Nineteenth-century faith in the law’s impartiality dwarfed later responses to persecution
Evidence
While the Dreyfus Affair in its broader political aspects belongs to the twentieth century, the Dreyfus case, the various trials of the Jewish Captain Alfred Dreyfus, are quite typical of the nineteenth century, when men followed legal proceedings so keenly because each instance afforded a test of the century’s greatest achievement, the complete impartiality of the law. 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
Category: Factual Claims
- XREF: Sets up the transition Arendt traces from legal equality as the century’s test to the twentieth-century explosion of race-thinking and anti-semitism that the reader will build on toward the Islamophobia field.