European Anti- Semitism: The Dreyfus Affair

Since Jews first started coming to the continent about fifteen hundred years ago, the relationship with Christian Europe has never been an easy one. The conflict between the European wish to see everyone assimilate and the Jewish need to maintain a separate identity could only lead to trouble and everywhere they went the Jews found themselves, sooner or later, unwelcome. Though the Jews had entered Europe from both East and West, the vast majority of Europe’s Jews lived in the East, in countries like Poland, Ukraine or Lithuania, either in separate inner city areas called ‘ghettos’ or in Jewish-only villages often called ‘stetls’.