Thus far, many of the posts at TheyWereSoldiers have focused upon Jewish military service in the Second World War. While I possess a vast amount of information “waiting in the wings” for future posts pertaining to that era, some of my forthcoming posts may (? – !) have a change of emphasis: I hope to focus upon aspects of Jewish military service in the (now) over-a-century-passed First World War, or, as that conflict was known until the advent of World War Two, the “Great War”.
By way of a preface to this vast topic, I searched for a substantive, yet not overly detailed summary of Jewish military service in the military forces of both the Allies and Central Powers during the years of 1914-1918.
Then, I remembered Dr. David Vital’s magisterial, brilliantly written book A People Part – A Political History of the Jews in Europe, 1789-1939, which includes – as an introduction – just such an account. There, Dr. Vital’s describes the military experience of European Jewry in the First World War in sociological, cultural, political (and geopolitical) terms. (This text appears within the book’s third and final section, entitled “New Dispensations”, as the start of Chapter 7, pertinently entitled “War”, on pages 647 to 651.)
Dr. Vital’s treatment of Jewish military service in the Great War is consistent with the underlying nature of his book. His 896 page monograph (in the softbound edition, the cover of which is displayed below) covers a 150-year-span of the history of European Jewry in a tone that is at once analytical, quietly impassioned, and practically (well, seems to me…I couldn’t put the book down) novelistic in literary style. This is particularly so in the sense that the “contemporary” reader – contemplating Vital’s text from the vantage of the early 21st century, after the events recounted in the book have receded into and become part of the past – already “knows” how the story will conclude … even as the innumerable individuals mentioned within the book’s pages, by the very nature of time would not, could not, and did not.
Notably, the late Dr. Robert S. Wistrich wrote a very insightful review of A People Apart that appeared in the November, 1999 issue of Commentary. While praising Dr. Vital’s book, Dr. Wistrich expressed ambivalence about what he deems to have the book’s focus upon interpretation of Jewish history centered upon politics and power relations, coupled with a relative lack of attention to the contributions and successes of European Jewry. Be that as it may, the overall thrust of his review is solidly positive. Other reviews – all laudatory – can be found at GoodReads.
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By way of digression, thus far, my posts at this blog have avoided presenting opinions, musings, or speculations about culture, politics, and religion. Yet, the verbal “structure” of the title of Dr. Vital’s Book – the end of which temporally “brackets” the course of European Jewish history within the time-frame of “1789-1939”, can’t help but make one ponder the condition of the Jewish people in contemporary times: Only one year before the commencement of the third decade of the twenty-first century. Thus, whether a historian in a future distant, or a future only a few decades from now, will compose a study paralleling A People Apart – for the history of post-WW II European Jewry; for the history of American Jewry – or whether such a work will be unnecessary, is as yet unknown.
What is certain about the history of the Jewish people (and, truth be told, the history of all men) is that though there can be similarities in the pattern and course of events between historical eras, history never repeats itself, from one era to another, with complete geometric congruence. The only certainty we possess about the future is that “things” and “events”; “occurrences” and “circumstances” – in the lives of individual men and women; within families; among communities; in nations; and, within civilizations – can be expected to continue much as they always have.
Until, of course, an era arrives when they no longer do so.
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So. With appreciation and acknowledgement to Dr. Vital, his text is presented verbatim, below.
“THE Jews of Europe passed through the valley of the shadow of death during the years 1914-18 with the rest of the continent’s population – which is to say, as best they could. That they were no more spared the crippling horrors of the war than any one else was at once the result and the supreme expression of the radical change in their circumstances. The days when, insignificant exceptions apart, it was natural, but also possible, for Jews to keep out of the way when the gentiles foolishly and incomprehensibly fought each other were over. Where their participation in continental warfare, if any, had been on an essentially individual basis – as bankers and provisioners, but only very rarely as soldiers – it was now first and foremost as ordinary fighting men in the ranks of each of the armies of the belligerents. Countless numbers of perfectly ordinary, non-political Jewish people marched off to war and to personal, often fatal involvement in the great and terrifying events that proceeded to unfold from August 1914 onwards along with all the other ordinary, non-political people who were marching off to war. They did so, moreover, for all the world as if it were a natural and (in central and western Europe) a worthy and desirable thing to do. Their political masters had still to determine whether, and if so in what way and to what degree, further advantage was to be taken of their services. And in this respect there were differences. In Russia there was no question at all of access to positions of influence and authority of any kind. In Germany too the contradiction between what wartime state interest appeared to dictate and the political and military classes’ refusal to acquiesce in a really serious relaxation of the rules by which society had been governed in the past remained incapable of resolution to the end. It would be worn down somewhat by undeniable necessity – as in the case of the sullen (and temporary) appointment of Walther Rathenau to a post as a principal organizer of the German war economy – but, no lasting change occurred. In the west Jews were taken on freely enough wherever they seemed likely to bring advantage and, unlike in Germany, regret at the prospect of irreversible change in the social order tended to be wistful rather than bitter. The unspoken rule remained, however, that while, when it was really necessary to do so, Jews might be admitted to the inner sanctums where high policy was decided, they would only be given places below the political salt, those reserved for specialists and experts, not those that would entitle them to wield real power.
Admission into the ranks of the armies themselves was free and unrestricted everywhere. In the dire circumstances of the times and the universal, unslakeable thirst for men to man the trenches, the old assumption that the Jew was useless as a fighting man was forgotten. In an environment that had generally been alien and hostile to him, the Jewish soldier was apt to be treated rather more decently than he had been in the past. If he distinguished himself in battle he was more likely than before to be awarded the honours that were his due. In some armies distinction in battle opened the way to promotion as well. But not in all. The imperial Russian army stood its ground in this respect to the end: its high command, with the full approval of the Tsar, refusing to sanction the granting of officer rank even to the most able, willing, and battle-proven of Jewish soldiers whatever the occasional fair-minded regimental commanded might say on his behalf. But even here matters were not absolutely cut and dried. Officer rank as military surgeons was conceded to Jewish doctors. Here and there, where the dearth of literate, willing, and responsible echt-Russian candidates had reduced a battalion or brigade commander to desperation, the official eye might briefly overlook an individual Jewish soldier’s being given de facto authority to perform an officer’s role. (1) (Of the flatly infamous treatment to which the Russian army’s high command subjected the civilian Jewish population in the area through which its forces moved on their way to the west and, more especially, on their retreat back towards the east, more will be said in in a moment.)
The German army, previously at one with the Russians in this respect, now rescinded its once unwavering refusal to promote suitable Jews to officer rank. By the end of the war some two thousand Jews had been commissioned. Still, no Jew was allowed to reach senior rank in the German army, unlike the Austro-Hungarian army in which, interestingly, some Jews had held rank as general officers even before the war. And the true spirit in which the German high command viewed the matter of then Jewish citizens, and that of Jews in uniform in particular, is conveyed by its notoriously bloody-minded decision in October 1916 to launch a formal investigation into the contribution of the German Jews to the national war effort and of Jewish soldiers to service in the trenches by initiating a systematic counting of heads. This so-called Judenzahlung (or Jew-count) was not only nastily hostile, but unwarranted. Actual Jewish Frontsoldaten (front-line soldiers) were outraged. It was, someone said, ‘as if the yellow patch had been sewn back on’. (2) A tiny handful of pacifists and extraordinarily courageous and determined social democrats had indeed opposed the war and been jailed or otherwise hounded out of society and home. But rare exceptions apart, German Jewry’s support for the war had been immensely (in retrospect almost embarrassingly) wholehearted at every level: from men of the greatest academic distinction (Hermann Cohen, the Kantian philosopher, and Fritz Haber, the chemist, for example) down to the simplest and least politically imaginative petit bourgeois. When the war was over, the society of Jewish Frontsoldaten, the stain on their honour still burning, conducted a meticulous survey of its own. It found that at least 100,000 Jews had served in the German armed forces or 18 per cent of the total Jewish population of imperial Germany of 550,000. Of these 12,000 had been killed in action or died of wounds: namely 2.2 per cent of German Jewry. Their study further demonstrated that these figures were virtually identical with those for the population of the city of Munich (a fair comparison, the Jews being a largely skilled and educated, urban population, much like the citizens of Munich): 645,000 citizens in all; 13,700 war dead. (3) The German general staff’s own figures were never published. But perhaps the most ominous aspect of the Judenzahlung was that when it was proposed and brought up in the Reichstag it was supported not only by the right wing, as was to be expected, but by the Catholic Centre Party and the National Liberals under Gustav Stresemann as well.
No such inquiries were instituted in other countries; nor were any warranted. (4) The general record of Jewish participation in the fighting forces of the various belligerents was in each case at least as high as that of the general population and in some cases higher. No figures as precise as those collated in Germany are available, but it has been fairly reliably estimated that some 450,000 Jews served in the immense Russian army – where it appears, moreover, that in consequence of the severely restrictive rules governing the military functions Jews might or might not perform, they tended to serve somewhat more commonly than others as front-line infantry soldiers and to suffer higher than average casualty rates in consequence. Some 275,000 Jews served in the Austro-Hungarian army: c. 11 per cent of the total Jewish population of the empire; 41,000 served in the British armed forces or a little under 14 per cent of British Jewry; (5) 35,000 in the French army: or c. 20 per cent of the total Jewish population of France. The overall figure for Jews serving in all belligerent armies (including the American army, in due course, in which the proportion of Jews was exceptionally high) was of the order of 1,500,000 or about 2 per cent of all mobilized manpower. It was therefore roughly double that of the Jewish proportion of the entire population of the countries concerned. (6)
There was thus a sense – an ironic one, one may think – in which the Great War, in practice, was the supreme occasion on which the Jews Europe were called upon to be ‘useful’ to each of the several states which they were nationals in very much the sense that those men of the Enlightenment who had troubled themselves either to think about or to legislate for the Jews or both had had in mind. The Jews’ skills, knowledge, experience, and native energy – coupled, in the central and western states, but not totally absent even in the east under the Russians, to their habitual loyalty to the sovereign power in the land and their manifest desire to please it – proved as easily available for harnessing to the machinery of war as Joseph II of Austria or his advisers had ever wished. And the total effect, again very much as the men of the Enlightenment would have wished, was further to promote and hasten their acculturation. The war initiated none of the essential processes of social and cultural change to which European Jewry was subject. But by dint of scattering and dissolving great numbers of young Jewish men into the larger mass of mobilized society on a basis that was unprecedentedly random it did greatly accelerate them and intensify their impact. It loosened the ties binding the individual to his community. It provided Jewish soldiers – much as it provided great numbers of other disoriented people – with new, alternative, if of course no more than temporary focuses of loyalty. And while it lasted there would be much else in its impact to support those who felt that the now century-old, imperfectly kept promise of fair dealing and equitable integration had not, after all, been false. None the less, perversely, the lasting impact of the war so far as the Jews were concerned was to reassert and re-emphasize the ascription to the Jewish people of their ancient status as a distinct – and for certain purposes justifiably autonomous – national entity. The major powers of Europe were moved, each in its way, in varying degrees, and, to be sure, with unequal consequences, to consider whether and how their own urgent national-political needs and interests might be squared with what were reckoned to be the collective needs, Interests, and aspirations of the Jewish people. This was a most dramatic alteration of perspective, as remote from the ordinary hostility that fueled policy towards them in some cases as from the somewhat more considerate, but always unsystematic and severely limited, philanthropic basis on which their affairs were viewed (when they were viewed at all). Nothing, certainly, could have been more remote from the legacy and purposes of the Enlightenment itself.”
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The following information, from The Committee for A Jewish Army’s 1943 publication The Fighting Jew, presents a statistical overview of Jewish military service in the First World War. The data is, “Condensed from the booklet Jews in the World War, published by the Jewish War Veterans of the United States, in October of 1941.” Notably the figures given below are identical to those presented in Martin Gilbert’s Atlas of Jewish History, on a map (appropriately) entitled “Jewish Soldiers 1914-1918”, on page 87 of that work.
| Personnel Mobilized | |
| Allies | |
| Belgium | 1,000 |
| British Empire | 50,000 |
| France | 55,000 |
| Greece | 4,400 |
| Italy | 6,000 |
| Rumania | 38,000 |
| Russia | 650,000 |
| Serbia | 1,200 |
| United States | 250,000 |
| Central Powers | |
| Austria-Hungary | 320,000 |
| Germany | 100,000 |
| Bulgaria | 12,500 |
| Total Casualties (Killed or Died in Service) | |
| Allies | |
| Belgium | 125 |
| British Empire | 2,400 |
| France | 9,500 |
| Greece | 300 |
| Italy | 500 |
| Rumania | 900 |
| Russia | 100,000 |
| Serbia | 250 |
| Turkey | 18,000 |
| United States | 3,400 |
| Central Powers | |
| Austria-Hungary | 40,000 |
| Bulgaria | 1,000 |
| Germany | 12,000 |
| Turkey | 1,000 |
(1) See Yohanan Rattner’s autobiography, for example: Hayyai ve-ani (Tel Aviv, 1978)
(2) Cited in Peter Pulzer, Jews and the German State (Oxford, 1992), 205
(3) The Reichsverband Judischer Frontsoldaten’s compilation was published in 1932 as the 423-page Die judischen Gefallenen des deutschen Heeres, der deutschen Marine und der deutschen Schutztruppen 1914-1918; ein Gedenkbuch. It consisted chiefly of the names, regimental affiliations, and dates of death of the war dead (where known). The great warlord himself, Hindenburg, now president of the republic, contributed a friendly preface.
(4) One partial exception was the case of Jews of Russian nationality who had settled in Great Britain, who for the greater part of the war were neither obliged nor permitted to serve in the British army, and who regarded consequent pressure to return to Russia to serve the Tsar as absurd, if not monstrous. They were therefore a source of unending embarrassment to the established segments of English Jewry, but of opportunity to the Zionists who saw them as natural recruits to the ‘Jewish Legion’ that they founded to fight alongside the Allies (on which more below).
(5) The proportion of the general population serving the British armed forces was 11.5 per cent (Geoffrey Alderman, Modern British Jewry (Oxford, 1992), 235).
(6) A.G. Duker, ‘Jews in the World War’, Contemporary Jewish Record, 2, 5 (Sept.-Oct. 1939); Y. Slutsky, and M. Kaplan, Hayyalim yehudiim be-ziv’ot eiropa (Tel Aviv, 1967); Encyclopaedia Judaica, xi, col. 1550; Felix A. Theilhaber, Die Juden im Wcltkriege (Berlin, 1916); Michael Adler, The Jews of the Empire and the Great War (London, 1919).
References
Gilbert, Martin, Atlas of Jewish History, Dorset Press [no location given], 1976
Gitelman, Zvi, A Century of Ambivalence – The Jews of Russia and the Soviet Union, 1881 to the Present, Schocken Books [Published in cooperation with YIVO Institute for Jewish Research], New York, N.Y., 1988
Nathans, Benjamin, A People Apart: The Jews in Europe, 1789-1939 by David Vital [Book Review], The Jewish Quarterly Review, Spring, 2006, 288-295, at JSTOR.org
Vital, David, A People Apart – A Political History of the Jews in Europe, 1789-1939, Oxford University Press, 2001
Vital, David, A People Apart – A Political History of the Jews in Europe, at GoodReads.com
Wistrich, Robert S., A People Apart, by David Vital (Book Review), Commentary, November, 1999
The Fighting Jew [no author], The Committee for a Jewish Army, New York, N.Y., 1943