Alfred Dreyfus
Man, Milieu, Mentality and Midrash
Published on 1. February 2013
Book
Paperback/Softback
414 pages
978-1-61811-293-4 (ISBN)
Description
This groundbreaking book focuses on Alfred Dreyfus the man, emphasizing his personal writings, including his recently published prison workbooks and 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 loyalties, 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.
Reviews / Votes
"Prof. Simms's forte is, of course, the manner in which he "midrashes" Dreyfus's notebooks from Devil's Island. Drawing from the rabbinical technique of analysis, Simms connects it with the kind of hallucination, or phantasmagoria (those were the years of Georges Melies), that was experienced by Dreyfus, while he also notes, after Gabriel Tarde, what an "interpsychic" experience the Affair was since both sides imitated each other in utter confusion....Simms tries, in this first volume of a series of three, to recapture the man as he emerged from the Affair. He does so considerately and effectively."-Prof. Norbert Col Universite de Bretagne-Sud France|"This is a remarkable book and sheds light on a Dreyfus that I and certainly many others did not know."-Dr Murray Kaplan FloridaMore details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Brighton
United States
Dimensions
Height: 234 mm
Width: 156 mm
ISBN-13
978-1-61811-293-4 (9781618112934)
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Schweitzer Classification
Person
Norman Simms (PhD Washington University) is associate professor in the Department of HUmanities and English at the University of Waikato in Hamilton, New Zealand. He is the author of Festivals of Laughter: Blood and Justice in Biblical and Classical Literature (2007), Marranos on the Moradas: Secret Jews and Penitentes in the Southwestern United States from 1590-1890 (2009), and Alfred Dreyfus: Man, Milieu, Mentality, and Midrash (2011).