‘The point was to dehumanise’: London Holocaust archive examines world’s first ‘viral’ antisemitism scandal

Dreyfus affair has echoes of how anti-Jewish hatred manifests itself today, say curators at Weiner Library

It was the world’s first experience of antisemitism “gone viral”, said Barbara Warnock, co-director of the oldest Holocaust archive, the Wiener Holocaust Library, in London.

It was 1894 and printing presses were faster than ever before. France’s prohibitive censorship laws had been lifted, and then along came the Dreyfus affair: a public shouting match that followed the wrongful conviction for treason of Alfred Dreyfus, a 36-year-old French army captain.

The clash between those insistent on Dreyfus’s guilt, as a Jewish man deemed to have a questionable allegiance to the French republic, and his outraged defenders triggered a deluge of newspaper specials, bespoke journals, posters and other polemics.