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Dreyfus affair
A French army convicted the wrong officer of treason on flimsy handwriting analysis, then spent twelve years defending the verdict rather than admitting the mistake.
Judaism
A people, a law and an argument conducted across millennia.
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- in history
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- 26 min
- in total
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The Holocaust
Historians still argue over exactly when Hitler decided to murder every Jew in Europe, a question the record calls unresolved even though it agrees an explicit order existed by the war's later years.
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Adolf Hitler
Hitler's earliest written statement calling for the removal of Jews predates his rise to power by fourteen years, and historians now largely agree it grew out of a specific wartime myth rather than any lifelong conviction.
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Ahmad Baba al-Timbukti
A jurist exiled for fourteen years after a foreign invasion still produced work specialists treat as the best surviving source on his field, proof of how portable book-based scholarship could be.
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Akbar
A widely repeated legend has two Rajput warriors' statues honouring their loyalty to Akbar, but a modern historian traced the story back only as far as a Dutch chronicle written decades after the event it claims to describe.
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