In Notre Jeunesse, or Our Youth, his memoir of the Dreyfus Affair, Charles Péguy, the poet of Catholic France’s salvific mission, wrote that “the prophet in this great crisis of Israel and the world was Bernard Lazare. Let us salute here one of the greatest names of modern times and . . . one of the greatest among the prophets of Israel.” If, for Péguy, the Dreyfus Affair was proof that in the republic “everything begins in the mystical and ends in the political,” Lazare was one of the few to withstand this degradation of a noble cause. He said of Lazare that “he undeniably had elements of a saint, of saintliness. And when I speak of a saint, I shouldn’t be suspected of speaking metaphorically. . . . He was a prophet. It was thus only right that he was buried prematurely in silence and oblivion.”
Lazare earned these exalted words of praise from his fellow Dreyfusard by being the first person outside Alfred Dreyfus’ family to come to his defense after he was found guilty of treason in 1894. If other names, more famous ones such as that of Émile Zola, come to mind when we think of Dreyfus’ defenders, that is more a reflection on the vagaries of history and memory than of the truth of events. And Lazare was more than just a noble controversialist. He was also a Jewish thinker who, after perversely explaining antisemitism as the fault of Jews, created a form of radicalism that viewed the Torah as a foundational revolutionary document. A saint with a strange trajectory.
Lazare was born Lazare Marcus Manassé Bernard in Nîmes on June 14, 1865. On his mother’s side his family had resided in that city for several centuries; one of his maternal ancestors was said to have been a silversmith in service to the pope in Avignon in the fourteenth century. His father, a successful tailor, came from a family that settled in the South of France in the late eighteenth century after leaving its native Lorraine region. Lazare, after completing his high school studies in 1882, chose to educate himself in literature. After leading a literary society in Nîmes, he “ascended,” as they say in French, to Paris in 1886.
Writing as Bernard-Lazare, he published symbolist tales, a collection of which was reviewed by Anatole France. France wrote floridly of Lazare that “there is in him the Asiatic and the African. His style has the thorny richness, the thick and heavy abundance, the enormous flower, the bitter juice of the vegetation of the torrid zone.” France concluded on a note that never had the chance to be proven true: “He is precise and firm in his thinking, and he expresses himself with verve. He will be totally to my taste when age will have given him gentleness and a tad of indulgence.” Lazare’s early death saved him from gentleness and indulgence, and the fire France saw in him never dimmed.
Lazare was militantly apolitical at the beginning of his writing life, but he soon became an outspoken anarchist. He explained his commitment in a book published in 1895 by his friend, the anarchist writer Augustin Hamon, called Psychologie de l’anarchiste-socialiste. Lazare’s contribution to the volume was a veritable profession of faith. “The value of authority is something I could never understand . . . . For me, that a man could arrogate to himself the right to in any way dominate his kind was, and still is, something inconceivable. In my eyes, nothing was and is as dishonoring as obedience, that is, the partial annihilation of the individual.” He was, by his nature, a purist, a dissenter, an agitator, an almost naive sort of moralist. He continued to write literary fables, but now with a political point. Lazare would publish articles in a variety of anarchist journals, coming in contact with leading figures of the movement such as Sébastien Faure and Zo d’Axa. He also established a number of journals of his own, editing the impressive though little-read Entretiens politiques et artistiques, which had a total of eighty paid subscribers. (But here we are, remembering it!)
Though some have questioned the sincerity of Lazare’s anarchism, he was serious enough in his beliefs to have the police trailing him and reporting on his doings. A police report on one of his speeches quoted Lazare proclaiming, “Yes, we want no more armies, no more fatherlands, and our acts of revolt are acts that are just.” Lazare found much to admire in the act of Auguste Vaillant, who threw a bomb into the Chamber of Deputies on December 9, 1893. This violence became known as the “propaganda of the deed,” a concept with a long and highly destructive career in modern politics. Writing to the Dutch socialist Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis, he praised Vaillant for his courage and spoke of how “the blood of sacrifices is a fertile rain; it causes the good wheat to germinate even in the souls of the indifferent; it prepares the harvests of the future.” The panic that accompanied the wave of bombings in the early 1890s resulted in a series of laws known to history as the lois scélérates, which effectively banned anarchist propaganda. Fearing for his freedom, Lazare briefly fled to Brussels. He returned home and defended his friend Félix Fénéon, an art critic who was accused of planting a bomb in a Paris café that cost its one victim an eye, in the press. Fénéon was found not guilty. Lazare’s activities during this period earned him a reputation as a man willing to defend the unjustly accused, a reputation he would soon confirm.
In 1892 Lazare took to the pages of the journal he edited, Entretiens politiques et litteraires, and published the first of a series of articles which he would later expand into a book that remains his most controversial book, L’Antisémitisme, son histoire et ses causes (Antisemitism, its History and Causes). The book marks the confluence of two currents that were on the rise in France at the time, antisemitism and anti-capitalism. Lazare’s book is a work that is deeply and unapologetically anti-capitalist. This is hardly surprising in the work of an anarchist. But anti-capitalism had many faces in fin-de-siècle France, and not only the radical left embraced it. Opponents of modernity hated capitalism for destroying traditional ways. And hatred of the Jew as the beneficiary and the ace of capital was where left and right met.
What, for Lazare, was the explanation for antisemitism’s ubiquity, its seemingly eternal nature? “If this hostility,” Lazare wrote, “this repugnance had been shown towards the Jews at one time or in one country only, it would be easy to account for the local causes of this sentiment.” But this is not the case. For the Jews, or as he calls them resorting to the concepts of the time, “this race,” (though elsewhere in the book he calls the notion of race “a fiction”) “has been the object of hatred with all the nations amidst whom it ever settled.” Those who have hated the Jews over the millennia have come from every class, every nation, virtually every corner of the world, “ruled by different laws and governed by opposing principles.” Their own ways of viewing the world are radically opposed, they worship God in different ways, and yet they all hate the Jews. There can only be one explanation according to Lazare: “It must be that the general causes of antisemitism have always resided in Israel itself, and not in those who have antagonized it.”
The outrageousness of Lazare’s assertion is hardly mitigated by what follows this disturbing diagnosis. “This does not mean that justice was always on the side of Israel’s persecutors, or that they did not indulge in all the extremes born of hatred; it is merely asserted that the Jews were themselves, in part, at least, the cause of their own ills.” Lazare’s lapidary explanation for how they are the cause of their own ills was a simple one: “Until today and everywhere, the Jew has been an asocial being.” He is asocial because unlike other conquered peoples, the Jew has refused to accept any master but the Law: the Torah.
The Jews’ separateness was religious and political, for wherever they settled their sole desire was to be able to follow their own religion and be ruled by their own laws. They thus always formed a state within the state. (The phrase became a platitude of modern antisemitism.) In Lazare’s telling, the results of this were rights and privileges that differentiated them from the rest of the nations in which they lived and which excited the jealousy of those around them. “Thus, Israel’s attachment to its law was one of the first causes of its unpopularity, whether because it derived benefits and advantages from that law which were apt to excite envy, or because it prided itself upon the excellence of its Torah and considered itself above and beyond other peoples.”
Antisemitism, in Lazare’s account, will not last forever, and in fact, thanks to its condemnation of capitalism, antisemitism bears within it the seeds of its own destruction. Lazare bizarrely saw something positive in Édouard Drumont, France’s leading antisemite, the editor of the daily La Libre Parole and the author of the two-volume best-seller La France juive. Lazare wrote that in attacking Jewish capitalists, the antisemites are actually opening the way for socialism! Antisemites such as Drumont “stir up the middle class, the petit-bourgeoisie, and sometimes the peasantry against Jewish capitalists, but in this way gently [lead] them to socialism, [prepare] them for anarchy, [lead] them to the hatred of capitalists and above all of capital.” The revolution that will inevitably arrive will be carried out by forces that will include Jews, for the Jews are, by their very nature, a revolutionary people. Jews naturally “seek justice” and their revolutionism has its basis “in their concept of life and death,” their insistence on the here and now and not the afterlife. The coming revolution will see the Jews as actors, for they are “a revolutionary ferment in society.” Antisemitism “works at eliminating not only the economic causes [of antisemitism], but also the religious and national causes that engendered it and which will disappear with the society of today of which they are the products.” Antisemitism, in the view of the pre-Dreyfus Lazare, is an ally — an unpleasant ally, but an ally nonetheless — in the revolutionary struggle.
Antisemitism will end not only with the end of the antisemitic movement, Lazare continues, but also with the fading of Jewish religious belief and practice. With general social trends moving in a secular direction, “the prejudice against the Jew, a prejudice as persistent as the Catholic prejudice against the Protestant, and the Jew against the Christian, cannot be the only one to continue. It is diminishing in intensity and they will doubtless soon no longer hold the Israelite responsible for Jesus’ suffering.” And this is not all. National prejudices, built on religious foundations, are also headed for extinction. “National particularism and egoism, however strong they might still be, are showing signs of decay.” (This, of course, was the standard Marxist assurance about the inevitable disappearance of nationalism, which was a supremely bourgeois distraction from the class struggle.) Foreigners are no longer hated, humanity is tearing down barriers, and antisemitism is doomed. It will perish “because the Jew is being transformed, because the religious, political, social and economic conditions are changing, but above all, it will perish because it is one of the final and persistent manifestations of the old spirit of reaction and narrow conservatism which vainly attempts to halt the revolutionary evolution.”
Lazare had no kind words for rabbis, those voices of reaction, but the Jewish religion itself possessed a “revolutionary spirit” that, given the antisemitic conditions in which Jews lived, also “constituted the Jewish fatherland.” Limned in Antisemitism, Its History and Causes is a historiosophical vision, a version of religion that was not just a source of sustenance for Jews as a people but also for Jews as a revolutionary force. The Torah served as a revolutionary manifesto for Lazare. Drawing from God’s words that “For unto me the children of Israel are servants” Lazare asks “what authority can, then, prevail by the side of the divine authority?” Here is the revolutionary core of Judaism: “All government, whatever it may be, is evil, since it tends to take the place of the government of God.” Writing at the time of the propagandists of the deed, the anarchist Lazare declared that earthly powers “must be fought, because Yahweh is the only head of the Jewish commonwealth, the only one to whom the Israelite owes obedience.” Through the centuries of oppression, this was the essence of Judaism that kept them going. “The funeral pyres, the massacres, the carnage, the insults, everything contributed to make dearer to them the justice, the equality, and the liberty which during many long years were for them the emptiest words.”
There is more than a hint of Karaism in Lazare. For Karaites, a medieval fundamentalist Jewish sect that survived into the modern era, the Torah, the “written Toirah” that was given to Moses at Sinai, is the only valid document of their religion: the Talmud, or the “oral Torah,” the dicta of the rabbis, has no validity, and all “rabbinite” authority is rejected. Lazare’s references to the Talmud are, in true Karaite fashion, all negative. Those who created the Talmud are dismissed as “casuists.” Marx is called a Talmudist owing to his mind “which does not falter at the petty difficulties of fact.” The dreadful state of the Jews of Eastern Europe, “where the Talmud still dominates,” is caused by the dominance of rabbis, “where he lives under the guidance of his rabbis, who unite with the powers in authority to prevent him from attaining light. (Two decades before Lazare wrote these words, the German Catholic theologian August Rohling published Der Talmudjude, or The Talmud Jew, which became an instant classic of modern Jew-hatred.) But even though rabbinical power via the Talmud “has put to sleep their instincts of revolt,” Lazare went on, it “did not debase all Jews.” There remain “some who persisted in the belief that justice, liberty, and equality were to come to this world; there were many of them who believed that the people of Yahweh was [sic] charged with working for this coming.” Lazare considered himself to be one of them. He did not stand outside the Jewish people, and his immersion as a Jew in the struggle of the Jews was about to begin.
On October 15, 1894 — the same year that Lazare’s tome on antisemitism was published — Captain Alfred Dreyfus, an officer on the French general staff, was arrested for espionage on behalf of Germany. Three pieces of evidence served as the basis for his condemnation: a secret dossier that was never shown to Dreyfus’ defense lawyers; a document called the bordereau containing information on French military matters fished from the garbage at the German embassy by a cleaning lady working for French intelligence; and a note referring to “cet canaille de D.” — “that scoundrel D.” — alleged by the government to refer to Dreyfus, though it was later learned that it referred to an officer named Dubois. Dreyfus was found guilty and publicly degraded, with his epaulets and the stripes on his pants torn from his uniform as he continued to proclaim his innocence.
This was not yet the Dreyfus Affair, but simply the case of an officer found guilty of treason. The headline of Édouard Drumont’s antisemitic newspaper screamed “The Traitor Condemned. Ten years of Prison and Degradation. Down with the Jews!” There was no public outcry, but Dreyfus’ brother Mathieu believed in his brother’s innocence. He regularly visited the condemned man in La Santé Prison, where he was being held before being sent to Devil’s Island for life. Mathieu wanted to publicize his brother’s case, and he had an unexpected ally: the governor of the prison, who had been impressed with the supposedly treasonous officer. He told Mathieu that there were only two men who could help him: the antisemite Édouard Drumont and Bernard Lazare. How and why he would have suggested Drumont is an unsolvable mystery. As for turning to the Jewish anarchist, Lazare later wrote in an unpublished memoir of his involvement in the affair that “I suppose that during the preceding years he had at La Santé revolutionaries and anarchists who had spoken of me.”
Even before meeting the prisoner’s brother, Lazare was convinced of Dreyfus’ innocence, and when he met Mathieu in February 1895, while the captain was still waiting to be sent to Devil’s Island, “I had decided to do all I could to wrest him from there.” Lazare gathered all the facts he could, with Mathieu Dreyfus providing invaluable information. In the summer of 1895 he began writing a pamphlet outlining the injustice of the captain’s fate and the falsity of the case against him. The pamphlet was quickly written, but the Dreyfus family requested that its publication be delayed until they felt the right moment had arrived. For a year nothing happened, and it was only in September 1896 that the family decided that the time had come to go public. In the end Lazare published three pamphlets defending Dreyfus, in 1896 and 1897 (both titled A Judicial Error) and in 1898 (How to Condemn an Innocent Man). They were masterpieces of forensic literature, detailed examinations of the case, laying bare the weakness and the falsehoods of the prosecution’s case. Yet however cogent the arguments in Lazare’s pamphlets, they failed to obtain Dreyfus’ release or calls for a new trial. They did, however, bring on board some new defenders of the cause.
On the left, the affair was generally viewed as an intra-bourgeois dispute. Why should an anarchist or socialist care about the army’s attack on a wealthy officer? In 1897, at the end of his pamphlet in defense of Dreyfus, Lazare had this to say to his comrades: “There are men for whom freedom and justice are not vain words. I am going to speak to them. They have no right to content themselves with general and generous theories if they refuse to apply them.” He condemned those leftists who, “preoccupied with humanity as a whole, turn away from unfortunate individuals.” If not all of the left lined up behind Lazare, some of the most important anarchists, such as Sébastien Faure, did support him, though with certain reservations, as did the greatest of France’s socialists, Jean Jaurès. It was thanks to Lazare that the editors of La Revue blanche were won over to the cause, bringing the future head of state Léon Blum into the fight.
The pamphlets that Lazare wrote are important for another reason. Lazare dared to state the obvious: “With such weak evidence, and if the pressure of the antisemitic gang hadn’t forced the hand of a government lacking in character or courage, they would never have dared lead Captain Dreyfus before a court martial.” The Jewish angle was a touchy one, and even among Dreyfus’ defenders there were Jew-haters. Captain Georges Picquart, who would deliver the fatal blow to the prosecution by proving the real traitor was Major Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy, despised Jews.
As support grew for Dreyfus, his defenders accused French Jews of doing nothing so as not to rock the boat. French Jews were throughout his life a particular bugbear of Lazare. Feeling that Juif was too harsh a term, one that loaned itself into being turned into an epithet, French Jews of a certain class called themselves “Israelites.” (German Jews of the same era had the same problem with the term Jude.) Israelites went along in order to get along. Israelites didn’t raise Jewish issues. Israelites turned their backs on their brothers, both in France and in Eastern Europe.
Antisemites spoke of a shadowy group, a “syndicate,” that was working behind the scenes on behalf of Dreyfus, suborning politicians and journalists as well as men and women known by the newly-coined term “intellectuals.” According to Lazare’s biographer Philippe Oriol, there in fact was a group working behind the scenes in the Dreyfusard cause, called the Defense Committee, and Lazare was its most active agent. Lazare visited politicians at the highest level, proof in hand of the falsity of the military’s case. He visited the editors of the country’s most important newspapers, sometimes obtaining support, more often not, yet never deterred. Writers and critics received his visits. Among them were men and women of the left, such as Octave Mirbeau and the revolutionary feminist journalist Séverine, who would soon be strong allies. Lazare did not only visit editors; he also started Dreyfusard newspapers from scratch. The list of people he importuned is enormous, and some, such as Lucien Herr, the librarian of the École Normale Supérieure and the great French Jewish archeologist and historian Salomon Reinach, would become key figures in the Affair. When Lazare first went to visit Émile Zola to convince him to become involved in the case, “I found [him] full of sympathy, but grace only struck him when the full tragedy, with Esterhazy the traitor, and Picquart the good genie, and Dreyfus the martyr seized his novelistic imagination.” Lazare’s specialty as emissary of the “syndicate” was in providing funds to groups on the left. Le Libertaire, an important anarchist newspaper, received funds for the paper’s general use and to publish a pamphlet in support of Dreyfus to be distributed free of charge. He assisted in the setting up of public meetings, and of newspapers such as Le Parti ouvrier, L’Antijésuite, and L’Ouvrier des deux mondes. Lazare continued this work for several years, spreading funds even into Belgium, where in 1901 he was the intermediary in forwarding money from the Defense Committee to establish a Committee for Propaganda Against Antisemitism. The organizer of that group wrote in thanks to Lazare: “You’re a magician.”
In 1899, during which two further trials took place, the second before a military tribunal, Mathieu Dreyfus asked Lazare to step back from the case, to have less of a public presence, to “let others act.” Lazare acquiesced, explaining in later years that “I cared more about justice than about myself.” Even so, he continued to work furiously behind the scenes. Yet in the heat of the Affair Lazare felt his role was already being forgotten and he worried about how he would be remembered. In a moving open letter sent to the head of the League for the Rights of Man, Lazare spoke out on behalf of his efforts: “For my family, I want it to be said that I, who was the first to speak out, to stand up for the Jewish martyr, was a Jew.””
Lazare attended Dreyfus’ military trial in Rennes in 1899, and it was there that for the first time he laid eyes on the man he had been defending. He spoke of his “fear” as he awaited Dreyfus’ appearance, and also of the effect the man had on him. “My fear vanished as soon as he entered. When I saw him as I’d never hoped to see him, after all these years of torture, full of the internal flame of life, firm and stiff, all I then felt was the tranquility of a perfect soul and more than ever the certainty that the innocent man was going to emerge victorious.”
When Dreyfus finally received a pardon in 1899, after being found guilty with attenuating circumstances of espionage at the Rennes trial, the various factions of the Dreyfusard movement exploded into opposing factions. Some supported Dreyfus’ acceptance of the pardon, which allowed him to be freed while letting the guilty verdicts stand, while others felt that the pardon had to be refused in the name of truth and justice. Lazare supported the former group. Dreyfus was fully exonerated in 1906, three years after the death of the first Dreyfusard.
Lazare’s activities in support of Dreyfus prepared him for the next and final phase of his political development. Before the Dreyfus Affair, in 1894, Lazare had been contacted by the cultural-Zionist thinker Ahad Ha’am about assisting the latter in having a collection of his writings published in French, though nothing came of it. In 1896, barely a month after the appearance of Theodor Herzl’s Der Judenstaat, Lazare wrote to Herzl asking about a French translation, telling him that “I would be happy to learn of this, and when it occurs to learn of your means of action and your practical projects so as to make them known here.” The two men met in Paris in July of that year, and Herzl described Lazare in a letter to a friend as an “excellent example of a fine, intelligent French Jew.”
Lazare was ripe for Zionism, and he would become a central member of the movement in France, though, as he wrote in 1897, “Zionism in France does not exist” and had but ten adherents in the entire county. In the same year he published a pamphlet called Jewish Nationalism. It is a typically unorthodox work, for the nationalism in the title is not, or is not just, the construction of a Jewish homeland. Lazare proposed two solutions to the injustices that Jews endured in Christian-dominated countries: a Jewish land, and a Jewish nation within the greater nations in which they live. Like the Jewish Labor Bund, Lazare accepted that Jews were a nation within a nation, a claim he himself had made and employed in explaining Jews as the cause of Jew-hatred. This was now viewed as a positive thing. It was, indeed, the road to liberation, and away from the worst outcome of all: assimilation. At the same time Lazare, unlike the Bundists, believed that Jews needed a country of their own, and saw Zionism as the only way to establish it. These contradictory ends were not always clearly melded in Lazare’s writings.
Lazare first had to establish that the disparate people of the Jewish Diaspora was one, that there really was a basis for Jewish nationalism. Jewish history, he wrote in his pamphlet, was made up of “common traditions and customs, traditions and customs that have not all equally persisted, for many of them were religious customs and traditions. Nevertheless, they have left their mark on us; they have given us habits and, even more, a similar attitude, thanks to which, despite the necessary individual divergences that separate us and must separate us, we look upon things from the same angle. How, then, do we translate this fact of a certain number of individuals having a common past, traditions and ideas? We translate it by saying that they belong to the same group, that they have the same nationality. . . . There is a Jewish nation.”
This, as he had once observed, was one of the sources of antisemitism, but the hatred of the Jews had a paradoxical effect. In an expansion of Jean-Paul Sartre’s later assertion that the Jew is created by the antisemite, Lazare wrote that the effect of antisemitism is to render that nationality more tangible to the Jews: “it is to make even stronger their consciousness that they are a people.” This old claim that the origins of Jewish identity were to be found in Jew-hatred does not withstand even perfunctory historical scrutiny, though in the modern period it explains some of the psychological perplexity of the assimilated Jew.
Nationalism for the Jews, Lazare proclaimed, means “collective freedom.” The Jew who proclaims himself a nationalist is saying that “I want to be a completely free man; I want to enjoy the sun; I want to have the right to my dignity as a man. I want to escape oppression, escape insults, escape the contempt that they want to bring to bear on me. At certain moments in history, nationalism is for human groups the manifestation of the spirit of freedom.” What Lazare’s Jewish nationalism did not mean at this point was a mass exodus to the Holy Land. It does not mean, as he wrote, that “I am a man who wants to reconstitute a Jewish state in Palestine and dreams of re-conquering Jerusalem.”
For Lazare the anarchist — which he remained until his dying day, however eccentric his version of anarchism might have been — the unity of the Jewish people, of the Jewish experience, ended at the point where the classes divided. In this pamphlet as in all his Jewish writings, the Jewish bourgeoisie desired nothing so much as to be not only like Christians, but actually to be Christians, and as such is an enemy. Lazare wrote with no ambiguity that “the Jewish bourgeoisie, deprived of its secular stays, poisons the Jewish nation with its rot. It will poison the other nations as long as it has not decided — and this is something we cannot encourage it strongly enough to do — to adhere to the Christianity of the ruling classes and to leave Judaism behind.” Jews, like all nations, are divided into different camps: “There are Jewish conservatives, Jews of the juste milieu, and socialist and revolutionary Jews.” Lazare’s Jewish nationalism, and later his Zionism, would stand on this Marxist ground of class division and class struggle. It would ultimately drive him to oppose Herzl and leave the Zionist movement.
Was a retreat into nationalism a denial of the central socialist doctrine of internationalism? Lazare dismissed this possibility out of hand. Abandoning his earlier hopes of Jews being liberated by the revolution, he now felt — given the sufferings of the Jews, as well as the depth of Jew-hatred — that “I don’t think that it would be legitimate to count on an economic and social transformation. In the first place this transformation, which I hope for, and whose coming I will participate in fighting for with all my might, sadly seems to still be far off. And then, it is not proven to me that it will bring Jews better conditions.” Going further, Lazare saw the Jewish fight for its nationhood as consistent with his anarchist goal of a future society being made up of a free federation of groups. “I believe that one day humanity will be a confederation of free groupings and not organized in keeping with the capitalist system; free groupings in which the distribution of wealth and the relations of labor and capital will be completely different from those of today. These groups must be allowed to be constituted, to form themselves. Why wouldn’t Jews form one? I see nothing that opposes this, and it is in the development of Jewish nationalism that I see the solution to the Jewish Question.”
Lazare was perhaps most clairvoyant in his response to those who denied the right of Jews to self-determination, to nationhood. In words that could be written today, he asks “In any case, are most socialists, even the internationalists, totally consistent? Do they act in conformity with their doctrines? Are they not demanding — and rightly — autonomy for the Cubans, Cretans, and Armenians? Don’t they recognize that all have the right to fight for their freedom, and don’t they join together this freedom with the demand for a nationality? Can someone tell me in what way the Jews are different?”
He then pivots one last time. Invoking the Passover “chant” of “next year in Jerusalem,” he calls on his fellow Jews to take their fate in their own hands. “From this day forward they should not expect help from heaven, or the assistance of powerful allies. The Jews will only find their salvation in themselves. It is through their own might that they will liberate themselves; that they will re-conquer that dignity that they have been driven to lose. The contemptible and vile portion, without convictions or any other motives than their personal interests, will convert. It won’t have any scruples to overcome in order to do this. What will believers and non-believers do who will never resign themselves to the recantation? They will ever more strongly feel that they will be free as individuals when the collectivity to which they belong is free, when that nation without a territory that is the Jewish nation will have a land and can dispose of itself without any constraints.” His reasoning here brings to mind the “auto-emancipation” of which the Russian Zionist thinker Leo Pinsker had written in 1882.
Lazare attended the second Zionist Congress in Basel in 1898, where he was greeted as a hero. As a contemporary account had it, as he entered the hall he was introduced as “Bernard Lazare, the noble, the bold, the strong,” and the hall rose as one in a standing ovation. Prior to the conference he had given an interview to a British journalist for The Jewish World, in which he seemed to have opted for colonization, saying that “I am in favor of colonization, the establishment of new colonies, and the introduction of industries in Palestine.” But he insisted that his Zionism had little to do with the Jews of Western Europe, specifically the French. He had joined the movement not for the hundred thousand Jews of his native land, but rather as an answer to the question of “What shall we do with millions of our brethren in Eastern Europe who have been ground down by their misery?” All the ambiguity, the eccentricity, of Lazare’s Zionism is summed up when he told the journalist that “As I see a future for them in Zion, I am a Zionist.”
The first task before Zionism, he told the interviewer, was to “form our masses into a Jewish people. It is therefore our duty, besides attending to colonization, to attend to the education of our people.” It is worth noting that unlike many early Zionists, Lazare was not Ashkenaz-centric. He spoke regularly of the sufferings and pogroms inflicted on the Jews of Algeria, who had been French citizens since the promulgation of the Crémieux Decree in 1870. In Basel he insisted that the proceedings be published not only into German but also into French — not for the Jews of the metropole but because “the Jews of Morocco and Algeria need us to bring them the consolation of Zionism.”
Yet Lazare was not convinced that the Zionist movement as it was constructed could bring that consolation to anyone but the bourgeoisie. Basel was the only Zionist conference he ever attended. (They were annual events until 1901.) He rejected the program developed at the congress as “a program of a faction of the bourgeois Jewish intellectuals, which in no way responds to the reality, to the situation of the Jewish people and its needs.”
Lazare’s opposition to the Zionist movement of Herzl began with his opposition to a bank to be established to support colonization. He was opposed less to the bank itself than to its centrality in Herzl’s thinking. The mobilization of the Jewish proletarian masses was Lazare’s aim, not the gathering of funds from wealthy supporters. He wrote to Herzl in February 1899 that “you are bourgeois in thought, sentiments, and ideas; bourgeois in social concepts. Being so, you want to lead a people, our people, a poor people, an unfortunate people, proletarians.” Herzl and the movement wanted to rule the Jewish people from on high, “in an authoritarian fashion.” Lazare accused Herzl of wanting “to lead them where you think is best for them. . . . You want to set a herd on the march.”
Lazare had been elected to the presidium of the movement as well as to its action committee, but this spell among the leadership was not fated to last. Along with the bank, Herzl’s entourage displeased Lazare, but even more Lazare found Herzl’s imploring the aid of the world’s autocratic rulers abhorrent. He resigned his official posts in the movement in early 1899, and when the fifth congress of the movement, in December 1901, paid homage to the Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid, it was the last straw. In an article published in the review Pro Armenia, Lazare let loose: “The representatives — or at least those who call themselves such — of the most ancient of persecuted peoples, those whose history can only be written in blood, sent their greetings to the worst of assassins.” Their degradation could not be worse: “This people, covered in the blood of its wounds, is thrown at the feet of this Sultan covered in the blood of others, yet in this assembly not a single protest echoed.” Herzl was clearly the subject of his reproach that “still today the descendants [of the Jews of the past] follow a man and ignore the means employed. . . . Yesterday [the leaders] placed the Jews at the feet of Kaiser Wilhelm; today they make them kneel before the Sultan; tomorrow they will have them lay flat on their bellies before the Tsar, and we will have the beautiful and grand spectacle of slaves licking the whip of the master.” The anarchist Lazare could not accept this. It was not enough to obtain foreign support and land. “For the task, the great task to be accomplished, is that of the intellectual and moral regeneration of the Jewish people.”
Herzl and his allies, with their realpolitik, were incapable of fulfilling this role. They were wed to “a politics of the ghetto, of serfs, worthy of those who walk hand in hand with the most fanatical rabbis of Galicia, Russia and Poland.” All forms of superstition must be abandoned. “It’s necessary to wrest them from their economic slavery. And the day of their liberation they will be able to freely dispose of their destiny.” In a letter to Chaim Weizmann, Lazare vented his spleen against what his entire life he viewed as a factor inhibiting Jewish liberation, again in tones strongly reminiscent of his peculiar modern Karaism. “I am convinced that the essential task is, above all, that of liberating the Jewish people, but especially liberating it from its internal obstacles. . . . The Jews must be taught to think, they must be wrested from ritualistic and Talmudic superstitions. . . . They must be shown that the very basis of Judaism is rationalist thought. We must extirpate from their minds all false Jewish belief as well as the Christian prejudices which have encumbered those who have escaped depressing rabbinism.”
Lazare did not abandon Zionism, though. He remained an independent Zionist, and most of all a defender of his fellow Jews. As he remarked in his final letter to Herzl, announcing his resignation from the established movement, “If I separate myself from you, I don’t separate myself from the Jewish people, from my people of proletarians and beggars, and it is for their liberation that I will continue to work, though by roads that are not yours.” Lazare the anarchist, the internationalist, and the universalist never entirely disappeared. This was made clear in the series of articles that he wrote in 1902 for the newspaper L’Aurore and, more importantly, for Charles Péguy’s Cahiers de la quinzaine (with whom he was close from the time of the Dreyfus Affair) under the general heading of “The Oppression of the Jews of Eastern Europe: The Jews of Romania.” The article, which also appeared as a pamphlet, was written before Lazare visited the country. When he later did, he was greeted as a hero.
If ever there was a situation that would appeal to a Zionist of the time, it was that of the Jews of Romania. Treated as foreigners in their own land, left to their own fate by other countries, already emigrating en masse, Lazare did not present Zionism at the end of this grim portrait of Romanian Jewry, which, alongside Russian Jewry, he regarded as the most oppressed.. Instead Lazare saw the only hope in a classically left-wing solution. “If tomorrow [the government] prepares to attack the rural workers, it will ignite the flame. Perhaps if it causes the Jews to despair, if it pushes them to the limit, the latter, despite their passivity, despite the counsels of the timorous rich, will unite with the workers of the fields and will assist it in shaking off their yoke. But even if they don’t join, it is the rebellious peasant who will, directly or indirectly, resolve the current Jewish question by freeing itself and liberating the Jew.”
Until the end of his days Lazare was torn by the tension between a socialism built by Jews where they currently lived and a socialism built in the Jewish homeland. At around the same time as his article on Romania, Lazare, in an article on Russia, wrote that “there will doubtless only be a cure in the midst of a general cure. Jews will only be free when the countries will be [sic] free.” But in 1900 he averred that “I am convinced that Judaism can only free itself from its slavery by emancipating itself as a nation and not by seeking a vain emancipation in the countries in which the Jews live. . . . Judaism must everywhere organize in a national proletarian party.” Lazare’s final work speaks eloquently of the contradictions that animated his radicalism.
Left unfinished at the time of his death, Le Fumier de Job, or Job’s Dungheap, incorporates the ideas that Lazare developed across all the periods of his life. (An English translation was published by Hannah Arendt at Schocken Books in 1948.) The short volume is written with poetic flair, harkening back to Lazare’s Symbolist days. It is militantly proletarian, a final nod to his anarchism. But it is also and centrally Jewish in a religious and socially radical way. Lazare said of himself that he was “orthodox in nothing.” This work is proof of that.
Job’s Dungheap is a thumb in the eye of the Christian world, a case not just for the right of Jews to live like any other people but also an uncompromising argument for the nullity of Christianity. Even more, it is explicit in its expression of the superiority of Judaism over Christianity. For Lazare, Judaism is not a religion, it is a form of superiority. Judaism, he says, “can be considered, not as a religion, not as a nationality, (so many diverse peoples are Jews), but as a discipline of the mind, as a concept of the world superior to the Christian discipline and concept.” He is nothing if not candid. And there is more. “The Jew consoled himself for his social abjection by recognizing himself to be intellectually superior and by inventing a thousand adventures in which his adversaries recognize his intellectual superiority.” Judaism is, in its very essence, modern, owing to the reason for its superiority: “The torch of rationalism in Israel has not gone out for an instant.” (Historically speaking, this is not remotely the whole story.) Judaism is therefore an element of progress, for “what has allowed the Jew to do better, to have a social influence, is that he has maintained the idea of justice with the hope of realizing it in this world, something Jesus put off until the millennium.” In any case, Christianity “is unable to understand justice, for it is founded on a monstrous injustice, since for [the Christian] the death of the Innocent One led God to pardon the guilty, since his justice was in this way satisfied.” His distance from actually existing Judaism notwithstanding, the idea of Judaism loomed very large in Lazare’s eccentric and intensely moral view of the world.
Job’s Dungheap is also a brutal examination of antisemitism. Lazare still maintains that “the religious factor is [its] basis;” that “the religious passion has always needed economic reasons as an auxiliary factor. But when these reasons are born religious passion and prejudices aggravate them.” “Every Christian is profoundly antisemitic,” he declares. He warns his co-religionists, “Jew, you will never know the hatred for you hidden in the soul of Christians, venom reheated for two thousand years in the darkest corners of the mind, poisons distilled for centuries in the spirit, ferments of scorn, leavenings of disgust and horror, all that sleeps and is being awakened.”
Lazare’s analysis of antisemitism had been deepened and simplified by the experience of the Dreyfus Affair and his studies of the experience of Eastern European Jewry. He still maintains that “the wealthy provoke antisemitism for which the poor suffer. They are at least the pretext.” But he adds that “antisemitism is a form of Christian hypocrisy. The Christian is cleansed by attributing his vices to the Jews.” This attribution of their own sins to Jews is a key idea in Job’s Dungheap. Any trait attributed by antisemites to Jews is actually a Christian trait: “Filth is Christian, it was never Jewish.” The claim of Jewish ritual murder is simply a Christian way of deflecting Christian thirst for blood as manifested in their art. The Christian spirit is mired in petty subjects, for “a religion where one wonders if the Word was resurrected with or without its foreskin has no right to mock Talmudic subtleties.” This is why the Jew is better able to grasp science, since he does not have to “cleanse his spirt of antirational dogmas, those of the Trinity and the Eucharist for example.”
The delicacy and saintliness for which Péguy and others admired Lazare appears to have abandoned him here. Filth is human. But Jew-hatred signifies something else for Lazare, and shows him overturning his original view of the universality of antisemitism. This hatred is now evidence of something positive, a cruel honor: “To be hated in this way by all of humankind, one must bear something grand within oneself.”
Zion is the solution, but a Zion in keeping with Lazare’s revolutionary vision. “Go to Zion to be exploited by rich Jews? How does this differ from the present situation? That’s what you are proposing to us? The patriotic joy of being exploited by being those of the same race?” Despite this, Zion is still the way out. The Jew must “leave his brothers in habits, mores, and customs, and go to those from whom you have been separated for years, whose faces and language are foreign to you. And yet, one must go there to guide them down the path that we, more fortunate, have gone down.”
Lazare began to feel run down as the twentieth century began. His friends and comrades attributed this to his overwork during the height of the Dreyfus wars, but this wasn’t the case. He was suffering from stomach cancer, and surgery performed by his physician brother was unavailing. He died in Nîmes on September 1, 1903.
In February 1905, Pierre Quillard, a writer and childhood friend of Lazare, spoke of the need for a monument honoring his late friend. The following year, after Dreyfus’ rehabilitation, a subscription for the monument was opened, and a total of 21,384.85 francs was contributed.The monument, close to ninetee feet tall, featured a bust of Lazare with a woman bearing a torch below. The inauguration was scheduled for October 5, 1908, but anti-Dreyfus forces had not given up the fight. In June 1908, a member of L’Action française fired on Dreyfus at the ceremony of the transference of Zola’s ashes to the Panthéon. The inauguration of the Lazare monument gave them further cause for upset, and the far right held a demonstration in the city against the “statue of dung.”
On July 14, 1909 the statue was vandalized by a man who swung a hammer at the bust and broke off its nose. The figure remained in this damaged state, and during World War II it was covered in antisemitic graffiti then taken down and stored in a museum in Nîmes. At the end of the war it was not restored it to its original location, and the monument was finally confiscated from the museum and its material was reused for a statue honoring the city’s liberation. For a long while, history committed the forgetting that Lazare had feared. But last December an exact replica of the monument was erected in precisely the spot the original once stood.
