Background
Bom in Nîmes, Lazare came from an assimilated French-Jewish family of Sephardic origin.
Bom in Nîmes, Lazare came from an assimilated French-Jewish family of Sephardic origin.
He moved in 1886 to Paris, where he studied at the Sorbonne.
Lazare soon became part of Parisian literary life and by the early 1890s was already a leading literary critic of the symbolist movement, expressing his belief that literature should be a tool of social justice. He also published volumes of symbolist poetry. His convictions led him to the anarchist and socialist movements in the framework of which he wrote articles in a number of periodicals.
These later formed the basis of his book Anti-Semitism: Its History and Causes (in French, 1894, English translation, 1903).
French Israélite was hated because he was Jewish and that anti-Semitism was growing from day to day. He published an anti-Drumont booklet, Anli-sémitisme et révolution in 1895 and wrote extensively in the press attacking anti-Semitism. in When Dreyfus was sentenced, Lazare did not at in first doubt his guilt, but he was shaken by the way the trial was exploited to whip up anti-Semitism, of even against the assimilated Jews. He claimed that Drumont and his supporters threatened the basic rights of man by seeking to deprive Jews from their freedom and to restore the medieval ghetto.
By 1895, when Dreyfus’s brother turned to Lazare for support, Lazare was already beginning to doubt the justice of the verdict. He found the relevant documents, reexamined the testimony, and by consulting handwriting experts was able to prove that evidence had been forged and that Id I Dreyfus was the victim of a conspiracy. Lazare published several booklets on the case in an attempt to demonstrate Dreyfus’s innocence. He d If realized that the case was not only a legal injustice but a conspiracy against the republic.
Now realizing that assimilation, like emancipation, could not solve the Jewish problem, Lazare, in 1897 adopted a nationalistic position and in 1898 founded a Zionist journal. He participated in the Second Zionist Congress. Later he was to become disillusioned by Theodor Herzl’s autocratic behavior and emphasis on diplomacy. Lazare’s fellow French Jews were embarrassed by his campaign against anti-Semitism. They preferred passivity and relied on French liberal principles to protect them. Eventually Lazare was ostracized by the French Jewish community.
Lazare continued to fight for Jewish cmancipation and traveled extensively in the Balkans and eastern Europe.
His last years were spent in poverty and loneliness. In his writings he attacked the rich Jews as responsible for holding back Jewish national emancipation.
This spurious doctrine [assimilation] far from ensuring the security and prosperity of the Jews, has undermined the foundations of their existance.
It has left them powerless and incapable of self-defense as soon as they become the focal point of Gentile hatred. Assimilation has corrupted French Jewry, destroying the natural sentiment of solidarity with their less fortunate brethren... eroding traditional virtues and substituting the modern vices of mercenary egoism and callous indifference.
Bernard Lazare
Quotes from others about the person
Charles Péguy credited Lazare in his essays as having taken a leading role in the Dreyfus affair. “In this great crisis he wrote the prophet of both Israel and the world was Bernard Lazare.”
"He had a heart which bled in Rumania and in Hungary, everywhere the Jew is persecuted, which is, in a certain sense, everywhere."