Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (79 page)

By then, however, some Jews had drawn conclusions from the Dreyfus affair. A Jewish journalist who had covered the case saw it, and the manifestations of extreme, widespread antisemitism it elicited, as cause to reject the goals of assimilation and emancipation. His name was Theodor Herzl, and the actions he took led to the founding of the World Zionist Organization and, ultimately, the state of Israel.
¹⁶

Dreyfus was restored to the army and promoted to major. He remained a patriot. When the Great War broke out, he would serve as an artillery commander with the rank of colonel at Verdun and Aisne. Later, the army would refuse to acknowledge his frontline service with the appropriate decorations, a final indignity.
¹⁷
In 1931, documents made available from Germany proved once and for all that Esterhazy had indeed been the spy, but that did not remove the French army's difficulty in facing the truth of its crime against the Jewish officer. Even in 1994, that difficulty persisted. The French army marked the centenary of the arrest of Captain Dreyfus with the publication of a study that made the army itself the victim. In it, Dreyfusards were identified as socialists, republicans, Freemasons, and radicals opposed to "the military caste." As for Dreyfus, the most the army review could acknowledge was that his "innocence is the thesis now generally accepted by historians." The French army has never reversed its two verdicts against the Jewish officer. The
New York Times
story about the 1994 study was headlined, "Years Later, Dreyfus Affair Still Festers."
¹⁸

What makes the affair so difficult to comprehend is that the antisemitic venom unleashed in France by the dispute seems at odds with the more or less progressive situation in which most French Jews had found themselves before Dreyfus was arrested. Clearly a hatred of Jews had been stewing below the surface of French society, from the reign of Napoleon III to the Paris Commune to the Third Republic, but no one could have predicted the strength it would have at century's end. Dreyfus's lawyer, Edgar Demange, took the case on at great cost to himself, not least because he was a fervent Roman Catholic, which would come to seem anomalous.
¹⁹

Certain leading Catholic intellectuals would denounce the vulgar anti-semitism of Dreyfus's opponents. Léon Bloy, for example, in his 1892 book
Salut par les Juifs,
had already ridiculed the ignorant but widely promoted idea that Jesus was not a Jew.
²⁰
He did so not as a modern ecumenist would, but as a traditional Catholic who, while rejecting anti-Jewish violence, also saw Jews as cursed by God. To insist that Jesus was a Jew was not to ennoble Judaism but to emphasize its offense in rejecting one of its own. Nevertheless, Bloy's repugnance at the mindless antisemitism of the time has a ringing eloquence to it. Writing expressly as a Catholic, once the affair had begun, he attacked the opponents of Dreyfus, condemning their hidden motives: "All the leaden-cheeked Christian onion-eaters ... understand admirably that a war against the Jews could, in the end, be an excellent dodge for healing up many a bankruptcy, or reviving many a decrepit business. We have even seen priests without number—among whom there must nevertheless have been sincere servants of God—fired at the hope of an imminent affray in which enough blood of Israel would be shed to make millions of dogs drunk."
²¹

A minority of Catholic liberals, some of whom would be disciplined by the Church as "modernists," associated themselves with the ever-fiercer struggle against antisemitism.
²²
The poet Charles Péguy was one. In reflecting on the Dreyfus case later, he offered his famous aphorism: "Everything begins in faith and ends in politics."
²³
Such Catholics might have cited a letter written by Pope Leo XIII (1878–1903) in 1898 condemning an antisemitic movement in Algeria.
²⁴
Leo was a relative liberal who, though he would condemn the heresy of "Americanism," also disappointed monarchists by urging French Catholics to support the Third Republic. The Church, Leo wrote in the encyclical
Sapientiae Christianae
(1890), "holds that it is not her province to decide which is the best amongst many diverse forms of government ... provided the respect due to religion and the observance of good morals be upheld."
²⁵
Leo's most important encyclical,
Rerum Novarum
(1891), was a resounding defense of workers, although, as Alan Wolfe points out, it was written more in the traditional Catholic language of solidarity than of individual rights.
²⁶
But Leo XIII was pulled in several directions, and he did not hesitate to support openly antisemitic organizations.
²⁷
His condemnation of antisemitism in Algeria was contained in a private letter, and it is unlikely that such Catholics as Bloy or Péguy were aware of it.

Far more publicly aired were Vatican attitudes as expressed that same pivotal year, 1898, by the Vatican newspaper
L'Osservatore Romano:
"Jewry can no longer be excused or rehabilitated. The Jew possesses the largest share of all wealth, movable and immovable ... The credit of States is in the hands of a few Jews. One finds Jews in the ministries, the civil service, the armies and the navies, the universities and in control of the press ... If there is one nation that more than any other has the right to turn to antisemitism, it is France, which first gave their political rights to the Jews, and which was thus the first to prepare the way for its own servitude to them."
²⁸
Given the long history of Vatican resistance to early French efforts to liberate the Roman ghetto, and Vatican insistence on the symbolic significance of a degraded Judaism for the maintenance of theological and social order, it is impossible to read this Vatican communiqué as anything other than an "I told you so." And it is remarkable for another reason, that it speaks of antisemitism as a right, especially since the Vatican was normally averse to discussion of rights at all.

The explosion of Jew hatred in France essentially ended the great turn in history that was the post-Revolution emancipation of Jews in Europe. Despite the witness of the exceptions cited above, that explosion was ignited, and then fueled, by Roman Catholicism. Later, the strategic use of overt antisemitism as a way to restore Catholicism was rejected by Leo XIII, but the French Church, for a crucial time, rallied around just such a policy. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of Catholic priests—"priests without number," in Bloy's words
²⁹
—attended antisemitic congresses, gave Jew-baiting speeches, and, in their sermons, inflamed Catholic congregations all over France. The usual stereotypes were invoked: the Jew as revolutionary, as financier, as traitor, as the killer of Christ, as the ritual murderer of Christian children. These priests were never chastised or reined in by their bishops, who themselves never raised a protest, as one injustice followed another in
l'affaire Dreyfus.
³⁰
Catholic bishops in other countries, like Bishop John Ireland of the United States, spoke up for Dreyfus, but not in the country in which the scandal unfolded. "No authorized voice was raised in the Church of France against these judicial monstrosities," one Catholic Dreyfusard protested, adding, "The universal silence of the French episcopate appeared as a crime ... The great moral authority which the Church represents was dumb ... it did not protest, it did not wax indignant, when forgery, collusion and perjury combined in broad daylight to mislead the conscience of Christians."
³¹

Most such Christians were misled, tragically, into regarding the campaign against Dreyfus as a holy cause. Another Catholic Dreyfusard wrote in 1902: "Too many Catholics, too many members of the clergy, too many so-called religious newspapers have allowed the cause of the Church to be identified with that of antisemitism. The upper clergy, it is true, and the episcopate in particular, has not gone so far; it is too careful for that. The bishops rather have kept quiet; their prudence has taken refuge in silence; but this silence itself, with which the anti-Semites have sometimes reproached them, has been taken by others as the sign of a tacit acquiescence in antisemitism."
³²

There was nothing tacit about the antisemitism of two attack-dog newspapers that led the charge against Dreyfus and Jews.
La Libre Parole
was published by a Catholic populist, Edouard Drumont. His hugely successful book of 1886,
La France Juive,
had struck like the first thunderclap of the coming storm: "The Semite is money-grubbing, greedy, scheming, subtle, sly; the Aryan is enthusiastic, heroic, chivalrous, disinterested, frank, trustful to the point of naivete ... The Semite is by instinct a merchant. He has a vocation for trade, a genius for all matters of exchange, for everything giving an opportunity to deceive his fellow man. The Aryan is farmer, poet, monk, and especially soldier ... The Jewish Semite ... can live only as a parasite in the middle of a civilization he has not made."
³³
It was Drumont who first published the news that the officer on the general staff arrested as a spy was a Jew. It was Drumont whose newspaper's motto was "France for the French!" and who led the charge against Jews as "a nation within a nation."
³⁴
This chord plucked strings that were tied to the initial idea of 1789 that Jews would get everything as individuals, nothing as a nation. Their treason now consisted in having maintained ties of kinship and peoplehood that violated the Enlightenment notion of a fully compartmentalized—marginalized—religion.

The deeper chord now struck evoked no mere treason but the archtreason of Judas and the archcrime of deicide. The ancient religious content of Jew hatred was brought more powerfully into play than its watered-down secular offspring. Drumont concluded
La France Juive
by asking, "At the end of this book of history, what do you see? I see one face and it is the only face I want to show you: the face of Christ, insulted, covered with disgrace, lacerated by thorns, crucified. Nothing has changed in eighteen hundred years. It is the same lie, the same hatred, the same people."
³⁵

The face of the crucified Christ could literally be seen on the masthead of the second leading newspaper of the anti-Dreyfusard faction, a paper published daily in Paris and named, with tragic aptness,
La Croix.
The historian Stephen Wilson called it "the most important mouthpiece of Catholic antisemitism."
³⁶
The newspaper stood as an especially authoritative voice of the Church because it was published by the Assumptionists, an order of priests in the Augustinian tradition. "Help! Help!" an editor of
La Croix
wrote on January 18, 1898. It was the paper's response to Zola's "
J'Accuse....!
" published five days earlier. "Are we going to leave our beloved France in the hands of Jews and the Dreyfusards?"
³⁷

The urgency in that question reflects the ignorance undergirding it. The anti-Semites referred to a population of Jews in France in excess of 500,000, when in reality, the number was not much more than one tenth of that, out of a total population of about 36 million.
³⁸
Only five cities in France had more than a thousand Jews, few of whom were religious, and the vast majority of whom had worked to assimilate. Yet now French people began to feel overrun by an alien tribe, and Zola seemed the tribal spokesman.

The next day, January 19,
La Croix
evoked the threat of revolution, which always conjured up the chaos of 1789, but which, to this newspaper's readers, would also have meant the nightmare of the Commune, less than twenty years before. "The first revolution was by France on behalf of the Jews. The revolution which is in the making is waged by the Jews against the French. This is how Jews show their gratitude."
³⁹

In an issue published on January 28,
La Croix,
as was often done, leapt from the Dreyfus case to a larger social complaint, offering an analysis of all that threatened Catholic France in the Third Republic, from curtailments on religious education, to restrictions on clergy, to other institutional constraints implicit in a separation of church and state:

We know well that the Jew was the inventor of our anti-Christian laws, that he put them on stage like the puppetmaster, concealed behind a curtain, pulls the string which makes the devil appear before the unsuspecting audience.

The proof that the man hidden behind the curtain was the Jew emerges in the first battle engaged by Judaism—that engaged by the Syndicate [trade unions]...

You don't have to be a great scholar to understand that law which ... removes the Crucifix from hospitals and schools comes from the same Pharisees who underhandedly persuaded people to free Barabbas and to vote for the death of the innocent Jesus.

The parents, the children of France have only benefited from the parochial schools just as the people of Judea only received healing from the Savior, while universal suffrage cried on all sides "death! Death!"

Who is whispering this cry today as they whispered it to Pilate?

The Savior died saying of the poor crew of opportunists, "They know not what they do."