To celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of the death of Bernard Lazare, famous French-Jewish historian and poet, a committee has just been formed in France under the presidency of Senator Justin Godard, former member of the French Cabinet.
The work to which French non-Jews as well as Jews are this year paying homage to this champion of fair-mindedness in a world of bigotry, is his presentation of the Jewish side to a Europe that was seething with anti-Semitism. His greatest work, which has immortalized him is his “Anti-Semitism, Its History and Its Causes,” which he published in Paris, in 1894, and in which he reviewed anti-Semitism from the early days of the Christian era. It was an answer to the persecution of Jews in Russia, Rumania and Germany of those days and to the anti-Semitism which began to raise its head even in France at that time and which culminated in the Dreyfus case.
It was largely due to the writings of Bernard Lazare, whose works have been translated into all languages of Europe, that the more progressive elements in European countries began to see the justice of the Jewish side of the story, and that anti-Semitism yielded its place to a more fair-minded attitude toward Jews.
Bernard Lazare distinguished himself particularly in connection with the Dreyfus case, as he was one of the principal champions of the innocently accused Jew in the French press, and helped to reestablish the Jew in French public opinion through his writings.
The famous Dreyfus case of thirty years ago, when anti-Semitism dominated France as Hitlerism does Germany today, has been brought to life again in France by the well-known French writer, Armand Charpentier, in his new book just published under the title “Histoire de L’Affaire Dreyfus.”
Although the new work in no way changes what the French have long ago accepted as definite proof of the innocence of the man who had been convicted purely because of anti-Jewish agitation, it brings out many new facts about anti-Semitism in France at the beginning of the present century, when the position of the Jew in France was very much similar to that of the Jews in Germany today. The book is based upon recently discovered documentary evidence, the Schwarzkoppen files, which add new proofs of the unfair anti-Jewish bigotry of those days and helps to vindicate the Jew in French eyes.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
