French Jews favored private personal lobbying over public protest in the Dreyfus affair.

Evidence

The Dreyfus family, for instance, summarily rejected the suggestion of Arthur Lévy, the writer, and Lévy-Bruhl, the scholar, that they should circulate a petition of protest among all leading figures of public life. Instead they embarked on a series of personal approaches to any politician with whom they happened to have contact … See also Foucault, op. cit., p. 309: “At this distance, one may wonder at the fact that the French Jews, instead of working on the papers secretly, did not give adequate and open expression to their indignation.” — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2142

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s broader scaffold on how marginalized communities choose between public-political and private-personal responses to persecution, relevant to later Islamophobia readings on Jewish and Muslim strategies of response.