Bernard Lazare

Bernard Lazare was born Lazare Marcus Manassé Bernard into an assimilated family in Nîmes; his father was a textile manufacturer. In 1885, having moved to Paris and changed his name to Bernard Lazare, he began writing literary criticism, poetry, and anarchist essays in French journals. Although his work Antisemitism, Its History and Causes, published shortly before the arrest of Alfred Dreyfus, in part blamed Jews for the hatred directed against them, Lazare would later devote himself to defending Dreyfus against the tide of French antisemitism, publishing the first pamphlet exposing the army’s mishandling of his case. Influenced by Ahad Ha-Am, Lazare defended Jews across Europe and French-colonial North Africa and became an early Zionist, but he later broke with Theodor Herzl over the means and goals of political Zionism. He continued to defend Jews across Europe until his last day, traveling to Romania and the Russian Empire to research and report on the conditions of Jews living there.