1898, 2009

It is popular these days to compare the status of Jews Then to that of other minorities - particularly Muslims. Now, I tend to be skeptical not of the comparisons themselves, which can be quite useful, but of drawing too many parallels. So I have found myself making a comparison along these lines this past week, to the Dreyfus Affair. A high-up member of the military, from a much-despised minority religion, is accused of a serious crime, and the nation was already looking about set to split into two opposing ideological camps. I've been trying, then, to see if thinking about the Affair in any way clarifies anything that's happening now. The best I can come up with is, yes and no. Because this is more me thinking to myself than any kind of argument, in categories:

-The nature of the crime: Dreyfus was accused of espionage during peacetime, not murder during wartime. We now know - have known for over a century - that Dreyfus was innocent. Even many anti-Dreyfusards accepted that Dreyfus was not the man they were looking for, but felt that the status of the army was too precarious to allow for admitting this - a point for justice meant a point against the safety of the nation. Meanwhile, there appears to be no doubt that Hasan massacred members of his own army; the only questions relate to why he did so and whether he acted alone. It's quite striking, then, that the NYT immediately took to discussing the stress of war - suggesting that any among us might have snapped, that the massacre was in some inadvertent way a legitimate protest against unjust American military actions - and thus implying a certain moral innocence in a case of a crime whose basic facts no one doubted, when we compare this to the near-universal immediate condemnation of Dreyfus, where the facts were iffy from the start, and where no in-your-face tragedy had occurred.

-The nature of the war: The Dreyfus Affair took place between the Franco-Prussian War and WWI. Germany was in a sense 'the enemy', but France was not at that moment at war with Germany. Dreyfus, meanwhile, was accused of spying on behalf of Germany, and was - like the vast majority of French Jews who originated from Alsace-Lorraine - seen as somehow German, but was attacked primarily as a Jew, not a German. Rioters in the streets demanded Death to the Jews, not a new attack on Germany. And France was in no way, shape, or form at war with the Jews or even some Jews, let alone a Jewish state. Jews never once knocked over the Eiffel Tower, killing thousands. The US, meanwhile, is engaged in a war against proponents of a politicized version of Islam, both in particular countries and internationally. There are reasons to suspect an international-relations significance here that would have been absent there.

-The broader ideological divide: One side is pro-army, pro-order, pro-majority-religion. The other is suspicious of nationalism, pro-tolerance, universalist, progressive. In neither case is the question really about religious minorities - Dreyfusards were more interested in anti-clericalism and, in some ways, anti-militarism than they were in the specific question of anti-Semitism, while the left today in the US is more preoccupied by rejecting the Bush foreign-policy legacy than with anything particular to Muslim-Americans. Jews were a symbol of that which the Church and reactionaries dislike, just as today, Muslims remind the left of all the terrible things the US has done, domestically but especially abroad. Political correctness, however, was not much of a thing in fin-de-siecle France - it was quite OK to say that one disliked Jews but loved Justice, and so declare one's self a Dreyfusard. Whereas today, only fringe-types would even think to suggest that disliking Muslims is an acceptable attitude to hold. The center-right debate is over how PC we should be (see: David Brooks), not over whether or not we should abandon religious tolerance altogether.

-The status of members of minority religions: It's hard to argue that France had as much of a grievance against Judaism in 1898 as the US does against Islam in 2009. Jews presented a symbolic threat to those who wished to define French nationhood on racial and religious grounds, which, compared with 9/11, makes it seem as though anti-Islam comes from a place less patently absurd than anti-Semitism. But because there are good reasons to fear certain Muslims, things could potentially get much worse for the rest of the Muslims living in the US, who are not, obviously, guilty of anything. In the immediate aftermath of the Dreyfus Affair, French Jews felt reassured that their country accepted them - which, to be fair, it did, until 1940, even as anti-Dreyfusards plotted their revenge. Whereas however many times we invoke PTSD and wrongheaded US foreign policy decisions, there's no way this battle will end in a pronouncement of innocence.