Maurice Samuels is the Betty Jane Anlyan Professor of French at Yale University, where he also chairs the Department of French. In 2011, he became the inaugural director of the Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism, one of the only academic programs in the United States dedicated to studying both historical and contemporary forms of antisemitism.
A native of Chicago, he received his A.B. summa cum laude from Harvard in 1990, after which he spent a year studying in Paris at the École normale supérieure and writing in cafés. He then worked for three years in Hollywood, where he rejected screenplays for a living (he has been trying to repay this karmic debt ever since). He then returned to Harvard for his Ph.D. in French, which he was awarded in 2000. He taught for six years at the University of Pennsylvania before moving to Yale in 2006.
A specialist of the literature and culture of nineteenth-century France, he has written five books: Alfred Dreyfus: The Man at the Center of the Affair (Yale University Press, 2024), The Betrayal of the Duchess (Basic Books, 2020), The Right to Difference (University of Chicago Press, 2016), Inventing the Israelite (Stanford University Press, 2010), and The Spectacular Past (Cornell University Press, 2004). He has also edited anthologies of Jewish literature in both French and English. He is the recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and the MLA's Scaglione Prize for the best book in French studies (for both Inventing the Israelite and The Right to Difference) and the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers Fellowship.
He currently lives in Branford, CT and New York, but spends part of every summer working at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris.
In Alfred Dreyfus: The Man at the Center of the Affair, new in the acclaimed Yale Jewish Lives series, Maurice Samuels gives readers new insight into Dreyfus himself. Drawing on an archive of more than 3000 documents and objects donated by the Dreyfus family, Samuels tells the story of Dreyfus’s early life in Paris, his promising career as a French officer, the false accusation leading to his imprisonment, the fight to prove his innocence that divided the French nation, and his life of quiet obscurity after World War I. Restoring the man himself to the center of the affair, Samuels emphasizes Dreyfus’s personal courage, heroic resistance to torture, and deep understanding of the historic importance of his case.
Analyzing Dreyfus’s complex relationship to Judaism and to antisemitism over the course of his life, Samuels argues that Dreyfus was not an “assimilated” Jew. Instead, he epitomized a new model of Jewish identity made possible when France became the first European nation to grant Jews full legal equality. Relying on Jewish newspapers in French, English, German, Yiddish, and Hebrew, this book also explores the profound effect of the Dreyfus Affair on the lives of Jews around the world.
Of the book’s relevance in our own time, Samuels writes: “The life of Dreyfus forces us to consider what it means when the institutions of liberal democracy come under assault and when half a nation commits to believing a lie. The life of Dreyfus also allows us to understand what it takes for truth to triumph, and how a nation can emerge from political crisis with its faith in its institutions intact. As antisemitism and right-wing nationalism stage a comeback around the world today, the affair has much to tell us not only about the causes of hatred, but also about the ways it can be resisted.”
