This is perhaps the first book to focus on Alfred Dreyfus the man with particular regard to his own writings, especially his recently published prison workbooks, but also his letters to his wife Lucie. Through close reading of these documents, a much more sensitive, intellectual and Jewish man is revealed than previously suspected. "Prof. Simms's forte is, of course, the manner in which he "midrashes" Dreyfus's notebooks from Devil's Island. Drawing from the rabbinical technique of analysis, Simms connects it with the kind of hallucination, or phantasmagoria (those were the years of Georges Méliès), that was experienced by Dreyfus, while he also notes, after Gabriel Tarde, what an "interpsychic" experience the Affair was since both sides imitated each other in utter confusion?.Simms tries, in this first volume of a series of three, to recapture the man as he emerged from the Affair. He does so considerately and effectively."