Imposing a veil of secrecy on the upcoming trial of two pro-Israel lobbyists could turn the case into a modern-day sequel to the Dreyfus affair, a Jewish group warned in a legal brief filed yesterday.

Federal prosecutors pursuing a case against two former employees of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman, have asked a federal judge in Virginia to keep the public from hearing and seeing some evidence that is the basis of charges that the pair illegally obtained and disclosed classified information.

The prosecution contends that disclosing some details publicly could harm American national security. However, the Coalition for Jewish Concerns, also known as Amcha, filed an amicus brief yesterday arguing that secrecy would lead anti-Semites and conspiracy theorists to distort the actions of Messrs. Rosen and Weissman.

“Any use of ‘secret evidence’ runs the risk of deepening anti-Jewish sentiment in the United States by perpetuating the myth of an overly-powerful ‘Jewish lobby’ composed of people loyal to Israel first and the United States second,” attorneys for the group, Steven Lieberman and Anne Sterba, wrote. “Trying these two men for disclosing critical ‘national defense information’ to foreign officials, without letting the public know what the alleged information was, will allow enemies of the Jewish people to exaggerate the significance of that evidence and will leave the press and the public to subsist only on rumors and speculation.”

The Jewish group said secrecy would create parallels with the treason trial of Alfred Dreyfus in France in the 1890s. Amcha quoted historians who said cloaking evidence in that case contributed to a fevered atmosphere in which anti-Semitic conspiracy theories flourished. Dreyfus was pardoned in 1899, but the Jewish group said the secrecy slowed efforts to prove that he was wrongly convicted.

Amcha did not argue that the charges against Messrs. Rosen and Weissman are the product of anti-Semitism, but it did suggest that they could be the victims of bureaucratic infighting. “The American Jewish community has a strong interest in being able to scrutinize the government’s evidence in order to ensure that Messrs. Rosen and Weissman are not being tried merely as the result of a political power play between or among different government agencies,” the group’s lawyers said.

Press organizations have also objected to the secrecy measures proposed for the trial, which is set to begin in June.