Quite how villainous, Barrès could not have anticipated: the enormity of the Holocaust lay in the future and was beyond anyone's imagination. "After the Nazi genocide," wrote the historian Stephen Wilson, "the endemic prejudice of non-Jews against Jews has assumed a monstrously inhuman dimension that has unbalanced the study of the Affair." As a result, it has been too readily assumed that all the anti-Dreyfusard intellectuals were anti-Semites and all the Dreyfusard intellectuals free from anti-Semitic prejudices.
Certainly, the prolific and popular novelist Gyp (the pen name of Gabrielle de Mirabeau, Comtesse de Martel de Janville) conformed to type. An ardent anti-Dreyfusard who gave her profession in a court case as "anti-Semite", she quarrelled with her Jewish publisher Calman-Levy over the Jewish stereotypes in some of her fiction. However, the anti-Dreyfusard Paul Bourget mocks the anti-Semitic prejudices of Catholics in his novel Mensonges (translated as Our Lady of Lies). In this the heroine Suzanne, in her campaign to seduce a young writer, says of her husband Paul:
"You will find him a charming man. He is not much taken with art, but he has great business capacity. Unfortunately we live in a period when it is necessary to be of Israel to rise very high." Jew-hating was, it may well be believed, quite foreign to Suzanne, who reckoned among her pleasant functions two or three dinners in Jewish mansions where the hospitality was princely, but she thought that phrase would complete the religious tone she wished to give herself in the young man's eyes.
Among the Dreyfusard authors, a charge of creating derogatory Jewish stereotypes is most plausibly made against Zola himself. In his novel L'Argent, a drama based on the collapse of the Union Générale Bank in 1882, Zola has a rascally gentile financier, Saccard (based on Eugène Bontoux), as its principal protagonist. When his bank collapses, Saccard blames the Jewish banker, Gunderman (supposedly based on Baron James de Rothschild). "As Saccard ascended the broad stone staircase," wrote Zola,
he felt an inextinguishable hatred for this man rising within him. Ah! the Jew! Against the Jew he harboured all the old racial resentment, to be found especially in the South of France; and it was something like a revolt of his very flesh, a repugnance of the skin, which, at the idea of the slightest contact, filled him with disgust and anger, a sensation which no reasoning could allay, which he was quite unable to overcome.He indicted the whole Hebrew race, the cursed race without a country, without a prince, which lives as a parasite upon the nations, pretending to recognise their laws, but in reality only obeying its Jehovah — its God of robbery, blood, and wrath; and he pointed to it fulfilling on all sides the mission of ferocious conquest which this God has assigned to it, establishing itself among every people, like a spider in the centre of its web, in order to watch its prey, to suck the blood of one and all, to fatten itself by devouring others...
"There is a strong Jewish element in this story," wrote Ernest Alfred Vizetelly in the introduction to his 1894 English translation of L'Argent, "and here and there some very unpleasant things are said of the chosen people. It should be remembered, however, that these remarks are the remarks of M. Zola's characters and not of M. Zola himself." But is this true? The group of "hawker-brokers" trading in the shares of defunct companies in the street outside the Paris stock-exchange, are described not by Saccard but by Zola as
an unclean Jewry...gathered in a tumultuous group — fat, shining faces, withered profiles like those of voracious birds, an extraordinary assemblage of typical noses, all drawn together as by a prey, all eagerly, angrily disputing, with guttural shouts, and seemingly ready to devour one another.
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