There are different views in the academia that try to explain the reason of Dreyfus's accusation of espionage and his arrest although there was no evidence to prove his guilt. Lindemann claims that anti-Semitism was not the cause but the outcome of Dreyfus's arrest and conviction. He attributes his arrest to his personality rather than his being a Jew. In his book, he explains the situation with the following lines in which he also describes Dreyfus as:.
" an awkard and distant man, with few friends or admirers in the military before his arrest. Most of those who worked with him dismissed him as a gracelessand pretentious pervenu, forever bragging about his money and success with women. No doubt some of them were inclined to dislike him because of his Jewish origins, but again there is little evidence that such feelings were decisive. There were many Jews in the French military by the 1890s, and unfair treatment of them was not condoned."" (p. 231).
Apart from Lindemann's argument attributing the cause of Dreyfus's conviction to his personality, which was not so much appreciated among his colleagues, Hannah Arendt approaches the issue from a different view in her book called The Origins of Totalitarianism, in which she discusses the causes of the affair in relation with anti-Semitism from the very beginning of the affair. From now on we will be dealing with the causes of the affair according to her arguments.
She calls our attention for a scandal that preceded Dreyfus's arrest. Between 1880 and 1888 the Panama Company, under the leadership of de Lesseps, who had constructed the Suez Canal, was able to make very little practical progress. In spite of this, during this period it succeeded in raising 1,335,538,454 francs in private loans which makes the success even more significant when one considers the carefulness of the French middle class in money matters. Only after a few years it became clear that some half-million middle-class Frenchmen was ruined.
