Drumont, a fuming, portly, irascible man with a wiry beard that splayed across his chest, is often regarded as the father of modern anti-Semitism in Europe. His book La France juive (Jewish France), which provided a disturbing account of the Jewish presence in France, sold a million copies and went through more than one hundred editions in French before being translated for the rest of Europe. Drumont’s bigoted argument about “the problem of the Jew in Europe” was, at the time, an outgrowth of the very idea of nationalism, which, as the historian Eric Hobsbawm writes, “by definition excludes
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