Alfred Dreyfus: Man, Milieu, Mentality and Midrash

When people say the Dreyfus Affair split a nation or inaugurated a new era, they are exaggerating and using 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 engrained in people’s minds, their ordinary, everyday ways of seeing the world, and were reflected as well in the more refined perceptions and feelings of the arts, the sciences, and the philosophies of the period. In this book, Simms explores many of these changes in the social and intellectual milieu, as they push and pull, influence and reshape one another. This book finds that midrash is at once a stratagem used by Jews, both consciously and not, to survive in a non-Jewish and often anti-Jewish world and and as such, can be used to discuss the Dreyfus Affair and the people involved in it.