Penslar - Jews and the Military

Jews and the Military

Jews and the Military

A HISTORY

Derek J. Penslar

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Princeton and Oxford

Copyright 2013 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW

press.princeton.edu

JACKET ART: Arthur Szyk, cover drawing for 1941 United Palestine Appeal yearbook. Reproduced with the cooperation of The Arthur Szyk Society, Burlingame, CA. www.szyk.org

All Rights Reserved

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Penslar, Derek Jonathan, author.

Jews and the military : a history / Derek J. Penslar.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-691-13887-9 (hardcover)

1. Jewish soldiersEuropeHistory19th century. 2. Jewish soldiersEuropeHistory20th century. 3. JewsEuropeHistory19th century. 4. JewsEuropeHistory20th century. 5. JewsCultural assimilationEuropeHistory19th century. 6. JewsCultural assimilationEuropeHistory20th century. 7. JewsEuropeIdentity. I. Title.

DS135.E83P45 2013

355.008992404dc23 2013000893

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in Minion and Univers

Printed on acid-free paper

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

ILLUSTRATIONS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I t takes a village to write a book. Over the years of this books gestation many colleagues have steered me toward fascinating areas of inquiry and sources. Deepest thanks to Israel Bartal, Michael Berkowitz, David Biale, Pierre Birnbaum, Bernard Cooperman, Natalie Zemon Davis, Todd Endelman, David Engel, Leah Garrett, Matt Goldish, Rachel Greenblatt, Elliott Horowitz, Paula Hyman (zl), Joy Jacoby, Jonathan Karp, Alexander Kaye, Rebecca Kobrin, Paul Lerner, Mark Mazower, Deborah Dash Moore, Sam Moyn, Yochanan Petrovsky-Shtern, Joseph Schatzmiller, Anita Shapira, Michael Silber, Michael Stanislawski, Adam Teller, Scott Ury, and Ruth Wisse. I have known David Sorkin since graduate school and Steven Zipperstein for almost as long; their advice, on this project and on all the previous ones, has always been invaluable and deeply appreciated. Special thanks to Richard Kravitz, an old and dear college friend, who gave me the idea for this book during a conversation almost a decade ago.

At the University of Toronto, Eric Jennings directed me to one of the books most important archival sources, read portions of the book manuscript, and helped me maintain a global perspective. Jonathan Gribetz, who spent a year at Toronto on a postdoctoral fellowship before moving on to a faculty position at Rutgers, is a delightful colleague and a gently exacting reader. I am grateful to the students in my fourth-year undergraduate seminar, Power and Identity in Jewish History, who read the draft manuscript and quickly overcame qualms about criticizing their professor. (One of those students, Arielle Lewis, prepared the bibliography and made innumerable library runs for me.) My Toronto colleagues Doris Bergen, Ritu Birla, Ivan Kalmar, Jeff Kopstein, Michael Marrus, and Anna Shternshis have been constant sources of support, intellectual exchange, and friendship. On the other side of the pond, my new colleagues at Oxford Abigail Green and David Rechter as well as Franois Guesnet at University College London critiqued the book manuscript with a sharp eye, sound judgment, and good humor.

It has been a great pleasure working with Princeton University Press. Thanks to my sponsoring editor Fred Appel, who showed enthusiasm for this project from the very start. The suggestions I received from Fred, the Presss anonymous readers, and my colleagues and students have helped me sharpen and clarify my arguments, cut redundant or extraneous material, and avoid embarrassing mistakes. Naturally, any remaining errors in fact or faulty judgments are entirely my responsibility.

Visiting professorships at Harvard in 2006 and Columbia in 2009, as well as a fellowship in 2008 from the University of Pennsylvanias Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, offered stimulating intellectual environments and unparalleled library resources. Thanks to the Katz Centers director, David Ruderman, and to the directors of Jewish Studies at Harvard and Columbia, Shaye Cohen and Jeremy Dauber, for these opportunities. A fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 200910 allowed me to write the bulk of the book manuscript.

I thank the archivists and librarians of the Central Archive for the History of the Jewish People and the Central Zionist Archive in Jerusalem, the Haganah archive in Tel Aviv, the Service historique de larme territoriale, Service historique de la marine, and Archives Nationales in Paris, and the Imperial and Royal Military Archive in Vienna. I am particularly grateful for assistance and guidance provided by Sabine Hank of the Stiftung Neue SynagogueCentrum Judaicum in Berlin and Michael Lax of the Archive of the Israel Defense Forces. I gathered much of the books German-language material at New York Citys Center for Jewish History, which has become over its short existence a scholars paradise. Within the center I made particularly heavy use of the collections of the Leo Baeck Institute, whose staff members extended me every courtesy, as did the staff at the New York Public Library, the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., the British Library, and the National and University Library in Jerusalem.

Portions of Participant to Victim, German History 29 (2011), 42344. I thank both publications for allowing me to use this material.

Anne Lloyd sent me documents from the Harley Library archives at the University of Southampton, and Rivka Brot did the same from the Yad Vashem archive in Jerusalem. I relied upon Brendan Cook and Natalie Oeltjen for translations from eighteenth-century Latin, and upon Daniel Mahla and Sylwia Szymanska-Smolkin for translations of Polish material. Talia Penslar, in addition to critiquing the entire manuscript, provided a far more stirring translation of a sermon by Esdra Pontremoli than my workaday Italian could muster. At my suggestion, Yitzhak Lewis prepared a powerful translation of Shaul Tchernichovskys poem Bein Ha-metsarim, which I discuss and cite in part in . I hope that he will someday publish it.

Daniel Heller, Sonya Issard, Tatjana Lichtenstein, Rafi Netz, Sophie Roberts, Dina Roginsky, and Daniel Rosenthal browsed and prepared photocopies from dozens of microformed periodicals. Samuel Biagetti and Simon Luling transcribed the faded and crabbed French handwriting of Captain Fernand Bernard, and Connie Aust did the same for scrawled German script from nineteenth-century Lviv.

My debt to my family is beyond words. Over the years that I worked on this book, my children Joshua and Talia matured from adolescents into independent adults. My wife of thirty years, Robin, is my closest friend and most unsparing critic. She has ridden the wave of four books with the inevitable swells and crashes, the good writing days and the bad. She remains my love and anchor, forever and always.

DECEMBER 2012

Oxford and Toronto

Jews and the Military

Introduction

A t a Toronto synagogue some years ago I gave a talk on Jewish soldiers in modern armies. I began the talk by asking members of the audience how many of them had served in the military or had close relativesfathers, brothers, uncles, grandfatherswho did the same. There were a few elderly veterans of the Second World War, and several who had served in Korea. People spoke of grandfathers who had fought for the German kaiser or the Russian tsar, or of fathers who had flown for the Royal Air Force, or of sons and daughters currently deployed in Afghanistan. After a few minutes of this conversation, an older man stood and announced, in an unmistakably Israeli accent, that he had fought in the Harel Brigade in Israels War of Independence. The audience broke out in spontaneous applause.