Entr'acte: Is the Dreyfus Affair over, or under a new name?

One hundred years ago this month, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a French-Jewish army officer who had spent five years on Devil's Island for high treason and another seven years trying to clear his name, was absolved by France's Supreme Court. A few days later, he was reinstated into the army, promoted to lieutenant colonel and given the Légion d'honneur. The Dreyfus Affair, which deeply divided France and sparked a vicious wave of anti-Semitism, was finally over. Or was it?

In practice, many anti-Dreyfusards - nationalists, army officers, fervent Catholics and assorted bigots - refused to accept Dreyfus's innocence. The Catholic daily La Croix lamented "the traitor's reintegration into the army."

Dreyfus himself left the army in 1907, rejoined it during World War I, then led a fairly uneventful life until his death in 1935. Yet, only five years later, during the German occupation of France, anti- Semitism became official policy as the collaborationist Vichy regime helped to deport 76,000 Jews, including Dreyfus's granddaughter, to Nazi death camps.

Now, on the centenary of Dreyfus's acquittal, the affair is again being remembered here.

Some 15 related books have been published or reissued. The Supreme Court has held a daylong seminar celebrating its decision July 12, 1906, to overrule a military court's scandalous 1899 guilty verdict. And the Museum of the Art and History of Judaism in Paris is presenting a show, "Alfred Dreyfus: The Fight for Justice," through Oct. 1.

Yet, while this anniversary once again underlines the lessons of history, it is also regrettably topical: in the view of many French Jews, anti-Semitism is again on the rise here.

This time, however, it is not a resurgence of the anti-Semitism that has long scarred European history: it is not that of the Middle Ages, the Dreyfus Affair, World War II or even the cynical minimizing of the Holocaust by the extreme rightist leader Jean- Marie Le Pen in the 1980s. Rather, a new form of anti-Semitism is now alarming France's 600,000 Jews.

By all accounts, children of Arab immigrants in France increasingly view Jews as their enemy. This anti- Semitism has its roots in hostility toward Israel dating from 1948, but it has also been aggravated by the continuing Israeli-Palestinian conflict and even post-9/11 tensions between the West and Islam. At the same time, some unemployed youths of Arab and African extraction have simply made Jews scapegoats for their anger at French society.

Attacks on and threats to Jews and Jewish property have escalated since 2000, but quite the most shocking incident was the kidnapping and murder of a 23-year-old French Jew, Ilan Halimi, in February. And, in what appeared to be the transfer of ancient prejudices to a new social group, the leader of the kidnap gang said Halimi was chosen because Jews are wealthy.

In a sense, then, today's Dreyfus Affair is the Halimi case. And both illustrate how easily a formally civilized society can slide into uncivilized behavior.