164 Maurice Samuels: Jewish Assimilation, Integration and the Dreyfus Affair (JP)

Feb 5, 2026

Maurice Samuels, historian and director of Yale’s antisemitism program, discusses French Jewish life and his new biography of Alfred Dreyfus. He traces Dreyfus’s trial and exile, the role of Zola and public intellectuals, and distinctions between assimilation and integration in France. The conversation also covers laïcité, Léon Blum’s rise, and how debates over French identity echo into modern politics.

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INSIGHT

Jewishness Central To The Dreyfus Story

Maurice Samuels argues the Jewish dimension of the Dreyfus Affair has been underemphasized in scholarship.
He says Jewishness was rarely the central focus despite being crucial to understanding the case.

ANECDOTE

The Dreyfus Family's Long Fight

Samuels recounts the basic Dreyfus narrative: a false conviction in 1894, exile to Devil's Island, and eventual pardon then exoneration.
He highlights Emile Zola's J'accuse and the family's persistent efforts to prove Alfred's innocence.

INSIGHT

Jews As Metaphor For Modernity

Samuels explains Jews became a metaphor for modernity and were attacked as symbols of capitalist modern life.
He traces this to anti-Semitic works like Edouard Drumont's La France Juive, which targeted individual Jews and modernity.

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When it comes to the condition of Jews in Christian Europe, France was long known as the haven and heartland of integration and of toleration. And yet when things seemed to be going well for Jews in Western Europe and North America generally and France especially, the infamous fin de siècle Dreyfus affair brought to the surface some of the worst kinds of bigotry and animus--like contemporaneous Russian pogroms a premonition of the deadly looming revival of ethnic or religious divisions that had seemed a thing of the past.

Our guest today, historian Maurice Samuels, author of many fine books on French history (Inventing the Israelite: Jewish Fiction in Nineteenth-Century France (2010), and The Right to Difference: French Universalism and the Jews (2016))and director of the Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism has written a crackerjack new book. Alfred Dreyfus: The Man at the Center of the Affair, (Yale 2024) has written a wonderful account of Dreyfus himself and how should we understand what that turmoil has ot tell us how Jews then (and perhaps today) coexisted with a mainstream secular Christian society either by way of assimilation or (not quite the same thing) by peaceful integration that preserved cultural distinctions.

The discussion ranges widely, setting the scene in the prior centuries when Jews settled all over France, and then were accorded unusual rights by the universalist vision of the French Revolution. Maurie also explains why succeeding generations in France included the ascension not only of Leon Blum the Jewish socialist (and inventor of the weekend!) who improbably led anti-fascist France during in the 1930's--but also the other Jews who followed him as political leaders in France, right up to the present-day.

From Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) forward, Maurie shows, intellectuals have missed the significance of the way Dreyfus and his family integrated without assimilating. The conversation culminating in Maurie introducing John to the fascinating "Franco-French War" about what that coexistence should look like: assimilation which presumes the disappearance of a distinctive Jewish cultural identity, or integration which posits the peaceful coexistence of French citizens of various religions and cultures.

Mentioned in the episode

Karl Marx, "On the Jewish Question" (1844)
George Eliot's (perhaps philosemitic) Daniel Deronda (1876)
Why does Yale have a Hebrew motto, אורים ותומים (light and perfection)?
The Haitian Revolution in its triumphs and tribulations is an analogy that helps explain jewish Emancipation--and also in some ways a tragic counterexample.
The horrifying Great Replacement Theory we have heard so much about in America (eg in Charlottesville in 2017) began in France; Maurie has some thoughts about that.
Michael Burns, Dreyfus: A Family Affair.
America's racial "one drop" rule.
Pierre Birnbaum, Leon Blum: Prime Minister, Socialist, Zionist (Yale, 2015)
Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time.

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