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Case file

Victor Basch

A French Jewish politician and human rights campaigner murdered in 1944. Through 2020 the opening said that "as a Jew and a Dreyfusard, Basch was subjected to persecution at the hands of the fanatical anti-Semitic populace," and that he was later assassinated by members of the antisemitic Vichy French Milice. Today the opening ends with his human-rights and anti-Nazi work, mentioning neither the persecution nor his 1944 assassination, though the word survives twice in the body. A reader arriving now learns he opposed Nazism and not that he was murdered by an antisemitic Vichy militia.
Read line by line and written up by hand.
Machine-checked against the full current article on 2026-08-01. “antisemitism” appeared 2 times in this article's opening at its peak. Today the opening has none; the body has 2.
We saved snapshots of this article over twenty years; you are reading the 2015 one. Red dashes: removed from Wikipedia since. Pale dots: rewritten; the numbered note shows what it says now. 1 tap a number or a side note to jump between them
The opening as it read in 2015

Victor-Guillaume Basch (18 August 1863/1865, Budapest – 10 January 1944) was a French politician and professor of germanistics and philosophy at the Sorbonne descending from Hungary. He was engaged in the Zionist Movement , in the Ligue des droits de l'homme (president from 1926 to 1944) and in Anti-nazism . His father was the journalist and political activist, Raphael Basch . Born in Budapest in 1863, Victor Basch emigrated with his family to France as a child, and later studied at the Sorbonne . In 1885 he was appointed professor at the University of Nancy , and in 1887 at the University of Rennes , where he became friend with Jean Jaurès . During the Dreyfus affair Basch was the leader of the Dreyfusards at Rennes, who were placed in a serious and difficult position when the case was tried in that city. Both as a Jew and a Dreyfusard, Basch was subjected to persecution at the hands of the fanatical anti-Semitic populace. In a 1916 interview cited by his biographer and granddaughter, the French historian Françoise Basch , Victor Basch declared, " I 'm really a Jew . I struggle and suffered for my Jewishness." However, biographer Françoise Basch underscores that her grandfather identified with his family history and the suffering of persecuted Jews, and not with Judaism as a religion per se. As both a member of the League against Imperialism created in Brussels in 1927, and as President of the Ligue des Droits de l'Homme from 1926–1944, Basch was one of the architects of the Popular Front . He fought and suffered for the principles of legal and social justice as well as human rights. On 10 January 1944, Victor Basch and his wife, Ilona Basch (née Helene Furth) aged 81,were taken from their home in Lyon and assassinated by Joseph Lecussan and Henri Gonnet of the antisemitic Vichy French Milice Française under orders of the regional chief Paul Touvier . Basch, Françoise Victor Basch: de l'affaire Dreyfus au crime de la milice.1

This is Wikipedia's own text, saved in our repository. Their copy of it is revision 667943863.
Today
“antisemitism” appeared 2 times in this article's opening at its peak. Today the opening has none; the body has 2. Read the current article and compare.
201020152020Oct '232025
antisemitism12220
Counts in the opening at each snapshot. Green: the word gained ground. Red: it was cut. Grey: no change.

Where the word went

It left the opening. It did not leave the article. Wikipedia moved it down the page, where a reader arriving from a search result will not reach it.

  • “antisemitism” now appears 2× under Biography, 20% of the way down the article
Struck red text is no longer in the article; dotted amber text was rewritten. Every revision id links to Wikipedia's copy; the text shown is our own saved copy. Data: /data. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA; quoted for the record; not affiliated with Wikipedia.

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