From Dreyfus to the digital age: how antisemitic conspiracies spread

In one of the most disturbing images from the era of the Dreyfus Affair, the French Jewish Army Officer Alfred Dreyfus is depicted as a monstrous hydra, with multiple snake-like heads emerging from his body. The image, part of a series of antisemitic posters published at the height of the Affair, presents Dreyfus not only as a traitor, but as the embodiment of a sinister Jewish conspiracy threatening the French nation.

More than 120 years since Dreyfus was finally exonerated, the image remains unsettlingly familiar. The conspiracy theories, dehumanising imagery, and false accusations that circulated during the Affair, as explored in The Wiener Holocaust Library’s latest exhibition, J’Accuse! Press, Polemic, and the Dreyfus Affair, have striking parallels with forms of antisemitism that continue today.

In 1894, Dreyfus was falsely convicted of passing French military secrets to Germany. Stripped of his rank and sentenced to imprisonment on Devil’s Island, he became the centre of a political and social crisis that divided France for more than a decade. His Jewish identity was central to the campaign against him.

Dreyfus’s detractors, known as ‘anti-Dreyfusards’, amplified their assertions of his guilt through the use of antisemitic images and rhetoric, particularly in forms that implicated Dreyfus in a Jewish plot to the undermine France and the Christian character of the French nation.

Such was the salience of antisemitic ideas in France at this time that a journal, Psst…! was established, entirely devoted to satirical antisemitic coverage of the Affair. In one image, a stereotypical figure of a Jew is seen with a mask of Émile Zola, the prominent French author whose pro-Dreyfus open letter, ‘J’accuse…!’ gives our exhibition its title, and the mask controlled by a Prussian military figure, Dreyfus’s supposed spymasters being the Germans.

In the late nineteenth century, as literacy levels rose across Europe, the popular press in France and elsewhere experienced a boom in circulation that fuelled the escalation of antisemitism that surrounded the Dreyfus Affair. The coverage of the Affair was a key factor in fomenting antisemitic riots that occurred in sixty French cities in the wake of Dreyfus’s trial and conviction for treason.

Antisemitic murders also took place in the French colony of Algeria. The Affair thus revealed how readily accusations against one Jewish individual could be transformed into hostility and violence towards Jews collectively.

Yet the Affair also demonstrated the power of the press to challenge injustice. Zola’s intervention helped turn the case into an international cause célèbre. Journalists, campaigners and supporters exposed evidence that supported Dreyfus’s innocence. The same platform that supported the proliferation of antisemitic propaganda also provided space for those determined to challenge and confront it.

Today, the technologies through which information circulates have changed significantly. The illustrated newspapers, graphic posters and pamphlets of the late nineteenth century have given way to social media platforms and their algorithms, where images, ideas, rumours, and conspiracy theories reach huge audiences almost instantaneously.

A recent report by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue revealed that on TikTok, users logging on to look at harmless content can subsequently be exposed to antisemitic conspiracy theories, Holocaust denial and far-right tropes within ‘hours of use’. Aspects of modern antisemitism, along with its mode of transmission, echo the antisemitism that shaped the Dreyfus Affair. Antisemitic narratives still present Jews as members of a hidden network, exercising disproportionate influence over politics, the media or global affairs.

Such accusations are often wrapped in simplified explanations of complex events, promoting suspicion and hostility rather than critical scrutiny. Following the outbreak of war with Iran in February 2026, for example, researchers at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue documented a surge in online antisemitic conspiracy theories.

These alleged that Jews secretly controlled Western governments and manipulated their foreign policies. The technologies have changed, but the underlying accusations of Jewish dual loyalties or disloyalty and secret power remain familiar.

There are of course many differences between the political culture of fin-de-siècle France and the digital world of today. But the Dreyfus Affair offers a powerful reminder that antisemitism does not depend on a particular medium. It adapts to new technologies and political circumstances while drawing on enduring prejudices and myths. The Affair shows us that antisemitic lies can have devastating consequences when they are normalised, repeated and left unchallenged.

The Affair also demonstrates the importance of those who refuse to accept such narratives, who scrutinise evidence and who speak out against injustice, in the ways that many pro-Dreyfusards and, decades later, Dr Alfred Wiener, did. Based in London since 1939, The Wiener Holocaust Library has its roots in Wiener’s anti-Nazi work in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s.

We are the world’s oldest Holocaust archive, and in our work today we seek to challenge the distortion and denial of the Holocaust. Our collections also include original historical records relating to the Affair.

On display until 19 Mach 2027, we hope this exhibition will shine a light on to this early episode in the history of European antisemitism and the role of the media in this defining moment and promote understanding of the nature of antisemitism today.

• Dr Barbara Warnock and Dr Christine Schmidt, co-directors, The Wiener Holocaust Library