Echo de Paris, for 14 November 1893, that Gauguin had returned from three years of exotic self-imposed exile with a new marvelous view of nature, and he contrasts the painter’s experiences with those of Le Mariage de Loti (1880); both men were searching for themselves in the tropics, but whereas Pierre Loti showed his small soul satisfied with superficial gratification of his senses, Gauguin made an intimate study of the natives of Polynesia (“les Maories”) and learned to respect their culture and to see nature in a new way, his art being but a translation of these intellectual ideas and aesthetic sensations (Combats esthetiques, II, 46). 35 Gauguin’s travel diary Noa Noa was co-written with his friend, the symbolist poet Charles Morice. According to one anonymous online source, “It is not surprising that, for those who disliked Gauguin’s art, Morice’s preface could be dismissed also as ‘modernistic’ and ‘decadent.’ Seemingly by extension Morice himself was wrongly described as an ‘Israelite’ in the right-wing journal La — 255 —

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women, however assimilated they may feel themselves to be, invisible and silent in a kind of safe anonymity, stand out when the anti-Semites need a scapegoat: then, suddenly, stability is gone from their lives and individuality replaced by stereotyped and grotesque imagery. History is often perceived as totally incoherent, and, being indigestible, is replaced by myth.36 Rational thought is turned upside down and what tumbles out of the black chest is humiliating curiosity, condescending trivialization, and hatred. Many scholars have discussed how the distorted image came into being and why it spread so easily through the minds, mouths, and texts of modern European culture. We ask: what did it feel like to wake up inside such a phantasmagoria and then to live in something that was nothing but a mad swirling repetition of illusions and delusions for the next five years?37 Near the close of the first of the three volumes38 that conclude the fictional biography of the musical genius Jean Christophe by Romain Rolland (1886-1944), the central eponymous figure prepares to escape from Germany to elude police arrest for a fracas in his home town, to seek political asylum in France that he has longed for most of his life and to enjoy what he hopes will be a more congenial and welcoming cultural environment for his musical talents.39 The date of this action is Libre Parole, an indication of the irrational anti-semitism already rampant in France on the eve of the Dreyfus affair” (“Tahiti: About Paul Gauguin”). 36 Tarde: “On s’apercevait alors que l’incohérence indigeste des faits de l’histoire, tous résolubles en courants d’exemples différents dont ils sont la recontre, elle-même destinée à être copiée plus ou moins exactement, ne prouve rien contre la régularoté fondamentale du monde social et contre la possibilité d’une science sociale, qu’à vrai dire cette science existe, à l’état épars, dans la petite experience de chacun de nous, et qu’il suffit d’en rajuster les fragments”: We can see that the undigested facts of history are absorbed into a flow of different examples among those we encounter, the flux destined to be copied more or less exactly, proves nothing against the fundamental regularity of the social world nor the possibility of a social science that, truth to tell, already exists, in a disorderly state, in the limited experiences of each one of us, and that it is enough to rearrange the fragments (Les lois de l’imitation, 13). 37 Gabriel Tarde: “Rien n’empêche de supposer malgré cela que chaque apparition dans cette fantasmagorie soit produite et déterminée même à en amener une autre, qu’elle traivaille même à en amener une autre”; Nothing prevents the supposition that each apparation in this phantasmagoria should be produced and determined even by being led to another, that it works even by leading it to another (Les lois de l’imitation, 5). 38 Originally published in four main parts over a period from 1904 to 1912, the English version has been divided into three volumes, which the Modern Library divides into three volumes printed in one. Each separately paginated; thus the two passages we are dealing with appear in Vol. I, “The Dawn,” Section 4, “Revolt.” For further details see the translator-editor’s comments in the “Preface,” Vol. I, iii-iv. 39 Honoré de Balzac, The Quest of the Absolute: “The first impression which calls for the long dormant — 256 —

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somewhere near the end of the final decade of the nineteenth century. Of the young musician-composer, Jean-Christophe Kraaft, in words that seem to express the same kind of experience to be found more than a decade later in Marcel Proust’s A la recherche de temps perdu, the narrator explains: It seemed to him that he had already seen them, the two trees, the pond . . .—and suddenly he had one of those moments of giddiness which open great distances in the plain of life. A chasm in Time. He knew not where he was, who he was, in what age he lived, through how many ages he lived, through how many ages he had been so. Christophe had a feeling that it had already been, that what was, now, was not, but in some other time. He was no longer himself. He was able to see himself from outside, from a great distance, as though it were someone else standing there in that place. He heard the buzzing of memory and of an unknown creature within himself, the blood boiled in his veins and roared: 40 And then, separated only by a thrice repeated incomplete phrase that is roiling inside of himself as though from an unconscious beast41 within, “Thus. . . Thus . . . Thus . . .,” the text carries on with a seemingly less metaphysical statement, which nevertheless places the hero in a context that almost identifies him with the mythic figure of the Wandering or Eternal Jew found in many novels42 of the fin-de-siècle. Specifically, the narrator refers to the hero’s recent ancestors who came to Germany emotion of youth is nearly always followed by a mute wonder such as children feel when, for the first time, they hear music. Some children laugh at first, and then grow thoughtful; others listen gravely for a while, and then begin to laugh; but there are souls who are destined for poetry or for love, and they listen long, with a mute request to hear the music again; their eyes are lighted up with pleasure, or with a dawning sense of wonder at the Infinite” (108). Rolland’s novel is partly based on his friend and later estranged correspondant André Suarès, a Sephardic Jew from Marseilles. 40 Romain Rolland, Jean Christophe, 596. Italics added. 41 Perhaps something akin the powerful repressed Id in Freudian psychoanalysis; but perhaps more likely to be the kind of Nietzschian blond-beast of Teutonic culture that Rolland makes Christophe speak to himself about. 42 E.g., Eugène Sue, Le Juif errant (The Wandering Jew: A Tale of the Jesuits [London: John Hamilton, 1934]). — 257 —

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from the Low Countries in their own Wanderlust and search for musical culture. The centuries whirled through him . . . Many other Kraafts had passed the experiences which were his on that day, and had tasted the wretchedness of the last hour on their native soil. A wandering race banished everywhere for their independence and disturbing qualities. A race always the prey of an inner demon that never let it settle anywhere. A race attached to the soil from which it was torn, and never, never, ceasing to love it. There is in the life of Alfred Dreyfus also “a chasm in time” that opens up—with similar points of analogy in confusion, alienation, and anomie that are revealed—the young military officer finds himself accused of treason, arrested, and sent into exile for the term of his life. The similarity between the fictional Christophe and the historical Dreyfus is not exact, nor are the points of analogy more than hints, and yet nevertheless what Romain Rolland describes is fully pregnant with meanings and implications, the very fact of the language here being imprecise and oblique suggesting the kind of rich depths rabbis search for in midrash and psychoanalysts in their listening sessions.43 That is because at its core midrash, based on “the verb derash, which has the basic meaning of ‘inquire of,’ ‘seek,’ ‘look intensely into,’ has the same semantic power as an oracle in pre-rabbinical times and the prestige of prophecy that plays such a key role in the formation of ethical Judaism.44 In fact, “the verb derash, used in pre-exile texts to designate the oracular inquiry of God by one who approached the diviner, acquired a specialized meaning, that of the act of ‘interpretation’ of the diviner himself.”45 Thus these 43

Even more, when Mirbeau is described by his modern editors as having at the heart of his writings on art a contradiction—as much about art as literature and about the ideals of society—they could also be talking about Dreyfus. For the one, the problem lies in his inability to coordinate the political agenda he had with the aesthetic principles he wished to apply in his critical assessment of modern painting and novels; in the other, the Jewish exile was attempting to express his own deepest thoughts, for the first time in his life, under conditions of deprivation and torment; see Mirbeau, Combats esthetiques, II, 68n10. 44 Paul Mandel, “The Origins of Midrash in the Second Temple Period,” in Barkhos, ed., Current Trends in the Study of Midrash (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2006), 11. 45 Mandel, “The Origins of Midrash,” 25. More than this, it is pointed out that “These diviners are designated by the term melitz (= meturgumen, interpreter…)” (25n63), which suggests that the — 258 —

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words recall and echo what other writers and artists had depicted in the course of the nineteenth century in their search for a way of understanding the complexity of human character, of individual personality and unconscious collective behavior—and how they wrote and how they painted, taking these cultural acts in the broadest sense possible, so as to include popular and innovative modes of entertainment and technological reproduction of natural phenomena that seemed suddenly to transform both the perceptions and imaginations of the fin de siècle period—are illuminating, instructive and highly suggestive in our attempt to understand the Dreyfus Affair.46 Thus here, as so often in this book, we will stop before we draw out the implications and then trace out the affinities between these comments in Jean Christophe as far as we can, before the process becomes so distorting as to deny the project altogether, after which we will have to begin again from another point of entry. This is because, as I cannot repeat often enough, this is not a historical study but a cultural analysis, a midrashic exercise, and a mentalities approach. I also cannot stress too much that as I have read Dreyfus—and the center of the discussions, even when they seem to wander off topic, are Dreyfus’s own writing—I melitza of the rabbis that we have earlier seen to be an essential component of Jewish rhetorical beauty does not stop in questions of style and taste but continues into the whole area of meaning and implication; so that word (textualized knowledge, logos) and act (performed and produced action, mythos) are deeply implicated in one another, as much in verbal communications as in the entire symbol system that is civilization. In other words, midrash (because of its roots in derash) is not limited to matters of instruction and interpretation, but of creation and the aesthetics of symbolic thinking altogether. The midrash seeks to understand the meanings of the Scripture and thus recreates the sacred writing itself, but also because the interpretation as a process of understanding is not confined to strictly exegetical exercises but generates new ways of seeing, thinking about, feeling, and acting in the world, the midrash is also a way of changing experience and history. Cp. Carol Barkhos, “Method(ological) Matters in the Study of Midrash,” in Barkhos, ed., Current Trends, 166. 46 According to the Rambam (Maimonides) in his Guide for the Perplexed, “Man’s distinction does not consist in the possession of imagination, and the action of imagination is not the same as the action of the intellect, but the reverse of it. For the intellect analyses and divides the component parts of things, it forms abstract ideas of them, represents them in their true form as well as in their casual relations, derived from one object a great many facts, which—for the intellect— totally differ from each other, just as two human individuals appear different to the imagination … Imagination has none of these functions. It only perceives the individual, the compound in that aggregate condition in which it presents itself to the senses; or it combines things which exist separately, joins some of them together, and represents them all as one body or as a force of the body” (trans. M. Friedländer, 2nd ed. rev. [New York: Dover Publications, 1956; based on the 1904 edition], Part I, Chapter 72, 130. All citations from Guide for the Perplexed are taken from this edition). — 259 —

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have found myself reading or re-reading the books and authors he mentions, and the contexts in which those books he read and commented upon were generated in their own milieus. Thus, take a look at two other quotations as a way to enter into the deepest, darkest, most secret aspects of Alfred Dreyfus’s soul, the places where, we may imagine—but only that—he had exposed himself in the missing three or four years of notebooks he kept while on Devil’s Island and which he destroyed, whether with or without the advice of his family and friends. The first citation comes from the Sodom and Gemorrah section of Proust’s long multi-volumed novel. First, here is what Proust writes: But Swann belonged to that stout Jewish race, in whose vital energy, its resistance to death, its individual members seem to share. Stricken severally by their own diseases, as it is stricken itself by persecution, they continue indefinitely to struggle against terrible suffering which may be prolonged beyond every apparently possible limit, when one already sees nothing more than a prophet’s beard surmounted by a huge nose which dilates to inhale its last breath, before the hour strikes for the ritual prayers and the punctual procession begins of distant relatives advancing with mechanical movements, as upon an Assyrian frieze. In the second citation, taken from a critical essay written on the above text, Sherban Sidery is discussing the relationship of Marcel Proust to his Narrator (also called Marcel) in one of the most disturbing passages in all of A la recherche du temps perdus, the scene in which Charles Swann, an old, dying man who is in many ways model, mentor, and reflection of the protagonist, visits the snobbish party of the Guermantes after many years of social ostracism, and finds, as it is a delicate time in the Dreyfus Affair, that he is harangued on the repercussions of that painful episode in French history, as though he were both the embodiment of all Jews and responsible for the consequences of the sharp divisions in French society. Sidery remarks, more subjectively about Proust’s character and its roots in his emotional milieu than might be acceptable in contemporary critical theory: — 260 —

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This extraordinary paragraph, in which Proust seems to foretell the Hitlerian death-camps, is particularly revealing: “they continue indefinitely to struggle against terrible suffering which may be prolonged beyond every possible limit….” The image is not merely dramatic; I feel that it is intensely personal. A Gentile could never have written it, nor framed it in a style so moving, cruel and authoritative. Become a prophet himself, the author is, as it were, possessed by the spirit of his persecuted race. His vision arises from a gulf where memory is crystallized and Time suspended, where what has been and what is now merge with is yet to be. Then the burst of illumination passes, and the novelist can return to the everyday world of appearances, and it is here that he draws his final portrait of his hero, integrated once again into the fugitive social world, in which everything decays and passes.47 There are several features of this interesting critical paragraph that further our discussion of Alfred Dreyfus, which as I have already said almost invariably slides into a discussion of Marcel Proust. Cutting through the protocols of formal literary criticism which demand textual and historical evidence to prove statements made about the passage under scrutiny—and more extremely against the post-modernist erasure of the author, a principle that pushes the older modernist notion of the intentional fallacy” to its extreme—Sidery tells what he “feels” about the passage, not just what he judges to be its dramatic use of rhetoric. And what he feels is the otherwise un-provable assertion that these remarks about Swann are personal to both the Narrator and to the Author of the novel. But by personal here is meant something more than the individual temperament and proclivities of the two Marcels; the personal is a collective phenomena, racial—so long as we take “race” in the senses that Proust, Dreyfus and other nineteenth-century Frenchmen would have meant, and which we can find rooted, less in the anti-Semitic ravings of a lunatic like Edouard Drumont and embodied in the ideology of Nazi racial laws, that is, genetic, biological and moralistic, and more, 47 Sherban Sidery, “Israel’s Way”’ in Quennell, ed., Marcel Proust, 90. — 261 —

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rather, part of a continuum with nation, culture, and collective personality. These are the features of “race” found in the writings of Taine, Renan and Michelet. Thus for Sidery to claim that a non-Jew could never have written the ensuing lines because of their cultural knowledge, personal insight, and collective experience, is indicative of a way of reading Proust and other writers and thinkers of the period that cannot be limited by either the intentional fallacy—wherein an author’s conscious motives would determine the meaning of a text, rather than the milieu in which he lives, the tradition that provides the substance and shapes of the literary discourses he inherits and studies, and the competence and critical attitudes of the ordinary and professional readers who constitute the audience and the filter through which later readers like ourselves receive the work in question; or by the essentialist fallacy—the double-notion that, on the one hand, no one but an insider can ever comprehend sympathetically the situation and feelings of another group without reductive distortions and, on the other hand, that even categorizing a person or group by their historical traditions, self-proclaimed identity, or socially-constructed appearance and function is politically incorrect and hence ultra vires to the contemporary critic. Instead of adhering to the theories that make these so-called fallacies primal sins, Sidery follows another path that wanders away, back into the kind of criticisms that were practiced when rhetoric was regnant as an institutionalized course (curriculum) of study, a culturally agreed-upon body of knowledge, and an unquestioned way of seeing the world.48 48 Michel Foucault has argued that in modern discourse writing moves closer to its original sources in oral tradition so that for us “[l]iterature is the reverse of rhetoric”; it is as though “rhetoric ceaselessly repeat[s] the speech of the Infinite that would never come to an end”; see “Language to Infinity” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald S. Bouchard, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 65. This kind of post-modernistic ideology makes all sorts of assumptions that run against the grain of the complex counter-history of Jewish tradition, from the relative and dynamic relations between oral and written texts to the role of rhetoric and midrash—all of which I have been writing about for close to forty years, and are further refined in this book on Dreyfus. As Jessica Benjamin writes in “Recognition and Destruction: An Outline of Intersubjectivity,” with the dynamic premises she does not acknowledge in Gabriel Tarde, let alone other thinkers of the nineteenth century Dreyfus was annotating in his cahiers, “Intersubjectivity was formulated in deliberate contrast to the logic of subject and object, which predominates in Western philosophy and science. It refers to that zone of experience or theory in which the other is not merely the object of the ego’s need/drive or cognition/perception but has a separate and equivalent center of self.” This could draw on Martin Buber’s discussions of I/thou relations or Emmanuel Levinas’ — 262 —

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And yet there is at the core of this critical statement, an aperçu that takes us back right into the first citation we began with from Romain Rolland and which has given this section of our book its title, “A Chasm in Time.” This perception reads: “His vision arises from a gulf where memory is crystallized and Time suspended, where what has been and what is now merge with is yet to be.” The Prison Notebooks as a Gamorah “Did you know, said a Greek to a Jew, “that several years ago when excavations were being made at Athens, a long wire was discovered?” “Well, what of it?” asked the Jew. “Don’t you understand?” answered the Greek. “It shows that our forefathers, the ancient Greeks, already in their times used the telegraph.” “That’s nothing,” replied the Jew. “The other day while excavating in Jerusalem they found no wires at all.” “What does that prove?” “Why, it proves that the ancient Hebrews already had wireless telegraphy.”49 concept of the interinanimation of souls in dialogue with one another. Benjamin could also learn from midrash as a process of relationships, a way of interpreting experience, and a lens to focus decisions and responses to the decisions of others, when she says: “Recognition between persons is essentially mutual. By our very enjoyment of the other’s confirming response, we recognize her in return.” But not all relationships are friendly or enjoyable, let alone symmetrical and licit, and so the power of transforming the world of self and others rests on the premise that what we can see, feel, think, and say is not all there is to deal with; and this comes along with the kind of things we cannot perceive or sense as real, what we conceive of as thoughts and images, and the language, grammar, and rhetoric we inherit—all need to be constantly challenged and questioned, and where necessary broken apart and reassembled. Benjamin argues then: “The movement out of the world of complementary power relations into the world of mutual understanding constitutes an important step in the dismantling of omnipotence [both in terms of the State and all its institutionalized agencies of violence and coercion and the self ’s illusion of loyalty and faith in the order of such a projected myth]: power is dissolved rather than transferred back and forth between child and mother in an endless cycle [as both Alfred and Lucie Dreyfus hope, wait and try to nudge the system of the State to recognize and revise its judicial errors] … The mind’s ability [the midrashing lens and contraption] to manipulate, to displace, to reverse, to turn one thing into another, is not a mere negative of reality [the metaphor of photography and all its developed applications and refinements] but the source of mental creativity.” Read those lines with the inserted words and the application to the Dreyfus Affair starts to come into focus. 49 An old joke compiled and retold by S. Felix Mendelsohn, The Jew Laughs: Humorous Stories and — 263 —

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Before reading the prison notebooks from Devil’s Island it would have been difficult to guess what type of a mind the young Captain had. Like others, I had assumed that he was first and foremost a military man ambitious to achieve high status through promotion in the French Army, loyal to its discipline and national purpose, with little concern for politics or culture outside of the people he dealt with at work in the High Command—albeit his Jewishness would have restricted the number of fellow officers willing to socialize with him.50 Almost all contemporary eyewitnesses report that he was perceived to be aloof and introverted because of his unwillingness to join in the leisure-time activities of his fellows, most of whom were young Catholic graduates from the rural bourgeoisie and impoverished aristocracy. We also can guess, along with the accepted point of view, that as he was an army engineer, Dreyfus was particularly interested in practical mathematics and the sciences, what would today be called “technology,” and therefore that his philosophical views would have been shaped by the positivism and rationalism of the late nineteenth century. Though he might have sowed a few wild oats before his marriage, the serious evidence51 essentially points to Alfred Dreyfus as being very much a bourgeois homebody, happy with his wife and two children, and close to both his own family and that of Lucie Hadamard. Despite slanderous rumors spread by the anti-Semites during the Affair, there is no indication that he indulged in alcoholic bouts, gambling, or similar debauchery. While not being ascetic or puritanical, he did have the Jewish sense of strict personal hygiene, devoted family loyalty, and constant self-control, like many other Jews in his class, especially those Alsatian-Ashkenaz families who had chosen to continue their French citizenship after the debacle of 1870. They made this choice even at the price of dividing up branches of the family between two countries; consequently, some members of an extended family would remain in the German-occupied lands to look after business matters and to care for sick and aged parents, while they would bring up their children in French schools and maintain strong ties with those relatives, Anecdotes (Chicago: L. M. Stein, 1935), 86-87. 50 Faur: “Only torpid minds perceive the dynamics of reality as something static, continuous and contiguous, and find no discrepancy between what may be found in a textbook and the case about to be adjudicated” (“Of Cultural Intimidation and other Miscellanea: Bar-Sheshakh vs. Raba,” Review of Rabbinic Judaism 5 (2002): 35). 51 Rather than anti-Semitic rumours in the rightwing press and scandal-mongering exposés from the period and thereafter. — 264 —

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usually the majority number, who made the migration into France. In essence, then, Alfred Dreyfus appeared to be, up to the time of his arrest and imprisonment, that kind of well-assimilated, moderately wealthy Jew who is home- and family-centered, certainly self-identified as a Jew but with modern, secular views of religion. Although we know that Lucie was an accomplished pianist and probably therefore played at home for the entertainment of her husband and children, there is no prior indication of any other activities in the Dreyfus family which could be called artistic, literary or scholarly; and no hint of either Alfred or Lucie keeping up with the latest literary trends or philosophical schools of thought, other than what they may have read in middle-brow newspapers and weekly magazines. In other words, we know almost nothing about their cultural life other than what they hint at in their letters from 1894 to 1898. Similarly, of their Jewishness the precise details are lacking: we do not know for sure that Alfred was circumcised, had a Hebrew name, went to cheder to learn Hebrew or was instructed at home by his father or older siblings, had a bar mitzvah, davened and put on tfillin, kept kosher, or anything, and we don’t know what Lucie learned at home about homemaking Jewish style or in a Hebrew class for girls, whether she lit candles on Friday evening, prepared a special Shabbat meal, or anything, all that being only implied by the general comments on the Hadamard family and their friends. Though we find a few hints they are loose threads, and they don’t even constitute, when wrapped around one another, a piece of wire. But as the old story goes, if there was no wire, maybe there was a form of wireless communication. Why not? So far as Alfred goes, the prison notebooks change the standard picture of Dreyfus altogether. The evidence is now compelling. The range of his reading, the breadth of knowledge, and the critical sensibility revealed in these little essays, commentaries, and translations indicate something far more profound and sensitive in both the husband and wife. For while the writing in the cahiers is certainly Alfred’s alone and represents a mind that has been thinking about the ideas in the texts he reads in prison for a much longer period in his life, the choice of those books at the same time represents both his own choices and those made for him by Lucie, who, for most of the period of his incarceration, acted as his research agent, as it were, finding and sending him titles she knew would interest him and which, we may also guess, they had discussed before at home and with their families. It would be most unlikely for a — 265 —

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man so alienated and isolated from formal life to develop new tastes and sensibilities, a complete and complex background knowledge acquired under pressure. Cut off from his family except in censored letters, continuing to reel under the shock of arrest and accusation of treason and not allowed to know the state of his case and the rising tide of sympathy in what would in retrospect be known as the Dreyfus Affair, he could not have suddenly and under duress created the intellectual and cultural contexts in which the mature and critical thought he displays in the notebooks shows itself. Moreover, physically suffering from the unfamiliar tropical heat and its attendant illnesses, the sensory deprivations of his tightly controlled cell-life wherein no one spoke to him or seemed to listen to anything he said, and the excruciating torture of being strapped into his bed each evening, how could he have opened up in his own mind new spaces for contemplation and analytical thought, if he had not already been practiced in these exercises? The other features of the notebooks, particularly the obsessional drawing of small repeated images, suggest that part of his mind needed something else to keep at bay not only suicidal thoughts but the rage he had already shown in the first few days after his arrest? While the long columns of mathematical formulae worked out on the pages of the cahiers bear witness to his need to keep his mind working within rational patterns and controlled understanding of the world, it is in the written essays that his real attention seems to be placed.52 The repetition of some of the small written exercises also show that, lacking human contact and feedback to his thoughts, he sometimes needed to come back to them again and again, as though he were stuttering, as when in the same short paragraph he will write the same phrase or sentence several times. As in the epistles to Lucie, these incremental repetitions and cybernetic corrections indicate a habit of mind that generates thought in terms of rabbinical conversation and dialogue, debate, and self-questioning. Thus, on the whole, the notebooks manifest something more and other than random jottings and obsessive or compulsive iterations. They contain a body of essays in some ways like those of Montaigne, an author favored by Dreyfus, with maturing thoughts about historiography, 52

It has been suggested by friends and former students of mine who have looked at samples of these formulae, equations, and exercises that Dreyfus was doing more than practicing by rote lessons he had learned; he was actually playing with the formulations and testing the limits of his own ability to think logically. — 266 —

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aesthetics, morals, and related topics. In one sense, of course, we find that in the choice of passages to write about or translate, Dreyfus is concerned with exploring ideas related to his current condition of imprisonment, separation from his family, doubts about the historical forces (natural and metaphysical) that have placed him in this untenable situation, the meaning of the doubts raised in his mind about the efficacy of reason, justice, and science (that is, epistemology). In another sense, Dreyfus takes a critical position in regard to many of the authors he comments on or translates, not accepting their authoritative views, and playing one writer off against another. He also demonstrates an aspect of his unconscious wrestling with the deeper implications of these ideas that he reads about, most of which came from classical writers and authors from the nineteenth century, when we see his paraphrases and reconstructions of the books he has been contemplating, and has perhaps been mulling over in his mind for many years, even before the Affair. The time and place of his exile and solitary confinement may, therefore, be more than just qualities of sensory deprivation; they also be a field of activity outside of time and space for reflection and teasing apart of the various strands of personal, collective, and cultural memory—in short, his Denkraum, his cell of self-analysis and self-reconstruction. Not only is the range of authors Dreyfus has chosen to discuss wider than his critics and supporters have usually imagined in their accounts, but the attitude he takes towards the most important writers of his age—he lists Hippolyte Taine, Ernest Renan, Jules Michelet, and Charles Darwin—is critical, skeptical, and creative. These discussions, as well as his translations and annotations on literary texts—such as Montaigne, Shakespeare, Racine, Ibsen, and so on—are embedded in short essays on science and technology, e.g., the chemistry of digestion or the workings of photography; and they are related directly to his mathematical exercises and problem-solving. How these various literary, historical, and scientific materials fit with the multitude of drawings that fill up pages by themselves and appear around the written texts remains to be seen. They show that while in prison, suffering exile and physical and psychological torment, he was also undergoing an epistemological crisis: what he believed was real and true before was put in doubt, and he tried through his various modes of filling the pages of the cahiers to preserve and protect his sanity and his moral integrity. His writings do not encompass only what came through his mind, filtered by his cultural — 267 —

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conceptions, but also how he could know about the world and his experience of it, the way he saw the universe of nature and history itself, the manner of perception and the reception of those external stimuli, coming to doubt his ability to keep his mind together—in harmony with his preconceptions, and whether or not what he consciously recalled of his various earlier experiences adequately constituted his mind. Joshua Levinson sees the midrash as a rabbinical mechanism or lens53 through which a “hermeneutical crisis” could be negotiated safely and sanely, because the whole experience of the world following the Fall of the Temple and the loss of the State of Israel as reflected or refracted through Scriptures and standard interpretations did not match their actual sense of reality.54 Throughout the Galut, the Dispersion and the endless persecutions—and even in the periods of deceptive toleration and prosperity— the Jewish imagination constantly called upon midrashic techniques to interpret the world and their place in it; and if this is true for all of Israel, so too for an individual Jew like Alfred Dreyfus. From the time of the Geonim of Babylonia and their followers in the lands of Exile, this act of interpretation by midrash involved three kinds of responsibility: first, to ensure the transmission of the tradition itself through instruction in what to read and how to read it, the active study of holy books and the commentaries continuously created upon it; second, the inculcation of processes for both rational exegetical methods and for poetic enhancements of the sacred lore; and third, for the practical implementation or application of the Law thus reconceived by the collective institutions and the component individuals.55 That last responsibility also came to include, as more and more individual Jews departed in varying degrees from the controlled monitoring by family and community, an internalization of both the crisis itself, from a hermeneutical to an epistemological crisis, and thus to a matter of psychology and aesthetics, to the way the mind itself evaluates its place in the world of human relationships and the harmony it achieves between its tension-ridden impulses to dance with the non-Jewish and the Jewish communities it finds itself within. The contemporary crisis for Alfred Dreyfus is therefore a varia53 It can also be thought of, in the words of André Aude, a “waltz of letters” (valse de lettres) in “Chronique de ma recontre avec le Midrash,” Le Champ du Midrash, http://www.lechampdumidrash. net/. 54 Joshua Levinson, “Literary Approaches to Midrash” in Barkhos, ed., Current Trends, 191. 55 Ibid., 193. — 268 —

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tion on what Levinson describes as pertinent to the historical moment of the formation of the Babylonian Talmud: This double move of rejection and interpretation is illustrative of the cultural tensions in the period—between rationalism and textual commitment—and nicely exemplifies the remarks of Jameson56 that hermeneutical traditions spring from “the desperate attempt of the society in question to assimilate monuments of other times and places, whose original impulses were quite foreign to them and which required a kind of rewriting.”57 However, this statement in itself and in the context of its origins in Jameson’s Marxist ideology washes out the intensity of the Jewish crisis of the leaders of the Babylonian academies and of later individual Jews working their way towards assimilation and into modern European civility without losing their core Jewish values or imagination. For, while each group in its own circumstances strives to produce answers that differ from all others in their specificity and in the processes by which they reach those decisions or reframe the doubts that keep them in a permanent state of crisis, so long as they adhere to the essential activity of trying to make sense out of words and facts that no longer make implicit, unquestioned sense, and adjust their behavior and their emotions to these questions and challenges, the symbolic center holds—and all things do not fly apart. Wild exaggerations, bizarre word-games, and even more dangerous mind-games take place, to be sure, and the doubts as to how far they should be taken seriously always remain to worry the thinking-person and his or her fellow Jews, as well as to discomfort and rouse the suspicions of the non-Jews around them. In a sense, these quests for coherence and continuity take in problems of aesthetics, in the same way as the epistemological challenges of the nineteenth century—through science, technology and revoltuiionary political institutions—express themselves through the arts and aesthetic theories. Three related problems have to be seen as separate but overlapping 56 Levinson is citing Frederic Jameson, The Ideologies of Theory: Essays 1971-1986 (St. Paul, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 5. 57 Levinson, “Literary Approaches to Midrash,” 194. — 269 —

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questions concerning the formation of a Jewish aesthetics that can encompass the diversity of Jewish artists, and going from those who separate themselves from the community and the tradition and merely regard themselves as ordinary men and women although of Jewish background; those who attempt to create their artistic achievements of performance and production with a specifically Jewish content and in what they understand to be a rabbinical or halachic soundness; as well as a variety of intermediary positions. These three issues are (1) a matter of perception and reproduction of what is seen within a tradition dominated by Greek-Christian notions of mimesis, imitation and mirror language or form, so as to allow for Jewish questions and challenges to this Platonic/Christian distrust of the world as created by God and participated in by people;58 (2) the matter of imagining or re-imaging the perceptions and memories of perceptions so as to enhance insight, confirming or enlarging the range of instructional and sanctifying acts, feelings and thoughts within Jewish life, and thus carrying out the conventional mitzvoth and those developed in aspects of tikkun ha’olam;59 and (3) the matter of a Jewish imagination and creative intelligence that can be juxtaposed to, experienced within, and evaluated and appreciated as part of the contextual movements of art in the whole of the civilized world, a crisis adumbrated in the secular world by the crystallization of something more than style and taste between these different modes of seeing, and registered in the images of the natural realm.60 58 This kind of mimesis is even more confused and contradictory than it seems to be at first sight: for it can range from exact mirror copying through a variety of refractions and diffractions to Tarde’s social imitations, then picking up the distortions of Taine’s fragmentary illusions and delusions coalescing into a semblance of myth as the phantasmagoria that pretends to be science and history can also come to be considered as part of the repetitions of the Law (Deuteronomy, Mishnah) as creative, speculative and sacred in itself, that is, midrash. On the relation of Taine to Tarde, see Tarde, Les lois de l’imitation, 82. Again, the role of Aby Warburg and Salomon Reinach will enter the discussion in subsequent books in this series. 59 In Volume III I will ask two major questions: (a) why did Dreyfus prefer David and Meissonier as painters over the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists formulating their programmes in his lifetime; and (b) why, though he appreciated Zola’s political efforts on his behalf, did he never engage with, let alone admit to reading, Zola’s novels, preferring those of Honoré de Balzac, George Sand, and even Jules Verne. 60 Aaron Scharf, Art and Photography (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1974 [1968]) reminds us that throughout the development of photography, in all its variations of technique and processing, there was often as much difference between one kind of photography and another as between one school of painting and another, and hence generalizations are always a tricky business. We have superadded to that difficulty by drawing an analogy between the transformations in perception occasioned by the changes in both the development of photography and the development of — 270 —

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As we have noted in earlier portions of this chapter, the matter of perception was highly controversial during the late nineteenth century because of scientific and aesthetic challenges to received wisdom, such as the invention of photography and the innovations of Impressionism and other forms of modernist art.61 But this matter can be parsed somewhat differently within a perspective that sees Jewish creativity as a matter of midrashing experience and memory, as well as sacred texts.62 artistic imagination and the liberation of Judaism from its previous structures in pre-modern Eastern Europe, the attempts by Jewish artists as individuals to assimilate into the mainstream of both technical and aesthetic movements, and the emergence or perhaps re-emergence of Jewish artists as a group with a communal debate as to their place in the modern world and their relationship to traditional Jewishness, as well as to the new problems of anti-Semitism and Zionism. 61 Scharf makes this crisis clear: “Convention notwithstanding, it was now possible to learn to see many of the new and startling forms, or to perceive them on a threshold level, but the subjects of high-speed photographs, taken from the 1870s, some with exposures as fast as 1/1000th and then, in the 1880s, 1/6000th of a second and less, could never be comprehended by the human eye alone. Though previously the photograph had been criticized for certain deficiencies of information, now the camera was accused of telling too much. Photographs of invisible objects taken though the microscope or telescope were known long before the instantaneous image, but because these had not posed a threat to vested artistic interests they were thought to fall safely with the purview of science or in the domain of visual curiosities. It was only, it seems, when some artists and their supporters began seriously to think in terms of another kind of truth, another kind of nature, when the restrictions of convention were seriously and consistently challenged, that the representation of natural conditions which escaped the unaided eye was considered detrimental to art” (Art and Photography, 19). Already in 1839, Samuel Morse, “on seeing Daguerre’s primitive photomicrographs … wrote enthusiastically to his brother of the possibility of a new universe being brought to light” (cited in Scharf, 304). 62 Marc Bregman, extrapolating from Heinemann, argues, “The rabbis did not interpret the Bible freely as simply in order to adapt the ancient text to contemporary taste. Rather, creative depiction and creative explication, the two primary aspects of the Rabbis’ organic thinking, exist in a symbiotic relationship … It is the synthesis of these two apparently contradictory aspects of the Aggadah which lends religious authority to Rabbinic thought and distinguishes it from the less textually oriented mythology of folk culture” (“Isaak Heinemann’s Classic Study”). Read from a slightly different angle, the passage may be construed to say that the rabbinical mode of imagining found historically in midrash and aggadah (virtually synonyms in Hebrew and Aramaic) crystallized under duress and in crisis the way Jews in the world of the Galut came to think about and feel themselves to be in the world. These people wandering through the lands of Exile in variations of persecution and temporary toleration had to be cognizant of the real dangers they were experiencing and to keep re-contextualizing those experiences in terms of the fixed body of texts that anchored them in a reality transcending the flux and absurdities of history, and in the remembered traditions of an interpreted and dreamed version of the sacred continuities of their existence as a people chosen by God and a nation in exile. Though these flights of the imagination and seemingly irrational acts of disregarding facts and circumstances, contingencies and ruptures in the wall of protective illusion may constitute something that looks like a myth or a fairy tale, the inculcation of midrashic thinking allowed for constant readjustments of the individual and collective consciousness to the exigencies of the moment and anticipation of further distortions of the surrounding society’s self-presentation as a national and ethnic permanence in the world. Thus Heinemann’s old-fashioned terminology about “natural folk,” “oral traditions,” and — 271 —

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If within Judaism there was a presumed predilection for the verbal, the intellectual and the analytical techniques of exegesis, new studies have explored the language of visualization with rabbinic commentaries and striven to understand the way in which the Jewish imagination has internalized and interpreted the visible world in order to gain access to and participate in the invisible world.63 In an appendix to his article on “Aqedah: Midrash as Visualization,” Marc Bregman cites Rabbi Nathan of Rome, who spoke of ancient mystics who “see and envision in the chambers of their heart like a man who sees and envisions something clearly with his eyes and they hear and tell and speak by means of a seeing eye by the divine spirit.”64 This sense of visualization (hachazayah in modern Hebrew) is a mode of spiritual-psychological seeing, a “primitive myths” ground him in the Germanic scholarship of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, they can also be understood as establishing a false dichotomy between archaic and modern Judaism, the midrash or aggadah seeming to be a merely rhetorical ploy to bridge the gap during a particular period in history when rabbinical discourses came to the fore. The view taken in this book is of a continuous, dynamic series of transformative processes, leaving both overlapped areas of historical experience—texts that operate at many levels at once to preserve and change historical perspectives—and gaps where at certain times and for some communities of Jews there appear to be discontinuities and absorption into the dominant civilization. 63 Marc Bregman’s article “Aqedah: Midrash as Visualization” in The Journal of Textual Reasoning 2:1 (2003), though hardly the first by him or anyone else to address this matter, set off a long, interesting debate on the question of how and to what extent the rabbis expected the sacred texts to be understood as matters of perception, insight and metaphorically visible experiences. This debate on visualization remains, however, historical and analytical; Bregman deals not with the dynamics of midrash as a creative process but as a specific body of texts—the collection of rabbinical texts produced under the name either of midrash or aggadah in the formative period of post-Temple Judaism. See Bergman, “Isaak Heinemann’s Classic Study of Aggadah and Midrash,” Department of Religious Studies, University of North Carolina (updated 19 March 2008), http:// www.uncg.edu/rel/contacts/faculty/Heinemann. Nevertheless, once it is accepted that aggadah and midrash were together “the chief repository of Jewish thought of the Graeco-Roman period,” it is also possible to see that “in Hebrew usage, the term Midrash, besides referring to a particular kind of exegetical activity in general, can also indicate any specific example or result of this activity …” Our approach takes the term several steps further, so as to see midrash as a habit of thought—a process of imagining both a new kind of textual reality generated by specific historical commentaries on sacred writings and a transformation of the way reality is seen, recollected, and utilized in current decision-making, which links with a transformation of reality itself based on psychological and political activities in the natural and social world. Thus whatever Heinemann or Bregman may have considered to be rabbinical privileging of morality over history or of indifference to anachronism and flamboyant philology, the point we are making—and as applicable to the study of Alfred Dreyfus and the Affair—is that the habit of thought known as midrashing is a creative act, a place where such action is possible and effective, a cast of characters who explicitly or implicitly know what is going on and meditate on its effects, and a body of knowledge thus generated, as well as a transformed memory of all these phenomena. 64 Bregman specifically cites Moshe Idel, Kabbalah: New Perspectives (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1988), 90; but he also notes other contemporary authorities such as David Halperin and Elliot R. Wolfson: “Midrash as Visualization.” — 272 —

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way of making the invisible visible. However, the question then arises as to what constitutes the invisible—is it what already always exists outside of normal perception and experience or is it something created by the act of meditation, interpretation and invention or imagining? And when this invisible scene is made visible through words, does it have any permanence, or does it only serve as a momentary aid to understanding, as an allegory, parable or poetic conceit, or does it transform all prior presumed and accepted realities and memories, so that nothing now appears as it once did to thought or to memory?65 Or as Bregman asks, referring specifically to the text of the Aqedah as midrashed by Rashi and the ancient rabbis: If we fully engage in this aggadic narrative—as I believe the authors of the midrash would like us to do—we can imagine a cinematic presentation … If we were indeed able to “see” what Sarah saw, if we were fully able to envision through the eyes of the mother the offering up for sacrifice of the son by his father, we too would die of horror, as did Sarah. The use of the cinematic metaphor seems pertinent in regard to the state of thinking on art and photography during the period Dreyfus was in prison writing his cahiers, but it also raises the question of whether or not the art of midrashing can be accepted within a tradition dominated by the suspicions Plato and his followers show towards mimetic art—not just painters who seek to reproduce objective, accurate photographic images of the natural phenomena in the world, an ideal of Hellenistic-Christian tradition. But there is also a deep fault in conception since the whole created world is at best a superficial parody of the eternal, invisible universe of ideas and, at worst, a delusionary confusion of 65 Susan L. Brauenstein, in her notes to The Furman Collection of Jewish Ceremonial Art (New York: The Jewish Museum, 1985) speaks of a ketubbah (marriage contract), drawn up in Venice in 1737, between Masud Rokeah and Sorlina Noverra. “At the top is a representation of Mount Sinai with Moses, Aaron and the Children of Israel. Such depictions of Mount Sinai are related to an inscription found on many Italian marriage contracts, ‘My beloved to me is a bag of myrrh’ [Song of Songs 1:13a]. The Targum (the Aramaic translation and paraphrase of the Bible) for the verse explains how Moses placated God on Mount Sinai by reminding him of the Sacrifice of Isaac, so He did not turn from the Children of Israel. This reminder of the covenant between God and Israel was deemed propitious for the beginning of married life” (Section 36, p. 34). — 273 —

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shadows on the walls of a cave compared to the actual state of reality on the surface of the earth. More than that, the mystics and artists who believe that their psychological way of seeing and articulating those perceptions are meaningful portraits of the otherwise inaccessible spiritual universe, have nothing but a vain and idolatrous belief. It was therefore argued in the last half of the nineteenth century that various forms of photography, cinema, and x-rays were merely artificial enhancements or extensions of human perception.66 And precisely because of their seeming objectivity and accuracy of depiction, they were obnoxious to all the ideals of art—their lack of discrimination in recognizing major and minor elements in the perspective, their lack of imagination in producing too many details and masking harmonious qualities in shadows, as well as being unable to reproduce colors and reducing fine variations in tone and texture to a blur, and also in being unable to capture movement and change, since even in motion pictures each instant is discrete from what precedes and follows.67 The so-called mystical visions of the ancient pagans and the modern Christians,68 in Jewish thought, were dangerous 66 Scharf reports: “The photographs made by the spiritualists from the 1860s and certainly those of Wilhelm Röntgen from 1895, called ‘X-rays,’ would be seen by those artists as pictorial verifications of the insubstantiality of solid forms” (Art and Photography, 265-266); he then cites Umberto Boccini: “Why should one continue to create without taking into consideration those visual powers of our own that can give results analogous to those of X-rays?” (266). 67 Scharf cites an eighteenth-century manual of instruction on how to draw by Charles-Antoine Jombert, where this description by M. G. J. Gravesande appears: “It cannot be denied that certain general lessons can in fact be drawn from it [the camera obscura and the light produced called chiaro-scuro] of broad masses of shadows and light: and yet too exact an imitation would be a distortion; because the way in which we see natural objects in the camera obscura is different from the way in which we see them naturally. The glass interposed between objects and their representation on the paper intercepts the rays of the reflected light which renders shadows visible and pleasantly coloured, thus shadows are rendered darker by it than they would be naturally” (Art and Photography, 21). Our analogy here would read the optical lens of the camera or other instrument of fixing images through gathering together and manipulating the light with the rabbinical imagination in exegetical terms of midrash as a machine for seeing that gathers together the scattered scraps of language—letters and their reproduction on a page and in the mind—and their interpretation into new memories and activated cognition. Just as emancipated Jews at first felt they had to cut their ties with the traditional modes of rabbinical thinking and feeling in society and in themselves but eventually and perhaps inexorably returned to appreciate in a new way the different perspectives they could achieve from accepting and developing this ancient heritage, artists in the nineteenth century tried to deny or trivialize the phenomena of artificial seeing the camera made popular—the illusion of absolute and accurate reproduction of natural realities—but then came to understand the greater potentialities and ways of freeing themselves from scholastic conventions that photography presented to them (61). 68 Ernst Gombrich recalls being introduced to the concepts of art in a training dominated by the Graeco-Christian point of view: “What struck me … is the frequent reference to the experience of seeing, of visual perception, in the many transformations of the concept of idea…. We have learned — 274 —

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and seductive lies (myths and idolatrous metaphors), or at least gross distortions of the real relationship between the worlds of the physical and of the spiritual, both of which are deeply entwined within one another in rabbinical conceptions, like the threads of a tzitsit or tallit. To be Jewish—to live and see and understand the world as a Jew—was to be in and on the fringes, to be part of the fringed garment, not in the sense of being marginal, but of being separate and particular, while firmly included within nature, and at the same time connected to the divine as well as mediating between the spiritual and the physical, ruhinut and

from Professor [Henry Alexander] Saffrey’s introduction, that in Greek the word idea clearly signified ‘the outward appearance of things perceived by the sense of sight’” (“Idea in the Theory of Art: Philosophy or Rhetoric,” The Gombrich Archive, http://www.gombrich.co.uk/showdoc. php?id=24). He says a little later: “We know from the outset Plato devalued seeing therefore mimesis as mere belief, doxa.” This then leads to a statement taken from R. L. Gregory: “The fact that the doctrine of anamnesis clashes with the central belief of Christianity in the divine creation of every individual soul at the moment of conception seems to me to be of much importance in the further modifications of Plato’s wholly self-consistent system of thoughts.” The return of the soul to its original status through memory is a form of artistic as well as purely intellectual act, since it requires the reconstruction of what one perceives into an image of what can no longer be perceived in the real world, a construction through questions, challenges, and imagination. “Cicero,” says Gombrich, “compares this image [eidos] with the creation of artists who must strive to transcend the beauty of real things and even the beauty of previous works of art.” Thanks to the insights of Erwin Panofsky, he feels we can now begin to come into touch with “how the artist’s mind, in confronting reality through the senses, can ever conceive of ideas … since we now know— if I may cruelly over-simplify Panofsky’s involved argument—that what we call reality is in itself nothing but the product of our minds.” Yet for all that, Gombrich sees this over-simplification as useful in revealing the inadequacy of the argument that there is no reality, no truth out there, after all. Everything is not relative or a mere “ballet of abstraction” wherein everything difficult can be explained away: “I remain convinced that intellectual history should not be a ballet of abstractions, however enticing, but an investigation of enduring problems.” True, but note that it never seems to enter Gombrich’s mind to add to the ideas he is dealing with those of the rabbis, as though Jews and Judaism played at best a marginal role, one where any Jewish artist or critic who has something to say says it outside of Jewish tradition. Alyssa Goldstein Stepinwall, in her review of Ilana Y. Zinger and Sam W. Bloom, eds., L’antisémitisme éclairé: inclusion et exclusion depuis l’Epoque des Lumières jusqu’à l’affaire Dreyfus (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2003), makes this precise point: “Rather than being only a footnote to the Revolution [of 1789], [Ouzi] Elyada contends, anti-Jewish rhetoric helped cement the idea that the revolutionaries aimed to annihilate Catholic France.” In other words, to expand on this argument, Jewish ideas, artists, and thinkers play a much more formative role in the history of the modern world, from the Enlightenment through the twentieth century, in two ways: first, somewhat covertly and obliquely through the ideas and insights they generate and feed into the mainstream of European culture, until the contemporary period when the Jewish philosophers and artists can speak openly and in their own voices; and second, in a different kind of obliquity and reversal of intentionality, Jewish thinkers and Jewish innovations are held up to scorn and ridicule by anti-Semites who nevertheless, despite their hatred and insanity, focus attention on alternatives to the conventional and central themes of Christianity and secularization. — 275 —

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gashmiut.69 That being the case, to create pictures or objects, to call them art or whatever, which claim to be true and proper representations of the otherness of something higher or something more profoundly inner, such as the individual soul of an artist, is to engage in nothing less than idolatry, a manifest self-deception.70 Michael A. Signer, commenting on Bregman’s essay, avers that in the midrash, Rashi describes the thoughts of Abraham as if he were reflecting upon what had transpired. This reflection takes place even before Abraham returns to learn the news of Sarah’s death…. The reader discerns from Rashi’s comment that Abraham’s consideration of a proper mate for Isaac occurs as a reward for his obedience to the divine command…. Rashi describes the inner qualities that constitute the character of Abraham…. Rashi provides the readers an occasion for reflection on the relationship between God and humanity… (emphasis added)71 In the words I have put in italics, it is possible to see that Signer’s argument rests on explaining how the midrash works through the metaphor of visualization of the invisible: what happens occurs only “as if” the transformation of the scene from outer to inner experience were real. The writer of the midrash takes over verbal control of the original text, pre-empts the implications of the meaning of that passage and describes its psychological dimensions, as though they could be seen in a performance of a ritual drama or a motion picture (perhaps even an 69 Lori Lefkowitz and Rona Shapiro, “Ritualwell.org—Loading the Virtual Canon, or: The Politics and Aesthetics of Jewish Women’s Spirituality,” Nashim: A Journal of Women’s Studies and Gender Issues (2005): 104. www.ritualwell.org/aboutus/file.2005-06-16.0302722100 (accessed 09 August 2005). The two authors explain further: “Although traditional Jewish thinking typically presumes a mind/body split, the body nevertheless provides access to the spirit through the wearing of ritual garb, the physical practices connected with prayer, and other enacments, such as waving a lulav; in these ways the body links the human spirit to the divine” (104). It is hard to see through the accumulated post-modernist jargon used in this essay, but when we do, as in this passage, we wonder just how they can claim to understand Judaism at all. 70 All of which should not obviate the fact that many rich Jewish families simply wanted show-off pieces of art in their homes and places of worship to call attention to their wealth. As Braunstein puts it in regard to the Rimmonim or Torah Finials donated to a Venetian synagogue at the start of the eighteenth century: “… it has been suggested that their large size represents ostentatious display on the part of the wealthy donors” (The Furman Collection, Section 8, p. 13). 71 Michael A. Signer, “Rashi’s Reading of the Aqedah,” The Journal of Textual Reasoning 2:1 (2003). — 276 —

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animated cartoon). The figure of the mirror—reflection as both a physical event in the optical world of ordinary reality and a term for thought, meditation, analysis, and interpretation—is imposed on the historical or mythical narrative of the Binding of Isaac (the Aqedah), the imposition, however, serving more to instruct or enlighten the reader of the midrash than to clarify the psychology of the human characters and the divine director of the scene. Hence, because Rashi takes Abraham as real and the motivations of God as also real, then the verbal manipulation of the text can be justified because it “provides an occasion,” that is, an impetus to artistic visualization, “for reflection.” In order for the reader to see what Abraham reflects upon and how he reflects, the midrash sets up two coordinated moments: one of the presumed act of studying the original text of Scripture through the intermediary lens of the exegetical book, the second of the re-imagined historical drama of Abraham and Sarah responding to the divine command to sacrifice their beloved son, a scenario that is reconceived as having an invisible dimension that can temporarily—in the time of reading the midrash—be visualized.72 Signer points out that

72

On the development of the concept of the “instant” in relation to the older notion of the “moment,” see James E. Cutting, “Representing Motion in a Static Image: Constraints and Parallels in Art, Science, and Popular Culture,” Perception 31 (2002): 1185-1193. The moment is an existential period of time considered as the conjunction of an act and its perception, memorable and able to be depicted in pictures; the instant, however, only comes into consciousness with the development of technical advances, such as fast-film photography, revealing actions and processes outside of normal apprehension. “First, all further subdivisions of instants shared the characteristic of being more fleeting than the eye could register. Thus, in an important sense all such instants are the same. Second, the rapidly acculturating human eye would never again expect the same things from any image” (1168-1169). However, it is possible to argue that there are at least two other facets to the shift in these conceptual apprehensions of events: on the one hand, from at least Virgil’s Aeneid through the fourteenth-century alliterative poem Sir Gawain and the Knight of the Green Chapel to Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, poets have divided up momentary actions into their constituent parts and described each split-second in some variation of incremental repetition, in a proleptic version of slow-motion photography or cinema. Such frame by frame rhetoric is not the same thing as multiple stages in an action seen often in historical and allegorical paintings and tapestries. The instant of poetic articulation breaks down the processes of an action as it transpires rather than indicating various stages in the completion of a narrative event or formal argument. The second place and way in which instantaneous presentation occurs is the midrash; this works by transforming the mimetic action into a textual occasion—a volume of words and phrases, then a suite of manipulable letters and possible voicings (vowels)—and the shifting of the original and recreated letter units into other contexts by taking each particle (letter and space) as a hint or metonymic connection to either existing contexts and purpose-built exemplary anecdotes, riddles, allegories, and poetic conceits. — 277 —

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The commentary begins by formulating [the] lexical foundation for his expanded interpretation of the verse. 14. The Lord will see. Its plain or lexical meaning can be explained according to the Targum [Aramaic translation or paraphrase] that renders the words as follows: The Lord will choose and see for Himself this place, to cause His Divine Presence [the Shekhina] to rest therein and for offering sacrifices there. What lies behind this linguistic explanation is a bridge between the event of the Akedah and the place where the future generations of Israelites will bring their sacrifices. Indeed, the Divine presence is to be discovered in that place. Bregman’s idea of “visualization” may be appropriate to note here. God will look at the place where Isaac was sacrificed and deem it the place of the indwelling presence where sacrifices will be offered. Now the midrashic event opens still further, so as to include more for the reader who finds his or her understanding of the biblical text enhanced by the metaphoric mirror that reflects an invisible psychological (moral and mythical) dimension to the story, Rashi creating an occasion for the reader to reflect on what the players in the scenario reflect on.73 It expands to describe God’s visualization of the event—and the stage setting, the time of its original performance, and the memorial or conventionalized and ritual repetitions in religious history—as something profoundly transformative and creative. Because God observes what happens on Mount Moriah, where the sacrifice was supposed to happen 73 The “reflection” can now be taken beyond the superficial metaphor of the mind as a mirror that allows conscious contemplation of its own processes and dimensions; as Cutting remarks of the advanced photographic techniques of the late nineteenth-century, “our contemporary-period eyes are simply accustomed to, and biased toward, expecting snapshot-like qualities from all images” (“Picturing Motion,” 1168), we can say further that minds shaped by midrashing imaginations have now a traditional expectation of reading and therefore seeing in the mind’s eye processes and dimensions that literal-minded interpreters miss out on and “serious” exegetes deny are possible. Such an observation includes a concomitant act of interpretation and therefore of recreation and expansion of what is seen. — 278 —

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but was stopped, the intentionality of the act becomes an enhancement of the scenario of sacrifice only there in potentia, and therefore God will, whenever He looks at the place, recall what was supposed to happen, what did not happen, and what did happen, so that his remembering of this complex inter-refraction and reflection transforms reality.74 The place is sacred not only because it was to be a site of sacrifice and of testing but in honor of the sacrifice that did not occur; and that sanctification is marked by the presence of the Shekhina as a token of God’s transformative remembering, his bringing into his mind the image of the Aqedah, and thus this is the place to which Jews would bring their future sacrifices.75 The Temple as the site of sacrifice is a work of art insofar as it actualizes into a concrete structure the occasion for reflection, the image of God assigned to this place is an act of embodying beauty, the enhancement of the memory by the cult of sacrifices performed by the priests on behalf of the people, and the refraction of this cult into the texts, their discussion and application by rabbinical Jews thereafter is also beautiful. That all this occurs through lexical modification of the original text, as Signer explains: “the biblical word yea’mer from the 74

As with photography, this deceptiveness—and ambiguity—in vision, perception and imagination frightens those who seek the safe refuge of literalness, of conventionality, the pshat of textual reasoning; and thus Delacroix, as Scharf points out, as the artist “must compromise with what is traditionally of value and not be misled by the truth. In art everything is a lie, and the facts of external reality are only a means to the greater guidance of the instinct” (Scharf, Art and Photography, 120). 75 Rivka B. Ulmer, in a review of Marc Lee Raphael, ed., Agendas for the Study of Midrash in the Twenty-First Century (Williamsburg, VA: College of Williama and Mary, 1999) on H-Judaic, H-Net Reviews in the Humanities and Social Sciences (May 1999), http://www.h-net.org/reviews/ showrev.php?id=3110 (accessed 04 July 2010), reminds us that “some midrashic scenes strongly lend themselves to comparisons with dramas, festivals and processions in the period of late antiquity in which the spiritual was frequently made visual.” Not only is this a valid inference to be drawn, so that we have speculated, along with others, that part of the passage in ancient Hebrew imagination is from precisely such festive embodiments of the spiritual—with masks, idols, and ritual performances—takes in the internalization of these archaic habits of thought; a process that at once greatly reduces the narratives of tradition to highly selective abstracts of mythical actions, rationalized to historical events, but the powerful drama of mystery religions gets turned into psychodrama, both tragic and comic performances through hint, implication and allusion. This means that the visual imagination does not completely disappear in Hebrew history as a whole, let alone in rabbinical communities. On the one hand, as Ulmer points out, the art works discovered in Dura Europos synagogue and other early monuments of the transformation of priestly cults to mitzvoth Judaism of the rabbis utilize Graeco-Roman iconography in order to depict “post-biblical material, including midrashic texts”; but on the other hand, as we are arguing, this is more than a matter of adapting or adopting foreign symbols and techniques—it is a matter of starting to think, feel, see, and speak in new ways through the expansion and refinement of the midrashic imagination. — 279 —

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Hebrew yir’u allows for the generalization from the biblical text about where God will appear.” A place thus becomes an action, and an action a place, with both acquiring in the process the time, actors, props, and meanings to actualize the original text as a midrashed reality.76 Signer then sums up: If we look at Professor Bregman’s idea that the biblical text of the Akedah evoked various perspectives of visualization in the rabbinic imagination, we can discern that Rashi continued in the tradition of the Rabbis. However, his commentary called upon God to look upon the ashes of Isaac heaped the altar. If the divine eye were cast upon this pile of ashes it would surely evoke mercy for Israel, the children of Abraham—who was beloved of God. But since Isaac was not killed and burnt as a holocaust on the altar, God’s imagination transforms the scenario to include what should have happened—the killing of the son; what did not happen—there was no killing and so no corpse to be burnt to ashes left on the altar for anyone, including God, to see; and what did happen—Abraham was prepared to carry out the repugnant deed, Isaac reluctantly acceded to his father’s wish and shared faith in the authority of God, and Sarah, learning of what had been planned out behind her back, especially her husband’s willingness to murder Isaac and Isaac’s acceptance and avoidance of bidding farewell to or seeking the aid of his mother, committed suicide in an act of despair and protest. God oversees more than past, present, and 76 Scharf: “Rather than producing a truthful image, wrote Henri Delaborde in 1856, photography gives us a brutal reality. By its own character it is the negation of sentiment and the ideal. It produces sad effigies of human beings, without style and resulting in what today is called realism. Its vulgar images seduce many people” (Art and Photography, 130). The notion that the signifier and the signified are equivalent to one another, and that the image thus produced is a virtual second reality, leads to idolatry, and is most pernicious when it captures the very processes upon which worship and belief exercise themselves. But when artists then come to actuate a secondary replacement belief, that their own expression and their own processes of creativity are to be valued more than what they produce—or the truth content of their paintings, statuary, or musical compositions—then this self-worship can be sustained only by a violence to the imagination: the canons of the new artistic code are arbitrary and dictatorial, they cannot be questioned or challenged—if the artist declares himself or herself to be an artist then whatever they do or say must ipso facto be art. Similarly, if the men charged to be the guardians of honor and justice declare their lies to be true and their right to say so more important than facts, then Alfred Dreyfus’s faith in France is a sham, a form of idolatry. — 280 —

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future; he also observes potentiality, possibility, and intentionality. The future sacrifices in the Temple and their as-if reconception into prayer, study and domestic relationships recall to God the scene at the altar on Mount Moriah (the scene that is observed in this creative and interpretative dynamic) as the place where his Shekhinah resides as the realization of all those various visualizations. In the terms of the late nineteenth-century scientists and artists who were discovering the power of advanced technology in photographic techniques, the world was being opened up to “extra-perceptual imagery,” and thus Odilon Redon could say of his friend the botanist Armand Clavaud: He was seeking, on the boundaries of a world beyond perception, for a life intermediary between animal and plant; for that flower of the being, that strange element that is animal for some hours of the day only, when it is activated by the power of light.77 This stimulation of the imagination by mechanical innovations serves a similar function as the midrashic rhetoric does in opening up both sacred texts to deeper insights that are available through purely rhetorical exegesis and the historical experiences through which each individual finds himself passing in the course of a lifetime.78 In the case of Alfred Dreyfus, the necessary conditions for such thinking lay in the shock of his arrest, the humiliation of his exile, and the long ordeal of silence and isolation. Then in his letters to his wife and soul’s companion Lucie and in his three-fold composition of the cahiers, he worked out a new, if only temporary, vision of the world: something more Jewish than he ever previously or afterwards would be able to see and act on. The beauty of this transformative creation is the product of a joint generation of art by God and the Jewish people: they make the world 77 Cited in Scharf, Art and Photography, 306. 78 “Far below the threshold of direct experience, states of matter, fractions of movements a millionth of a second’s duration, particles smaller than the wavelengths of light, beyond even the surveillance of the optical microscope, are made visible by the camera” (Scharf, Art and Photography, 310). As his prison guards watched him and as the authorities scrutinized his writings, they could not recognize any of the real insights being created by Dreyfus, except that, unlike most of his friends and allies who were unwilling to look beyond the surfaces, the hostile agents and anti-Semites sensed something wonderful going on; they called it kabbalah, and ironically they weren’t too far off the mark. — 281 —

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beautiful through their study of sacred texts, their memory of their ancestors and the appearances of God in history, their interpretation and performance of mitzvot. None of these transformations take place because the original text is historical or photographic; it is made up of concepts, images, words, letters, and sounds, and these are all particles, sparks of energy and light, composing at best a rough outline of reality, so that each unit requires that it be placed in a context that informs it with resonance and potential significance, then is taken as a hint or allusion or echo of other words, concepts, images and narratives, and finally tentative, provocative new versions are presented for challenge, questioning and debate, and so interpreted in circumstances meaningful and pressing on the readers.79 Claire Elise Katz continues to comment on Bregman’s essay80 and draws in ideas from Sören Kierkegaard, Franz Rosenzweig, and Emmanuel Levinas. She argues that because of the midrashic tradition, The story is no longer about Abraham as a man of faith or about Abraham’s perceived duty to God. Rather, this moment in the story could be read as the need for our attention to be focused on the victims, those who suffer the violence, not the administrators of that violence, even if, or maybe especially if, that violence is administered in the name of God…. The faith Abraham has must be a condition for him to see the ethical, not necessarily a faith merely to obey the command of God. Thus, as Bregman suggests, Abraham must be a man of faith in order to be see what needs to be seen…. 79 Scharf: “…[Sully] Prudhon reiterated his theme. A portrait, he said, ought to have both the exactitude of photograph and, more than that, the intimate thought characteristic of the subject…” And then he cites Prudhon’s exact words: “A man is much better known through painting than through photography” (Art and Photography, 138). This kind of either/or thinking removes the dynamic, expansive, and dialectical quality from the situation and leads to varieties of idolatry, not to truth. This is why it is better to see in everything through the interpretative lens of the midrashing machine, for as Eugène Durieu put it, with potential application in our own argument concerning Jewish aesthetics, “The camera is not a simple optical contraption which responds mechanically to the first comer who cares to try it out, but an instrument that the photographer can direct and control according to his personal feelings” (cited in Scharf, Art and Photography, 141-142). 80 Claire Elise Katz, “The Voice of God and the face of the Other,” The Journal of Textual Reasoning 2:1 (June 2003). — 282 —

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The Jewish perspective shapes the ethical contours of experience in a midrashic way by demanding that the spectator, auditor, or performer never accept the givens of the work of art as a fixed entity, clear and coherent; it must always be approached as a difficult objet d’art, one that demands careful and painstaking readings. In many ways this work of art does not exist until it is interpreted. The creation is not complete until there is a critical reader or viewer, and what is then understood is always tentative, evoking or provoking further questions and challenges. Though the end of this midrash has the angel staying Abraham’s hand, my claim is that Abraham was changed when he looked into Isaac’s face—before the angel stayed his hand. The staying of the hand was the continuation, or affirmation, of an action that was already set in motion…. By the midrashic reading, the text is changed: it gains a new dimension in itself and demands new perspectives from which it can be approached. But not only the text as a mirror image or photographic plate of a presumed historical or mythical reality, the reality itself is recreated. Such a view remains without dynamic tensions that can actually transform thought, experience, and the meaning of the world. The lexical intrusion thus is shown to be something more than an arbitrary game of allegorical decoding, where the writer of the super-text guides the reader through a labyrinth towards a pre-determined end: the moral or meaning of the interpreted story. The midrash gives to the actors or releases from potentiality the powers they always had to act freely. Levinas realizes that this kind of relationship with God is difficult. On the one hand, God’s true desires are hidden. And on the other hand, we must be free to show that we are strong by being able to disobey God’s command … As Levinas reminds us, Judaism is a difficile liberté: precisely because it both commands us to be and allows us to be adults81 … Franz Rosenzweig makes a 81 The reference here is to the chapter in Difficile liberté: Eassai suer le Judaisme (Paris: Albin Michel, — 283 —

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similar point when he claims that if humanity is to be truly free, God must also be truly free, and part of that freedom is the freedom to deceive us. In addition, God must make God’s own actions difficult, if not impossible, to understand lest we be too willing to follow along God’s will blindly….In order to be free, we must be free to defy God’s will. Making a work of art and performing a beautiful act are not easy to do, either physically, psychologically, or morally. Dreyfus says something very similar when he cries—in his letters to Lucie, in his essays on literature and philosophy and history, in his mathematical exercises, and in his drawings—out of the depths of his suffering for the strength and sanity to keep wrestling all through the dark night of his ordeal. He rejects facile paradigms, cozy platitudes and easy appeals for mercy or salvation. Lost Illusions and Transitory Things In every word we speak, in every action of our lives, there is a strange magnetic power which makes itself felt, and which never deceives. The glances, the tones of the voice, the lovers impassioned gestures, can be imitated… —Honoré de Balzac82 In and out of the visual field of the lens passed the pedestrians and the horse-drawn vehicles. Here and there, only the most anonymous smears of ghostly vestiges faintly recorded some moving form or something that had suddenly moved off during the long exposure. … they remained more or less indefinable blurs spread out 1976 [1963]) called “Une religion d’adultes,” 25-45. This section originally was a talk given in 1957 in Morocco and published in Tioumliline 1 (1957). Judaism is a difficult religion for adults because it makes few or no concessions to the primitive thinking or facile adolescent idealism of other faith systems; it asks not for submission or passivity, but for a duly conscious application of the mind to the performance of lawful deeds that confront the world in all its absurdities and cruelties. 82 Balzac, The Quest of the Absolute, 135. — 284 —

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in the direction of movement. — Aaron Scharf83 Marcel Proust became aware of the plight of Captain Dreyfus, and became for a time an activist on his behalf, never doubting for an instant the innocence of the Jewish officer, responding to an almost instinctive call of loyalty to his own Jewish blood relations on his mother’s side and his many Jewish friends; he thus assiduously followed the news in the press and became active in collecting signatures for the petition calling for a revision of the first court martial. However, it is extremely unlikely that Alfred Dreyfus had ever met, heard of, or read the early or later writings of Proust. Nevertheless, there are many points of similarity between the two men as authors, not least is the importance to both of them of detailed notebooks as a means of recording their thoughts, working out their ideas, and creating an external literary space to reflect and compensate for the lack of close, intimate and trustworthy critical conversations. More important perhaps than the fact that both of them did their most important writing when locked up—Dreyfus, as we know, involuntarily in exile on Devil’s Island, Proust by his own choice in a cork-lined room in Paris—each of them reveals to the midrashic aspects of their Jewishness usually unrecognized and denied by their best critics and ardent readers. They remain therefore examples of Marranos: not just assimilated Jews who avoid exploiting their Jewishness in public as central aspects of their achievement but as modern Frenchmen caught between conflicting, often unsuspected impulses and paradigms. As Juliette Hassine points out, most educated Frenchmen at the end of the century had heard about the Marrano experience, in regard to the New Christians from Spain and Portugal who had settled in southern France and gradually showed themselves openly as Jews as the society around them became more secular and tolerant of religious differences, this phenomenon becoming the subject of a number of popular plays and novels.84 In addition, historical works, from Renan and Michelet onwards, explored the nature of Crypto-Judaism along with a sympathetic study of rabbinical Judaism as something more and other than a con83 Scharf, Art and Photography, 169. 84 Juliette Hassine, Marranism et hébrïasme dans l’oeuvre de Proust (Fleury-sur-Lorne: Minuit, 1994), 7-8. — 285 —

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tinuation of an Old Testament religion preparatory to and triumphed over by Christianity. Further than that, there were increasing numbers of professional anti-Semites who wrote about both Crypto-Jews as hidden agents of a mysterious enemy conspiracy and rabbinical Jews whose psychological and biological characters were obnoxious to and unassimilable into French society; these writers, not least of which was Edouard Drumont, put into circulation many ideas and pseudo-facts (half-truth, lies, and muddled versions of the truth) that caused Judaism to play a larger part in the culture of France than it had ever done before. But where the anti-Semites sniffed treason and graft whenever a Jewishsounding name or modernizing challenge to conventional wisdom was suspected, writers like Proust found insight into human character and the nature of the artistic temperament.85 Such insights into the Jewish presence in France and especially among the artists and thinkers of the nineteenth century, however, were at best smudges and blurs at the edges of vision, barely noticed, and usually unrecognized for what they were. These blurred images picked up by the sluggish mechanisms of the early cameras, like the experiences of ordinary life recorded in learned essays and fictional narratives,86 could not enter into consciousness until more efficient technologies were developed—and these techniques of analysis and interpretation themselves lay hidden in the often mocked and always misunderstood strategies of rabbinical and kabbalistic exegesis.87 The impetus to find them would not come in the major thinkers of the period, but rather in the popular entertainers and the mass circulation press seemingly opposed to all that the Jews were bringing 85 Ibid., 18. 86 Scharf, Art and Photography, 170. 87 Cutting makes a remark that leads towards our understanding of the repeated drawings that fill Dreyfus’s prison cahiers when he points to traditional decorative symmetries that include “translation, rotation, and glide reflection … Most of these are typically not completely symmetrical; they only approximate it, even play with it” (“Picturing Motion,” 1171). Each of Dreyfus’s drawings returns to an initial assertion of X or Y ( ‫ צ‬or ‫ )א‬then begins to rotate it, embellish it with emergent curves and extensions, filling one or more of the three to four spaces that are created, shading in some but not all of the areas opened and seeking different near-symmetrical or cross-symmetrical balances. Occasionally the instigating patterned letter is only alluded to in the repetition of the elaborate flourishes. As Tarde discovered, in the words of Henri Bergson writing in 1909: “La répétition avec l’opposition et l’adaptation qui en sont complémentaires, fut pur lui un principe d’explication véritablement universel” (Cited by Ian Lubek, “Histoire de psychologies sociales perdues: le cas de Gabriel Tarde” Revue française de sociologie 22:3 (1981): 364: “Repetition with opposition and adaptation which are complementary were for him a veritable principle of universal explanation.” — 286 —

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in to France as an alien presence. It was from Edgar Degas, for instance, a cranky anti-Semite with his own faulty natural vision, that the transformations began to percolate upwards into the fine arts: “Thus, by the power of its convincing images, photography served, in these and in other respects, to undermine any ideas of an immutable perception of nature.”88 This is similar to what Ernst Gombrich says was the true greatness of the discovery of Renaissance perspective; “not that it conformed to optical truth but that it embodied something more fundamental: the need to see the world that way.”89 The formation of an apparently new kind of Jew and Jewishness during the nineteenth century posed more than a threat to the world the anti-Semites wanted to preserve, without their fully recognizing the image of themselves in the scapegoat they chose to persecute. This kind of ungodly or non-Jewish Jew also posed a threat to the leaders of the rabbinical community who were charged with guiding their congregants through the difficult terrain of modernity itself and, aside from the most reactionary or conservative rabbis, who sought to resist the inroads of secularism and alien theologies into their midst, sought to reform Judaism without losing its individuality. The very toleration and easing of tensions in the surrounding culture which allowed men and women to leave their families and old-fashioned communities also lured them into the false assumptions that they were assimilated and accepted as normal Frenchmen and women or other Western Europeans and could participate fully in the same developments as their non-Jewish counterparts. However, as events in the 1930s and 1940s would make violently evident, these assumptions were false.90 Without the individual artists 88 Scharf, Art and Photography,195. 89 Ibid., 195. 90 Marthe Robert speaks of the way Sigmund Freud and his fellow Jews had to deal with the events in Germany and Austria in the first decades of the twentieth century which blocked their ability to think of themselves clearly and consistently as good citizens and full participants in European culture: “For where others can take sides with a clear conscience on the strength of their enlightened opinions, a Jew must first put himself to the test must first look not among his persecutors but within himself and in the dense texture of his own millennial hatred that his race has brought upon itself by the mere fact of its existence” (From Oedipus to Moses: Freud’s Jewish Identity, trans. Ralph Manheim [Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1976], 146). But how does one put himself to the test and with what consequences? Gananath Obeyesekere postulates that “most languages have not developed an idiom for describing guilt-ridden inner states … it is not possible to talk about it even to one’s own self, let alone to others” (Medusa’s Hair: An Essay on Personal Symbols and Religious Experience [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981], 80). His book focuses on Sri Lankan phenomena, but he does refer occasionally to Jews and Judaism. — 287 —

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or thinkers being aware of their self-delusions in this regard, they nonetheless began, from at least the 1890s, to be sensitive to difficulties in integrating the various facets of their personalities and the impulses driving them. As Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi puts it in his study of Sigmund Freud: For the Jew without God is, after all, historically problematic and not self-evident, and the blandly generic term secular Jew gives no indication of the richly nuanced variety within the species.91 The non-Jewish Jew, to use Isaac Deutscher’s felicitous designation of himself,92 however, poses a very different kind of problem to himself There are, in general, three ways in which guilt is expressed: (1) through bodily symptoms that each culture learns to express and recognize; (2) through dreams, private and public, manifest in physical reactions and in ritual gestures, dance, paintings, statues, and other works of art; and (3) through visions, which Obeyesekere categorizes as constituted by interconnected symbols that operate on both private and cultural levels, “simultaneously, serially, or alternatively” (80). Whereas most Europeans societies, based on their Greek heritage, know how to demystify and decode the symbols of symptoms, dreams, and visions as psychology, political discourse, and aesthetic discourse, there is another component derived from Jewish tradition: “The other aspect is a reverse process whereby guilt is ethicized and inextricably linked with the central symbols of Christianity and Judaism.” In this way, “religious guilt is deliberately cultivated as part of the way of life of the religion” (85). Obeyesekere thinks he is talking about Judaism as well as Christianity here; he is not. Like so many others duped by the facile formula of Judeo-Christian culture, he misses the radical distinctions between the two belief systems. As Robert points out in regard to Freud, the Jew learns to test himself even as he becomes aware of the dangers posed by those with power over his life and death, knowing that the Jewish nation and its adherence to the Law is a constant irritant to the dominant culture, that he and his fellows are scapegoats for all that the Jew-haters hate in themselves and fear in the changes that give to Jews opportunities in the new world, and that in the very act of trying to suppress the irritating factors in their behavior and attitude, Jews simply compound the distrust and disgust they arouse in the people around them. Though it may be a commonplace of witty jokes and poignant stage comedians to speak in terms of self-hatred and guilt internalized from parental reminders that the child is never perfect enough to satisfy all his mother’s and father’s hopes—of being so superior as to cancel out the social hatreds of the goyim, the Jew is not debilitated by his guilt, only to operate in the world as a neurotic Woody Allen character; but he or she is really angry at the situation, which thus blocks his or her desire to be taken for what he or she really is—a conflicted individual. Obeyesekere comes a little closer when he distinguishes between the formal conventions of a society in what it teaches and displays as its inner core of meanings and what he calls “operative culture” and says: “it is not sufficient to delineate the culture: it is also necessary to see how it operates in collective or individual experiences” (134). 91 Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1991), 9. 92 Isaac Deutscher, The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays, ed. Tamara Deutscher (London: Oxford University Press, 1968); the essay called “The Non-Jewish Jew” was first delivered as a lecture in 1958. — 288 —

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or herself than to the general community of non-Jews or to the Jewhaters. The problem can be a stimulant to creativity and self-exploration, as we see in Proust, and, in a more subtle manner, in Dreyfus. For example, though others, such as Nietzsche or many Romantic poets had known about the workings of an unconscious mind long before Freud gave it a scientific cast, what belonged to the realm of dangerous, hostile worldly impulses and radical and heretical anti-social notions, could be taken as fascinating particles of an original creative power that when exposed to the light of rational inquiry or artistic articulation help create a viable alternative mentality and milieu for the individual and the society in which it was found. Jewish tradition already always expected breaks, fissures, losses and forgetting, and so the need for mending, correction, and substitution; the world was assumed to be left incomplete and full of both mysteries and pains.93 Or as the Talmud expresses it in tractate Sukkah 20a: In ancient times when the Torah was forgotten from Israel, Ezra came from Babylon and established it. [Some of it] was again forgotten and Hillel the Babylonian came up and established it. Yet again was [some of it] forgotten, and R. Hiyya and his son came up and established it.94 Disagreements and controversies were expected parts of intellectual and emotional life, not horrible disturbances and debilitating circumstances. One was also expected, as a Jew, to complain to God, to the world, and to oneself about these conditions, and the search for happiness had to go through a long series of ordeals. The sages had said that 93 Or as Eadward Muybridge puts it in a passage cited by Scharf: “If it is impressed on our minds in infancy that a certain arbitrary symbol indicates an existing fact; if this same association of emblem and reality is reiterated at the preparatory school, insisted upon at college, and pronounced correct at the university; symbol and fact—or supposed fact—become so intimately blended that it is extremely difficult to disassociate them, even when reason and personal observation teaches us they have no true relationship” (Art and Photography, 214). Jewish art will, in essence and by definition, always be questioning and challenging the assumed narrative, scenario or conventional wisdom of perceptions and memories, always rejecting the fixity that would turn words and pictures into idols, and received knowledge into dogma and ideology. 94 Cited in Yerushalmi, Freud’s Moses, 88. Babylon was both the name of a specific historical place of Jewish dispersion and exile, and also the generic name for the Galut, the lands of the Exile and Diaspora. — 289 —

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no one could expect to complete all the tasks set before him or her—or that he or she set up before themselves—but that there was no option of opting out: the goal is tam ve-lo nishlam, it is finished but not completed.95 The intention itself and the attempt were what mattered, and thus that work, avodah, as we see so often in Dreyfus’s prison essays, does not define itself as mindless forced labor but as duty, service, honor, and dignified activity.96 Thus the work of art is less as an object of art, un objet d’art, than a process of self-fulfillment, in which the maker is both subject and object, the creator along with the Creator and this world (olam hazeh) along with the World to Come (olam habah). Shenkar sees art not only as an object, a thing, or as a process, but as a vehicle, the road it travels between heaven and earth and back again, the burden it bears, the interpretative acts that accompany it, and the interpreters and creators who interact dynamically with one another.97 What concerns us requires that we distinguish between several factors that are close, yet are often discrete, that occasionally overlap and thus have been confused and considered either muddled or non-existent categories. (1) First, as we have started to show, there is a place for Jews in the history of European art that begins with the children of Israel as a people in many ways like all others in the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern worlds of ancient civilization, passes through stages when Hebrew culture separates itself out from the contextual societies by its special features and proud self-perception as a people apart, and then, in exile and dispersion, forming an ambiguous or minor part in other national histories of art, and particularly in relation to the traditions of Western Europe. (2) Second, as we examine the various facets of the supposedly unique quality of Jewish art history as a process of development and articulation—rather than particular and individual objects of art or craftsmen or artists—we have to ask whether there 95 Ibid., 99. 96 Vincent van Gogh to his brother Theo: “I have only one belief, one strength: work. All that kept me going was the immense task I had assigned myself. The work I am telling you of is regular work, a task, a duty set myself, so that every day, even if it was a single step, I would move forwards in my labours” (Walther and Metzger, Van Gogh, 151). 97  Chinaglia paraphrasing and citing Nadine Shenkar, L’arte ebraica on CHIWEB: “nella perspectiva ebraica l’oggetto artistico non esiste in sé, no ha nessuna ragione d’essere se non è veiculo delle spirituale e del sacro” (from the Hebrew perspective the objet d’art does not exist in itself, it has no reason to exist if it is not a vehicle of the spiritual and the sacred). In another place, she says that art is the receptacle (ricettacolo) as well as the vehicle of light, energy and receptor of these forces (la luce, l’energia e quello che la riceve). It is the shadow that hides and the shadow that reflects the light. — 290 —

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could be a continuity of imagination over hundreds of generations and in a great diversity of contextual traditions in which the Jewish people found itself as a minority, rarely welcomed enthusiastically, occasionally tolerated and more often treated with hostility and subject to constant harassment: and does this continuity, should it be found to exist at all, consist of shared functions and meanings assigned to the artistic process, even when specific content or style shifts and develops with circumstances, so that the Jewish imagination is constantly seen as something outside of normal perception—in fact, in any given moment, at any specific time, Jewish art cannot be differentiated from that of the creative productions of the people around it, with Jews sometimes working as professionals in the service of other cultures and religions, and non-Jews hired and supported by Jewish individuals, families and institutions to provide works of art on their behalf. And if the Jewish imagination is thus not evident in any superficial examination of its products, identified as Jewish only because owned by particular persons or groups or found by research to have been so owned at some time close to the creation or performance of the artistic work, can there be an invisible marker or set of markers to be discovered through analysis and interpretation, and that process of investigation shown to be trustworthy in an objective way and not a subjective distortion of the facts?98 (3) 98 Aaron Scharf points out that while “photography was not the only force to produce this reaction [of disgust with the vulgarity of photographic realism in all the arts, including literature] … it had become a symbol: the most visible, the most tangible expression of a state of mind … Once the artist attempted to break with his immediate tradition … once he declared his subservience of the visible to the invisible world, he entered into a realm of consciousness which had no bounds and which was to provide subjects which he believed no photographer could discover and no camera record” (Art and Photography, 249). The camera is, then, one of many new contraptions that seem to provide justification for the claptrap of an ideology of positivistic science, of an objective realism that can at once project images of the world such as no previous art(ifice) has been able to concoct and yet at the same time reveal all the flaws of such a belief system—all the distortions, fragmentariness and lack of discriminatory subtleness that great art has always attempted to provide in a critique of conventional wisdom and authorization institutions of thought. The new technologies of science, however, develop around themselves more refined and sophisticated modes of cognition and affective relationship to the environment; on the one hand, as microscopes and telescopes reveal areas of reality below and above the field of normal perception, the speed of seeing can be slowed down and speeded up so as to make possible the vision and understanding of aspects of movement and development never before imagined; and on the other, as with x-rays and tinted and refracted filters, to provide models for perceiving inner experiences and active agencies of consciousness itself—and as much as the atom no longer would be considered the unit of indivisible matter by being broken open to show a universe within a universe of energy and anti-energy, so the perceiving, evaluating and remembering mind would be cracked apart to reveal vast new dimensions of intelligence and creativity well outside the range — 291 —

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Further, will this deeper identification of the Jewish imagination and its products, even those produced by non-Jews for the uses, pleasure or service, of Jews have its own aesthetic values, values that are demonstrably related to the social, moral, psychological and spiritual core of Judaism itself as it has grown and developed for many thousands of years and in diverse parts of the world? Isaac Deutscher recalls growing up in a strictly religious Yiddishspeaking community, and going to school in a cheder where supposedly his inception into Jewish civilization began with qualities that were anything but amenable to the moral, social, and aesthetic values he came to appreciate as an adult once he was able to wrench himself free of this cloying and oppressive matrix. “But even this dirty and fetid hole had some redeeming features,” his daughter Tamara recalls after his death, as she retells his life-story in the Introduction to a collection of his essays; in Isaac’s own words: There was one teacher whom I remember better than all others…His gaze was always fixed on one corner of the ceiling, somewhere at the farthest end of the room, behind all the boys. He was telling and re-telling the story of the flight from Egypt. But he embroidered on it at will. His powerful imagination was bringing into our stuffy classroom the air and the smell and the breath of the Red Sea. We could feel the gentleness of the breeze that was moving forward the pillar of cloud….We sat spellbound and hardly able to breathe.99 Tamara Deutscher assesses her father’s powerfully vivid memory of these occasions when the red-headed teacher roused the boys to imagine fully and substantially the stories he told. “This kind of Jewish imagination nourished and stimulated Isaac in his childhood,” and the experience was moreover similar to what Isaac Deutscher describes as happening to another schoolboy, Marc Chagal, but in the sense that for the future painter the breakthrough of a vivid imagination came against “the of conscious awareness. For example, in 1890, Paul Gauguin could say of his old master Maurice Denis, a proponent of photography, he had liberated artists from “all the shackles that the idea of copying had fastened on our instincts as painters” (cited in Scharf, 251). 99 Deutscher, The Non-Jewish Jew, Introduction, 8-9. — 292 —

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rabbinical orthodoxy which ‘stunted the growth of the visual arts’.”100 In one sense, for these Ashekanizi boys at the turn of the nineteenth into the twentieth century, Judaism as an official body of information, ways of learning, and legal system of being in the world, was something that sought to crush the imagination and the artistic sensibility.101 When the imagination did show through, as with Isaac Deutscher’s teacher or with Chagal’s rebellious insistence on fostering his own aesthetic feelings against the pressures of home, community and religious orthodoxy, it was an individual and spontaneous thing. “For a Jew to paint was to rise in revolt, to achieve an act of emancipation,”102 Tamara quotes her father saying, and then she remarks: “Isaac achieved his act of emancipation by revolting against the Messianic faith and Khassidic [sic] tradition and going over to revolutionary socialism.” At the same time, she points out, as her father did, that the Jewish imagination had gone underground in Eastern Europe and where it could not be found in the rabbinical discourses or practices of the community at large—and it seems they mean both the branch of Jewish Orthodoxy centered in Lithuania and the followers of the Gaon of Vilna and the branch of Chassidim located mostly to the south in Galicia in Poland, surfacing in folklore and jokes. However, this assertion is as exaggerated and misleading as the mythic separation of East European Jews into Litvaks and Galitzianas, or even the strict divide between Ashkenazim and Sephardim, at least as essential entities instead of as time-bound, superficial and porous categories. The red-haired teacher who could expound with such verve and colorful words in the cheder was unusual only insofar as any true artist is unusual in a society, for what he was engaged in was the passing on of midrashic tradition, the ability to imagine stories and arguments in vivid terms so as to convince his listeners, make them remember the lessons they are studying, and behave in ways that the culture believes 100 Ibid., 9. 101 Scharf: “Indeed, photography not only served painters who continued to work in the traditions of naturalism, but it was exploited as well by those who rejected that tradition. What these artists deplored above all was the orthodoxy which had been imposed upon them by an insistence on imitative form, underwritten by the photographic image” (Art and Photography, 254). In Judaic terms, such a fetishistic faith in the truth content of photographic realism both leads to idolatry of the visible universe as eternal and all-powerful and to a worse self-idolization of the narcissistic eye and an exaltation of pure reason operating without the constant adjustment of midrashic interpretations of the Law, that is, by an intelligent imagination. 102 Deutscher, The Non-Jewish Jew, Introduction, 9. — 293 —

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have been handed down for millennia. Similarly with jokes. Tamara Deutscher claims “It was this humour that helped the persecuted and oppressed to bear the uncertainty and grimness of existence.”103 To be sure. But this old saw cannot stand alone as the whole truth of Jewish wit and imagination. The jokes can be found in Scriptures, Talmud, Midrash, and other rabbinical writings because they embody values and attitudes, ways of perceiving the world and living in it. In his essay, “The Non-Jewish Jew,” Isaac Deutscher says that Jewish heretics and dissenters appear often in exemplary tales and allegorical constructs throughout the commentaries, and this has puzzled him: Did they have anything in common with one another?… Yes, I think that in some ways they were very Jewish indeed. They had in themselves something of the quintessence of Jewish life and of the Jewish intellect. They were a priori exceptional in that as Jews they dwelt on the borderlines of various civilizations, religions, and national cultures. They were born and brought up on the borderlines of various epochs. Their mind matured where the most diverse cultural influences crossed and fertilized each other. They lived on the margins or in the nooks and crannies of their respective nations….104 What is wrong with this statement? In the first place, it assumes that the so-called heretics and dissenters were outside of Judaism, even though Deutscher wants to believe they were essential Jews, this paradox being the best way for him to argue for his own identity outside of rabbinical categorizations. But suppose Judaism was not either one or the other and not merely one and the other but precisely the tension between them? The Jewish imagination, then, is always in tension with its own inner dynamics, conservatism, and radical innovation, midrashic enhancement and pilpul stultification. The tension, in the second place, does not occur only when one epoch is coming to an end and another is emerging to take its place or where one civilization encroaches on another and both confront each other with suspicion and hostility. The 103 Ibid., 9. 104 Ibid., 27. — 294 —

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tension is always there because it is part and parcel of Jewish experience, because Israel has rarely, if ever, truly been a coherent and consistent Promised Land with Jews in the majority and imposed its laws and institutions on all, but rather always a site of disagreement, a mixture of diverse peoples, nations, cultures, institutions and laws. The Talmud does not repress the voices of its dissidents and heretics but allows them a space to continue the argument, to exercise their own disagreements and alternative views of reality, with halachic decisions rarely concluded and more normatively left open to further discussion and debate. Third, we might say, that within Judaism and Jewish history (if they are at all different) there are no nooks and crannies because there is no center—or at least since the Fall of the Temple and the Destruction of the State, there is no cult center for priestly authority, no judicial center for legal authority, and no geographical center for communal rituals and customs: rather, at the center there is the Law, and so the debates and discussions swirl about it. And the men and women of imagination? “Their mind matured where the most diverse cultural influences crossed and fertilized each other.” Deutscher further says: Their manner of thinking is dialectical, because, living on borderlines of nations and religions, they see society in a state of flux. They conceive reality as being dynamic, not static. Those who are shut in within one society, one nation, or one religion, tend to imagine that their way of life and their way of thought have absolute and unchangeable validity and that all that contradicts their standards is somehow “unnatural,” inferior, or evil. Those, on the other hand, who live on the borderlines of various civilizations comprehend more clearly the great movement and the great contradictoriness of nature and society.105 Here Deutscher comes very close to the heart of the matter: but as we have already said, it is not only or even primarily the tension between Jews and non-Jews or between Judaism and other religions and civilizations that the essence of Jewish imagination lies, but 105 Ibid., 35. — 295 —

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between diverse versions of Judaism all moving in and out of relation to the moral, spiritual and legal center—the Law. This dynamic tension and lack of visible central authorities of institutional or communal life generates misunderstandings, fear and hatred of Jews by outsiders. Francité versus Judéité [Antoine Amedée Marie Vincent Amat Manca de Vallombrosa, known as the Marquis de Morès’s] politics became overtly anti-Semitic and he challenged Ferdinand Camille Dreyfus,106 a Jewish member of the Chamber of Deputies, to a duel after Dreyfus wrote an article attacking him. De Morès said he wanted Gaul for the Gauls, and Dreyfus replied by writing that de Morès had a Spanish title, a father with an Italian wife, who was neither Christian nor French. At the duel, Dreyfus fired first and missed, and the Marquis wounded his opponent in the arm.107 In both Hebrew and Aramaic ema (“dread”) is not a fear motivated by immediate physical danger but anxiety designed to intimidate and facilitate psychological coercion and manipulation. — José Faur108 The argument over what constitutes a Frenchman or woman and the nation of France could go in several directions at the end of the nineteenth century, and these arguments constituted the question of 106 He was not a relative of Alfred Dreyfus. The family name was fairly common among Jews from Alsace. 107 “Marquis de Morès,” Absolute Astronomy, http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/issues/marquis_ de-mores (accessed 5 November 2010). Even further: “In 1889 de Morès joined La Ligue Antisémitique de France founded by Edouard Drumont. After more verbal attacks on Jews, he went to Algeria to strengthen the French hold there and stop British advances into the interior of Africa. He used anti-Semitic rhetoric to his advantage in Algeria, giving speeches claiming African Jews and the British were conspiring to conquer the entire Sahara Desert. With the British losing in the Sudan after the death of General Charles George Gordon, de Morès planned to help them to meet the Mahdi. But before the Marquis could complete his journey his caravan was infiltrated by Tuareg tribesmen who were the enemies of the French. De Morès was surrounded, attacked by a saber and then killed with rifles. An investigation that followed revealed that his enemies in the French government may have taken part in the assassination. His wife, the Marquise, sought to expose the conspirators, but no government official was convicted.” 108 Faur, “Of Cultural Intimidation,” 44. — 296 —

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whether or not France would or could ever be a modern republic or lapse into a old-fashioned and traditional Catholic state. On the one hand, if being a Frenchman or woman was not compromised or denied by their being Jews, Masons, or Protestants who also were true and loyal citizens of the Republic, then “Frenchness” (francité) was not embedded in the blood, the soil or even the spirit; it was a matter of both inherited culture and elective loyalties. However, if Jews formed part of the nation from its inception, and therefore being a Frenchman did not compromise one’s Jewishness (judéité) or even Judaism (judaïsme), then the old-fashioned notions of the Catholic, rural, and monarchic French state would be threatened to its very core. In a sense, this debate is what the Dreyfus Affair was about, certainly in its public manifestations. There are at least three—perhaps four—sides to this debate that overlap, in a variety of ways, the key issues of the Dreyfus Affair. Michael Burns calls the story of the Dreyfus family and their relations a “chronicle of two faiths—religious and national—that were often, but not always in conflict”109 and sets their history against the false ideology of anti-Semitism and the ignorance or indifference of the mass of people, Jewish and non-Jewish alike. First, there is the thesis presented in Drumont’s France juive that modern France already has been taken over by an unassimilable other group, the Jews, and hence its very identity and future are in jeopardy.110 Drawing on fears and anxiety of modernism, including the dislocations of the urban and industrial revolutions, the instability of the political centre in Paris, and the threats of foreign invasion, the anti-Semitic press was thus able to whip up fervour against Dreyfus, making him the centre of the debate about who and what a Frenchman can or ought to be. The Jew was the symbolic demon, representing all that was dangerous and subversive in the economy, the social and political institutions, and the high and low or popular culture. While not all the anti-Semites belonged to the same camp as the Boulangists or Bourbonists or other regressive movements, since the search for revenge after the defeat of 1870, bitterness at the way the Commune was put down and rage at the financial scandals of the 1880s and 1890s, also 109 Burns, Dreyfus: A Family Affair, xv. 110 Cf. Romain Rolland: “They [the Jews] have many faults: but they have one great quality—perhaps the greatest of all: they are alive, and human: nothing human is foreign to them and they are interested in every living being” (Vol. II, 256-257). — 297 —

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fuelled the search for the usual scapegoats, the Jews. The key image for the mechanism or contraption that produced the Affair in these terms is the phantasmagoria,111 a metaphor we have shown to be both explicitly and implicitly used in many anti-Semitic documents, sometimes as the secret guide to a secret Jewish cabal or syndic, sometimes as a setting for the grotesque stage comedy, as well as appearing in Dreyfus’s own writing—as the fantasmagorie itself or variations on “an infernal machine” that turned normal life into a terrible nightmare.112 Second, the public debates among the mostly left-wing Dreyfusards for the most part put aside the question of Jews and Judaism,113 treating such issues as an incidental factor (the “Incidentalism” discussed earlier in this book, ennieux, tedious, trying or annoying when brought to their attention, but trivial in itself, once the problem for the socialists and anarchists over taking an active stand on behalf of a wealthy, middleclass military officer had been resolved for the moment.114 Like Dreyfus 111 “God forbid,” writes Maimonides in The Guide for the Perplexed, “to assume that God would make his prophets appear an object of ridicule and sport in the eyes of the ignorant, and order them to perform foolish acts” (Part II, Chapter 46, 246); and then soon after, “Whatever is said in the account of a vision, that the prophet heard, went forth, came out, said, was told, stood, sat, went up, went down, journeyed, asked, or was asked, all is part of the prophetic vision; even when there is a lengthened account, the details of which are well connected as regards the time, the persons referred to, and the place. After it has once been stated that the event described is to be understood figuratively, it must be assumed for certain the whole is a prophetic vision” (Chapter 46, 247). And is this not how we should approach these two intermingled, overlapping and mutually exclusive phantasmagorias? And if you were to disagree with this way of approaching the character of the man and the meaning of the Affair, “you will find many of the wise men and the commentators differ sometimes from him in the interpretation of words and in many things respecting the prophets. Why should it be otherwise in these profound matters? Besides I do not decide in favour of my interpretation. It is for you to learn both … God knoweth which of the two explanations is in accordance with that which the prophet intended to say”(Part II, Chapter 4, 257). Though Rambam seems to follow the traditional western distinction between intellect and imagination, reason and wit, he actually argues in a more flexible and dynamic manner, so that the products of the imagination—poetical conceits, midrashim, prophecies, like dreams—should not be dismissed but analyzed, not considered pure fictions at best rhetorically useful and persuasive for the nonce, but powerful analytical lenses themselves by which things about the ineffable can be brought into discussion which otherwise would be out of sight and whose memory would be lost in an ecstasy of fear and anxiety. 112 We have also used the metaphors of the kaleidoscope and the mazurka, but all are part of a vast complex of simulation and dissimulation, deception and delusionment that were experienced as part of a nightmare, a machination, and an enigma by the Dreyfus family. 113 Romain Rolland: ‘”Dreyfusards? said Christophe. ‘Well: what does that matter?’ [answered Commandant Chabran.]/ ‘It is they who have ruined France.’/ ‘They love France as much as you do.’/ ‘They’re mad, mischievous, lunatics’” (Jean Christophe, Vol. II, 435-436). 114 Faur: “Properly understood, the conflict between Rome and Jerusalem is political through and through; there is nothing ‘religious’ about it. Both systems are broad and all-inclusive and — 298 —

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and his family and close friends, for whom the real issues seemed to be about whether or not France was already a modern, secular republic based on the principles of the 1789 Revolution and their refinements throughout the nineteenth century, for the other pro-Dreyfus and pro-Zola and even pro-Col. Piquart intellectuals, as they came to be called, the Affair was above all a matter of a judicial error committed by individual men—although, to a certain degree, the cover-ups and bullying tactics to quiet opposition was seen as systemic as well. This was what we have called the arrogance of power. From this perspective, it was supposedly their caste loyalties to the Army, supported by proclergy rural elites and hide-bound urban capitalists who wanted a return to some form of monarchic or imperial oligarchy. Consequently, as soon as the overturning of Dreyfus’s condemnation was achieved, many of these strategic supporters of Dreyfus turned away from him and fought politically for their primary goals, such as forming a socialist government, separating church and state, and boosting national pride and glory. Third, as can be seen in the writings of Marcel Proust and Charles Péguy, the place of Jews and Judaism in the concept of France was made to turn on two illusions or self-induced delusions: on the one hand, as seen in A la recherche, the true essence of the nation and its institutions not only coincided with a secular, moral version of assimilated Jewishness, but this dream of French Judeity was made stronger by the exuberant support of Jewish culture and intelligence.115 On the comprehend the realms of the political, the spiritual, the cultural and the legal. Only one issue stands between them: is the ultimate ground for authority the sword, centered in a monarchical Empire headed by a Cosmocrator ruling the world (Pharaoh, Alexander, Caesar, et al., in antiquity, in modern times Napoleon and more recently Hitler)? Or the Law?” (“Of Cultural Intimidation,” 46). 115 But what is a dream and what happens when a person enters a dream and dreams that he or she is not dreaming? Maimonides said “I need not explain what a dream is, but I will explain the meaning of the term mareh, ‘vision’ … ’In a vision (be-mareh) do I make myself known unto him’ (Num. Xii.6). The term signifies that which is also called mareh ba-nebuah, ‘prophetic vision,’ yad ha-ha-shem, ‘the hand of God,’ and mahazeh, ‘a vision.’ It is something terrible and fearful which the prophet feels while awake…” (Guide for the Perplexed, Part II, Chapter 41, 234). Then he adds: “You must know that whenever Scripture relates that the Lord or an angel spoke to a person, this took place in a dream or a prophetic vision” (Part II, Chapter 41, 235). In other texts, the rabbis have said that a dream has meaning only when it is interpreted. we have argued, Dreyfus entered into a dream world and that experience was a nightmare from which he could not disentangle himself until two things happened: one, of course, that he was released from prison and eventually rehabilitated, something that required a dedication and a perseverance by others, such as Lucie Dreyfus and Mathieu Dreyfus; and the other that he dream two radical counter— 299 —

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other hand, as seen in Notre jeunesse (Our Youth), Jews played the role of a spiritualized inner force within the Christian nation of France, embodied less in Alfred Dreyfus, however, than in Bernard Lazare. Thus this truly Catholic and traditional France could at once also be formed around the Old Testament, especially the prophetic, ethics that Christ is manifest in the world, fulfilling the prophecies of the Old Dispensation, perfecting the prefigurations in Jewish Law, and transcending the fallen world of sin in a new France. However, there might be a fourth aspect to the Affair, hidden in the letters, journals, and workbooks of Alfred Dreyfus. This is a position that was not consciously worked out, if at all conscious, and drew on inherent but not always active mystical and apocalyptic aspects of Jewish thought. Because it lacked a specific, or easily recognizable lexicon in modern languages, such as French, it was spoken of obliquely, by hints and allusions, and hidden in christological terms. In their letters, Alfred and Lucie created a new kind of domestic unit, a French family—not the romantic pairing of loving husband and adored wife nor the little bourgeois circle of father, mother, and children, but the larger, extended family that is in itself a viable community—built on mutual admiration, love, and loyalty to the supreme values of the modern secular and tolerant state. In his journals, as he argued for his legal rehabilitation and confronted opposition both from the old anti-Dreyfusard camp of reactionary intellectuals and irrational nationalism and from the splitoff supporters seeking to establish a socialist-anarchist totalitarian state, Dreyfus created a vision of moderate enlightenment values, conciliatory politics, and general tolerance. In his prison cahiers, finally, although they are seemingly incomplete, the exiled martyr penned a vision of a dreams, a vision of rationality that would create around him a protective wall of intellectual activity such as reading, thinking and writing about ideas, and a vision of metaphysical love and loyalty that was composed of two greater ideas, an idea of a spiritually superlative and morally noble Lucie and a similarly just and courageous France, true to its own Republican ideals. But on the other side, the nation, the people, the crowds, as they ranted and howled against the Jew Dreyfus, and the fearful and ignoble officers and politicians acted out their own dream of a purely Christian and racially consistent Gallic France, as much as they knew intellectually that Dreyfus was innocent and the charges against him a grotesque mélange of forged documents and perjured statements, could not afford to wake up and denied that they were dreaming. Maimonides argues: “In our dreams, we sometimes believe that we are awake, and relate a dream to another person, who explains the meaning, and all this goes on while we dream” (Part II, Chapter 43, 238). Alfred Dreyfus’s grandchildren and great-grandchildren recalled the family tradition, derived from Jeanne Dreyfus, that Alfred would suffer from nightmares all the remaining years of his life. — 300 —

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cosmopolitan France, built on the basis of what has recently been called religious humanism, that is, a form of Jewishness at the heart of ancient Sephardic traditions (but not so much in cases of the East European shtetl and ghetto Jews who escaped the pogroms of the late nineteenth century and immigrated to various New Worlds) so often occluded and maintained as a form of Marranism, even by those who are nominally practicing Jews in accord with science and technology, yet valuing art and the imagination, honouring great men and women of all nations and faiths.

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Part 2: Dreyfus, Jewish Art and Midrashic Aesthetics

In Jewish lore, God himself is referred to as the Supreme Artist who first designed the world, and from its materials then designed man (Midrash Sifri). The rabbis refer to God as a sculptor (Bab. Talmud Berakhot X:AA); and, indeed, human sculptors are compared to the Divine Sculptor (Mekhilta of Rabbi Simon Bar Yohai). — Michale Korniel116 The transformations of Jewish life in the last two-anda-half centuries still boggle the mind. Deep ruptures opened to separate the present from the past, modernity from tradition, setting terms that have defined the contours of Jewish life until today. How did people try to think their way through the change?  — Yehuda Mirsky117 Carl Ludwig Fernow wrote that “the artist is merely tolerated. Like the Jews, he lacks the rights of the ordinary citizen.”118 To us, the analogy is somewhat bizarre and reversible, but it is good starting point to discuss the way in which Alfred Dreyfus can be considered an artist because it captures the melancholic, cynical, and decadent romantic aspects common to many fin de siècle views of aesthetics. In the same way as we have tried to tease out from his various writings—letters, journals, notebooks—aspects of the Judaism in his character and personality that he normally and consciously wished to keep hidden, if they played any part at all in his day to day thinking, we have to approach the pages and pages of drawings in the prison cahiers. In earlier preliminary 116 Michael Koniel, The Art of World Religions: Judaism (Poole, Dorset: Blandford Press, 1979), 9. 117 Yehuda Mirsky, “Secularism and its Discontents,” Jewish Ideas Daily (17 December 2010), http:// www.jewishideasdaily.com/content/module.2010/12/17/mainfeature/1/secularism-amd-itsdiscontents (accessed 20 December 2010). 118 Walther and Metzger, Van Gogh, 473. — 302 —

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sections of chapters we have broached a number of background themes relevant to a discussion of these seemingly obsessive doodles. Now it is time to consider them as manifestations of a Jewish attitude towards visual experiences, art in a very broad sense of the word, as well as images conceived at a time when Jewish artists were first beginning to make their presence felt in the universe of European art as Jews and not merely as individual artists who happened to be—once were—Jewish.119 Which is not to say, however, that we consider Alfred Dreyfus to have been an Impressionist or Post-Impressionist artist or an art critic. Of art in general, meaning the visual practices of painting and sculpture in particular, Dreyfus actually had relatively little to say, yet more than almost every historian has said (if they say anything at all about his aesthetic tastes) and when he does it seems that his taste and experiences were limited but not completely absent—what is absent outside of the prison workbooks is almost any mention of art or music or other artistic experiences. He certainly does not seem to be in close touch with the latest developments amongst the Impressionists, postImpressionists and other modernist movements at the close of the nineteenth century. His preferences, too, if they are expressed at all, tend to be the Old Masters and a few more classical or traditional artists of his own century. In the cahiers he mentions Ernest Meissonier favourably. Though Meissonier was dismissed as a popular artist out of the current of Impressionists and their modernist followers, it turns out that he not 119 Braunstein on a Megillat Esther (Purim Scroll) from Bohemia-Moravia of the early eighteenth century gives a good idea of the kind of decorations and representational paintings there were on these objects, how international they are, and how much they derive from non-Jewish patternbooks. Nevertheless, she also indicates that the Jewish artists had individual styles and did not copy passively what was traditional and in fashion: “The margins between each column of text are filled with lavish arrangements of flowers, columns incorporating caryatids, and large scrolls with suspended bunches of flowers. These decorative elements are drawn from the stylistic vocabulary of the late seventeenth-century Baroque, and are based on the pattern books of such designers as Jean Berain. Each design in the Furman [megillah] across is repeated once. Across the top of the scroll are landscapes and hunting-scenes within cartouches; these are flanked by cherubs, cornucopias, acanthus scrollwork, and allegorical figures. The bottom of the scroll contains scenes from the Story of Esther, set within ornate frames. The scenes are separated by masks, grotesques, stags, peacocks, and sphinxes … the scenes from the Story of Esther are identical to those of a popular group of engraved megillot that were produced either in Holland or Italy in the seventeenth century. However, the scribe of the Furman megillah has adapted these models in his own style, thus creating a highly ornamented work of art in an early Rocco idiom … Their subject matter was frequently derived from printed prototypes … but these were usually altered somewhat and interpreted in the individualistic style of each artist, producing lively and imaginative genre scenes” (The Furman Collection, 28-29). — 303 —

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only “had an enormous reputation for artistic fidelity,” sometimes to the point of being accused “of being a master of ‘microscopic art,’ but he was very interested in all the advances being made in optics, photography and cinematic studies of organic motion.”120 It was not surprising that Meisonnier considered himself and was considered to the foremost living artists to have spurned the conventional modes of representation and to have rediscovered the truths which, he believed, only the Assyrians had known before him.121 Burns mentions that in 1884, during his years of training for the army, Dreyfus once “travelled to an art exposition in Amsterdam,” but not what he saw nor how he responded.122 And once only does Dreyfus himself mention going to an exhibition of paintings, and that merely in passing in his Carnets of the period following his pardon.123 In his prison notebooks, as with so many other philosophical topics, he does 120 Scharf, Art and Photography, 215. 121 Ibid. In 1881, Meissonier welcomed Muybridge to Paris and helped him put on an exhibition of his latest techniques to a gathering of painters, sculptors, and writers. The new apparatus was called a “photo-praximoscope” or “zoöpraxiscope” (217). The long strips of images of birds in flight, horses galloping, men running and similar actions recall, without overstretching credulity, the endless drawings of Dreyfus, each one a variation on what comes before and what follows, as though also in a series of developing attempts to capture motion, transformation and life in its dynamic reality. As Muybridge’s photographs were exhibited and printed in popular books and magazines in the late 1880s, there is no reason that Alfred Dreyfus could not have already seen them when he was sent to prison or encountered them in the magazines he was allowed to receive there. 122 Burns, Dreyfus: A Family Affair, 75. 123 Outside of the several small essays in the prison workbooks, the only reference to art per se appears in the carnets of 1899 to 1907. “I profited from my stay in Nieuport to go visit the exhibition of Flemish primitives that had just come from an opening in Bruges” (Je profitai de mon séjour à Nieuport pour aller visiter l’exposition des primitives flamands qui venait de s’ouvrir à Bruges) in Carnets, XV, 115. What he has to say about the show is more interesting, although extremely brief: “The exhibit of paintings was very interesting; the Memlings were quite remarkable. Gerard Davis had some very lovely works, if all were by him, which is still disputed among about some of them” (L’éxposition de tableaux était fort intéressante; les Memling tout à fait remarquables. Gérard David y avait de très belles oeuvres, si toutes sont de lui, ce qui est encore contesté pour certaines d’entre elles) in Carnets, XV, 15. Though the judgments on the paintings are vague—interesting and remarkable are hardly technical terms or demonstrative of emotional responses—Dreyfus has paid attention to what he has seen. His most cogent remarks, however, have to do with the contested provenance of some of David’s works. These two primitives of the Northern Renaissance have as much of an historical as an aesthetic interest. Hans Memling (1465-1494) and Gerard David (1460-1523) do not raise any questions of their subject matter, Christian art, nor of technique and individual personality, and Dreyfus’s unusual comments for him are those of an intelligent but untrained viewer, not a connoisseur or art historian. — 304 —

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write a few brief essays that we have touched upon in this book. It would therefore seem that, on the whole, Dreyfus would agree with José Faur, who cites Philo of Alexandria: “poetry and art are forms of idolatry designed to charm and seduce the foolish.”124 But this stricture holds true only in certain circumstances, just as the commandment against graven images is not a universal taboo; when pagan worship or false philosophy are involved or may be imputed, the rabbis forbid Jewish participation, but where it is a matter of enhancing the worship of God through beautiful adornments and making the pursuit of virtue more alluring, then art is allowed and even praised. 125 Unlike Marcel Proust, with whom they shared many general background qualities and cultural interests, Alfred and Lucie were not collectors or connoisseurs of the fine arts. They seem not to have taken full advantage of the many public and private galleries and museums in Paris. They definitely were not frequenters of fashionable salons in which artists, patrons, and the cognoscenti met in the private homes of aristocratic families and the upper bourgeoisie, who patronized art and artists, nor of the restaurants, nor were they habitués of those bohemian cafés where artists, critics, and their patrons met to argue over matters 124 “The Special Laws,” quoted in The Horizontal Society, Section 1, Paragraph 4. 125 Aryeh Tepper, in an essay called “Where Have All the Prophets Gone?,” cites Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, one of the fathers of religious Zionism, as saying in “The Way of Renewal” that Jewish history oscillated between two radical polar axes: “the soul-force of exceptional individuals, and the dictates of religious texts. During the golden age of Jewish life in ancient Israel, ‘the mighty personality of the prophets was more dominant.’ But the people, moved by violent passions, were easily drawn away by the temptations of idolatry, and the resulting corruption caused the destruction of the First Temple and exile from the land. Thenceforward, in order to guard against the influence of idolatry, Jewish religious life shifted away from the unmediated encounter with nature and became grounded in texts, a paradigm that remained in force until the present day” (Jewish Ideas Daily, 18 January 2011). Modified by circumstances over the centuries, the nature of idolatry itself, like the status and extent of the sacred texts, shifted, but not the essential antipathy between the rabbinical midrashic processes and the “slide” into a facile belief that one can connect in an unmediated way with both nature and the self; the lack of mediation—a lens or an elaborate verbal waltz or mazurka—is a delusionary state, i.e., idolatry. In terms that Alfred Binet was using around the same time as Dreyfus was going through his ordeal, the passage from a primary fetish, in which one believes one’s contact with reality is transparent and meaningful, and secondary fetish which is built on the conventionality of associated ideas ritualized into patterns of behavior and recollection that disappear into the illusion of immediacy, are both types of idolatry (cf. Binet, Le culte des objets corporels on http://www.psychanalyse-paris.com/ Le_ culte_des_objets-corporels). Binet also defines the religious fetish as a material object to which the fetishist attributes a mysterious power, as indicated by the etymology of the word fetish from the Portuguese fetissa, signifying an enchanted thing, related to the Old French fatum, destiny (“Festishisme religieux et amoureux” Chapter I online at www.psychanalyse-paris.com/ Le_culte_ des_objets-corporels). — 305 —

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of mutual interest. That does not exclude the probability that the couple purchased and read over the books of art that were illustrated with the latest techniques of photography, and also became as knowledgeable as any non-professionals with the effects of experimental instantaneous pictures of motion that started to appear in popular and sophisticated paintings in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. The most striking feature of the roll-on effect was the use of various lines and textures to indicate rapidity of motion. These abstract signs were to become the visual schemata in a new language of motion. Trace images behind moving objects, so commonplace in the work of our modern cartoonists, are rarely to be found before photography and only very occasionally antecede [Etienne-Jules] Marey’s chronophotographs. As has often been the case, popular graphic artists, caricaturists especially, less inhibited by convention, exceeded painters in inventiveness.126 Something similar to his participation in the world of the visual arts would have to be said about Dreyfus’s tastes and knowledge of music. Lucie is reputed to have been a pianist,127 and therefore might have been expected to have possessed an instrument at home which she might have played either during the day for her own pleasure or perhaps in the evenings as a family entertainment.128 There is no mention, however, in the records that she owned a piano or performed at home. Whether she and Alfred ever went to public or home concerts, as we see Proust’s narrator doing at key moments in his life, could not be confirmed until the prison workbooks were made public: now we know that Alfred attended performances,129 discussed music with relatives, and had 126 Scharf, Art and Photography, 228. 127 Burns, Dreyfus: A Family Affair, 79. “Her first love was the piano, for which she had considerable talent …” 128 If the analogy holds, given the provisos already noted, between Lucie Dreyfus and Jeanne Proust, we can say that musical tastes, along with literary predilections, were passed on from generation and were typical in middle-class Jewish family at the end of the nineteenth century; cf. Evelyne Bloch-Dano, Madame Proust (Paris: Editions Grasset et Fasquelle, 2004), 18. 129 See Burns, Dreyfus: A Family Affair, 98, for evidence that Lucie and Alfred occasionally attended the symphony in the evenings after he returned home from work. — 306 —

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educated if not technical tastes, preferring Mozart over Wagner.130 In part, this not very avant-garde interest in the performing or exhibiting arts is what we might expect in a young, comfortable middleclass and professional Jewish family of the time. Despite the fact that there were a disproportionate number of Jews, religious, indifferent, or assimilated, actually participating at various levels of the high culture of France in the last half of the nineteenth century, as one can see in novels such as the Goncourt Brothers’ Manette Salomon, only a small number of individual Jews and Jewish families were involved as creators, critics, art-dealers, or patrons. The reasons why are not hard to find. Traditionally, Jews, up to the late nineteenth century in most western nations, if they were not teachers or performers in the arts, had little or no interest in the cultural developments of the Christian societies where they resided because they were not welcomed, legally or socially.131 130 Romain Rolland: “Of course, Wagner was [Josias Kling] the type of the pure Aryan, of whom the German race had remained the last inviolable refuge against the corrupting influences of Latin Semitism, especially the French” (Jean-Christophe, Vol. I, 424). 131 How confusing it could be to determine whether or not there was actually any quality specific to a Jewish artist or to a work of art created by someone claiming Jewish ancestry, maybe seen in the way modern curators in Jewish museums try to confront the task. Thus, for instance, Susan Tumarkin Goodman, Introduction to Michael Sonimo, ed., The Batkin Collection for the Jewish Museum, New York, that took place from 2 July to 6 October 1985 (New York, NY: The Jewish Museum of New York under the auspices of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1985), 4-5. Goodman curated an exhibition of the Batkin Collection of Israeli Art emphasizes the diversity and individuality of each of the participating artists. “These artists,” she says in the Introduction to the catalogue, “neither follows nor espouses a particular style, nor do they embrace a single dogma, and their origins, training, and practice are quite dissimilar” (4). Having set forth the position that there is no one theory or style of art that can be essentially Jewish or Israeli, Goodman then makes a complementary statement that establishes the second principle: “Each, however, expresses in art the sum of his or her personal background and experience” (Ibid.), a theoretical statement that, brief and incomplete as it is here, suggests that common experiences throughout their history, diverse as such might seem superficially, unite all Jews in and by that history. What she then says next almost comes to the nub of the matter, although she leaves the final extrapolation for the reader: “In a sense, the diversity of the Batkin Collection epitomizes Israel itself” (Ibid.). Notice the elements in her sentence: (1) each artist expresses the sum of his or her background, the total being more than the sum of its parts, either for the particular artists who constitute the selected eleven in the Batkin collection, or the conscious and recollected components of their backgrounds and experiences; (2) the sum constituted is more than a bundle of diverse parts because it is an epitome of the whole of Israel, meaning at once a representative selection of types honed down to a manifestation of the essence of the missing whole and a created intellectual exemplar of the otherwise invisible essence; and (3) the Israel represented by these eleven artists is, in the first place, the modern State of Israel, the homeland and refuge for all Jews from their Diaspora wanderings and sufferings in galut, the Exile, and not only that Israel, but also Israel the people or nation who have existed, wandered and suffered for more than three millennia, and Israel the ideal of Jewish personhood, nationality, culture, and spirituality, the legal embodiment of the covenant partner with God undertaken at Sinai. (Sonimo, ed., The Batkin Collection). — 307 —

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When they did show an interest, the majority culture regarded them as intrusive outsiders. Assimilated as the young Dreyfuses considered themselves to be, they remained true to propensities within traditional Jewish family ways. That is not to say, however, that either the Dreyfus clan nor the Hadamard extended family were philistines or maintained strict East European attitudes towards the arts, visual and otherwise.132 Far from it. But how far is far? Alfred’s stated interests were mostly in science, technology, history, and literature. When he did come to write about painting or music, mostly in the prison notebooks, he tended to use a terminology drawn from art criticism133 as a way of describing through analogy and allusion his own condition and his longings for a more poetic component in his life. However, on certain occasions, the concepts and conceits he uses take their shape and substance from common and traditional rabbinical attitudes, tending towards a Sephardic perspective than his own Ashkenazic family connections. His stated predilections and implicit tastes seem to be based on the very traditions of tolerance and sympathy towards principles set out by authorities within the socalled Levantine Option (David Shasha’s expression), from Saadya Gaon to Moses Maimonides and their followers. This option, which can also go back to the great Alexandrian Jewish historians and philosophers, such as Philo Judaeus and Josephus, marks the best of Sephardic tradition and much of the enlightened Ashkenazi heritage. In this trend within rabbinic thought, rather than in the line of Nachmanides, the German Pietists and the more recent Hasidim (mystical enthusiasts) and Maskallim (Enlightened Jewish thinkers) of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who became entrenched in different forms of extremism and nationalism, Judaism was understood to be creatively 132 Jacob Schulman makes “A Personal Statement” at the opening of the catalogue introducing his collection exhibited in Jewish Museum in New York: “To the dismay of their families—and despite the prevailing rigid interpretation of the Second Commandment prohibiting figurative art—each of these artists displayed a talent for drawing and at an early age adopted painting and/or sculpture as their lifetime pursuits. They also rejected the outward manifestations— the ceremonial trappings—of their faith, choosing instead to confront the challenges posed by acculturation” (Michael Sonino, ed., The Schulman Collection of 20th Century American Art [New York: The Jewish Museum under the auspices of the Jewish Theological Seminary of New York, 1985], 6). By a few minor adjustments—speaking of fin de siècle Parisian artists instead of Jewish American painters and sculptors, changing acculturation to assimilation—this fits for the milieu in which Lucie and Alfred grew up. 133 Such as could be found in the newspapers and magazines he read, a list of which is found in the earlier section where we discussed his reading while on Devil’s Island. — 308 —

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open to ideas from “among the nations.”134 Yet this openness was also a dynamic and robust attitude that carefully weighed up and transformed what it accepted. In regard to ancient theories of imitation, analysis and praxis, this classical Sephardic school of thought built up a body of attitudes, ideas, and values created over many generations in creative reaction against tendencies in ancient Greek and Roman civilizations, not closing itself off from the world, as tended to happen in Jewish communities forced to live in ghettos, shtetlech, and pales of settlement. In other words, probably without being conscious of where his tastes had come from nor articulate in expressing those preferences, Dreyfus revealed himself to lie within the ambit of this particular model of Hebrew culture; when he shows himself drawn towards great western art he also backs off into ambiguity and critical modification, just as medieval and Renaissance talmudic scholarship from Yemen to Spain and around the littoral of the Mediterranean was not rejecting outright the pagan and Christian developments of art and aesthetics as much as playing off them with an independent spirit, and assimilating into the Jewish collective experience what is compatible with the Law as interpreted continually and dynamically by the sages and rabbis and likely to stimulate new directions within that Jewish core of values and practices.135 At certain times, such as the nineteenth-century fin de siècle in cities 134 Faur: “R. Abraham ibn Ezra (1089-1164) observed that ‘created’ (‫—)אּרּבּ‬the Hebrew verb designating God’s primeval act of creation—actually means ‘to cut, to sever.’ The function of this verb is to negate any sort of link, metaphysical or physical, relating God to His creatures: causality is the effect, not the ground, of Creation. Creation belongs to the realm of the semiological…. Signification is not a given. It requires discerning a ketub system excluding vowels, which challenged the reader to interpret it by means of a mikhtab system, becoming thereby the writer. The purpose of Creation, as far as biblical man is concerned, is for man and God to transcend their ‘radical solitude’” (The Horizontal Society, Section 1, Concluding Reflections). 135 Schulman cites Clement Greenberg’s Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968) on an artist’s Jewishness in terms that come close to the picture appropriate for Alfred Dreyfus, again, subject to small adjustments: “Jewishness becomes the condition of Kafka’s [work—ed.] mainly to the extent that it emerges as its subject. To the extent that the Jewish condition becomes the subject of Kafka’s art, it informs its form—become in-dwelling form. Through his Dichtung—literally, his imaginings and musings—Kafka wins through to an intuition of the Jewish condition in the Diaspora so vivid as to convert the expression of itself into an integral part of itself; so complete, that is, that the intuition becomes Jewish in style as well as sense” in Sonino, ed., The Schulman Collection of 20th Century American Art, 7. From this point of view, an artist or a work of art can be Jewish, even if it is not situated at the heart of Judaism as a religion and without focusing on a moment or an event in Jewish history; but simply by emerging from a condition of existential awareness of how a Jew feels and thinks about life in a way distinct from the nations around him or her. — 309 —

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such as Paris, Vienna and Berlin, a considerable number of individual Jewish artists seemed to enter the mainstreams of European culture, leaving their baggage of rabbinical ideas behind with the families they moved away from; and yet, as both the anti-Semites did at the time and as more serious, tolerant and sometimes Jewish historians can now perceive in hindsight, these same individuals could be viewed as a more or less coherent movement within the other movements, and more particularly as leaders in the most radical, independent, and critical drivers of those European developments.136 Jewish art and artists and their ideas emerged into the modern world along with other groups and schools and movements, though they lacked much of the background which the other painters, musicians, and other artists had accumulated in their history since Antiquity.137 Even today, the ancient commandments against graven images and idolatry are applied in assessing Jewish history in rather strict terms only by those unfamiliar with rabbinical thinking. It is therefore wrongly assumed by non-Jewish historians, and Jews disconnected from their intellectual heritage, that in Judaism there exists an almost aniconic liturgy and worship at home and in public, inculcating attitudes detrimental to the development of visual, auditory, olfactory, and tactile sensibilities, particularly in the fine arts. Close examination of the historical facts, however, easily reveals that the strictures against art, artistry, artisanship and appreciation of beauty were hardly ever taken literally, as has been assumed,138 nor as consistently applied 136 Norman Simms, “Jewish Symbolism and Art,” Journal of Literature & Aesthetics 7:2 (1999): 7-13. 137 Gilya Gerda Schmidt, The Art and Artists of the Fifth Zionist Congress, 1901: Heralds of a New Age (Syracuse, NY: University of Syracuse Press, 2003). 138 Mirbeau wrote in an essay, “Notes sur l’art” for La France on 15 November 1884, that “we receive, from our birth, an education in Beauty, always the same, as though Beauty were something to be learned like grammar, and as though there existed a concept of Beauty more than the beautiful things we know, a true Beauty, a unique Beauty; as though the Beautiful, not being a wholly personal faculty of the mind and consequently different for each of us, of receiving impressions and, drawing from them the truths of life and the mysteries of a dream, fixing them on canvas, in stone or in a book” (I, 32). This is not Dreyfus’s heritage as a Jew, although he can read about it in books and be guided through the galleries where it is exhibited, in paradigms set up by others. As an adult, he can become familiar with these ideas, but he did not imbibe them with his mother’s milk, and they do not form the substratum of unquestioned premises that he can react against and modify by conscious will. Basic words, such as art and beauty, always have different resonance and allusive force. Whereas for Mirbeau, radical as he is in his tastes and performance, the “mystère d’art consiste dans le plus ou moins de développement de cette sensation”(I, 305) (the mystery of art consists in the more or less development of this sensation”); for Dreyfus the sensation does not come unimpeded or spontaneously and then pass through a series of modifications as the intellect — 310 —

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across the Jewish world as the experience of Israel in Eastern Europe over the past few centuries may actually have been.139 For the most part, when circumstances allowed, the restrictions were interpreted by rabbis in a rather more liberal fashion, or daily customs (minhagim) simply over-rode theoretical juridical concepts (halachah). Whenever military and political pressures allowed, Jewish communities could support artistic endeavours in their midst and so saw generations of trained Jewish artists flourishing and moving outside the closed confines of Jewish institutional life. Where home-grown workshops, ateliers, and family traditions had not come into being, wealthy Jews would hire Gentile workmen and artists to supply these patrons with objects and decorations to their own specifications, usually following current contextual trends.140 It is often argued, however, that even in examples of such painting, architecture, gold-work, and so forth in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, the Jewish contribution was at best peripheral and passive: most of the physical objects produced for synagogues and family rituals belonged to the category of folk-art or craftsmanship, as Chaim Potok points out in his learned novels about the artist Asher Lev, while at worst, as some of the older histories Jewish art say, they are processes the ideas generated. The sensation has to be formed in itself by special training and the modifications often run against the grain of traditional Jewish understandings and counterpreferences. One has only to observe the career of that most “Christian” of Jewish artists, Marc Chagal (Marek Segal) to see how the more he undertakes to paint for supposedly secular revolutionary institutions or in churches and chapels, he forces his Jewish sensibilities to shape the form and fill up the spaces of “normal” projects. 139 Even in English, as the early twentieth-century art historian Roger Fry points out, the term “beauty” sits in ambiguity, sometimes meaning “sensuous charm” and sometimes as an “aesthetic approval of works of imaginative art where the objects presented are often of extreme ugliness” (“An Essay in Aesthetics” in his Vision and Design [Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1937; orig. 1920], 34). There is also a distinction between “beauty” in a serious sense, not necessarily sensuous in form or matter, but in form and function, insofar as it enhances people, places, institutions, events, and so forth, as opposed to “pretty,” which is less serious, often frivolous and ephemeral, and merely appeals to superficial charms, harmony, and “niceness.” In the classical sense, Beauty stands with Truth and Justice, as mutually supportive terms for ideals of moral and ethical purity, cosmic and psychological order, and fairness and rational harmony. Insofar as Beauty, along with Truth and Justice, can stand alone or in complementary status to one another, they imply an autonomy which the rabbis rejected as idolatrous. Only when art, as skill and as spiritual insight, combine to make visibly evident the divine powers and lawful rituals associated deeply with objects, places, persons and ideas that are created can the production be called beautiful. 140 Chaya Benjamin explains, “… the same silversmiths made havdalah spiceboxes and Church vessels such as the monstrance, in the latter the foot is an organic part of the entire structure.” (Introduction to “Towers of Spice: The Tower-Shape Tradition,” in Havdalah Spiceboxes, ed. Marilyn Gold Koolik [Jerusalem: The Israel Museum, 1982]). Chavya Benjamin was curator of the exhibition in question. — 311 —

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examples of a primitive, unsophisticated piety.141 The flourishing of Jewish musicians, painters and performers in public and private theatres, fairgrounds and circuses, along with artists in the new popular entertainments of the nineteenth and twentieth century,142 it is averred, were not engaged in Jewish art at all, insofar as the performances and products were mostly to be found in secular venues and make no specific appeal to Jewish tastes, talents, or predilections. Even the design and decorations of specifically Jewish places, such as synagogues, community centres, and communal organizations and institutions seem to be credited as secondary applications of themes, images, and techniques developed in the surrounding cultures. As an anonymous author for the Jewish Virtual Library puts it, speaking in general terms, …when the Jews were to some extent culturally assimilated, they began to share in the artistic outlook of their neighbours and the prejudice against representational 141 “Jewish Art: Introduction,” Jewish Virtual Library, http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/source/ judaica/ejud__0002_0002_0_01373 (accessed 06 December 2010). 142 For much of its history in Europe, the Jewish people’s contributions to art have been completely overlooked, the Synagogue being considered at best a very pale imitation of the Church as a site for and patron of the visual and musical arts, and what of this art has managed to survive repeated persecutions, massacres, and expulsions has seemed only to be of minor significance, either as examples of folk-art in specific locales or as vestiges of ancient Middle Eastern traditions. Only since the foundation of the State of Israel following the Holocaust have proper museums, art schools, and historical methods been developed to rectify this problem of misunderstanding Jewish aesthetics and art. During the nineteenth century, at the time when individual Jews seemed to appear out of nowhere to be seen as significant players in European art history, it has been assumed—often even by themselves—that their Jewish backgrounds had been at best unimportant to their expression or at worst something to be struggled against. In regard to the discussion in the body of the book, the role of Jews in the development of popular entertainments and minor forms of painting, music or theatre has tried to limit them to entrepreneurship, financial supporters, and spectators. Yet they were more active and influential in both practical participation and theoretical or creative ways. Nor should it be forgotten that in general popular artists in the sense of “Sunday Painters” or the naifs also contributed to the over-all reception, spread and development of new ideas in the nineteenth century; many of these petit-bourgeois and amateurs deriving from the professional classes grew up in traditional craft-families whose services were no longer needed as technology made mass-production possible, whose aesthetic tastes had shifted to marginal status as their own knowledge and skills required greater and greater commitment of time, or whose upbringing and financial status prevented them from reaching the full potential of their latent talents. On rare occasions, too, these amateurs moved from the restricted zone of amateur or naïve art to become major artists (as with Vincent van Gogh or Paul Gauguin) or major collectors and thus patrons of the artists they admired (as with Father Tanguy or the banker Hoschédé). See Anatole Jakovsky, Eros du Dimanche. Bibliothèque Internationale d’Erotologie, no. 13 (Paris: Jean-Jacques Pervert, 1964). — 312 —

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art dwindled, and in the end almost disappeared. At least two counter-arguments to this negative view—or, at best, hesitantly ambiguous position—can be made, however. In the first, when anti-Semitic nationalists and religious bigots in general at the end of nineteenth century castigate Jewish achievements in the arts as subversive, transgressive and intrusive, the importation of alien perspectives, moral value systems and emotional responses, what they also do, without meaning to, is bear witness to the pervasive and significant role Jews played in the developments that may collectively be known as modernism.143 The Jewish artist, insofar as he or she really is Jewish, always feels like (or is made to feel like) an outsider, just as much as the anti-Semite so categorizes him or her—usually because of the bigot’s pathological need to project his own fears and anxieties on a scapegoat—latching on to the seemingly “other” qualities in the hated Jew. The Jew comes eventually to realize that this bigotry and hostility threatens his or her very existence, and yet he or she seeks to build a wall of protection made of those ideals from within Judaism that are matched by the highest values in the world around him or her.144 To that 143 Often enough, when the Jewish artist proclaims his or her credo in verbal statements accompanying the objet d’art itself these apparently universal humanist values should also be interpreted not as vague Enlightenment ideals, though they are that, to be sure, but also as a “Messianic faith,” as when Leonard Baskin confesses: ”my brain is serried with an infinity of memory-traces that recall the sound and smell of shul, of home, of Yeshiva, of the nearly all-Jewish street. If that committed rabbinic childhood of mine did not develop my sensibility to form, it at least helped me forge my ‘Yiddishe kop’ and that is something that is in this alien and dark world” (Sonino, ed., The Schulman Collection, 11). 144 Octave Mirbeau reviews the Exposition Universelle, opened on 1 May 1889, for Le Figaro on 10 June under the title “Impressions d’un visiteur”: “De tout temps, la beauté excite la verve iconoclaste des vandales. Ne pouvant la détruire, ils tentent de la déshonorer. C’est toujours l’histoire symbolique du voyou dont parlent les Goncourt [in Manette Salomon, 1867] et qui, au Jardin des Plantes, va çrachant sur la beauté des bêtes et la majesté des lions.’ La blague, c’est la vandalisme moderne” (I, 374): “It’s the same old story always, beauty arouses the iconoclastic impulse (verve). Being unable to destroy it, they attempt to dishonor it. Always the same symbolic story of the naughty kid, of whom the Goncourt Brothers speak, who goes into the zoo to spit on the beauty of the animals and on the majesty of the lions.” Too often in the nineteenth century, when speaking of the naughty boys who desecrate art and the vandals who pillage French culture, what is meant are the Jews. The Goncourts describe mobs of the lower classes and the nouveaux riches who descend upon the centers of Parisian culture and by their very enthusiasm and misunderstandings abuse the beauty and richness of that culture. Yet, speaking of the illuminated avenues at the Universal Exhibition of 1889, Mirbeau exclaims: “It was perhaps for the first time that I attended a spectacle in which the sweat did not overwhelm me and lead to a vile and bad conclusion and then to political chants.” The snob in him is caught up by the marvel of the new electrical lamps and other devices and by the joyful and family atmosphere of the crowds. Mirbeau was also struck for the first time by how — 313 —

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extent, at least, what is most specifically Jewish in Jewish art is also what is most universal, as one can see in the productions of Grunwald, van Gogh, and Orozco, for instance.145 In the second counter-argument, the enormous and dynamic Jewish contribution to the development of both high culture (the fine arts) and popular culture (middle- and lowbrow tastes) in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were passive, not only in the sense of entrepreneurial and productive skills in the display, performance, preservation, and dissemination of new technologies of entertainment and articulation, but also in regard to creative, critical and interpretive ideas; that is, Jews did more than achieve as artists and make it possible for others, non-Jews as well as their co-religionists, to find the means and venues to transform the nature of European art at all levels. Aside from the Jew-haters, like Edouard Drumont and milder bigots such as Degas, who described the situation as a Jewish take-over of the art scene, most intellectuals and cultural figures at the time only saw individuals at work. It would take hindsight to bring the real picture of a collective Jewish effort into focus, and it would also take historical events to galvanise Jewish consciousness into recognizing what all those individual artists, performers, critics, historians, and philosophers were doing. They also began to emerge as historians, critics, and philosophers of art and aesthetics. It took, for example, the pressures of the Zionist movement to mount the first-ever exhibit of all Jewish artists in 1901 and motivate Martin Buber to write “Protokol 1901,” a call-to-arms for a national Jewish art for the new homeland about to be proclaimed. Another way of looking at Jewish art and aesthetics is also possible: that is to conceive of art manifested in Jewish terms of perception, reference, and interpretation; and though such a theory of non- or anti-pagan and Christian aesthetics was not fully articulated until well into the twentieth century, it still may be brought to bear on the discussion to follow on the nature and rationale of Dreyfus’s obsessive much art was showing the influence of industry and science. Again, modernity, so often attributed to Jews or at least Jewish influence, shows itself to be a popular manifestation of freedom for the surging crowds of Frenchmen and women usually marginalized to the category of “popular entertainments” or disregarded altogether in an assessment of how the perceptual world was changing at the end of the nineteenth century. Another side light on this Exposition is that one of the principal organizers was Antonin Proust, the father of Marcel Proust; see Combats esthetiques, I, 374-375. 145 From the head-note on Hyman Bloom in Sonino, ed., The Schulman Collection, 17. — 314 —

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doodles that fill so much space in his prison workbooks.146 Because the non-representational drawings seem to be obsessive, perfunctory, and insignificant (having no sign value to point elsewhere, inside or outside of themselves, except in the process of their performance), they seem not to warrant the epithet “beautiful.” They are analogous, at best, to what Roger Fry calls the “perfunctory and mechanical” designs of classical Greek and Roman decorations.147 The enargeia or “vitality”148 in Dreyfus’s drawings come not from an attempt to reproduce some image in the natural world around him or to express the harmony within, but are manifestations of a tension, troubling and unsettling to his mental equilibrium, he tries to control through the mechanical motion of his hands, the focalizastion of his eyes and therefore of his mental attention and the need to fill up pages in his cahiers, to do work that will be rewarded by receipt of another blank workbook to scribble in.149 The general nature of this fourth approach is outlined by Mel (Mordechai) Alexenberg in an online essay entitled “On Being a Zionist Artist in a Networked World.”150 From what he says, it is clear that Jewish art does not fall into the classification of Eastern or Oriental, no matter what the subject matter, any more than do the fashionable paintings of houris, pashas, harems, or casbahs in the romantic artists of the 1830s and 1840s. A portrait of a rabbi or a Jewish damsel does not in itself make a work of art Jewish. Rather, the Jewishness comes in 146 Like Dreyfus in his comments in the cahiers, Kaniel sums up the attitude: “Aesthetics and art go together, but should they ever conflict with ethics and morality, there is no question that the latter takes precedence” (The Art of World Religions: Judaism, 10). 147 Fry, “Mohammedan Art,” in Vision and Design, 101. 148 Ibid. Whereas in Graeco-Roman hands these kinds of regular designs are “rigid, unvarying and frequently so lifeless,” they do not rise above the category of craftsmanship into creative art, in the hands of Muslim artists who take over the tradition in the early centuries of their positive relationship to the classical past, the designs are “so skillfully interwoven, so subtly adapted to their purpose” that the result is aesthetic pleasure, even if, in strict accordance with their religious principles, that is not their primary purpose or social function (Ibid., 107). 149 Fry points out, with perhaps unintended irony, that the Muslim artists who perfected the classical designs so that “there was developed a singularly easy and rhythmic manner of filling any given space with interlaced and confluent forms suited to the caligraphic [sic] character of Mohammedan designs” did so not only without any of private or social purposes developed in Western Christian art during the Renaissance and beyond, but out of a characteristic moral lethargy and cultural or racial subservience of the whole endeavor to the autocratic nature of their society. “It cannot be denied that in the course of time,” Fry asserts in regard to this slavish perfunctory and slavish iteration without meaning, “it pandered to the besetting sin of the oriental craftsman, his intolerable patience and thoughtless industry, and became in consequence as dead in its mere intricacy and complexity as the Graeco-Roman original in its frigid correctness” (Ibid., 108). 150 To be found at http://www.melalexenberg.com/paper.php?id=2 (accessed 05 December 2010). — 315 —

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the deeper conception of the work, its analytical processes of execution, and its appreciation by viewers who respond with a sense of something uncanny or uncomfortable in its presence. Emphasizing the playful nature of Jewish creativity attested in biblical and rabbinical sources, using as well his own interesting translations of key texts, Alexenberg tries to find a specifically (though not uniquely) Jewish origin. For example, he sees in the Hebrew word for artist, oman, based on the tri-consonantal root a-m-n, ‫אמן‬, and he extracts the meaning of amen (spelled the same way) as truth, in the sense of “may be it so,” used as the collective response to prayers. In another instance, he puts into English Psalm 119:174 normally rendered as “thy law is my delight” as “your Torah is my plaything,” taking the keyword sha’ashua, from the root sh-a-sh-a, ‫שעשע‬, to delight, amuse, sport or play. From these two examples, then, Alexenberg comes to understand the role of the artist to be a maker of truth who participates in the creative pleasures of divine creation. He also shows how these readings, far from being contemporary eccentricities, have a long tradition in rabbinical exegesis. He explains: Not only are the Hebrew words for “artist” and educating: related, but the Torah teaches that Bezalel and Oholiav are divinely endowed with artistic talent coupled with the talent to teach (Exodus 35:30-34). Creating art can be an alternative method of Torah study that beautifies the mitzvah of study through creating visual midrash… In a sense, midrash fills the spaces between the written words to reveal deeper meanings of scriptural passages … that extend the verbal exploration of text into visual realms. Conceived this way, creativity is a complex process of free play and rationality. Sometimes it weaves between logic and the grammar of textual logic, obedient to the rules of order, as when one plays chess or an orchestra plays a symphony, so that the beauty and pleasure produced comes from the regularity and precision of the players and the original composition, although every live performance is different, alive and dynamic. In other cases, it pulsates and resonates around, through, and behind the given conditions of the textual beginning, and, through a sequence of often surprising shifts, disappearances, — 316 —

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and transformations, re-emerges with new insights and original interpretations that extend and enhance, while affirming and confirming the normative readings of the text—as in the play of apparent fortune or the wild formless play of an exuberant children’s game that breaks all the rules in order to bring the immature mind closer to the realities of time, space, and self-expression. It is said, however, that artistic embellishments and decorations, so long as they do not distract attention from the moral and legal meanings of the Law, are more than legitimate; they are extensions of the text—known as hiddur mitzvat translated by Karniel as “the enchantment of the command.”151 Ordinarily, the Greek worship of Beauty as a virtue in itself and as a near synonym for Truth and the Ideal does not fit well in Jewish thought. The idealization of harmony and sensual form rubs the wrong way with an essentially ethical and rational approach to the ways in which the Law should be understood, appreciated, and put into practice. However, as Joshua Shmidman puts it, the concept of hevel ha-yofi (vain or ephemeral beauty) has a negative connotation, but not the concept of beauty itself; a more central role in Judaism comes into focus when he shift from the word and connotation of what is “nice,” “pretty,” or “attractive,” yofi, to what is honorable, noble, just, and life-affirming, hadar—the word for beauty when put into the performance of the mitzvot. Like all abstract theories in Judaism which ultimately find their expression in concrete mitzvot, the idea of beauty, as well, finds a tangible realization in the central mitzvoth of the holiday of Sukkot. The Torah requires: “And you shall take unto yourselves on the first day (of Sukkot) a fruit of a beautiful tree—pri etz hadar.” The Talmud (Sukkot 35a) wishes to define what constitutes a beautiful tree by analyzing the Hebrew word for beautiful, hadar. The sages conclude that it is the etrog tree, because the word “hadar” is interpreted to be a fruit which “dwells continuously all year on the tree” (ha-dar, literally, “that which dwells”). Thus, they understood the word “dar” to mean the opposite of temporary or intermittent residence; rather, it implies permanence, a 151 Kaniel, The Art of World Religions: Judaism, 58. — 317 —

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continuous process through time (similar to the French “durée” or the English “endure”)…152 In essence, then, the concept of beauty in the sense of hadar “means the indomitable power of life, the determination to live on despite all difficulties, the affirmation of the victory of life over death, the drive for eternity.” It is not a thing in itself or an idealized embodiment of some harmonious and attractive quality inherent in the thing. Beauty is a dynamic process, a way of relating to this world and the world to come, a moral and ethical motivation to action, to fulfillment of the Law. Again, to cite Shmidman, “In Judaism, beauty inheres in the basic Jewish historical sensibility: the palpable experience of apprehending the eternal in the flow of passing time.”153 How does such a sensibility come into being and how can it be recognized, since we can only perceive outward appearances and actions? There is a hint in what is yofi, momentarily charming, pretty and attractive to the senses, to be sure, but also it is suggested in what is hadar, enduringly noble and honorable in actions, but the hint is confirmed when the dialectical tension between these two concepts is reconciled: the passing moment of pleasure and the long-lasting commitment to Truth and Justice. “Discovering, affirming and struggling in the face of implacable difficulties in the face of mutability and death itself, for the realization of the eternal creates the Jewish sense of beauty.”154 Thus, there is not so much an inward turn of appreciation—beauty as the inner qualities of some person or thing that is to be admired, respected and honoured; this would transform the idea into some romantic allegory—as it is a shift away from Greek notions of harmony and proportion as the key to beauty, normally to be found in what is youthful, vigorous, and sensually active to something manifest in action, in the performance, but also in the commitment and the persistence, the intention and the direction of that action, so that the performance need not be completed in a well-shaped product or composition: its beauty emerges in the decision, in the process of trying, and in the resistance to obstacles and persecution. When God created the world in the first six days, he looked on his work and said, 152 Joshua Shmidman, “Jewish Beauty and the Beauty of Judaism,” Jewish Action (Spring 1998), http://www.ou.org/publications/ja/5758/spring98/beauty. 153 Ibid. 154 Ibid. — 318 —

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It is good; he did not say it was beautiful. What is beautiful is the work itself, including the resting up so as to be able to continue afterwards, to work in concert with humanity in completing and perfecting what was started, and whatever participates in those acts of correction and continuous development is beautiful and good. Merely to observe and to take pleasure in the uncompleted work, no matter how good it looks and feels, is a form of idolatry or fetishism. The processes of midrashing go on and on forever, with necessary sabbatical moments of rest in order to contemplate and enjoy what is good—good for contemplation and for pleasure, for gathering outer and inner strength to continue the work. One of the big arguments that came into focus in the nineteenth century after the invention of photography was not merely its relationship to art or its effect in obviating the need for those forms of painting or sculpting that tried to make accurate likenesses, but was instead over whether the new technology would take away the positive qualities of work in art—the need to learn drawing, the study of the laws of proportion, color harmony, and composition—or would free the artist to engage in a higher form of intellectual and aesthetic labor, that of learning to express the deeper, inner nature of his or her own personality or soul. This relatively superficial debate, however, was replaced by a more sophisticated argument over the artificiality of photographic images, which make the role of the technician who operates the camera and develops the negative plates into positive pictures merely passive, so that the very qualities of originality and insight that once marked the artist became superseded and interfering: scientific objectivity, like mechanical skill, would replace subjectivity and aesthetics. That said, the response was that the blemishes in photography—its inability to distinguish between major and minor points of attention, its distortion of edges and contours, its lack of a full palette of subtle tones and colors and its limitation to single moments instead of action and transformation—could be rather taken as assets and virtues: the camera eye sees new things in new ways that human perception fails to capture because of its physical limits and its conventionalised modes of interpretation; its careful discrimination of shadowy tonalities and textures offered subtle ways of observing relationships between things, the light they were seen in, and the angle of perception; optical improvements and printing processes were already providing not just a wider spectrum of tints and depths of color but indicating how the — 319 —

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prismatic range could be made nicer and more intricate; instantaneous pictures could be taken with a rapidity far beyond normal human ability and so could reveal the nature of organic and inorganic motion so subtle and distinct that no one could ever again look in the same old way at a horse’s gallop, a bird flapping its wings, a flower opening to the sun, a droplet crowned above the water, or a shadow undulating across the landscape. More than that, as ordinary middle-class people turned to photographs to preserve likenesses of themselves, their families, and the things and places they wished to recall, the need for mimetic accuracy in commercial art melted away rapidly. At the same time, familiarity with the more detailed pictures produced by cameras, with their easy perspectives and composition, nudged most painters, sculptors, and novelists to endeavor in their creative works to satisfy this new set of conventional notions of reality and truth. Creative artists began to explore aspects of their media, techniques, and expression that had at best been touched upon rarely and unsystematically in the past. As we have suggested several times in the first two chapters of this book, this revolution in the way of seeing and imagining attracted Jewish men and women of an artistic temperament both because the occurring epistemological crises broke down prejudices from the guilds and schools of craftsmen and artists who were losing their prior power of exclusivity and from the Jewish sensibility that the corpus of subjects deemed necessary to the production of public and private art had repelled, and because the underlying principles of mimesis and idealization that had rubbed against the grain of Jewish traditions. The innovations and radical breaks going on in sensibility, taste, style, and productive technologies all seemed more amenable to these emancipated and secularising Jews and made their contributions to the arts more acceptable to a wider public. As that opening up of professional opportunity happened, some—not all—of the Jewish artists came to realize that what they were doing was extending and varying the processes of midrash known since ancient times. In another way, historians and philosophers in the new Science of Judiasm discovered,155 biblical and rabbinical discourses treat art as a 155 Two points to be noted here: (a) the meaning of science or Wissenschaft followed the still current Continental sense of a systematic mode of knowledge and not merely a positivistic or pragmatic — 320 —

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way of passing through time and space in the paradigm of exile. These objets d’art are also seen as something useful and powerful, ancillary to worship, focal points of meditation, and externalizations of inward states of prayer and study.156 What the anti-Semites hold against Jews as a supposedly divine punishment for their iniquities and what they mock for the incompatibility with well-rooted nations and cultures, on the contrary are interpreted as signs of divine grace and indicators of a different mode of creativity, more moral and more true than the static concepts of Hellenic philosophy. The Hebrew people, through embodied representatives such as Abraham and Moses, get up from places where they seem settled, from lands of darkness, ignorance, superstition, idolatry and passive submission to the powers of venial authority and go out into the world, wandering, dispersed, and always critically evaluating the environment through which they pass. Alexenberg writes of it in this way, paraphrasing what Abraham is told by the Voice of God to get up and walk away from Ur of the Chaldees, Go for yourself from you land, from your birthplace, and from your father’s house to the land that I will show you. (Gen. 12:1) study of the natural world to distinguish itself from a study of historical events, social institutions, and aesthetic artifacts and (b) the echoing of Vico’s The New Science indicates a concern for seeking meanings of ontological development of ideas, images, and legal processes, with serious attention to mythology and etymology, metaphors and symbols, rhetoric and mathematics. 156 According to Marilyn Gold Koolik, writing about medieval havdalah spice boxes, “the medieval Jew appears to have shown his ingenuity in his battle with the devils. For in this one object was combined some of the most effective methods for combating the evil spirits” (Towers of Spices, 19). The question of aesthetics and beauty turns on what is meant here by “ingenuity”: if it only means a certain cleverness in coordinating different functions into one object used for celebrating the passage of the Sabbath into its own dimension and the return of ordinary everyday life in the weekdays that follow, then such skill and intelligence have no specific aesthetic quality to them and the object produced may only be incidentally “pretty”; however, if the artistry has been able to engage the viewers in the ceremony so that the appearance and the feel of the spice box as they pass it among themselves are in themselves experienced as enhancement of what is normal, ordinary, and useful, then the beauty of the object and of the process of meditating upon it serve to give a sense of providing a shared joy with the deity who also observes and shares in the ritual, while the object embodies that higher experience long after the moment of transition between the sacred and the profane disappears until the following week, and remains a permanent presage of the future state of messianic ecstasy. Moreover, in the appropriations of Christian iconography to give form to the ritual occasion and the employment of Christian artisans to produce the objects, the Jews—artists and/or patrons of the arts—inform the rabbinical dream of all peoples eventually coming to Jerusalem and to worship the God of Truth and Justice, each in their own way. — 321 —

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Walk with your authentic self away from all the familiar and comfortable places that limit vision to a land where you can freely see. As painful and humiliating as the conditions of Exile might be, they also form the basis for a whole new way of being in the world, passing through it as though it were a “field of midrash” where nothing is as it seems and everything must be interpreted, gliding through as a critical outsider, transforming one’s own memories and the depictions of that memory in verbal, pictorial, tactile, and dramatic or dance form.157 This creative experience should not be seen only as an intellectual or mystical endeavor, real only in the mind or on the page of exegetical comments; it is also a creative artistic act, producing objects of beauty that lead to enhanced states of contemplation.158 Jewish art, then, defies and swerves away midrashically from the Greek conventions of creativity.159 “The voice of the Lord is in Beauty” 157 Faur argues: In reading and pronouncing classical and talmudic Hebrew and Aramaic, “staging, voice manipulation, and all the paraphernalia associated with oratory, are not germane to alphabetic meaning. An important consequence of this view is that within an alphabetic system, speech and writing are fundamentally one and the same” (The Horizontal Society, Vol. I, Section 1, Paragraph 1). 158 Faur, Golden Doves with Silver Dots, 123. 159 These discussions of Jewish art practice and theoretical aesthetics may be compared with what Pope John Paul II wrote in his “Letter to Artists” (4 April 1999), http://www.praiseofglory.com/ wayofbeauty. Though commonplaces of the Hellenistic tradition down from antiquity through the medieval period and beyond the Renaissance, the ideas expressed by the pontiff set out the context within which Jewish artists had to find their own distinctive way of expressing ideals and ethical concepts of enhancing the worship of God. “The link between good and beautiful stirs fruitful reflection. In a certain sense, beauty is the visible form of the good, just as the good is the metaphysical condition of beauty. This was well understood by the Greeks, who, fusing the two concepts, coined a term which embraces both: kalokagathia, or beauty-goodness…. It is in living and acting that man established his relationship with being, with the truth and with the good. The artist has a special relationship to beauty …” For a fuller discussion on this concept, see M-A Dürrigi, ”Kalokagathia—Beauty is More than just External Appearances,” Journal of Cosmetic Dermatology 1 (2002): 208-210. Dürrigi, who speaks from the Old Church Slavonic Institute in Zagreb, Croatia, offers a view from Eastern Orthodoxy, closer to the Greek origins than the Roman Pope’s statements: “the concept of kalokagathia, καλοκαγαφια … is a complex word derived from two adjectives: kalós = beautiful, pretty, handsome (outwardly) decent, honest, noble (inwardly) + agathós = honest, good, noble, courageous, worthy of admiration … an ideal to be achieved through education and lifestyle … It united the outward appearance with an inner quality” (208). In Jewish thinking, the ideal of beauty is more in ethical actions than in physical objects, and it is the way in which such objects open up insight, reflect aspirations and achievements, and stimulate emotions and thoughts that are valued. Opposed to the Greek (Platonic, Neoplatonic, and then Christian) idea of beauty, which is always in itself suspect as — 322 —

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(Psalm 19:2-3) is the guiding principle, or as Alexenberg argues: The ancient Greek view of art as mimesis, imitating nature, arresting the flow of life, has become obsolete as new definitions of art are arising from Jewish thought a mere copy in words or material of an ideal of spiritual reality outside of human achievement, the rabbis conceived of art as a way of participating in an ongoing creation, perfecting and thus sanctifying the world, with words as the medium of primary expression, and thus inner speech or thought also considered divine in its meditation and in its shaping of concrete objects. As in Nietszche and Derrida, there is a deep suspicion of confusion, self-delusion and deliberate masking of the truth inherent in words and in their physical attributes; see Roger Wilson, “Deception in Derrida’s Platonic Labyrinth: The Awareness of Ignorance and its Ineffable Implications,” www. drury.edu/multinl/story.cfm?ID=2440&NLID=166. Jewish thinking, to generalize on a vast number of variations, requires works of art, as well as dreams, texts, and sacred objects, to be interpreted in order to become meaningful and applicable in the moral world; the very act of interpretation being a beautiful process linking each human performer with the divine creativity. For, as Yosef Tabory reminds his readers, “When we learn Torah, we are learning the word of God. When we talk to God, we are basically praying” (“History of Prayer” [spring 2000], www.yucs. org/~jyuter/notes/historyofprayer), with the understanding that “learning” is a social ritual, a form of collective festival and dance, and “talking” is a metonym for a whole variety of active, moral and ethical performances of mitzvot, not least in our discussion of enhancement of the public and private places, along with the accoutrements and gestures of worship. Rabbi Moshe Shamah goes a step further saying of midrash: “Many teach beautiful lessons using the text of the Torah as a springboard to an idea or a memory device to anchor an insight.” But then makes a modification that cuts right through the easy assimilation of Greek-Christian tradition where “truth is beauty, and beauty is truth, and that is all you need to know” (paraphrasing Keats’s Ode on a Grecian Urn), his proviso being: “As long as the reader/listener realizes that the interrpetation given under such auspices is not the true meaning of that particular passage, no harm is done and a benefit is derived from the lesson. When necessary, the rabbis would promulgate Midrashim even if the uneducated masses might mistakenly take them for the actual meaning of the Torah” (“Understanding Midrash, Parashat Beshalah,” http://www.judaicseminar.org/general/midrash). The “true” or “actual meaning” is ambiguous here, and most likely what is meant is that in midrashim beautiful meanings are generated that are part of a whole dynamic of truth, not a single iconic statement to be applied under varying circumstances in different times and places; for it is the process that matters, not the specific understanding at that moment of teaching; with the process not a free for all activity and the rules of logic and example being observed. What Tarbay, Shamah and other commentators often miss out on is what Israel Davidson reminds us of: “The ancient rabbis had a keen sense of humor, and often manifested it in the course of their educational and religious work” (Parody In Jewish Literature [New York: Columbia University Press, 1907] 2). More than that, the same type of wit and humor can be found in Holy Scriptures themselves, with the Divine playing his role as comic entertainer for purposes of instruction and placing those who take the world too seriously into perspective sub species aeternitate, as well as the rabbinical commentators and the commentators upon them. These Jewish “holy fools,” however, differed from their Christian analogues insofar as the whole of creation, with its faults and failures, its incompleteness awaiting human correction and repair, is a vast parody of the ineffable internal coherence and contuinuity of God’s own being; not only were words not separate from ideas, but the world of ideas was as much pervaded by the infinite and eternal spirit of the Creator as the very existence of God continues and is informed by his intimacy with men and women, their society and their history. See my Festivals of Laughter, Blood and Justice. — 323 —

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and action that explore issues of truth, faith, and education as they enrich everyday life. … the Hebraic rather than the Hellenistic roots of Western culture [are] redefining art … This is partly due to the freedom from historical restraints on innovation because of previous exclusion from guilds, ecclesiastical patronage, and courtly support. As middle-class urban society in Western Europe opened up to the scientific, technological, and political freedoms of the post-Revolutionary period at the end of the eighteenth century, Jews adjusted more easily than many of their co-citizens in the secularising nation-states that were formed. It is also partly true because Jews had a more open, tolerant, and even at times involved affinity with these revolutionary developments in culture, science, and social relationships.160 At the same time, though, because of previous exclusions and continuing bigotry, Jews were often in a better position than their Christian neighbours to adapt radical, critical, and satirical postures vis-à-vis the status quo, the outrageously extreme tendencies of many aesthetic and political movements. They also had a national set of traditions based on seizing occasions, dissembling acceptance of normative practice and value while operating against the grain in private and in their own hearts and minds, and usually grew up educated in paradigms of critical argumentation, creative commentary, and imaginative or speculative investigation of possible alternatives. These distinctions between Jewish and non-Jewish art should not, however, be taken as absolute markers, but as guidelines towards tendencies in the formation of the oeuvre of individuals and groups. The Jewishness is, in fact, fairly consistent with the radical epistemological and aesthetic transformations occurring generally in Western art and artists over the course of the nineteenth century. Describing public reactions to an exhibit of Post-Impressionist art shown at the Grafton Galleries in 160 Nadine Shenkar goes much further, suggesting that the Jewish approach to art, as to all matters of law, governance and justice, introduced into Western thought, just as Jews were being emancipated and coming under attack for signalizing the very freedoms being established in European secular modernity, “un pensiero che destabilizza il sistema a cui l’occidentale tende” (a thought which destabilized the system towards which the quest was tending), and thus seem to threaten the illusion of progressive, continuous growth out of the past, instead of based on a set of dynamic breaks and leaps (cited by Ruggero Chinaglia in his review of L’arte ebraica e la cabala on CHIWEB: il sito dell’inedito, http://www.chiweb.net/shenkar. — 324 —

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1912, Roger Fry sets out the changes in aesthetics: …the English public became for the first time fully aware of the existence of a new movement in art, a movement which was the more disconcerting in that it was no mere variation upon accepted themes but implied a reconsideration of the very purpose and aim as well as the methods of pictorial and plastic art. It was not surprising, therefore, that a public which had come to admire above everything in a picture the skill with which the artist produced illusion should have resented an art in which such a skill was completely subordinated to the direct expression of feeling.161 The discrepancy between public expectations and artistic intention and performance emerges in the same way that the achievements of Jews in society in general makes manifest the transformations in the very way that society conceives of itself as a modern entity, while public opinion is still formed in what is now an archaic language of race, religion, and relationships. As Fry explains in terms that, in themselves, are now very dated and hence misleading, yet nevertheless indicative of the problem as conceived at virtually the same time as Alfred Dreyfus was attempting to create an alternative to his reality162 on Devil’s Island: The difficulty springs from a deep-rooted conviction due to long-established custom, that the aim of a painting is the descriptive iteration of natural forms. Now, these artists do not seek to give what can, after all, be but a pale reflex of actual appearance, but to arouse the conviction 161 Fry, “The French Post-Impressionists,” in Vision and Design, 194. 162 This is Dreyfus’s attempt, most likely, as we have said many times, unconscious in its full design and application, to midrash his life, to transform its unbearable realities into more acceptable, meaningful contours, substantiated by grasping hints, re-contextualizaing them, and exploring the implications of language from the inside out through various techniques of exegesis, techniques subsumed in Maimonides’ terms as aggadic: “the method of which is well known to those who are acquainted with the style of our Sages. They use the text of the Bible only as a kind of poetical language [‘for their own ideas’—José Faur], and do not intend thereby to give an interpretation of the text. As to the value of these Midrashic interpretations, we meet with two different opinions. For some think that the Midrash contains the real explanation of the text, while others, finding that it cannot be reconciled with the words quoted, reject and ridicule it” (Part III, Chapter 43, 353). — 325 —

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of a new and definite reality. They do not seek to imitate life, but to find an equivalent for life.163 Just as the late nineteenth-century artists were seeking to break free of the shackles of Hellenistic ideas institutionalised for centuries into an aesthetic of mimetic endeavours, however variously articulated, so Jews across Europe were seeking emancipation and integration into the new secular societies in which they happened to live. They did so by not just participating in or supporting movements that promised freedom and tolerance, but by often taking the lead in formulating methods of expression and circulation of those ideas through the printed word, the public stage, the sponsoring of galleries and museums, and the sponsorship of individual artists. Whereas it is all too usual to discuss Jewish art and artists as in terms of the way they broke loose from the bonds of their own anti-artistic parents and learned traditions of the Law, seeing them at best as the epitome of the man or woman anxiously caught between a restrictive past and a frightening freedom of choice, it might be better to start to examine Jewish aesthetics and its proponents as essential components of the developments in practice and theory. For example, Fry describes what Matisse was attempting to do as an artist: …Matisse aims at convincing us of the reality of his forms by the continuity and flow of his rhythmic line, by the logic of his space relations, and, above all, by an entirely new use of colour. 164 Taken from the immediate context, which first of all recognizes the superior place Matisse has come to hold in the world of European art through the beauty of his work, the lines Fry inscribes here could be applied to Dreyfus as well, albeit with a few minor adjustments to make it appropriate to what we find endlessly scribbled on the manuscript pages of the cahiers. There is no color component to Dreyfus’s drawings, only the contrast of black ink on a white page. Otherwise, the prisoner aims at convincing us—or rather, in the first instance, himself, and 163 Fry, “The French Post-Impressionists,” 195. 164 Ibid., 196. — 326 —

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in the second, his jailers—of a different reality, one that for himself provides the order, logic, and control over space he longs for, and one for those others allaying their suspicions of the onset of madness or the threat of a secret, mystical conspiracy to destroy the French nation. As he repeats his basic design, the continuity also affirms an individuality in each drawing flowing or flowering out of the X/‫ א‬and Y/‫ ץ‬he begins with. It is also clear, with his little essays on artists and musicians, that Dreyfus does not slavishly follow avant garde or bourgeois norms; he is always critical, probing and seeking to contextualize his subject with familiar books and experiences. Thus, though he is not a first class artist or critic, any more than his cahiers can rank with Marcel Proust’s novels or Jules Michelet’s histories of France, the sea, birds, people or women in terms of literary merit or intellectual influence, he is nonetheless potentially one of their rank, a much greater man than historians have dared to say, and one tragically prevented from achieving his full potential. Outrageous as this may first seem, it can also be taken as the logical development of the close-readings and discussions presented in this and the previous book. Why does it seem so outrageous, however? Because of outright prejudice and a milder form of Incidentalism, the assumption is often made that Jewish contribution to the development of the arts at the most creative level has always been minor and marginal. Similarly, for Alfred Dreyfus, even the most sympathetic of historians tend to underestimate the degree to which he was cultured and the depth of his awareness of the intellectual ideas developed at the end of the nineteenth century, and tend, like the hostile government officials and prison guards, to dismiss his letters, journals, and notebooks as superficial, repetitive and unworthy of serious attention. One of the main conclusions reached by my book is that, on the contrary, Alfred Dreyfus was anything but superficial and repetitive in a tedious manner. My close reading of these three bodies of evidence has tried to show how insightful, thoughtful, and creative he—and often his wife Lucie— could be. Jewish Artists in the Fin de Siècle Jewish music is the song of Judaism through the lips of the Jew. It is the tonal expression of Jewish life and — 327 —

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development over a period of more than two thousand years…..It takes its trend of development through the Semitic race, and retains its SEMITIC-ORIENTAL CHARACTERISTICS in spite of non-Semitic—Altaic and European—influence. Jewish song tales its unique qualities through the sentiments and the life of the Jewish people. DISTINGUISHING CHACTERISTICS are the result of the spiritual life and struggle of that people. — A.Z. Idelsohn165 It is much easier to declare that everything in the garments of a period is absolutely ugly than to apply oneself to the extraction of the mysterious beauty which they contain, be it ever so trifling or slight. Modernity is the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, one half of art of which the other half is the eternal and the immutable. — Charles Baudelaire166 The nineteenth century could talk about Jews and Judaism, as well as Jewish culture, in the pseudo-biological language of race theory and in the Romantic aestheticism of social exclusion, but the more Jews achieved in and assimilated into the majority culture, the less palatable such discourses would become. By the end of that century, instead of being merely exotic subjects for other painters, from Rembrandt to Gauguin, Jews could be artists in their own right, increasingly so during the development of modernism during the nineteenth century.167 Though for the most part, in terms of their basic concepts and acquired skills, they were virtually indistinguishable from any of the other young men and women gathering in Paris and other European centers to support one another and learn their craft, there were a distinct few who could not sustain the negativity, the melancholy and the intense 165 Jewish Music in its Historical Development, 24. Uppercase letters in the original mark emphasis. 166 Cited in Charles Rewald, The History of Impressionism, 4th rev ed (New York: The Museum of Modern Art/distributed by Graphic Society of Boston, MA, 1973 [orig. 1946]) 127; from “Baudelaire, “Le peintre de la vie moderne,” Le Figaro (26 November 1863). 167 Tom L. Freudenheim, “Not Just a Friend of Gauguin: Meijer de Haan’s Serious Oeuvre,” The Forward (15 December 2010), http://www.forward.com/articles/133952 (accessed 18 December 2010). — 328 —

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loneliness of the others. Some of them became noticeable in two ways around the time of the Dreyfus Affair: they would appear within the circles and schools who sat in the cafés of Paris, talking and whooping it up with the rest of the young men and very few women, hardly different from their peers in ideas, dress, or accomplishments, but singled out by anti-Semites like Degas; they would also start to cluster together as Jewish artists, sometimes exhibit their work separately from the rest of their friends and rivals; and, under those external pressures to be taken as different, as well as deeper ruminations of rebellion against the direction of certain aspects of the aesthetic movements, they began to discover their own ideas and goals, particularly when the Zionist movement developed an agenda for a Jewish national art.168 For once the idea of race as a biological category is put aside, there still remains the shape and content of culture, and the history of national memory. Idelsohn can point to the facts beyond his quaint language: that despite the resultant variance [of historical dispersion], Synagogue song remains identical the world over, because these differences in tonality are of sufficiently minor importance not to change the character of the music.169 Because the songs of the synagogue, both in terms of cantillated readings of the Scripture and the various individual and group incantation of hymns, prayers, and other new and traditional songs, remain the heart of the public ritual, these musical performances absorb into themselves over generations the history of the Jewish 168 The attempts by Max Nordau and Martin Buber to create a venue for Jewish art and to develop an aesthetic for the new nationalism of a reborn State of Israel reached crystallization at the Fifth Congress of the Zionist Organization in 1903. with the Exposition of Eleven Jewish Artists and then in speeches by the two main theorists of art and education. At the First Zionist Congress in 1897 the grounds were laid for these developments. However odd as it might seem to cynical and openly hostile artists and academics today, who see in Zionism nothing but a colonialist, imperialist enterprise for what they conceive of as “the failed Jewish state of Israel,” the delegates who voted Theodor Herzel’s ideas into a world-wide movement thought quite otherwise and, though the Holocaust murdered many artists who would have played a leading role in our contemporary world and scattered or destroyed the existing Jewish art world—much of it hidden under false attributions today—in the late 1890s one could be optimistic. Cp. Stuart Schiffman, “Zionist Art?” The Jewish Times (19 December 2010), http://www.jewishtimes.com/index.php/ jewishtimes/opinion/jt/op_ed/zionist_art (accessed 19 December 2012). 169 Idelsohn, Jewish Music, 26. — 329 —

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experience—and indeed come to shape the emotional life of the congregation and the community.170 To a great extent, until well into modern times, the structure of the liturgy and the singing that pervaded it was strictly monitored by community and rabbinical leaders; and education consisted of learning to read, to chant, to move the body in accordance with traditional patterns of davening and shuckling, and therefore to express the joys and sorrows of the whole group. In Idelsohn’s words: As is generally known, Israel’s prayers are not exclusively in the singular form; they are not prayers for individuals only, but prayers for the household of Israel. The individual is part of the community. He does not stand by himself; he could not exist by himself. He is incorporated into the community, and is influenced by the moral strength of the community. At the same time … Israel’s prayers interpret the life of the individual. To be aware that a whole community has the same wishes and hopes as he has and shares the same troubles and distress, is in itself a consolation for the individual.171 Amsterdam-born Meijer de Haan (1852-1895) was one of those Jewish artists who, after joining the Gauguin circle, moved in an independent direction, leaving behind his earliest influences in the Dutch Masters and “their soft palette and in an interest in genre subject matter,” with “A Portrait of a Sleeping Rabbi” and “Talmudic Lesson,” rendered with old-fashioned exoticism, passing through and beyond Gauguin’s Synthetism,172 emphasizing in his own paint strokes and “odd colors” a new vivacity, as Freudenheim expresses it, until he re-created the very idea of exoticism itself. Camille Pissarro, another Jew, though 170 See Hayoun, La lituirgie juive (Paris: Presses Universitaire de France, 1994), 106-107. The singing and motions of worship that is filled with beauty, partly by regularizing and enhancing the effects of human voice and gesture, and partly joining nostalgic memories of Temple cult to future messianic expectations of perfection of body and soul. 171 Idelsohn, Jewish Music, 74. 172 See the anonymous notes on the site of Hôtels Paris Rive Gauche for the exhibition “Meijer de Haan, the Hidden Master,” held from 16 March to 20 June 2010 at www.musee-orsay.fr (accessed 19 December 2010). This exhibit originated at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and then moved to Quimper’s Musée des Beaux-Arts from 8 July to 11 October 2010. — 330 —

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a Sephardi from the New World, was also part of the Pont-Aven group near Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh.173 Sympathetic as Vincent van Gogh’s younger brother Theo was to Meijer de Haan, he could not help describing the young painter as a “hunchback, but one without an ounce of malevolence,” which one would normally expect from a Hebrew, and further calling him a “biblical” Jew who combined “all that is human and all the good” from both worlds of Christian and Jewish culture.174 By the end of the nineteenth century, although Jewish artists were identifying themselves as such for more than exotic purposes, whether in terms of religious-cultural assertion of their own peculiar perspective on the world and the aesthetic best suited to depict it in a way that both enhanced Jewish values and interpreted historical and natural phenomena in a Jewish way, or in terms of a nationalist identity that easily merged with revolutionary movements in art and politics, it was still difficult to distinguish anything about the art works themselves, other than in terms of naturalistic and allegorical content—or even highly stylised versions of the abstract modernisms developing around the same time. Hence Haim Finkelstein can argue that: … there were no clear demarcation lines between sentiments related to a renascence of Jewish national identity, in its religious-cultural sense, and those associated with Zionism as a national liberation movement that aimed to provide an answer to questions raised by modern anti-Semitism.175 To a great extent, then, one must admit that there is nothing uniquely Jewish in the art of these painters, sculptors, architects, musicians, choreographers, or other artists who just happen to be Jewish in 173 See the anonymous note on “Meijer de Haan et la question de l’árt juif’ à la fin du XIXe siècle,” France Culture (7 November 2010) at http://www.franceculture.com/culture-ac-meijer-de-haanvers-le-synthetisme-me (accessed 19 December 2010). 174 Benjamin Ivry, “Meijer de Haan: More than Just a Jewish Student of Gauguin’s,” The Arty Semite (14 May 2010) http://blogs.forward.com/the-arty-semite/128035/meijer-de-haan-more-thanjust-a-jewish-student-of/ (accessed 19 December 2010). Theo’s remarks may have sounded somewhat pleasant and only teasing in the 1890s but they have a terrible resonance when we read them today, knowing that remaining members of de Haan’s families were murdered in Sobibor in 1943 and Meijer’s star pupil Baruch Lopes Leão Laguna was gassed at Auschwitz in the same year. 175 Haim Finkelstein, “Lilien and Zionism,” Assaph: Studies in Art History 3 (1998): 199; http://arts. tau.ac.il/departments/images/stories/journals/arthistory/Assaph3/11finkelstein.pdf. — 331 —

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themselves or in their ancestry. Nevertheless, because many of these men and women at the turn of the century did feel that there was something special about their artistic identities and the way they practiced and thought about their crafts, the simple answer may not be the best one. Similarly, with all the provisos we have adduced throughout this book, when we examine what the anti-Semites say—and when they see something different in Jewish art that is, as they say, not healthy, not supportive of Christian or national principles, and that betrays some racial qualities they do not like—at the same time as we dismiss their rationale as nonsense and insanity, we cannot throw out a possible baby with the bath-water: that baby being evident in several factors indirectly and implicitly connected to the emergence of all these artists in this period of European history. One of these factors is the difference between their coming-tobe artists out of the cultural aniconic and enclosed pilpulism of most Central and East European Jewry and the great body of their peers in the art world, who derive from cultures and social situations that have other forms of resistance to the radical shifts in modes of perception, techniques of articulation, and methods of interpretation that they partly shared with the Jews. Arthur A. Cohen describes the process of the licit aesthetic creation into an object of forbidden idolatry: Worship [of the graven image] releases the potency of the object, converting it from a work of art intended to reflect beauty or sublimity in nature into an idol whose beauty is at most a means to seduction. As a work of art, the painted or graven image has a grounded charge; however, as an object physicalizing the spiritual, the object becomes an idol.176 The metaphor has been drawn from the science of electricity and echoes the late nineteenth century’s fascination with the psychology of “magnetism,” the suggestibility and attractions of mesmeric force, as though the objet d’art could be the medium through which the unwanted 176 Arthur A. Cohen, “From Eastern Europe to Paris and Beyond,” in The Circle of Montparnasse: Jewish Artists in Paris, 1905-1945, ed. Kenneth E. Silver and Romy Golan (The Jewish Museum, New York: Universe Book, 1985), 61. The biblical injunction against graven images is intended to prevent idolatry not the creation of beauty to enhance and focus worship of God. — 332 —

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external power made its connection with the naïve or unaware viewer; in novels, this idea was popularised in the character of a devious lover whose “passes” caught an innocent young woman under his sexual control. Another factor to be taken into account is that, whatever critics may discern in individual works by these artists, there is also something distinct about their overall oeuvre; that is, the relationship of one work of art to another as the artist progresses through his or her own career and moves in and out of various social and cultural contexts. For many Jews in the period most important to the study of Dreyfus, this movement had a trajectory distinct from that of non-Jewish colleagues, such as Gauguin or van Gogh, whose separation from their home environment and intellectual peers and judges led to forms of external and internal exile and re-creation of their heritage. Jews were attempting at once to assimilate into the mainstream of their surrounding culture and to hide or forget their own Jewish origins at the same time as they were transforming and advancing the radical shifts in perception and imagination inaugurated by the artists with whom they associated. A third distinction can be made in the way in which their lives and works were registered177 in the history of European art, particularly in the period before, during, and after the Holocaust. An artist is seen and measured not only, as we have suggested, by the development of his or her own achievement in relation to those individuals and schools around them—how and why they made the choices they did and how they learned to produce in response to those choices or by the arc or trajectory of their careers—but also by the place they take and are given in the overall picture that develops. For painters, this is determined by what public and private galleries and museums will show their work; for composers, where, how often, and in what context their works are performed; for sculptors and architects, what commissions they receive, what eventual preservation efforts are taken to show their work, and 177 The passive voice hints at the controlling agent of the categorization as art critics, historians and dealers, rather than necessarily the individual artists themselves or the private purchasers who wish to own what strikes them as beautiful and meaningful. Yet the individual artists when their casual meetings turn into a programmatic ideology or a systematic guide to group exhibitions can take on a new conscious determination to create works reflective of this ideology or commercial endeavor, not to mention a self-defensive retreat from participation in the national or cultural efforts of the non-Jewish art milieu in which these Jews find themselves. Cf. Kenneth E. Silver, “Jewish Artists in Paris, 1905-1945,” in Silver and Golan, The Circle of Montparnasse, 13-14. — 333 —

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what schools and students study their achievement. During the 1930s and 1940s, and to some extent through to our own day, many Jewish artists were murdered or sent into an exile that curtailed or transformed their careers. The works of many were forbidden public display or performance, others were destroyed, and still others were stolen, misattributed to non-Jewish authors and composers. In the two previous chapters we have begun to discuss some of the rabbinic and kabbalistic contexts in which Jews of the late nineteenth century, and Alfred Dreyfus in particular, could have appreciated art. This is not to say that any of these people would have necessarily been able to articulate a fully developed aesthetic based on these background qualities, but that, as we have seen in the writings of Lucie and Alfred, when placed under sufficient stress, they did express themselves in terms that were not part of the general public’s discourse. In what the writers of these documents probably would have taken as casual allusions to figures of speech they had heard or read in irregular attendance at synagogue during High Holidays or domestic ceremonies, as well as in everyday parlance amongst Jews, whether in French or Yiddish, they nevertheless have available to them—or to their unconscious mentalities—the capacity to see, hear, feel, and think about the arts that resonate with traditional Jewish attitudes and beliefs. Thanks to the popularisation of Lurianic kabbalah in the aftermath of the Hasidic movement in the eighteenth century in Eastern Europe which brought about a large number of mystical songs, prayers, anecdotes, and jokes, even fairly assimilated, highly educated Jewish families in western Europe, including France, would have been familiar with notions that had previously been limited to small elite groups just a few hundred years earlier. This could include the medieval rabbi Abraham Abulafia’s comparisons of the technique of letter combinations with musical harmonies: Know that the method of tserouf [letter combinations] could be compared to music; for the hearer hears the sounds of diverse combinations, in accord with the character of the melody and the instrument …. From the ear, the sensations travels to the heart

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and from the heart, even to the spleen.178 Words are composed of letters representing sounds that vibrate with the energies that constitute their meanings, which thus enter into the sensorium of the listener and harmonize with and through the person’s entire body, including the mind, without having to be understood first; and may indeed, because those now wordless sounds form units of spiritually and intellectually creative energy, produce meanings totally new—new beauties of experience that enhance previous knowledge and language.179 The body is like a musical instrument for the reception, storage, and production of new visible and aural vibrations, sound and light rays. These points of nervous vibrations, the voiced sound of letters that transform themselves into embodied meaning, words, each a “little world made cunningly,” are visible as points of light, like the dots and dashes attached to letters of the aleph-bet to indicate pronunciation. Thus each word is a picture of the sounds that constituted it, the meanings it embodies, and the creative energy that beautifully expresses itself throughout time and space toward infinity and eternity. Or as Ouaknin puts it: The existence of different vowels does not only produce sounds and in-formations of differentiated sense, but permits varieties of vibrations which are the important effects for the whole of the human organism. The emission of vowels during expiration provokes a vibratory 178 Ouaknin, Tsimtsoum, 179. 179 Guy Cogeral, “Beyond Impressionism,” in Guy Cogheral, Sylvie Pafry, Stéphane Guégan, and Christine Dixon, Masterpieces from Paris: Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne and Beyond; PostImpressionism from the Musée d’Orsay (Canberra, AQCT: The National Gallery of Australia, 2009) writes: “Sensation has become entrenched as an autonomous and absolute fact necessitating an objective submission to the direct experience of phenomena … Impressionism shatters art into innumerable fragments, it dazzles like a scintillating nebula” (19). Or as he says also, thus echoing even more the mythic imagery of Lurianic kabbalah we have been showing in the discourses of Ouaknin, “Painting, as it were, explodes. After Impressionism, nothing in French art—and soon internationally—can ever be the same again” (19). Such a view of the Nachleben (cultural and psychological afterlife) of the sounds and actions associated wirth the production of musical ideas (“motifs” and “tones”) accords with our earlier discussions of Warburg’s Pathosformeln (passionately invested formulae of metaphoric images). Though the language we have chosen to use, following many commentators, derives from Kabbalah, there is nothing magical or mystical about the phenomena or the means of apprehending them in the history of art. — 335 —

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auto-massaging of the organs and the vibrations reach the deepest tissues and nerve cells; the circulation of blood intensifies itself in the affected tissues and organs. The glands of internal secretion, which pour out their hormones directly into the blood and the lymph are stimulated (pituitary, pineal, thyroid, thymus, suprarenal, gonads).180 The whole organism of the human being listening to such music begins to discharge nervous energy, secrete hormonal stimulants, and stimulate creative brain activity, thus releasing in turn further vibratory energies outside of itself. Analogously, reading and sounding out words in a text involves visual agitation and ecstatic pleasures when the stimulation is beautiful, that is, harmoniously involved with the internal and external dialogue and the in-pouring of divine energy—the Shekhina. It may be said, as Ouaknin does, that as the human mind caresses (copulates with) the text through meditation, discussion, and chanting, the participants rhythmically “dance” together.181 There was hardly a community of Jews at any time in the long history of the Hebrew people who were not influenced by their surrounding cultures, and, after the Fall of the Temple, the relationship between these dispersed and exiled Jewish groups and the civilizations in which they lived was a dialectical one. According to one important historian of Jewish music, “The coexistence of Jews and Gentiles in the Diaspora, even in times of persecution, enriched both cultures.”182 In fact, during the periods of most intense persecution, including times of massacres, expulsions, and re-integration under extreme conditions of wandering and foreign rule, when formal rabbinical institutions faltered and seemed to disappear altogether, Jewish traditions of music continued to exist in a subterraneous way, out of view (or hearing) of normal historical record, because the “other” aspects of Jewish life remained operative—that is, the domestic and commercial activities of families 180 Ouaknin, Tsimtsoum, 192-193. 181 Ibid., 200. 182 Eliyahu Schleifer’s three-part essay from his Jewish Liturgical Music from Bible to Hasidim under the title “Jewish Liturgical Music,” Liturgica.com: Liturgies, Books and JMusic (13 October 2004), http://www.liturgica.com/htm/ litJLitMusDev1/jsp?hostname=liturgica and continuing through as Dev2 and Dev3. — 336 —

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and individuals who were not registered in the records of synagogues or yeshivot, and the female rituals and entertainments. Both of these were “other” sites of the ongoing tradition—and by “ongoing” I mean with the capacity to keep drawing from the surrounding societies in a critically selective manner, while turning this newly acquired material into something that was at once recognizably harmonious with ancient song and dance and also similar to, but not simply part of, the sources from which the innovations were taken. This transitional dynamic, we might say, was secular, insofar as any part of pre-modern Jewish life was uncontrolled by rabbinical authorities, and often maintained by women and uneducated men. To be sure, such crises of expulsion and resettlement in the early modern period led to a more radical division between the Ashkenazim in Europe, who moved further to the East and developed aesthetics and artistry while struggling between the various imperial powers of Czarist Russia, Austro-Hungary, and Germanic hegemony, and the smaller but more tolerant Protestant states in the western zone, and the Sephardim, who lost their original cultural centers in Iberia and re-established themselves in new social combinations around the Mediterranean, the Levant and Middle East, mostly under Muslim and Ottoman rule, with less contact to the division between various strands of modernization evident in Western Europe. Paradoxically, although Ashkenazi and Sephardi branches of Judaism seemed to become more radically distinct over the past five hundred years, at the same time both in Yiddish-speaking communities and in those Jewish groups assimilating into the tolerant lands of Germany, France, Italy, and England, the power of Lurianic kabbalah infiltrated the remaining liturgical and aesthetic shapes and attitudes of organized religious life. To briefly sum up this argument for the two paradoxes of continuity within constant change of Judaism’s relations with its various non-Jewish contexts and the mutual transformation of seemingly incompatible elements within Judaism itself, Eliyahu Schleifer writes, We no longer can believe that some Jewish communities were so secluded that they never were influenced by others. The essence of the Jewish experience with history has been that Jews have moved like peddlers from community to community, carrying their musical merchandise with them. Some rabbis and cantors traveled — 337 —

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to distant places expressly intending to transplant their liturgical chants to the cultural soil of foreign Jewish communities.183 As with ritual theatre and ceremonial processions common to the surrounding cultures of ancient Israel, the musical and other artistic traditions are partly absorbed into the metaphoric language of Psalms and other lyrical or prophetic books, partly rationalized into narratives, whether aggadic figures or historical descriptions, and abstracted to form the movements and gestures of prayer and study.184 The beauty spoken of in such texts is itself transformed into ethical and intellectual concepts and principles.185 After the destruction of the Temple, when the actual practice and performance of dancing and instrumental music “fell into oblivion,” according to Idelsohn, “the intonations of the Psalms and the Pentateuch, as well as the recitation of the prayers … was most likely retained and transplanted into the Synagogue …”186 What is lost in terms of theological significance, however, is preserved in memory and practice in various Jewish centers in the East and in the West—centers whose existence continued since the destruction of the Second Temple, and in some instances from even before that event, throughout the ages up to this very day [1929]. These centers are: Yemen … Babylonia … Persia … Syria, 183 Ibid. 184 Idelsohn, Jewish Music, 16-18, etc. 185 Rav Ezra Bick expounds on the midrashim on Abraham’s journey into the Land of Egypt and the moment he realizes that his wife Sarah, old in years and worn from the trip, is beautiful: “Behold I now know that you are a beautiful woman.” How did he know this and what did he mean? Time and travel would have affected her outward appearance, so that this concept of beauty refers to some kind of unchanging inward state. Then Bick says: “Since neither the Torah nor the Sages attribute beauty to all pious and righteous women, you might ask just what kind of character is meant to be reflected in this kind of beauty. The answer, I think, is found in the famous midrash quoted by Rashi at the beginning of Chayei Sara. When Sarah dies, she is ‘one hundred years, and twenty years, and seven years’ old. The repetition of ‘years’ elicits this comment from the midrash. ‘Twenty years old like seven years old in terms of beauty; one hundred like twenty in terms of sin’ (58:1). The commentators immediately point out the variant reading of this midrash—‘one hundred years old like twenty for beauty; twenty like seven for sin,’ which makes a lot more sense. In any event, what the midrash means is that Sara preserved a youthfulness about her, an innocence of youth, throughout her life …” (“Understanding Midrash, Shiur #8: Egypt,” Yeshivat Bar Etzion). 186 Idelsohn, Jewish Music, 19. — 338 —

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North Africa, Italy and the so-called Sephardim …187 Though Idelsohn was able to make contact with the most ancient and archaic traditions of pre-rabbinic Jewish culture in these relatively secluded communities, the point we are trying to make by extrapolating from his findings is not a reconstruction of an original or essential Jewish music or art but a sense of an aesthetic and a philosophy of divine beauty that has developed in many variations outside the mainstream of Hellenic and Christian ideas. Like Gauguin on his tropical islands, recreating his ancestral Peruvian self in a strange mixture of Polynesian (he calls it generically “Maori”) scenes and African and Papuan primitivism learned from books, Dreyfus also mixes his sources, blends together his nostalgic memories of domestic life at home with Lucie and the children, the idealized civilization of France in the glow of the Revolution of 1789, and the Judaism he knows more in his heart than in his mind. The painter—also sculptor and wood decorator—flattens his perspective and organizes his composition with musically repetitive patterns; so too does the maker of the cahiers, particularly evident in the drawings that fill whole pages of these books. This is how Shelly Couvrette describes Gauguin’s work: In use of color and line, Gauguin suggests in his paintings an urgent, rhythmic quality. Music was important in his art, and he often applied theories of music to his works. The harmony found in his use of undulating, sensuous lines and in his high-key palette he often referred to as the melodic, or musical, facet of painting. Even in his fine tuned theories concerning art he likened his work to music, stating that the goal of both should ideally be the suggestion rather than the mere description.188 It is too early to say whether or not the hundreds of essays and commentaries in the cahiers also constitute a patterned rhythmic order, and not just a jumble of ad hoc exclamations responding to the availability 187 Ibid., 22-23. 188 Shelly Couvrette, “Paul Gauguin: Manao Tupapau (She Thinks of the Spirit or The Spirit Watches Over Her),” http://www.cat-sideh.net/Writing/Gaunguin (accessed 12 January 2011) — 339 —

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of books or their memory. Certainly the so-called desseins or random doodles do something other than merely fill up space with meaningless scribble; they conspicuously avoid, while at the same time hint at, representational figures, their very flatness intensified by the dynamic repetition into a volume of energy bursting at its seams—to keep on forever, it seems, creating out of itself an outpouring of energy.189 Similarly, these flattened aniconic images Dreyfus draws, black against white, and dark lines enclosing lighted spaces, suggest meanings that never become articulate, hieroglyphs of silence, cuneiform cabinets of secret sense.190 Physical and Psychical Energy On the other hand, he insists, nothing is as it appears while it is going on. “What you see when you [examine archives opened only 30 years after an event] is that the people you imagined had been strong were weak; the people you thought weak were strong, and things you thought couldn’t possibly be taking place were taking place.” — Sir Martin Gilbert191 One might say that for Dreyfus, cooped up in his little hut surrounded by a palisade that blocked his view of the outside world, there was a need for a regular discharge of energy as compensation for lack of physical exercise and personal or social conversation; and perhaps, for a vigorous young man who longed for his wife’s embraces and was watched day 189 The Fathers According to Rabbi Nathan: “And ELEAZAR BEN ‘ARAK HE CALLED ‘OVERFLOWING STREAM AND EVERFLOWING STREAM whose waters ever flow and overflow”—confirming the statement, Let thy spirits be dispersed abroad, and courses of water in the streets (Prov. 5:16)” (Chapter 24, 74; uppercase emphasis in original) . 190 The Fathers According to Rabbi Nathan: “Rabbi Eleazar ben Azariah called [Rabbi Judah the Prince] ‘A spice-peddler’s basket.’ For to what might Rabbi Eleazar be likened? To a spice peddler who takes up his basket and comes into a city; when the people of the city come up and ask him, ‘hast thou good oil with thee? hast thou ointment with thee? hast thou balsam with thee?’ they find he has everything with him. If questioned on Scripture, he answered; on Mishnah, he answered; on Midrash, he answered; on Halakha, he answered; on Agada, he answered. When the scholars parted from him, he was filled with good and blessing” (Chapter 18, 90-91). 191 Ruthie Blum, “One on One with Sir Martin Gilbert: Hindsight and Aforethought,” The Jerusalem Post (23 February 2007). — 340 —

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and night, shackled in the evenings to his bed, there was a need to compensate for enforced sexual abstinence. All his nervous tensions could not always be focused into intellectual or scientific exercises and at times—perhaps most of the time—he was under a compulsion to concentrate on making little marks on the page, again and again, each a minor variation on the other, rarely a major alternative within the system, as a way of moving his hands, of pressing down with his pencil, watching in a hypnotic way the blank spaces on the page fill up with these meaningless signs. The space on the cahier pages were thus filled by repeated variations on a limited number of patterns, perhaps, as has been suggested, like patterns in a carpet or in the decorations of a book of which the dominant culture is aniconic, thus forbidding the production of figurative reproductions of human, animal, or other natural beings, emphasizing geometric patterns, repetitive contours of borderlines, and kaleidoscopic variations of a few simple lines. But why? What repressed or archaic and forgotten visual melodies are played out in these prison cahiers? Even the most idle play of a pencil on a pad while one speaks on the phone or listens to one’s colleagues at a meeting cannot be considered devoid of all meaning, though the meanings, as in failed private jokes, slips of the tongue and forgotten names of familiar persons and things, all are signs of unconscious activity in the mind. Dreyfus’s drawings thus cover over the feelings and thoughts he cannot or will not dwell on, release the impulses that are too frightening and painful to break into his conscious thoughts, and express aspects of his personality only hinted at obliquely in the essays. Thus, though the endless variations on the signs of X/‫ א‬and Y/‫ צ‬cannot be read as alphabetic codes192 and probably have no linguistic sign value at all, they do have the kind of meaning we associate with music, dance, and other forms of artistic endeavour: the meaning is in the process more than the product. In his obsessive and hallucinatory moments, Dreyfus thus seems to demonstrate a reversion to a primitive need to fill up space. The primitive need does not coincide with pre-historical or anthropological states of being—the way in which many late nineteenth-century thinkers tended 192 Bernstein reports that late nineteenth-century stone hannukiah from the Atlas Mountains seems based on an ancient design. “The sides of the lamp in the Furman Collection are decorated with an incised design consisting of an X with circles in each quadrant flanked by paintings of vertical lines” (The Furman Collection, Section 26, p. 27). — 341 —

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to analogize neurotic or psychotic states of mind with infantile preverbal imaginings, tribal or archaic myths and folklore and, thanks to Freud, with dreams and repressed thoughts expressed as symptoms in casual actions and words (paraplexia). We know that when he could not bring himself to write in a regular fashion so as to fill up his workbooks, hand them in, and receive a new one for the next fortnight or month, as he was allowed to do, Dreyfus would fill the folio pages with his doodles, as though the very act of completing one book and receiving another signified the accomplishment of a ritual, the performance of work as service he set himself, a passage of a unit of time credited towards the fulfillment of his sentence to perpetual exile. Insofar as the cahiers could be taken as his external brain during the five years he was under sentence, he would have felt—rather than thought through rationally or even consciously—that this work (avodah) dignified his stay in exile, proved to him if not to others that his mind was not a blank, inane, useless, mad, and meaningless. But why non-representational drawing? In the anomalous surviving cahier from the first months on Devil’s Island (1895) preserved in the Colonial Museum at Aix-en-Provence, the drawings are both representational and figurative: geometrical shapes and caricature faces, stylistic alphabetic signs and other shapes that have explicit meaning, even if not decidable at the moment. This was no psychotic relapse into an anti-iconic or anti-idolatrous pattern of thought, regression into the psychological disorder that David Shasha thinks is endemic in Ashkenazic pilpul culture, a collective pathology “deeply damaging to Jewish identity in our time.”193 Non-verbal patterns of thought and feeling can be seen, though not translated into verbal language, as though the patterns formed a code or kabbalistic system. In the Preface to Radivoje Peshich’s essays on The Vincha Script, Giacomo Giraldi makes some pertinent comments on the markings (perhaps a script) found on ceramics in the Middle Danubian Basin, that were first taken as “an ordinary graphics representing ornamental elements” which “were “to be looked at, not read.”194 193 David Shasha, “Pilpul as a Psychological Disorder,” Sephardic Heritage Update (4 February 2011), www.sephardicheritage.com/ (accessed 5 February 2011). 194 Giacomo Giraldi, “Preface,” Radivoje Peshich, The Vincha Script, trans. Olivera Papović (Belgrad: Peśić i Sinovi, 2008), 6. Because the translation is rather awkward, I have taken some liberties in silently modifying the text, without, I hope, distorting the sense. Often this only means adding or — 342 —

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However, in due course, the markings or signs were recognized to be an integral part of a definite structure: small circles, concave and convex arcs, separated segments, angled segments of semi-circles ... Everything points to a conclusion that this people used triangles, arcs with chords, etc., even when drawing a face or a silhouette or a line around the eyes. One might even say they wrote even when not writing, when only drawing or making a figure.195 Peshich goes even further in his essays. He argues that the same measured relationships between the different signs that gave a hint of some kind of sign system also exists in the very architecture of the monumental architecture and enclosed space where the marked ceramics were found, “prompting a conclusion of [the] existence of measures and numbers.”196 From this conclusion the author goes another step: This suggests, this civilization had a motif [= motive] and a stimulus, and subsequently, a designation, which [also] had to be in mutual correlation [to one another], the [result] being completely normal for the degree of their development and aspirations.197 In this way, expanding his study to other ancient scripts in India and the Near and Middle East, Peshich argues that each culture that develops a script also develops a system of signs, and this system binds together. It is even the impulse to further developments in the culture so long as it can maintain its internal integrity, even when absorbing many external features from surrounding and invading other societies. In this way, “Each script is based upon a system, as it stems out of it and exists within it and with it, as the expression of the general order subtracting definite and indefinite articles and making the prepositions more idiomatic. 195 Giraldi, “Preface,” The Vincha Script, 6. 196 Hence the importance, almost as obsessive as the need to keep doodling his way through empty pages and blank spaces with writing on it already, of mathematics for Dreyfus: the equations and formulae are visible, tactile patterns of rationality. They do not stand for something: they are in their process of being made the meaningfulness otherwise absent from his ordeal. 197 Peshich, The Vincha Script, 10. — 343 —

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of things.”198 But the “system” in response to certain circumstances from within and without at times develops both an exoteric way of communicating, storing, and commenting on its “lore” and laws and an esoteric form of writing.199 “The ancient peoples used secret writing for recondite knowledge.”200 Nevertheless, whether the secrets were kept by mirror writing, some elaborate code of letter-substitutions, rebus, or pictographic representation of sounds and ideas, usually the same original system of relationships is at work. This process of elaboration and variation has often been missed, Peshich claims, because palaeontologists and prehistorians have assumed that ancient peoples could or would not communicate in such witty, oblique, and subtle ways: the assumption is of a kind of stupid literal-mindedness, and an either/or mentality—either the marks found in caves, on cliff faces, large boulders, monumental dressed stones, ceramic objects and clay tablets were forms of script (syllabic, pictographic, or alphabetic), or they were not. If they were, they would be recognizable because they would eventually be found 198 Ibid., 67. 199 Levinson writes: “… I would say that a given culture’s narrative repertoire does not just play itself out until exhaustion. Rather, culture as a whole can be viewed as a form of persuasion or rhetoric for the creation and preservation of preferred meanings, and the literary text may be understood as an intervention—an attempt to render certain stories convincing” (“Literary Approaches,” 206). Yet as we keep arguing, it is not merely a matter of an invented or intrusive (“intervening”) style or taste, of literature or even of rhetoric, but of epistemological categories and of a symbolic system so deep that it includes—because it probably begins with—things outside of verbal language: things like architecture, social relationships, and awareness, and so patterning of volume, size, and motion, that is, an inclusive dance, a mazurka. I would add a further cautionary note about the neologistic use of the term narrative as the central genius of a cultural enterprise or project; for a story as it follows its own plot makes sense only when we can see it as a system of knowledge, an impulse to interpret itself according to the shape outlined by its own dance, that is, its aesthetic qualities or its imagination. A midrash is only sometimes and not by definition a narrative, an aggadah, and even then such an interpretative act has a seder, an order, that is a much fuller, richer, more complex ritual existence—a time and a place, a collection of people, a set of objects and a scenario to be followed and improvised upon: in short, a festival and the surrounding times and places that allow it to be seen as special and meaningful. While the halachic system, as it develops to encompass every facet of life and the experiences of individuals and groups within that life, “one of the most important functions of rabbinic midrashic texts is to enhance the halakhic system” (Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert, “The Handmaid, the Trickster and the Birth of the Messiah,” in Bakhos, Current Trends, 247). Fonrobert significantly points out that “the genre of aggadic midrash [is] much more permeable to extra-rabbinic voices than the halachic discussion of the talmudic literature” (250), so that we might say that the muse of midrash is the Shekhina, she who interfaces with the sephirot that proceed towards En-Sof (the Infinite) and shares in the world of the finite, of history, individuality and art. 200 Peshich, The Vincha Script, 77. — 344 —

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to stem from the same core system in the ancient Middle East or the Indus Valley. If they were not, then they were completely meaningless, or their meanings were utterly lost in the mists of time.201 Referring to the palaeolithic markings found in Glozel, the author argues that much more subtle and complex thought processes can be credited to ancient artifacts, and that what Glozel in particular shows, because the site itself is dated relatively late in comparison to the variety of objects it contains, dating over a period of several thousand years, is that what was recognized as sacred, meaningful, and ritually powerful in the objects, the symbols scratched or carved on them, and the clay tablets with signs imitating these markings, is that a distinct system of generating a coherent culture existed long before, and thus without there being a strictly verbal language. The system including sounds, to be sure, but not as the predominant or necessarily motivating element.202 While I would in no way describe Dreyfus’s drawings or doodles as related to any archaic or even ancient script or symbol system of the sort that Peshich writes about, what is important is that the cahiers make sense as a whole only by taking the written essays, the mathematical equations and formulae, and the thousands of drawings as different aspects of the same external brain Dreyfus was projecting outwards in order to preserve the sanity of his inner mind from the threats of physical and psychological tortures inflicted on him. This is the importance of Peshich’s discussions. In his “Treatise on the Script,” he says: Space cannot be separated from time, thus, in the same manner neither can the script be separated from its words (the language). For space is the expression of form, and time the expression of sound. Movement of space and time create rhythm, out of which commences number. Number, dominating the overall harmony, forms the sign,

201 Ibid., 80-90. This was the same argument used—and still adduced—to discredit the discoveries in Glozel, central France, in the late 1920s, and in which Salomon Reinach, a full supporter of Dreyfus, became embroiled: the so-called “War of the Bricks” or “The Second Affair,” i.e., Dreyfus Affair. 202 Ibid., 92ff. The author claims that the evidence for such pre-verbal sign systems goes back at least 40,000 years, and in some instances may be 250,000 years old. In other words, the evolution of human intelligence precedes that of individual self-consciousness, cultural and legal organizations, and speech and writing as clear forms of expression. — 345 —

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being the sign itself and the master of the form.203 The drawings in the cahiers are a dance of sanity performed by Dreyfus, wordlessly, in the enforced silence of his imprisonment, and they form a rhythmic performance choreographed by his mind and his heart. The empty space of the workbooks is filled with animated motion, his pencil repeating with variations the forms of the lines he draws into shapes, the actual sound and movement of the dance occurring in his mind and only symbolically expressed on the page as inane figures. What Peshich says of the platonic background to these ideas can also be expressed in kabbalistic terms, as we have indicated in our many citations from Marc-Alain Ouaknin, to show the resonance of Dreyfus’ ideas and actions in composing his essays: For Plato, the script was hipomnesis and mneme. But the script is not only the mnemonic technical means but also truth intuition. It is a continued repetition of Creation. It is a penetration into the transcendental [en-sof, the infinite spiritual] and transcendental presence [shekhina or shadow extension of the divine into the world] of existence.204 Participation in the primal creative act is an ongoing development in accord with God and a fulfilment of the covenantal obligation to help correct the faults and complete the sanctification of the world.205 While in the tsimtsum, the contraction or withdrawal of God into himself to allow the time and space for creativity to occur, the result was not a vacuum of meaninglessness, but the production of physical volume and chronological history, with the Shekhina herself extending the shadow of 203 Ibid., 99. 204 Ibid., 99. 205 The Israeli musician and composer Zvi Keren (born Howard R. Kirshenbaum) tells Alona Keren-Sagee, his daughter: “… I hoped to share with my students a spiritual attitude towards composition. As a religious person, I felt that composers invent much as the Almighty creates. This belief … recognizes affinities between rhythmic motion in music and the rhythmic frequencies that permeate the world … in music, rhythmic modifications and their combinations alter musical phrases in infinite ways. I hoped that my students would align such processes of rhythmic variation with relentless Divine creation of new physiognomies.” In Keren-Sagee, “Zvi Keren: His Contribution to Israel’s Music Scene—An Interview in Honor of his 85th Birthday,” www.biu.ac.il/ hu/mu/min-ad02/alona (accessed 07 May 2009). — 346 —

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God into the universe as a constant token and theoretical presence and a special quality of the divine that takes up neither space nor time, always maintaining the contours of this expanding and extending universe. Dreyfus forces himself to recapitulate this fundamental dance maneuver and inadvertently perform the mitzvah of tikkun ha’olam, his intention to preserve Truth and Justice overriding his limitations of space and time to act in the world of politics and his inadequate understanding of his own specific cultural obligations as a Jew. In this way, what Peshich calls “script” means a meaningful sign, where the meaning as an exoteric shape is unknown to the maker and the censors who observe, and the meaning as an esoteric symbol is unknown to the maker again but emerges from reading it in terms of its several contextual writings in the cahiers. Following Plato, Peshich goes on: The script [drawing or doodle] does not repeat only the “the outer” meaning of the word (phoneme). Being a sign by its very nature, it prompts creation of words. Accordingly, it is not only a metaphor but a reality as well.206 That is, it is a metonym or synecdoche, a part for the whole, the product for the maker, the process for the intention, the physical and psychological release of frustrated energies for the cultural and spiritual meanings hidden in the system itself. “In a word,” Julien Benda says through his allegorical figure of Eleuthère, “the Affair could have been the most formidable and the most symbolic of conflicts between the metaphor and the syllogism, between the subjective and the objective, between sentimentality and rationalism.”207 Now the most important thing about this speculation turns out to be, as the rabbis would have known in a moment, the opening triviality, “In a word;” for the word cannot be sloughed off as an arbitrary sound made to symbolize a lexical unit, which is an arbitrary sign of a concept, which is a conventional way of speaking of the swirling illusions and reconstructed memories that constitute the mind. “In the 206 Peshich, The Vincha Script, 199. 207 Benda, Dialogues à Byzance, 2ème ed. (Paris: Editions de la Revue Blanche, 1900): “En un mot l’Affaire aura été le plus formidable et le plus symbolique des conflits entre la métaphore et le syllogisme, entre le subjectif et l‘objectif, entre le sentimentalisme et le rationalisme” (21). — 347 —

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beginning was the Word,” the λογος, Logos, that the New Testament and the Septuagint use to translate the more dynamic and creative sense of the Hebrew Torah. Through the word, as we have seen, the flow and flux of all the fragments of original energy, the sparks of primal creativity, seem to be seen as myth and history, a hodgepodge of illusions called the Phantasmagoria. Through the word as the creative manifestation of the divine, En-sof, the infinite God, and Adom, primal and secondary mankind, cooperate in the never-ending enterprise of Creation. Together they midrash themselves and all eternity. One day in 1894, Alfred Dreyfus, his wife, his family, his friends, and all of France suddenly were wrenched out of the comfortable stream of phantasms to find themselves in another phantasmagoria, that of the Affair, and forced to realize—hardly anyone at the same time, most only in the final days, and a few, alas, never at all—that what they had before been living was a dream; and where they were now was a nightmare. Painful and humiliating, the awakening and the ordeal of waiting for it to be over caused some of them, notably Alfred and Lucie, to work out a new set of illusions, intellectual, artistic and metaphysical, a midrash of meaningfulness in their lives. Others tried to return to the old myth of benevolent, tolerant, rational France. Others bided their time, grumbling and mumbling under their breaths, waiting for the moment to take their revenge on those who devoured the real France, who were rotting it to the core, and then for a few years imposed their vision of racial purity and national honor on the land. But now, more than a hundred years later, can we see through the words, not to a reality that exists beyond language and iconography, but to the secret of the words and images themselves? Put another way, that is, the way this book has tried to do, can we both see the words of the Affair as Jewish words—including the distorted, noxious version of the anti-Semites—and learn to read them as images in a Jewish way, that is, by midrashing the surviving documents? The answer: we have only tried, and thus only begun. The effort must continue, the battle continues. Or as Benda has one of his characters put it: “c’est, au fond, l’éternelle lutte,” it is fundamentally the eternal struggle.208 However, this is not a Manichean war between Good and 208 Benda, Dialogues à Byzance, 56. Of course, he writes here in the name of one of the anti-Semites who claims that this is a war waged by happy man against the suffering one, the serf against the freeman, the inapt to joy against the apt; or put simply, the endless struggle between Christian and Jew. — 348 —

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Evil, Light and Darkness,209 Us and Them. For as the Sephardic chacham (rabbi) José Faur indicates in a recently composed study of the origins of Christianity, it is only in pagan and Christian thought that “dominion is synonymous with ‘might’ or tyrannical power. For Israel, dominion is the effect of creation ex nihilo.” The consequence of this Jewish thought is that, as the late seventeenth-century commentator R. Isaac Abendana put it elegantly, “Whereas God Almighty is the Lord and Governor of the Universe, as having by Right of Creation the Supreme Dominion over all Creatures,” he cannot exercise that right arbitrarily, but “according to the norms of justice.” Might is not right, and even precedence in creating the universe does not mean that God is absolved from all responsibilities under the Law or immune from questions and challenges from his partners in the covenant, or brit, entered into with Israel. The ideal society under the Law is of horizontal relationships, not hierarchical entities in a pyramidal structure where the king speaks on behalf of the deity and thus is a deity himself above the law. In Jewish tradition, each individual created in the likeness of God, is not only equal before the Law, but equal to God under the Law. Therefore, in the endless war against the forces of evil, darkness, and tyrannical power, such as can be seen in Dreyfus’ resistance to the arbitrary and arrogant claims of the Army and the State, “The history of Israel is the continuing unfolding of this primordial struggle.” The struggle, however, is not power against power, one arbitrary system against another, but between two different ways of processing reality, one where the signifier becomes the same as the signified—a short circuit in the system of syntagmatic understanding of language, a misprision of what should be for what is because the powerful agent of violence and willfulness says so—and one where the signifier is not the signified: because merely appropriating the names of ideals and principles does not make the appropriators what they claim to be. Like a good Jew, Alfred Dreyfus did not accept authority because 209 Dov Wagner offers this mystical view: “Darkness serves but one purpose: to be transformed and converted into light” (“Sept. 11 and the Jewish Approach to Tragedy,” Chabad-Lubavitch Media Center, http://www.kabbalaonline.org/KabbalaWorld/11.09.2002). Wagner continues: “A great darkness was released in the world, a series of coldly planned actions unprecedented in their wanton and random destruction. If we allow the darkness to engulf us, all of those people will continue to suffer, as will we all. But we don’t have to give in. We have the ability, hard as it may be, to fight back: to build out of the ashes, and to create light out of the darkness. We can choose to add in acts of goodness and kindness, and to do random wanton acts of good in memory of, and counter-balance to, the horrors that have been perpetrated.” — 349 —

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he believed that submission to authority was a good in and of itself, a manifestation of faith; he questioned it, challenged it, and resisted it— he wrestled with the dilemma, not with the ultimately unreal, untrue, and ugly phenomenon.210 So the final words are from Faur: …in modern Europe, Jewish intellectuals of all kinds, were under the same peril as Jewish conversos were in Spain and Portugal, where any linguistic or intellectual “indiscretion” could result in persecution, ignominy, etc.

210 Hannah Arendt saw authority, auctoritas, as a foundational Roman concept, from the verb augere, “to augment,” and thus says “authority always depended upon augmenting the foundation, thus carrying the past alive into the present” (cited in Harold Bloom, “What is Genius?” Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds, [Fourth Estate, 2002], excerpted online at NotAlone/You are not alone, www.youarenotalone.com/article/3946 [accessed 06/11/2011]). In Jewish thought, authority does not reside in who or what an ancient author was but in what he or she said, how valid and persuasive the words are. Those who accused, tried, and exiled Dreyfus all claimed the authority of the Army and the State; at first Dreyfus tried to rationalize what happened with the authority he respected as a military man. He claimed his own honor and integrity on the basis of loyalty. But the opponents never saw anything but a hideous, degraded face of a Jew who, by definition, could not carry any authority. Adam Gopnik, reviewing several new books on the Dreyfus Affair, writes in The New Yorker of the man: “Far from being faceless, he was all face: the haters never tired of describing and drawing his hdieousness. ‘His face is grey, flattened and base, showing no sign of remorse … a wreck from the ghetto,’ the journalist Léon Daudet wrote. That hideous degradation ritual is at the heart of the Dreyfus affair …” — 350 —

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Epilogue Has everything been said that could be said about the topic?

La traduction usuelle du mot tohou est désert, chaos, inanité, vanité, vide, mais également étonnement, stupéfaction, selon Rachi, qui cite alors l’ancien français “estordison”. “BOHU signifie vide, continue Rachi, et solitude. L’homme est saisi de stupéfaction et d’horreur en présence de la vide.”1 To a great degree, this book and the one that precedes it, not to mention the ones that will follow, are concerned with the fact (yes: fact) that as soon as Alfred Dreyfus was arrested, and Lucie was notified that he was arrested and threatened with dire consequences, normal reality ceased to exist for them. They were plunged into a nightmare, an enigmatic emptiness: like that moment when Georges Méliès realized a mistake he made when his film caught and stopped turning as he sought to capture the passage of people and vehicles through the street was magical; for when he fixed the breakage and began to work the camera again, what had happened was that a vehicle changed into a horse, or was actually— in the present moment of the artificial “now” of the cinema—half horse and half vehicle. The inanity of it was, on the one hand, stupefying and absurd, a chaotic confusion of things caught in the emptiness of time and space, and on the other, creative, poetic, and full of insight.2 For 1 

“The usual translation of the word tohu is desert, chaos, inanity, vanity, void, but equally astonishment, stupefaction, according to Rashi, who then cites the Old French “etordison.” BOHU signifies emptiness, Rashi continues, and solitude. Man is seized with stupefaction and horror in the presence of the void. Stéphane Zagdanski, L’impureté de Dieu: souillures et scissions dans la pensée juive (Paris: Editions de Felin, 2005; 1991), 47. 2  Virgil, too, had realized the significance of inanity, as the emptiness of absence and loss, of destruction and exile, to be sure, but also as the purification of space and time, the emptying out of what had grown old and meaningless so that new realities could be born and new meanings, aesthetic and epistemological, could be developed in their place. Thus his Aeneas became in the Roman epic the man of inanitas and of anima. — 351 —

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Alfred and Lucie, the emptiness of time and space that yawned between them was felt painfully in the chaos of their correspondence as letters failed to arrive in order or at all, each epistle being grasped blindly in the need to repeat their own and each other’s words, yet suddenly and subtly clarified in the awakening of understanding and spiritual depths in their love. That enforced emptiness spurred Alfred to fill the empty pages of his cahiers with words, numbers, drawings, history, science, technology, morality, memories, dreams, exercises in language, and repetitions of narratives. To make sense of this, we need to read midrashically, kabbalistically, inferentially, and cunningly. We need to participate in the processes of condensation that make the void in which creation takes place out of time and space, to break apart received and conventional narratives, exploding the texts into their constituent elements—light-beams and darkness, substance and emptiness, words and silences, consonants and vowels, letters floating above and below the burning parchment of experience—and then to follow and collect the scattered sparks, bring them together, and read them in a myriad of ways, using and abusing the rules of Greek knowledge, rhetoric, and aesthetics, reproducing rabbinical conventions, fissuring them in the madness of historical experience, reassembling them, swimming over the surface of new texts, diving down deep into the unconscious depths of myths, dreams, and madness. Have we or has anyone said all there is to say about Alfred and Lucie Dreyfus? No. Though this book may have reached its final pages, the argument is not complete, and the investigation into Alfred Dreyfus as something more than a zinc puppet has only begun. However, it should be clear now that Dreyfus, if not one of the great thinkers of his time, let alone part of the avant-garde, was no mere bourgeois conformist or dabbler. Under the pressure of isolation and confinement, thanks also to the help of his wife Lucie, he reviewed a large number of the mainstream writers of the nineteenth century, evaluated them critically, and attempted a synthesis that takes into account his own Jewish sensibility. What remains to do, then, is to see Dreyfus in the context of the many books on women, marriage, and love that were written in the period before World War I (not only the great romantic novels of the century, but the investigations based on deep self-analysis, the collection of population trends, and the investigation of different cultures from the archaic past — 352 —

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to the diverse and exotic nations of the present); to find the authors and ideas on Jewishness that were available directly and indirectly to both Alfred and Lucie (such as the traditional manuals given to young men on the eve of their marriages, the meditations and prayers for young women and new mothers, and the scientific study of Judaism in French and German), and thus in general to set Dreyfus and the Affair in the intellectual context that was being replaced, at first somewhat gradually, and then explosively, in the fin-de-siècle, so that it can be seen as one of the final acts of the nineteenth century—and yet as part of the very conglomeration of modern ideas and movements that came into being out of the Great War and the rise of totalitarian dictatorships that crystallized in that same period. For as advances in science, social theory, moral philosophy, aesthetic principles, and artistic technology opened up a range of new ways of seeing, thinking, remembering, and speculating on the world, they did not always correct or refine old ways. Often they skittered into new directions without answering open questions that were consequently left hanging, and that were quickly forgotten, meaning that what someone like Alfred Dreyfus was thinking about in the mid-1890s was not necessarily otiose, or misconstrued from the perspective of the minds shocked by the Great War, or discombobulated by the pervasiveness of Communism or Fascism and Nazism. They can still be seen as legitimate, interesting and significant alternatives, albeit for the most part still undeveloped, to those systems, paradigms, commonplaces and horizons we today normally assume are the grounds for what is natural, logical, and human. Screens, Sieves and Lenses Le cinéma n’est pas le prédateur de la réalité; il feint seulement d’en absorber la substance comme un serpent avale sa proie d’un bloc avant de la laisser se dissoudre lentement en lui sous l’acide de ses sucs digestifs. Cette ingestion de la vie par l’Image est bien entendu le fantasme mégalo-maniaque et jouissif de tous les cinéastes.3

3 

Zagdanski, La mort dans l’œil, 343. — 353 —

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“Cinema is not the predator of reality; it only pretends to absorb the substance as a serpent swallows its prey whole before allowing it to dissolve slowly in the acids of its digestive juices. This ingestion of life by the Image is of course the megalomaniac fantasy and Schadenfreude of all cinemaniacs.” There are some critics who do not like films, finding cinema deadly and pernicious, anti-literary and pandering to the most crass of middle-class tastes.4 For them, the latest advances in cinematography, with their use of digital imaging, high-powered microscopic enhancements and telescopic lenses are no more than banal tricks, hardly improving on the rickety-clunky productions of the 1890s, and no better finally than the duplicitous depictions Plato denounced in The Republic and the Timaeus. In addition, when they speak of the colorless, soundless films of the first few decades, they see no imaginative enhancement in the performance beyond the heavy fog of grisaille and empty speech captions, as though early audiences were incapable of appreciating the difference between the artificial delights of the cinema and the realities of the contextual world. This kind of snobbism, reinforced too often by post-modernist jargon and anti-Americanism (including anti-Zionism), tends to merge with the snide and condescending remarks made about Alfred Dreyfus’s lack of imagination and inarticulate passivity in the face of his accusers before and after his arrest. Though we have attempted to enhance our own case by citing such authors in the body of our text and in the footnotes as part of the midrashing exercise, our approach to these writers always has to be cautious and critical if we are to avoid fall4  These are the critics who use cinema as a virtual synonym for Hollywood, both as a specific place and set of film studios located there and all the glitz and glamour of celebrity and publicity associated with them, and as a metonym for American modernity in its globalized dominance of popular entertainment and culture. Such critics are related to those nineteenth-century writers who mocked the mobs who came to the Salons at the Louvre to gawk at the Impressionists, and other non-academic painters who were trying new ways of seeing reality and their own artistic sensitiveness in the world, and the members of the juries who kept most of the artists we now recognize as important out of the Salons, as well as the people—and in many cases they were the same as those reviewers of the Salons for Paris newspapers, but also several significant poets, novelists, and artists—who believed that photography was a banal non-artistic mode of reproducing human reality and nature. I have started to address these problems in several articles, such as Norman Simms, “Fantasia, Enargeia, and the Rabbinical Midrash: The Classical Way to Read Jewish Texts,” Literature & Aesthetics 19:2 (2009): 10-24 and “Age Old Limits from Paradox to Contradiction: Limiting Jewish Art” (forthcoming). — 354 —

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ing into the kind of contradictions that would result if the conclusions reached by the post-modernists were seen as attempting to prove or amplify our own position. The imminence of such contradiction, however, should not be downplayed for the very reason that the collision of the two points of view seems to provide the spark that ignites the explosion that fissures the existing narratives and paradigms we are seeking, not so much to replace them with wholly new facts or models of explanation, but with new patterns of arrangements, patterns that have more depth and dynamic than those normally or normatively relied on, and more resonance or allusive signifying power5 in areas of experience and historical memory than seem to find legitimacy in academic historiographical protocols.6 Worms, Parasites and Mites Comme sa langue est éclatée, le texte biblique se révèle vermicule, sa transmission parasitée par des signes insignes, ses pages ornées de glyphes fuligineux, habitées de tranquilles acariens qu’ailleurs on choisirait de rejeter 5  A deeper pun which Zagdanski takes in the name of the psychoanalyst and biblical commentator Daniel Sibony is of signify as s’ignifie, to burn a meaning into oneself; L’impureté de Dieu, 256. 6  Zagdanski uses the term texturalité as a further extension of textuality to cover some of these aspects of the “thickness” of midrashic and midrashed texts. It is not merely “la texture du texte” (the texture of the text), but much more: it is the tresse or braided locks of Samson that give him his strength, the twisted threads of blue and white that make up the fringes of a tallit or tsittsit. To “texturalise l’historicité du Livre, au sens où elle mêle l’interprétation du texte au texte lui-même, rendant spontanément simultanées Réel, Texte, et Interprétation” (To textualize the historicity of the Book, in the sense where it mixes the interpretation of the text with the text itself, rendering spontaneously and simultaneously the Real, the Text and the Interpretation) L’impureté de Dieu, 71. Once again, to indicate the path by which Dreyfus might have been aware of these complex ideas deeply embedded in rabbinical and kabbalistic traditions, see the source Zagdanski calls upon to support his argument: Chateaubriand’s Génie du christianisme. “L’hébreu, concis, énergique, presque sans inflexion dans ses verbes, exprimant vingt nuances de la pensée par la seule apposition d’une lettre, annonce l’idiome d’un peuple qui, par une alliance remarquable, unit à la simplicité primitive une connaissance approfondie des hommes” (Hebrew, concise, energetic, almost without inflexion in its verbs, expressing twenty shades of meaning in its thought merely by apposition of a letter, proclaims the idiom of a people who, by a remarkable covenant, unite to the primitive simplicity a profound knowledge of humanity) (L’impureté de Dieu, 152). Interestingly, in the long discussion from which this passage is drawn, Zagdanski cites often from Zadok Kahn, Chief Rabbi of France, the officiant who married Alfred Dreyfus and Lucie Hadamard, and virtually the only member of the Jewish hierarchy who came out—and came out early—as a proponent of Dreyfus’s innocence. — 355 —

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dans la catégorie négligeable des dérapages de calame, altérations matérielles, erreurs de copiste ou étourderies diverses de scribe, et que les Talmudistes ont décide pour leur part de lire comme des déflagrations de sens, des hiéroglyphes a déchiffrer en supplément, des coups a poinçon pensés dans la plénitude d’une forme admise et vénérée.7 As the language explodes into light, the biblical text reveals itself as worm-eaten, its transmission parasitized by insignificant signs, its pages decorated with shiny glyphs, inhabited by tranquil itch-mites who elsewhere would be decidedly rejected into the category of the negligible and as slips of the reed-pen, inadvertent alterations to the cloth, errors of the copyist or diverse scribal blunders, but which the Talmudists have decided in their wisdom to read as dazzling of the senses, as hieroglyphs to decipher to supplement the deliberate marks of thought in the fullness of an acknowledged and venerated form. Dreyfus, especially as a Jew, has been shifted off centre into the margins of history, hidden in the shadows, reduced to a “grey” superficial type, while Lucie herself stands ambiguously in these tenebrous fringes, although she should now be seen as a deeply involved partner in his life. My studies have attempted to show the dynamic situation of the man and his wife in history to be quite other than the incidental and sentimentalized version normally adduced, thanks to a close-reading of the love letters and prison notebooks, and an attempt to contextualize these writings on literature, art, and philosophy of the nineteenth century. Those books and authors of the fin-de-siècle and a generation earlier and later, though popular and mainstream in their own time, have been virtually and steadily overlooked in our contemporary re-creations of the period, as though what is important for us should have been important for the men and women in that century. Alfred and Lucie, 7 

Zagdanski, L’impureté de Dieu, 156. — 356 —

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moreover, should be seen in a context of their times that includes the range of Jewishnesses (judéités) available to the Dreyfus and Hadamard families, as well as to the explicit and implicit supporters of the cause Alfred and Lucie fought for. These contextualizing Jewish texts range from the Imre lev (Consolation of the Heart) that Lucie kept close by her since childhood, the Iggeret kadosh (The Sacred Epistle) that Alfred would have been told to read just before his marriage, but also the homiletic writings of Zadok Kahn and other Jewish scholars and rabbinical sages who contributed to the Etudes juives during the 1880s and 1890s, sponsored by the Consistory and subscribed to by bourgeois families such as the Hadamards. This range would extend to more secular Jewish authors, like Salomon Reinach, or the thinkers earlier in the nineteenth century who sought to understand the Hebrew backgrounds to Jesus’s life and the development of Christianity, as well as the Judaism that was created during the Middle Ages; hence the importance of Chateaubriand, Jules Michelet, and Ernest Renan. This enlarged Jewish context is usually neglected, not only by the academic historians, whether Jewish or non-Jewish, who do not deem rabbinical and secular Jewish thinkers, writers and artists significant because of their Jewishness or simply have a deficient or indeed no knowledge or understanding of Jewish traditions, other than a series of superficial clichés. It is falsely assumed, when some concern is shown for the Jewish component of the Affair, that rabbinical traditions are coherent and consistent through many ages and across diverse cultural zones, particularly popular American versions of Ashkenazi belief and practice, where the range seems to run from Liberal through to Orthodox to Hasidic strands, along with heavily atheistic secularism; thus forgetting the strong components of Sephardic and Italianate Judaism in France during Alfred’s and Lucie’s lifetimes. Orblutes and Historical Hallucinations …Warburg’s own argument was that memory, externalized in images and other crystallizations of feeling, selects us. The past bears down on the present. We are not not so free to transfigure the past. Warburg, in life, retreated from reality in ordert to stabilize himself and find some refuge from the present, and the future, in the — 357 —

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hope of grasping it at all.8 Unlike the formal paintings, sculptures, architecture and book-illustrations that Aby Warburg and his disciples studied and out of which they extrapolated a mentality of migrating symbols and metaphors that trigger deep cognitive changes in the crises of history, the jottings and doodlings of Alfred Dreyfus, along with the anxiety-ridden letters passed from Alfred and Lucie through the prying and hostile eyes of military censors, present a version of reality that often anything but real at all. Sometimes it seems as though the narratives and pictures of experience are shattered and scattered over the past, much of it lost to view altogether and replaced by a variety of trompe-l’oeil images, hallucinated dreams, and random yellowy and faded photographs of unrecognizable persons and events; at other times, the records and interpretations of the Affair strike us as distant gleams and nomadic shadows of other events altogether swept up in the madness of the twentieth century. To deal with this kaleidoscope and phantasmagoria, we scramble to find terms of reference, outmoded metaphors and neglected processes of decoding these signal lights flashing over the horizon. As a very young girl, Aurore Dupin, later to call herself George Sand, went with her mother to Madrid to be with her father during the Napoleonic occupation of Iberia. While there, the toddler would play on the roof garden of the palace where the family were living. Aurore recalls her first experience of a visual phenomenon that she would return to many times in her later life as a novelist. A ma droite, tout un côté de la place était occupé par une église d’une architecture massive, du moins elle se retrace ainsi à ma mémoire, et surmontée d’une croix plantée dans un globe doré. Cette croix et ce globe étincelant au coucher du soleil, se détachant sur un ciel plus bleu que je ne l’avais jamais vu, sont un spectacle que je n’oublierai jamais, et que je contemplais jusqu’à ce que j’eusse dans les yeux ces boules rouges et bleues…9

8  9 

Christopher S. Wood, “Dromenon,” Common Knowledge 18:1 (2011): 106. George Sand, Histoire de ma vie, ed. Brigitte Diaz (Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 2004), 163-164. — 358 —

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On my right, along the side of the place was filled by a church with a massive architecture, at least it is thus traced into my memory, and surmounted by a cross planted in a golden globe. This cross and globe sparkling in the setting sun detached themselves from the bluest sky I have ever seen, made a spectacle I will never forget, and that I contemplated until I had these red and blue bubbles in my eyes...10 Reflecting back on this optical illusion in her infancy, George Sand turns her attention to the appropriate word for this phenomenon which she believes is more universal than the absence of a correct modern French term would suggest. She finds the best word available is a local dialect derived from Latin. …que par un excellent mot dérivé du latin, nous appelons, dans notre langue du Berry, les orblutes. Ce mot devrait passer dans la langue moderne. Il doit avoir été français, quoique je ne l’aie trouvé dans aucun auteur. Il n’a point d’équivalent, et il exprime parfaitement un phénomène que tout le monde connait et qui ne s’exprime que par des périphrases inexactes.11 …which we call, by an excellent word derived from Latin, in our dialect of Berry, orblutes. This word could pass into our modern language. It could have been French, although I have never found it in any author. It has no equivalent, and yet it expressed perfectly a phenomenon that everyone knows and which can only be expressed by inexact periphrasis.12 The experience is manifold: on the one hand, little Aurore enjoys the phenomenon itself as a kind of magical game she can play by herself; on the other, George Sand considers the absence of an appropriate modern 10  11  12 

My translation. Sand, Histoire de ma vie, 164. My translation. — 359 —

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term and the lack of a scientific explanation for its occurrence as part of the education she was acquiring as preparation for being the writer of fiction she would become, an author sensitive to psychological activities in the sensoria and in the inquiring mind. Ces orblutes m’amusaient beaucoup, et je ne pouvais pas m’en expliquer la cause toute naturelle. Je pensais plaisir à voir flotter devant mes yeux ces brûlantes couleurs qui s’attachaient a tous les objets, et qui persistaient lorsque je fermais les yeux. Quand l’orblute est bien complète, elle vous représente exactement la forme de l’objet qui l’a causée; c’est une sorte de mirage. Je voyais donc le globe et la croix du feu se dessiner partout ou se portaient mes regards, et je m’étonne d’avoir tant répété impunément ce jeu assez dangereux pour les yeux d’un enfant. 13 These orblutes gave me a great deal of pleasure, and I could not explain their natural cause. I thought it enjoyable to watch these burning colours that were attached to all the objects floating before my eyes, and which continued when I shut my eyes. When an orblute is finished, it represents to you exactly the form of the object that created it; it is like a mirage. I could thus see the globe and the cross of fire making pictures of themselves everywhere and carried them in my perceptions, and I am astonished to have repeated this dangerous game so often without harm to my infant eyes.14 Sand adds a footnote to her text suggesting a slight orthographical change to allow the word to enter into standard French. Pour que le mot fût bon, il faudrait changer une lettre et dire orbluces.15

13  Sand, Histoire de ma vie, 164. 14  My translation. 15  Sand, Histoire de ma vie, 164, note *. — 360 —

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To make the word acceptable, one need only change a single letter and say orbluces.16 The modern editor of the Histoire de ma vie adds her own note to point towards two further novels in which Sand employs the word in the sense first found here in these childhood memories. George Sand emploie ce mot dans La Petite Fadette et Les Maîtres sonneurs, dans un sens assez proche de l’expression populaire “berlue”.17 George Sand uses this word in Little Fadette [1869] and The Master Pipers [1857] in a sense very close to the popular expression “burlue.” 18 This is the point at which we leave off one approach to the study of Alfred Dreyfus and move into the next in a third volume of this series. In George Sand’s attempt to recreate the state of mind she had as a very young child, reflected and refracted through the mentality of a middle-aged woman and an accomplished novelist, we grasp the deep heritage of introspection and psychological (moral) analysis in which Alfred engages both in his letters to Lucie and in his prison cahiers. The perspective we attempt to construct does not focus on the aspects of the man, his milieu and his mentality that we can easily identify with because those features of the age that eventually developed into the milieu and mentality of our own more than a hundred years later but on those ideas, images, feelings and rational patterns of thought that were overtaken by and left behind in the wake of what to us is the more familiar nineteenth century. In almost every instance where Dreyfus refers to some author, thinker, scientist or artist whom we appreciate as a maker of the twentieth century, he shows that he disagrees, dislikes or does not understand such a person and his or her accomplishments. He chooses rather to dwell on and in the ideas and images of people we consider to be passé, out of date, and mostly irrelevant if not long 16  17  18 

My translation. Diaz in Sand, Histoire de ma vie, 164, n.1. My translation. — 361 —

———————————————————— Epilogue

————————————————————

forgotten. They are, to anticipate the next book on Alfred Dreyfus, like the orblutes or burlues that little Aurore Dupin played with on the roof in Madrid in about 1808. They seem like motes dancing in the sunlight, mirages and hallucinations, things we imagine we see, if we look into the bright reflections of the sun, rub our eyes too hard, or allow our fancy to get the better of us.19

19  The discussion of orblutes will be expanded greatly in the third volume of the Dreyfus series. — 362 —

———————————————————— Appendix I ————————————————————

Appendices

Appendix I: Persons quoted and discussed in Dreyfus’s Prison Notebooks These consist mostly of literary authors, painters, sculptors, musicians, dramatists, philosophical writers, military leaders, and political figures in whom Alfred Dreyfus was interested. Wherever possible, I have expanded on the names and entered birth and death dates in order to show the range of readings and the periods of the books and authors. A Aeschylus (525-456 BCE) C5, F 13; C5, F17, V Alembert, Jean Le Rond d’ (1717-1783) C9, F18 Alexander the Great (350-323 BCE) C8, F31, V Ampère, André (1775-1836) C2, F8; C4, F40, V Amyot, Jacques (1573-1593) C11, F8 Angelico, Guido. Il Beato (1400-1455) C10, F19 Aristippus (5th century BCE) C14, F24, V Aristotle (384-322 BCE) C2, F29; C14, F27, V Art, G. C1, F12 Aubigné, Agrippa d’(1552-1630) C4, F11 Augerau, Pierre (1757-1816) C11, F2 Aurelius. See Marcus Aurelius. B Balzac, Honoré de (1799-1850) C14, F34, V Barras, Paul, vicomt de (1735-1829) C11, F17; C14, F16 Barrès, Maurice (1862-1923) C4, F15; C6, F25; C13, F3, V Barthea, Marechal de France C4, F16 Bathier, General. C3, F32 Baudelaire, Charles (1821-1867) C4, F37, V; C4, F38 Beato, Il. See Angelico. Beauharnais, Eugène de (1781-1824) C4, F16 Beccaria, Cesare Bonesana, marquis de (1738-1794) C9, F18 Beethoven, Ludwig van (1770-1827) C8, F21, V — 363 —

———————————————————— Appendices ————————————————————

Belliard, Marechal de France. C4, F16 Berard, Victor. C4, F46 Bessières, Jean-Baptiste, duc d’Istrie, marechal de France (1768-1813) C4, F16 Bjornson, Bjornstjerne (1832-1910) C1, F7, V Boccaccio, Giovanni (1313-1375) C7, F15 Bode, Johann Ehert (1747-1826) C7, F5 Bogeaud, Thomas, marquis de la Piconnerie, duc d’Islay (1784-1849) C11, F14 Bonald, Louis, vicomte de (11754-1840) C12, F12 Bonaparte. See Napoleon. Bossuet, Jacques (1627-1704) C4, F11; C5, F6, V; C10, F2, V Bourget, Paul (1852-1935) C4,F36; C4, F36, V; C4, F37; C4, F37, V; C4, F38; C5, F9; C5, F9, V; C5, F10; C5, F10, V; C5, F10, V; C5, F11; C5, F11, V; C5, F12; C5, F12, V; C5, F13; C5, F13, V; C5, F14; C5, F14, V Brieux, Eugene (1858-1932) C8, F24 Broussois, Dr. C3, F35; C5, F6, V; C10, F2, V Brown, Oliver Madox C3, F35 Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de (1707-1783) C4, F41, V Bugeaud, Thomas, Marquis de la Piconnerie, duc d’Isly (1784-1849) C5, F16, V C Caesar, Caius Julius (101-44 BCE) C8, F29; C8, F29, V; C8, F30; C8, F31, V; C8, F32 Carnot, Lazare (1753-1823) C11, F1 Cassius Julius. C7, F3, V; C7, F4, V Catherine II the Great (1729-1796) C9, F18; C9, F18, V Catullus (87-54 BCE) C9, F12 Caus, Solomon de (1576-1626/1630) C2, F36, V Chapelain, Jean (1595-1674) C4, F14 Charles IX (1550-1611) C13, F16, V Chateaubriand, Auguste de (1768-1848) C2, F4; C4, F11; C5, F6, V Chatham, Lord. C3, F22; See Pitt. Cicero, Marcus Tulius (196-43 BCE) C4, F30; C4, F41; C4, F43, V; C8, F5; C8, F20, V; C9, F12 Clive, Robert, de Palissy (1735-1774) C3, F31 Colbert, Jean-Baptiste (1619-1683) C14, F39 Condillac, Etienne Bonnot de (1715-1780) C4, F50, V Condorcet, Jean Antoine Nicolas de (1743-1794) C4, F6; C4, F13, V; C4, F19 Corneille, Pierre (1606-1684) C4, F46, V; C5, F17 Cornwallis, Charles (1728-1805) C3, F41 Courtois, Bertard (1777-1838) C4, F15 D D’Alembert. See Alembert. D’Anunzio, Gabriele (1863-1938) C1, F2 — 364 —

———————————————————— Appendix I ————————————————————

Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) C4, F11; C4, F24, V; C5, F13 Danton, Georges Jacques (1759-1794) C3, F14; C3, F19; C4, F19 Darwin, Charles (1809-1882) C5, F1, V Da Vinci, Leonardo (1452-1519) C2, F29, V; C2, F30 Davout, Louis Nicolas, duc d’Auerstaedt, prince d’Eckmühl (1770-1823) C4, F16 De Maîstre, Joseph and Xavier. See Maîstre. De Quincy, Thomas (1785-1859) C7, F5 De Sévigné. See Sévigné, Madam de. De Vigny, Alfred (1799-1863) C2, F2; C4, F28, V; C10, F3; C10, F19; C11, F19; C13, F20, V De Vogue, Melchior, Viscount Eugene, duc de (1829-1916) C4, F15; C5, F17, V Deane, Silas (1737-1789) C4, F21, V Decamerone. See Boccaccio. Delacroix, Eugene (1798-1863) C8, F38; C14, F3 Desaix (Louis Charles Antoine des Aix) (1768-1800) C4, F16 Descartes, Rene (1596-1659) C1, F7, V; C6 F38, V; C9, F36, V; C10, F2, V; C11, F13, V Diderot, Denis (1713-1784) C4, F25; C4, F42, V; C5, F17; C9, F18 Dostoevesky, Fydor Mikhaelovich (1821-1881) C1, F7, V Doun, Leopold Joseph, comte de (1705-1766) C14, F21 Drake, Sir Francis (1540-1596) C14, F5 Dubois (de) Crancé, Edmund Louis Alexis (1747-1814) C11, F1 Duclaux, Emile (1840-1904) C3, F23; C8, F39 Dudevant, Aurore. See George Sand. Dumas (Governor of French India) C3, F26, V; C3, F27 Dupleix, Joseph François (1696-1763) C3, F27; C3, F28, V; C3, F31; C14, F23 Duruc, Marechal de France. C4, F16 Duruy, Victor (1811-1894) C4, F15 E Eliot, George (1809-1880) C13, F3 Elizabeth I of England (1533-1603) C14, F5 Estrées, Victor Maurice (1660-1737) C14, F21 Euler, Leonard (1707-1783) C3, F45 Euripides (480-406 BCE) C5, F17, V; C5, F18; C11, F13, V Evans, Mary Anne. See George Eliot. F Foester-Nietzsche, Elisabeth C6, F6; C6, F6, V François I (1494-1547) C13, F1 Franklin, Benjamin (1706-1790) C4, F21, V; C7, F9, V Frederic II the Great of Prussia (1712-1786) C8, F18; C9, F18; C9, F18, V; C13, F2; C13, F2, V; C14, F21; C14, F41 Fréron, Louis (1754-1802) C11, F17 — 365 —

———————————————————— Appendices ————————————————————

Fresnel, Auguste (1788-1827) C10, F16, V Friar, maréchal de France. C4, F16 Friesse, Sgt. C3, F8, V Fustel de Coulanges, Numa Denis (1830-1889) C2, F7, V; C5, F7, V; C6, F2; C6, F2, V; C11, F19 G Galba, Servius Suplicius (5 BCE-69 CE) C14, F20 Galvani, Luigi (1733-1798) C14, F9 Gilbert, William (1544-1603) C14, F9 Giotto di Bondone (1266-1337) C5, F13; C5, F16, V Gomenol. C14, F19 Goncourt Brothers, Edmond (1822-1890) and Jules (1830-1870) C14, F47 Gréard, Octave (1828-1904) C14, F2 Grimm, Melchior, baron de (1723-1867) C9, F18 Grose, de, admiral. C4, F22 Guise, Claude I, de (1496-1550) C13, F16, V Guizot, François (1787-1874) C5, F6, V; C5, F7 H Hannibal (247-183 BCE) C2, F5, V; C11, F8 Hanotaux, Gabriel (1853-1944) Hegel, Friedrich (1770-1831) C2, F8; C9, F11, V Heine, Heinrich (1797-1856) C6, F3, V Helvetius, Claude Adrien (1715-1771) C5, F4 Henri IV (1553-1616) C2, F35 Hertz, Heinrich (1857-1894) C14, F6 Hetzel, Pierre-Jules (1814-1886) C11, F10, V Hoche, Lazaee (1768-1797) C13, F3, V Hoffman, ETA (Ernest Theodor Amadeus) (1716-1822) C6, F3, V Holbach, Paul Henri Dietrich, baron d’ (1723-1789) C13, F4, V Homer. C2, F30; C11, F4, V Horace, Quintus Horatius Flaccus (65-8 BCE) C1, F24; C4, F43, V; C6, F28; C8, F20, V; C14, F20 Hugo, Victor (1802-1885) C4, F38; C5, F4; C10, F16; C14, F10, V Hume, David (1711-1776) C2, F10. I Ibsen, Henrik (1828-1906) C1, F7, V; C1, F38, V J Jefferson, Thomas (1743-1826) C11, F6, V Joinville, Jean, Sire de (ca. 1224-1317) C4, F11 Jomini, Henri, baron de (1779-1869) C11, F1, V — 366 —

———————————————————— Appendix I ————————————————————

Julius Caesar. See Caesar, Caius Julius. K Kant, Emmanuel (1724-1804) C3, F22, V; C3, F23, V; C3, F38, V; C5, F14, V Kléber, Jean-Baptiste (1753-1800) C11, F1, V L La Boëtie, Etienne de (1530-1563) C12, F10, V La Bourdonnais, Bertrand François Mare de (1699-1753) C3, F27 La Rochefoucald. See Rochefoucauld. Lacordaire, Henri (1802-1861) C11, F4 Lafayette, Marie-Joseph, Marquis de (1757-1834) C3, F40, V LaFontaine, Jean de (1631-1697) C4, F39 Lallamand (Chief Minister of Mines) C7, F5, V Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste de Monet (1744-1829) C5, F1, V Lamartine, Alphonse de (1791-1869) C3, F7, V; C4, F14, V; C4, F43; C4, F43, V Lamennais, Félicité Robert de (1782-1854) C2, F17; C4, F40, V Lamy, E. C50, F50 Laporte, Arnaud de (1737-1792) C11, F5 Lenoir, Alexandre (1822-1900) C3, F26, V Levertin, Oscar Ivar (1862-1906) C11, F14 Livy (Titus-Livius) (59 BCE-17 CE) C6, F2, V Lombroso, Cesare (1835-1909) C2, F8 Longinus (213-273 CE) C2, F29 Loti, Pierre (Julien Vaud) (1856-1923) C1, F2, V; C5, F5 Louis XIV, le Grand (1638-1715) C4, F30; C9, F11; C11, F1 Louis XV, le Bien aimé (1710-1774) C4, F30; C4, F33, V; C13, F2; C13, F2, V; C14, F29 Louis XVI (1754-1793) C14, F29 Lucan (33-65 CE) C3, F5, V; C7, F4, V; C9, F12; C14, F5 Lucretius (98-55 BCE) C2, F13, V; C1, F41, V; C4, F4; C7, F3, V; C9, F12 M Machiavelli, Nicolo (1469-1527) C8, F29 Maîstre, Joseph de (1752-1821) C2, F16; C14, F47 Maîstre, Xavier de (1763-1852) C2, F16 Malesherbes, Guillaume-Chretien de Lamoignon de (1721-1794) C14, F30; C14, F30 Malherbes, Alfred or V. Jacob (1826-1904) C3, F42, V; C3, F43 Marceau, François Séverin (1769-1796) C3, F36, V Marcellus, Marcus Claudius (ca. 268-208 BCE) C11, F8 Marcus Aurelius. C14, F2 Marie-Thérèse (1717-1780) C13, F2; C13, F2, V Masson, Frédéric. C5, F5, V — 367 —

———————————————————— Appendices ————————————————————

Maupassant, Guy de (1850-1893) C6, F3, V Maury, Jean Siffrein, Cardinal (1746-1817) C4, F13, V Maximilien I, Emperor (1573-1651) C9, F19, V Meisson[n]ier, Ernest (1815-1891) C7, F2; C14, F2; C14, F2, V Mérimée, Prosper (1803-1870) C5, F4, V; C10, F2, V Michalangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564) C2, F19, V; C2, F30; C5, F13; C5, F16, V; C8, F38 Michelet, Jules (1798-1874) C2, F12, V; C2, F29, V; C2, F30; C3, F23, V; C3, F37, V; C3, F42, V; C3, F45; C4, F35; C4, F39; C5, F7, V; C5, F17; C10, F2, V Milton, John (1608-1674) C13, F18 Mirabeau, Gabriel Riquati, comte de (1745-1791) C14, F4; C14, F4, V Mirabeau, Victor Riquati, marquis de (1715-1789) C14, F4 Monluc. See Montluc. Monroe, James (1758-1831) C11, F6; C11, F6, V Montaigne, Michel de (1533-1592) C1, F24; C2, F13; C2, F13, V; C2, F14; C2, F14, V; C2, F45; C3, F26; C4, F5; C4, F40; C4, F43, V; C5, F17; C6, F27; C6, F28; C7, F3, V; C7, F4, V; C8, F19; C8, F20; C8, F20, V; C8, F21; C8, F29; C8, F29, V; C8, F30; C8, F31, V; C8, F32; C9, F12; C9, F18; C9, F19, V; C9, F44, V; C10, F2, V; C10, F5, V; C10, F14, V; C10, F16l; C11, F8; C11, F16, V; C12, F10, V; C13, F1; C13, F16, CV; C14, F1; C14, F7; C14, F13; C14, F20; C14, F24, V; C14, F27, V; Letter to his wife C12, F10, V Montesquieu (Charles de Secondat) (1689-1755) C3, F44, V; C3, F45; C3, F47, V; C5, F6, V; C5, F17; C9, F18; C10, F2, V; C14, F34 Montluc, Blaise de Lassera Massemene, seigneur de (1502-1577) C4, F11 Moreau, Hegesippe (1810-1838) C2, F28 Mounterax, Madame. C4, F17 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus (1756-1791) C5, F4, V Murat, Joachim (1767-1815) C7, F2 N Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821) C2, F5, V; C3, F47; C4, F9, V; C5, F5, V; C7, F2; C8, F18; C8, F21, V; C8, F29; C8, F30; C8, F31, V; C8, F32; C11, F2; C11, F1, V; C11, F3; C13, F13, V; C14, F15, V; C14, F16; C14, F21; C14, F44 Napoleon, Louis (1778-1846) C4, F16 Nerval, Gerard Labrune de (1808-1855) C11, F10, V Nguyen, King of Tonkin. C14, F23 Nietzsche, Friedrich (1844-1900) C1, F7, V; C1, F13, V; C6, F6; C6, F6, V O Orvilliers, Louis, comte de (1708-1792) C4, F22 Ovid: Publius Ovidius Naso (43 BCE-17/18 CE) C1, F13 P Pascal, Blaise (1623-1662) C2, F37, V; C4, F12; C5, F17; C5, F18; C8, F24; C8, F39; — 368 —

———————————————————— Appendix I ————————————————————

C10, F2, V; C13, F18, V; C14, F50, V Pasteur, Louis (1822-1895) C5, F20, V; C6, F23; C14, F32, V Peter Alekseivich the Great ( 1672-1725) C9, F17 Ichegru, Charles (1761-1804) C3, F37 Pitt, William, Lord Chatham (1708-1778) C3, F22 Plato (428-347/8 BCE) C10, F14, V; C14, F2 Plutarch (46- ca. 120 CE) C11, F8; C12, F10, V Poniatowski, Joseph (1763-1813) C9, F18, V Propertius, Sextus Aurelius (47-15 BCE) C4, F5; C4, F48, V Proudhon, Pierre Joseph (1809-1865) C9, F11, V Prud’homme, Sully. C4, F25, V Q Quesnay, François (1694-1774) C14, F39 Quinton, René (1867-1930) C7, F5, V R Rabelais, François (1494-1553) C2, F7, V; C5, F17; C10, F2, V Racine, Jean (1639-1699) C4, F12; C4, F46, V Rainer. C11, F5 Raphael (Raffaelio Santi or Sanzio) (1483-1520) C5, F16, V Remus[s]at, Claire Elisabeth Gravier de Vergenne, comtesse de (1780-1821) C3, F6 Renan, Ernest (1823-1892) C1, F6; C1, F11, V; C3, F45; C3, F44, V; C3, F45, V; C5, F8; C5, F17; C10, F2, V Richelieu, Armand de Vignerot du Plessis, duc de (1696-1788) C14, F21 Richelieu, Armand Jean du Plessis, cardinal de (1535-1642) C5, F15, V; C5, F16; C11, F1 Robespierre, Maximilian de (1758-1794) C3, F14; C3, F15; C3, F21; C11, F18 Rochambeau, Jean-Baptiste de Vimeur, Comte de (1725-1807) C3, F41 Rochefoucauld, François de la (1613-1680) C1, F2; C5, F8; C4, F22; C5, F18 Rol(l)and, Marie-Jeanne, Madame de la Platière (1754-1793) C3 F14 Röntgen, Wilhelm (1845-1923) C14, F3; C14, F6; C14, F9 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1712-1778) C1, F26; C3, F24; C3, F38, V; C3, F45; C3, F49; C4, F12, V; C4, F12, V; C4, F19; C4, F25; C5, F17; C9, F11, V; C10, F2, V Ruskin, John (1819-1900) C6, F8, V S Sabonde, Raimund. See Raimund Sebond. Saint Simon, Louis de (1675-1755) C4, F12; C4, F11 Sand, George; alias Aurore Dudevant (1804-1876) C4, F47, V Sargent, John Singer (1856-1925) C5, F10, V Scherer, Barthelemy (1747-1804) C11, F1 Sebond(e), Raimund(o) (?–1436) C13, F1 Secondat, Charles. See Montesquieu. — 369 —

———————————————————— Appendices ————————————————————

Seeley, Sir John Robert (1834-1896) C14, F5 Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, The Philosopher (4 BCE-65 CE) C7, F7, V; C8, F20, V; C13, F14, V; C14, F24, V Sévigné, Madam, Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, marquise de (1626-1696) C14, F2 Shakespeare, William (1564-1616) C1, F5; C1, F14, V; C2, F20; C2, F21; C3. F34, V; C3, F47; C4, F11; C4, F28, V; C4, F35, V; C4, F38; C4, F39; C4, F48, V; C5, F2, V; C5, F13. As You Like It C4, F38. King Lear C2, F20; C2, F21. Macbeth C5, F2, V. Merry Wives of Windsor C4, C48, V. Othello C1, F8; C3, F34, V. Richard III C3, F47. Twelfth Night C4, F35, V Shelbourne, William Petty, Second Earl of (1737-1805) C3, F22 Smith, Adam (1723-1790) C14, F39 Sobreski, John III (1629-1696) C4, F29 Sophocles (496/494-406 BCE) C5, F17, V; C14, F2 Soubise, Charles de Rohan (1715-1787) C8, F18; C14, F21 Souvanof or Souvanov, Russian general (18th century) C4, F7; C14, F45 Spinoza, Baruch or Benedict (1632-1677) C14, F8, V Staël, Madame de. Germaine Necker, baronne de (1766-1817) C10, F18 Suffren, Admiral Pierre-André de Suffren Saint-Tropez, known as Baillin de Suffren (1729-1788) C4, F22 Sully Prud’homme. See Prud’homme. T Tacitus (ca. 55 CE-ca. 120 CE) C14, F41 Taine, Hippolyte (1828-1893) C4, F7; C4, F8; C4, F36, V; C4, F39; C5, F17; C10, F2, V Tasso, Torqauto (1544-1595) C2, F13, V Tennyson, Alfred Lord (1809-1892) C3, F35 Thibeaudeau, Antoine, comte (1765-1854) C5, F2 Thierry, Augustin (1795-1856) C5, F6, V; C5, F7; C5, F7, V Thiers, Adolphe (1797-1877) C8, F18 Timanthius (4th c. BCE) C2, F29 Titus-Livius. See Livy. Tocqueville, Charles Alexis Clebel de (1805-1859) C5, F7; C5, F9 Tolstoy, Lev Nikolaievich (1828-1910) C1, F7, V; C1, F12 Trochu, Louis (1815-1896) C8, F50 Turgot, Anne Robert Jacques (1727-1781) C3, F42; C3, F42, V; C3, F43; C3, F45; C4, F19 V Vaud, Jean. See Pierre Loti. Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapier, marquis de (1715-1747) C9, F11 Vienne. Author of the Philippide. C2, F34 Vigny. See De Vigny. — 370 —

———————————————————— Appendix I ————————————————————

Villehardin or Villehardouin, Geffroi de (ca. 1150-ca. 1213) C4, F11 Virgil. Publius Virgilius Maro (70-10 BCE) C1, F2, V; C2, F13; C2, F14; C4, F7, V; C4, F31, V; C5, F13; C9, F12 Volta, Alessandro (1745-1827) C14, F9 Voltaire, Francois Marie Arouet (1694-1775) C3, F42, V; C3, F43; C5, F6, V; C5, F17; C10, F2, V; C14, F21 W Wagner, Richard (1813-1883) C5, F4, V; C6, F6; C6, F6, V Washington, George (1732-1799) C3, F39; C3, F39, V; C3, F40, V; C3, F41 Wizewa, Teodor de. C1, F12 Wolesley, Sir Joseph Garnat, Vicount of (1833-1913) C13, F3 Z Zeno of Elee (490/485 BCE- ?) C14, F24, V

— 371 —

———————————————————— Appendices ————————————————————

Appendix II Topics, Places, Themes and Events discussed in Dreyfus’s Prison Notebooks

NB: This is not an index of all usages of words, phrases, and concepts, but an attempt to indicate Dreyfus’ major themes and ideas, points of reference and topics. Therefore it lists places where Dreyfus gives titles to his little essays or where themes are isolated for special comment. Titles of essays are given in quotes, both those so named by Alfred Dreyfus or given by me. A “A Nation Lives in Harmony.” C14, F47 Acetetylene. C14, F22, V Adolescents in Antiquity. C14m F3, V Algeria. C7, F3 American Constitution. C4, F10 American Revolution. C3, F39 Art. C2, F29; C2, F29, V; C2, F37; C7, F2; C8, F38; C9, F11; C14, F2; C14, F3; C14, F11 Art in the Eighteenth Century. C9, F11 Astronomy. C3, F45 Atheism. C4, F50, V Austerlitz, Battle of. See Napoleon (Appendix I). Australia and New Zealand. C8, F45; C8, F45, V B Balloon Directions. C7, F12, V Beauty. C2, F29; C4, F14 Benevolence. C14, F30; C14, F31 Bible. C2, F30. See also Vulgate. Bicycles. C4, F17 Bode’s Law. C7, F5 C Cahiers of [17]89. C7, F19, V. See also French Revolution. Certainty and Spontaneity in Life. C4, F50 — 372 —

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Character. C13, F20, V; C14, F30, V; C14, F32 Chemistry. C3, F6 Chickens. C7, F2, V Children. C10, F18, V; C11, F4, V; C12, F13, V Clepsyde (water-clock). C2, F36 Codes. C8, F41 Colonialism. C8, F45; C8, F45, V; C8, F46; C8, F46, V; C14, F34 Courage, Physical and Moral. C13, F20, V Culture and Personality in the Revolution. C4, F8, V. See French Revolution. D “Dawn and the Illusion of Hope, A Prose Poem.” C13, F4 Death. C1, F24; C1, F31, V; C1, F34; C7, F3, V Debates on the Natural Frontiers of France. C11, F1; C11, F1, V Defence against Disease. C6, F21; C6, F23. See also Vaccination. Disinterestness of Intelligence. C13, F15, V Duty and Honour. C13, F20, V E “Each Best Flower is a Soul” (Prose Poem). C14, F41, V “Eve: A Fantasy.” C7, F15 “Evolution Progressive and Regressive.” C10, F19 Ecoles superieur militaries. C14, F43 Economic France at the End of the Ancien Régime. C14, F39 Education. C3, F4, V; C3, F24; C3, F32, V; C3, F35; C4, F19; C5, F10, V; C5, F12; C6, F25; C8, F19; C8, F20; C8, F20, V; C8, F21; C9, F24; C10, F2; C11, F14; C11, F18; C14, F16, V Egypt. C10, F17, V. See also French Expedition to Egypt. Eighteenth of Brumaire. C5, F5, V; C14, F16 Eloquence. C3, F21; C14, F4, V; C14, F10 Emotion and Will. C14, F10, V English colonial expansionism. C14, F5 English Colonies. C4, F28 English Company in the Indies. C13, F15 Euler’s Formulas. C3, F45. See also Astronomy. European Politics until the end of the Ancien Régime. C6, F30; C6, F30, V; C6, F31; C6, F31, V Eye Glasses. See Spectacles. F Facts and Form. C9, F12, V Faith in the Ideal. C10, F16, V; C10, F20 Fever. C5, F16 Firmness of Character. C10, F16, V — 373 —

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“Formation of the Moral Man at his Mother’s Knees.” C14, F47, V Free Speech and Mutual Respect. C14, F6, V French Colonialism. C8, F46; C8, F46, V French Company (India). C3, F26, V French Economy in the Eighteenth Century. C4, F49, V French Expedition to the Far East. C6, F12; C6, F12, V; C6, F13; C6, F13, V; C6, F14; C6, F14, V; C6, F15; C6, F15, V; C6, F16; C6, F16, V French Italian Campaign of 1796. C11, F3 French Literature. C5, F17 French National Character. C9, F36, V; C9, F40 French Revolution. C3, F36, V; C3, F37; C3, F37, V; C3, F38; C4, F13, V; C4, F15; C5, F2, V; C8, F21, V; C14, F29 Fresnel’s Theory. C10, F16, V G Genealogical Lines in Families, History and Literature. C4, F11 “Generals of the French Revolution.” C4, F2 Generosity. C6, F38, V; C10, F4 “Goal of Life, The.” C3, F4, V Goménol (petroleum jelly). C14, F19 Good Judgment. C14, F16, V Gospels. C1, F12. See also Vulgate. “Greatest Good for All, The.” C11, F20 Greece. C4, F29, V Greek Proverb. C14, F5, V Greeks. C4, F22, V Greek Tragedy. C9, F1, V H Health. C2, F35, V Heroism of Nations and French Generosity. C6, F38, V Hindustan. C3, F26; C3, F26, V; C6, F32; C6, F32, V History/Historiography. C2, F7, V; C2, F12, V; C3, F33, V; C4, F3, V; C4, F11; C5, F6, V; C5, F7, V; C6, F3, V; C11, F2; C14, F41 “Honour of the Army.” C8, F48, V “Humanity and Liberty.” C12, F8, V I “Ideas and Facts.” C14, F16 Ideal and Truth. C2, F29 Idealism. C2, F29, V; C3, F22, V Imagination. C1, F31 Immediate Origins of the French Revolution. See French Revolution. Inclination on Railway Lines. C6, F21 — 374 —

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India. See French India. Indo-China. C14, F23 “Injustices of the State.” C14, F1, V Intelligence. C1, F13, V; C3, F50; C5, F1; C5, F1, V; C5, F4, V; C11, F13, V; C11, F20, V Invisible Rays and Cathode Rays. C14, F17 Italian Campaign of 1796, French. C11, F3 Italy during the Revolution and under the Directory. C6, F35 J Judgment. C14, F7; C14, F50 “Justice and Truth.” C13, F6; C13, F16; C14, F22; C14, F24, V; C14, F29, V L Law. C14, F36 “Law of Nature is Love, The.” C1, F34 Lens. See Spectacles. Letter of Michel de Montaigne to his Wife. C12, F10, V. Cp. Montaigne in Appendix I. Liberty. C10, F16; C11, F16; C14, F32, V “Liberty and Slander.” C12, F7, V Literary Style. C11, F5 Literary Taste. C14, F32 Literature of Ideas. C14, F31, V; C14, F32; C14, F36 “Literary History vs. Direct Reading.” C1, F6; C1, F11 Love of Homeland or Fatherland. C11, F16 Love of all People or Humanity. C11, F16 “Loving What You Write in Silence.” C7, F15, V M “Man is only a reed.” C4, F12 “Meditation on Motionless Friends.” C7, F9, V Menu Poropos d’un Solitaire. See Rambling Thoughts. Military Education. C14, F43 Mischief. C10, F15 “Modern Pessimism.” C9, F1, V Modernity. C14, F10 Mongol Empire. C3, F26, V Monroe Doctrine. C11, F6; C11, F6, V “Moral Personality.” C13, F6 “Moral Thoughts and Sentiments.” C11, F4; C14, F11 “Morality and Truth.” C13, F11, V Music. C5, F4, V; C6, F6; C6, F6, V; C8, F21, V; C10, F2, V

— 375 —

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N Napoleon’s Expedition to Egypt. C4, F16 Napoleon’s Expedition to Italy. C6, F33 Napoleon’s Eloquence. C3, F5, V; C8, F30 Napoleon’s Military Genius. C14, F44 “Nation Lives in C oncord, A” A Prose Poem. C14, F47 National Differences. C4, F8 Natural Boundaries of France. C11, F19, V Natural Man. C14, F13 Nature. C1, F34; C1, F36 “Nature and Beauty.” C4, F24 Naval Matters. C14, F50 Niaouli. C14, F19 Nobility. C9, F4, V Northern Literatures. C4, F31 O “One Hour to Sunset” (a prose poem). C6, F3 Optical Telegraphs. C14, F17; C14, F17, V Optics. C8, F37, V Organic Chemistry. C2, F35, V Orient. See Question of the Orient. P “Photography of the Invisible.” See X-rays. “Pleasures of the Mind.” C14, F24, V “Positivism.” C11, F19 “Power of Affection and Sympathy.” C14, F8, V “Precocious Judgments.” C13, F3 Painting. C14, F11 Painting. C3, F35 Paintings of Women. C8, F36 Petrolium Jelly. See Goménol. Philosophes of the Eighteenth Century. C14, F28 Philosophical Paleontology. C5, F18, V; C5, F19; C5, F19, V; C5, F20; C5, F20, V Photographic Equipment. C2, F35, V Physical versus Moral Powers. C14, F47, V Physiocrats. C14, F39 Political Economy of the French Revolution. C8, F2 Political Eloquence. C14, F12; C14, F15 Politics. C4, F12, V Politics and Character. C9, F34; C11, F13 Potable Water. C8, F47 Principles of War. C14, F15, V — 376 —

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Projectiles Activated by Triple Motions. C6, F17 Psychosis of Genius. C2, F8 Q Qualities of a Leader in War. C11, F2; C11, F13 Question of the Orient. C4, F29; C4, F30 R “Rambling Thoughts of a Solitary Man.” C10, F2; C10, F16; C11, F13; C11, F16; C11, F16, V; C11, F18; C13, F6; C14, F8, V; C14, F10; C14, F10, V; C14, F11; C14, F12 Reading. C14, F1; C14, F11 Realism. C2, F30 Reason. C13, F20, V Recoil of Rifle. C7, F6, V Religion. C2, F17 Religious Faith. C1, F8; C1, F10 Religious Sensibility. C1, F26 Renaissance Latin. C5, F17, V Revolutionary Armies. C10, F2, V; C10, F16, V; C11, F13 Revolutionary Spirit. C4, F21, V. See American Revolution, French Revolution. Right Life as the Pursuit for Truth. C6, F39 Romantic Art. C2, F12, V Röntgen Rays. See X-rays. Russia. C9, F17 Russian Literature. See Northern Literatures. S Scandanavian Literatures. See Northern Literatures. Scepticism. C11, F18 Scholarship and Scientific Creators of the [French] Revolution. C4, F19 Scientist. C14, F13 Sensibility of Things. C10, F2, V Sensibility, Progress of. C5, F1 Seven Years War. C13, F2; C13, F2, V; C14, F21 Shape of the Earth. C7, F5, V “Silence: A Prose Poem.” C10, F16, V Slander as a Moral Infirmity. C14, F44 Sneezes. C14, F27, V Solitary Man. See Rambling Thoughts. Soul of a Leader. C14, F50 Spectacles. C2, F35, V Spirit of Revolutionary Armies. C3, F8, V Spiritual Exercises. C1, F15 — 377 —

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Stoics. C9, F1, V Suffren and the Sea Battles of the American Revolution. C4, F22 “Sunset, A Prose Poem.” C12, F6, V Switzerland. C4, F16, V T Terror under the [French] Revolution. C5, F2 Testing of the Soul. C9, F44, V “Tournament of History.” C9, F10 Translations during Negotiations. C7, F7 Truth. C1, F18; C10, F16 U Universal Reason. C11, F2, V “Unmerited Suffering.” C14, F33; C14, F34 V Vaccinations. C8, F39 Vegetable Paleontology. C11, F5 Virtues of a Military Leader. C10, F17, V Vulgate. C1, F34; C10, F17, V. See also Gospels. W War. C11, F7, V “When the Evening Comes” (Prose Poem). C14, F41, V Will. C14, F14 Women. C11, F4, V; C11, F14 X X-rays and Photography of the Invisible. C14, F3; C14, F6; C14, F9 Z Zeal for Truth and Justice. C11, F16, V

— 378 —

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Appendix III Equations, Formulae and Sketches in Dreyfus’s Prison Notebooks

Note: Pages on which there are formulas or equations without captions or other indications of function have not been listed. Illegible and indeterminate sketches and pictures have not been listed. A Alphabetic equations. C4, F48, V Animals. C3, F3 Arc degrees. C6, F28 Asymptotes. C14, F1, V B Batavian Architecture. C3, F46 Bissection of angle. C10, F13, V Bridge and Trees. C1, F27, V C Cannon. C7, F13 Chemical formulae. C3, F4; C3, F6; C7, F13 Circle. C1, F12, V; C1, F31; C2, F5; C3, F5; C7, F17; C7, F18; C14, F40, V Cone. C1, F3; C2, F32; C2, F43, V; C7, F13; C8, F28; C8, F37; C11, F19, V Corinthian Column. C1, F3; C3, F46 Curve of Temperatures. C1, F49, V Cylinder. C11, F19, V D Development of series. C14, F2, V Doric Column. C1, F3; C3, F46 E Earth. C1, F12, V Electric bobbins and accumulator. C1, F30 Electrical installation. C1, F30 Ellipse. C7, F12; C8, F22, V; C14, F36, V — 379 —

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Ellipsis. C1, F37; C2, F9, V; C2, F10, V; C11, F16, V Ellipsoid. C2, F16, V; C3, F43, V; C7, F18 Equation of tangent. C1, F4 Equilateral hyperbola. C1, F31 Equilateral parabola. C2, F6 F Force and movement. C4, F49; C14, F39, V H Hydrogen. C3, F4 Hyperbola. C1, F12, V; C14, F1, V Hyperboloid. C3, F5 I Imbrication. C8, F32, V Ionic Column. C1, F3; C3, F46 K Koclos. C3, F6 L Locus of bisector. C8, F26, V Locus of fixed plane. C1, F3, V Locus of points. C1, F27; C5, F15 M Male profile. C3, F48 Motion. C11, F10, V; C11, F14, V O Ocular prism. C14, F35 Optic system. C2, F9; C8, F37, V P Parabola. C1, F23, V; C1, F4; C1, F33; C2, F18; C2, F6, V; C2, F9; C2, F32; C6, F21, V; C6, F26; C7, F18; C9, F22, V; C9, F22, V; C11, F10, V Parallelogram. C14, F39, V Perpendicular. C14, F35 Planetary motion. C11, F16, V Polyhedron. C1, F28; C11, F15, V Prism. C14, F35 Profile. C3, F4; C3, F48 Projectiles. C7, F13 — 380 —

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R Radius. C3, F43, V Resistance. C11, F16, V Resolution of the equation. C1, F2, V Right angle. C3, F6; C3, F7; C3, F8; C3, F17; C3, F46; C3, F46, V; C4, F12, V; C8, F37 Right parallels. C6, F28 Right perpendicular. C14, F18 Rotation of a body. C1, F1, V; C14, F40, V S Series. C4, C32, V; C8, F22, V Speed. C4, F49; C14, F18, V Sphere. C14, F18, V Spherical triangle. C1, F29, V Sulphur. C3, F4 T Tangent. C2, F18; C15, F18, V Time. C2, F18, V; C2, F19 Trajectory. C11, F16, V Triangle. C1, F13; C1, F21, V; C1, F38; C1, F41, V; C3, F1, V; C7, F18; C8, F2; C8, F26, V V Volumes. C2, F7 W Watt’s parallelogram. C14, F39, V Weather. C1, F49, V Woman’s profile. C3, F4

— 381 —

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Appendix IV Maths and Science in Dreyfus’s Prison Notebooks Ken MacNeil (University of Waikato)

The majority of the entries are to do with geometry, mainly curves in two dimensions (the ellipse [including the circle], the hyperbola and the parabola) and triangles (with connected entries on angles). Three-dimensional objects he looked at include the ellipsoid and the hyperboloid (three dimensional analogues of the first two objects above) cones and cylinders. This is all consistent with a late nineteenth century undergraduate education in science and maths (pre-quantum theory and pre-relativity theory). Planetary orbits are ellipses, and, neglecting air resistance, artillery projectile trajectories are parabolas. His artillery officer training seems to account for the large number of entries on parabolas. The calculations mostly involve working out distances and lengths of lines connected with the geometrical objects, and are at an upper high school—lower undergraduate level. The entries to do with chemistry and physics too seem to be a recollection of things from his science education, particularly technical applications in the military. Hydrogen was the gas used in airships, pioneered in France, and sulphur is a major component of gunpowder. The few references involving electricity are to devices using transformers and capacitors (early use of radio), and the optics references relate to lens systems such as those used in rangefinders. In summary, the entries appear to be the work of someone trying to keep his mind sharp in difficult circumstances by going over the things he had encountered in his studies.

— 382 —

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Ulmer, Rivka B. Review of Marc Lee Raphael, ed. Agendas for the Study of Midrash in the Twenty-First Century (Williamsburg, VA: College of William and Mary, 199). H-Judaic, H-Net Reviews in the Humanities and Social Sciences. May 1999. http:// www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=3110 (accessed 09 February 2011). Urmeneta, Vincente Huici. “Tiempo, espacio y memoria: actualidad de Maurice Halbwachs.” Paper delivered at the IV Euskal Soziologia Kongresua—IV Ciongreso Vasco de Socilogia, Bilbao, 1998, 438-441. http://www.uned.es/ca-bergara/ ppropias/vhuici/Temmh (accessed 29 July 2004). “Van Gogh as a Letter-Writer.” mhtml:file//F:/Van Gogh as a letter-writers— Vincent van Gogh Letters (accessed 07 April 2010). Vidal-Naquet, Pierre. Les Assassins de la mémoire: Un Eichmann de papier et autres essais sur la révisionnisme. Paris: La Découverte, 1987 (1981). Vidal-Naquet, Pierre. Les Juifs, la mémoire et le présente. Paris: La Découverte, 1981 (1991). Villemar, H. Dreyfus intime. Paris: P-V Stock, 1898. Villemar, H. Essai sur le colonel G. Piquart. Paris: Eilbron Classics, 2007; orig. Paris: P-V. Stock, 1988. Visotzky, Burton L. “Midrash, Christian Exegesis, and Hellenistic Hermeneutics.” In Bakhos, ed., Current Trends in the Study of Midrash, 111-132. Vizetelly, Ernest Alfred. With Zola in England: A Story of Exile. London: Chatto & Windus, 1899. Vovelle, Michelle, ed. Iconographie et histoire des mentalités. Centre méridional d’histoire sociale des mentalités et des cultures. Université de Provence, Aixen-Provence. Paris: Edition du Centre de la Recherche scientifique, 1979. Walther, Ingo F. and Rainer Metzger, Vincent van Gogh: The Complete Paintings. 2 vols in 1. Translated by Michael Hulse. Köln, London, etc.: Taschen Books, 1990. Weibel, Peter and Friedrich Stadler, eds. Vetribung der Vernunft/The Cultural Exodus from Austria. Vienna: Löcker Verlag, 2993. Weil, Julien. Zadoc Kahn (1859–1905). Paris: Félix Alcan, 1912. West, Rebecca. 1900. New York: Crescent Books/Random House, 1996 (1982). Wieseltier, Leon. Kaddish. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998. Wilson, Nelly. “Bernard Lazare et le Syndicat.” In LeRoy, ed., Les écrivains et l’affaire Dreyfus, 27-33. Wilson, Stephen. Ideology and Experience: Anti-Semitism in France at the Time of the Dreyfus Affair. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1982. Winock, Michel. “Les intellectuels dans le siècle.” Vingtième Siècle: Revue d’histoire, no. 2 (April 1984): 3-14. Wood, Christopher S. “Dromenon.” Common Knowledge 18:1 (2011).

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Index of Names (Modern critics, philosophers and historians have not been listed)

A Abendana, Isaac 349 Abulafia, Abraham 334 Albert the Great 115 Alexander the Great 82 Améry, Jean 97, 101 Antoinette, Marie 41 Apuleius 97 Ari, The Great: see Isaac Luria Arendt, Hannah 127, 350 Aristophanes 178

Bosch, Hieronymous 116 Bourget, Justin M. 51, 73 Bourget, Paul Joseph 29, 31, 37, 50, 51-55, 64, 71-73, 108, 137, 140, 143, 205, 252-254 Breton, André 120 Brod, Max 197 Brown, Oliver Madox 37 Buber, Marin 262, 314, 329 Buonaparte, Napoleon: see Napoleon Buxdorf, Johannes 127

B Balzac, Honoré de 81, 90, 161, 171, 186, 256, 284 Barnum, P.T. 114, 115 Barrès, Maurice 32, 69 Baudelaire, Charles 29, 52, 54-55, 142, 143, 235, 328 Beck, Claire (Klara-Franziska) 187, 189, 191 Beethovem, Ludwig von 82 Benamozegh, Elijah 66, 100 Benda, Julien 21, 65, 133, 180, 347348 Beranger, Pierre-Jean de 39 Bergson, Henri 65, 140, 242 Bernanos, Georges 112 Bernard, Claude 39, 121 Beyle, Henri de: see Standhal Bezalkel 316 Blavatsky, Madam Helena 135 Bleuler, Eugen 224-225 Bloy, Léon 144 Boccaccio, Giovanni 80 Boethius 182, 183

C Caesar, Julius 82 Céline, Ferdinand 18 Cézanne, Paul 121, 199, 335 Chagal, Marc 292-293 311 Chateaubriand François René, Vicomte de 355, 357 Chatham, Lord: See William Pitt the Elder Chopin, Fréderic 166, 233, 234-235 Cicero 58, 86, 275 Clemenceau, Georges 19 Columbus, Christopher 251 Comte-Sponville, André 182, 208 Condillac, Etienne Bonnot de 61 Condorcet, Marie Jean Antoine Caritat, Marquis de 44, 50 Crookes, William 152 D Danjean, L. 81 Dante, Alighieri 50 Danton, Georges Jean 31 Darwin, Charles 121, 267 — 405 —

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David, Gerard 304 David, Louis 270, 304 Defoe, Daniel 182, 183 Degas, Edgar 287, 314, 329 Delacroix, Eugène 85-86, 279 Donne, John 63, 140 Dreyfus, Mathieu 32, 73, 89, 98, 166, 249, 300 Drumont, Edouard 54, 107, 108110, 112, 113-116, 124, 127, 128, 169, 193, 220, 261, 286, 296-297, 314 Duchamp 155 Duclaux, Emile 136 Dupin, Aurore: see George Sand Dupleix, Joseph François 34 Durand-Ruel, Paul 201 Durkheim, Emile 203 Duve, Thierryde 155 E Einstein, Albert 154, 188 Eliot, George 148 F Flaubert, Gustav 139 Forinzetti, Ferdinand 218 Fourier, Charles 21 France, Anatole 14, 200, 222, 223, 251, 252 Freud, Sigmund 53, 105, 128, 134, 140, 162, 188, 225, 257, 287 Fry, Roger 311, 315, 325-326 Fustel de Coulanges, Numa Denis 78, 125 G Gallé, Emile 14 Gauguin, Paul 63, 129, 135, 136, 137, 255, 292, 328, 330-331, 333, 335, 339 Gide, André 45 Gilbert 152 Goncourt, Edmond and Jules de

102-103, 105, 161, 307, 313 Gonineau, Comte de 54 Goudechau: see Rothschild Family Gracian y Morales, Balthasar 18-19 Grunewald, Matthias 116, 314 Guizot, François 70 H Haan, Meyer (Meijer) de 330-331 Hadamard Family 12, 67, 68, 203, 308, 357 Ha-Levy, Judah 96 Halévy, Daniel 117 Hegel, Friedrich 107, 121 Heidegger, Martin 145 Heine, Heinrich 26 Helvetius, Claude Adrien 64 Henry, Joseph 193 Herzl, Theodor 236, 329 Hobbes, Thomas 78 Homer 54 Housel, Charles 51 Hugo, Victor 52, 55-57, 66 Huneker, James 121, 151, 152, 165, 166, 207, 234-235 Huysmans, Joris-Karl 199 I Ibn Ezra, Abraham 309 Ibsen, Heinrich 267 J Jabès, Edmond 217 Jaurès, Jean 43 Josephus, Titus Flavius 308 Judah the Prince, Rabbi 27 Jung, Carl G. 130, 135, 136, 188 K Kafka, Franz 173, 197, 243, 309 Kahn, Zadok 165, 249, 355, 357 Kant, Immanuel 155 Kierkegaard, Søren 282 Klimt, Gustav 133 — 406 —

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Kraus, Karl 190 L Lacordaire, Henri 144 Laguna, Baruch Lopes Leão 331 Lamarck, Jean Baptiste de Monet 208 Lamartine, Alphonse de 39, 49, 58 Lamennais, Félicité Robert de 39, 51, 55, 142, 143 Lavoisier, Antoine Laurent de 120 Lazare, Bernard 8, 165, 194, 300 LeBon, Gustave 239 Le Bourbonnais, 34 Leibniz, Gottfreied Wilhelm 115, 116 Leon, Moshe (Moses) de 246-247 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 86 Liszt, Franz 166, 235 Lombroso, Cesare 4 Loos, Adolf 187, 188, 189, 190 Loos, Claire: see Claire Beck Loti, Pierre 69, 135, 255 Lucretius 43-44, 46 Luria, Isaac 91, 246, 334-335 M Maigritte, René 137 Maimonides 96, 218, 259, 298, 300, 308, 325 Maîstre, Joseph de 161 Maîstre, Xavier de 217 Marat, Jean-Paul 120 Marx, Karl 121, 269 Maurois, André 73, 76, 183 Maurras, Georges 112, 185 Maximilian, Emperor 92 Meissonier, Ernest 77, 86, 270,303304 Méliès, Georges 82, 117, 121, 122, 123, 165, 167, 351 Memling, Hans 304 Mendelssohn Moses 15 Mercier, General Auguste 218, 223

Michelet, Jules 20, 36, 38, 39, 41, 51, 99, 267, 285, 327, 357 Milton, John 149 Mirbeau, Octave 8, 108, 135, 242, 252, 255, 258, 310, 313 Monet, Claude 121, 172 Montaigne, Michel de 13, 43, 58, 78-79, 92, 147, 266, 267 Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, baron de 42 Morice, Charles 129, 135, 136, 255 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 67-69, 307 Muybridge, Edouard 214, 289, 304 N Nachmanides 308 Napoleon Bonaparte, 31, 45, 53, 50, 78, 86 Naville, Jules-Ernest: see Villemar Newton, Isaac 17 Nieto, David 106 Nietzsche, Friedrich 18, 42, 77, 134, 135, 189, 191, 323 Nordau, Max 329 O Oholiav 316 Orozoco, José Clemente 314 P Paléologue, Maurice 111 Paladdi, R. Hattim 187 Pascal, Blaise 81, 93, 141, 162, 163 Pasteur, Louis 159 Péguy, Charles 112, 180, 299` Philo Judaeus of Alexandria 305, 308 Piaget, Jean 224 Picquart, Marie George 19, 299 Pissarro, Camile 14, 199, 201, 330 Pitt, William the Younger 33 Pitt, William the Elder 33 Plato 9, 18, 170, 182, 270, 273,275, — 407 —

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322, 346, 347, 354 Proust, Marcel 64, 73, 120, 122, 134, 140, 156, 171, 172, 178, 190, 225, 232, 252, 257, 260262, 299, 305, 327

Stendhal 37 Sue, Eugêne 113, 257 Surovich, Alexandr Vasilevich 45 Swift, Jonathan 154 Sydney, Sir Philip 62, 86

R Rabelais, François 186 Rashi 351 Racine, Jean 48, 51, 267 Rambam: see Maimonides Ramban: see Nachmanides Reinach Brothers 166 Reinach, Salomon 270, 345, 357 Rembrandt, Hermanszoon van Rijn 151, 328 Renan, Ernest 8, 42, 54, 71, 193, 267, 285, 357 Richardson, Samuel 182 Robertson, Etienne Gaspard 116, 121 Robespierre, Maximilien de 32 Rochefoucauld, François de la 71 Röntgen, William Conrad 150, 152 Rolland, Romain 125, 165, 256-257, 297-298, 307 Roncière, Charles de la 155 Rothschild Family 114-115 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 34, 42, 43, 49, 120 Rubens, Peter Paul 151

T Taine, Hippolyte 29, 45, 46-47, 51, 53-55, 57, 65, 105, 139, 149, 151, 215, 234, 270 Tarde, Gabriel 99, 101, 113, 140, 141, 256, 262, 270, 286 Thierry, Augustin 38 Titian, Tiziano Vecello 117 Toqueville, Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de  70, 71-72 Turgot, Anne Robert Jacques 41

S Saint-Simon, Claude Henri comte de 48 Sand, George 166, 358-362 Sandherr, Col. Jean 111 Schil, Rachel Dreyfus 218 Schiller, Friedrich von 155 Schopenhauer, Arthur 108 Schwob, Meyer-André-Marcel 72-73 Shakespeare, William 13, 16, 33, 36, 42, 56-57, 61-62, 154, 267 Socrates 181

W Wagner, Richard 67-69, 77, 135, 166, 307 Warburg, Aby 105, 132, 203, 270, 335, 357-358 Watteau, Antoine 151

V Van Gogh, Theo 243-245, 290, 331 Van Gogh, Vincent 45, 63, 243-245, 290, 314, 331, 333, 335 Vico, Giambattista 26, 99, 106, 321 Vigny, Alfred de 94 Villabrègue, Henriette 210, 211, 249 Villabrègue, Joseph 210, 211 Villemar, H. 209, 210 Virgil 45-46, 351 Volta 152 Voltaire: François Marie Arouet 120, 190

Z Zola, Emile 14, 47, 81, 84, 96, 113, 144, 164, 199, 201 Zweig, Stefan 183, 190

— 408 —

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Index of Key Ideas, Concepts and Terms

A Aesthetics 11 Aggadah: see Hagaddah Autism 205-206, 208, 223-228

Haskallah 15

C Camera: see Photography Cryptography 11-12, 122 Cinema 10, 117, 170, 274, 351, 353354 Contraption 97, 100-101, 137, 138, 170, 263, 291 Counter-text 17

K Kaleidoscope 55, 63, 107, 124, 132, 140, 235, 298 Klippot 48

D Delirium 18 Denkraum 248 Derasha 23, 174, 176, 216, 258, 352 Drasha: see derasha Diffraction 19

M Mashol 79, 82, 176 Mazurka 107, 231, 232, 234, 298, 305 Melitsa 106, 258 Mentality 10 Midrash 10, 29, 61, 150, 167, 171, 173, 181, 191, 217, 236-237, 258, 259, 262, 263, 268, 270-273, 276279, 293-294, 298, 305, 322-323, 338, 344, 348, 355 Mikra 175 Morasha 26

I Incidentalism 189

E Enargaeia 103, 119, 315 Epistemology 11 Epistemologicsal Crisis 119 Exile: see Galut F Fantasmagorie: see phantasmagoria G Galut 14, 24, 64, 144, 221, 268, 271272, 289, 307 Gesamtkunstwerk 134, 135 H Haggadah 24, 271, 325, 338, 344

L Lernin 16 Loshen kodesh 26

N Nachleben 132, 335 Non-text 19 P PaRDeS 174 Pathosformeln 105, 132, 335 Peshat 23, 175, 279 Phantasmagoria 10, 20, 21, 55, 97, 107, 116-119, 1225-126, 128,

— 409 —

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135-136, 140, 170, 208, 229, 232, 233, 234, 256, 270, 298, 348 Photography 10-11, 108, 121, 150, 151, 214, 263, 270-271, 273274, 277-278, 282-283, 286-287, 291-293, 304, 306, 319-320, 358 Post-Modernism, 10, 124, 174, 276, 354 Prism 17, 151, 185 Pshat: see peshat R Ramez 29, 150, 175, 176 S Shekhina 14, 37, 91, 158, 279, 336, 346 Shevira 48

Sitra acha 91, 206 Sod 24, 29, 175, 177 U Untext, 20 W Wissenschaft des Judentums 15 X X-ray 150, 151, 214, 274, 291 Y Yiddishkeyt 15 Z Zekhut 145

— 410 —