———————————————————— Prologue ———————————————————— Alfred Dreyfus: Man, Milieu, Mentality and Midrash Norman Simms — 1 — ———————————————————— Prologue ———————————————————— Reference Library of Jewish Intellectual History — 2 — ———————————————————— Prologue ———————————————————— ALFRED DREYFUS: MAN, MILIEU, MENTALITY AND MIDRASH Norman SIMMS Boston 2012 — 3 — ———————————————————— Prologue ———————————————————— Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: A catalog record for this title is available from the Library of Congress. Copyright © 2012 Academic Studies Press All rights reserved ISBN 978-1-936235-39-1 Book design by Adell Medovoy On the cover: Woodcut by Martha Simms based on Alfred Dreyfus' drawings in his prison cahiers from Devil's Island. Published by Academic Studies Press in 2012 28 Montfern Avenue Brighton, MA 02135, USA [email protected] www.academicstudiespress.com An electronic version of this book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched. KU is a collaborative initiative designed to make high quality books Open Access for the public good. The Open Access ISBN for this book is 978-1-644-69325-4. More information about the initiative and links to the Open Access version can be found at www.knowledgeunlatched.org. Effective March 20, 2020, this book is subject to a CC-BY-NC license. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/. Other than as provided by these licenses, no part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, or displayed by any electronic or mechanical means without permission from the publisher or as permitted by law. — 4 — ———————————————————— Prologue ———————————————————— 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. — 5 — ———————————————————— Prologue ———————————————————— ….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 1 Cited by Pierre Michel and Jean-François Nivet, eds., Octave Mirbeau, Combats esthétiques, I, 1877- 1892 (Paris: Séguier, 1990), Introduction: “Mirbeau Critique d’Art,” 32. 2 Bernard Lazre, Le nationaliosme juif. Publications du “KadimaH” No. 1 (Paris: Associations des Etudiants Israelites Russes, 1898), 2. — 6 — ———————————————————— Prologue ———————————————————— TABLE OF COntEnts Preface 9 Chapter 1: Introduction Part 1: Diffraction of Light Rays 13 Part 2: The Dreyfus Texts 36 Part 3: The Myth of the Unthinkable and the Impossible 63 Chapter 2: Bodies of Evidence Part 1: An Orchestrated Litany of Lies 81 Part 2: Alfred and Lucie’s Love Letters 110 Part 3: Internal Pains and External Brains 157 Chapter 3: The Phantasmagoria of a Secular Midrash Introduction 187 Part 1: Midrashing the Cahiers 198 Part 2: More Essays and Excursions 232 Epilogue 291 Bibliography 293 Index 327 — 7 — ———————————————————— Prologue ———————————————————— — 8 — ———————————————————— Prologue ———————————————————— Prologue What you are about to read is the first of several new book-length studies of Alfred Dreyfus. This first in the series clears the ground of many assumptions, guesses set out as facts, and interesting ideas that have not been followed through to their logical conclusions. What are new are not so much facts as two new factors: to begin with, my concern is much less about the Dreyfus Affair than it is about the man’s life and personality, along with that of his wife, Lucie, and of their closest relatives and friends. But my book is neither a biography of the Dreyfus family and its association with the Hadamards, Lucie’s family, nor a social or intellectual history of the fin de siècle in France, the setting of the Affair. This is because of the second new factor, my concern with the intellectual, emotional and spiritual qualities of the man Alfred Dreyfus as evidenced in his writings—his letters to Lucie and hers to him, his several journals, and his prison workbooks composed on Devil’s Island, approximately half of which have been saved from destruction. In other words, I am presenting a book about Dreyfus as a late nineteenth- century writer, a thinker, a scientist and a poet, a critic and a historian, and, not least, as a Jew. The essential approach to Dreyfus’s achievements I take is similar to the parameters established by Vincenso Calfa, the translator of Jules Michelet’s The Bible of Humanity: The circumscribed frame of the narrative is broken.... history becomes a poem, and even when he keeps within the limits of pure narrative, his vivid imagination is not slackened. The images are so lively, the manner so rapid, the quick invention so happy and so wild that the objects appear to be born again with all their colors, motions, and forms, and pass before our eyes as a phantasmagoria of luminous pictures.1 1 Vincenso Calfa, “Life and Works of Michelet” in Jules Michelet. The Bible of Humanity (1864), trans. Vincenzo Calfa (New York: J.W. Bouton and London: B. Quarditch, 1877), xvii. — 9 — ———————————————————— Prologue ———————————————————— Though Calfa’s remarks deal specifically with Michelet’s style of writing, as much in his historical studies as in his more adventurous books on aspects of nature and people, there are at least two reasons why it is appropriate to cite them in regard to the life of Alfred Dreyfus. First, because Dreyfus describes what happened to him during the period from 1894 to 1906 as a phantasmagoria; and second, because Michelet is one of the writers he singles out as most influential to the nineteenth century and by implication to himself. In addition, when the love letters written by Lucie and Alfred to one another are carefully studied for the dynamics of their energy, intimacy and implied creation of a mystical relationship, and also when we examine closely the three-fold phenomena of his fifteen surviving cahiers—the essays and commentaries on a variety of historical, scientific, aesthetic and moral issues; the formulae and equations of mathematics and physics he works out; and the thousands of strange drawings that fill up scores of pages—there seems no better word to describe the results than phantasmagoria. Finally, his biography itself, with all of its starts and interruptions, its periods of seeming ordinariness, its outbreaks of nightmarish pain and humiliation, and its many disturbing blank spots, may also be appropriately designated by this same term. In the second volume of this projected series, I will examine more closely the letters, journals and workbooks to see how they stabilize the now standard view of Alfred Dreyfus. Rather than being out of the picture as an individual of no particular intellectual merits and achievements, he will be shown to be a remarkable man who, under the extreme constraints of his imprisonment—exile, solitary confinement, and physical torture—prevented himself from going mad by discovering in his own mind a rational and critical consolidation of nineteenth-century philosophy and aesthetics. He was not an advanced author, but he was a deep thinker. He was also not a practicing Jew but he was a Jewish thinker. In other words, as his writings define him, instead of the rather middle-class conformist and technician most historians have assumed him to be, if they spent any time at all on his personality and feelings during the long ordeal he went through, close reading of his epistles and cahiers reveal an interesting man who was anything but ordinary. In the third volume in this series, there will be a study of Alfred Dreyfus as a lover, a poet, a moral historian and a midrashist. All of these — 10 — ———————————————————— Prologue ———————————————————— unexpected aspects of his personality will then be set in the context of his favourite European authors, not merely the figures of William Shakespeare and Michel de Montaigne, who historians have claimed were the sources of his thought, but the four writers he repeatedly cited and claimed as his key influences—Jules Michelet, Hippolyte Taine, Ernest Renan and Paul Bourget. Interestingly, Dreyfus hardly mentions any of the authors who emerged during the Affair to be his chief supporters, such as Emile Zola, Bernard Lévy and Marcel Proust. Moreover, thanks to his wife Lucie’s influence and the circle of relations and friends on her side, the Hadamards, Alfred knew what was happening in the arts, music and literature, although his tastes were not for the avant garde, and his standards stemmed from the rabbinical culture of Alsace where his family had its roots. The mystery remains, however: why, given the great range of writing displayed in the prison cahiers and the meticulous record of his struggle for complete rehabilitation, does Alfred Dreyfus virtually fade from view after 1906, with only a few appearances in public until his death in 1935? From the time he was restored to his service in the Army and awarded the Legion d’honneur, we know more about his wife Lucie and their children Jeanne and Pierre than we do about Alfred. What can explain this? Was he a broken man, too exhausted by his ordeal, too depressed by his failures, to receive the full recognition he felt he deserved, and therefore unable or unwilling to speak in public, or to write to a public he could no longer trust? — 11 — ———————————————————— Prologue ———————————————————— — 12 — ———————————————— 1.