A single wrongful conviction in France scandalized the world more than later Nazi persecution

Evidence

It is characteristic of the period that a miscarriage of justice could arouse such political passions and inspire such an endless succession of trials and retrials, not to speak of duels and fisticuffs. The doctrine of equality before the law was still so firmly implanted in the conscience of the civilized world that a single miscarriage of justice could provoke public indignation from Moscow to New York. Nor was anyone, except in France itself, so “modern” as to associate the matter with political issues. The wrong done to a single Jewish officer in France was able to draw from the rest of the world a more vehement and united reaction than all the persecutions of German Jews a generation later. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 279

Categorization

• QUESTION: Why did pre-1940s audiences read Dreyfus as a legal matter and not a political issue? This inversion — law as universal, politics as parochial — is worth tracing forward into later readings.
• XREF: Connects to Arendt’s broader scaffolding: the collapse of legal impartiality as the pre-modern bulwark, which the Islamophobia readings build on in their account of how race-thinking corrodes the rule of law.