Abstract

Utilizing perspectives from Hannah Arendt, Karl Marx, and Bruno Bauer among others, this article addresses the evolving representations of antisemitism in films depicting the Dreyfus Affair. Ranging over 120 years, from George Méliès’s L’affaire Dreyfus [The Dreyfus Affair] film serial (1899) to Roman Polanski’s An Officer and a Spy (2019), the filmmakers under review portray specific episodes of the Affair to suggest fluctuating interpretations for Dreyfus’s imprisonment and its lasting historical impact. I propose the films of the Affair engage in varying degrees with the highly contested “Jewish Question”—heatedly debated amongst philosophers and sociologists in fin-de-siècle Europe—regarding Jews’ struggles integrating as an “out-group” into European modernity. In particular, Dreyfus’s Jewish identity is steadily incorporated more into these films, along with the overarching military-governmental conspiracy that unjustly imprisoned him. Over decades, the films slowly examine how antisemitism became not just a racist dog-whistle during the Affair, but a distinctly modern, politically expedient ideology which gave the gentile core-group in the French army justification for their relentless pursuit of power and crushing of dissent.