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

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.

A florid sample of the outpouring – including a British newspaper’s special edition, heavily coloured by an anti-French agenda – will go on display this week at a new exhibition at the Wiener Holocaust Library, 120 years after Dreyfus’s exoneration, promotion and award of the legion d’honneur.

“This is a very relevant topic for now,” said Warnock at a preview of the exhibition. “And so there are maybe some interesting echos in terms of how antisemitism manifests itself today.”

The Wiener Holocaust Library was founded by Alfred Wiener, grandfather to the Conservative peer Daniel Finkelstein. He fled Germany for the Netherlands in 1933 following the rise of the Nazis, and then escaped from Amsterdam to London in 1938, bringing with him an extensive collection of documents chronicling the rise of antisemitism.

Among the 40 or so Dreyfus exhibits on display are pieces that Wiener sourced, but there are others collected in the intervening decades by the library and a haul that is on long-term loan from Birkbeck, University of London.

The intention is to bring to life the toxic debate that split France the 1890s and early 1900s as Dreyfus languished in solitary confinement on the notorious Devil’s Island penal colony off French Guiana. Among the most eye-catching of the exhibits is a large poster in which Arthur Ranc, a leftwing politician, writer and newspaper editor who supported Dreyfus, caricatured as an alligator-like creature with razor-sharp teeth.

It was one among a series of such posters titled the Musée des Horreurs, said Clara Dijkstra, one of the curators of the exhibition. “They were published from autumn 1899 to 1900 and there are 45 to 50 versions of this and they all depict key figures who are pro-Dreyfus,” she said. “The point was to dehumanise all these figures that were defending Dreyfus’s innocence. They are reflective of a relaxation of the press but actually after a year of them being published the government finally decided they were too grotesque and shut down publication of them.”

A copy of the rightwing newspaper La Libre Parole, founded by Édouard Drumont, initiator of the Antisemitic League of France, is notable for its “grotesque antisemitic imagery on its cover”. “It had a large circulation and this paper was the first one to start reporting on the fact that Dreyfus was guilty and so broke the story in a way,” said Dijkstra.

The only English-language Dreyfus-themed publication in the Wiener collection is a special 45-page edition of a weekly illustrated newspaper, the Graphic, which carried as its front-page headline “Dreyfus the martyr”, above an image of his apparent arrest. “It is not necessarily highlighting the antisemitism but they focus more on the kind of miscarriage of justice,” said Dijkstra. “Everything playing out as a courtroom drama. I think that really captured people’s attention.”

One journal published in France specifically to cover the Dreyfus affair emerged in direct response to an open letter, titled J’Accuse, written by the novelist Émile Zola to the French president, Félix Faure, in 1898. He accused the French government of antisemitism and a cover-up. Zola was later convicted of libel and fled to England. One image in the publication, titled Psst….!, shows a Prussian officer pulling the strings of a mask of Zola’s face, and behind it is a caricature of a Jewish man. “It is implying that Germans are behind it all, that there is a conspiracy,” said Dijkstra. “It is pretty much always the same message”.

• The exhibition, J’accuse! Press, Polemic and the Dreyfus Affair, runs from 5 November to 19 March at the Wiener Holocaust Library