Ergas draws Dreyfus Affair parallel to October 7

Economist and columnist Henry Ergas has told a Melbourne audience that the antisemitism unleashed in Australia after October 7 follows a pattern first set more than a century ago in France’s Dreyfus affair.

Speaking at a Lamm Jewish Library of Australia event at Beth Weizmann on Tuesday, October 13, Ergas said the hatred did not follow Israel’s military response in Gaza. It came within hours of the massacre.

“It was not October 7 that created the torrent of antisemitism that erupted on our shores,” he said. “It revealed the hatred and it set it loose.”

Ergas, a columnist for The Australian who was made an Officer of the Order of Australia in 2016, spent 15 years at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in Paris and has taught at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and Monash University.

He traced the 1894 conviction of Jewish army captain Alfred Dreyfus for treason, a case built on forged evidence that divided France for more than a decade. Ergas argued the affair became a “condensation symbol”, a term coined by American political scientist Murray Edelman, which absorbed every grievance in French society until it marked the line between friend and enemy.