The cartoon above is a caricature of Alfred Dreyfus printed in 1906, in France.
Alfred Dreyfus was a Jewish officer in the French army. In 1894, he faced false accusations of revealing military secrets to Germany, opening what became known as The Dreyfus Affair which raged over the next decade.
Convicted of treason through forged evidence, he was sentenced to life imprisonment at Devil’s Island. In the years after his conviction, new evidence surfaced that proved Dreyfus' innocence. Nevertheless, high-ranking military officials suppressed it, and fabricated new forgeries to bolster his conviction. This cover-up was exposed and created a public outcry. By 1898, the 'affair' was at the center of national politics as the nation split between those who believed "the Jew did it" and those who saw him as an innocent victim. Twelve years after his conviction, in 1906, Dreyfus was exonerated and reinstated in the French army.
While Dreyfus was cleared of all guilt in the eyes of the law, large parts of the public who had been against him during the affair continued to hold doubts about his innocence. These doubts were largely fueled by anti-Semitic politicians, the newspaper La Libre Parole, and the general anti-Semitic climate in France at the time.
The caricature above, depicting Dreyfus’ head with a hooked nose on a wolf’s body (a popular theme in anti-Semitic cartoons, both for dehumanizing the Jews and for associating them with dangerous animals that threaten mankind), was printed in the year he was reinstated into the French army and cleared of any wrongdoing.
In 1908, two years after his exoneration, an assassination attempt was made on Dreyfus while he attended the funeral of Emile Zola, the writer who had exposed the affair's cover-up conspiracy in 1898. He survived and went on to fight in WWI to defend his native France.
