In the Context of His Times

From the very moment Alfred Dreyfus was placed under arrest for treason and espionage, his entire world was turned upside down, and for the next five years he lived in what he called a phantasmagoria. To keep himself sane, Dreyfus wrote letters to and received letters from his wife Lucie and exercised his intellect through reading the few books and magazines his censors allowed him, writing essays on these and other texts he had read in the past, and working out problems in mathematics, physics, and chemistry. He practiced his English and created strange drawings his prison wardens called architectural or kabbalistic signs. In this volume, Norman Simms explores how Dreyfus kept himself from exploding into madness by reading his essays carefully, placing them in the context of his century, and extrapolating from them the hidden recesses of the Jewish Alsatian background he shared with the Dreyfus family and Lucie Hadamard.

Norman Simms (PhD Washington University) is associate professor in the department of humanties and English at the University of Waikato in Hamilton, New Zealand. He is the author of Festival of Laughter, Blood and Justice in Biblical and Classica Literature, 2007, Marranos on the Moradas: Secret Jews and Penitentes in the Southwestern United States from 1590-1890, 2009, and Alfred Dreyfus: Man, Milieu, Mentality, and Midrash, 2011.

Raymond Apple:
“This is a remarkable, stimulating and indeed paradigmatic book. . . . The work is well worth reading and utterly absorbing. . . . Simms has succeeded in the task he set himself – ‘to tease (Dreyfus) out from his various writings.’”

The striking feature of this volume of Norman Simms’ trilogy on Alfred Dreyfus is the approach the author has adopted. He decodes Dreyfus’s letters and cahiers (prison work books), written under duress and censorship on Devil’s Island, in a most skilful way so that the reader is led to grapple with the texts and to perceive them in a new light. The work offers a fascinating portrayal of Dreyfus as a lover and family man, intellectual and poet, scientist and Jew.

Norman Simms' new book on Dreyfus is a truly inspiring piece of scholarship. In particular, Simms shows the importance of Dreyfus' relationship to his wife and his being Jewish. Finally, I love Norman Simms' intellectual curiosity and his analysis of mentality rather than simple facts. A must read for those who want to learn more about Alfed Dreyfus, antisemitism in France and antisemites who didn't want to kill all Jews at once (like Balzac).