This seminar will focus on the history, literature, and art of the Dreyfus Affair, the near civil war to which France was brought at the end of the nineteenth century by the struggle to reverse the guilty verdict against an innocent officer, of Jewish origin, delivered in a secret military trial for treason. It will study the emergence of the European "intellectual" during the Affair and the birth of political Zionism, widely regarded as one of its offshoots. An effort will be made to situate the Affair in two interpretive contexts: was it the second act in a two-act drama that began with the scandal attending France's failed attempt, before the United States stepped in, to build a Panama Canal, or was it, with its anti-semitic riots in every major French city in 1898, a "dress rehearsal" for the Holocaust? On the horizon: an assessment of recent efforts to interpret the situation of American detainees in Guantánamo in light of the ordeal of Dreyfus, imprisoned not that far away on Devil's Island.

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