Legacies of Anti-Semitism in France was first published in 1983. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. These four essays—on Blanchot, Lacan, Giraudoux, and Gide—have as their focus the barely imaginable coherence which the writings of four major contemporaries take on when read in the light of France's pre-World War II heritage of anti-Jewish thought. As the essays delve into such crucial topics as the inaugural silence in Blanchot's sense of literature, the "style" of Lacan, Giraudoux's relation to Racine, and the sexual politics of Gide, they engage a realm that at times seems—or seemed—anti-Semitic in its essence. Negotiating the complex ramifications of a lost tradition and the structure of its obliteration, Jeffrey Mehlman, in his conclusion, speculates on the emblematic value of Walter Benjamin's perpetually deferred "journey to Palestine via France" and its import for textual interpretation. A French version of Mehlman's essay on Blanchot, published in Tel quel,spurred an impassioned journalistic debate in Paris and London. Broadening still further the context of that inquiry, Legacies will prove a source of provocation and insight to all who are interested in the intellectual history of contemporary France.

"From an award-winning journalist, a provocative, deeply reported expose of the history and present crisis of anti-Semitism in France--and its dire consequences for the rest of Europe. Hate explores the alarming history and present predicament of anti-Semitism in France. By examining the issue at local, international, and personal levels--interviewing everyday French men and women as well as powerful leaders such as National Front president Marine Le Pen--Weitzmann attempts to understand how nine Jews have been murdered by French citizens in the last eight years, and how France has become the number one country from which Western jihadists flee to join ISIS and other extremist Middle Eastern organizations. How do contemporary French Jews grapple with these troubling facts, and with the historical legacies of the French Revolution, the Holocaust, and the Gaullist "Arab-French policy"? While internationally minded consumers of the news may have some knowledge of the events Weitzmann describes--including the 2013 "Day of Anger" and the rise of France's popular, and famously anti-Semitic, comedian Dieudonne M'bala M'bala--these controversies are largely unknown in the States, and utterly shocking in the unity Weitzmann gives them here. In his hands, these events are not just the story of French anti-Semitism, but that of the breakdown of a major Western power, of the dark side of our global age"--

Gives an account of the career and influence of Drumont and the development of modern nationalistic antisemitism in France. Drumont combined the socialist's hostility to the Jews as the essence of capitalism with the conservative view that Jewish emancipation threatened traditional Christian society. Through his publications, especially the journal "Le Libre Parole" and his book "La France juive" (1886), he created a small core of antisemitic militants and a widespread enmity towards the Jews as the enemies of France. Examines his role during the Panama Scandal (1892) and the Dreyfus Affair, his career as a journalist, his decline, and his posthumous influence.

*Includes pictures *Includes a bibliography for further reading "By my forty years of work, by the authority that this toil may have given me, I swear that Dreyfus is innocent. By all I have now, by the name I have made for myself, by my works which have helped for the expansion of French literature, I swear that Dreyfus is innocent. May all that melt away, may my works perish if Dreyfus be not innocent! He is innocent. All seems against me - the two Chambers, the civil authority, the military authority, the most widely-circulated journals, the public opinion which they have poisoned. And I have for me only an ideal of truth and justice. But I am quite calm; I shall conquer. I was determined that my country should not remain the victim of lies and injustice. I may be condemned here. The day will come when France will thank me for having helped to save her honor." - Émile Zola Sometime in 1889, a woman named Madame Marie Bastian was recruited as an agent of the secretive "Statistical Section," an espionage and counter-intelligence agency attached to the military intelligence office of the French General Staff. Mme. Bastian, a cleaner employed by the German Embassy in Paris, and thanks to her Romany origins, she was somewhat acquainted with Germany and marginally conversant in the German language. She enjoyed complete and unrestricted access to the private residences of many important German diplomats and functionaries, and as she gathered up the torn-up documents in the various waste paper baskets, she routinely passed them on to a handler attached to the Statistical Section. Most of what was delivered was of little interest or importance, but on some occasions, documents taped back together and translated proved to be of significant value. In September 1890, among a pile of torn-up documents delivered by Mme. Bastian was found a note handwritten in French which, when pieced together, proved to be a list of French military secrets handed over to the Germans by an unknown French officer of the General Staff. This discovery, which proved the existence of a traitor in the department, triggered a ferment in the corridors of the Conseil Supérieur de la Guerre, and the hunt was on for the culprit. By a process of elimination, officers of the military intelligence were able to narrow down a list of probable traitors, among whom was a young Jewish staff officer, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, who was immediately earmarked as the chief suspect. Dreyfus' handwriting was compared to that on the bordereau, and although the various handwriting experts who conducted the comparison failed to reach a common consensus, it was nonetheless judged that Dreyfus was indeed the culprit. In December 1894, Dreyfus was court-martialed, convicted, and sentenced to a term of life in prison. On January 5, 1895, in a formal parade, Captain Dreyfus was stripped of his rank, his sword was broken over the knee of a sergeant, and he was shipped overseas to the penal colony of Devil's Island on the coast of French Guiana. These are the essential facts of the "Dreyfus Affair," as it came to be known, an episode that in many respects defined French anti-Semitism in the late 19th century. A case was built with the central objective of protecting the integrity of French military establishment, and in the process, the relatively muted anti-Semitism in France (at least compared to other European nations) was transformed into an era of virulent and violent Jew-hatred that characterized and sullied the final decade of the 19th century in France. Even today, as many of the affair's nuances and facets have faded from memory, its political importance and anti-Semitic elements continue to be well-known and quite relevant today. The Dreyfus Affair: The History and Legacy of France's Most Notorious Antisemitic Political Scandal examines the chain of events that produced one of the most notorious episodes in modern French history.

This book traces the global, national, and local origins of the conflict between Muslims and Jews in France, challenging the belief that rising anti-Semitism in France is rooted solely in the unfolding crisis in Israel and Palestine. Maud Mandel shows how the conflict in fact emerged from processes internal to French society itself even as it was shaped by affairs elsewhere, particularly in North Africa during the era of decolonization. Mandel examines moments in which conflicts between Muslims and Jews became a matter of concern to French police, the media, and an array of self-appointed spokesmen from both communities: Israel's War of Independence in 1948, France's decolonization of North Africa, the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, the 1968 student riots, and François Mitterrand's experiments with multiculturalism in the 1980s. She takes an in-depth, on-the-ground look at interethnic relations in Marseille, which is home to the country's largest Muslim and Jewish populations outside of Paris. She reveals how Muslims and Jews in France have related to each other in diverse ways throughout this history--as former residents of French North Africa, as immigrants competing for limited resources, as employers and employees, as victims of racist aggression, as religious minorities in a secularizing state, and as French citizens. In Muslims and Jews in France, Mandel traces the way these multiple, complex interactions have been overshadowed and obscured by a reductionist narrative of Muslim-Jewish polarization.

A powerful history of Jewish art collectors in France, and how an embrace of art and beauty was met with hatred and destruction In the dramatic years between 1870 and the end of World War II, a number of prominent French Jews—pillars of an embattled community—invested their fortunes in France’s cultural artifacts, sacrificed their sons to the country’s army, and were ultimately rewarded by seeing their collections plundered and their families deported to Nazi concentration camps. In this rich, evocative account, James McAuley explores the central role that art and material culture played in the assimilation and identity of French Jews in the fin-de-siècle. Weaving together narratives of various figures, some familiar from the works of Marcel Proust and the diaries of Jules and Edmond Goncourt—the Camondos, the Rothschilds, the Ephrussis, the Cahens d'Anvers—McAuley shows how Jewish art collectors contended with a powerful strain of anti-Semitism: they were often accused of “invading” France’s cultural patrimony. The collections these families left behind—many ultimately donated to the French state—were their response, tragic attempts to celebrate a nation that later betrayed them.