‘Alfred Dreyfus: The Man at the Center of the Affair’
By Maurice Samuels
Yale University Press, 224 pages

The writer Solomon Rabinovich, known by his pen name of Sholem Aleichem, once observed that “Paris will not experience until Judgment Day” the “anguish and pain that Kasrileveke underwent” as a result of the Dreyfus Affair. That a fictional shtetl could undergo convulsions expected of the eschaton because of the fate of an artillery officer in the French army underscores that Dreyfus’s fate is, in another age of war against the Jews, a warning.