Jewish Geography
HISTORY FRENCH PARLIAMENT UNANIMOUSLY VOTES TO POSTHUMOUSLY PROMOTE ALFRED DREYFUS by GRACE GILSON
II. As newly emancipated Jews encountered modernity, they created a vast Yiddish litera- ture both high- and low-brow: books, literary journals, news- papers, plays, songs, and films. It was a literature, according to Lansky’s mentor, the Yiddish scholar Ruth Wisse, “that, if it suffers from anything, suffers from its youthfulness, from the exaggerated emphasis on inno- vativeness and on modernity and originality.” Lansky says Yiddish litera- ture asks the essential question, “What does it mean for Jews to live in a modern world?” That question gnawed at him as a student, first at Hampshire Col- lege and later at McGill Uni- versity, and led him to marshal teams of collectors with wheel- barrows and pickup trucks. “The idea that we were going to go reinvent ourselves in a modern world without reference to this vast literature seemed kind of foolish to me,” he says. Lansky is under no illusion that Yiddish will be revived as a spoken language outside of the haredi Orthodox communi- ty. But both in the original and in translation, Yiddish litera- ture will continue to offer new possibilities for Jews and non- Jews to understand the “dialec- tic” of Jewish culture: religious and secular, holy and profane, triumphant and tragic. “What I would put my money on is that Jews, as a people, can’t get by with religion alone,” says Lan- sky. “There’s also a day-to-day side of Jewish life.... The most profound works of Jewish liter- ature are those works that em- brace that dialectic.” JTA
A FRENCH PARLIAMENTARY COMMITTEE unanimously approved a bill this summer to posthumously promote Alfred Dreyfus, more than 130 years after he was framed for treason in one of the defining antisemitic incidents of the nineteenth century. Dreyfus, a Jewish French army captain, was falsely accused of es- pionage and convicted of treason in 1894, decades after the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian war. The trial — playing out in a West- ern European republic purportedly committed to equal rights — be- came an international scandal and symbol of enduring antisemitism on the continent. French writer Émile Zola published a famous open letter titled “J’accuse!” charging the government and army of “treason against humanity” by playing to the public’s antisemitism. The trial also re- portedly persuaded Theodor Herzl, who covered it as a journalist, to turn to Zionism. He is now considered the chief ideological influence behind Israel’s establishment. Dreyfus was eventually exonerated, returned to the military, and died in 1935, but the incident, widely known as the Dreyfus Affair, is seen as a stain on French history. More than a century later, the French parliament’s National Defence and Armed Forces Commit- tee unanimously voted to promote him to the rank of brigadier gen- eral, a decision that was supported in a unanimous vote by the full National Assembly a few days later. “Accused, humiliated and condemned because he was Jewish, Al- fred Dreyfus was dismissed from the army, imprisoned and exiled to Devil’s Island,” wrote former French prime minister Gabriel Attal, who has Jewish ancestry, in a post on X. “More than 130 years later, the national representation honors the values and principles of the Republic. It has come to do justice. It has come to give this man, who fought for France, everything he is due. A French hero. “ The French embassy in Israel also praised the vote in a statement on X. “The French Nation is just and does not forget,” the statement said. “This rights an injustice, honors a warrior, and clarifies that antisemitism, from history to today, will never have a place in the Republic.” JTA
24 AUTUMN 2025
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