The Blood of Lorraine by Barbara Pope Page A

the army? Who can trust any of them? It’s the last bastion of the nobles, of the elite. They’ll fire on the workers if it comes to that. They’re worse,” his hazel eyes twinkled as he shook a stubby finger at Martin, “worse even than the magistrature.”
    “That may be so,” said Martin, suppressing a smile as Giuseppe made the obligatory poke at his profession. “But what if people use Dreyfus’s treachery to punish all Jews?”
    “Maybe they deserve it!” Giuseppe’s fist fell upon the table, rattling the short, thick glasses. “The Rothschilds, the Perriers, their banks, their railroads, their exploitation.”
    The working man’s plaint against the Israelites. The ignoramus Pierre Thomas had blurted out similar accusations. Martin took a gulp of the brandy. It seared a burning path down his constricted throat. He’d never dreamed that Giuseppe would be an anti-Israelite. The subject had never come up between them.
    “Surely you don’t read La Libre Parole ?” Martin took in a breath while he waited for the answer.
    “Oh no.” Giuseppe grimaced with disgust. “You don’t need to read Drumont’s rag to know that the Rothschilds have too much power.”
    “Not all Jews are Rothschilds,” Martin said, thinking of Singer. “Not all of them are rich,” he murmured, as a vision of his landlords, the Steins, formed in his mind. There probably weren’t any Israelites in Arles. And if Giuseppe did not know any Jews, he might not see how the Steins were like them, like Martin’s dead father, who had barely eked out a living from his clockmaking, and like the blacksmith himself. Kind, decent, hardworking people. He shook his head, pulling himself back to his father-in-law. He had to press his case. As he gathered his thoughts, he realized that what he was about to say might be preparation for a new role. Instead of arguing that someone had committed a crime, he might have to prepare himself to exonerate an entire race from the crimes—real or imagined—that they stood accused of. “Should all the Israelites be hated and persecuted because some are very rich, or one may be a traitor, or because they are not Christians? Should we allow mobs to threaten all of them?”
    “Do you think that could happen?”
    “It has. In the past.”
    Giuseppe pursed his lips in thought, giving Martin an opportunity to go on. “They are in all walks of life. Among the bakers and shoemakers and shopkeepers. Probably even among the workers,” he added, appealing to his father-in-law’s “red” sympathies. Martin’s heart began to pound, he wanted so much to get Giuseppe on his side.
    For the next few minutes, Giuseppe countered Martin’s insistence that the Thomases’ lies posed a danger to the city with a recitation of the many ways the rich, especially the Rothschilds, exploited workers, not only in France but wherever their banks and their companies operated, for money, always for money, and the power money gave them.
    “But that’s not true of all Israelites,” Martin insisted. Even though Singer, Martin’s only real friend at the courthouse, was the reason he had been put into the position of defending French Jews, he did not mention him to his father-in-law. It was not only because they had never met. Martin guessed that his father-in-law would not have liked his fellow judge. Singer’s excessively formal demeanor would have come off as a kind of snobbishness, an exemplar of everything Giuseppe accused the courts of being. This is why Martin clinched the argument by speaking of the Steins. “You’ve met our landlords,” he said. “Who would they plot with? What other care do they have except running their store and passing it on to their children and grandchildren, just as you are passing your smithy onto your stepsons?”
    “So,” the old man said as he scratched his full white beard, “to blame all workers because one of them commits a crime, or all Italians because…is like blaming all Jews