Maurice Samuels.
MAURICE SAMUELS
ALFRED DREYFUS: THE MAN AT THE CENTER OF THE AFFAIR (2024)
Alfred Dreyfus (born 1869) was a French army officer of Jewish faith. In 1894 he was victimised by the French army authorities who, without any evidence or basis in fact, accused him of acting as a spy for Germany. He was sentenced and exiled to a penal colony in Devil’s Island, off the coast of South America. It later emerged that Dreyfus was entirely innocent, and had been scapegoated as as a Jew by the authorities. The true culprit was a Catholic army officer Charles Esterhazy. This scandalous revelation provoked a political crisis, and Dreyfus was eventually pardoned and reinstated into the French army, in which he served during the First World War.
Reviewing Maurice Samuels’ biography of Dreyfus in the New York Times, Roger Cohen wrote: "An intimate portrait of the defiant rectitude of Alfred Dreyfus, the wrongfully accused French military officer whom Mark Twain called 'the most infamously misused Jew of modern times.' At a time when truth is flouted, bigotry rampant, and nationalism resurgent, Maurice Samuels provides an important account of a French society inflamed and divided by hatred of a deeply patriotic Jew. Exiled, abused, left for dead, Dreyfus never wavered in his fight for truth and a society of equal treatment for all. That fight continues to this day."
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Maurice Samuels (born 1968) is Professor of French at Yale University. He graduated from Harvard University, where he obtained his MA and PhD. He specialises in Jewish Studies, and in the cultural and literary history of France in the 19th century.
