Simms, Norman,

Alfred Dreyfus : Man, Milieu, Mentality and Midrash / Norman Simms. - Boston, MA : Academic Studies Press, [2020] ©2011 - 1 online resource (336 p.) - Reference Library of Jewish Intellectual History .

Frontmatter -- Table of Contents -- Prologue -- Chapter One: Introduction -- Chapter Two: Bodies of Evidence -- Chapter Three: The Phantasmagoria of a Secular Midrash -- Epilogue -- Bibliography -- Index

Open Access https://purl.org/coar/access_right/c_abf2

This groundbreaking book focuses on Alfred Dreyfus the man, with emphasis placed on his own writings, including his recently published prison workbooks and his letters to his wife Lucie. Through close reading of these documents, a much more sensitive, intellectual, and Jewish man is revealed than was previously suspected. He and Lucie, through their family connections and mutual loyalty, were interested in and supported the artistic, scientific, philosophical and historical movements that formed their Parisian milieu. But as an Alsatian Jew, Alfred was also critical of many aspects of technological and ideological developments, making his mentality one of skepticism as well as idealism. Norman Simms addresses the way Dreyfus perceived the world, challenged many of its assumptions and contextualized it in the style of a rabbinical midrash, a process that created what Alfred called a “phantasmagoria” of the Affair that bears his name, and also interprets the man, his milieu and his mentality in the style of a midrash, a creative, transformative reading.


Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.


This eBook is made available Open Access under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license:


In English.

9781644693254

10.1515/9781644693254 doi


HISTORY / Europe / Western.