History has been curling back lately in the most uncomfortable ways. Nearly 125 years ago, a French military court convicted the artillery captain Alfred Dreyfus of treason for handing military secrets to the Germans. Dreyfus, who was Jewish, would eventually be exonerated, but not before his case was turned into a national referendum on the nature of loyalty to the state and the place of Jews in French society. Leading the charge against Dreyfus was the journalist Édouard Drumont, founder of the Anti-Semitic League of France and author of the best-selling Jewish France, a lengthy and largely incoherent screed against immigrants and Jews. Among its many spurious claims was that Jews were “perpetual nomads,” incapable of loyalty to any existing state.

This charge would reappear with disastrous consequences in the century that followed. It resonated both with ancient slanders against Jews and with new forms of xenophobia that arose alongside modern nationalism. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, American nativists also accused Catholics of maintaining a sinister loyalty to Rome, just as far-right pundits in France and the U.S. alike currently allege that Muslims are incapable of living in a liberal democracy, that allegiance to Islamic law conflicts with the obligations of citizenship.

Now, in a twist equally painful and absurd, Ilhan Omar, America’s first black, Muslim congresswoman, stands accused by both political opponents and her Democratic peers of employing the old, anti-Semitic canard of dual loyalty. Few have stopped to consider that Omar, who has been the subject of constant assaults from Drumont’s ideological heirs, looks a lot more like Dreyfus than any of his accusers.

All attention went to just five words: “allegiance to a foreign country.” Never mind that Omar was talking about politicians, and not about Jews at all.

It began last Wednesday night. Omar, sitting beside Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib at a Washington, D.C. bookstore event, complained that she and Tlaib, who is Palestinian-American, endure accusations of anti-Semitism almost “every time we say something.” Omar was just beginning to catch her breath from last month’s controversy, in which she had been labeled an anti-Semite for calling attention to the outsized influence of AIPAC money in American politics. Such accusations, she observed, effectively end all conversation. “Nobody ever gets to have the broader debate of what is happening with Palestine,” she continued. “So for me, I want to talk about the political influence in this country that says it is okay to push for allegiance to a foreign country.”

Omar went on to ask why she was permitted to speak about other powerful lobbies—the NRA, fossil fuel industries, pharmaceutical companies—and not about Israel, but that bit would not be quoted in the storm of coverage that followed her remarks. All attention went to just five words: “allegiance to a foreign country.” Never mind that Omar was talking about politicians, and not about Jews at all: Congressman Eliot Engel had released a statement before the week was out, accusing Omar of “invoking a vile anti-Semitic slur.” The pundits soon jumped in. On Monday, New York Times columnist and former Jerusalem Post editor-in-chief Bret Stephens, who had elsewhere called anti-Semitism “a disease of the Arab mind,” took to Twitter to charge Omar with “classic anti-Semitism.” Jeff Ballabon, a former Trump campaign adviser, lobbyist, and fund-raiser for far-right Israeli settlers, went a step further, calling the Congresswoman “filth” on Fox Business Network.