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Throughout history, anti-Semitism has been a reoccurring problem in which the Dreyfus Affair was an

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Throughout history, anti-Semitism has been a reoccurring problem in which the Dreyfus Affair was an important event. The Dreyfus Affair was a political scandal, which divided France from the 1890's to the early 1900's. It was a very important event in history. 1894 marked the start of a revolution for Jewish people, as a French-Jewish artillery officer, Captain Alfred Dreyfus was accused of treason (Isseroff). The accusations against Dreyfus were false all because he was a Jew. Following his accusation Dreyfus accumulated many followers that became known as Dreyfusards and there were also those who were against him called anti-Dreyfusards (Drefler). Alfred Dreyfus was born into an upper middle class on October 9th 1859 in Mulhouse, …show more content…

He was convicted of treason by court martial in December 1894 and sentenced to life imprisonment in solitary confinement on Devil's Island, a prison off the coast of French Guiana (Derfler). Before his deportation to Guiana he was publicly degraded and humiliated. This false conviction was based on a list called the bordereau, which contained admission to secret French military information (Dreyfus). This list was picked out of the garbage pail of Maximilian Von Schwartzkoppen, a German military attach in Paris (Johnson). Many years passed before the truth was uncovered, Dreyfus was innocent and although false information was used he was an easy target because the writing in the bordereau matched his handwriting and the information came from an artillery officer (Johnson). In 1899, Alfred Dreyfus was granted a presidential pardon and it is unwritten that he had committed treason against Dragnev 3 France (Martin). It was a matter of life or death because Dreyfus feared that he would not survive the well-known penal colony. The bordereau looked to connect an artillery officer since it intended access to specific information regarding a new French artillery weapon called the Modele 1890 120mm Banquet howitzer (Read). Along with the fact that Dreyfus was a highly skilled artillery officer, he was

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