New Books in the Pipeline

Four books at least are now in preparation, that is, I have managed to disentangle the strands from all the reading I have been doing over the past few years as part of the grand project with trying to save Alfred Dreyfus from his detractors and trivilializers—those who still see him as no more than a dull, unimaginative military engineer and boring bourgeois husband and father.  These forthcoming books are taking shape as follows:

1.    (1)  The fourth in the series on Dreyfus himself.  This will concentrate on recently available notebooks and letters dealing with his service in the Great War, his participation in the salon of the Countess Marie Viscont-Arconanti, his reviewing of books for the Journal historique, and other data on his life between the almost complete vindication of his innocence in 1906m and his death in 1935.

2.    (2) A study of a cluster of Jewish and pseudo/quasi Jewish intellectuals and artists around the fin de siècle consisting of men and women who thought they could safely assimilate into a tolerant, liberal society in western and central Europe but who discovered that neither their accomplishments could ensure them safety or an enduring reputation where anti-Semitism was dominant and increasingly pervasive.  By pseudo and quasi Jews I mean those persons who were mis-identified as Jews because of their associations with and favourable treatment of Jews in their works or who through marriage and conversion actually tried to live, think and feel as Jews in times of stress.

3.     (3) A history of the relationship between Salomon Reinach and his Christian opponents and rivals in the controversy that arose over his publication of Orpheus in 1909, a book which had the temerity to treat Judaism and Christianity as types within a model of comparative religions, and which treated all religions as superstitions, historical constructs and oppressive regimes of intolerance and persecution.  Though many other scholars, clerical or lay, were saying similar things, it was Reinach the assimilated Jew who was targeted for his arrogance and inappropriate disregard for the conventions of Christian society.

4.    (4) A study of how the Jewish Imagination challenges and creates the world through midrash and science.  It is not that the Jewish imagination is completely different from any other, but that its emphases, its nuances, and rejection of certain experiences makes it distinct.  In this book, I will examine closely the various variations in sensual experience—the five senses as they register in a textualized mind, one that thinks in terms of words and intellectual concepts—and the kinds of artistic (aesthetic) forms of expression that are traditional to Jewish life.  In addition, because the Jews entered modern society at a fairly late period and used their intellectual skills to make advances in the sciences, from historiography and other social disciplines through to the hard sciences of mathematics, physics, and so on, I will spend time looking at the way Jews manipulated the technologies of photography, cinema, voice recordings, radio and so on.