Léon Lipschutz collection of Dreyfusiana and French Judaica, 1796-1934 | Brandeis University

The bulk of the items in this collection relate to the Dreyfus Affair in France during the 1890s and early 1900s. These materials include newspaper clippings, cartoons, books, and studio photographs of many of the key players in the Affair. Particularly well represented are anti-Semitic newspaper clippings and caricatures, which characterize the anti-Dreyfus movement. The collection also contains some correspondence between the major figures involved in the Affair, notably Georges Clemenceau and Émile Zola.

In addition to the Dreyfus materials, the collection contains a number of documents related to the Jewish community in France between the French Revolution and World War II. These items include essays on particular French Jewish communities, correspondence dealing with Biblical translation, and Hebrew-French coin collecting.

Léon Lipschutz, who compiled this collection and donated it to Brandeis in 1970, wrote an annotated finding aid that describes each piece in varying degrees of detail. This document provides the researcher with historical commentary and analysis on both the Dreyfus Affair and the French Jewish community. The collection includes the Lipschutz finding aid in the original French and a translation into English completed in March 2009.

The majority of the correspondence in this collection has been transcribed in French and translated into English. Researchers may compare original documents to their corresponding transcriptions and translations to assess accuracy of interpretation and discernment of difficult-to-read handwriting. Please contact the Department for access to these materials.