Three New Studies

On

Alfred Dreyfus, his Family and his Judaism

Norman Simms

Alfred Dreyfus: Man, Milieu, Mentality and Midrash.  Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2012.

In the Context of his Times: Alfred Dreyfus as Lover, Intellectual, Poet and Jew.   Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2013. 

Alfred and Lucie Dreyfus: In the Phantasmagoria.  Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing,   2013.

Unlike current books and articles, these three studies put Alfred Dreyfus at the centre of things.  Based on close-reading of the love letters between Dreyfus and his wife Lucie, as well as the recently published notebooks he composed during his imprisonment on Devil’s Island, Simms shows a very different personality than that usually dealt with.  Dreyfus emerges as a widely read and critical intellectual of the late nineteenth century, a sensitive and troubled soul wrestling with the mystery of his arrest and exile, and a Jew who, though not a religious man, reveals profound understanding of the morals, ethics and sufferings of his people.

By setting Dreyfus into the context of his times, through interconnections with the novels, poetry, painting, music and science of the period—some of which works and ideas are explicitly mentioned in the letters and notebooks—Simms shows how Dreyfus was at once very much a man of high culture and yet at the same time a Jew whose moral sense of truth and justice set him apart.