Alfred Dreyfus was a French Jewish officer who was falsely accused and convicted of treason for spying for Germany in 1894. The only evidence against Dreyfus was a scrap of paper retrieved by a night watchman from a wastebasket, with hand written notes that remotely resembled Dreyfus' handwriting form. Dreyfus as the only Jew in his military unit was the prime target to be accused and later convicted of being the spy. In 1906, twelve years after his incarceration on Devil Island, off the coast of South America, he was vindicated of any wrongdoing.
The Dreyfus Affair deeply divided the French Republic and its people into two groups: Dreyfus supporters and detractors. It sent the wrong message to the French people about the Jews. The message was that Jews were insufficiently loyal to France and other European countries where they lived. The French revolution's promise for equality in social, economic, and political institutions for all its citizens did not seem to include Jews. Anti-Semitism was reshaped in form but not in substance. Jews no longer experienced Russian style Pogroms. Instead they experienced social, economic and political discrimination as the Dreyfus Affair had demonstrated.
The Jews had no solutions to solve anti-Semitism, as it was not based on logic or truth. There was nothing they could change to make themselves acceptable to their host nations. They knew that to the living they were considered dead, to the nations they were strangers, to the poor they were the exploiters, and to the nationalists they were homeless; people without a country, like orphans without a protector.
The Jews needed a modern Moses to fulfill the prophetic promise for ingathering the Jews and rebuilding the homeland of their forefathers. Unfortunately, self-determination, and national independence remained a prophecy not yet fulfilled. It stayed an ideal in consciousness, thought, and speech; however, there was little progress for national independence for the next fifty years. Indeed anti-Semitism increased.
The writer Emile Zola recognized the injustice and human rights violation against the Jews in France. He decried it in his writings, and finally went into a self-imposed exile in England, as a protest against his own native land. Theodore Herzl, a Jewish journalist from Vienna, Austria who reported the Dreyfus Affair, concluded that no Jewish assimilation would solve anti-Semitism. He appealed to wealthy Jews, like the well-known banker, Baron Rothschild to support his movement, and sought additional help from Eastern European Socialist and Zionist organizations.
It resulted in the first Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland in 1897 as the Dreyfus Affair controversy continued in France. The Congress established the World Zionist Organization, which adopted resolutions for establishing a future Jewish State. One of the major organizations, which were established at that time, was the Jewish National Fund. This organization in later years helped reclaim the land of Israel through financial support, purchase of farmland, and funding for major developments. Although Herzl established the Zionist foundations for a Jewish state after the Dreyfus Affair, his future dreams were premature. The Jewish people had yet to face the greatest anti-Semitic and satanic expression that ever befell humanity: the Holocaust.