Dreyfus Affair prefigured 20th-century antisemitism within stable politics.

Evidence

The fourth chapter deals with the Dreyfus Affair, a kind of dress rehearsal for the performance of our own time. Because of the peculiar opportunity it offers of seeing, in a brief historical moment, the otherwise hidden potentialities of antisemitism as a major political weapon within the framework of nineteenth-century politics and its relatively well-balanced sanity, this case has been treated in full detail. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 83

Categorization

• QUESTION: What does treating Dreyfus as a ‘dress rehearsal’ imply about the difference between antisemitism as a weapon and antisemitism as a mass movement?