From Dreyfus to Today
By Allison Galloway-Gonzalez, Curator
The Frisch Family Holocaust Memorial Gallery at LJD Jewish Family & Community Services (JFCS) Jacksonville is proud to present “Fighting Antisemitism: From Dreyfus to Today,” opening on September 3rd. A landmark travelling exhibition from the Wiener Holocaust Library in London, one of the world’s foremost institutions dedicated to the documentation of the Holocaust and Nazi persecution, this is the exhibition’s American debut, and Jacksonville is its first home in the United States.
The exhibition takes its name and its starting point from one of the most consequential miscarriages of justice in modern European history. In October 1894, Alfred Dreyfus, a captain in the French army and the son of a Jewish textile manufacturer from Alsace was arrested on charges of selling military secrets to Germany. The evidence against him was thin, the proceedings irregular, and the verdict swift: guilty of treason, sentenced to life imprisonment, and publicly stripped of his rank in a ceremony designed to humiliate. He was sent to Devil’s Island, a penal colony off the coast of South America, where he would spend years in solitary confinement maintaining his innocence.
What made the Dreyfus Affair so significant was not simply that an innocent man had been condemned. It was the machinery behind the condemnation. The antisemitic French press, led by the newspaper La Libre Parole, had turned Dreyfus into a symbol and even proof, they claimed, of the inherent disloyalty of French Jews. When new evidence emerged pointing to another officer as the real spy, the French military suppressed it. It took 12 years, the intervention of writer Émile Zola with his famous open letter, “J’Accuse,” and the sustained organizing of a broad coalition of civil society figures before Dreyfus was finally exonerated in 1906 and reinstated to the army.
