The Jewish 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Jews of All Time (20 page)

In 1817 his magnum opus,
The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation,
was issued. Continuing to develop his theories of an “economical and secure currency,” Ricardo lay the basis of the monetary policy of capitalist nations for more than one hundred years. He expounded theories (“the laws which regulate”) of production and income and of economic control, describing how and why people consume and invest, use and waste what they have. With an almost scientific thoroughness, Ricardo sought to explain the workings of international trade and its impact on domestic economies. He provided a conceptual methodology, which remains influential, and was the first to identify economics as a set of principles concerned with material wealth.

Ricardo’s interest in the economy led to a political awareness and involvement. In 1819, he became the second person of Jewish origin to be returned to Parliament^ remaining until his death in 1823.

Many of Ricardo’s theories were scrapped by later theorists. However, his influence on John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx is well documented. Ricardo’s narrow, quasi-scientific approach, with little room for social philosophizing, continues to win adherents to this day.

“
D
eath to Dreyfus! Death to the Jews!”

On January 5, 1895, at the parade grounds of the military school in Paris, shrieks of hatred pierced the ice-cold air. An immaculately dressed Captain Alfred Dreyfus, standing proudly at attention in freezing rain, was publicly humiliated before hordes of soldiers and city people. A noncommissioned officer cut off Dreyfus’s suit buttons, then his badges, and finally grabbed his sword and broke it across a knee. Dreyfus was marched about the square to vicious taunts and curses. Although he shouted, “I am innocent!” The crowd ridiculed him. Dreyfus was led away to a life’s sentence in exile on dreaded Devil’s Island.

The Dreyfus affair, known to the French as simply
“L’Affaire,”
was, before the pogroms in Russia and the unique tragedy of the Holocaust, the most publicized and perhaps the most influential event of anti-Semitism in modern European history. It spawned the pernicious growth of modern state-supported campaigns of persecution culminating in the tsarist and Nazi oppressions. The affair destroyed the myth that highly cultured societies were immune from irrational bitter hatred or could chill insane prejudice with developed civilization. The beautiful era of the 1890s in Paris,
la belle époque
of Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec, Debussy, and Eiffel, was stained forever by the great lie of bigotry and fear. Only through the gallant and heroic efforts of writer Emile Zola, politician Georges Clemenceau, Lieutenant Colonel Georges Picquart, and other Dreyfusards, were the ideals of the French Revolution reaffirmed, and Dreyfus freed.

Dreyfus himself was not a remarkable man. He was from a wealthy Alsatian family, overbearing, ambitious, thought of as a bit of a prig. His supporters would say that he was not a committed individual. If the victim had not been himself, Dreyfus would surely not have supported the accused. He would not have been bothered by the affair. It is rather his story not his person that is so remarkable.

The origins of the Dreyfus case lay not in Jewish affairs, but in centuries-old antagonisms separating France and Germany and in petty anti-Semitism in the armed forces. In the early 1870s, France had lost the Franco-Prussian War. The industrially rich region of Alsace-Lorraine was taken by the Germans, not to be returned until the First World War. French authorities were suspicious of all things German and saw the need to spy incessantly on their adversary.

Disturbed by the sudden disappearance of military maps, a certain Major Henry of the Statistical Staff of the French General Staff enlisted the help of a maid at the German Embassy to deliver him paper discarded as trash by its diplomats. These papers noted a “Scoundrel D” as the source of French military secrets. The highest levels of the French government ordered the apprehension of the spy at once, at any cost.

When Henry was on leave, another, even more zealous officer on the Statistical Staff stole from the unattended lobby of the German Embassy a catalog of French military secrets. This list (French
“bordereau”)
with its references to artillery formations and the promised delivery of a firing manual would become infamous. The Statistical Staff reviewed the names of officers attached to the General Staff, hoping to match the handwriting of the
bordereau
with that of one of its officers. “Scoundrel D” was quickly assumed to be a somewhat pompous, Alsatian artillery officer, and the only Jew on the General Staff, Alfred Dreyfus. Examples of Dreyfus’s handwriting on file were compared to that of the
bordereau.
A handwriting expert concluded that the
bordereau
was not written by Dreyfus; there were no similarities. So to justify their belief that only a Jew could commit such vile treachery, similarities were manufactured. A Police Department statistician, one Alphone Bertillon, was brought in and confirmed that the writing was by Dreyfus. The war minister, General Mercier, seeking to further his career, wanted a traitor, found desired confirmation in Bertillon, and ordered Dreyfus arrested.

Catholic newspapers, aligned with the anti-Semitic organ
La Libre Parole
(edited with virulent prejudice by the Jew-hating Edouard Drumont), launched a series of attacks on “spy” Dreyfus. Some in the official Catholic establishment saw in the affair an opportunity to regain religious authority lost since the Revolution and subsequent industrialization of the nation.

They were not alone. Major Henry with the help of his anti-Semitic superior, Colonel Sandherr, produced a file of supposed state secrets claimed to have been passed to the enemy. The military tribunal judging Dreyfus, assured by the War Ministry that the matter was one of essential state security, unanimously rendered a guilty verdict. Dreyfus was condemned to the most severe sentence permitted under law. Stripped of his military rank in the most degrading fashion, he was deported and imprisoned in a living hell.

As soon as Dreyfus was incarcerated on Devil’s Island, the French public forgot about him. France was now safe from traitors. Dreyfus eked out a bare existence on the desolate isle with guards who were forbidden to speak with him, gradually losing all hope and slowly his health.

A year after Dreyfus’s imprisonment, Lieutenant Colonel Georges Picquart was appointed to replace Sandherr, who had resigned due to a terminal illness. Picquart, a thorough officer, began to research Dreyfus’s unclear motives in committing the great crime. Picquart examined the dossier given to the military tribunal by the War Ministry that had led so quickly to the conviction. He was amazed to discover how skimpy and unconvincing the allegedly conclusive evidence was. Picquart also received at the time a small card that had been lifted in a cafe by a French surveillance agent from the pocket of the German military attaché. The card had as its addressee Major Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy, a French officer of noble heritage but dubious reputation.

A caricature of Dreyfus as a traitor.

At about the same time, Esterhazy applied for a position on the General Staff. Esterhazy’s application was reviewed by Picquart and compared with the
bordereau.
The handwriting was identical. Esterhazy was the spy! Picquart’s superiors, however, would have nothing of it. High officials of the French government had sanctioned the case, even the war minister. The case was closed.

Dreyfus’s family began spreading rumors in the press about his escape. They sought to get some interest, any interest in the case. Perhaps it could be reopened. Instead, the anti-Semites in the press and the military went to work. Newspapers printed inflammatory stories about international Jewish syndicates organizing to release Dreyfus and overwhelm France. Dreyfus was put into iron shackles. When his guard protested at the treatment, he was relieved and replaced with a sadist. Disturbed by Picquart’s assertions about Esterhazy, Major Henry enlisted the help of a forger and fattened the Dreyfus file with “new” evidence. Picquart was ordered to Africa and replaced by Henry. The cover-up continued.

The Dreyfus family would not give up. After a photograph of the
bordereau
was published in a popular newspaper, Dreyfus’s brother Mathieu distributed pamphlets throughout Paris with copies of the
bordereau.
The handwriting was recognized as Esterhazy’s. With the help of a prominent French senator, Auguste Scheurer-Kestner, the government commenced an inquiry into Esterhazy’s possible involvement. The state investigation decided Mathieu’s proof was inadequate. Esterhazy, however, would have none of this. He demanded a full trial, a court-martial, to clear his name.

The court-martial was a farce. Despite the testimony of Scheurer-Kestner and Picquart and the production of damaging evidence, the military tribunal (possessed as it was of Major Henry’s expanded file) exonerated Esterhazy, who was carried to his carriage to the hero’s welcome of “Long live Esterhazy and the army! Death to the Jews!”

The Esterhazy case, however, did have the effect of mobilizing the forces of progress in France. To the assistance of the estimable Scheurer-Kestner came the journalist and later premier of France Georges Clemenceau and the popular novelist Emile Zola. Zola responded to the Esterhazy fiasco immediately with his brilliant article
“J’Accuse…!”,
which endures as a testament to blunt truth in the service of justice. Zola accused Mercier and the other generals of being accomplices in one of the worst crimes in history. The anti-Semites reacted with pogroms in most of the French cities, the worst occurring in colonial Algiers. The government charged Zola with libel. He fled to England to escape imprisonment. Picquart was also arrested, and on trumped-up charges, imprisoned.

But in the end, miraculously, truth won out. In 1898, a new minister of war, General Godefroy Cavaignac, interviewed Major Henry, questioning carefully the supposed proofs that had led to Dreyfus’s conviction and Esterhazy’s vindication. Henry broke down and confessed everything. Cavaignac had Henry arrested. That night in his prison cell, Henry committed suicide, slicing his throat with a razor. Esterhazy, shorn of his well-known mustache, slipped into Belgium.

Despite all this, the French government and many Frenchmen would still believe that the army could do no wrong. Dreyfus was returned to France, his hair all white, racked with malaria, his naturally high voice reedy and hollow. Retried, he was again convicted. Offered a pardon, he accepted. Clemenceau and the others were outraged by his cowardice. But Dreyfus seemed to know better. He was later made a general, helped defend Paris during the First World War with an artillery battery, and died in 1935, five years before the fall of France to Hitler. Although Clemenceau and other leftist politicians took over the government in an overwhelming victory in 1906, anti-Semitism became part of the official French body politic, which led directly to complicity in the Holocaust. The vicious anti-Dreyfusards would have their murderous way with French and refugee Jewry during the Vichy years of the Second World War. The Gestapo found ready accomplices in the sons and daughters of Esterhazy, Drumont, Henry, Sandherr, and too many others.

In the courtyard of those military parade grounds that bone-cold January day in 1895, witnessing the degradation of a proud but stuffy Alsatian officer who happened to be Jewish, was a reporter from Vienna. Theodor Herzl’s short life would never be the same. To escape this kind of persecution, this infamy, the Jews must have their own homeland. Out of the Dreyfus affair, Zionism was born.