In 1886 Edouard Drumont published La France juive, a ‘concoction’ of Jewish life and customs, which, though crude and clumsy, became an instant best-seller. It turned out to be the prelude to a wave of anti-Semitism in that country, culminating in the Dreyfus affair, when a Jewish officer was falsely accused of being a German spy. In Germany, the so-called Kulturkampf, the ‘cultural battle’, though it was waged over the supervision of schools and the appointment of parish priests, was really about the attempt by the Protestant state to make Catholic politicians conform to Prussian policy. In
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