ABSTRACT
The real evidence for anti-Semitism, in Edgar Degas's case, or against it, in Camille Pissarro's, is both more straightforward and, as far as Degas is concerned, more contradictory. The Dreyfus Affair was one of the crystallizing agencies, pushing equivocators over the brink, spurring to action people like Degas who before had perhaps merely grumbled and read Drumont with a certain degree of approval, but who did not have a cause until the Affair served as a catalyst. Degas's position at the time of the Dreyfus Affair offers a classic example of the "status anxiety" associated with anti-Semitism. Degas, in his last years, when the storm of the Dreyfus Affair had subsided, seems to have drawn back to some degree from overt anti-Semitism, although the evidence is equivocal. Degas's representation of Ludovic Halevy in the Cardinal illustrations is a quite different, and more ambiguous, one than that embodied in the "noble head" from the Dieppe group portrait.
