The Dreyfus Affair was the nation-state’s antisemitism reaching its culmination

Evidence

The Dreyfus Affair brings into the open all other elements of nineteenth-century antisemitism in its mere ideological and political aspects; it is the culmination of the antisemitism which grew out of the special conditions of the nation-state. Yet its violent form foreshadowed future developments, so that the main actors of the Affair sometimes seem to be staging a huge dress rehearsal for a performance that had to be put off for more than three decades. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 166

Categorization

• XREF: The dress rehearsal framing anticipates Arendt’s later argument that nation-state antisemitism gave way to imperial-era race-thinking — useful for the toolkit’s periodization.