The socialist left shared the bourgeois anti-Jewish skepticism about Dreyfus

Evidence

It must also be remembered that the Panama scandal was then fresh in the public mind and that following the Rothschild loan to Russia distrust of the Jews had grown considerably. War Minister Mercier was not only lauded by the bourgeois press at every fresh turn of the trial but even Jaurès’ paper, the organ of the socialists, congratulated him on “having opposed the formidable pressure of corrupt politicians and high finance.” Characteristically this encomium drew from the Libre Parole the unstinted commendation, “Bravo, Jaurès!” Two years later, when Bernard Lazare published his first pamphlet on the miscarriage of justice, Jaurès’ paper carefully refrained from discussing its contents but charged the socialist author with being an admirer of Rothschild and probably a paid agent. Similarly, as late as 1897, when the fight for Dreyfus’ reinstatement had already begun, Jaurès could see nothing in it but the conflict of two bourgeois groups, the opportunists and the clerics. Finally, even after the Rennes retrial Wilhelm Liebknecht, the German Social Democrat, still believed in the guilt of Dreyfus because he could not imagine that a member of the upper classes could ever be the victim of a false verdict. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 304

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the toolkit: shows how class analysis can blind the left to state injustice against an ‘Other’ — a mechanism the reader will need when reading about left complicity in Islamophobic framing.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: whether the left’s structural blindness (class reduces everything to bourgeois factionalism) is a recurring pattern across the later totalitarian and Islamophobia case studies.