Alfred Dreyfus

When people say the Dreyfus Affair split a nation or inaugurated a new era, they exaggerate and use figurative language. The Affair grew out of attitudes and opinions that were already in the process of changing by the final decade of the nineteenth century – and these attitudes and opinions were part of people’s minds, ordinary everyday ways of seeing the world, and were reflected too in the more refined perceptions and feelings of the arts, the sciences, and the philosophies of the period. In this book, Simms will try to engage with many of these changes in the social and intellectual milieu, as they push and pull, influence and reshape each other; and this book finds that midrash is at once a stratagem used by Jews, consciously or not, to survive in a non-Jewish and often anti-Jewish world, as well as an analytical tool we can use to discuss the Dreyfus Affair and the people involved in it.