Color illustration of the 2nd Dreyfus court martial trial

Alfred Dreyfus (1859-1935) was born in Mulhouse, France to a wealthy Jewish textile manufacturing family. Dreyfus decided to pursue a military career, and by 1889 he had risen to the rank of captain in the French army and was assigned to the War Ministry. In 1894 Dreyfus was accused of selling French military secrets to the Germans, and he was arrested on October 15. Based on unsubstantiated and fabricated evidence Dreyfus was convicted of treason by a military court-martial on December 22, and sentenced to life imprisonment in the Devils Island penal colony. He was then publicly stripped of his rank and insignia medals, while an angry crowd yelled antisemitic slurs at him. Antisemitic publications, and much of the larger French populace, used Dreyfus as a symbol of the disloyalty of all French Jews. Lieutenant Colonel Georges Picquart, head of the French military intelligence service, was unconvinced of Dreyfus’s guilt, and continued investigating the affair. He uncovered evidence that Major Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy was the true traitor, but the army ignored this information and removed Picquart from his post. Esterhazy was brought before a court martial, but was acquitted almost immediately. Following this acquittal, Émile Zola, a prominent author and journalist, wrote a letter titled “J’Accuse,” in which he accused the French Army of covering up its unjust conviction of Dreyfus. Zola was charged with libel, and the Dreyfus Affair grew into a national political crisis. In 1898, Major Hubert Joseph Henry admitted to forging the documents that proved Dreyfus’s guilt, and Esterhazy fled the country in panic. Esterhazy finally admitted to his crimes in exile. Following these events, Dreyfus was brought back to France for a retrial in August 1899, but was found guilty again and sentenced to another 10 years in prison. The verdict was met with outrage around the world, and there were threats to boycott the World’s Fair in Paris in 1900. The president of the republic offered Dreyfus a pardon to end the crisis, which he accepted. In 1906, a civilian court of appeals officially cleared Dreyfus and reversed all previous convictions. Following a bill passed by parliament, he was then formally reinstated into the army, where he attained the rank of major before retiring to the reserves. Dreyfus was recalled to active service in World War I, and commanded an ammunition column as a lieutenant colonel. The army finally publicly declared his innocence in 1995.

The Katz Ehrenthal Collection is a collection of more than 900 objects depicting Jews and antisemitic and anti-Jewish propaganda from the medieval to the modern era, in Europe, Russia, and the United States. The collection was amassed by Peter Ehrenthal, a Romanian Holocaust survivor, to document the pervasive history of anti-Jewish hatred in Western art, politics and popular culture. It includes crude folk art as well as pieces created by Europe's finest craftsmen, prints and periodical illustrations, posters, paintings, decorative art, and toys and everyday household items decorated with depictions of stereotypical Jewish figures.

The illustration was donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2016 by the Katz Family.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, Gift of the Katz Family

Funding Note: The cataloging of this artifact has been supported by a grant from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.