Lieutenant Colonel Dreyfus Earns His Oak Leaves — in Israel

The promotion of one Uriel Dreyfus, a veteran reserve judge, to the rank of lieutenant colonel is a moment to savor. Lieutenant Colonel Uriel Dreyfus is, as his surname attests, a descendent of the Jewish French army officer, Alfred Dreyfus, who was falsely convicted of treason in one of the signature antisemitic episodes in Europe’s long annals of prejudice. Dreyfus’s descendent marvels at how his ancestor “stood alone.”That’s one thing he won’t have to fear. For the younger Dreyfus is an officer of the Israel Defense Forces. He told the crowd marking his promotion: “I stand here today with the weight of two histories meeting in a single moment. One is my family history — the name ‘Dreyfus,’ which for generations symbolized injustice, antisemitism, and the attempt to break the spirit of a Jewish officer. The second is the history we have written and continue to write since October 7.”Lieutenant Colonel Dreyfus added that “More than 130 years ago, in a square in Paris, the ranks were torn from the uniform of Captain Alfred Dreyfus. In a humiliating ceremony before crowds, his sword was broken. He was accused of treason he did not commit, solely because he was Jewish. He was sent to Devil’s Island, a place where hope was meant to die. But he did not break. He continued to cry out his innocence.” The military judge shared that “When I entered the IDF induction center as a young soldier, I carried this memory with me. I understood that every rank I would receive, every step I would take in the army, would represent a form of historical correction. Today, as I receive the rank of Lieutenant Colonel, I feel that the ranks torn away in disgrace are now being sewn back with pride onto the olive uniforms of the Israel Defense Forces.”Our A.R. Hoffman has written that the slandering of Dreyfus — the real treason was committed not by the Alsatian patriot but by Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy, a German spy — was “a frame up, clumsily done, driven by antisemitism, that escalated into a crisis about liberal democracy, the fate of the Jews in modernity, and the future of France’s tattered Enlightenment dream.” Theodor Herzl covered Dreyfus’s degradation for Vienna’s Neue Freie Presse.The travails of Dreyfus were also noted in 1899 in an editorial in The New York Sun, headlined “The Second Condemnation of Dreyfus.” The then-editors wrote that “unprejudiced onlookers” can harbor “in their hearts no feeling but one of execration for the judges who condemned him, of contempt for the army which applauds the decision, and of pity for France, if what seems incredible, the judgment is allowed to stand.” Herzl would write in an unpublished essay that “what made me a Zionist was the Dreyfus trial,” though that came only after the affair had electrified the world. The author Rick Richman is skeptical that Dreyfus alone tipped Herzl toward the necessity of a Jewish state. A recent biographer of Dreyfus, Maurice Samuels, though, writes that the affair “played a transformational role in the development of Zionism.”Dreyfus, by then a man in his fifties, served France in World War I as a lieutenant-colonel, the same rank that his descendant now holds. In 2025, the French National Assembly voted to elevate the older Dreyfus to brigadier general, in recognition of the rank he might have achieved had he not been falsely accused. Now Lieutenant Colonel Dreyfus vows that Israel “will endure and prevail because we have no other country and no other army.”

Lieutenant Colonel Dreyfus Earns His Oak Leaves — in Israel

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