Jewish Soldiers in the Collective Memory of Central Europe: The Remembrance of World War I from A Jewish Perspective [1 ed.] 9783205208419, 9783205207221

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Jewish Soldiers in the Collective Memory of Central Europe The Remembrance of World War I from a Jewish Perspective

Edited by Gerald Lamprecht Eleonore Lappin-Eppel Ulrich Wyrwa

Schriften des Centrums für Jüdische Studien Band 28 Herausgegeben von Gerald Lamprecht und Olaf Terpitz

JEWISH SOLDIERS IN THE COLLECTIVE MEMORY OF CENTRAL EUROPE The Remembrance of World War I from a Jewish Perspective Edited by Gerald Lamprecht Eleonore Lappin-Eppel Ulrich Wyrwa

BÖHLAU V ER LAG W IEN KÖLN W EIM AR

Published with the support of: Zukunftsfonds der Republik Österreich Amt der steiermärkischen Landesregiserung, Referat Wissenschaft und Forschung MA 27, Kulturabteilung der Stadt Wien, Wissenschafts- und Forschungsförderung Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz

Deutsche Nationalbibliothek Cataloging-in-publication data : http://dnb.d-nb.de © 2019 by Böhlau Verlag Ges.m.b.H & Co. KG, Wien, Kölblgasse 8–10, A-1030 Wien All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any other information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. Cover : Max Liebermann: ‘Den Müttern der Zwölftausend’, Lithographie, 1924 Lector : Sara Crockett, Graz Cover design : Michael Haderer, Vienna Typesetting : Michael Rauscher, Vienna

Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht Verlage | www.vandenhoeck-ruprecht-verlage.com ISBN 978-3-205-20841-9

Table of Contents

Gerald Lamprecht, Eleonore Lappin-Eppel, Ulrich Wyrwa Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  9 Hillel J. Kieval Conflict Zones Empire, War, and Jewish Destinies in East Central Europe.. . . . . . . . . .

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Ulrich Wyrwa The Dialectic of Expectations and Experiences Jews in Europe During the First World War and Beyond.. . . . . . . . . . . 43 Soldiers Jason Crouthamel “Even a Jew Can Fight Back” Masculinity, Comradeship and German-Jewish Soldiers in the First World War.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69 Dieter J. Hecht Austro-Hungarian Jewish Military Chaplains between East and West Rabbi Bernard Dov Hausner (1874–1938) during World War I . . . . . . . . 91 Gábor Schweitzer Hungarian Neolog (Progressive) Rabbis During the “Great War” (1914–1918). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111 Eszter Balázs The Image of the Jewish Soldier-Intellectual in Múlt és Jövő, the Hungarian Review Promoting Jewish Cultural Renaissance (1914–1918) . . . . . . . . . 121 Eleonore Lappin-Eppel Reflections on the Jewish War Effort in the Viennese Jewish Press 1918–1938. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145

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Olaf Terpitz Literary Notes and Historical Documents Shimon An-Ski’s Yiddish togbukh fun khurbn (1921–23) and Simon Dubnov’s Russian Story of a Jewish Soldier (1917) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169 Refugees Gintarė Malinauskaitė Wandering Lithuanian Jewish Refugees during the First World War Hirsz Abramowicz and a Jewish Perspective on the War . . . . . . . . . . . . 187 Ines Koeltzsch Familiar Strangers? Perceptions of Galician- and Bucovinian-Jewish Refugees in the Czech-Jewish Press and Fiction during the First World War.. . . . . . . . . 203 New Loyalties Nino Gude Dual Loyalties of Jewish Soldiers in the Ukrainian Galician Army 1918/1919 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225 Ana Ćirić Pavlović Yugoslavs of the Mosaic Faith? Public Discourse about Jewish Loyalty in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, 1918–1941. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 239 Antisemitism Thomas Stoppacher The Jewish Soldiers of Austria-Hungary. in the Austrian Parliament Debates during World War I and the Post-war Years (1917–1920) . . . . . . 257 Miloslav Szabó “Jewish Reign of Terror”? Campaigns Against Jewish Officers and Antisemitism in Slovakia During the Period of the First Czechoslovak Republic . . . . . . . . . . . . . 279



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Memory Hildegard Frübis “To Mothers of the Twelve Thousand” Max Liebermann and the Commemoration of Front-Line Jewish Soldiers in the First World War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 301 Gerald Lamprecht Jewish Soldiers in Austrian Collective Memory 1914 to 1938 . . . . . . . . . 311 Ljiljana Dobrovšak Fallen Jewish Soldiers in Croatia during the First World War . . . . . . . . . 331 Veronika Szeghy-Gayer Jewish War Memory as a Local Community Building Project – the Heroes’ Memorial in Prešov, Slovakia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 351 Contributors.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 371

Gerald Lamprecht, Eleonore Lappin-Eppel, Ulrich Wyrwa

Introduction After decades during which the Jewish experiences made in World War I have often been marginalized in both historical science and Jewish Studies, it can be stated that the centennial of the beginning of the war in 2014 has triggered new impulses. Research projects were carried out, exhibitions were shown and publications emerged, so that we can now ask what new perspectives the commemoration has opened up, what new methodological approaches have become visible and what new insights have been gained into the historical contexts, backgrounds and consequences of the war.1 The European Jewish experience in WWI has certainly been the subject of historical research before. A milestone for Germany was the work presented by Egmond Zechlin on German politics and the Jews in the First World War.2 Soon afterward, in 1971, the question of the Jews at war was made the topic of the fundamental collection of essays Deutsches Judentum in Krieg und Revolution edited by Werner E. Mosse.3 After these two most instructive and inspiring volumes, historical research on this question fell silent for almost two decades. Significantly, the PhD thesis of Stephen Magill Defense and Introspection  : The First World War as a Pivotal Crisis in the German Jewish Experience under the supervision of Amos Funkenstein remained unpublished.4 It was not until 2001 that the issue was taken up again in an inspiring and intellectually stimulating 1 Christoph Cornelißen, “‘Oh  ! What a Lovely War  !’. Zum Forschungsertrag und zu den Tenden­zen ausgewählter Neuerscheinungen über den Ersten Weltkrieg,” Geschichte in Wissen­ schaft und Unterricht 65 (2014), 269–83  ; Ulrich Wyrwa, “Zum Hundertsten nichts Neues. Deutschsprachige Neuerscheinungen zum Ersten Weltkrieg (Teil I–III),” Zeitschrift für Geschichts­wissenschaft 62, H. 11 (2014), 921–40  ; 64, H. 7/8 (2016), 683–702  ; 65, H. 11 (2017), 955–76  ; a critical review of national cultures of memory regarding World War I from the perspective of women’s and gender history appears in the issue of L‘Homme. Europäische Zeitschrift für Feministische Geschichtswissenschaft 29 (2018), No. 2  : “1914/18 – revisited” edited by Christa Hämmerle, Ingrid Sharp and Heidrun Zettelbauer. 2 Egmont Zechlin, Die deutsche Politik und die Juden im Ersten Weltkrieg (Göttingen  : Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1969). 3 Deutsches Judentum in Krieg und Revolution 1916–1923, ed. Werner E. Mosse (Tübingen  : Mohr, 1971). 4 Stephen Magill Defense and Introspection  : The First World War as a Pivotal Crisis in the German Jewish Experience, Phil Diss. University of California, Los Angeles 1977.

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study performed by Ulrich Sieg on Jewish intellectuals in World War I, their war experiences, ideological debates and new cultural life concepts.5 Regarding the Centraly European Jewish experiences in World War I, Hillel Kieval introduced new research questions and methods in 1988 by looking into Jewish identity politics in times of national strife and war. In his monograph in The Making of Czech Jewry, he starts his investigations in the year 1870 and closes them after the fall of the Habsburg Empire in 1918.6 Kieval’s innovation was his close study of the shifts of Jewish national, linguistic and cultural orientations as well as his redefinitions of identities in the face of changing regimes and national allegiances. Some years later, Marsha Rozenblit presented her study of Habsburg Jews during World War I in which she also focused on the adaptation of Jewish identity to the changing national environment.7 Kieval and Rozenblit not only introduced new research questions but also new sources by heavily relying on ego documents like memoirs, diaries and letters. At the same time, David Rechter also published his volume on Jews in Vienna during WWI and presented Jewish politics as both fluid and a process of adapting to the changing political and national situations.8 The only study that has dealt with the catastrophic experiences made by the Jews living in the region of the Eastern Front was presented by Frank M. Schuster in 2004.9 Concerning the Habsburg Monarchy, another academic void was filled in 1989, when the Austrian Jewish Museum in Eisenstadt published a catalogue of its exhibition on Jews in the Habsburg army, which was penned by the military 5 6

7 8 9

Ulrich Sieg, Jüdische Intellektuelle im Ersten Weltkrieg. Kriegserfahrung, weltanschauliche Debatten und kulturelle Neuentwürfe, (Berlin  : Akademie Verlag, 2001). Hillel J. Kieval, The making of Czech Jewry. National conflict and Jewish society in Bohemia 1870– 1918, (Oxford-New York  : Oxford University Press, 1988)  ; Marsha Rozenblit, Reconstructing a national identity  : the Jews of Habsburg Austria during World War I (Oxford-New York  : Oxford University Press, 2001). Marsha Rozenblit, Reconstructing a national identity. David Rechter, The Jews of Vienna and the First World War (Oxford-Portland  : Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2001). Frank M. Schuster, Zwischen allen Fronten. Osteuropäische Juden während des Ersten Weltkrieges (1914–1919) (Köln-Weimar-Wien  : Böhlau Verlag 2004). Two years earlier, Joachim Neugroschl had published a translation of S. A. An-Skys report  : “Yiddish togbukh fun khurbn.” S. Ansky, The Enemy at his Pleasure. A Journey through the Jewish Pale of Settlement during World War I, ed. Joachim Neugroschel (New York  : Owl Book, 2002). See also S. A. An-Sky, 1915 Diary of S. An-sky. A Russian Jewish Writer at the Eastern Front (Bloomington-Indianapolis  : Indiana University Press, 2016), Simon Dubnow, Geschichte eines jüdischen Soldaten. Bekenntnis eines von vielen, ed. Vera Bischitzky and Stefan Schreiner (Göttingen  : Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 2012) and Carnage and Care on the Eastern Front. The War Diaries of Bernhard Bardach 1914–1918, ed. Peter C. Appelbaum (New York-Oxford  : Berghahn, 2018).



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historian Erwin A. Schmidl. This exhibit and the catalogue filled a surprising lacuna in the research of Jews and the war  : the history of Jewish military service.10 This book, too, presents a general overview of Jewish military service in the Habsburg Monarchy, beginning in the 18th century. However, the First World War is a central topic. Therefore, it does not come as a surprise that a revised version of the book came out in 2014.11 After this study, it took almost twenty years until Jewish soldiers in World War I again became the subjects of historic studies. The focal points of two newer studies were the notorious “Judenzählung,” the Jewish census taken in the German army. Werner T. Angress had already published essays on this topic in the 1970s, 12 and in 2007, Jacob Rosenthal’s fundamental book on this subject came out.13 Both authors stressed the shock felt by the Jewish soldiers, who once again felt segregated from their gentile comrades. This hypothesis, that Jewish soldiers felt generaly estranged from their comrades after the Jewish census, was tested in later studies, namely, by the American historian David J. Fine with respect to Bavarian sources14 and by the British historian Tim Grady, who had conducted two studies on German-Jewish soldiers. In these studies, Grady stressed the commonalities between Jews and gentiles in the German army. In his first study, he pointed out that the joint war experience also resulted in joint acts of commemoration of war victims. In his 10 Erwin A. Schmidl, Juden in der K. (u.) K. Armee 1788–1918 / Jews in the Habsburg armed forces. Wissenschaftliche Begleitpublikation zur Ausstellung “200 Jahre jüdische Soldaten in Österreich” des Österreichischen Jüdischen Museums in Eisenstadt (Eisenstadt  : Österreichisches jüdisches Museum, 1989). In 2013. Derek Penslar published his remarkable book Jews and the Military. A History. In this study. he gives an overview of Jewish militarism from ancient times to the present. Cf. Derek J. Penslar, Jews and the Military. A History (Princeton-Oxford  : Princeton University Press, 2013). 11 Erwin A. Schmidl, Habsburgs jüdische Soldaten. 1788–1918 (Wien-Köln-Weimar  : Böhlau, 2014). See also István Deák, Beyond Nationalism. A Social and Political History of the Habsburg Officer Corps, 1848–1918 (Oxford  : Oxford University Press, 1990), including a chapter about Jewish officers and Jüdische Soldaten – Jüdischer Widerstand in Deutschland und Frankreich, ed. Michael Berger (Paderborn  : Schöningh, 2012)  ; Juden und Militär in Deutschland zwischen Integration, Assimilation, Aus­ grenzung und Vernichtung, ed. Michael Berger (Baden-Baden  : Nomos-Verlag, 2009) and a monograph Michael Berger, Eisernes Kreuz – Doppeladler – Davidstern. Juden in deutschen und österreichisch-un­ garischen Armeen. Der Militärdienst jüdischer Soldaten durch zwei Jahrhunderte (Berlin  : trafo, 2010). 12 Werner T. Angress, “Das deutsche Militär und die Juden im Ersten Weltkrieg,” in Militärges­ chichtliche Mitteilungen 19 (1976), S. 98–105  ; Werner T. Angress, “The German Army’s ‘Judenzählung’ of 1916  : Genesis – Consequences – Significance,” in Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 23 (1978), S. 117–138. 13 Jacob Rosenthal, Die Ehre des jüdischen Soldaten. Die Judenzählung im Ersten Weltkrieg und ihre Folgen (Frankfurt/Main  : Campus, 2007). 14 David J. Fine, Jewish Integration in the German Army in the First World War (Berlin  : De Gruyter 2012).

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second study, he presented German-Jewish soldiers as explicitly and unwaveringly German despite experiencing antisemitism at the front and at home.15 Most recently, the German historian Hans-Joachim Becker even presented a “re-evaluation” of the ‘Judenzählung,’ but his attempt was strongly criticized because of his apologetic Prussian representation.16 The 100th anniversary of the Great War considerably stimulated the interest in the Jewish fate during those catastrophic years. Particularly the experiences of German Jews as well as the events on the Eastern Front in this pivotal moment of Jewish history became a topic of extensive research studies, museum exhibitions and special issues of historical journals.17 In the context of this research, the literary scholar Petra Ernst from the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Graz succeeded in achieving an important methodological extension with her peer reviewed and published first volume of the “Yearbook for European Jewish Literature Studies.”18 Based on a fundamental earlier essay she had written19, Ernst’s aim was to illuminate the literary processing of the war experience and, in connection with this, the dynamics of expectations, experiences and memories. In the volume, she examines the complex life situations of European Jews shortly before, during and after the war and addresses the “Jewish (cultural) history of the First World War as an integrative part of the European (cultural) history of war.” In addition, Ernst, together with Eleonore Lappin-Eppel, published the volume “Jewish Journalism in the Sign of the First World War.”20 For 15 Tim Grady, The German-Jewish Soldiers of the First World War in History and Memory (Liverpool  : Liverpool University Press, 2011)  ; Tim Grady, A Deadly Legacy  : German Jews and the Great War (New Haven, London  : Yale University Press, 2017). 16 Hans-Joachim Becker, Von der konfessionellen Militärstatistik zur ‘Judenzählung’ (1916). Eine Neubewertung, (Nordhausen  : Verlag Traugott Bautz, 2017. 17 See eg. Special issue  : Jim G. Tobias, Nicola Schlichting (eds.), Davidstern und Eisernes Kreuz. Juden im Ersten Weltkrieg, in  : Nurinst. Bei­träge zur deutschen und jüdischen Geschichte 7 (2014)  ; Special Issue  : Rabbis and The Great War  : European Judaism A Journal for the New Europe Volume 48 (2015) Nr. 1  ; Markus Patka im Auftrag des JüdischenMuseums Wien (ed.), Weltunter­ gang. Jüdisches Leben und Sterben im Ersten Weltkrieg (Wien-Graz-Klagenfurt  : Styria Premium, 2014)  ; Ulricke Heikaus, Julia B. Köhne (eds.), Krieg  ! Juden zwischen den Fronten 1914–1918 (Berlin  : Hentsch & Heinrich, 2014). 18 Petra Ernst (ed.), Europäisch-jüdische Literaturen und Erster Weltkrieg / European-Jewish Literatures and World War One. Yearbook for European Jewish Literature Studies / Jahrbuch für europäisch-jüdische Literaturstudien 1 (2014). 19 Petra Ernst, “Der Erste Weltkrieg in deutschsprachig-jüdischer Literatur und Publizistik in Österreich” in  : Siegfried Mattl, Stefan Karner, Gerhard Botz, Helmut Konrad (eds.), Krieg. Erinnerung. Geschichtswissenschaft (Wien-Köln-Weimar  : Böhlau, 2009), 47–72. 20 Petra Ernst, Eleonore Lappin-Eppel (eds.), Jüdische Publizistik und Literatur im Zeichen des Er­ sten Weltkrieges (Wien-Köln-Weimar  : Böhlau, 2016).



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the first time, this volume brings together literary and historical contributions, which primarily deal with the First World War from a transnational Central European perspective, using contemporary Jewish journalism and literary works as examples. The region of the former Austrian Empire and Germany, for example, is also analyzed in special issues of Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History21 and the Austrian journal zeitgeschichte.22 A global dimension of the Jewish experience is highlighted by Sarah Panter’s study “Jewish Experiences and Conflicts of Loyalty in the First World War”23 and the anthology “World War I and the Jews. Conflict and Transformation in Europe, the Middle East, and America.”24 In summary, with regard to these and other publications not mentioned here, it can be stated that the memorial year 2014 brought, on the one hand, a stronger focus on the experiences of Jews during the World War I on the front as well as on the so-called home front. The First World War has emerged from the shadow of the Holocaust and is increasingly being perceived as a turning point in European Jewish history. On the other hand, it has become apparent that the narrow boundaries of national historiography are being abandoned with increasing frequency, and that researchers are now developing a transnational perspective25 and are particulary interested in the roles of minority groups.26 In addition, especially with a view toward Eastern Europe, it has also been suggested that the year 1918 was not the end of violence. Instead, the First World War is to be seen at the beginning of a long history of violence, which ultimately reached its devastating climax during the Holocaust. At the end of the memorial years, this volume bridges the gap between the war and the post-war period, between the empires that existed during the prewar period and the successor states. The study focuses on Jewish soldiers in the 21 Petra Ernst, Jeffrey Grossman, Ulrich Wyrwa (eds.), The Great War. Reflections, Experiences and Memories of German and Habsburg Jews (1914–1918), Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jew­ ish History. Journal of Fondazione CDEC, n. 9 (October 2016). 22 Gerald Lamprecht, Eleonore Lappin-Epel, Heidrun Zettelbauer (eds.), Der Erste Weltkrieg aus jüdischer Perspektive. Erwartungen - Erfahrungen - Erinnerungen, Zeitgeschichte 41, H. 4. (2014). 23 Sarah Panter, Jüdische Erfahrungen und Loyalitätskonflikte im Ersten Weltkrieg (Göttingen  : Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014). 24 Marsha Rozenblit, Jonathan Karp (eds.), World War I and the Jews. Conflict and Transformation in Europe, the Middle East, and America (New York, Oxford  : Berghahn, 2017). 25 Jay Winter, “Jüdische Erinnerung und Erster Weltkrieg – Zwischen Geschichte und Gedächtnis” in  : Jahrbuch des Simon-Dubnow-Instituts XIII (2014), 111–29. 26 Hannah Ewence, Tim Grady (eds.), Minorities and the First World War. From War to Peace (London  : Palgrave Macmillan, 2017)  ; Oswald Überegger (ed.), Minderheiten-Soldaten. Ethnizität und Identität in den Armeen des Ersten Weltkriegs (Ferdinand Schöningh  : Paderborn, 2018).

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Introduction

various armies of Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe. The study not only examines their situations during the war, but also the memories of the wartime deployment of Jews in the post-war period. The fate of Jewish soldiers becomes a paradigm for the situation of Jews in their mostly newly emerging homelands. In his introductory article, Hillel Kieval deals with the upheavals that the war brought to the Jewish population of Central and Eastern Europe. He points to the catastrophic consequences of war in Eastern Europe and describes the not always easy, but necessary change in national identity that took place in the successor states of the Habsburg Monarchy but also in the Russian Empire. Kieval traces this change in identity from state-bearing citizens in multinational empires to members of a religious and/or national minority in a successor state, primarily using Czechoslovakia as an example. In contrast to the other successor states of the Habsburg Monarchy, Czechoslovakia was constituted as a nationality state, although the Czech nation enjoyed a clear priority. The situation of Jews in Czechoslovakia was, nevertheless, much better than in most other successor states, which often saw themselves as exclusive nation states in which Jews were primarily seen as foreigners, as the “others.” The recognition of the Jewish nation in Czechoslovakia was, above all, the success of the Czech Zionists, who represented a diaspora-related cultural Zionism of Achad Haam’s coinage, which also corresponded to the national understanding of Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, the co-founder and first president of Czechoslovakia. In return, however, the Jews were expected to recognize and strengthen the Czechoslovak state. In view of the liberal democratic constitution of this state, showing their loyalty to it was not difficult for the Jews. How unstable their situation was, nevertheless, became apparent after the conclusion of the Munich Agreement, which immediately brought anti-Jewish laws along with it to the rest of Czechoslovakia. Other contributions in this volume for Austria (Eleonore Lappin-Eppel, Dieter Hecht), Hungary (Eszter Balázs) and Yugoslavia (Ana Ćirić Pavlović) show that the Zionist organization emerged stronger from the war and became an important political force in European Jewish life. Although the ideological orientations in the individual countries differed, all Zionist national organizations combined Jewish nationalism with state patriotism. The recognition of the Jewish nation by the state, however, remained a Czech peculiarity. Already during the war and increasingly after the war, Jewish soldiers were confronted with accusations that extended from shirking and cowardice to treason. In Austria, Jewish war refugees in particular, but also alleged Jewish profiteers and price drivers became the scapegoats for the rampant hardship of the last war years and the first post-war years. Antisemitic attacks on soldiers were made mainly in the Austrian press and in parliament, as Thomas Stoppacher and Eleonore Lappin-Eppel show. The Jewish press tried to refute these accus-



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ations with facts, but this proved to be unsuccessful. Nevertheless, the ban on antisemitism in the Austro-Hungarian Empire seems to have been a serious blow. It seems to have been largely heeded in the Austro-Hungarian army. Contrary to Germany antisemitism was primarily a phenomenon of the hinterland rather than the army. (Dieter J. Hecht). Jason Crouthamel proves a high degree of mutual acceptance and comradeship in the fighting troops also for the German army on the basis of ego documents from Jewish soldiers. According to Crouthamel, this sense of comradeship was not disturbed by the “Judenzählung.” Nino Gude also encountered an unexpectedly high degree of acceptance and sense of belonging to both Ukraine and Judaism when studying ego documents of Jewish soldiers in the Ukrainian army in 1918/19. The loyalty of Jewish soldiers to their homelands, their courage and their willingness to make sacrifices also served to demonstrate the loyalty of the Jewish population in general to the state. The Jewish press and Jewish opinion leaders also considered this to be an effective means of defending the Jews against antisemitism, as demonstrated in Hungary (Eszter Balázs), Germany (Hildegard Frübis) and Austria (Eleonore Lappin-Eppel, Gerald Lamprecht). The hero’s recollection and the war memory in the successor states was more problematic. This becomes particularly clear in the contribution by Veronika Szeghy-Gayer, who describes the arduous path to the erection of the war memorial in Prešov, Slovakia. The problem was that the area around Prešov came from Hungary to Slovakia only after the war. A monument to the fallen – Hungarian – soldiers, therefore, had the nimbus of Hungarian revanchism. Efforts by the initiators to remove the national (Hungarian) imprint from the monument and make it a supranational place of remembrance failed. Even when the war memorial was finally erected as a Jewish monument, it was distrusted by the police. By this time, in 1937, the Jewish community had already increasingly distanced itself from the Hungarian minority due to increasing antisemitism. War memory was similarly problematic in the multinational Kingdom of Yugoslavia, where Jewish and gentile soldiers had fought in hostile armies. Here, the soldiers of the Serbian army were honored, but those of the Habsburg armies were ignored (Ana Ćirić Pavlović). This and other problems led to incompletely records being made of the Croatian Jewish war victims(Ljiljana Dobrovšak). A little-known fact is that there was hardly any antisemitism in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and yet a highly developed Zionism, which did not lead to mass emigration (Ana Ćirić Pavlović). Not only in the successor states of the Habsburg Monarchy, but also in Austria, war memories were dominated by questions of rupture or continuity with the monarchy as well as integration into or exclusion from the new national narratives. Many of the Jewish remembrance narratives had their starting point not in the national and social upheavals of 1918, but

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rather in the emancipation history of the 19th and 20th century and in the specific Jewish expectations of the war, as Gerald Lamprecht shows in his contribution to war memory in Austria. The discussion of the perception of the Jewish war efforts during and after the war serves as an introduction to the investigation of the general constitution of Jewish communities in the years between the two world wars. In his considerations, Ulrich Wyrwa comes to the conclusion that the upheavals caused by the war also led to positive developments. Thus, the Jews in Eastern, Southeastern and Central Europe were granted a greater degree of political participation, so that they initially perceived their situations as positive despite the economic hardships. Rightly so, as Wyrwa writes, because the fascist radicalization process only began during the course of the economic crisis in the 1930s. Hillel Kieval argues that the new rights granted to the Jews gave them a sense of political strength and self-determination which they ultimately did not have. The same can be said of the war deployment of Jewish soldiers. This, too, promised – at least in the view of the Jews – complete acceptance in general society and the achievement of complete societal equality at the beginning of the war. As the contributions to this volume show, this hope was soon disappointed. Nevertheless, the experience of comradeship and the common struggle of many Jewish soldiers brought them closer to their gentile comrades, a rapprochement that continued to exist even during the time of peace. But the courage and devotion with which Jewish soldiers fought for their homelands was also a source of Jewish self-assurance. In spite of all the antisemitic attacks, they could feel that they were loyal, full citizens. The soldiers’ sacrifice also offered the opportunity to praise Jewish civilians as loyal citizens who had sacrificed their sons and husbands, but also their fortunes, and who engaged in charity. The image of the Jewish soldier thus became the counter-proposal of the “Jewish shirker”, “coward” and “war profiteer.” Therefore, in the 1930s, the honor of the Jewish fallen soldiers and war-disabled gained in importance with the rise of antisemitism, but also with the militarization of society. The Shoah covered up the memory of the Jewish dead and made unconditional Jewish loyalty to the home states appear questionable or misguided. The introduction of totalitarian socialist regimes in Eastern and Southeastern Europe after the Second World War further contributed to the fact that the roles of the Jewish soldiers in the First World War as well as the fate of the Jewish civilian population during and after the war were forgotten. It is a clear merit of the commemoration years to shed more light on the Jewish experience in World War I.

Hillel J. Kieval

Conflict Zones Empire, War, and Jewish Destinies in East Central Europe From these and other dismaying reports, we realized that things beyond human comprehension were going on in Galicia. A vast region of one million Jews, who only yesterday, under Austrian rule, had enjoyed human and civil rights, was trapped in a cordon of blood and iron. Severed from the rest of the world, they were at the mercy of Cossack and Russian soldiers provoked like wild beasts. It was as if an entire people were perishing. S. Ansky, The Enemy at His Pleasure (Khurbn Galitsye) (1920) They have no fatherland, the Jews, but every country in which they live and pay their taxes looks to them for patriotic commitment and heroism, and reproaches them for dying without enthusiasm. Joseph Roth, The Wandering Jews (1927).1

Introduction If one were to read the First World War as a Jewish experience, what would that entail  ? Perhaps, first and foremost, one would want to attend to the story of the Jewish soldiers who fought on both sides of the conflict, easily the largest military engagement in world history that pitted Jew against Jew. But Jewish civilians – from Bukovina to Galicia to the Kingdom of Poland to Lithuania  – were no less under attack in the war, and their fates also demand our attention. In the shadow of the Shoah, it is sometimes forgotten that the First World War also brought in its wake demographic catastrophe. Millions of Jews had the distinct displeasure of discovering that their homes, villages, and towns essentially comprised the Eastern Front. They suffered the violence that accompanied invasion, counter-invasion, and retreat  ; fled as refugees to Hungary, the Bohemian lands,

1 S. Ansky, The Enemy at His Pleasure  : A Journey Through the Jewish Pale of Settlement During World War I., trans. and ed. Joachim Neugroschel (New York  : Henry Holt and Co., 2002)  ; 9  ; Joseph Roth, The Wandering Jews, trans. Michael Hofmann (New York  : W.W. Norton, 2001), 20.

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and Vienna  ; and endured expulsions and forced evacuations to the interior of Russia. The war looms large as a political watershed as well, an upheaval with enormous consequences for the Jewish quest for citizenship, the relationship between Jews and the state, and, ultimately, the nature of Jewish collective identity. The mobilization of individuals and communities to tend to the social, medical, educational, and material needs of the Jewish refugees served as one kind of political training field. The Russian revolutions of 1917 and the national uprisings that attended the collapse of the German, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman empires provided an entirely different set of political experiences. Jewish emancipation throughout East Central Europe (and in the late Ottoman state) had been experienced in a multi-ethnic, imperial context, and the primary political allegiance of Jews had been to the supranational, imperial state. Now Jews faced the need to unlearn, as it were, the nineteenth-century lessons of emancipation. They faced an uncertain future in the necessary quest to recalibrate their political relationship to the state and to reposition themselves in post-war society.2 It says something, perhaps, about the peculiar nature of Jewish attachment to the multiethnic, imperial state that in both Austria-Hungary and interwar Czechoslovakia, Jews acquired (perhaps cultivated  ?) the reputation of being “state citizens” par excellence. The only “true Czechoslovaks” after 1918 – so the quip goes  – the only people who identified unequivocally with the new state, created, somewhat artificially, out of the ruins of the Habsburg monarchy, were the Jews. A similar proverb circulates concerning Jews of the former empire  : the only true “Austrians” before 1914, we are told, were the Jews.3 Jews, then, of all of the constituent populations of both the pre-World War I imperial states of Central Europe and at least some of their successor states – constructed in theory according a nation-state model – found no difficulty in identifying their 2

3

For surveys of the Jewish experience under wartime conditions, see  : David Engel, “World War I,” YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/ World_War_I  ; Frank M. Schuster, Zwischen allen Fronten  : Osteuropäische Juden während des Er­ sten Weltkrieges (1914–1919) (Weimar, Vienna  : Böhlau Verlag, 2001)  ; Eric Lohr, “The Russian Army and the Jews  : Mass Deportation, Hostages, and Violence during World War I,” The Rus­ sian Review 60 (2001)  : 404–419  ; Tim Grady, German-Jewish Soldiers of the First World War in History and Memory (Liverpool  : Liverpool University Press, 2011)  ; and Omer Bartov and Eric D. Weitz, eds., Shatterzone of Empires  : Coexistence and Violence in the German, Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman Borderlands (Bloomington  : Indiana University Press, 2013). One expression of this point of view can be found in Joseph Samuel Bloch, Der nationale Zwist und die Juden in Österreich (Vienna, Gottlieb, 1886). Bloch’s book was an open criticism of those Jews who tried to join one or another national group, such as the Germans, Poles, or Czechs, insisting that the Jews of the “Austrian” half of the monarchy were quintessentially Austrian, hence supranational.



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own collective self-interest with that of the country as a whole. In this way, Jews could be seen as  – perhaps constructed themselves as  – the ideal citizens of pluralist, multi-ethnic empires but also of fragile, post-war, pluralist democracies. What lies behind both claims, I would argue, is an absence, a lack  : the assumption that Jews belonged to no nationality, that they did not challenge the legitimacy of either the imperial or the multiethnic state in the name of a presumptive nation, because they – alone among East Central Europe’s ethnic groups  – had none to wield as a weapon. Jews, according to this reading, remained aloof from the nationalist pressure cooker, choosing out of necessity to identify with the state as a supranational construct. The problem for Jews, which they soon discovered in weak or collapsing empires, in revolutionary situations, and in newly-emerging nation states, was that the same aloofness and neutrality that was well-adapted to imperial settings translated for the nationalist as unreliability and disloyalty.4 With regard to Czechoslovakia, at least, our proverb suggests a mutuality of interest between the state and its Jewish population that never in fact existed  : on the one hand that the state never had reason to regard the Jews within its borders as threatening or problematic and, on the other, that the Jews recognized in Czechoslovakia not a nation-state in the Wilsonian model but another supranational construct  – the “nationalities state” that the Habsburg monarchy had claimed to be. While the aphorism about “true Austrians” and “true Czechoslovaks” may not be very satisfying in the end, it does invite us to look more closely at the effects of war and the collapse of imperial structures on the long-term project of Jewish emancipation in Europe  : on conceptions of Jewish citizenship, political and social integration, and collective Jewish identities. This essay considers some of the major transformations and dislocations that occurred in the lives of East Central Europe’s Jewish population during and in the wake of the First 4

There is, of course, much that is wrong with such a one-sided view of Jewish political culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For one thing, it presumes that members of ethnic nationalities in imperial states do not, or will not, identify politically with the state  ; this is, at best, an untested hypothesis based largely on the political rhetoric of a segment of the nationalists themselves  ; it represents a position, which for most of the nineteenth century, at least, was not shared by the majority of the population. Marsha L. Rozenblit offers a more subtle formulation regarding the Jews of Austria-Hungary before the First World War. Jews felt deeply loyal to the Habsburg monarchy, she argues, because “the supranational state allowed them the luxury of separating the political, cultural, and ethnic strands in their identity.” With regard to Habsburg Austria, she writes, Jews developed a “tripartite identity,” according to which they identified politically as Austrians, culturally as German, Czech, Polish, etc., and ethnically as Jews.: Marsha L. Rozenblit, Reconstructing a National Identity  : The Jews of Habsburg Austria during World War I (New York  : Oxford University Press, 2001), 3–4.

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World War  : military occupation  ; refugee movements  ; the temporary erasure of state boundaries  ; the political collapse of three empires and their replacement with nation-states  ; and eruptions of both military and popular violence against Jews. My larger aim is to open up the question of the changing nature of Jewish collective and individual identities in the early decades of the twentieth century, with a focus on the social, cultural, and political implications of the transition from empire to nation-state. Much of my attention will be directed at the territories and populations of the new state of Czechoslovakia, but I hope also to make comparisons to the situation in other East Central European contexts. Jewish memories of the Great War may have originated on the battlefields, in refugee camps, in the urban centers of the German and Habsburg empires, and in the shtetls of imperial Russia  ; but they were nurtured, cultivated, and expanded in new republics, states which bore the names of “reborn” and newly sovereign nations. What did these memories of destruction, of total war and the collapse of empire, mean for the production of viable Jewish identities  ? The Shatterings of War European Jews engaged with the war most directly as combatants and they did so in unprecedented numbers on both sides of the conflict. “Never before in history,” writes Derek Penslar, “had so many Jews been mobilized for battle.”5 Over one million Jewish soldiers served in the Allied forces while some 450,000 enlisted in the armies of the Central Powers. The 650,000 Jews who fought in the Russian armed forces constituted approximately five percent of the total number of soldiers in the empire (12 million), while the 320,000 Jews who fought with the Austro-Hungarian army made up four percent of its total (7.8 million). 100,000 Jews wore the uniform of the German army, of whom 12,000 were killed in battle.6

5

Derek J. Penslar, Jews and the Military  : A History (Princeton  : Princeton University Press, 2013), 157. 6 For the numbers of Jews who served in the various armed forces of World War I, see  : Elie Barnavi, ed., A Historical Atlas of the Jewish People (New York  : Schocken Books, 1994), 210–211  ; David Engel, “World War I  ;” Erwin A. Schmidl, Juden in der k. (u.) k. Armee 1788–1918 / Jews in the Habsburg Armed Forces. Studia Judaica Austriaca, Bd. 11 (Eisenstadt, 1989), 144  ; and Penslar, Jews and the Military, 3.



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Jewish Enlistment in the Armies of World War I Triple Entente

Central Powers

Russia

650,000

Germany

100,000

U.S.

250,000

Austria-Hungary

320,000

55,000

Ottoman Empire

18,000

Britain

50,000

Bulgaria

12,500

Other

50,500

France

Total

1,055,500

450,500

The memoirs and correspondence of Jews who served in the German and Austro-Hungarian armies reveal various degrees of enthusiasm for the war, little effort to evade military service, and, at least in some cases, a conviction that the campaign against the repressive and antisemitic government of Tsarist Russia was more than justified.7 I do not know of any organized effort on the part of Jews to refuse a military call-up because it would have required Jews to shoot at and kill other Jews  : thus the emancipation had borne its fruit. Some of the most traumatic effects of the war were felt by civilians living in the line of fire and, subsequently, under military rule, and Jewish civilians bore a disproportionate brunt of the burden. As noted, much of the fighting on the Eastern Front – the borderlands of the Russian, German, and Austro-Hungarian Empires – took place squarely within the heartland of East European Jewry, areas with a combined Jewish population of more than four million. The production of refugees took shape in various contexts and stages  : 1) the initial Russian invasion of Galicia, Bukovina, and East Prussia in the fall of 1914  ; 2) Russian military rule in the western provinces of the empire and in occupied Austrian territories  ; 3) the hasty retreat of Russian forces in the spring and summer of 1915  ; and 4) the 1916 Russian counter offensive. Tens of thousands of Jews from Galicia and Bukovina fled to other parts of Austria-Hungary already in advance of the invading Russian army in the fall of 1914. And for good reason. The Russian forces left death and destruction in their wake  : Jewish home towns were turned into battle fields  ; many were burned to the ground. Echoing the contemporary reportage of S. Ansky, David Rechter writes that looting, violence, rape, 7

The Leo Baeck Institute in New York houses scores of unpublished memoirs, many of which detail the author’s military service. Marsha L. Rozenblit writes about a number of these in Re­ constructing a National Identity, 82–105. See also Tim Grady, German-Jewish Soldiers of the First World War in History and Memory (Liverpool  : Liverpool University Press, 2011) and Schmidl, Juden in der k. (u.) k. Armee, 142–145.

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and the burning of homes began as soon as Russian troops entered Galician and Bukovinian territory.8 So, too, did expulsions and forced evacuations  : their use as a military tactic did not begin with the Russian retreat of 1915  ; even the motives behind them predated the war. Russian government officials and military commanders had long expressed deep suspicions regarding Jewish loyalties in what were to become the main areas of combat. In addition, as Alexander Prusin has argued, ideology crucially informed the conduct and policy of the Russian army during the war. In late imperial Russia, the army made increasing use of statistical data regarding the ethnic and religious composition of separate areas of the empire in order to determine the loyalty and reliability of various populations. These assessments were then projected onto areas targeted for military occupation  ; Jews ranked very high among potential enemies.9 The Russian military predicted, among other things, that Galician Jews would form the backbone of any resistance to the Russian occupation by virtue of the fact that, as an emancipated population, they had enjoyed demonstrably better living conditions in Austria-Hungary than Jews had in Russia. Such ascriptions of hostile intentions, Prusin writes, “were bound to evolve into a self-fulfilling prophecy, especially when combined with the spy-mania that from the war’s outset pervaded the Russian military and society.”10 Russian forces initiated largescale expulsions of Jews from cities and towns, including, for example, the entire Jewish population of Przemyśl. Violent attacks on Jewish areas often accompanied the Russian entry into Galicia, of which one of the most deadly took place in Lwów in September 1914, where local residents followed Russian troops into Jewish residential neighborhoods and together looted homes, murdered somewhere between 20 and 50 individuals, and left hundreds wounded.11 With the establishment of Russian military administration in October 1914, however, the series of improvised pogroms, evacuations, and executions of the previous weeks   8 David Rechter, The Jews of Vienna and the First World War (London, Portland  : Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2001), 69. The fact that some attacks were perpetrated in the first instance not by invading Russian troops but by civilians seeing an opportunity to loot complicates the picture. See Alexander V. Prusin, “A ‘Zone of Violence  :’ The Anti-Jewish Pogroms in Eastern Galicia in 1914–1915 and 1941,” in Bartov and Weitz eds., Shatterzone of Empires, 367.   9 Prusin, “A ‘Zone of Violence’,” 367  ; see also Peter Holquist, “To Count, to Extract, and to Exterminate  : Population Statistics and Population Politics in Late Imperial and Soviet Russia,” in A State of Nations  : Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin, eds. Ronal Grigor Suny and Terry Martin (Oxford  : Oxford University Press, 2001), 111–119  ; and Schuster, Zwischen allen Fronten, 166–168. 10 Prusin, “A ‘Zone of Violence’,” 368. 11 Prusin, “A ‘Zone of Violence’,” 369. Schuster surveys other first-hand accounts of violence at the hands of Russian and Cossack troops in Zwischen allen Fronten, 169–179.



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and months were replaced by what Prusin calls “a more systematic persecution consistent with the official anti-Jewish restrictions in Russia proper.”12 With the German and Austro-Hungarian counter offensive of the spring and summer of 1915, Russia was forced to beat a hasty retreat from Galicia and Bukovina, while the Central Powers took temporary control of all of Congress Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and parts of Volhynia and Belorussia, bringing some forty percent of the Russian Empire’s Jews under their wing.13 It was under the conditions of retreat that a new wave of reprisals and pogroms occurred. S. Ansky complained that “every commander and every colonel who made a mistake had found a way to justify his crime, his incompetence, his carelessness. He could make everything kosher by blaming his failures on a Jewish spy.”14 Nine Jews were hanged in Radom for “welcoming Germans in a friendly way  ;” seven were hanged in Zamość, and four in Krasnik, including the government-appointed rabbi.15 Practices such as these reached their peak between March and September 1915, when, as German forces advanced deep into Russian territory, more than half a million Jews were expelled from frontline areas, including all of northern Lithuania and much of Latvia. The mass deportation of Jews from the Kovno (Kaunus) province began in early May and resulted in 150,000 deportations within two weeks, the property left behind by those expelled often looted or destroyed. A report by the American Jewish Committee on the situation in the war zone in June 1915 estimated that 600,000 Jews (in retrospect an underestimate) had been left “homeless” and “ruined” in the Polish lands and the northwestern districts of Russia.16 A devastating situation to be sure, one that put tremendous strain on Jewish relief committees and welfare organizations. More than 80,000 Jewish refugees had congregated in Warsaw by 1915 while an additional 22,000 Jews had settled in Vilna (Wilno).17 The only bright spot in this storm of despair was perhaps the fact that, as an unintended consequence, the mass expulsions precipitated the de facto abolition of the borders of the Pale of Settlement. In time the war forced the Tsarist government to recognize that it could no longer continue to sustain the Pale, that 12 Prusin, “A ‘Zone of Violence’,” 369. On Russian military policy toward Jews, see also Lohr, “The Russian Army and the Jews, 404–419. 13 Engel, “World War I.” 14 Ansky, The Enemy at His Pleasure, 5. 15 Ansky, The Enemy at His Pleasure, 5. 16 Lohr, “The Russian Army and the Jews,” 410. The AJC report (The Jews in the Eastern War Zone [New York, 1916]) is cited in Rechter, Jews of Vienna, 68. Rechter notes (p. 70) that the Austrian record in Galicia was also marked by atrocity although to a lesser degree. 17 Engel, “World War I”.

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it was more important to defeat the real enemy than to maintain administrative controls over the Jewish population. As the liberal-minded Minister of Agriculture A. V. Krivoshein (1858–1923), put it  : “one cannot fight a war against Germany and against the Jews.” Certainly, Jews continued to suffer all manner of harassment and physical abuse at the hands of the Russian army. Yet once it became clear that their movements could no longer be policed by the state, the Pale of Settlement essentially dissolved itself. In August 1915 the government reluctantly conceded that, “Jewish war sufferers” should be allowed to settle in provincial towns but not in Petrograd or Moscow. Consistent with pre-war Tsarist policy, Jews were forbidden to settle in villages  ; all the same, two-fifths of all Jewish refugees moved to areas of the Russian Empire that had previously been closed to them. The consequences were unsettling. The use of Yiddish in public places led some Russians to think that German was being spoken, and this compounded the fear of Jewish cultural difference.18 Practical Work in the Present: Jewish refugees from Galicia and Bukovina Accounts vary widely as to the total number of Jewish refugees uprooted by war in Galicia and Bukovina – with estimates ranging anywhere from 200,000 to as high as 450,000 – also as to their places of destination.19 It appears that most of the refugees headed for Hungary, Vienna, or the Bohemian lands. Austrian government statistics published in the fall of 1915 put the number of Galician Jews entering Vienna during the months of the Russian advance at 77,000, while another 75,000 had found refuge in Bohemia and Moravia. By early 1915 as many as 30,000 Jewish refugees may have been living in Prague, with several thousand more in other parts of Bohemia. In Budapest, meanwhile, where au18 Peter Gatrell, “Refugees,” in 1914–1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War, eds. Ute Daniel et al., issued by Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin 2014-10-08. DOI  : 10.15463/ ie1418.10134. 19 Engel cites both the lower and the higher figure. Rechter writes that “perhaps as many as 400,000” made their way to Hungary, Vienna, and the Bohemian lands. Beatrix Hoffmann-Holter cites a report from the Vienna that refers to some 600,000 refugees, a high percentage of which were Jews. If one accepts the figure of 450,000 as correct, it would have represented over half of the total prewar Jewish population of Galicia (872,000 in 1910). See Beatrix Hoffmann-Holter, „Abreisendmachung“  : Jüdische Kriegsflüchtlinge in Wien 1914–1923, Wien, Köln, Weimar Böhlau, 1995. Peter Gatrell notes that around 200,000 Jewish refugees fled Galicia and Bukovina in the first year of fighting, but this figure does not include those who were resettled within the region, dispatched to the Russian interior (perhaps as many as 50,000), or fled at a later date. See Gatrell, “Refugees”.



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thorities appear to have been much less forthcoming in providing aid to Jewish refugees, there were approximately 20,000.20 These figures are most likely incomplete, as they do not account for all Galician Jews who fled to the Hungarian areas of the Habsburg Empire, nor for the many who were housed in refugee camps in Styria and other Austrian provinces. By the end of 1915, at any event, at least 340,000 refugees from Galicia were living in Austria, two-fifths of whom were Jews, while many others scraped by in Hungarian territory, some of them in designated refugee camps.21 Unofficial surveys from the period identified more than 130,000 Galician Jews in Vienna alone. Several thousand other Jews, mainly from Bukovina, fled to Romania. Many refugees returned to their homes with the Austrian recapture of the contested areas in the second half of 1915, but some were forced to flee again during the 1916 Russian offensive. At the close of the war, an estimated 20–25,000 Galician Jews, and perhaps as many as double that number, remained in the Austrian capital.22 The need to feed, clothe, educate, and find shelter for arriving refugees stirred a variety of different Jewish organizations to mobilize. In Prague these included the Praga and Bohemia lodges of B’nai B’rith, the Zentralverein zur Pflege jü­ discher Angelegenheiten, the Jüdische Volksverein, and various Jewish confraternities. The Austrian government ordered the construction of provisional refugee camps in Nikolsburg/Mikulov, Pohrlitz/Pohořelice, and Gaya/Kojetín in Moravia. The organized Jewish community of Prague, together with representatives from nineteen Jewish welfare organizations, established an umbrella Hilfskomitee to oversee the distribution of aid, headed by the young Zionist leader Chaim

20 The figures are derived from Engel, “World War I  ;” Gatrell, “Refugees  ;” and Jiří Kuděla, “Die Emigration galizischer und osteuropäischer Juden nach Böhmen und Prag zwischen 1914– 1916/17, Studia Rosenthaliana 23 (1989)  : 125–126. As the Galician refugees were Austrian citizens Hungary considered them “foreigners” and refused to take responsibility for them. 21 Engel, “World War I”  ; Gatrell, “Refugees”  ; Hoffmann-Holter, “Abreisendmachung.” 22 Engel, “World War I”  ; Schmidl, Juden in der k. (u.) k. Armee, 145, where he cites a police report from autumn 1915, which put the number at 137,000. Beatrix Hoffmann-Holter, “Abreisend­ machung”  : Jüdische Kriegsflüchtlinge in Wien 1914–1923, Wien, Köln, Weimar 1995. It should be noted that fighting on the Western Front produced its own, general flow of refugees. Upwards of 400,000 people fled from Belgium to Holland in the first three months following the outbreak of war. This was only the beginning of an enormous upheaval. An estimated 200,000 Belgian refugees arrived in France in the aftermath of the German invasion. Around 160,000 refugees remained on UK registers at the end of 1916, the number dropping only slightly before the war ended. According to the Ministry of the Interior, the total number of French refugees who were internally displaced reached 150,000 by the end of August 1914. By the first of January 1915, the number exceeded 500,000 and by the end of the year it hovered at about 910,000, after which the growth rate subsided. (Gatrell, “Refugees.”)

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Nagler.23 It is certainly likely that not all Prague Jews were pleased about the presence of so many “Eastern” Jews in the city, put off by the poverty, dirt, and misery that they confronted, and apprehensive about the unsophisticated, foreign image that the immigrants presented. One memoir of the war years, and written from a Zionist perspective, attributed the following, racially-charged lines to the Czech-Jewish newspaper Rozvoj  : No reasonable person would claim that they are our brothers. Their religion is certainly not ours  ; and if one takes a look at the physiognomy of these Jews, one could not even claim that we are members of the same race.24

Alfred Engel, a Moravian-born Zionist and historian, organized one of the more intriguing institutions to care for the needs of Jewish refugees in Prague  : the Emergency School for Jewish Refugees from the East (Notschule für jüdis­ che Flüchtlinge aus dem Osten), which operated a Volksschule, a Bürgerschule, and classes in continuing education in Prague, as well as a number of smaller, rural schools, and which may have serviced as many as 1,400 students at any one time.25 Engel recruited the writer Max Brod (who served out most of the war in Prague’s General Post Office) to teach a course on world literature to girls aged fifteen to nineteen, and Brod went on to teach at the school for the next three years. He provided a first-person account of his experiences after the first year of teaching in Martin Buber’s journal Der Jude, based, according to Brod, “on diary entries.” In sometimes insightful but often essentializing and romantic language, he gave expression to the potentially transformative nature of the encounter for student and teacher alike. Brod begins his account by offering important details about the composition of the schools, the curricula, and the energy behind the endeavor. The students, who ranged in age from six to thirty-six, came from all parts of Galicia and Bukovina. Some had been receiving a Polish education  ; some, German  ; others, Yiddish  ; and still others, Ruthenian. Some (whom Brod labeled “Analphabeten”) had known only Hebrew or Yiddish until age eighteen  ; and most had only two or four years of education behind them. Somehow Engel managed to assemble a staff of teachers (“stamped out of the earth” – Golem-like), assign students to 23 Kuděla, “Emigration,” 120–124. 24 Moses Wiesenfeld, “Begegnung mit Ostjuden,” in Dichter, Denker, Helfer  : Max Brod zum 50. Geburtstag, ed. F. Weltsch (Moravská Ostrava, 1934), 55. 25 See Max Brod, “Erfahrungen im ostjüdischen Schulwerk,” Der Jude 1 (1916)  : 32–36  ; and the coverage in Selbstwehr in spring and summer 1915, as cited in Iris Bruce, Kafka and Cultural Zionism  : Dates in Palestine (Madison  : University of Wisconsin Press, 2007), 118–119.



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the proper classes, assemble teaching materials in various languages, and mount courses in agriculture, housekeeping, commercial arts, and woodworking in addition to academic subjects. The project even included a children’s home for orphans, a reading room, and a “modern Cheder.” All, Brod quipped, within the framework of something created by like-minded people (unsere Gesinnungs­ genossen) with state support. “Who says the Zionists do not engage in Gegen­ wartsarbeit  ?”26 Brod could at times express sexist notions about the “enchanting freshness and naiveté” of his female students, their enthusiasm and thirst for knowledge for its own sake, and not – as with “assimilated, Western Jewesses” – as a way station to marriage. He could wax romantic about beauty and sublime ideas corresponding to the most urgent needs of his students, who possessed hearts yearning for both poetry and religion  ! When an East European Jew entered a room, Brod proclaimed, it is immediately filled with his speech, his deepest problems, his Weltanschauung. He is not a bit shy. He goes straight for the essential point without thinking of adopting the conventions of polite, skeptical speech. He says what interests him, what he wants to learn, and be taught. This “naiveté of the mind,” Brod asserted, this deep mixture of “the natural and the sublime” – much like the blending of narrative (aggadah) and law (halakhah) in the Talmud – this unmediated relationship to the spirit, is what made his teaching so pleasant. I feel that I can appeal to a tradition, a common feeling in all of the students. I have a people, a community, before me, not scattered individuals.27 And one can lecture on Homer much better to a nation than to such delicately chiseled individuals. Something of the national energy, which the writer rolls together in his work, something of the tragedy of the solitary figure, who is separated from his people yet fervently reaches out to them, to the community […] something of the ties of communal feeling is alive among these students.28

When one peels away the “orientalist” and somewhat sexist layering of Brod’s reminiscence, what one finds is a message about the need for basic social, cultural, and political work in which to ground ideology and lofty ideas. For years Zionists in Prague had been listening to speeches and reading editorials about the need to “nationalize” Jewish culture, beginning with the education of the 26 Brod, “Erfahrungen,” 33. Iris Bruce notes that Brod’s close friend Franz Kafka was very supportive of this endeavor, visited Brod’s classes on a number of occasions, and got to know some of the students. (Bruce, Kafka and Cultural Zionism, 118–119). 27 Brod, “Erfahrungen,” 34. 28 Brod, “Erfahrungen,” 34.

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young. Now, thanks to the war, a fully functioning, Jewish national school system was in place in the Bohemian capital. “Perhaps the government would be interested to know that the so-called opposition to education (Bildungsfeindlichkeit) of the Orthodox in Galicia is hardly detectable,” Brod provoked. And what did it take to remove this supposed resistance  ? Allow the boys to cover their heads, hold classes on Sunday instead of Saturday, celebrate the Jewish festivals. It did not take much to relieve the concerns of the parents. Everything else fell into place powered by the enthusiasm of the students themselves.29 Brod was certainly not alone in concluding that the success of the school for refugee children offered a model for a national Jewish educational system that might be established throughout Central and Eastern Europe, particularly in areas recently freed from Russian control. National Jewish education, Zionists argued, was not only in the best interests of the Jews but also worked toward the creation of better citizens, unbroken, and steeped in their own ethnic and religious heritage.30 For many Prague Zionists then, the experience of war made clear the need to transition from intellectualism to practical work, from the cozy reading rooms of the academy to the classrooms and backrooms of the living community. For some, concrete work in the present meant the building of modern Jewish cultural institutions in Palestine. By the end of 1918 Hugo Bergmann was urging Martin Buber to accompany him to Jerusalem, where they might form a committee to establish a Jewish university. Buber, complaining that his Hebrew was not yet fluent enough, was reluctant to leave Germany. Bergmann, however, made the leap of faith, leaving his position as librarian at the University Library in Prague in 1919 to become secretary of the Cultural Department in the Zionist Office in London and moving to Jerusalem the next year, where he was instrumental in creating the National and University Library, which opened in 1925.31

29 Brod, “Erfahrungen,” 33–34 here 33. 30 On this point, Brod  : “If I might draw from my modest experiences conclusions concerning the formation of a Jewish school system in Occupied Russia, it would appear to me that it is essential, not only in the interests of Jewry, but also of the Austrian and German empires – who need full, upstanding characters as citizens – to establish Jewish schools on the basis of a sound, Jewish-national consciousness, Jewish spirituality, and religion. In that way not only are the intellectual, educational successes guaranteed, but also the cultivation of unbroken men and women, conscious of their responsibilities.” (“Erfahrungen,” 35.) 31 Hugo Bergmann to Martin Buber, 30 December 1918  ; Buber to Bergmann, 21 January 1919, in  : Martin Buber, Briefwechsel aus sieben Jahrzehnten, vol. 2 (Heidelberg, 1973), 20–21 and 27– 28. For a more extensive survey of Jewish national activity after the war in Prague, Europe, and Palestine, see Hillel J. Kieval The Making of Czech Jewry  : National Conflict and Jewish Society in Bohemia, 1870–1918 (New York  : Oxford University Press, 1988), 154–197.



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Max Brod, in addition to teaching in the school for refugees, became a regular contributor to Buber’s journal Der Jude and a co-founder of the Jewish National Council (Národní rada židovská) of Czechoslovakia in 1918, which represented the interests of the Jewish national minority in the new republic.32 Siegmund Kaznelson, who had been the mainstay behind the newspaper Selbstwehr during the war years, joined the editorial board of Der Jude in 1918  ; in 1920 he assumed the directorship of the Berlin-based Jüdischer Verlag. Several Jews from the Bohemian lands occupied key positions in the world Zionist movement both during and at the end of the war. Hugo Herrmann served as editor-in-chief of the Berlin weekly Jüdische Rundschau from 1913 to 1914, when he was called up for military service. Following demobilization he took up the position of editor of Jüdisches Volksblatt, published in Moravská Ostrava (Mährisch-Ostrau), from 1919 until 1922 – at which point it merged with Selbstwehr – and served as head of Keren Hayesod (Palestine Foundation Fund) in Czechoslovakia until his emigration to Palestine in 1934. His cousin, Leo Herrmann, had been brought to Berlin in 1913 to assume the position of secretary of the World Zionist Organization. He, together with the Moravian-born Berthold Feiwel, helped to establish the Keren Hayesod in 1919 and served as its secretary general in Jerusalem from 1926 until his death in 1951.33 Ludvík Singer, the most prominent of the Czech-speaking Zionists, cofounded the Národní rada židovská with Max Brod in 1918 and also edited the Czech-language Zionist weekly, Židovské zprávy ( Jewish news). He attended the Paris Peace Conference at the close of the war (as did Hugo Bergmann) to present Jewish national demands, served as chairman of the Jewish National party in Czechoslovakia, and, in this capacity, was elected to Parliament.34 Rob32 Max Brod, Streitbares Leben, 1884–1968 (Munich, 1969), 230–233  ; A. M. Rabinowicz, “The Jewish Minority, in Society for the History of Czechoslovak Jews ed., The Jews of Czechoslovakia 1 (Philadelphia, 1968), 155–264  ; and O. Rabinowicz, “Czechoslovak Zionism  : Analecta to a History,” in The Jews of Czechoslovakia. Historical Surveys and Studies 2 (Philadelphia  : Jewish Publication Society of America, 1971), 19–136. Arthur A. Cohen, in his introduction to The Jew  : Essays from Martin Buber’s Journal, Der Jude, 1916–1928 (University of Alabama Press  : Alabama, 1980), underscores the prominent role played by Prague Jews in both the publication process and the determination of editorial policy (pp. 10–11). 33 On Hugo Herrmann, see Encyclopaedia Judaica ( Jerusalem, 1972), vol. 8, col. 393  ; and Viktor Kellner, “Ben dodo shel Leo,” in Prag vi-Yerushalayim  : Sefer le-zekher Leo Herrmann, ed. Felix Weltsch ( Jerusalem, 1954), 120–121. On Leo Herrmann, see Encyclopaedia Judaica, vol. 8, col. 365  ; also Robert Weltsch, “Leo Herrmann  : Darko u-tekufato”  ; G. Herlitz, “Pe’ula tsiyonit bereshit milhemet ha’olam ha-rishonah’  ; and Ya’akov Hodes, “Ha-yamim ha-rishonim shel hakeren ha-yesod,” all in Prag vi-Yerushalayim, ed. F. Weltsch, 125–142, 153–155, and 156–159. 34 Felix Weltsch, “Shnei tsiyonim tshekhi’”, in Prag vi-Yerushalayim, ed. F. Weltsch, 73–74  ; Selbst­ wehr, 12 February 1926, 2.

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ert Weltsch worked as a correspondent in Vienna during the revolutionary crisis of 1918–19. For the next eighteen years, he occupied the position of editor-inchief of Jüdische Rundschau, thereby becoming the most visible Zionist journalist in all of Central Europe.35 As for Hans Kohn, who had spent much of the war as a prisoner of war in Russia  : after his return to the West, he held posts in the Zionist Organization in London, Paris, and Jerusalem, the last from 1925 to 1929. Several years later, however, he moved to the United States where he would teach at several universities, including Smith College, and live out his life alienated from the Zionist movement and increasingly suspicious of what he understood to be the excesses of nationalism in all of its forms.36 To be sure, the romanticism that had occupied a central position in pre-war Prague Zionism did not vanish with the call to arms. It would be more accurate to say that it became tempered by the experience, committed to its realization in practical activity. Hugo Bergmann summed up this intellectual orientation in a programmatic article that he published in the first issue of Der Jude titled “Jewish Nationalism after the War” (Der Jüdische Nationalismus nach dem Krieg). Assessing the effects of the war on nationally inclined Jews in Central Europe, Bergmann continued to promote the view that the conflict, however traumatic, had brought to its Jewish participants a taste of life in community (Gemeinschaft). The individual indeed experienced what it was like to devote one’s energies to the collectivity, and, although it was still unclear what the outcome of the war would mean for Jewish nationalism, it had at least taught the Jew to appreciate the movement of history and the role of the group in historical change.37 The war, Bergmann felt, had forced Jews to choose activity over passivity, to take up arms, to respond through concrete action. Jews had a choice  : they could allow themselves to be overcome with grief at the sight of suffering and death – and thus continue a literary/religious tradition that dated back to the Crusades – or they could answer with the determination to control their own destiny, to effect change in their own community in their lifetime. They could respond, Bergmann suggested, as refugees or as soldiers. But to become a Zionist soldier meant to set out to build a Jewish national reality in Europe as well as in Palestine. Thus the war had the effect of extracting from pre-1914 Zionist intellectualism a deathbed confession. Likening pre-war Zionism to pre-war socialism, Bergmann asked  : 35 Grete Schaeder, Introduction to Buber, Briefwechsel, vol. 1, 46–47  ; also Robert Weltsch zum 60. Geburtstag  ; and Robert Weltsch zum 70. Geburtstag, eds. Hans Tramer and Kurt Löwenstein. 36 See Hans Kohn, Living in a World Revolution  : My Encounters with History (New York, 1964), 47–155. 37 Hugo Bergmann, “Der jüdische Nationalismus nach dem Krieg,” Der Jude 1 (1916–17), 7–13.



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What mistake did all of the intellectuals make – such well-meaning men and such bad politicians – who lulled us into a dream of peace out of which we awakened so cruelly  ? They did not take into account the true interests of man, but rather [those of ] an illusory image, a holiday man [Feiertagsmensch], an abstraction. Clearly it was not the idea of peace or the brotherhood of nations that was at fault but rather the superficial psychology of many of its adherents, who felt that they could master reality through addresses at congresses, toasts, and the exchange of telegrams.38

The challenge that lay ahead was for Zionism to integrate into the everyday lives of real Jews, to create a living Jewish reality in Europe. “I demand respect for facts,” Bergmann challenged, “an honest discussion with life.”39 It would not take long for the honest discussion to take shape. The New European Order: Jewish Citizenship in the new Nation-States. The Case of Czechoslovakia The dissolution of the Habsburg monarchy in 1918 brought with it an end to the distinctive political structures that had established the framework for the cultural and political choices of Jews in three different environments  : the lands of the Czech crown (Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia), Upper Hungary (Slovakia), and Carpatho-Rus’ (in today’s Ukraine). Months of social unrest accompanied the collapse, which included rioting against Jews in Slovakia, Moravia, and even in Prague. To what extent, one might ask, did attitudes and behaviors whose origin lay in accommodations to Austrian and Hungarian conditions carry over to the new nation-state  ? What was the relationship between culture and citizenship  ? Did “insider” status, a sense of belonging to the new state, depend on meeting specific cultural/linguistic requirements  ? Did Jews achieve a successful integration as “Czechoslovaks”  ? Finally, how did Jewish nationality function as a set of norms around which to organize group politics and social identity  ? Jews from the various regions that would come to form the Czechoslovak Republic had developed distinct responses to the challenges of acculturation and political integration under the Habsburg monarchy. In Bohemia, the rise of a politically articulate (and demanding) Czech middle class – which achieved complete dominance of Prague government, if not its cultural life, by the 1880s – combined with the migration of bilingual Jews from the Czech countryside to the cities, produced shock waves in what for nearly a century had been a steady, 38 Bergmann, “Der jüdische Nationalismus,” 7–8. 39 Bergmann, “Der jüdische Nationalismus,” 9.

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calm voyage of acculturation to the linguistic culture of the Court and loyalty to the dynastic state, achieved largely through the medium of the German-Jewish normal school. The late imperial period produced the first modern, Czech Jews, committed to deploying the language of the majority and to displaying overt sympathy for its larger political goals. It also had the dual effect of tempering, on the one hand, the enthusiasm and confidence with which German-speaking Jews continued to pursue the previous acculturation (attenuating, as it were, the “German-Jewish embrace” and removing it from any sense of national identification) and of initiating a fascinating experiment with Jewish cultural nationalism on the part of young, urban Jews – mainly artists and intellectuals, but also members of the commercial middle class.40 This sea change in political culture was not as fully achieved in Moravia, where proximity to Vienna, German dominance of the Landtag (provincial government), and the survival of autonomous Jewish municipalities (politische Judenge­ meinde) decades beyond the Revolution of 1848 prolonged the germanocentric orientation of a large portion of the Jewish community. The existence of Jewish political communities alongside Christian towns, in a structure that seemed to blend aspects of the premodern, corporate status of the Jews with their new role as citizens, also encouraged the articulation of an autonomous Jewish politics not found in Bohemia.41 The overall consequence of the new demographic, cultural, and political realities in Bohemia and Moravia – in the context of late-Habsburg institutional arrangements – was the production of a modern Jewish community that managed to remain staatstreu (or, at least, regierungstreu) even as it positioned itself to meet the rules and expectations of a very different kind of state, a multieth­ nic nation-state, which, while recognizing the rights of its national minorities, would nevertheless be unabashedly committed to furthering the interests – and expressing the sovereignty – of its dominant group. There is a certain irony in the maneuvering and self-refashioning that characterized much of public Jewish life in Bohemia and Moravia in the last decades of the monarchy. One could 40 These processes are described more fully in Kieval, The Making of Czech Jewry, and, more recently and from a more long-term perspective, in Idem, Languages of Community  : The Jewish Experience in the Czech Lands (Berkeley  : University of California Press, 2000). 41 On the political culture of Moravian Jews – and the unique structural characteristics of Moravia – see Michael L. Miller, Rabbis and Revolution  : The Jews of Moravia in the Age of Emanci­ pation (Stanford  : Stanford University Press, 2011)  ; Idem, “Reluctant Kingmakers  : Moravian Jewish Politics in Late Imperial Russia,” Jewish Studies at the Central European University 3 (2002–2003)  : 111–123  ; and Jacob Toury, “Townships in the German-Speaking Parts of the Austrian Empire before and after the Revolution of 1848/49,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 26 (1981)  : 55–72.



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argue that the net result of the long and arduous process of what in earlier work I have called “secondary acculturation,” far from transforming the basis on which Jewish politics in East Central Europe operated, merely preserved for the Jews their cherished position as a Staatsvolk.42 Only the object of their devotion was new. Jews in the Bohemian lands had distanced themselves, to be sure, from Austro-German liberalism and had learned (sometimes from painful experience) to pay close attention to the shifting balance of power among the region’s dominant ethnic groups, but on one important level nothing had changed. Jews continued to play their long-standing political card of choice  : full identification with the state. Loyalty to the Czechoslovak state would transcend linguistic and political divisions  ; it would encompass veterans of the Czech-Jewish movement as well as recent converts to the cause, die-hard promoters of German language and culture, and committed Zionists  ; and it would be predicated on the self-generated assurance that the imagined community of “Czechoslovaks” (a fiction born of the dissolution of the monarchy, in which Slavic speakers who had lived under dissimilar political conditions for the previous four centuries were proclaimed members of a single nation) was both expansive enough and generous enough to accommodate multiple languages, religions, political ideologies, and even ethno-cultural programs. Certainly a large percentage of Jews in Bohemia and Moravia, if no longer the majority, continued to speak the German language, send their children to German schools, attend German cultural events, and read German newspapers.43 The fact that members of the Jewish National Party were actively involved in a number of German-language newspapers raises the question of the connections that existed among language use, cultural politics, national minority rights, and loyalty to the state in Czechoslovakia between the wars. Were German speakers more likely than Czech speakers to promote a Jewish national position in Bohemia and Moravia  ? Were speakers of Hungarian more likely than speakers of Slovak or Yiddish to promote Zionism in Slovakia  ? Were German- and Hungarian-speaking Jews induced to declare their nationality as Jewish in the 1921 and 1930 censuses in order not to be too closely identified with the formerly dominant cultures now in decline and disfavor  ? Did Beneš and Masaryk agree to recognize the Jewish nationality in 1920 in order to reduce the numbers of 42 On the concept of “secondary acculturation,” see Kieval, Making of Czech Jewry, 4, 8, and 198– 203. 43 Čapková observes that it was primarily among the higher social strata of Jews that families sent their children to German-languages schools in interwar Czechoslovakia. Middle class and working class Jews sent their children primarily to Czech schools, including middle schools and universities. (Češi, Němci, Židé  ?, 64.)

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Germans and Hungarians in the state and weaken their respective influence  ? Last, to what conception of the state did Jewish nationalists pledge their loyalty  ? Max Brod formulated his own negotiation of the competing claims of language, culture, and national identity with some subtlety during the closing months of the war  : I do not feel myself to belong to the German people, but I am a friend of Germanness (Deutschtum), culturally related to the German world above all through language and education, through much of what sociology calls […] “traditional values” – as opposed to “generational” or “inherited values” […]. Language, education, reading, and culture have made me a thankful friend of the German people, but not a German.44

Czech national leaders could perhaps be excused if they did not fully grasp the distinction between cultural affinity and core national identity, and if they regarded the claims of the newfangled Jewish National Council for Jewish minority rights with suspicion. The fact that the Czechoslovak government eventually was won over to the idea can be attributed in no small measure to the ability of the Prague Zionists to deploy the language of the nineteenth century national revivals of East Central Europe as well as to their intuitive grasp of the real balance of power in the new state. Only a few hours before the proclamation of the Czechoslovak Republic, on 28 October 1918, representatives of the Jewish National Council – including its chairman, the Czech-speaking Ludvík Singer, and vice-chairmen Max Brod and Karel Fischel – appeared before the Czech National Council (Národní Výbor) and presented it with a memorandum that argued for recognition of national minority rights of Jews. A close reading of the document reveals that the Jewish nationalists knew exactly how to counter the suspicions of the new government toward their intentions – they did this by casting their own experience with German and Hungarian acculturation in terms borrowed from Czech and Slovak national narratives – and were able to make broad promises of real benefits that would accrue to Czechoslovak legitimacy (and hegemony) through Jewish national support. “We national Jews,” the memorandum intoned, “grant that there are some Jews who have so completely identified with the Czech or German people that they are capable of participating fully in the inner life of the nationality in whose midst they live.” The Zionists had no intention, it assured the Czech National Council, of placing any political obstacles before individuals 44 Max Brod, “Juden, Deutsche, Tschechen  : Eine menschlich-politische Betrachtung ( Juli 1918),” in Max Brod, Im Kampf um das Judentum (Vienna, Berlin  : R. Löwit Verlag, 1920), 15, 17.



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who had undergone such complete “assimilation.” It then proceeded to touch on a very sensitive argument in both Czech and Slovak national rhetoric regarding “insincere” assimilation and the role that the Austrian and Hungarian political systems had played in manipulating Jewish cultural declarations to inflate the relative weight of German and Hungarian influence, respectively, in their domains. What we have fought against, and are still fighting against, is that vacillating, insincere sort of assimilation which is to be blamed not on the unfortunate Jewish people, but on the conditions of their dispersal, and on the fact that the Austrian government (particularly under Magyar influence) consistently opposed the recognition of the Jews as a nationality group. The governments of Austria and Hungary continually sought to use the Jews as tools for oppressing the small nationalities, an exploitation which we Zionists have always emphatically deplored. The Jewish National Council regards as its primary aim the promotion of honest and frank relations between the Jewish and Czech peoples. The Czech people has equally great benefits to derive from the attainment of this goal, for the new Czech State must have domestic peace if it is to enjoy the unhampered development which we all would wish for it. Furthermore, the respect, which the Czech democracy will gain among all the peoples of the world if it finds a fair solution to the Jewish problem, will serve to raise the international status of the Czech State.45

The statement that “the new Czech State must have domestic peace if it is to enjoy the unhampered development which we all would wish for it” signals two important points regarding the Zionist initiative in October 1918. First, it may have been the Jewish nationalists themselves who first planted the suggestion that official recognition of the Jewish nationality would carry the added benefit of diminishing the size of the German and Hungarian minorities in the new state and, hence, of enhancing the ability of the “Czechoslovak” majority to govern. Second, the Jewish National Council indicated inferentially that it was prepared to support the idea of a Czechoslovak nation-state, dominated by its leading nationality. Jewish leaders had no illusions about the nature of the state that was about to be proclaimed  : they did not imagine that they were about to take part in a supranational “nationalities state” of some kind  ; quite the contrary, they knew the name of the game and were prepared to cooperate. What they hoped to get in return was a moral victory in the war against the “assimilationists,” a position of influence in Jewish public life, and some degree of cultural autonomy, 45 Memorandum from the Jewish National Council to the Government of the Czechoslovak State (Národní Výbor). Translated in Aharon Moshe Rabinowicz, “The Jewish Minority,” in The Jews of Czechoslovakia, 218–219 (Appendix A).

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as yet undetermined.46 Jewish activists in Czechoslovakia thus accommodated themselves, as Tatjana Lichtenstein has argued, to “the dominant nationalizing paradigm” of the state, identifying not so much with the supranational implications of a multinational polity as with Czechoslovakia as an ethnic-national structure.47 Jews, in this sense, were “real Czechoslovaks” because they accepted the underlying terms on which the new state was established and identified with the state-nation endowed with new power. The fact that Jewish nationalists in Czechoslovakia more or less followed suit might seem counter intuitive or improbable. But it goes to the crux of the political strategy of accommodation and speaks to the ingenuity of the Jewish national position in the interwar years. If we turn our attention to the formerly Hungarian areas of Czechoslovakia, we see that here Jews not only faced a different set of political complications, but that conditions in Slovakia and Carpatho-Rus’ produced distinctive Jewish cultural responses. Bratislava’s (Pressburg/Poszony) geographic proximity to Vienna, the presence of a strong German social element in the cities and towns of Central and Western Slovakia, and the relative weakness of Slovak national culture in the nineteenth century, had helped to assure a gradual, moderate acculturation to German among a wide swathe of the region’s Jews  – including the Orthodox population in urban centers. In contrast to the Czech lands, however, the secondary acculturation that inevitably occurred during the last third of the nineteenth century – to Hungarian language, culture, and politics – did not evolve in opposition to the hegemony of the imperial state but, rather, as a program of the state, in this case post-Ausgleich Hungary. As German-speaking fathers and mothers sent their sons to Magyar primary and secondary schools, they were moving from one imperial embrace to another – casting off Vienna in favor of Budapest – but they were not altering their political-cultural behavior in any fundamental way. Their cultural and linguistic choices were still predicated on the need that they felt to accommodate the requirements of the imperial state.48 46 Rebekah Klein-Pejšová makes a similar observation regarding the Jewish national leadership in Slovakia. There the Jewish nationalists promoted Jewish politics not only as an authentic form of Jewish self-expression but as an effective way of distancing themselves from the pre-war pattern of Hungarian linguistic and political allegiance. See Rebekah Klein-Pejšová, Mapping Jewish Identities in Interwar Slovakia (Bloomington  : Indiana University Press, 2015)  ; Idem, “Building Slovak Jewry  : Material Evidence of Reorientation as Citizens of Czechoslovakia.” Unpublished paper, Association for Jewish Studies Annual Conference, 2007. 47 Tatjana Lichtenstein, Zionists in Interwar Czechoslovakia  : Minority Nationalism and the Politics of Belonging (Bloomington and Indianapolis  : Indiana University Press, 2016), 12  ; and, more generally, 63–88. 48 On Jewish linguistic and political identifications in Slovakia, see  : Livia Rothkirchen, “Slovakia,



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From this perspective, Jews in Slovakia were a good deal less prepared than their Czech counterparts to assume the function of a Staatsvolk in the new Czechoslovak state after 1918. Yet we learn from scholars such as Rebekah Klein-Pejšová that Slovak Jews soon went about the process of symbolically redrawing maps and boundaries, effacing traces of their Hungarian citizenship and political allegiance, and reorienting themselves and their communities to the contours of their new home state. This was to be a difficult and at times painful exercise, which involved a profound rupture of historical patterns of identification as well as a spatial/territorial about-face.49 Perhaps nothing epitomizes the depth of the challenge better than the fact that Slovak Jews continued to be represented by religious-communal institutions that bore the Neolog, Status Quo, and Orthodox designations of their Hungarian origins. Slovak language and culture had never held the appeal for Jews in the Kingdom of Hungary that Czech language and culture enjoyed among Bohemian and Moravian Jews, and, for the most part, when Jews of the former Upper Hungarian counties refashioned themselves as “Slovak,” their point of reference tended to be geographical and territorial, not national. Thus, while the small Union of Slovak Jews (Sväz slovenských židov) may have urged active acculturation to Slovak language and culture and close identification with the newly-forged “Czechoslovak” nation, the majority of Jews in this part of the new state understood themselves to be “Slovak” in a more restricted sense  : as belonging, in Klein-Pejšová’s words, “to the bound[ed] territorial unit of Slovakia and the specific set of challenges and opportunities [that] that reality presented.”50 Carpatho-Rus’, which in 1930 had a Jewish population of 102,500, presented a very different type of community. Largely rural and agricultural (with the exception of Munkács/Mukačevo and Ungvár/Užhorod)  ; religiously Orthodox (though not in the modern, ideological sense)  ; and Yiddish speaking, the Jewish population in the easternmost part of the state had not been as thoroughly “magyarized” under the monarchy as had Slovak Jewry. The hold of Ruthenian national culture on the Jews, meanwhile, was slight. This was a region, if you will, that was ripe for colonial picking. Zionist and Czech-Jewish teachers and 1848–1918.” in The Jews of Czechoslovakia 1, 72–84  ; Idem, “Slovakia, 1918–1938.” in The Jews of Czechoslovakia 1, 85–124  ; Yeshayahu Jelinek, “In Search of Identity  : Slovakian Jewry and Nationalism (1918–1938).” in A Social and Economic History of Central European Jewry, eds. Yehuda Don and Victor Karády (New Brunswick  : Transaction Publishers, 1990), 207–227  ; Idem, “Židia na Slovensku v 19. storočí  : poznámky k dejinám,” Slo­venský národopis 41/3 (1993)  : 271– 296  ; and Idem, Židovské náboženské obce na Slovensku v 19. a 20. storočí a ich spoločenské postavenie (Bratislava  : Inštitút Judaistiky UK, 2002). 49 Klein-Pejšová, Mapping Jewish Identities in Interwar Slovakia. 50 Klein-Pejšová, Mapping Jewish Identities, 86–114  ; here 92.

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party officials from Prague quickly set up shop in the region (as did the Prague government itself ), setting about the task of producing modern Jewish political subjects. Representatives of Slovakia’s political Orthodoxy, meanwhile  – with the support of the Minister for Slovak Affairs (Vávro Šrobár)  – agitated successfully for the creation of an Orthodox-controlled, central office for Jewish religious affairs.51 Twenty-three Jewish public schools in Carpatho-Rus’ and Slovakia educated some 2,500 Jewish pupils in 1920-21 (many more – about 13,000 in 1923-24 – attended non-Jewish schools). In sixteen of the Jewish schools, the language of instruction was Slovak  ; in four, Magyar  ; in two, German  ; and only in one, in Munkács/ Mukačevo, was the language of instruction Hebrew. The number of Hebrew-language institutions would grow to nine over the next decade (950 students were attending such schools in 1923-24), but – unlike Czech, Slovak, German, Hungarian, and Ruthenian schools – they only received a small annual subsidy from the government, notwithstanding President Tomáš Masaryk’s personal contribution of 10,000 Czech crowns. The Prague government, for its part, built a number of schools for Jewish children in remote rural areas, in which the language of instruction was Czech.52 The question remains as to how, in the historically, culturally, and linguistically disconnected communities of Czechoslovakia, Jewish nationality might function as a set of norms around which to organize group politics and collective identity. The answer that I would offer is that the Jewish national camp in Czechoslovakia achieved greater success than it probably had any right to expect. As we have seen, the historical profiles of the three regions of the country worked at cross-purposes to one another. In Slovakia, the major political force in the Jewish community was Orthodoxy, followed by the largely Margaryized elements of the urban middle class. In the Bohemian lands, the number of Jews who identified with cultural or political Zionism was, at the outset, far smaller than those who formally proclaimed either Czech or German as their nationality. But Bohemian and Moravian Zionism benefited from several factors unique to it. First, the circle of nationally-inclined intellectuals and writers that had been active in Prague on the eve of the war enjoyed considerable prestige both at home and abroad, possessing a moral and intellectual capital that far outweighed its numerical importance. Second, Masaryk and his close associates held Zionism 51 On Jewish life in Carpatho-Rus’, see  : Aryeh Sole, “Subcarpathian Ruthenia, 1918–1938,” in The Jews of Czechoslovakia 1, 125–154  ; Yeshayahu Jelinek, Ha-golah le-raglei ha-karpatim  : Yehudei karpato-rus’ u-mukatshevo, 1848–1948 (Tel Aviv  : Goldstein-Goren Diaspora Research Center, Tel Aviv University, 2003)  ; and Mendelsohn, Jews of East Central Europe, 141–146, 152–162. 52 Sole, “Subcarpathian Ruthenia,” 134–153.



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(particularly Ahad Ha’amian cultural Zionism) in high esteem, sensing that its emphasis on self-conscious choosing and internal regeneration had much to offer the Czechs themselves. Finally, as I argued earlier, Beneš essentially bought the claim of the Zionists that allowing Jews officially to declare the Jewish nationality would have the beneficial effect of reducing the size and strength of the German minority in Bohemia and Moravia, and of the Hungarians in Slovakia and Carpatho-Rus’.53 The main challenge facing Czech Zionists, then, was to create enough competition for political Orthodoxy in Slovakia to offset its dominant position in Jewish communal affairs, and to capture the largely hasidic masses in Carpatho-Rus’.54 Two potential markers of the appeal of Jewish national identity in Czechoslovakia are the official declarations of nationality in census returns and the development of a nationally-oriented Jewish school system. With regard to the former, Jewish national consciousness increased as one moved across the country from west to east. By 1930, about 20 percent of Bohemian Jews affirmed a Jewish nationality  ; in Moravia-Silesia, the figure was more than 51 percent  ; for Slovakia, 53 percent  ; and for Carpatho-Rus’, apparently 93%. The strongest competing national identity in Bohemia was Czech (or, “Czechoslovak,” as the government listed it, 46%)  ; in Moravia, German (29%)  ; and in Slovakia, Slovak (again, “Czechoslovak,” 32%). It seems that the Prague government’s bet regarding the effect of Jewish national minority rights on state-wide nationality ratios proved to be only partially correct, for in both Bohemia and Moravia, a number of Jews appear actually to have defected from the “Czech” to the “Jewish” camp. Indeed, in Bohemia the percentage of Jews who declared themselves “Czechoslovak” actually dropped slightly between 1921 and 1930 in favor of the Jewish nationality. The big losers in this competition appear to have been Germans in Moravia and Hungarians in Slovakia.55 In the field of education, the Zionists scored some modest victories. As I have noted, they established nine elementary schools in Carpatho-Rus’, attended by 384 students in 1931–32, in which Hebrew was the language of instruction  ; and, more impressively, two Hebrew gymnasiums, in Mukačevo and in Užhorod, attended by 135 students. A national Jewish elementary school in Prague educated its students in Czech  ; both its sister institution and a Reformrealgymnasium in Brno started out teaching in German before switching over eventually to the 53 Kieval, Making of Czech Jewry, 186–197  ; Kieval, Languages of Community, 198–216. 54 On Zionist activity in interwar Czechoslovakia, see  : Čapková, Češi, Němci, Židé  ?, 197–266, and Lichtenstein, Zionists in Interwar Czechoslovakia. 55 Figures on nationality declaration are gleaned from Mendelsohn, Jews of East Central Europe, 131–169  ; see also Čapková, Češi, Něnci, Židé  ?, 46–53  ; 197–206.

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“proper” language of the state. These figures need to be compared, of course, to the some 64,000 Jewish students attending school throughout the country. Of these, 36,000 (about 56%) were going to Czech or Slovak schools  ; a little under 11,000 (17%) to German schools  ; 6,000 to Ruthenian schools  ; a little over 5,000 to Magyar schools  ; and over 4,900 to schools that had more than one language of instruction.56 To add one more note of complication to this discussion  : in the case of Czechoslovakia, Jewish minority rights – and indeed Jewish national identity – were not tied to language. Jews, in fact, were singled out as the one exception to what was otherwise the rule. They could speak whatever language they wanted and still proclaim the Jewish nationality if they wished. Thus, even among these 64,000 students who were educated outside of the Zionist system, some 38,400 (about 60%) declared the Jewish nationality.57 Conclusion Jewish emancipation in interwar Czechoslovakia came with its own “bargain,” its own particular costs and tradeoffs, which set it apart from other states in Central Europe. Chief among these was an implicit acknowledgment and acceptance of “Czechoslovak” (one might argue, Czech) political and cultural hegemony  – a position of power that required of many Jews a new set of linguistic accommodations, and of Jewish nationalists a willingness to subordinate federalist visions of full cultural autonomy to the much more limited possibilities afforded by the nation-state model. Interwar Hungary  – much reduced in size and population – made no pretense of accommodating other nationalities, while Poland, with its large Ukrainian, Jewish, German, and Belarussian populations, seemed to comprise a laboratory for national minority politics. In contrast, there seem never to have been any illusions on the part of Czechoslovak Jews that theirs was to be a supranational, nationalities state. For the Czech-Jewish movement, the consolidation of political power by Czech nationalists corresponded to their own ideal for the future. But liberal, German-speaking Jews also bought into the agreement and worked toward the legitimization of the state because of the benefits to individual liberty and personal advancement that the parliamentary democracy offered. Bilingualism had always been a pattern in their lives, and if now they had to bestow greater weight to Czech language and culture, so be it. 56 Some of these schools, particularly in Slovakia, were run by the local Jewish religious community. (Rabinowicz, “The Jewish Minority,” 213–217.) 57 Rabinowicz, “The Jewish Minority,” 213–217.



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Just as interesting, Jewish nationalists promoted full “Czechoslovak” sovereignty as well, to the point of promoting Czech “internal colonialism” in Eastern Slovakia and Carpato-Rus’ while constructing a Czechoslovak Jewish nation whose contours coincided with the borders of the new state. The semi-fiction of a Jewish national position in Czechoslovakia afforded Jews – particularly in the eastern regions of the state – a political and cultural structure within which to organize education and public life, an opportunity to distance themselves from historical patterns of acculturation, and a vehicle through which to articulate the contours of their citizenship in the new state. Through all of the diversity of the Czechoslovak Jewish experience between the wars – and despite the political, religious, social, and linguistic divisions in the Jewish community – one can, I think, find signs of an emerging, cohesive, Czechoslovak political culture among Jews. It was a culture of allegiance to a (for the most part) protective state, and of increasing identification with its two main languages and literatures (Czech and Slovak). And it appears to have coexisted perfectly well with both political Orthodoxy and Jewish ethnic affirmation – a kind of Europe-centered cultural Zionism that was more conducive to the reproduction of Jewish life in multinational East Central Europe than to the encouragement of Jewish migration to Palestine. It is not entirely clear, however, to what extent the political identity of Czechoslovak Jews as Czechoslovaks secured their status as citizens of the young state. Indeed, Jews were to see their rights reduced and their security threatened in the aftermath of the Munich accords. Moreover, there was something antiquated about Czechoslovak Jewish loyalism. For all of the convulsions that Jews had lived through since 1914, for all that was “new” in Jewish political culture, it contained unmistakable echoes of Habsburg experiences and models. In a new context of ethnic-national struggle, class conflict, and radical challenges to parliamentary democracy, Czechoslovak Jews once again had transformed themselves into a Staatsvolk. And once more the risks and benefits of this move – its wisdom, if you will – depended on the long-term viability of the Czechoslovak state. Jews made individual and collective choices as though they were in control of their own fate. They were not.

Ulrich Wyrwa

The Dialectic of Expectations and Experiences Jews in Europe During the First World War and Beyond*

The extensive historical remembrance of the First World War on the occasion of its 100th anniversary presents it appropriately as a fundamental break in general European history.1 However, the question remains if and in which way this war was a decisive turning point in European Jewish history as well. In this sense, one has to ask what the Jews in different parts of Europe had expected at this crucial moment in European history (i.e., in August 1914) and both whether and how they were mistaken in their expectations. The focus of this article is the question as to how the experiences of Jews changed in the course of the devastation and desolation of this war. Methodologically, the categories “space of experience” and “horizon of expectation” will be used, both of which were presented by Reinhart Koselleck as two fundamental historical categories.2 There is no history, Koselleck explains, “which could be constituted independently of the experiences and expectations of active human agents” and the tension between these two categories, he continues, appears in “ever-changing patterns” and brings about new resolutions.3 Therefore, the dialectic of experiences and expectations of Jews in different European countries will be analyzed,4 respecting the different sides of * 1

2

3 4

This paper had first been presented at the conference  : Contesting Jewish Loyalties  : The First World War and Beyond, at the Jewish Museum Berlin in December 2016. I would like to thank Werner Bergmann for his helpful comments. For an overview of the literature about the First World War on this occasion see  : Ulrich Wyrwa, “Zum Hundertsten nichts Neues. Deutschsprachige Neuerscheinungen zum Ersten Weltkrieg (Teil I–III),” in Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 62 (2014), H. 11, 921–940  ; 64 (2016), H. 7/8, 683–702  ; 65 (2017), H. 11, 955–976  ; Christoph Cornelißen, “‘Oh  ! What a Lovely War  !’. Zum Forschungsertrag und zu den Tendenzen ausgewählter Neuerscheinungen über den Ersten Weltkrieg,” in Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 65 (2014), 269–283. Reinhart Koselleck, ‘Erfahrungsraum’ und ‘Erwartungshorizont’  – zwei historische Kategorien [1976], see the English translation  : “Space of Experience and Horizon of Expectation  : Two Historical Categories,” in Futures Past  : On the Semantics of Historical Time (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), 255–275, 310–311. Ibid. 256. Jörn Leonhard had used this dialectic of expectations and experiences in his overall presentation of the Great War, primarily for the year 1916  : Jörn Leonhard, Die Büchse der Pandora. Geschichte des Ersten Weltkriegs (München  : C.H. Beck Verlag, 2014), 608–613.

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the front during the war. The changes in these patterns and their dynamics will be explored. The leading questions are first, which solutions or resolutions this tension brought about in European Jewish history, and second, whether German Jews travelled a particular path during this ambiguous and contradictory historical period or if there was a common European Jewish development. Before presenting this dialectic and before asking if and how the Great War can be seen as a fundamental break in the overall European Jewish history, I will give a brief review of the Jewish experiences in the nineteenth century. Jewish experiences in the ‘long’ nineteenth century From a Jewish perspective, the ‘long’ nineteenth century5 was, first of all, an age of progress, social advancement and recognition as citizens. It was a success story,6 but at the same time, this period was marked by intensifying tensions between transnational and national orientations.7 These are the two conflicting points of reference for European Jewry in the age of the “great transformation,” and in the era of the changing world.8 On the one hand, European Jewry of the nineteenth century had a transnational character. European Jews experienced a histoire croiseé. Jews crossed national or imperial borders, and rabbis took up different positions during their lives’ journeys in various parts of Europe, from East to West as well as from Central Europe to South Eastern Europe and vice versa. A Polish political activist like Jan Czyński fled to France after the suppression of the Polish November Uprising of 1830 and published a treatise on the Polish Jewish question as a European question.9 Jewish intellectuals were also able to make the most of their experiences in different worlds and to readily cross national boundaries. 5 6 7

Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire. 1875–1914 (London  : Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1987). Shulamit Volkov, Die Juden in Deutschland 1780–1918 (München  : Oldenbourg, 1994). Shulamit Volkov, ‘Juden und Judentum im Zeitalter der Emanzipation. Einheit und Vielheit,’ in Juden in der europäischen Geschichte, ed. Wolfgang Beck (München  : C.H. Beck, 1992,) 86–108  ; Dan Diner, “Geschichte der Juden – Paradigma einer europäischen Historie,” in Annäherungen an eine europäische Geschichtsschreibung, ed. Gerald Stourzh (Wien  : Verlag der österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2002), 85–103. 8 See  : Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation. The political and economic origins of our time (New York  : Farrar & Rinehart, 1944), and  : Jürgen Osterhammel, Die Verwandlung der Welt. Eine Ges­ chichte des 19. Jahrhunderts (München  : C.H. Beck, 2009). 9 Jan Czyński, La question des Juifs polonais envisagée comme question européenne (Paris  : Guillaumin, 1833)  ; for the significance of this document see  : Andreas Reinke, “Einleitung,” in Die ‘Juden­ frage’ in Ostmitteleuropa. Historische Pfade und politisch-soziale Konstellationen, eds. Andreas Reinke et al. (Berlin  : Metropol Verlag, 2015), 13–54  ; 13.



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The Russian-Jewish activist, Angelika Balabanova, as another example, was born in Černigov in the Pale of Settlement and studied in Belgium, where she started her activities in the working-class movement. She then went to Italy and wrote for the socialist newspaper Avanti.10 German-Jewish intellectuals like Hermann, alias Ermanno Loevinson11 or Robert Davidsohn,12 moved to Italy. In the same way, Italian-Jewish intellectuals like the composer Alberto Franchetti13 or socialist Gustavo Sacerdote14 lived for years in Germany, mediating German and Italian culture. This histoire croiseé extended into the stories of Jewish families, which often had branches in different European countries, such as the family of the German-Jewish historian Martin Philippson,15 who lived for years in Belgium and whose brother Franz remained there and found great recognition, while Martin returned to Germany.16 At the same time, nineteenth century European Jewry had also been marked by the opposite orientation. Jews were patriots of the countries in which they lived, internalizing the national feelings of their gentile compatriots.17 Ultimately, German Jews felt like German citizens, French Jews like French and Polish Jews like Poles, and so on, attitudes that have been fiercely criticized by the historian Heinrich Graetz as “Grenzpfahl-Patriotismus,” [boundary-patriotism].18

10 With a focus on her socialist activities  : Johann Wolfgang Brügel, “In memoriam Angelica Balabanoff,” in Rote Revue. Sozialistische Monatsschrift 45 (1966)  : H. 1, 1–8. 11 In 2015, the Archive of Bologna had presented the exhibition  : Ermanno Loevinson  : Un’archivista vittima della Shoah. 12 Wiebke Fastenrath Vinattieri ed., Robert Davidsohn (1853–1937). Uno spirito libero tra cronaca e storia. 3 Vol., I. Atti della giornata di studio, II. Gli scritti inediti, III. Catalogo della biblioteca, Firenze 2003. 13 Paolo Giorgi and Richard Erkens eds., Alberto Franchetti. L’uomo, il compositore l’artista. Atti del convegno internazionale (Lucca  : LIM, 2015). 14 Alberto Cavaglion, ”Socialismo e profetismo. Profilo di Gustavo Sacerdote (1867–1948),” in Piemonte vivo. Rassegna bimestrale di lavoro, arte, letteratura e costumi piemontesi 1988, N. 4, 36– 41  ; Alberto Cavaglion, “Gli ebrei e il socialismo. Il caso Italiano,” in, Stato nazionale ed emanci­ pazione ebraica, eds. Francesca Sofia and Mario Toscano. (Roma  : Bonacci, 1992), 377–392. 15 Geneviève Warland, “Der deutsch-jüdische Historiker Martin Philippson (1846 bis 1916). Wissenschaftsvermittler zwischen Deutschland und Belgien,” in Belgica – terra incognita  ? Resul­ tate und Perspektiven der Historischen Belgienforschung, Sebastian Bischoff et al. (Münster – New York  : Waxmann Verlag GmbH, 2016), 56–67. 16 Johanna Philippson, “The Philippsons, a German-Jewish Family 1775–1933,” in Leo Baeck In­ stitute Yearbook 7 (1962)  : 95–118. 17 Volkov, “Juden und Judentum im Zeitalter der Emanzipation,” 86  ; Derek J. Penslar, Jews and the Military. A History (Princeton– Oxford  : Princeton University Press, 2013), 121–165. 18 Heinrich Graetz, Geschichte der Juden von der ältesten Zeit bis auf die Gegenwart, Bd. 11, 2. Aufl. (Leipzig  : Oskar Leiner, 1900), 428.

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Even some socialist Jews like Ludwig Frank in Germany shared these national feelings.19 At the end of the nineteenth century, along with the growing exclusionary nationalism of parts of the conservative Gentile society, another feeling emerged among European Jewry that took the form of Zionism or Jewish nationalism.20 Revealingly, many nineteenth-century European Jews were still able to combine distinct orientations. The dialectic of expectations and experiences in World War I In August 1914, however, this perfectly balanced arc of suspension among different orientations and worldview options broke down simultaneously in all belligerent countries. The Great World War brought a profound turning point for European Jewry with it and led to a transformation of Jewish life.21 What characterized Jewish experiences during the war – in Germany as well as in other European countries – was the “tension between integration and rejection” within their states,22 and, at the same time, the breakup of the transnational relations of European Jewry. Shulamit Volkov, thus, argues that the legendary unity of the European Jews had in fact definitely been destroyed during the Great War.23 In every country and on both sides of the frontlines, Jews engaged in an intense debate about their loyalties and were forced to take clear positions,24 and they predominantly expressed their loyalty to the countries where they were born and where they lived. Only a few European Jews were able to elude the wave of patriotism and escape this existential dilemma. Examples include Ernst Bloch, who fled to Switzerland,25 and the brothers Gershom and Werner Scholem, even if both held extremely different political orientations and world views.26 Some Jewish 19 Karl Otto Watzinger, Ludwig Frank. Ein deutscher Politiker jüdischer Herkunft (Siegmaringen  : Thorbecke, 1995). 20 Stefan Vogt, Subalterne Positionierungen. Der deutsche Zionismus im Feld des Nationalismus in Deutschland 1890–1933 (Göttingen  : Wallsteinverlag, 2016). 21 Gerald Lamprecht, “Juden in Zentraleuropa und die Transformationen des Antisemitismus im und nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg,” in Jahrbuch für Antisemitismusforschung 24 (2015)  : 63–88. 22 Christhard Hoffmann, “Between Integration and Rejection. The Jewish Community in Germany 1914–1918,” in State, Society and Mobilisation during the First World War, ed. John Horne (Cambridge  : Cambridge University Press, 1997), 89–104. 23 Volkov, ‘Juden und Judentum im Zeitalter der Emanzipation’, 86. 24 Sarah Panter, Jüdische Erfahrungen und Loyalitätskonflikte im Ersten Weltkrieg (Göttingen  : Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2014). 25 Arno Münster, Ernst Bloch. Eine politische Biographie (Berlin, Vienna  : Philo-Verlag, 2004). 26 Gershom Scholem, Von Berlin nach Jerusalem. Jugenderinnerungen. Erweiterte Fassung (Frank-



The Dialectic of Expectations and Experiences 

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socialists opted for peace and took part in the Zimmerwald Conference like the previously mentioned Angelica Balabanova and the Polish socialist Maksymilian Horwitz.27 At the outset of the war in all parts of Europe, Jews expressed their loyalty to their home countries,28 but they had to express their patriotism, as Ulrich Sieg has pointed out, under “difficult conditions” because of the war atrocities, the xenophobic mood, internal political conflicts and growing nationalistic extremism.29 In turn, German and Habsburg Jews expected that they would gain recognition for their contributions. They consented to fight against the Triple Entente of the British Empire, France and the Russian Empire. On the other frontline, British, French and even some of the Russian Jews expressed their loyalty to their countries as well. They were willing to fight against the Central Powers, expecting likewise to earn respect for their efforts and their willingness to put their own lives at risk. In October 1939, the historian Abraham G. Duker, who later served as editor of the journal Jewish Social Studies, gave a brief historical outline of the Jewish participation in the First World War, underlining that the “casualty figures for both sides demonstrate that the overwhelming majority of the Jewish soldiers saw actual combat, and their sacrifices equaled those of their comrades-in-arms.”30 From the very beginning, when governments had decided to go to war, the ruling classes  – primarily in Germany and Austria-Hungary  – were urgently forced to present their countries as victims of foreign aggressors.31 Within both alliances, the political classes attempted to construct social cohesion, as well as a furt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1982)  ; For Werner Scholem s.: Mirjam Zadoff, Der rote Hiob. Das Leben des Werner Scholem (München  : Carl Hanser Verlag, 2014)  ; Ralf Hoffrogge, Werner Scholem  – eine politische Biographie (1895–1940) (Konstanz  : UVK Verlagsgesellschaft, 2014). For their experiences of the war see  : Ralf Hoffrogge, “Utopien am Abgrund. Der Briefwechsel Werner Scholem – Gershom Scholem in den Jahren 1914–1919,” in Schreiben im Krieg – Schreiben vom Krieg. Feldpost im Zeitalter der Weltkriege, eds.Veit Didczuneit, Jens Ebert and Thomas Jander (Essen  : Klartext, 2011), 429–440. 27 Brügel, “In memoriam Angelica Balabanoff,” 3  ; Joshua D. Zimmerman, “Horwitz, Maksymilian,” in YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe  : http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Horwitz_Maksymilian (accessed December 11, 2018). 28 Panter, Jüdische Erfahrungen und Loyalitätskonflikte, 39–93. For Germany see  : Tim Grady, A Deadly Legacy. German Jews and the Great War (New Haven – London  : Yale University Press, 2017), 25–48. 29 Ulrich Sieg, Jüdische Intellektuelle im Ersten Weltkrieg. Kriegserfahrung, weltanschauliche Debatten und kulturelle Neuentwürfe (Berlin  : Akademie Vrelag, 2001), 69–87. 30 Abraham G. Duker, “Jews in World War I. A Brief Historical Sketch,” in Contemporary Jewish Record. A Review on Events and a Digest on Opinion, 2 (1939)  : N. 5, 6–29. 31 Anne Lipp, Meinungslenkung im Krieg. Kriegserfahrungen deutscher Soldaten und ihre Deutung

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new national or imperial unity that would integrate the society and convince the entire population to unite and fight unanimously against the foreign aggressor. Even if the later-constructed myth of the “August Days” in Germany was by no means as all-pervasive as the nationalistic activists claimed,32 the method of the German ruling class was, nevertheless, effective. Large segments of Jewish society also joined in with the enthusiasm for war  ;33 they felt it their duty to defend their country and to volunteer.34 The same thing happened in the other countries, with the principle means of attaining this aim being the construction a new national unity, as well as the familiar state-oriented unity in the larger Empires. The ruling classes proclaimed a domestic truce, which was called Burgfrieden in German or union sacrée in French.35 Directed first of all against the working classes as supposedly “unreliable fellows” because of their internationalist orientation, this propaganda referred to all classes and the members of all religions, Jews included. Jews in all countries welcomed this policy with open arms – and not only the assimilated upper-class Jews but also those among the younger generation of Zionists.36 Jews hoped even more strongly that this participation would bring an end to the prolonged discrimination and the resistances that opposed their legal equality. This attitude was found in all European countries on both sides of the front where the Jews had not yet been socially recognized and socially integrated. In France, the policy of the union sacrée gained broad acceptance.37 According to Ester Benbassa, antisemitism in France was swept away by a wave of

32 33 34

35

36 37

1914–1918 (Göttingen  : Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2003)  ; Wolfgang Kruse ed., Eine Welt von Feinden. Der Große Krieg 1914–1918 (Frankfurt/M.: Fischer, 1997). Michael Stöcker, Augusterlebnis 1914 in Darmstadt. Legende und Wirklichkeit (Darmstadt  : Eduard Roether, 1994)  ; Steffen Bruendel, Volksgemeinschaft oder Volksstaat. Die “Ideen von 1914” und die Neuordnung Deutschlands im Ersten Weltkrieg (Berlin  : Akademie Verlag, 2003). Grady, A Deadly Legacy, 25–48. Saul Friedländer, “Die politischen Veränderungen der Kriegszeit und ihre Auswirkungen auf die Judenfrage,” in Deutsches Judentum in Krieg und Revolution 1916–1923, eds. Werner Mosse and Arnold Paucker (Tübingen  : Mohr & Siebeck, 1971), 27–65  ; Clemens Picht, “Zwischen Vaterland und Volk. Das deutsche Judentum im Ersten Weltkrieg,” in Der Erste Weltkrieg. Wirkung, Wahrnehmung, Analyse, ed. Wolfgang Michalka (München  : Piper, 1994), 736–755. Wolfram Pyta and Carsten Kretschmann eds., Burgfrieden und Union sacrée. Literarische Deutun­ gen und politische Ordnungsvorstellungen in Deutschland und Frankreich 1914–1933 (München  : Oldenbourg, 2011)  ; Christine G. Krüger, “Kriege und Integration. Deutsche und französische Juden im Vergleich,” in Jahrbuch des Simon Dubnow Instituts 12 (2013)  : 173–193. Eva Edelmann-Ohler, Sprache des Krieges. Deutungen des Ersten Weltkrieges in zionistischer Pub­ lizistik und Literatur (1914–1918) (Berlin – Boston  : Conditio Judaica 88, 2014). Jean-Jacques Becker, The Great War and the French People (Leamington Spa  : Berg, 1985)  ; Nicolas Beaupré, La France en guerre 1914–1918 (Paris  : Éditions Belin, 2013).



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patriotic enthusiasm during the First World War.38 Philippe Landau, however, has presented evidence for growing antisemitic activity in France during this period. During the war, over five hundred pamphlets were issued, and French Jews were accused of espionage.39 French Jews saw the war service as a civic duty, and Alfred Dreyfus, who was then in his mid-50s, re-enlisted in order to serve at the front.40 The national alliance included the Catholic Church as well as the socialist working-class movement, and it gave the French republic a new foundation. Even the antisemitic journal Action Française accepted the policy of the union sacrée and restrained itself from making attacks against the republic and the Jews. It restricted its activities to denouncing defeatism and betrayal, and some antisemitic phrases may be found in the descriptions of individual Jews who had economic relations with Germany.41 In some countries, Jews enjoyed a quite far-reaching political integrationalready at the beginning of the war. In Hungary, for instance, Jews even held prestigious positions. For example, the mayor of Budapest at the beginning of the First World War was the Jewish politician Ferenc Heltai. Hungarian antisemites expressed violent rage, because the Hungarian Ministry of War was led by the converted Jew Samu Hazai.42 A peculiar case regarding the integration of Jews, as well as the party truce, was Italy.43 Here Jews had achieved an exceptional degree of social and political integration44, but the party truce did not work at all. Italian society was highly divided between interventionists and neutralists, and the same held true of Italian Jews.45 38 Esther Benbassa, Geschichte der Juden in Frankreich (Berlin – Wien  : Philo Verlag, 2000), 183. 39 Philippe E. Landau, Les Juifs de France et la Grande Guerre. Un patriotisme républicain 1914–1941 (Paris  : CNRS Éditions, 1999), 67–78. 40 Vincent Duclert, L’honneur d’un patriote (Paris  : Fayard, 2006). 41 Dominique Trimbur, “L‘Action française (1899–1944), ” in Handbuch des Antisemitismus, Vol. 6, 1–3, eds. Wolfgang Benz, et al. (Berlin  : de Gruyter, 2013)  ; Laurent Joly, “D’une guerre l’autre. L’Action francaise et les Juifs, de l’Union sacrée è la Révolution nationale,” in Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 59 (2012)  : 4, 97–123. 42 Rolf Fischer, Entwicklungsstufen des Antisemitismus in Ungarn 1867–1939. Die Zerstörung der magyarisch-jüdischen Symbiose (München  : Oldenbourg, 1988), 116. 43 Mario Isnenghi and Giorgio Rochat eds., La Grande Guerra 1914–1918 (Bologna  : Il Mulino, 2008). 44 Ulrich Wyrwa, “Jüdische Geschichte im ‘langen’ 19. Jahrhundert. Deutschland und Italien im Vergleich,” in Jüdische Lebenswelten. Von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, eds. Ernst Baltrusch and Uwe Puschner (Frankfurt/M – Bern  : Peter Lang, 2016), 243–266. 45 Matteo Perissinotto, “Gli ebrei italiani di fronte alla Grande guerra (1914–1919)” (PhD diss., Università degli Studi di Trieste, anno accademico 2014/2015)  ; Matteo Perissinotto, “La

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In Russia, at the other end of Europe, there was no incentive to integrate the Jews into the ‘we-group’.46 Officially, Russian politicians also declared the unity all inhabitants of Russia against the enemies, and the Tsarist ministers joined this line as well. Russian antisemites, however, remained active within the army and among the state authorities. At the beginning of the war, Russian commanders pointed to the alleged disloyalty of Russia’s Jewish population, its direct complicity with the enemy and its involvement in espionage.47 Nevertheless, as Simon Dubnow wrote in his fictional story about a Jewish soldier, parts of the Jewish population went voluntarily to war even in Russia, expecting that their situation might improve due to their military engagement.48 Members of the Jewish Labor Bund, however, were, as Vladimir Ilyich Lenin wrote in a letter to the Russian trade union leader Alexander Gavrilovich Shliapnikov in February 1915, mostly Germanophile and happy about the defeat of Russia.49 In Romania, Jews had expressed their loyalty to the Romanian nation just as they had done in the Balkan Wars.50 They contracted voluntarily for military services. Nevertheless, they were confronted with further antisemitic measures issued by the government, which ordered the expulsion of Jews from the borderline regions.51 Their expectations to get the Romanian citizenship were disappointed despite their contributions to the nation. stampa ebraica italiana e il ‘nemico’ durante la Prima guerra mondiale,” in Fratelli al massacro. Linguaggi e narrazioni della Prima guerra mondiale, ed. Tullia Catalan (Roma  : I libri di viella, 2016), 229–254  ; Mario Toscano, “Gli ebrei italiani e la prima guerra mondiale (1915–1918). Tra crisi religiosa e fremiti patriottici,” in Clio 26 (1990)  : 79–97. 46 Heinz Dietrich Löwe, Antisemitismus und reaktionäre Utopie. Russischer Konservatismus im Kampf gegen den Wandel von Staat und Gesellschaft 1890–1917 (Hamburg  : Hoffmann & Campe, 1978). 47 Semion Goldin, “Antisemitism and Pogroms in the Military (Russian Empire),” in 1914–1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War, 2014  ; Eric Lohr, “The Russian Army and the Jews. Mass Deportation, Hostages, and Violence during World War I,” in The Russian Review 60 (2001)  : 404–419. 48 Simon Dubnow, Geschichte eines jüdischen Soldaten. Bekenntnis eines von vielen, ed. By Vera Bischitzky and Stefan Schreiner (Göttingen  : Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2012). 49 Wladimir Iljitsch Lenin, Werke Bd. 35, Februar 1912-Dezember 1922, ed. by Insitut für Marxismus-Leninismus (Berlin  : B. Dietz Verlag, 1979), 161–162. 50 Elisabeth Weber, “Im Krieg für gleiche Rechte. Die Balkankriege, der Erste Weltkrieg und die jüdische Bevölkerung Rumäniens 1913–1923,” in Portal Militärgeschichte, 9. Juni 2014, URL  : http://portal-militaergeschichte.de/weber_rumaenien (accessed December 11, 2018). Dietmar Müller, “Erwünschte Soldaten – unerwünschte Staatsbürger. Juden und das rumänische Militär (1866–1942),” in Jahrbuch des Simon Dubnow Instituts 12 (2013)  : 195–219  ; Egmont Zechlin, Die deutsche Politik und die Juden im Ersten Weltkrieg (Göttingen  : Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1969), 238–251. 51 Dietmar Müller, Staatsbürger auf Widerruf. Juden und Muslime als Alteritätspartner im rumänischen



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European Jews had warmly accepted the policy of Burgfrieden or union sacrée in their respective countries, and they showed that they were prepared to do their duty as citizens of the different states. In doing so, European Jews had thrown themselves and were thrown into extremely difficult and awkward situations, which lay at odds with their expectations and experiences. Arriving at the frontlines, Jewish soldiers had to bitterly realize that they were compelled to fight against their co-religionists on the opposing front  – Jews against Jews.52 Furthermore, French and British Jews, for instance, who were generally self-confident and conscious of their achievements and of the decisive contribution their countries had made to the emancipation of the Jews, now saw themselves fighting in a coalition with Russia. This country was seen by all European Jews as the most antisemitic country in the world. It was natural that the British and French Jews would feel irritated when confronted with this unexpected und adverse situation.53 German and Habsburg Jews, on the other hand, could consider themselves as the liberators of the suppressed and miserable Russian Jews, including the Polish Jews.54 And indeed, Germany tried to win Polish Jews over as partners, promising them liberation from Russian oppression.55 But German Jews had also saw themselves in an extremely difficult situation on the Western Front. They had to legitimate a war carried out against the prestigious countries who had contributed decisively to Jewish emancipation  : France and Great Britain. The German-Jewish Social Democrat Eduard Bernstein openly expressed his dismay that the democratic nations Great Britain and France were allies of the autocratic Russian Empire.56 The situation became even more problematic after the atrocious conduct of the German army in Belgium. Many German Jews tried to develop sophisticated and elaborate arguments to legitimate German violations of international law and the German terrorist actions against the Belgian

und serbischen Nationscode. Ethnonationale Staatsbürgerschaftskonzepte 1878–1941 (Wiesbaden  : Harrassowitz Verlag, 2005), 519. 52 Ulrike Heikaus ed., Krieg  ! Juden zwischen den Fronten 1914–1918 (Berlin  : Hentrich & Hentrich Verlag, 2014). 53 Panter, Jüdische Erfahrungen und Loyalitätskonflikte, 66–71. 54 Ibid, 47f.; Zechlin, Die deutsche Politik und die Juden im Ersten Weltkrieg, 144–223. 55 Matthias Vetter, Antisemiten und Bolschewiki. Zum Verhältnis von Sowjetsystem und Judenfeind­ schaft 1917–1939 (Berlin  : Metropol Verlag, 1995). 56 Eduard Bernstein, “Vom Patriotismus der Juden,” in Friedens-Warte 18 (1916)  : 243–248. Jack Jacobs, “On German Socialists and German Jews  : Kautsky, Bernstein und Their Reception 1914–22,” in The Jews and the European Crisis 1914–21, ed. Jonathan Frankel (New York – Oxford  : Oxford University Press, 1988), 67–83  ; Sieg, Jüdische Intellektuelle im Ersten Weltkrieg, 87.

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civilian population.57 Only a few German Jews criticized the German atrocities. One of these few Jews was Victor Klemperer. He was particularly horrified by the terrible retaliatory measures taken in Belgium. In his diaries, he described this war with all its cruelties and all its heroism as horrible and stupid.58 German Zionist Jews had adopted the German national euphoria for the war, but they were put into a quandary when they volunteered for war service in Palestine. Here Zionist Jews from Germany were forced to fight against Zionist Jews from Great Britain.59 The overall willingness of Jews to serve in the opposing armies, possibly fighting against Jews on the other side, had disastrous consequences for Jewish history. The former transnational bond of Jews in Europe broke down  ; the war smashed the histoire croiseé, which had characterized European Jewry in previous decades. And, equally serious, even the family ties of those relatives living in different European countries broke down, as their sons were forced to shoot at each other. One can observe this horrifying moment in the different branches of families, where the sons served in the respective and opposing armies, so that cousin stood against cousin. This can be observed among the ancestors and the family of Anne Frank, which had branches in Germany, France and Switzerland.60 Even among brothers these personal conflicts could occur, as between the historian Martin Philippson and his brother, the banker Franz. Martin had once lived in Brussels, but had returned to Berlin long before the war, whereas Franz still lived in Belgium in 1914. Franz lost his son, who served in the Belgian army during the German occupation.61 A striking example of how personal friendships were destroyed was the public breach that took place between Stefan Zweig and his former friend Emil Verhaeren.62 57 Ulrich Wyrwa, “German-Jewish Intellectuals and the German Occupation of Belgium,” in Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History, N. 9, (October 2016)  ; http://www.quest-cdecjournal.it/focus.php  ?id=379 (accessed December 11, 2018). 58 Victor Klemperer, Curriculum Vitae. Jugend um 1900, 2. Buch, 1912–1918 (Berlin  : Siedler, 1989), 182–197. 59 Norbert Schwake, “Nazareth Illit, Deutsche und Österreichische jüdische Soldaten an der Palästinafront im Ersten Weltkrieg,” in Jüdische Soldaten – Jüdischer Widerstand in Deutschland und Frankreich, eds. Michael Berger and Gideon Römer-Hillebrecht (Paderborn  : Ferdinand Schöningh, 2012), 115–128. 60 Carl Eric Linsler, “Jüdische Erfahrungen des Ersten Weltkriegs. Die Geschichte der Familie Frank als deutsch-französische Familienbiographie,” in Portal Militärgeschichte, 26. Mai 2014. URL  : http://portal-militaergeschichte.de/node/1087 (accessed December 11, 2018). 61 Philippson, ‘The Philippsons’. 62 Wyrwa, “German-Jewish Intellectuals and the German Occupation of Belgium”.



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During the war, even the Alliance Israélite Universelle abandoned its internationalist position by defending France.63 The Zionist World Organization, however, remained neutral, in order to continue its work despite the fact that its members fought in opposing armies.64 What marked this new warfare above all was the fact that this war – as a total war – was conducted not only against opposing armies but also against the civilian populations.65 The most appalling example of this aspect of the Great War was the fate of the Jews in Galicia and Bukovina, the province of the Habsburg Empire with the largest Jewish population.66 Consequently, the dense Jewish population in these areas suffered all the more as a result of the battles waged there. From August 1914 and onward, these areas and their populations suffered terribly. Massive troop formations moved across Galicia and Bukovina with devastating results. Petra Ernst has described the impact of the “ever changing conquests and recapture of vast areas and the consequent destruction of numerous villages  – by both czarist and Austro-Hungarian units  – as well as collective branding of civilians, […] by military commands on both sides.” This, she adds, “all meant that the populations of Galicia and the Bukovina […] were very badly hit by the war. As fighting also led to increased tensions among the different nationalities living in these regions, it was the Jewish community, which suffered especially under these circumstances. Faced with such chaos, masses of people fled their homes and their villages, even those who did not fall victim to deportation or forced evacuation” by the Russians.67

63 Dzovinar Kevonian, Philippe Landau, “La Grande Guerre et ses lendemains,” in Histoire de l’Alliance israélite universelle de 1860 à nos jours, ed. André Kaspi (Paris  : Armand Colin, 2010), 157–188. 64 Eleonore Lappin, Jüdische Moderne zwischen Partikularismus und Universalismus dargestellt an­ hand Martin Bubers Monatsschrift “Der Jude” (1916–1928) (Tübingen  : Mohr Siebeck, 2000), 30–31 (see  : footnote 107), 242. 65 Anton Holzer, Das Lächeln der Henker. Der unbekannte Krieg gegen die Zivilbevölkerung 1914– 1918 (Darmstadt  : Primus Verlag, 2008). 66 Frank M. Schuster, Zwischen allen Fronten. Osteuropäische Juden während des Ersten Weltkrieges (1914–1919) (Köln – Weimar – Wien  : Böhlau Verlag, 2004)  ; David R. Stone, The Russian Army in the Great War. The Eastern Front, 1914–1917 (Lawrence, Kansas  : University Press of Kansas, 2015)  ; Tracey Hayes Norrell, For the Honor of our Fatherland. German Jews on the Eastern Front During the Great War (New York – London  : Lanham Boulder, 2017). 67 Petra Ernst, “History and Narrative  – Galicia during World War One in the Light of German-Jewish Literature and Journalism,” in Europäisch-jüdische Literaturen und Erster Weltkrieg / European-Jewish Literatures and World War One, [= Yearbook for European Jewish Literature Studies /Jahrbuch für europäisch-jüdische Literaturstudien 1 (2014)], ed. Petra Ernst, 133–160, here 138–9.

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With the destruction of the illusions about a quick end to the war, and the increasingly frightening experiences at the front, the situation within the civil societies as well as within the armies changed dramatically. Even in France Jews were viewed as suspicious elements. In Germany and Austrian-Hungary, antisemitic articles appeared again in the newspapers,68 antisemitic organizations re-awakened, and in this particular moment during the disastrous course of the war, the public mood turned again against the Jews.69 Jews from Galicia and the Bucovina who had fled to Vienna were exposed to this heightened antisemitic sentiment.70 During the search for culprits to blame for the unsuccessful and never-ending war, antisemites again renewed their agitation, blaming the Jews for the defeats. In this new antisemitic agitation, we encounter the accusation of the Jewish shirker, who ran away from military service at the front, the Jewish price drivers, and the Jewish war profiteer.71 The Catholic newspaper Christli­ ches Volksblatt, published in Budapest, brought articles that accused Jews of not suffering from the war, because they hoarded banknotes and without working. Jews were accused of conducting war against the civilian population, and the journal Magyar Kultúra again raised the Jewish question as if it were an ancient illness affecting the country.72 The Catholic priest Ottokár Prohászka had already warned of “Jewish morality” and “Jewish business spirit” in an antisemitic fashion before the war and denigrated the Jews as “vampires of usury.”73 After the beginning of the war, he complained in his pastoral letter about the power, 68 For Hungary see  : Péter Bihari, “Aspects of Antisemitism in Hungary 1915–1918,” in The Great War. Reflections, Experiences and Memories of German and Habsburg Jews (1914–1918), in  : Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History. Journal of Fondazione CDEC, n. 9 October 2016 [url  : www. quest-cdecjournal.it/focus.php  ?id=377]. 69 Werner Bergmann and Ulrich Wyrwa, “Antisemitism,” in 1914–1918-online. International Ency­ clopedia of the First World War, https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/pdf/1914-1918-Online-antisemitism-2017-03-02.pdf (accessed December 11, 2018). 70 Eleonore Lappin-Eppel, “Kaftanjuden, Kriegsflüchtlinge, Österreicher, Ostjuden  – Das Bild galizischer und Bukowinaer Juden in der Wiener jüdischen Presse während des Ersten Weltkriegs,” in Aufklären, Mahnen und Erzählen. Studien zur deutsch-jüdischen Publizistik, zum Kampf gegen den Antisemitismus und zur subversiven Kraft des Erzählens, eds. Holger Böning and Susanne Marten-Finnis (Bremen  : Édition Lumière, 2015), 199–214. 71 Werner Bergmann, “Das antisemitische Bild vom jüdischen Soldaten von der Emanzipation bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg – am deutschen Beispiel,” in Weltuntergang. Jüdisches Leben und Sterben im Ersten Weltkrieg, ed. Marcus G. Patka (Wien – Graz – Klagenfurt  : Styria Premium, 2014), 52– 60  ; Jan-Philipp Pomplun, “Kriegs- und Krisengewinnler,” in Handbuch des Antisemitismus, Bd. 3, Benz et. al., 181–182  ; Volker Ullrich, “Drückeberger,” in  : Antisemitismus. Vorurteile und Mythen, eds. Julius H. Schoeps and Joachim Schlör, (München  : Zweitausendeins, 1995), 210–217. 72 Quoted in  : Fischer, “Entwicklungsstufen des Antisemitismus in Ungarn”, 122. 73 Bettina Reichmann, Ottokár Prohászka. Krieg und christliche Kultur (Paderborn  : Schöningh, 2014), 102.



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pleasure and greed of the people, and he made “Jewish” capitalism responsible for the war.74 Prophaszka is, by the way, an example for the transnational network of European antisemites. His brochure “The Jewish question in Hungary”75 was translated into German and published in 1920 by the Deutsch-Völkische Schutzund Trutzbund, which was founded in 1919 and became the most active and influential organization of extreme antisemitism in early post-war Germany.76 In Russia, however, Jews gained some hope, when, due to the massive numbers of deported Jews from the border regions the Pale of Settlement had to be largely dissolved by the summer of 1915. The government subsequently made concessions to the Jewish population, giving them the right to attend secondary schools and universities. Even if this process was not free of its cruel and violent moments, this experiment opened new experiential spaces for Russian Jews, and they had new possibilities to live among and receive the approval of other Russians.77 As soon as Romania entered the Great War in 1916, Romanian Jews were exposed to the accusation of espionage, and many Jews were imprisoned.78 Nevertheless, many Jews voluntarily entered the military services, and they were sent to the most lethal front lines. After the prompt defeat of the Romanian army, Romanian Jews were held responsible for it. At that time, the situation of the European Jews had become even more paradoxical. After the entrance of Italy into the war in May 1915 and of Romania in August 1916 on the same side of the front, the two most radically different countries in Europe regarding the civil and political integration of the Jews, were now allies. Paradoxically, Italian Jews did not reflect upon this odd coalition, even if the Italian Jewish Prime Minister Luigi Luzzatti had explicitly appealed to the Romanian government only a few years before to improve the situation of the Jews in Romania.79 For German Jews who lived in Italy, participated in and worked for the Italian culture, the situation became extremely dramatic  ; some were forced to leave the 74 Ibid, 137. 75 Ottokár Prohászka, Die Judenfrage in Ungarn (Hamburg  : Deutsch Völkische Verlagsanstalt, 1920). 76 Uwe Lohalm, Völkischer Radikalismus. Die Geschichte des Deutschvölkischen Schutz- und TrutzBundes 1919–1923 (Hamburg  : Leibnitz Verlag, 1970). 77 Gabriele Freitag, Nächstes Jahr in Moskau  ! Die Zuwanderung von Juden in die sowjetische Metropole 1917–1932 (Göttingen  : Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004), 69–75. 78 Zechlin, Die deutsche Politik und die Juden im Ersten Weltkrieg, 241. 79 Iulia Onac, ‘In der rumänischen Antisemiten-Citadelle’. Zur Entstehung des politischen Antisemitis­ mus in Rumänien 1878–1914 (Berlin  : Metropol Verlag, 2017), 165, 167  ; Carol Iancu, L‘emanci­ pation des juifs de Roumaine, 1913–1919 (Montpellier  : Collection SEM, 1992), 47–53. Cristiana Facchini, ‘Luigi Luzzatti e la teoria della tolleranza religiosa. Per una storia del consumo pubblico delle scienze delle religioni’, Annali di Storia dell’Esegesi 33 (2016)  : N. 1, 175–200.

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country because of their German origin. This was the experience, for instance, of the German-Jewish historian Robert Davidsohn, who lived for more than two decades in Florence. He had written the first and extensive history of Florence in the middle ages and had received an honorary citizenship from the town.80 Similar experiences were made by the Italian socialist and Jew Gustavo Sacerdote, who lived in Berlin for years, where he worked as a reporter for the Italian socialist newspaper Avanti. He also contributed to the German socialist newspaper Vorwärts, and in 1910, he was still acting as editor of the publishing house Langenscheidt for the 16th edition of his German-Italian dictionary. During the war, he was forced to seek refuge in Switzerland.81 After two years of murderous fighting and the emergence of a new, hideously industrialized form of warfare, the First World War was nowhere near an end. On the contrary, some of the war’s most devastating battles occurred in 1916, including the Battle of Verdun, “the longest battle in world history.”82 Verdun was by no means the only devastating battle that took place in 1916. It had not yet come to an end when the Battle of the Somme – “the bloodiest battle” of the Great War – had begun, by the end of which more than one million men were killed or wounded.83 At the Eastern Front, in the meantime, Russia had initiated the Brusilov Offensive, likewise one of the most lethal battles of World War One. Again, the battle field was war-torn Galicia, and the first victims were Jewish civilians.84 Over the course of these two years, European Jews had passed through a series of tempests as well as inner turmoil, having moved from an initial phase of hope and enthusiasm into one of despair and terrifying dread. In Germany, antisemitic activists had repeatedly and publicly labeled Jews as shirkers, and, in June 1916, the Reichstag deputy of the antisemitic Deutsch­ völkische Partei asked the ministry to statistically record the number of Jews who served at the front. This and other initiatives and questions initially remained 80 Vinattieri, Robert Davidsohn (1853–1937). 81 Cavaglion, Socialismo e profetismo  ; Sacerdote Gustavo, Taschenwörterbuch der italienischen und deutschen Sprache, 2 Bde., Italienisch-Deutsch, Deutsch-Italienisch, 16. Aufl. (Berlin  : Langenscheidt, 1910). 82 Olaf Jessen, Verdun 1916. Urschlacht des Jahrhunderts (München  : C.H. Beck, 2014), 12  ; Gerd Krumeich, Antoine Prost, Verdun 1916. Die Schlacht und ihr Mythos aus deutsch-französischer Sicht (Essen  : Klartext Verlag, 2016). 83 Gerhard Hirschfeld, Gerd Krumeich and Irina Renz eds., Die Deutschen an der Somme 1914– 1918. Krieg, Besatzung, Verbrannte Erde (Essen  : Klartext Verlag, 2006). 84 Timothy C. Dowling, The Brusilov Offensive (Bloomington  : Indiana University Press, 2008)  ; Manfred Rauchensteiner, Der Erste Weltkrieg und das Ende der Habsburgermonarchie 1914–1918 (Vienna – Cologne – Weimar  : Böhlau Verlag, 2013), 541–565  ; Schuster, Zwischen allen Fronten, 122–128.



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unanswered. The Deputy Minister of War, Gustav von Wandel, was responsible for this dilatory handling of the petitions and the delay in the response to the parliamentary request made by the antisemites. The Minister of War himself, Adolf Heinrich Wild von Hohenborn, meanwhile, was not present in his ministry in Berlin, but stayed in the German General Headquarters. After the failure of the strategy of the Supreme Command under Erich von Falkenhayn in mid-1916, the German Emperor appointed Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff in August 1916 as Chiefs of the Supreme Army Command. They assumed dictatorial powers, and the Minister of War was forced to return to his ministry in Berlin. Consequently, the Deputy Minister Wandel retired, and Minister Wild von Hohenborn personally took over the official duties and, hence, the responsibility for the issue of antisemitic petitions. Wild von Hohenborn had assigned these with a greater importance, and therefore decreed the so-called Judenzählung, a Jewish census, in October 1916.85 Large segments of the German-Jewish population were deeply shocked by this move  ; their (mostly) still positive expectations were crushed. Even if recent studies raise the question as to whether the shock evoked by the Jewish census was as great as it has been presented in a retrospective view, and whether it produced the same effect in each of the different German countries, the fact remains that this move provoked significant outrage in the German-Jewish press.86 But, again, from a European perspective, new prospects arose even at this critical moment. Only one month later, in November 1916, the German and Habsburg governor-general in Poland proclaimed the Regency Kingdom of Poland, in fact a puppet state of the German Empire, offering Polish Jews the chance to become equal citizens.87 This state would of course be dependent on Germany.88 The following year, new prospects arose also among the Russian Jews. With the outbreak of the revolution in February 1917, new perspectives for Russia 85 Werner T. Angress, “Das deutsche Militär und die Juden im Ersten Weltkrieg,” in Militär­ geschichtliche Mitteilungen 19 (1976)  : 98–105  ; Werner T. Angress, “The German Army’s ‘Judenzählung’ of 1916  : Genesis – Consequences – Significance,” in Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 23 (1978)  : 117–138  ; Jacob Rosenthal, “‘Die Ehre des jüdischen Soldaten’. Die Judenzählung im Ersten Weltkrieg und ihre Folgen” (Frankfurt/M – New York  : Campus Verlag, 2007). 86 David J. Fine, Jewish Integration in the German Army in the First World War (Berlin – Boston  : de Gruyter, 2012)  ; Tim Grady, The German-Jewish Soldiers of the First World War in History and Memory (Liverpool  : Liverpool University Press, 2011)  ; see also  : Jason Crouthamel, “‘Even a Jew Can Fight Back’  : Masculinity, Comradeship and German-Jewish Soldiers in the First World War,” in this volume. 87 Schuster, Zwischen allen Fronten, 236–239. 88 Włodzimierz Borodziej, Geschichte Polens im 20. Jahrhundert (München  : C.H. Beck, 2010), 84–87.

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opened89 and Jews finally were given civil and civic equality with the decree made on March 22, 1917. “The dream of my whole life has become reality,” Simon Dubnow wrote on this day in his diary. But at the same time, this cautious eyewitness added some skeptical observations after this euphoric remark  : “the German Hannibal ante portas and the specter of counterrevolution and anarchy.”90 In the same year of 1917, new prospects arose for Romanian Jews, when King Ferdinand promised equal rights to all “those who will have struggled” for Romania, “be they Christians, Jews, or of any other faith.”91 Nonetheless, antisemitism also remained a strong social force in Romania in 1917.92 So, we have the paradoxical situation that the outlook for the Jews changed for the better in Russia and Romania, whereas the situation of the Jews worsened decisively and the activities of antisemites intensified among the Central Powers. The background to this intensification was the entrance of the United States of America into the war in April 1917, as this country was viewed by Central European antisemites as one of the most materialistic powers and one of the most supportive of Jewish interests.93 In the same year, the Foreign Secretary of Great Britain, Arthur James Balfour, declared that “His Majesty’s government views with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people,” opening new prospects for the European Jewry with this promise.94 89 Manfred Hildermeier, Russische Revolution (Frankfurt/M.: S. Fischer Verlag, 2004)  ; Orlando Figes, Die Tragödie eines Volkes. Die Epoche der russischen Revolution 1891–1924 (Berlin  : Berlin Verlag, 1998)  ; for the Jewish experiences, see the special issue  : “Judentum und Revolution  : Der Weltverband Poale Zion zwischen Zionismus und Kommunismus” of the journal  : Arbeit – Be­ wegung – Geschichte. Zeitschrift für historische Forschung 16 (2017), N. 2. For the experiences of Russian left-wing Jews, see the edition of their public debate in exile  : Karl Schlögel, Karl-Konrad Tschäpe eds., Die Russische Revolution und das Schicksal der russischen Juden. Eine Debatte in Berlin 1922/23 (Berlin  : Matthes & Seitz, 2014). 90 Simon Dubnow and Verena Dohrn ed., Buch des Lebens. Erinnerungen und Gedanken. Material­ ien zur Geschichte meiner Zeit, vol. 2 (1903–1922) (Göttingen  : Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005), 223. 91 Glenn E. Torrey, The Revolutionary Russian Army and Romania, 1917 (Pittsburgh, PA  : The Center for Russian & East European Studies, University of Pittsburgh, 1995), 19  ; Iancu, L’emanci­ pation des juifs de Roumaine, 117–138. 92 Müller, Staatsbürger auf Widerruf, 173–174. 93 See for this semantic connection of antisemitism and Amerika the remark by  : Werner Sombart, “Amerika ist in allen seinen Teilen ein Judenland,” in Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben, Werner Sombart (Leipzig  : Duncker & Humblot, 1911), 31. 94 Markus Kirchhoff, “Balfour-Deklaration,” in Enzyklopädie jüdischer Geschichte und Kultur, Bd. 1, ed. Dan Diner (Stuttgart – Weimar  : Springer, 2011), 243–250  ; Zechlin, Die deutsche Politik und die Juden im Ersten Weltkrieg, 373–412.



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The development in Germany led in an opposite direction. In 1917, German antisemites and members of the German right-wing community reassembled more generally for the foundation of a new nationalistic and antisemitic party. In September 1917, they founded the extremely nationalistic Deutsche Vaterland­ spartei, which had around 800.000 members one year later. It should be noted, however, that this party did not officially appear as an antisemitic party.95 To assess the huge success of this extreme right-wing party, it must be remembered that the antisemitic parties had received only 300,000 votes in the last election before the war, in 1912.96 This antisemitic atmosphere even reached countries which had formerly been more or less untouched by antisemitic agitators. In Great Britain, Jews faced accusations of pro-German sympathies during this dramatic moment of the war.97 British antisemitism was strictly connected with Germanophobia. In the British public sphere, a particularly negative portrayal of “German Jews” as “the bad Jews” increased in popularity, and these images could be found in novels, newspapers, pamphlets and non-fictional treatises. Journalists like Leo Maxse accused the Liberal Party of subverting the nation’s fate according to the schemes of “German” or, alternatively, “international” Jews.98 New dialectics after the Great War and during the revolutions The intensification of antisemitic activities in Germany and the Habsburg Monarchy resumed with the breakdown of the Central Powers.99 At that time, new topics and new motifs were being created. After the unexpected military defeat and the collapse of the monarchy, German and Austrian antisemites used the stab-in-the-back legend (Dolchstoß-Legende), which emerged just during 95 Heinz Hagenlücke, Deutsche Vaterlandspartei. Die nationale Rechte am Ende des Kaiserreiches (Düsseldorf  : Droste Verlag, 1997), 181, 407. 96 Jürgen Bertram, Die Wahlen zum Deutschen Reichstag vom Jahre 1912. Parteien und Verbände in der Innenpolitik des Wilhelminischen Reiches (Düsseldorf  : Droste Verlag, 1964). 97 Susanne Terwey, Moderner Antisemitismus in Großbritannien 1899–1919. Über die Funktion von Vorurteilen sowie Einwanderung und nationale Identität (Würzburg  : Königshausen & Neumann, 2006). 98 Leo Maxse, Politicians on the War-Path (London  : The National Review Office, 1920). 99 Werner Bergmann, “Antijüdische Gewalt in Deutschland in der Zwischenkriegszeit 1918–1939,” in Czasy Nowozytne 27 (2014)  : 213–234  ; Werner Bergmann, Juliane Wetzel, “Antisemitismus im Ersten und Zweiten Weltkrieg. Ein Forschungsüberblick,” in Erster Weltkrieg – Zweiter Welt­ krieg. Ein Vergleich. Krieg, Kriegserlebnis, Kriegserfahrung in Deutschland, eds. Bruno Thoß and Hans-Erich Volkmann (Paderborn  : Ferdinand Schönigh, 2002), 437–469.

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and was effectively propagated after the war by Paul von Hindenburg, as a momentous motif for antisemitic propaganda.100 Convinced that the German and Habsburg Army had not lost the war on the battlefield, anti-Semites like Hindenburg denounced their internal enemies, with the most prominent being the Socialists and the Jews, of having thrust a dagger into the back of the army and leading to their defeat. Despite this dramatic outburst of extreme antisemitism, we must be aware of the ambivalent nature of this historical moment and the further shift in the dialectic of experiences and expectations. Immediately after the defeat of the Central Powers, revolutions broke out, opening again new prospects for a far-reaching democratization process and the establishment of new republics,101 namely, for the states from the legacy of the Habsburg Monarchy and the Russian Empire. Jews renewed their hopes for improvements in their legal and political situation.102 But precisely during this revolutionary moment, another ambiguity emerged within the Jewish population. Some Jews took part in the revolutionary movements. Historical records show the broad participation of Jews in the Soviet movements, from Russia to Germany and and Hungary, during the first revolutionary phase as well as in the Bolshevist parties in the later stages.103 Middle-class Jews, however, were frightened by the revolutionary activities of their coreligionists, fearing that their activities would fan the flames of antisemitism still further. And, in fact, the antisemites invented a new trope in exactly this historical moment, which was to become one of the most important keywords used in the antisemitic campaigns across Europe in the future  : the Bolshevik Jews and the idea of a Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy.104 This trope emerged immediately 100 Boris Barth, Dolchstoßlegende und politische Desintegration. Das Trauma der deutschen Nieder­ lage im Ersten Weltkrieg, 1914–1933 (Düsseldorf  : Droste, 2003)  ; Grady, A Deadly Legacy, 169, 208–211  ; Gerd Krumeich, “Die Dolchstoß-Legende,” in Deutsche Erinnerungsorte, Bd. 1, eds. Etienne François, Hagen Schulze (München  : C.H. Beck. 2000), 585–599. 101 Tim B. Müller, Nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg. Lebensversuche moderner Demokratien (Hamburg  : Hamburger Edition, 2014)  ; Tim B. Müller, Adam Tooze eds.: Normalität und Fragilität. Demokratie nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg (Hamburg  : Verlag des Hamburger Instituts für Sozialforschung, 2015). 102 Ezra Mendelsohn, The Jews of East Central Europe between the Wars (Bloomington  : Indiana Univerity Press, 1983). 103 See the special issue of the journal  : Chidushim. Studies in the History of German and Central European Jewry 18 (2016)  : ‘Jews and Revolutions’, ed. by Moshe Zuckermann and Rachel Freudenthal. 104 Ulrich Herbeck, Das Feindbild vom “Jüdischen Bolschewiken”  : Zur Geschichte des russischen An­ tisemitismus vor und während der Russischen Revolution (Berlin  : Metropol Verlage, 2009)  ; Vetter, Antisemiten und Bolschewiki  ; Joachim Schröder, “Der Erste Weltkrieg und der ‘jüdische



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after the October coup in Russia, spread rapidly through Europe and could be found not only in the countries of the former Central Powers, but also in the Western Nations, and the term of the Żydokomuna was coined to reflect it in Poland.105 Furthermore, the pamphlet entitled “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” which had originated in the offices of the Czarist police before the war, spread across Europe.106 Only now, in the context of the post-war crisis in Europe, this pamphlet became a widely read and frequently discussed item across the continent. And not only here – it profoundly impressed Henry Ford in the United States of America as well.107 Even if the process of radicalization had reached a new level during the revolutions, the situation became even worse immediately afterwards during the counterrevolutions in Hungary and Germany and during the civil war in Russia.108 At that time, European Jews were confronted with new antisemitic legislative measures. The counterrevolutionary regime in Hungary, as well as the governments of the new Polish republic and Romania, issued the first antisemitic laws, the so-called numerus clausus acts, so that civilian antisemitism extended to governmental antisemitism in East Central Europe.109 On the Eastern Front, the war did not end in 1918. In Russia and in the Ukraine, the war changed into a civil war, where Jews became victims of atrocious acts of violence.110 In Poland, the Great War transmuted into the Polish-RusBolschewismus’,” in Nationalsozialismus und Erster Weltkrieg, Gerd Krumeich ed. (Essen  : Klartext Verlag, 2010), 77–96. 105 Joanna B. Michlic, “Żydokomuna,” in Enzyklopädie jüdischer Geschichte und Kultur, vol. 6, Dan Diner ed. (Stuttgart  – Weimar  : Springer Verlag, 2015), 584–588  ; Miloslav Szabó, ‘Von Worten zu Taten’. Die slowakische Nationalbewegung und der Antisemitismus 1875–1922 (Berlin  : Metropol Verlag, 2014), 313–333  ; Paul Hanebrink, “Transnational Culture War  : Christianity, Nation, and the Judeo-Bolshevik Myth in Hungary, 1890–1920,” in Journal of Modern History 80 N. 1 (2008)  : 55–80. 106 Jeffrey L. Sammons ed., Die Protokolle der Weisen von Zion. Die Grundlage des modernen An­ tisemitismus. Eine Fälschung. Text und Kommentar (Göttingen  : Wallstein-Verlag, 1998)  ; Michael Hagemeister, Eva Horn eds, Die Fiktion von der jüdischen Weltverschwörung. Zu Text und Kontext der ‘Protokolle der Weisen von Zion’ (Göttingen  : Wallstein-Verlag, 2012). 107 Henry Ford ed., The International Jew. The World’s Foremost Problem, 4 Vol. (Michigan  : 1920– 1921). 108 Robert Gerwarth, “The Central European Counterrevolution  : Paramilitary Violence in Germany, Austria and Hungary after the Great War,” in Past and Present 57, Nr. 200 (2008)  : 175– 209  ; Robert Gerwarth, Die Besiegten. Das blutige Erbe des Ersten Weltkriegs (München  : C.H. Beck, 2017). 109 Regina Fritz, Grzegorz Rossolinski-Liebe and Jana Starek eds., Alma Mater Antisemitica. Aka­ demisches Milieu, Juden und Antisemitismus an den Universitäten Europas zwischen 1918 und 1939 (Wien  : New University Press, 2016). 110 See the collection of documents  : Die Judenpogrome in der Ukraine und die ukrainische Na-

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sian war, in which frightening antisemitic atrocities took place and which only ended in 1921.111 Moreover, with the end of the war, acts of antisemitic violence did not stop in Poland. During the election campaign, a whole week of antisemitic acts and public disturbances took place, leading to the murder of the first President of the newly founded Polish Republic, Gabriel Narutowicz – an act that was clearly motivated by antisemitism.112 In Lithuania, the situation remained relatively calm, leading to the integration of the country’s Jews and granting them wide-ranging autonomy.113 The dialectic between the spaces of experiences and the prospects, therefore, did not end with the war. Although the process triggered a new dynamic of revolution and counterrevolution, and with it one of antisemitic violence, it also opened up new prospects for a democratization process and the foundation of new republics. Conclusion To summarize the dialectic of experiences and expectations of European Jews during this crucial moment in the general European as well as Jewish European history, twelve observations are recorded below. 1. Beyond the contrast between Eastern Jews in Russia and Romania, and Western Jews in the ‘long’ nineteenth century, the similarities among the Jewish experiences in different European countries prevailed.114 During the war und tionalbewegung, Berlin 1921  ; Ilya Trotsky, ‘Jewish Pogroms in the Ukraine and in Byelorussia (1918–1929)’, in Russian Jewry 1917–1967, eds. Jacob Frumkin, et al., (New York  : Thomas Yoseloff, 1969), 72–87. 111 Norman Davies, White Eagle, Red Star, the Polish-Soviet War, 1919–20 (London  : Random House, 2003)  ; Eva Reder, “Im Schatten des polnischen Staates  : Pogrome 1918–1920 und 1945/46 – Auslöser, Bezugspunkte, Verlauf,” in Zeitschrift für Ostmitteleuropa 60, H.4 (2011)  : 571–606. 112 Paul Brykczynski, “Anti-Semitism on Trial  : The Case of Eligiusz Niewiadomski,” in East Euro­ pean Politics & Societies 28, N. 2 (2014)  : 411–439. 113 Egle Bendikaite, “Zwischen Anspruch und Wirklichkeit. Die Politik gegenüber den Juden in Litauen in der Zwischenkriegszeit,” in Zwischen großen Erwartungen und bösem Erwachen. Juden, Politik und Antisemitismus in Ost- und Sudosteuropa 1918–1945, eds. Dittmar Dahlmann and Anke Hilbrenner (Paderborn  : Schöningh, 2007) 101–120  ; Šarūnas Liekis, “A state within a state  ?”. Jew­ ish autonomy in Lithuania. 1918–1925 (Vilnius  : Versus Aureus, 2003)  ; Samuel Gringauz, “Jewish National Autonomy in Lithuania (1918–1925),” Jewish Social Studies 14, N. 3 (1952)  : 225–246. 114 The differences between East and West are sharply emphasized by Dan Diner, “Zweierlei Emanzipation  – Westliche Juden und Ostjuden gegenübergestellt,” in Gedächtniszellen. Über jüdische und andere Geschichten, Dan Diner (München  : C.H. Beck, 2003), 125–134. For similarities and simultaneous developments in Eastern and Western Europe see  : Ulrich Wyrwa, Juden



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the early postwar years, however, the differences in the living conditions of Jews in the various countries in Europe, and respectively in its diverse states whether old or new, became apparent. Thus, the experiences made by European Jews during and after the war were by no means coherent. The dynamics between the spaces of experiences and the horizons of expectations and prospects of European Jews in this historical moment were full of contradictions and opposing features. These dialectical shifts did not occur simultaneously. The specific characteristics of these processes were different in each of the European countries, regardless of whether they belonged to the Central Powers or the Allies of the Triple Entente. “The one process of time became” according to Koselleck, “a dynamic of a coexisting plurality of times.”115 2. This process was marked by incessant upheavals that ranged from hope to despair, from engaged participation to an increasing exclusion and perpetual “tensions between integration and rejection.”116 This dialectical change from hope to despair and new hope again dominated the situation of the Jews of the Central Powers but also affected the Jewish population of allied countries. But this dialectic did not affect all European Jews in the same way. 3. In this sense, fractures also occurred due to the experiences made by the Jews from the two opposing blocks  – the Jewish solders of the multi-ethnic Habsburg Empire, on the one hand, and the Jews in the armies of the allied forces, on the other hand. Here, differences emerged primarily between Russian and Romanian Jews or Jews from France, Great Britain, or Italy, respectively, even though they all belonged to the same alliance. A very special case, again, were the Jews who lived in Polish-speaking areas and served partly in the Russian, German, or Austro-Hungarian armies. They all had different experiences, and their dialectical shift from hope to despair acquired peculiar features in each case, a dialectic that was heavy burden regarding the formation of a new national political culture and, hence, the construction of the new state. Most similar to the war experiences of the Jews in Congress Poland were those of the Jews in Lithuania, who both were forced to serve in the Russian army. After the war, however, they made different experiences in each of the new national states. While Jews in Lithuania received certain autonomous rights and set up their own ministry, an antisemitic mood spread in the new state of Poland. 4. In contrast to previous wars, this war was a war against the civilian population. This feature had emerged already with the first acts of war, implemented by in der Toskana und in Preußen im Vergleich. Aufklärung und Emanzipation in Florenz, Livorno, Berlin und Königsberg i. Pr. (Tübingen  : Mohr Siebeck, 2003), 415–431. 115 Koselleck, Space of Experience and Horizon of Expectation, 269. 116 Hoffmann, “Between Integration and Rejection,” 102.

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the German forces during the occupation of Belgium and in the warfare against Serbia. For European Jews, this aspect of the war as a war against civilians had frightening consequences, particularly as this feature had its most atrocious consequences for the Jews in Galicia, one of the European regions with the highest Jewish population density. This region was a site of one of the most fiercely contested battlefields during the war, which was conquered several times by the warring powers, lost and retaken. The Russian Jews in the Western provinces had similar experiences. Battles were fought in these regions, and the front lines ran through them. As the Russian government felt compelled to deport the Jews from the theaters of war it had to open the Pale of Settlement, creating new hope for the Russian Jews. 5. Even if the legendary unity of nineteenth century European Jewry was by no means comprehensive and all-embracing, it was completely destroyed during World War One. The former transnational exchange that existed among European Jews was interrupted. Between 1914 and 1918, intellectual exchange among European Jews was cut off and their lives’ journeys across the national borders had come to an end.117 The Jewish organizations in both the countries of the Central Powers and the Allies became highly patriotic. 6. Not only did the histoire croisé of European Jewry break down with the Great War, but a unique period of social advancement and civil recognition for the Jews in Europe ended. As Jonathan Frankel summarized the paradoxical politics in his thoughts on the Jewish situation during the years 1914–1921  : The First World War brought to an end a hundred-year period that, in retrospect, can be seen as something of a golden age in the history of the Jewish people. […] Everywhere in Europe and the Western world – with the major exception of Russia and, in effect, Romania – Jews were granted equal rights before the law.118

7. During the ‘long’ nineteenth century, a new kind of hostility against Jews emerged, which was directed primarily against the integration of Jews into society. A new political fight against Jews was conducted under the new catchword of antisemitism.119 But a broad countermovement emerged from civil society as 117 Volkov, “Juden und Judentum im Zeitalter der Emanzipation,” 86  ; Penslar, Jews and the Military, 121–165. 118 Jonathan Frankel, “The Paradoxical Politics of Marginality. Thoughts on the Jewish Situation During the Years 1914–21,” in, The Jews and the European Crisis 1914–21, ed. Jonathan Frankel (New York – Oxford  : Oxford University Press, 1988), 3–21. 119 Thomas Nipperdey and Reinhard Rürup, “Antisemitismus,” in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. His­ torisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache, vol. 1, eds. Otto Brunner, Werner Conze and



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well, whose members adopted a variety of strategies to fight antisemitism.120 This fight was not without success in combating the new hostility expressed towards Jews. At the end of the ‘long’ nineteenth century, the impression could be gained that this countermovement might indeed prevail. Around 1910, contemporary observers, Jews and non-Jews alike, had good reason to believe that antisemitism could be overcome.121 But during the war, and even more frequently after the war, a new wave of hostility against Jews broke out, leading to the emergence of an extreme form of antisemitism at the beginning of the “age of extreme.”122 8. Not only the Great War constituted the turning point in European Jewish history, instead the whole historical complex of the war together with its aftermath of revolutions and counterrevolutions represented this turning point. This historical nexus of war, revolution and counterrevolution formed a historical knot that combined the political, social and cultural dimensions of ‘long’ nineteenth and the ‘short’ twentieth century. 9. Therefore, the dialectical process of forming prospects and making experiences seen among European Jews did not end with the end of the war. The defeat had initiated a process of democratization, from which large numbers of Central European Jews benefited. European Jewry witnessed the foundation of new republics, and these new democracies partly fulfilled the expectations that Jews had had at the beginning of the war. Primarily Russian Jews formed new expectations and gained hope from the revolutions. In fact, after the civil war, the first decade of the Soviet Union proved to be a success story for Russian Jews. A new republic that was the heritage of the Tsarist Empire, like Lithuania, fulfilled the expectations of the Jews as well  ; Lithuanian Jews gained far-reaching autonomous rights. In this respect, the situation differed fundamentally from the development that took place in Poland. Polish Jews also gained civil and civic rights, but they were confronted by strong antisemitic attitudes. With the forRein­hart Koselleck (Stuttgart  : Klett Cotta, 1972) 129–153  ; Albert S. Lindemann, Esaus’ Tears. Modern Anti-Semitism and the Rise of the Jews (Cambridge  : Cambridge University Press, 1997). 120 Ulrich Wyrwa, Strategien im europäisch-jüdischen Abwehrkampf. Das Engagement der Juden in Europa gegen den entstehenden Antisemitismus (1879–1914) (Graz  : Grazer Universitätsverlag, 2013)  ; Eleonore Lappin-Eppel, “Zensur und Abwehr des Antisemitismus  : Dr. Bloch‘s Österreichische Wochenschrift im Ersten Weltkrieg,” in Judenfeindschaft und Antisemitismus in der deutschen Presse über fünf Jahrhunderte vol. 1, eds. Michael Nagel and Moshe Zimmermann (Bremen  : Édition Lumière, 2013), 299–316. 121 Ulrich Wyrwa, Gesellschaftliche Konfliktfelder und die Entstehung des Antisemitismus. Das Deutsche Kaiserreich und das Liberale Italien im Vergleich (Berlin  : Metropol Verlag, 2015), 372. 122 Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extreme. The Short Twentieth Century 1914–1991 (London  : Michael Joseph, 1994)  ; Werner Bergmann and Ulrich Wyrwa, “Antisemitism,” in 1914–1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War, https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/ pdf/1914-1918-Online-antisemitism-2017-03-02.pdf (accessed December 11, 2018).

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mation of the new German and Austrian Republics as well as the newly founded post-Habsburg states – with the exception of Hungary – Jews now enjoyed more rights and generosity than they had in the pre-war states. 10. European Jewry had gained new prospects with the Balfour Declaration, which was issued at the darkest moment in the Great War in November 1917.123 This decision represented a new landmark for the growing Zionist movement in Europe, which had previously made up only a relatively small minority among the European Jews. German and Austrian Zionists, however, were faced with the problem of how to respond to the public statement made by the British government to support the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine, not least because this land was still in the hands of the Ottoman Empire and closely associated with Germany. German and Austrian Zionist Jews were faced with a particularly awkward situation when they served on the Palestine front, fighting against British or French Zionist Jews. 11. Beyond the immediate post-war conflicts, the Great War had disastrous impacts on Jews in Germany. Even if the radicalization of antisemitism in Germany was not particularly outstanding compared to Hungary, Poland, or Rumania, the outcomes were, in fact, most devastating there. Nevertheless, the Great War did not necessarily lead to National Socialism, and the catastrophic consequences of the war in post-war Germany were less a result of the brutalization of German politics but rather a consequence of the incapacity of the German political class to accept the defeat and come to terms with the destruction of their hypertrophic fantasies of world power.124 Their ostentatious denial to accept the responsibility for the war corresponded to their ostentatious assignment of guilt to the Jews. 12. Nevertheless, even in Germany, the process of the radicalization of antisemitism was not irreversible. The extreme antisemitism, which emerged at the end of the war and in the period immediately after war, did not necessarily lead to Nazi Germany and National Socialist antisemitism. The Weimar Republic was by no means doomed to fail. The positive expectations of German Jews, formed after the defeat of the counterrevolution, were not merely illusions. The disaster would only come with the economic crisis of 1929.125

123 For the year 1917 see  : Leonhard, Die Büchse der Pandora, 614–805. 124 George L. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers. Reshaping the Memory of the World (New York  : Oxford University Press, 1990). Mosses’ thesis of the brutalization of the war and its consequences (159–181) is rejected in more recent studies  : Gerwarth, Die Besiegten, 25. 125 Werner E. Mosse and Arnold Paucker eds., Entscheidungsjahr 1932. Zur Judenfrage in der End­ phase der Weimarer Republik (Tübingen  : Mohr Siebeck, 1965).

SOLDIERS

Jason Crouthamel

“Even a Jew Can Fight Back” Masculinity, Comradeship and German-Jewish Soldiers in the First World War

Louis Liebmann, a German-Jewish cattle dealer from Giessen, who was drafted into the Imperial German army in 1915, wrote that he hoped that the antisemitism he had encountered in his youth would disappear when the war broke out as a result of the patriotic unity promised by the Kaiser. However, his optimism quickly evaporated  : In my youth, I had already heard derogatory comments about Jews, although these antisemites usually did business with us. I often had the opportunity to respond to these comments with words or fists. I fought only when there was good cause, but it happened more than I would have wished. When I became a soldier, I thought all this would now be over, that now we were all equals, and this nastiness would stop. Unfortunately, it wasn’t so. Already during the first eight days of our training, while cleaning our rifles, I had a fight with a comrade named Wiederstein from Seck over his antisemitic comments. Wiederstein was in the same platoon as me and, later on, in the same company. However, from that time on, he kept his mouth shut, because he found out that even a Jew can fight back when he has to.1

Throughout the war, despite his efforts to be a good comrade, Liebmann constantly faced antisemitic “nastiness” from his comrades. Aware that Jews had been stereotyped as unmanly, he asserted that “even a Jew can fight back.” After the war, he was extremely bitter when he realized that the racial tensions had only intensified. He was able to escape from Nazi Germany in 1938 after being briefly imprisoned in Buchenwald. He wrote his memoir in Great Britain in 1941, expressing hope that his children and grandchildren could learn from his experiences and be proud of their Jewish heritage.2 The letters, diaries and memoirs of veterans like Liebmann revealed the complex interactions that occurred between Jewish and non-Jewish soldiers 1

Louis Liebmann, “Notes on My Life – Dedicated to My Children,” Leo Baeck Institute, New York (LBINY ), B188, ME 1183, 28. 2 Ibid.

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on the combat front, which were often viewed through the lens of ‘comradeship,’ ideals of masculinity and shared sacrifice. In this essay, I investigate how ordinary German-Jewish soldiers perceived prevailing male cultural ideals and how these ideals shaped their experiences with antisemitism. This essay also uses Feldpostbriefe and diaries to uncover how non-Jewish soldiers perceived their Jewish comrades, in particular through the lens of ‘comradeship.’ I explore several overlapping questions  : How did their experience at the front shape the German-Jewish soldiers’ sense of masculinity  ? How did the German-Jewish soldiers’ ideals of masculinity enable them negotiate antisemitism  ? To what degree did their self-image and their attempts to attain the masculine ideals resonate with those of non-Jewish comrades  ? I argue that ideals of masculinity and comradeship were key parts of the German-Jewish soldiers’ beliefs that they were integrated and accepted members of the war front community. On the one hand, German-Jewish soldiers in the trenches asserted they had a common set of masculine ideals that they shared with their gentile comrades. At the same time, many German-Jewish front soldiers faced what they considered to be a particular challenge to their masculinity. The fight against antisemitism tested their sense of masculine pride. Masculinity was maintained not only by fighting the external enemy, but also by fighting prejudice at the front. Furthermore, German-Jewish men described masculinity as an attribute that could be performed, which was in contrast to prevailing essentialist constructions of masculinity that excluded Jews and other minorities. The essentialist, racialized notion of comradeship and the ‘front community,’ which was later sanctified by the Nazis, did not necessarily reflect the more inclusive notions of comradeship embraced by both German-Jewish front fighters and some non-Jewish soldiers in 1914–1918. The idea that Jewish soldiers believed that they were accepted because of their performance as ‘good comrades’ is supported by evidence from Feldpostbriefe written by some of their gentile comrades, who also believed that personal behavior, rather than their ‘essential’ personal identity, determined whether one was a loyal comrade, a member of the front community and, thus, a ‘good German.’ These letters from the front reveal that the soldiers had much more complex experiences than were often recounted in memoirs published after the war. Well-known memoirs from the 1930s, such as Julius Marx’s Kriegstagebuch eines Juden, which will be discussed below, were written in the wake of the Nuremberg Laws and the Reichspogromnacht. Nazi racial policies and postwar rhetoric that was established even before 1933, blaming Jews for the ‘stab in the back’ and excluding them from the memory of the front experience and the front community, negatively shaped the Jewish veter-



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ans’ memories of the war.3 However, evidence from letters and diaries written in 1914–1918 suggests that most soldiers felt accepted and shared a common bond with their comrades. The wartime ideals of shared sacrifice and manly valor seemed to make them feel as though they were part of a common masculine experience.4 Reflecting the broader, historiographical trends on the traumatic effects of the First World War, the focus of scholarship on German-Jews has slowly shifted from the experiences of cultural and intellectual elites to the perspectives of ordinary front soldiers. As historian Derek Penslar argues, the actual war experiences of Jewish soldiers at the front still need to be explored, as their interactions with non-Jewish soldiers complicated the history of antisemitism in German society.5 Historian Tim Grady argues that, instead of viewing the First World War as a disastrous turning point in the lives of Jewish people living in Germany, there were actually “considerably positive interactions between Jews and other Germans” during the war. Grady calls for historians to move away from institutional approaches and toward a “broader analysis” that is sensitive to the more complex interactions between gentile and Jewish soldiers, an approach that influences my methodology.6 Much of the scholarship on antisemitism in the war has focused on hatred disseminated by the military and political leaders, and in particular the notorious 1916 Judenzählung (‘Jew Count’), in which Jews were stereotyped as unmanly shirkers who evaded military service.7 However, this antisemitism ‘from above’ did not necessarily reflect the nuanced, layered interactions that occurred between gentile and Jewish comrades. At the level of everyday interactions be3

4 5 6 7

This was emphasized by Michael Geheran in “Rethinking Jewish Front Experiences,” in Beyond Inclusion and Exclusion  : Jewish Experiences of the First World War in Central Europe, eds. Jason Crouthamel, Michael Geheran, Tim Grady and Julia Barbara Köhne (New York  – Oxford  : Berghahn Books, 2018), 111–143. Regarding this shared wartime experience, see  : Tim Grady, A Deadly Legacy  : German Jews and the Great War (New Haven  : Yale University Press, 2017). Derek Penslar, Jews and the Military. A History (Princeton  : Princeton University Press, 2013), 172–173. Tim Grady, German-Jewish Soldiers of the First World War in History and Memory (Liverpool  : Liverpool University Press, 2011), 9–10. On the impact of the Judenzählung as a precursor to Nazi antisemitism, see  : Jacob Rosenthal, Die Ehre des jüdischen Soldate. Die Judenzählung im Ersten Weltkrieg und ihre Folgen (Frankfurt  : Campus Verlag, 2007)  ; See also  : George L. Mosse, Towards the Final Solution (New York  : Howard Fertig, 1997)  ; William Brustein, Roots of Hate. Anti-Semitism in Europe before the Ho­ locaust (Cambridge  : Cambridge University Press, 2003)  ; Brian Crim, Antisemitism in the Ger­ man Military Community and the Jewish Response, 1914–1938 (Lanham, MD  : Lexington Books, 2014).

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tween non-Jewish and Jewish front soldiers, the ‘Jew Count’ seemed to have had little impact. The ‘Jew Count’ was rarely mentioned in the letters, diaries, or even postwar memoirs of German-Jewish front veterans.8 While historians have characterized the 1916 ‘Jew Count’ as a kind of caesura in Jewish-Christian relations, as well as a key step along the road to the Holocaust,9 evidence suggests that the ‘Jew Count’ played a more decisive role in the political battles between elites on the home front than it did for ordinary Jewish front fighters. Scholarship on the history of masculinity has also illuminated the experiences of German-Jewish soldiers at the front. As many historians have noted, the ideal of ‘comradeship’ became an all-pervasive masculine image. Despite the widespread ‘crisis in masculinity’ experienced by many in the face of industrialized violence, the image of the ‘good comrade’ and the spirit of sacrifice were embraced by many men, including minorities who were considered social outsiders.10 Evidence suggests that German-Jewish soldiers felt as though they could achieve the masculine ideal and, thus, assimilation by performing well at the front.11 As historian Brian Feltman has demonstrated, even if the rise of National Socialism after 1933 caused German-Jewish veterans to reevaluate their memories of the war and the experience of ‘comradeship’ that had helped them survive the stress experienced in the trenches, where they had built bonds of friendship with gentiles, which made them feel that they were accepted, at least between 1914–1918.12 Just as gentile and Jewish front soldiers shared the 8

Derek Penslar emphasizes this in Jews and the Military, 173. He cites over 700 letters written by Jewish soldiers, who never mentioned the Judenzählung, in this paper, which is found in Sabine Hank and Hermann Simon, eds., Feldpostbriefe Jüdischer Soldaten, 1914–1918, Band 1 und Band 2 (Berlin  : Hentrich & Hentrich, 2002). 9 On the ‘Jew count’ and its significance, see George L. Mosse, Towards the Final Solution, 171. 10 Monika Szcepaniak, Militärische Männlichkeiten in Deutschland und Österreich im Umfeld des Grossen Krieges (Würzburg  : Königshausen & Neumann, 2011), 10. On the crisis in masculinity, see  : Birthe Kundrus, “Gender Wars – The First World War and the Construction of Gender Relations in the Weimar Republic,” in Home/Front. The Military, War and Gender in Twenti­ eth-Century Germany, eds. Karen Hagemann and Stefanie Schüler-Springorum (Oxford  : Berg, 2002), 160. 11 German-Jews also ‘performed masculinity’ in German university culture, see  : Lisa F. Zwicker, “Performing Masculinity. Jewish Students and the Honor Code at German Universities,” in Jewish Masculinities. German Jews, Gender and History, eds. Benjamin Maria Baader, Sharon Gillerman and Paul Lerner (Bloomington  : Indiana University Press, 2012), 114–137. 12 Brian K. Feltman, “Conceptions of Comradeship. Hans H. Pinkus and the Nazification of the Reichsvereinigung ehemaliger Kriegsgefangener”, Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook (March 2016)  : 1–20. On assimilation through militarized masculinity, see  : Gregory A. Caplan, “Germanising the Jewish Male. Military Masculinity as the Last Stage of Acculturation,” in Towards Normal­ ity  ? Acculturation of Modern German Jewry, eds. Rainer Liedtke and David Rechter (Tübingen  : Mohr Siebeck, 2003).



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traumatic experience of the trenches, they also shared ideals of manliness and comradeship that were fundamental to their sense of national identity. Concepts of Masculinity in the Imperial German Army In 19th century Germany, the concept of ‘masculinity’ became increasingly aligned with a militarized notion of the ‘heroic ideal,’ which required personal sacrifice and absolute loyalty to the fatherland.13 The image of the steel-nerved soldier became ubiquitous in the popular media, and it was the basis for the rugged ‘New Man’ who emerged from the horrors of trench warfare.14 Germany’s military leaders and civil organizations attempted to control and reinforce this dominant image of a self-sacrificing warrior who was focused entirely on defending the nation. The idealized masculine image was held up against demonized countertypes. Homosexuals, Jews and emancipated women were widely stereotyped as the enemies of the middle-class standards of discipline and self-control.15 Jewish men were portrayed as people who displayed weak and unmanly ‘hysterics’ and threatened to spread the contagion of ‘degeneracy.’16 Before the war, conservatives had hoped to counteract this perceived plague of effeminate men, socialism, feminism and racial degeneration with the image of a warrior male, driven by his selfless devotion to the fatherland.17 Right-wing critics, especially in the mostly middle-class German Navy League and Pan-German League, called for the creation of ‘real men’ by applying a combination of militarized discipline and middle-class values based on the work-ethic, merit and productivity.18 13 Karen Hagemann, “Of ‘Manly Valor’ and ‘German Honor,’ Nation, War and Masculinity in the Age of the Prussian Uprising against Napoleon,” Central European History 30 (1997), 187–220  ; Ute Frevert, “Soldaten, Staatsbürger  : Überlegungen zur historischen Konstruktion von Männlichkeit,” in Männergeschichte – Geschlechtergeschichte. Männlichkeit im Wandel der Moderne, ed. Thomas Kühne (Frankfurt a. M.: Campus Verlag, 1996), 82–85. 14 Bernd Hüppauf, “Langenmarck, Verdun and the Myth of the New Man in Germany after the First World War,” War and Society 6,2 (September 1988)  : 70–103. 15 See, for example  : George L. Mosse, The Image of Man  – The Creation of Modern Masculinity (Oxford  : Oxford University Press, 1998)  ; Ute Frevert, A Nation in Barracks. Modern Germany, Military Conscription and Civil Society (New York  : Berg, 2004), 170–199. 16 George L. Mosse, “Shell Shock as a Social Disease,” Journal of Contemporary History 35, 1( January 2000), 101–102. 17 Ibid., 110–111. 18 Marcus Funck, “Ready for War  ? Conceptions of Military Manliness in the Prusso-German Officer Corps before the First World War,” in Hagemann, Schüler-Springorum eds., Home/Front, 43–68.

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The ideal of ‘comradeship’ increasingly became a cornerstone of the masculine ideal. Popular culture portrayed Germany as a nation of comrades. After the 1870–71 Franco-Prussian war and German unification, the idea that one could only become a loyal subject and member of the Volk as a result of soldierly prowess was disseminated through war memorials, religious commemorations for the dead and the historical narrative built around Germany’s war experience, all of which sanctified the ideal national community. War was widely viewed as the ‘school for masculinity’ in Imperial Germany, 19 and it provided the opportunity for men to prove their individual worth through the collective act of defending the nation. During the war, men could demonstrate their commitment to the newly defined concepts of ‘manly valor’ and ‘national sacrifice’ that German poets and cultural elite enshrined as essentially ‘German’ male characteristics.20 Notions of military sacrifice in the 19th century, which spawned notions of ‘comradeship’ during the age of immersion in war, gave men a sense of meaning and self-actualization. The idea of a Männerbund appealed to millions of German men, because it provided a sense of belonging and emotional support outside the traditional social structures and was worshiped by members of those same social institutions for protecting ‘traditional’ life. In particular, the image of ‘comradeship’ appealed to men who sought assimilation and acceptance as patriotic, masculine embodiments of the ‘warrior image.’21 At the same time, ‘comradeship’ was contested and appropriated by members of different social and political groups. For example, the National Socialists would later define ‘comradeship’ as an exclusive category, with political and racial ‘enemies’ denounced as essential outsiders to the ‘front community’ (Frontgemeinschaft).22 However, members of many groups that were marginalized as ‘social outsiders’ (for example, homosexual men) in Imperial, Weimar and Nazi Germany did not accept the essential definition of the ‘good comrade’ as being based on essentialist notions of ‘who you are,’ but rather they defined masculinity based on one’s performance and experience at the front.23 In their letters and diaries, front soldiers often described the path towards acceptance as a comrade and, thus, the path to ‘Germanness’ as dependent on how one formed ideal friendships and sacrificed for the nation. 19 Hagemann, “Of ‘Manly Valor’ and ‘German Honor’”, 187–220. 20 Ibid., 201–202. 21 Thomas Kühne, “‘…aus diesem Krieg werden nicht nur harte Männer heimkehren’  – Kriegskameradschaft und Männlichkeit im 20. Jahrhundert,” in Thomas Kühne ed., Männerge­ schichte – Geschlechtergeschichte (Frankfurt  : Campus Verlag, 1996), 174–191. 22 Thomas Kühne, Kameradschaft. Die Soldaten des nationalsozialistischen Krieges und das 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen  : Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006). 23 Jason Crouthamel, An Intimate History of the Front. Masculinity, Sexuality and German Soldiers in the First World War (New York  : Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), Ch. 5.



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Masculine Self-Image and Struggles against Antisemitism Evidence suggests that German-Jewish soldiers saw becoming the masculine ideal of a ‘good comrade’ as a way to transcend social and cultural differences. An examination of letters and diaries written by front soldiers reveals these perceptions of masculine ideals and how comradeship shaped relationships between Jewish and non-Jewish front soldiers. For example, Julius Fürst, a middle-class son of a businessman who volunteered to join the army at the age of 18 at the outbreak of the war, considered the war as an opportunity to prove his masculinity and earn the respect of his comrades. He was promoted to Leutnant in 1915, earned the Iron Cross first-class in 1917, was wounded several times in battle and was killed at the Battle of Arras during the 1918 Spring Offensive. His Nachlass, which includes letters, poems and essays that include reflections on ‘The Duties of a Company Leader in the Field,’ reveals his tremendous pride in his status and responsibilities as a German officer.24 Fürst wrote extensively about how an officer should be a model of masculine self-control for his men in the face of stressful situations. He saw this as the key to preserving morale, but also an expression of his national integration. He argued that assimilated Jews – differentiating himself from Eastern European Jews – could define themselves and, thus, could choose to be ‘German in their soul’ (Seele) through the act of comradeship.25 He noted that antisemites, which he had encountered during his childhood in Königsberg while he was a member of youth organizations like the Wandervogel, wrongly stereotyped Jews as selfish cowards. The war gave him the opportunity to defend the honor of the German nation and the families living there and be a “friend and comrade,” thus, allowing Jews to dispel stereotypes that they were different than any other German.26 Even dealing with the paraphernalia that came along with being a German officer was an emotionally powerful experience for Fürst. In a letter written to an old friend from the Wandervogel in February 1916, he described his deep pride in being able to put on a uniform, which he said made him feel like a brother to other soldiers.27 At the same time, like his brothers in arms, Fürst was deeply traumatized by what he encountered on the Eastern and Western fronts. While he embraced the hegemonic ideals of masculine self-control, sacrifice and discipline, he admitted that these ideals collided with “the reality of torn bodies and shattering violence.” 24 25 26 27

Julius Fürst, Nachlass, ME 163, MM 26, LBINY. Ibid., 4 (digital file). Ibid., 17. Ibid., 25.

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By 1917, he noted that he was no longer as naïve about the adventurousness of war that he had dreamed of while in the Wandervogel. He wrote that he had become a “worried soul,” haunted by the loss of friends. Interestingly, he characterized his loss of innocence as only one more step taken along the path towards attaining his masculine status  : “It takes a real man to wipe out the remnants of youth.”28 Fürst unabashedly used the word ‘love’ to describe his feelings for his comrades. In a letter written two weeks before his death to his girlfriend Annemarie, whom he called “the queen of my life,” he wrote that his love for his girlfriend and comrades was the best chance to gain immortality.29 He was confident that this love was reciprocated by his comrades, and that he lived up to the heroic image  : It is a major project to build up such a community [at the front], and I think it is successful because my company is recognized as the best in my regiment, and my people love me […]. A person who was regarded, both mentally and socially, as coming from a high status recently said that he considers his leadership of his company to be his life’s work. Yes, Annemarie, perhaps it is also the greatest act of my life, and all my dreams of spiritual creation (geistigem Schaffen) are in vain compared to the lively effects (lebend­ igen Wirken) that take place in the human soul as the person prepares for death, which requires a serious look into the human soul, and out of which comes heroism.30

Being a model comrade and being loved by his comrades were clearly definitive experiences during Fürst’s life. His belief that he was strongly adored by the men in his unit was not illusory. After his death in the March 1918 offensive on the Western front, one of his non-Jewish comrades from his regiment, Leutnant Ludwig Z., wrote to one of Fürst’s friends, Trude K., to inform her that Julius had passed away. Leutnant Z. praised Julius’s comradeship and his friendship  : “With his death we lost a true comrade, whose spirit brought verve and fire to daily life. I lost a friend for life. Friendship in the field (Feldfreundschaft) binds us closer than anything in times of peace.”31 Many German-Jewish soldiers wrote that the experiences of comradeship made them feel integrated. This was the case for not only assimilated, liberal Jews, but also men from orthodox backgrounds. Samuel Jacobs, a self-described orthodox Jew from lower Saxony, seemed to experience comradeship and a sense 28 29 30 31

Ibid., 27. Ibid., 29. Ibid., 32–33. Ibid., 35. Ludwig Z’s last name is not given in the file.



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of national integration in a way that was similar to the experience of assimilated Jews. He wrote letters regularly to his parents for four years, who collected them for his children after he survived the war. In these letters, he never mentions any antisemitic encounters made during the war itself. He only described encounters with antisemitism before the war and in the wake of defeat and revolution. The clearly defined masculine virtues that were associated with comradeship seem to have made him feel as though antisemitism evaporated for the entire duration of his front-line experiences. Samuel Jacobs indicated that he wrote his 1920 memoir, Thoughts and Mem­ ories from the World War, which was based on the collection of letters he sent to his parents from the front, to give his children and grandchildren some insight into the war’s effects on him and a sense of what human beings can endure in stressful situations.32 He begins the memoir with an overview of his burst of patriotism in August 1914, the Kaiser’s call for unity and an expression of his sincere feeling that antisemitic prejudice would be put aside in the pursuit of the common cause to save the fatherland  : The enthusiasm of the masses let all of the persistent differences of class and status, of race and religion, disappear when we went to the front as comrades. We young Jews met with excitement the shock and cruelty of war. Nevertheless, we had the reassuring feeling that, finally, the German people could now probably see what other nations knew already – the fact that it was not religion or race that determined your ability in the eyes of the state or military – but only individual achievements. However, a bitter feeling overtakes me when I see that we Jews are categorized as a second-class group of humans, and they want to take from us our holiest possession, our honor.33

Reflecting upon the ‘spirit of 1914’, Jacobs describes the initial sense of optimism he felt upon having the opportunity to defend the nation. He hoped that he would not be judged on the basis of his religion or race, but only by his “individual achievements.” Still, looking back on the experiences he had during these years later on, after the Jews were used as scapegoats for the defeat and revolution, he confessed feeling a crushing disappointment and admitted that his hopes had been largely an illusion. Despite the disillusionment he expressed from his postwar perspective, antisemitic experiences from the war itself are notably absent from his memoir. Between 1914–1918, Jacobs’s disillusionment grew in response to the traumatic 32 Samuel Jacobs, Gedanken und Erinnerungen aus dem Weltkriege, LBINY, ME 328. MM41, 3 (digital file). 33 Ibid., 5.

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experiences he made during trench combat rather than his encounters with prejudice. He described the brutality and carnage that he witnessed in considerable detail. By 1916, after losing friends in combat, he confessed that his nerves were on the verge of collapse, and he could no longer conceal his anxiety  : In June [1916] we suddenly came to a new position in the trenches. We were unloaded in Roulers. After a few more days, we were taken again in front of Hill 60, in Ypres, the soil of which has drunk so many streams of German blood. If we had once believed that we were battle-tested soldiers, it was only at Ypres that we learned what war is. It was here that my nerves became shattered, so terrifying were the explosions. We said to one another  : “We’re standing here on a barrel of gunpowder.” I don’t want to go on further here about the war’s events.34

Like other German-Jewish soldiers, he relied on comradeship to help him cope with this violence, and he gained an appreciation for “gallows humor” (Galgen­ humor) to maintain his psychological stability.35 He listed the names of his comrades with great affection, and he took joy in domestic duties that allowed him to make his niche in the trenches as ‘homey’ (heimisch) as possible.36 When he went on leave, his Commanding Officer told him that his comrades were happy for him, and he clearly felt that he had their close friendship and acceptance.37 In addition to providing emotional support, the experience of comradeship clearly helped Jacobs feel both integrated and emotionally fulfilled. His memoir includes a chapter called “Comradeship at the Front” (Kameradschaft im Felde), in which he defined the role as a supporter of his friends, when they experienced stress during combat, which was based on the role model of his beloved commander  : Comradeship at the front  ! Caring for one another, covering for one another. Our losses were low and so we endured everything without grumbling. At this point I’d like to dedicate an honorable mention to our regimental commander, lieutenant-colonel (Oberstleutnant) von Stutternheim. In the front trenches at Dixmunde he was hit by deadly enemy fire. We mourned the loss of this dear leader as one would if a close relative were ripped away from us. He actually cared for us the way a father does for his children and he had a nickname and an affectionate word for each of us.38 34 35 36 37 38

Ibid., 18. Ibid., 11. Ibid., 13. Ibid., 15. Ibid., 17–18.



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The comradely ideal had a familial component. Under the guise of ‘comradeship’, it was acceptable, and even sanctified, for men to express the emotions of love and caring for one another.39 Jacobs wrote that being a good comrade gave him the feeling that he was respected, and he reciprocated the affectionate feelings expressed by men in his unit. While the orthodox Samuel Jacobs shared the masculine ideal of ‘comradeship’ that was described by other men, he also filled his letters with references to God, who played a major role in helping him maintain his emotional well-being. In his letters, he repeatedly asked God to protect and console him  : “G-d is with me and therefore I am not afraid. Our faith in G-d has strengthened us, warmed our hearts, against the heavy pain of the last year.”40 Like many of his Christian comrades, he believed that God would decree whether he lived or died. He also saw God as the means through which he could balance both his religious and national identities  ; he prayed to God to give him strength to preserve both his sense of “Germanness” (Deutschtum) and his “Jewishness” (Judentum).41 Although Jacobs’s faith in God and his comrades lent him psychological strength, by the summer of 1918, he had faced the reality of Germany’s military defeat. While on leave during October 1918, civilians asked him whether the war could be won, and he replied that the outcome was in God’s hands, and they should be proud of their front fighters.42 Writing in the months after the defeat, he was eager to address the popular accusations that the Jews were responsible for the ‘stab-in-theback’, the allegation that Jews, socialists and other ‘social outsiders’ had betrayed the nation. He emphasized that, like any other German, he felt devastated by the defeat. Despite the postwar antisemitism he encountered, he wanted to make it known that he had never experienced antisemitism while in the trenches  : Before I close my notes, I want to reflect on a particular fact in order to clear up certain prejudices for later times  : none of my many superiors ever put me down in any way because of my religion. They extended to me just as much respect and recognition as my comrades who were of another faith. And if today my heart bleeds because of all the events of the postwar period it is because I am a loyal German warrior (Kämpfer), bearing the suffering that I had to carry around with me every day due to the destruction of my nerves, and I am filled with the pain brought on by the decline of our German fatherland.43 39 Crouthamel, An Intimate History of the Front, Ch. 5. 40 Samuel Jacobs, 28, Consistent with Orthodox tradition, he wrote ‘G-tt’. 41 Ibid., 9–10. 42 Ibid., 32–33. 43 Ibid., 36.

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In the memoir that he wrote for his children and grandchildren, Jacobs indicated that he wanted to reveal “for future times” that antisemitism did not affect him during his time in the trenches. Until the postwar period, he had felt that he was an accepted comrade. The traumas of combat and defeat were clearly more destructive than any experiences he had with prejudice. In late November 1918, he described his lingering psychological wounds  : “My nerves were totally destroyed. Wild dreams disturb my rest at night.”44 Jacobs was treated in a military psychiatric hospital shortly after the war. Still, he ended his memoir by reflecting upon the fact that his belief in God was unshaken, and he included a list of his comrades and a promise that he would be true to his “holy duty” to remain devoted to the fatherland. The absence of references to any antisemitism experienced during wartime in Fürst’s and Jacobs’s letters is exceptional. Many other soldiers had to deal with antisemitism encountered at the front. However, Jewish soldiers often described their antisemitic comrades as exceptions, and they took heart from the fact that their ‘good’ Christian comrades came to their defense when ignorant, antisemitic colleagues made comments. The hegemonic masculine ideal of ‘comradeship’ gave the Jewish front soldiers something that they considered as a form of armor against prejudice. Paul Lebrecht, for example, volunteered as a corporal (Gefr­ eiter) and served on the Western and Eastern fronts between 1916 and 1918. Lebrecht kept a diary during his time at the front and made entries in it virtually every day for over two-and-a-half years. Born in Nuremberg in 1882 (he was 34 years of age when he first went to the front in 1916), Paul Lebrecht was older than most of his comrades and came from a middle-class German-Jewish family. He was called up as an infantryman during the summer of 1916 to serve with the 28th Bavarian Infantry Regiment, and he served on both the Western and Eastern fronts. One of Lebrecht’s most important experiences was the feeling of ‘comradeship’ he experienced with other men in the trenches, which he described as having a paternalistic quality. He portrayed himself in his diary as an “optimistic” older comrade, who tried to ease his own fears and those of others with his humor and positive outlook. He wrote that he would calm his buddies and help them cope with anxiety when they were under shellfire  : “I myself was totally cool and didn’t get nervous at all. I even made a few jokes.”45 Many men used macabre humor and fatalism to deal with emotion,46 but Lebrecht enthusias44 Ibid., 36. 45 Paul Lebrecht Kriegstagebuch, 27 August 1916, Bayerisches Armeemuseum, generously made available by Ulrike Heikaus at the the Jüdisches Museum, München. 46 On soldiers’ psychological coping mechanisms with violence, see  : Alexander Watson, Enduring



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tically played the role of the unit’s good-natured comedian. Finding his place as a ‘good comrade’ was a source of great pride to Lebrecht, and he commented that it gave him a sense of belonging and acceptance. In his diary, he included a photograph of himself wearing his steel helmet, uniform and a brilliant smile, which had the caption  : “Directly out of the poster  : buy war bonds.”47 This was a reference to the famous, popular image of the steel-helmeted ordinary solider (Feldgrau), which was used to sell war bonds, and Lebrecht, when humorously comparing his own photograph to the war bond poster, identified with this symbol of patriotism, comradeship and masculinity. Lebrecht considered himself as a popular, well-liked fellow soldier, and he wrote that he simply wanted to “do my duty as a good comrade” at the front, and not be treated as different because he was Jewish.48 At the same time, he also tried to maintain his distinct Jewish cultural identity. Coming from a liberal reform background, he wrote that he tried to remain pious, but he did not strictly observe religious traditions, and his diary does not include many reflections on God or spirituality.49 He did not maintain a kosher diet – pork was one of his favorite foods  – and he sometimes attended Christian church services, especially when he was invited by Christian comrades. He did not find the Christian practices of worship particularly interesting, and he even fell asleep during sermons.50 Lebrecht sometimes complained that the synagogue services that he went to while in Romania were also “boring.”51 He admitted that he sometimes went to synagogue only for the food after the service, and he enjoyed Christmas because they received better food rations, care packages and his Christian comrades were in a good mood.52 Lebrecht rarely encountered antisemitism among men in his unit, and when he did, he noted that it was unusual. In fact, antisemitic comments, according to his diary, were only uttered by one of his comrades, a fellow soldier named Friedl. His first confrontation with Friedl occurred when he complained that Jews did not serve in “high military positions,” and he said that this was probably because Jews could be easily bribed and would probably betray the army. Lebrecht brushed off Friedl’s comments  : “Now I’d had enough. I declared he was ripe for the lunatic asylum and ended the conversation. My comrades are

47 48 49 50 51 52

the Great War  : Combat, Morale and Collapse in the German and British Armies, 1914–1918 (Cambridge  : Cambridge University Press, 2008), Ch. 3. Paul Lebrecht Kriegstagebuch, 6 June 1917, Image 2739. Ibid., 24 September 1916. Ibid., 19 September 1917. Ibid., 16–17 September1917. Ibid., 16–17 September 1917. Ibid., 3 December 1916.

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for the most part on my side.”53 Lebrecht believed that he had begun to win over Friedl with his good humor and reason, and that his other comrades were sympathetic, making Friedl feel as though his prejudicial ideas were isolated. When Friedl suggested they all sing some patriotic songs, Lebrecht reminded him that the German-Jewish poet, Heinrich Heine, had written the text for one of Germany’s most famous traditional songs, the “Loreley.”54 By June 1917, he wrote that he and Friedl were getting along well and cooperated together in their work.55 Though he felt he was winning the battle to gain his comrades’ respect, he had more difficulties with his military superiors. He suspected that he was being passed over for promotions because he was Jewish, and he commented on another Jewish comrade who had the same problem.56 After the war, Lebrecht joined the Association of Jewish War Veterans (Bund jüdischer Frontsoldaten) in Nuremberg. Like millions of other men who had been brutalized by the war, he grew cynical about what he perceived as a dehumanizing military system. At the same time, he was proud of his war service, which he felt symbolized his loyal devotion to the nation and proved that his Jewish identity did not influence the definition of his German identity. However, his experiences at the front, sacrifices and ideals of ‘comradeship’ could not save him from racial hatred.57 Lebrecht died on November 11, 1938, a few days after he was attacked during the Kristallnacht. His wife Hedi fled to Mexico shortly thereafter. Regardless of the Jewish soldiers’ military service between 1914–1918 and their sense of acceptance into the ‘front community,’ the Nazis annihilated Jewish veterans as inherent enemies of the ‘national community.’ While Lebrecht encountered little antisemitism in the trenches, other German-Jewish soldiers wrote about their experiences with prejudice. Louis Liebmann, mentioned at the opening of this essay, encountered widespread antisemitism among comrades at the front. These included accusations that Jews were cowardly malingerers. Writing his memoirs in Great Britain after being released from Buchenwald and escaping from the Nazis in 1938, Liebmann ironically noted that the antisemites at the front who denounced the Jews as lazy cowards were themselves malingerers who avoided their duties and dangerous missions. Emboldened by his realization that “even a Jew can fight back”, Liebmann continued to reinforce his sense of masculinity by countering the comments of anti53 54 55 56 57

Paul Lebrecht Kriegstagebuch, 3 March 1917. Paul Lebrecht Kriegstagebuch, 9 April 1917. Paul Lebrecht Kriegstagebuch, 15 June 1917. Paul Lebrecht Kriegstagebuch, 2 October 1917. For further analysis of interwar memory-building, see  : Grady, German Jewish Soldiers of the First World War in History and Memory, Chapter 4.



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semitic comrades. In fact, he considered the fact that he stood up to antisemites as evidence of his strong nerves and masculine character, and he wrote that Jews who did not stand up for themselves were cowardly  : Now and again one heard belittling comments about Jewish behavior, business and many other things. I found myself in the midst of this and defended my views, supported by some of my Jewish comrades. Other Jewish soldiers stood to the side and said nothing because they lacked the courage to do so.58

While in the hospital, Liebmann encountered soldiers who accused wounded Jewish comrades of malingering, even though they were too injured to fight.59 When he returned to the front, he had to cope with a captain, a Catholic officer from a middle-class background whom he described as “somewhat antisemitic,” who insulted and demoted his Jewish comrades. Liebmann began to suspect that the prejudices of his Christian comrades were merely a cover for their own cowardly actions. Antisemites, he realized, projected their own weak character and fears of malingering on to their Jewish neighbors. Much of this malingering was hidden from view  : At that time, I tended to believe that some charges were not totally without merit, but my means of defense were sufficient to overcome unfounded accusations. I myself was no friend of those who were called shirkers. However, I soon realized that Jews did not belong to the shirkers. Instead, there were countless farmers’ sons who gave butter, eggs, ham and bread to those superiors in a position to keep them from fighting at the front. In general, nothing at all was said about these cases  ; only the unfit Jews were badly spoken of.60

The ‘shirkers,’ according to Liebmann, were not Jews who avoided front service, but the “countless farmers’ sons” who bribed officers to avoid fighting. He contrasted these ‘shirkers’ with Jewish soldiers in the hospital, who had actually been wounded in combat, and who were later unjustly stigmatized and scapegoated. In this memoir, which he wrote for and dedicated to his children on the brink of World War II, Liebmann shifted abruptly from the topic of antisemitism, writing, “This theme must be getting boring, so I will leave it and return to my

58 Louis Liebmann, “Notes on My Life – Dedicated to My Children,” LBINY, B188, ME 1183, 28. 59 Ibid. 60 Ibid., 29.

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time at [camp] Frauenstein.”61 But when he reflected on the end of the war, he bitterly recalled that the “unity” of 1914 had only been “wishful thinking”  : On November 13, 1918, I saw Germany and my loved ones once again. It was no longer the Germany I had left. Certainly, the majority of soldiers had longed for the end of the war, but it was not to be the end of quarrel and strife among the German people, to which we Jews thought we belonged.62

Liebmann primarily blamed the military and the imperial government for lying to the German people, but he was also critical of his non-Jewish comrades at the front, among whom he never felt entirely accepted.63 Other Jewish soldiers, who experienced constant antisemitic attacks, viewed the idea of ‘comradeship’ as a remote possibility. For example, Julius Marx, a German-Jewish soldier from the small town of Freudental in Baden-Württemberg, who had served during all four years of the war and fought at Arras, Verdun, and the Somme, experienced chronic harassment among his fellow infantrymen. Marx came from a middle-class background, and when the war broke out, he volunteered as a non-commissioned officer (Unteroffizier). He kept a diary during the war, which he published in 1939 while in exile in Switzerland (he left Germany in 1935 after losing his automobile company in the wake of the Nuremberg Laws). During the excitement that occurred in August 1914, he remembered that, at first, he did not detect hatred  : “At the beginning of the war, it seemed like every prejudice disappeared. There were only Germans.” But only a few months after the outbreak of the war, he wrote in his diary, “one now hears the old, hateful expressions again.”64 Marx could no longer endure the verbal abuse, and he reported to his commanding officer  : “Captain, I cannot remain at this post. They’re always scolding me behind my back about the ‘cowardly Jews.’”65 His captain was sympathetic and invited Marx to the officers’ quarters, where they treated him to dinner and assured him that not all men in the unit were antisemitic, and that his friends valued his comradeship and dedication. This promise seemed genuine to Marx, as he gradually rose up through the ranks, was promoted to Leutnant and earned an Iron Cross for his bravery and dedi61 Ibid. 62 Ibid., 47. 63 Ibid. 64 Julius Marx, Kriegstagebuch eines Juden (Frankfurt am Main  : ner-tamid-verlag, 1964), 5 October 1914 diary entry, 32. 65 Marx, Kriegstagebuch, 1 December 1914 diary entry, 41.



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cation. But he continued to confront antisemitic stereotypes. In August 1917, he encountered a psychologically traumatized soldier named Lewenherz who broke down under fire and complained that “the war was already lost.” Men who heard of the soldier’s breakdown speculated that Lewenherz must be a “cowardly Jew.” Marx pointed out that Lewenherz was actually not a Jew, but his comrades continued to make anti-Jewish, stereotypical comments. Two other men, embarrassed by the hateful comments made by their comrades, apologized later to Marx, but the insults still stung, and Marx felt it was impossible to prove that he was a loyal, courageous soldier to the antisemites in his unit.66 Non-Jewish Soldiers’ Perceptions of their Jewish Comrades at the Front Feldpostbriefe from Gentile soldiers indicate that German-Jewish soldiers experienced complex feelings of both alienation and acceptance. The Feldpostbriefe of their gentile comrades mirror this complexity, as the non-Jews’ perceptions of their Jewish comrades covered a spectrum that ranged from hatred to genuine respect. Despite escalating antisemitism encouraged by parts of the military high command led by Erich Ludendorff and Paul von Hindenburg, and which culminated in the infamous 1916 Judenzählung, not all gentile soldiers and officers held or openly verbalized racist beliefs. In fact, some Christian soldiers discovered that their Jewish comrades did not fit the stereotypes they were familiar with during their experience at the front. An interesting case study of a gentile who revaluated antisemitic stereotypes is Leutnant Rudolf Veek, a middle-class Christian soldier who volunteered for service at the outbreak of the war. For two years, Veek wrote to his wife, Julie, every day.67 He was emotionally very close to her and told her in graphic detail about the violence that he witnessed at the front. His letters describe in detail how strongly he was traumatized by the war experience. Comradeship was a key theme in his reflections on the impact of war, as he struggled to explain how he could maintain his sense of humanity by establishing close bonds with comrades during the stressful experiences at the front. Rudolf Veek was wounded in September 1914, and he wrote to Julie, describing how he could not forget the moment in which a bullet had struck him in the lung and he had believed he would die.68 He wrote page after page about the deaths of comrades and described their 66 Marx, Kriegstagebuch, 29 August 1917 diary entry, 181. 67 Letters from Rudolf Veek to his wife, in  : MSG 2/2901, Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv, Freiburg (BAMF). 68 Letter from Rudolf Veek to his wife, Julie, 17 October 1914, MSG 2/2901,BAMF.

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last moments in great detail, as well as the different injuries that men in the hospital beds around him had suffered. He included a handwritten, autobiographical pamphlet in one of his letters, “Rudolf Veek, My Life, After my Wounding on September 25, 1914,” and a poem called “My Dead Comrades from Chilly,” about a mass grave of German soldiers, and wrote that his “tears that streamed into my hands” when he reflected on the terrible wounds they had suffered.69 Rudolf Veek’s close encounters with death profoundly changed him. He told his wife that it was not the warrior’s image or his skill at killing that made men real men, but rather the expressions of love exchanged between comrades at the front. He wrote  : “Is it possible for men who are still capable of love to become brutalized  ? I’ve never seen more examples of selfless love than there at the front, where we fight through the most difficult days in blood and desperation.”70 Like many other front soldiers, comradeship provided Veek with a sense of love and intimacy that was necessary for surviving the brutality of modern war. The emphasis Rudolf Veek placed on comradeship as the cornerstone for maintaining his humanity included his feelings of admiration for Jewish comrades. He told his wife that the antisemitic stereotypes that he had been taught before the war did not make sense at the front. In particular, the war experience led him to criticize the stereotype that Jews were selfish, unmanly cowards. Veek told his wife about his Jewish comrades, who took every opportunity to show their courage. In October 1914, he wrote about three friends in the unit who were Jewish and how they constantly volunteered to go back to the front, even when they were on leave. When one of his Jewish comrades, Schumacher, lost a brother at the front, Veek told his wife how impressed he was by Schumacher’s courage. He wrote that, although Schumacher was given the opportunity to go on leave to mourn his dead brother, he chose to stay with his comrades at the front. Schumacher eventually invited Veek to a synagogue to attend a Sabbath worship service, where a Synogogenvorstand made him feel welcome. Veek told his wife that the synagogue service was “beautiful and relaxing.”71 Like Paul Lebrecht’s experience of going to a Christian worship service, Rudolf Veek’s visit to a synagogue made him realize that his Jewish comrades were not so different from him. But the experiences Rudolf Veek had while serving with Jews who attended different places of worship gave him an even deeper insight than Lebrecht had gained into the community of ‘the other,’ which he had not really considered before. He viewed stereotypes about Jews as unmanly 69 Letter from Rudolf Veek to his wife, Julie, the handwritten pamphlets were included in 28 Oct. 1914 letter, MSG 2/2901, BAMF. 70 Ibid. 71 Rudolf Veek letter to his wife, 30 August 1914, Msg2/2901, BAMF.



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shirkers critically, and he wrote to Julie  : “Jews really do give all their courage to fulfill their duty.”72 For the next two years at the front, he continued to rely on his comrades for emotional support until his death on July 2, 1916, when he was killed at the Battle of the Somme. While some Christian front soldiers revaluated the old stereotypes they held about Jews, the prejudices of others remained unchanged at the front. The appearance of antisemitic remarks in the Feldpostbriefe and diaries of German-Christian front soldiers suggests that institutionalized prejudices in Imperial Germany reflected the views of ordinary front soldiers to some degree. Antisemitism aimed at Eastern European Jews was certainly widespread, as men wrote about what they perceived to be ‘uncivilized’ Jewish communities that they encountered on the Eastern front. Many German soldiers considered Eastern European Jews as cultural and racial ‘others.’ For example, when the evangelical Lutheran Leutnant George G. was stationed in on the Eastern front, he wrote extensively to his parents about what he described as “unbelievably dirty little Jewish towns” in Galicia. He told his parents that the local communities should “thank God that the Germans are occupying Russia” and bringing civilization to the region.73 But gentile front soldiers also expressed antisemitic comments towards their Jewish comrades in their own military units. For example, in the letters he wrote from the front to his parents, Leutnant Hermann B., who volunteered in 1916, frequently criticized his Jewish comrades, and the war experience only seemed to reinforce his stereotypes. Hermann B. was an individual who described himself as “bitter and agitated,” who became generally disillusioned with virtually all the relationships he formed at the front, whether they were with non-Jews or Jews. Within a few weeks of arriving in the trenches, he described what he interpreted as the hollow ideal of ‘comradeship’ in the most derisive terms. Drunken fellow officers who visited the brothels behind the lines repulsed him, and he wrote to his parents that he had to conform in the trenches, but he wanted nothing to do with these men  : In the future, I want to completely cut myself off from the society of comrades (Gesell­ schaft der Kameraden), where I’m a machine gun specialist. In fact, it’s really easy for me to start hating other people here in ways that wouldn’t be natural in peacetime […] one has to carry on with everything undertaken by comrades, but just out of duty. There is very little freedom here.74 72 Rudolf Veek letter to his wife, 30 August 1914, Msg2/2901, BAMF. Original  : “Die Juden geben sich alle Mühe ja ihre Pflicht zu tun.” 73 Georg G. letters to his parents, 23 and 29 May 1915, MsG2/3600, BAMF. 74 Hermann B. letter to his parents, 30 May 1916, MsG2/18075, BAMF.

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The trench experience seems to have actually intensified Hermann B.’s feelings of hatred, which often were expressed as antisemitic rants. He wrote to his parents that he did not like working with the Austrian officers who visited his unit, because “every tenth Austrian officer looks Jewish.”75 In a letter written to his father in August 1917, he complained  : “I’m having a real difficult time with a technical officer in the 3rd Machine gun Company. This guy Karl is causing me a lot of problems – he’s certainly a Jew (ein ganz gewisser Jude).”76 Hermann B. wrote that he was convinced that Jews were conspiring to prevent him from getting promotions. He characterized the Jews in his unit as imposters, who put on a show of comradeship but were actually conniving to destroy him. He described this alleged double-game in a letter written to his mother and father  : It’s amazing how these Jews try to flatter us all the time, and we let ourselves be fooled by them. But every word they say is hollow and their only aim is to gain an advantage. I don’t think our Major sees this at all, but I recognize this guy for exactly what he is […] The interesting thing about war is that one has to get to know different kinds of people. Or at least one is forced to, because one has to always be around them.77

Hermann B. resented Jews and considered them to be imposters who were ‘pretending’ to be friendly comrades. He was particularly incensed when another lieutenant who was Jewish obtained a promotion before him. His letters were characterized by chronic expressions of anger. While taking a much anticipated leave in Berlin, Hermann B. avoided his comrades and preferred to explore the streets, museums, opera house and restaurants on his own, and he wrote to his mother  : “I seem to feel nothing but irritation with life.”78 His resentments placed him under considerable stress, and he wrote extensively about his feelings of isolation, loneliness and his inability to make any friends at the front, a situation that he actually preferred.79 Hermann B. told his parents that “all of my anger makes me feel really nervous,” and he admitted the war left him feeling exhausted and numb. However, he feared that he would be ridiculed by the other men if he went to a doctor to complain that his nerves were shattered, as ‘war neurosis’ was stigmatized as a symptom of cowardice and malingering.80

75 76 77 78 79 80

Hermann B. letter to his parents, 3 February 1917, MsG2/18075, BAMF. Hermann B. letter to his parents, 22 August 1917, MsG2/18075, BAMF. Hermann B. letter to his parents, 12 Sept. 1917 letter, MsG2/18075, BAMF. Hermann B. letter to his parents, 29 November 1917, MsG 2/18075, BAMF. Hermann B. letter to his parents, 9 August 1918, MsG 2/18075, BAMF. Hermann B. letter to his parents, 16 July and 8 August 1917, MsG 2/18075, BAMF.



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Conclusion Despite the antisemitic stereotypes that were circulated on the home front and among members of the military elite, Jewish and gentile soldiers in the trenches shared the traumatic experience of combat and the ideals of masculinity that gave Jewish soldiers a sense of Germanness and manliness. From the perspective of the German-Jewish front soldiers, the ideals of comradeship applied to all men who performed their duties of self-sacrifice, heroism and friendship. At the same time, German-Jewish men often wrote that they faced another challenge that tested their sense of dignity and even masculinity. The fight against antisemitism was another component of front-line violence, and, in this case, it was a form of psychological violence, which required resilience and daily struggle. Thus, the written evidence from German-Jewish soldiers indicates that they often felt as though they were engaged in a dual battle, against the external enemies of the nation and the antisemites within their ranks, both of which challenged their sense of manhood and national identity. Combating essentialist notions of ‘comradeship’ and the ‘front community’ that excluded Jews, the writings of German-Jewish front soldiers indicate that they saw masculine ideals as universally accessible. While postwar, right-wing constructs of the front and national community, which culminated in National Socialist memories of the war and visions of the Volksgemeinschaft, suggest that German-Jewish veterans’ visions of comradeship and integration were illusory, the diaries and letters of front soldiers during the actual war experience in 1914– 1918 reveal that these visions were much more complex. These sources show that antisemitism was widespread in the military establishment and political fabric of the home front, as evidenced by the ‘Jew Count’. Indeed, “those old hateful expressions,” as Julius Marx called them, which would later fuel Nazi policy, also poisoned the men’s experience at the front. But during their interactions in the trenches, German-Jewish men also received respect from at least some of their gentile friends for their performance of the masculine ideals of sacrifice and comradeship. This was confirmed by at least some non-Jewish soldiers who, based on their experiences with ‘good comrades,’ revaluated the commonly held stereotypes of Jews as unmanly cowards. Thus, a decisive break in Jewish-Christian relations did not occur in 1916. From the perspectives of many Jewish and non-Jewish front comrades, the shared war experience and the masculine ideal of ‘comradeship’ contradicted the prejudices that labeled Jews as essentially different.

Dieter J. Hecht

Austro-Hungarian Jewish Military Chaplains between East and West Rabbi Bernard Dov Hausner (1874–1938) during World War I*

The first rabbi in Austria, who addressed Jewish soldiers on the eve of their departure to their military units, was the Chief Rabbi of Prague, Ezechiel Landau (1713, Opatów  – 1793, Prague), in 1789. In his speech, he urged the soldiers to keep religious laws, especially the dietary laws and Shabbat insofar as it was possible. Jewish soldiers should eat only milkhik [dairy] food in the army and consume meat only in Jewish houses.1 In his speech, Landau expressed his support for the soldiers and sanctified the compulsory conscription of Jews that Joseph II had decreed only a few months before. For the first time, a law concerning Jews was not limited to a specific crown land in the Habsburg Monarchy but was applied to the whole empire. Consequently, Jewish soldiers served – and moved – in all parts of the monarchy like their Christian comrades. This mobility contrasted starkly with the limited freedom of movement enjoyed by the other subjects of the Kaiser, and especially the Jewish ones.2 At first, Jews served mainly in the supply units, but already during the nineteenth century they could even be promoted to the rank of officers without converting to Christianity. Many Jewish soldiers pursued impressive careers in the Austro-Hungarian Army. According to the military statistics, 59,784 Jewish soldiers served in the army in 1902, i.e., 3.9 percent of the total number of soldiers. This percentage was about the same as the average of Jews in the general population.3 The rising number of Jewish soldiers within the army was a driving force for the establishment of a Jewish military chaplaincy. * This work was supported by the OENB Anniversary Fund [Project 15563]. 1 Gerson Wolf, “Die Militärpflicht der Juden”, Ben Chananja, February 21, 1862, 61–63. 2 Michael Silber, “From Tolerated Aliens to Citizen-Soldiers. Jewish Military Service in the Era of Joseph II,” in Constructing Nationalities in East Central European, eds. Marsha Rozenblit and Pieter Judson (New York  : Berghahn, 2005), 25–30. 3 Erwin A. Schmidl, Habsburgs Jüdische Soldaten 1788–1918 (Wien  : Böhlau Verlag, 2014), 104– 105, 130–131. István Deák, Beyond Nationalism. A social and political history of the Habsburg officer corps, 1848–1918 (Oxford  : Oxford University Press, 1990), 174–178. Cf. Moritz Frühling, Biographisches Handbuch der in der k.u.k. Österreichisch-Ungarischen Armee und Kriegsmarine ak­ tive gedienten Offiziere, Ärzte, Truppen-Rechnungsführer und Sonstigen Militärbeamten Jüdischen Stammes (Wien  : Selbstverlag, 1911).

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Jewish communities throughout the monarchy supported the efforts to appoint military rabbis to the army for the benefit of future Jewish soldiers. In 1874, the Emperor appointed Alexander Kisch (1848, Prague  – 1917, Prague) as the first military rabbi to serve in a reserve unit. At the same time, Kisch was employed as the community rabbi for Brüx/Most in Bohemia. Military rabbis served as regular community rabbis in times of peace and had to supervise Jewish soldiers in the military barracks.4 Between 1874 and 1914, military rabbis were appointed to serve in different parts of the army, except for the navy, because of the lack of Jewish soldiers there. On the eve of World War I, nine rabbis were serving in the common Austro-Hungarian Army  ; additionally, there were twelve rabbis in the Austrian k.k. Landwehr (militia), and eleven rabbis in the Hungarian Honvéd. They were certainly not enough to administer to the needs of the approximately 300,000 Jewish soldiers which the army called to arms during World War I. Therefore, the military administration appointed more military rabbis. According to the military Schematismus (schematism), 76 rabbis served in the common army, nineteen in the k.k. Landwehr and eighteen in the Honvéd in 1918, making a total of 113 rabbis. Several rabbis who were appointed as military rabbis between January and October of 1918 are not included in these statistics.5 In this article, I present an analysis of the work and experience of the Austro-Hungarian military rabbis during their terms of service in World War I. The source material included primarily personal documents, such as letters and diaries, as well as newspaper articles, photographs and military documents. The research questions that were developed place a focus on the religious, social and regional background of the rabbis, the issues of age and the generation gap (between rabbis and soldiers) and touch on the sensitive question of ( Jewish and other) nationalism. In addition, I investigate the possible impact of military chaplains as agents of modernization. The central focus in this paper is the role of Bernhard Hausner, a rabbi and teacher in Lemberg/Lwów (today Lviv), and his service as a military rabbi at the Isonzo front. How a rabbi became a soldier Already in the first half of the nineteenth century, a public debate about rabbis taking positions as military officials had started. The strength of this debate grew 4

Alexander Kisch, Zur Geschichte der israelitischen Militärseelsorge in Deutschland und Österreich (Prag  : Selbstverlag, 1917), 7. 5 Cf. Schematism of the k.k. Army 1914–1918, the k.k. Landwehr 1914–1918, the k.k. Honvéd 1914–1917.



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with the increase in numbers of Jewish soldiers in the Habsburg Army, despite the strict denial of the military authorities and the Emperor. The appointment of military rabbis became a symbol of the eagerly awaited emancipation of Jews. This fact was expressed explicitly at the funeral of the victims of the revolution in March 1848. Vienna’s Rabbi Isaac Noah Mannheimer (1793, Copenhagen – 1865, Vienna) officiated at the funeral for all the fallen revolutionaries regardless of the faith together with Christian priests.6 In Hungary, the revolution allowed a military rabbi to serve temporarily. In July 1849, Ignacz Einhorn (1825, Waag Neustadtl  – 1875, Budapest) escaped from besieged Budapest to the fortress Komárom. The commander of the fortress, Georg Klapka, appointed Einhorn as a “Feldpater”, i.e., a military chaplain who was given the rank of captain like his Christian counterparts. As a captain in the army, Einhorn was pardoned in the general amnesty that was granted to all officers after the fall of the fortress in October 1849. Nevertheless, Rabbi Ignacz Einhorn went into exile, travelling to Leipzig to avoid further prosecution.7 After the suppression of the revolution, the topic of military rabbis was not discussed publicly for a number of years. It surfaced again only in 1856, when the Jewish historian Gerson Wolf published a report about the importance of Jews in the Austrian military.8 One of the first rabbis who issued a demand for military rabbis, which was published in the Jewish newspaper Die Neuzeit, was the district rabbi of Teschen/Cieszyn, Simon Friedmann (1826, Verbó – 1893, Teschen/Cieszyn). In March 1863, he presented the office of a Jewish military chaplain as a “biblical institution” and refuted the reservations of orthodox Jews, who argued that military life was incompatible with the Halakhah ( Jewish religious law). His main arguments were the sanctification of God’s name through active service and the abolition of kashrut (dietary laws) during war times.9 Those two arguments were relevant for all Jewish soldiers and rabbis in 6

Salo Baron, “The Revolution of 1848 and Jewish Scholarship. Part II  : Austria,” in Proceedings of American Academy for Jewish Research XX (1951)  : 1–2. For the important role of Christian military chaplains in the Austrian-Hungarian army since the early modern period compare Roman-Hans Gröger, Claudia Ham and Alfred Samer, Militärseelsorge in Österreich  : Zwischen Himmel und Erde (Graz  : Styria, 2001). 7 Ignacz Einhorn, Die Revolution und die Juden in Ungarn mit einem Rückblick auf die Geschichte der Letzteren (Leipzig  : C. Geibel, 1851), 135. Vgl. Péter Zakar, “Tábori Rabbik 1848–49-Ben”, Múlt és Jövő 10,1 (1998)  : 97. Michael K. Silber, “Einhorn, Ignác,” in YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, 5 August 2010, http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Einhorn_Ignac (accessed December 11, 2018). 8 Gerson Wolf, “Juden in der österreichischen Armee,” in Jahrbuch für Israeliten, II. Folge, (1856– 57/5617)  : 115–124. 9 Simon Friedmann, “Jüdische Feldprediger, eine biblische Institution,” Die Neuzeit, March 27, 1863, 6f. Zu Rabbiner Simon Friedmann vgl. Michael Brocke and Julius Carlebach, eds., Die

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future military conflicts. Rabbis administered in the position of a military rabbi twice during the late nineteenth century. In 1866, the Emperor appointed Josef Szánto (1816, Nagy-Kanizsa – 1873, Vienna), head of the first Jewish school for girls in Vienna, as the first military rabbi during the Austrian-Prussian War  ;10 and in 1878, during the occupation of Bosnia-Hercegovina, Wilhelm (Vilmos) Bacher (1850, Lipto-Szent-Miklós  – 1913, Budapest), a professor at the Rabbinical Seminar in Budapest, was appointed for the time of the military operation.11 It is noteworthy that neither of these two rabbis served as community rabbi. Nevertheless, both had a Semikhah (rabbinic ordination), and Bacher had even worked as the Rabbi of Szeged for a year in 1876. Who possessed the right to teach and train future rabbis was a crucial question for the Jewish religious establishment as well as for the state. The latter tried to regulate and supervise the education of rabbis, which the religious establishment considered an illicit intervention into their internal religious affairs. In general, most rabbis studied at Yeshivot (traditional Talmud academies) where they received their ordination, until the second half of the nineteenth century. Attending a gymnasium or a university was not part of the traditional education of rabbis. Changes in the educational patterns of rabbis started, on the one hand, within Jewish Enlightenment circles and, on the other hand, as a result of state regulations issued at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Both suggested that rabbis should be educated at seminaries that combined traditional learning with secular subjects. Still, there was no coherent policy in the Habsburg Monarchy. In the territories of Cisleithania, i.e., the Austrian part of the monarchy, future rabbis had to attend a gymnasium and obtain a university degree (doctorate) from 1850 onwards  ; in Transleithania, i.e., the Hungarian part of the monarchy, there was no such provision.12 Rabbinical seminars gained importance for the education of future rabbis in the second half of the nineteenth century. Rabbiner der Emanzipationszeit in den deutschen, böhmischen und großpolnischen Ländern 1781– 1871, Bd. 1 (Berlin  : De Gruyter Saur, 2004), 349–350. 10 His brother, Simon Szánto was the editor of the well-known Jewish weekly Die Neuzeit (1861– 1903). Gerson Wolf, Joseph Wertheimer. Ein Lebens- und Zeitbild (Wien  : Herzefeld & Bauer, 1868), 151. Gerson Wolf, Die Geschichte der Wiener Juden 1156–1876 (Wien  : Hölder, 1876), 167  ; Neuzeit, July 27, 1866, 341. 11 Neuzeit, October 18, 1878, 330. Kinga Frojimovics, Géza Komoróczy, Viktória Pusztai and Andrea Strbik, Jewish Budapest  : Monuments, Rites, History (Budapest  : Central European University Press, 1999), 209–211. Cf. http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Bacher_Vilmos (accessed December 11, 2018). 12 Cf. Dieter J. Hecht, “Der König rief, und alle, alle kamen’ Jewish military chaplains on duty in the Austro-Hungarian army during World War I,” Jewish Culture and History (2016)  : 2–3 (accessed May 2, 2017) doi  : 10.1080/1462169X.2016.1217600.



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The most influential of these for the Habsburg Monarchy were the seminars in Breslau/Wrocław (founded in 1854) that served all currents of Judaism  : the Reform-oriented Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums (founded in Berlin in 1872), the orthodox seminar of Esriel Hildesheimer in Berlin (founded in 1873), the Budapest seminar (founded in 1877) and, finally, the Israelitisch-Theologis­ che Lehranstalt in Vienna (founded in 1893). The latter was supported by the main Jewish communities of Cisleithania, namely, Vienna, Prague and Lemberg/ Lwów.13 In the long run, these seminars and the Yeshivot produced more rabbis than the communities could hire, as Mordechai Zalkin had already pointed out for Eastern European regions. Therefore, these graduates gradually formed a rabbinic precariat, which entered the public school system as traditional religious teachers (Melamed), even though the reputation of these teachers was low. From the early twentieth century onward, many young rabbis filled positions as teachers of religion in the state-controlled school system, because it offered them the opportunity of a career as a civil servant. The famous historian Rabbi Majer Bałaban (1877, Lwów – 1942, Ghetto Warsaw) was one of these men.14 From 1903/04 onwards, he taught at the seventh state gymnasium in Lwów and work as a rabbi in the Jewish orphanage. In June 1916, he went on a six-week, fact-finding mission at the request of the high command of the army to examine the Jewish school system in occupied Poland. After his return, he asked to be appointed as a military rabbi for occupied Poland and the supervisor of the Jewish school system and religious affairs. The military did not grant him the position as supervisor, but appointed him as a chaplain and gave him an agenda to focus on schools and religious affairs at the end of December 1916.15 Like Bałaban, several other teachers who had a rabbinical training became military chaplains during World War I. For most of them, it was a unique opportunity to work as full-time rabbis and gain a reputation in the Jewish and general society. However, 13 Gábor Lengyel, Moderne Rabbinerausbildung in Deutschland und Ungarn. Ungarische Hörer in Bildungseinrichtungen des deutschen Judentums 1854–1938 (Münster  : LIT, 2012), 120–121  ; Peter Landesmann, Rabbiner aus Wien. Ihre Ausbildung, ihre religiösen und nationalen Konflikte (Wien  : Böhlau, 1997), 124–125. http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Seminary (accessed December 11, 2018). 14 Mordechai Zalkin, “Me and mine community  : to be a clergy man in 19th century Eastern Europe” (paper presented at the Kurt-and-Ursula-Center of Jewish Studies, Palacký University, Olomouc, Czech Republic, October 14, 2015). For Majer Bałaban cf. Marie Gotzen-Dold, Mojżes Schorr und Meir Bałaban polnisch jüdische Historiker der Zwischenkriegszeit (Göttingen  : Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014), 98–99. 15 ÖStA, KA, KM, Abt. 9, 1916, Kt. 991. Cf. Robert Moses Shapiro, Majer Bałaban in  : http:// www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Ba%C5%82aban_Majer (accessed December 11, 2018).

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the military authorities once and again declined the applications of rabbis and teachers who wanted to serve as military rabbis, either because of their weak health or because they did not want to create new positions.16 One of Bałaban’s successful colleagues was Majer Tauber (1880–1942, Ghetto Warszawa), a graduate from the Israelitisch-Theologische-Lehranstalt in Vienna, who taught at the sixth state gymnasium in Lwów. As a teacher and rabbi, he had already become a military rabbi by December 27, 1914.17 Rabbi Tauber served at the Galician front, but he was at the Isonzo front most of his time, where he met his colleague Bernhard Hausner in 1916. Hausner, six years Tauber’s senior, was also a graduate from the Israelitisch-Theologische-Lehranstalt in Vienna. After finishing his studies, Hausner returned to Lwów in 1898 and became a teacher at the second state gymnasium in Lwów.18 These three cases indicate that the policy of appointing teachers as military rabbis was still pursued during WWI as it had been with the aforementioned Szánto (1866) and Bacher (1878). Those military rabbis made it possible for both the Emperor and the army to maintain religious observances in most of the Jewish communities during times of war and prevent hierarchic arguments and religious interference between different communities. Between trenches and military barracks Despite possible animosities between colleagues about reputation and honor, all rabbis belonged to the same level of the army hierarchy and held the rank of captain. The military provided them with two uniforms  : dress regimentals for representation in black with a small cylinder and a golden braid and field-gray uniforms with a black velvet collar patch for the field. The badges of rank were three golden braids located on the cuffs.19 Unlike the practice undertaken with Christian denominations, the military and, respectively, the Emperor did not appoint a chief rabbi to act as the supreme authority of the military rabbis, i.e., the Christian authorities respected the autonomy of the Jewish religion. Every rabbi received a so-called ‘field chapel’ that contained a Torah scroll, a Tallit (prayer shawl), ten Hebrew prayer books, ten Tefillin (phylacteries) and a black kippah from the Ministry of War. The rabbis were supposed to keep the military registers to adminis16 ÖStA, KA, KM, Abt. 9, 1916, Kt. 988. 17 Ranglisten der K.K. Landwehr und der K.K  : Gendarmerie 1916 (Wien  : k.k. Hof- und Staatsdruckerei, 1916), 184. 18 Asaf Kaniel, “Bernhard Hausner”, in http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Hausner_ Bernard_Dov (accessed December 11, 2018). 19 Schmidl, Habsburgs Jüdische Soldaten, 133–134.



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ter lifecycle events for military persons (i.e., to conduct marriages or funerals of soldiers). Beyond this, the Ministry did not interfere with the exercise of their duties. Every rabbi could freely choose whether he would carry out his duty in his headquarters, a military hospital, or at the front together with Jewish soldiers. The main tasks of the Austrian military rabbis were similar to those of other religious representatives, namely, holding services and funerals. Additionally, a highly popular task was providing soldiers with cigarettes and the so-called Liebesgaben (charitable gifts) from women, which were mainly parcels with clothes and food. Most duties did not require the presence of the rabbis at the army frontline. In fact, the job description of the military rabbis resembled the profile of a Christian chaplain more closely than that of a traditional rabbi. Due to their relative freedom in the administration of their duties, the rabbis could reach out to Jewish soldiers from Orthodoxy to Reform and secular positions. The differences in religious and political orientations represented a challenge for rabbis and soldiers alike and left their marks on both sides. Many orthodox soldiers from Galicia or Hungary encountered a Jewish religious authority that differed significantly from their own background and customs for the first time.20 The Rabbi of Pilsen/Plzen, Samuel Link (1871, Neutra/Nitra – 1943 Baltimore), upon his arrival at the Isonzo front, discovered that the services for Jewish soldiers were led by a Polish cantor in a traditional manner, which he considered noisy and inappropriate. Due to his resentment of this custom, he started educating his soldiers, who came primarily from Galicia, to pray in a modern and quiet way. At the same time, the soldiers mistrusted him because he had different religious practices.21 The military rabbis came from all parts of the monarchy and were responsible for tending to the spiritual concerns of the soldiers. One of the most valuable assets of the rabbis’ transnational background was their multilingualism. According to military documents, most of them spoke German or Hungarian as their mother tongue as well as some Czech or Polish according to their place of origin. All of them had some knowledge of German, at least as a second or third language. They served in all sections at the front  ; many of them were decorated for their valor.22 Due to the absence of a chief rabbi who would act as the supreme coordinator, the rabbis tried to coordinate their work by holding rabbinical conferences. Like the German rabbinical conferences (e.g., described in 20 Hecht, “Der König rief, und alle, alle kamen’ Jewish military chaplains on duty in the Austro-Hungarian army during World War I,” 4–5. 21 Marsha L. Rozenblit, Reconstructing a National Identity  : The Jews of Habsburg Austria During World War I (Oxford – New York  : Oxford University Press, 2001), 100. 22 Hecht, “Der König rief, und alle, alle kamen’ Jewish military chaplains on duty in the Austro-Hungarian army during World War I,” 4.

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Hirson, March 1915),23 the Austro-Hungarian rabbis organized conferences in different places. One of the biggest was held in Trieste in the February of 1917, with eleven military rabbis and two local rabbis participating  ; Bernhard Hausner and Meir Tauber were present at this conference.24 Another tool that rabbis used to promote exchange with colleagues and friends was writing letters and articles for newspapers. Hausner and other rabbis wrote about their war experiences  ; they also published memoires and their war sermons. The Österreichische Wochenschrift, edited by the renowned Josef Samuel Bloch (1850, Dukla – 1923, Vienna), who was himself a rabbi and former Member of the Reichstag (the Austrian parliament), and other Jewish newspapers served as platforms for this literary exchange. Jewish newspapers regularly published reports about the conferment of Medals of Honor upon military rabbis and soldiers.25 For example, in April 1917, the Österreichische Wochenschrift announced the decoration of Hausner with the Golden Cross of the Commander of Merit.26 Such articles were also published in Hungarian Jewish journals like Múlt es Jövő, Egyenlöség and Magyar Izrael.27 These reports served as important tools to increase public awareness about military rabbis. In addition, the private records of Jewish soldiers and officers include evidence of the significance of their relationships with the military rabbis and their contacts beyond national borders.28 Published and unpublished diaries of those soldiers and rabbis played a crucial role in preserving and transmitting war experiences. The most remarkable one was the diary of the Russian writer and ethnographer Shloyme Zanvil Rappoport (1863 – November 8, 1920), better-known by his pseudonym S. An-ski, who wrote extensively about Bernard Hausner.29 His diary gives insights into Hausner’s activities 23 Sabine Hank, Hermann Simon and Uwe Hank, Feldrabbiner in den deutschen Streitkräften des Ersten Weltkriegs (Berlin  : Hentrich&Hentrich, 2013), 10. 24 Archive of the Jewish Museum Vienna, no. 1456. 25 Manfred Altmann, “k.u.k. Feldrabbiner Adolf Altmann an der Kriegsfront (1915–1918) in Begegnungen mit Feldmarschall Conrad von Hötzendorf und anderen Armeekommandanten,” in Ein ewiges Dennoch  : 125 Jahre Juden in Salzburg, ed. Marko Feingold (Wien  : Böhlau, 1993), 488–572. “Tagebuchnotizen des Feldrabbiners Samuel Guttmann”, Jüdisches Kriegsgedenkblatt, 1914–1917, 78–80. Jüdische Zeitung, December 31, 1915, 3. Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums, June 9, 1916, 269. 26 Österreichische Wochenschrift, April 27, 1917, 256. 27 Kinga Frojimovics, “The First World War In The Hungarian Israel (Magyar Izrael), The Monthly Journal Of The National Rabbinical Association, 1914–1918,” European Judaism 48,1 (Spring 2015)  : 112–113. Cf. Múlt es Jövő, January 1915, 39  ; Egyenlöség, May 7, 1916, 13. 28 Jay Winter, “Jüdische Erinnerung und Erster Weltkrieg – Zwischen Geschichte und Gedächtnis,” in Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 13 (2014)  : 119–120. 29 Polly Zavadivker, “Introduction,” in 1915 Diary of S. An-ski. A Russian Jewish Writer at the East­ ern Front, trans. Polly Zavadivker (Bloomington  : Indiana University Press, 2016), 18–19.



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as a teacher and a rabbi under the Russian occupation that prepared the ground for his later engagement as a military rabbi. From the Hilfskomitee in Lwów to the Isonzo battlefields Bernard Hausner was ordained by the rabbinical seminary of Vienna and received a doctorate in philosophy from the German University in Prague. When he returned to Galicia in 1898, he became a teacher at the second state gymnasium in Lemberg/Lwów. He also participated in Zionist activities.30 When the war began, most of the members of the synagogue board were on vacation. With the approach of the Russian army many of the leaders and rabbis, including the rabbi of the “progressive” community in the city, Rabbi Dr. Samuel Guttmann (1864–1935), fled to Vienna. The Jewish community in Vienna nominated Guttmann as a military rabbi (Subsidiarseelsorger) in October 1914. In this difficult situation, the president of the congregation in Lwów, Jacob Diamand, entrusted the position of the community rabbi to the teacher and rabbi, Bernard Hausner. In his first sermon on August 18, 1914, Hausner called upon Jews to remove the label of cowardice given them by their enemies. He tried to evoke the fighting spirit of Bar Kokhbha and the Maccabees, calling upon the community to fight for the monarchy and show their loyalty.31 His fighting spirit flashed again when he and other leaders of the Jewish community tried to organize a Jewish military unit with the support of the army. Their efforts came to naught with the invasion of the Russians.32 In 1917, Hausner wrote in an article in the Österreichische Wochenschrift about the challenges he had faced after the outbreak of war. He mentioned that an aid committee was founded at the beginning of August 1914, but most of its leading members soon fled to the West, as the Russians approached. Nevertheless, the committee continued its work after the Russian invasion, which took place on September 3, 1914.33 Hausner acted as the representative of the Jews in the city 30 Asaf Kaniel, “Bernhard Hausner,” in  : http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Hausner_ Bernard_Dov (accessed December 11, 2018). ÖStA, KA, KM, Abt. 9, 1918, Kt. 1381, letter of Bernard Hausner, August 24, 1918. 31 Julian J. Bussgang, “The Progressive Synagogue in Lwów”, in Polin 11 (1998)  : 145. ÖStA, KA, KM, Abt 9, 1914, Kt. 471. Despite this appointment Samuel Guttmann never appeared as military rabbi in the military schematism between 1914–1918. 32 https://archive.org/stream/jdischesarchiv00komiuoft/jdischesarchiv00komiuoft_djvu.txt (accessed December 11, 2018). 33 Österreichische Wochenschrift, February 2, 1917, 71–73. https://archive.org/stream/jdischesarchiv00komiuoft/jdischesarchiv00komiuoft_djvu.txt (accessed December 11, 2018).

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before the occupation authorities, and especially when the Russians took several Jewish hostages. One of these was Jakob Diamand, the president of the community, who was captured to enforce their demands. Hausner also served as the first secretary of the aid committee, which helped the city’s Jews as well as refugees. In this article, Hausner did not write about the next four months. However, in a report for the Jüdische Kriegsarchiv34 he described how he spoke up in front of the Russian authorities on several occasions to protest against antisemitic accusations and to protect the Jewish community. Additionally, he reported about the pogrom in Lwów on September 27, 1915.35 Hausner started his report in the Österreichische Wochenschrift only after the arrival of the well-known author Shloyme Zanvil Rappoport, alias S. An-ski, in Lemberg/Lwów in the January of 1915, who reorganized the social welfare work. The aid committee had a tremendous list of tasks to fulfill. Under the Russian occupation, Jews fell victim to abuses and humiliations, including mass arrests, deportation, forced labor, public beatings, murder, robbery, the destruction of homes and synagogues and the deprivation of their civic rights. A forceful description of the sufferings of the Jews is transmitted in Simon Dubnow’s diary as well as in his novel “History of a Jewish soldier”. Dubnow (1860, Mstsislaw – 1941, Riga), a Russian historian and political activist, met An-ski on several occasions during World War I.36 As a civilian, An-ski could not enter the war zone. He was allowed to enter Galicia and the Bukovina only in early January 1915 as member of the Red Cross. An-ski arrived as member of the EKOPO (Relief Committee of Russian Jewry), which distributed funds, food, clothing and medicine, in Lwów on January 27, 1915. Lwów was the capital of East-Galicia with nearly 75,000 Jews, which constituted a quarter of the population. An-ski started his work by meeting leading figures of the Jewish community, like Hausner. He tried to set up a welfare program for the Jews living in the city. According to An-ski, the local 34 A committee of Jews established a Jewish Archive in Vienna in 1915. The aim of the archive was to document the brutal oppression of the Jews during the war. Cf. Eleonore Lappin, “Zwischen den Fronten  : Das Wiener Jüdische Archiv. Mitteilungen des Komitees ‘Jüdisches Kriegsarchiv’ 1915–1918,” in Deutsch-jüdische Presse und jüdische Geschichte, eds. Eleonore Lappin and Michael Nagel, Vol. 1 (Bremen  : edition lumière, 2008), 229–246. 35 Asaf Kaniel, “Bernhard Hausner,” in http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Hausner_ Bernard_Dov (accessed December 11, 2018). ÖStA, KA, KM, Abt. 9, 1918, Kt. 1381. 36 The second volume of Simon Dubnow’s diary was published in 1935. His novel “History of a Jewish soldier” was published in the newspaper Evrejskaja Nedelja in 1917 and as a book in 1918. Cf. Simon Dubnow, Buch des Lebens. Erinnerungen und Gedanken. Materialien zur Geschichte meiner Zeit, eds. Simon-Dubnow-Institute and Verena Dohrn, Vol. 2 (Göttingen  : Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005), 154–239. Simon Dubnow, Geschichte eines jüdischen Soldaten. Bekenntnis eines von vielen, eds. Vera Bischitzky and Stefan Schreiner (Göttingen  : Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2012).



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relief committee was paralyzed by internal conflicts. Additionally, the Russian occupation forces sent conflicting messages to the Jewish community. The Russian Governor-General of Galicia Georgii Bobrinskii allowed the distribution of philanthropic funds to support the Jewish population  ; the army chief Nikolai Ianushkevic, on the other hand, prohibited the collection of charitable funds for Jews. Under the auspices of Bobrinskii, a relief committee (Va’adat ha-Ezrach) could be established. Hausner was ready to distribute the Russian funds, but Diamand regarded the cooperation with the Russians – even with Russian Jews – as treason. An-ski tried to mediate between the two and managed to establish a relief committee in early March, with Diamand as president, Hausner as secretary and twenty other members.37 In his diary, An-ski described his work and meetings with Hausner and other members of the Jewish community between January 28 and March 5, 1915, in detail. This was An-ski’s first impression of Hausner  : January 28 […] Diamand arrived soon afterward, and was followed by a rabbi, Dr. Hausner, a young man, thirty-two or thirty-three years old, with a very wise, intelligent face. He spoke about the meetings he had held with Count Bobrinskii, both on his own and together with D.F. Fainberg. He recounted his conversation with the count – and his responses were so smart, tactful and quick-witted that I was simply struck. I won’t transcribe the conversation because Fainberg has it written down verbatim. […]38

In February, Hausner went to see Bobrinskii again to negotiate for ways to alleviate the hardships of Jewish life in Russian-occupied Galicia. All railways and stations were closed to Jews. This interrupted all commercial relations between the Jews  ; it caused a terrible inflation and virtually a famine. Hausner also talked to Mayor [Tadeuszk] Rutowski.39 One of the biggest problems in Galicia was the situation of women, and especially the rape of women ( Jewish and non-Jewish ones) by the Cossacks. For example, Hausner told An-ski that 42 girls were raped by Cossacks in Cuczacz on January 28, 1915.40 An-ski wrote in his diary about the problems within the committee a month later  : 37 Zavadivker, “Introduction”, 12–15, 18–19. 38 1915 Diary of S. An-ski. A Russian Jewish Writer at the Eastern Front (Bloomington  : Indiana University Press, 2016), 72. 39 1915 Diary of S. An-ski, 112–113. 40 1915 Diary of S. An-ski, 31. A detailed description about the pogroms of the Cossacks and raped women gave Simon Dubnow in his novel. Cf. Dubnow, Geschichte eines jüdischen Soldaten, 119–121.

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February 27 […] But there are problems in the committee. Dr. Diamand, a fervent Austrian patriot who is generally unhappy with the close ties to Jews from enemy Russia, opposed that Hausner had gone to Bobrinskii and requested his permission to organize a committee. Diamand called Hausner a traitor whose actions showed ingratitude to the Austrian government. Now that the committee is organized, he wants it to function independently of the Jewish gemina [community], so as not to compromise the gemina, and he refuses to serve as the committee’s chairman. Diamand is a very matter-of-fact, honest man, but he’s an assimilationist who looks to the Poles and won’t make a move without their approval. He is content to receive money from Russia, but only if it is unofficially distributed through the gemina. Hausner is a nationalist, practically a Zionist – a bold, very intelligent, and selfless man, but he’s incredibly ambitious, is waging a struggle with Diamand, and wants the committee to function in an official manner. Apparently, he wants to be the committee’s chairman. But Diamand’s position as the head of the Jewish gemina calls for him to be the chairman of such a committee. And the petty squabbles continue.41

In this entry, An-ski gave a brilliant description of Hausner’s personality. Hausner himself saw the whole story about the foundation of the committee slightly differently. He wrote in a newspaper article  : In a conference, which took place at my house, the following persons participated  : the Imperial Council Jakob Stroh, the president of the Jewish community Dr. Jakob Diamand, David Feinberg, Dr. Eusejew and myself  ; we finalized the guiding lines for an aid campaign for Jews in Galicia in written form. […] Until the constitution of the committee they instructed me to lead the aid campaign. After the constitution of the official committee on 15 April 1915, I handed over all documents, financial statements and 14,250 Rouble as amount of balance to the committee. I kept only the written evidence for my statements.42

Hausner had no problem taking the Russian money and distributing it. He wanted the aid committee to gain control over the money  ; i.e., he himself wanted to be in charge, and not the Jewish community. An-ski did not want to interfere in the quarrel between Hausner and Diamand, as he wrote a few days later  :

41 1915 Diary of S. An-ski, 114. 42 Österreichische Wochenschrift, February 2, 1917, 71–73.



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March 2 I went to see Hausner. He implored me to go to Diamand and insist that he agree to join the Relief Committee and assume a role as its chairman. I was not eager to get involved in this affair, but I went to see him anyhow. My arrival caused a commotion, as it had when I visited Diamand the first time, until Diamand saw it was me and not an officer or a policeman. Diamand spoke of Hausner with great frustration, kept pointing out that a Relief Committee wasn’t necessary  ; that the gemina, which is functioning as it had been earlier, can provide the necessary aid  ; that for an Austrian subject to participate in a committee organized by Russian Jews, and with the approval of the Russian governor general, is an act of ingratitude toward this government. He added that Hausner is carrying on intrigues against him. I pointed out to him that the Russians – the Petrograd and Kiev Relief Committees – cannot send money otherwise, given what is legally required of those committees. They must have accountability that they can depend upon at all times, and the committee allowed by Bobrinskii already exists. And there is nothing illegal about this relation to the Austrian government, since this is a purely charitable institution. We argued at length, until he agreed, very reluctantly, to become the chairman of the committee.43

According to An-ski, the quarrels between Hausner and Diamand did not stop at that point, but grew even more complicated. Disagreements between (military) rabbis and Jewish communities on authority and religious customs, however, were common. Therefore, Hausner drew a completely different picture in his article in the Österreichische Wochenschrift from February 1917. First, he did not mention An-ski by name, because  – according to him  – An-ski did not want to be identified. Instead, he called him Dr. Eusejew from Petrograd. Other members of the EKOPO like David Feinberg or local donators are mentioned with their full names. A central part of his article, which resembled a statement of accounts, was a cash report about his activities in the aid committee between January 24 and April 15, 1915. Hausner stated that Jakob Diamand got 14,500 ruble from David Feinberg, the founder of EKOPO, at the beginning. Despite all difficulties, Hausner managed to fundraise 165,065.50 Kr. He spent everything except for 35,625 Kr. for the support of soup kitchens, refugees from the countryside, Mazzoth for Jewish soldiers and aid work in the smaller cities throughout Galicia. At the end of his article, he even thanked the Russian sponsors for the help they provided the Galician Jews.44 43 1915 Diary of S. An-ski, 115–116. 44 The aid committee in Lwów supported several Jewish communities in Galicia  : Belz, Brzezany, Buczacz, Cholojow, Chodorow, Komarno, Kozlow, Krystynopol, Magierow, Monasterzyska, Podhajce, Pomorzany, Premylany, Bursztyn, Rabziecho, Rohatyn, Sokal, Stojanow, Stryi, Tarta-

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Hausner handled the situation during the Russian occupation by working closely with the orthodox Rabbi Leib Braude. After the Austrians re-occupied Lwów on June 22, 1915, Hausner handed over the task as a rabbi to Guttmann, who returned to Lwów.45 The fate of his opponent Diamand was dramatic. The Russians took him as a hostage with their last evacuation train on June 22, 1915, and he remained in Russian captivity for almost two years.46 It is still unclear what Hausner did until he became a Jewish military chaplain in March 1916. According to an appeal issued in the Neue Freie Presse in September 1915, Hausner continued working for the Jewish aid committee.47 The orthodox Jewish newspaper Jüdische Korrespondenz stated that the head of the committee was Jakob Stroh in its article about the appeal of the aid committee. Hausner was one of Stroh’s deputies. The appeal called on Jews to send more money to the committee.48 Hausner probably worked again as a teacher as well. In March 1916, the Austrian Jewish newspaper, the Österreichische Wochenschrift, announced the appointment of Bernhard Hausner as a military rabbi in Lwów and emphasized his engagement as the general secretary of the aid committee.49 In September 1916, Hausner was transferred to the military headquarters in Ljubljana.50 After the high holidays in October 1916, Hausner published his acknowledgements in the Österreichische Wochenschrift, where he thanked people for the support extended to him and his soldiers. He emphasized the fact that 600 prayer books had been received from the Alliance Israelite Vienna and some festive prayer books from Malvine Grunwald, the wife of the Viennese Rabbi Max Grunwald (1871, Zabrze – 1953, Jerusalem). He also mentioned money he had received, which he had invested in cigarettes for the soldiers.51 Other Jewish military rabbis like Meir Tauber, who had received 330 war prayer books by Max Grunwald and the war Haggadah from Brno, wrote similar statements that

45

46 47 48 49 50 51

kow, Ulasztowce, Trembowla, Warez, Wielkie-Oczi, Zaloce and Zoliew. Österreichische Wochen­ schrift, February 2, 1917, 71–73. Bussgang, “The Progressive Synagogue in Lwów”, 145–146. Guttman’s predecessor as chief rabbi of the progressive synagogue, Rabbi Lewi Freund (1877–1941), severed as a military chaplain in 1918. For the faith of Lwów during World War I. cf. Christopher Mick, Lemberg, Lwów and Lviv 1914–1947  : Violence and Ethnicity in a Contested City (West Lafayette  : Prude University Press, 2016). Jüdische Korrespondenz, February 17, 1916, 4.; January 11, 1917, 2–3.; Neues Wiener Journal, January 19, 1917, 7. Neue Freie Presse, September 21, 1915, 18–19. Jüdische Korrespondenz, September 23, 1915, 2. Österreichische Wochenschrift, March 10, 1916, 175. Österreichische Wochenschrift, September 1, 1916, 575. Österreichische Wochenschrift, October 27, 1916, 707.



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appeared in newspapers.52 In May 1917, Hausner sent a telegram to the Jewish community of Prague to acknowledge the receipt of 100 prayer books from the printing house of Jakob Brandeis.53 Hausner published letters about his war experiences as a military rabbi in November 1916 and July 1917. He probably wrote several more letters to friends and family. His first letter on the eve of Yom Kippur is addressed to an anonymous friend, but the text indicates that it is written for a Jewish audience. He described the eight services that occurred in his district over Rosh ha-Shana. He himself attended alternating four services. He emphasized the support of the Christian commanders who helped organize the services and that they condemned any kind of antisemitism. For Hausner, every Jewish soldier was an “epigone of the Maccabees.”54 For many of the traditional soldiers from Galicia, kosher food was essential. The rabbis explained to them that this was a Holy War and, therefore, they were not bound to the dietary laws. Additionally, the rabbis portrayed their participation in the war against Russia as a fulfillment of a holy duty.55 Since Galicia was heavily affected by the war against Russia, and many Jewish soldiers fought on both sides (i.e., Jewish soldiers fought against each other), this raised questions about their sense of belonging and their loyalties.56 Some rabbis compared Russia to Amalek, the eternal enemy of the Israelites, which was defeated with the help of God.57 The inner-Jewish propaganda strategy established two main goals for Austrian Jewish soldiers  : to protect their families and liberate the suppressed Russian Jewry. Military rabbis significantly impacted this debate, because they could act beyond national borders. As we know from the records of military rabbis like Meir Tauber and Hausner, many soldiers from Galicia served at the Isonzo front.

52 53 54 55 56

Österreichische Wochenschrift, April 16, 1915, 290. Archive Jewish Museum Prague, military rabbis, folder 128442, Bernard Hausner. Österreichische Wochenschrift, November 3, 1916, 718. Österreichische Wochenschrift, April 16, 1915, 289–290. Marsha L. Rozenblit, “A Holy War and Revenge for Kishinev  : Austrian Rabbis Justify the First World War,” in European Judaism 48, 1 (Spring 2015)  : 74–78.; Petra Ernst, “Der Große Krieg in deutschsprachig-jüdischer Literatur und Publizistik in Österreich,” in Krieg, Erinnerung und Geschichtswissenschaft, eds. Siegfried Mattl et al. (Wien  : Böhlau Verlag, 2009), 61–65  ; Sarah Panter, Jüdische Erfahrungen und Loyalitätskonflikte im Ersten Weltkrieg (Göttingen  : Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014), 205–212. 57 Eleonore Lappin-Eppel, “Gedanken zum Judentum, Krieg und Frieden in der Wiener jüdischen Presse während des Ersten Weltkriegs am Beispiel von ‘Die Wahrheit’, ‘Jüdische Zeitung’ und ‘jüdische Korrespondenz’”, Zeitgeschichte 41/4 (2014)  : 204.

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In a letter written in November, Hausner mentioned that he received Liebes­ gaben, and that he sent photographs from the holidays, i.e., of the religious services. Such photographs were enormously influential during World War I. Photographs of rabbis were converted into postcards that showed the military rabbis in their uniforms or with a group of soldiers. They were sent to friends or distributed among soldiers. Photographs of rabbis praying with soldiers at field services or in synagogues strengthened the sense of religious identity felt during war times, not only by the soldiers themselves, but also by their families at home.58 At the same time, the photographs of rabbis with their military decorations transmitted a patriotic message to the general public. In November 1916, the news paper Das Interessante Blatt published a photograph of Bernard Hausner during a service with soldiers in a reserve unit at the Isonzo front.59 In another photograph of Hausner, he is posing in a chair on the top of several stairs in uniform, signalizing not only that he is an officer in the rank of a captain, but also symbolizing his authority. In his second letter, Hausner reported on the battles at the Isonzo front and his encounter with soldiers of all denominations. Hausner not only described his duties  ; he also emphasized his efforts to be close to the fighting soldiers. He wrote about how he heard and saw the shrapnel flying, and how he encountered death on a daily basis  : I am right next to the street. Everyone who goes to the front or comes back passes me by. One is confronted with an extraordinary picture, hard to describe. Here they come, the new troops, who furiously march against the Walhasz [i.e. Italians]. Their front line is already visible on the next hill, marked by a blaze and lines of shrapnel. I recognize many of the passing soldiers as my former pupils, acquaintances and friends […] It gets dark  ; now you see another picture. They are coming back, those who had carried out their duty heroically – by foot or in an ambulance, lightly or heavily wounded  ; and in the rear, fully covered, those, who cannot lament anymore. Who can possibly exhaust the shudder of war  ? I have seen many pictures that epitomize war, but reality is thousand-fold worse.60

Additionally, Hausner praised the Jewish soldiers again as heroes who were fighting the enemy fearlessly. He even mentioned five young Jewish officers by name to remember them as war heroes. He also mentioned a thanksgiving ser58 Cf. Bernhard Purin, Die Welt der jüdischen Postkarten (Wien  : Brandstätter, 2001). 59 Interessante Blatt, November 16, 1916, 11. 60 The five Jewish officers were Heinrich Pollak, Adolf Akselrad, Viktor Schulhof, Josef Schöke and Elias Schuck. Österreichische Wochenschrift, July 13, 1917, 442–443.



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Fig. 1: Bernhard Hausner wearing the uniform of a military rabbi of the Austrian-Hungarian army during World War I. Cited after Polly Zavadivker, 1915 Diary of S. An-ski. A Russian Jewish Writer at the Eastern Front, trans. Polly Zavadivker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016).

vice held after the tenth battle of Isonzo, where the catholic priest held the service, and Hausner spoke a prayer and gave a sermon. He praised the friendly atmosphere between the chaplains of different denominations and emphasized that they treated each other with the utmost respect. Despite his ambitious work at the front and the meetings held with other military rabbis, the military documents reveal that Hausner had serious health issues. He was affected by rheumatism. Therefore, he went to spas like Baden several times. To his military commando, i.e., the military commando Lwów that was stationed in Mährisch Ostrau/Ostrava due to the moving front line, it was not clear whether Hausner could continue to serve at the front. Nevertheless, he had to replace his colleague Apard Hirschberger in December 1917 at the Izonso front, because Hirschberger was even more ill and could not continue his service.61 In August 1918, the director of Hausner’s former gymnasium sent a request to dismiss Hausner from his duties as a military rabbi, because Osias Frost, Hausner’s successor at the school, had been conscripted, and the gymnasium had no proper replacement.62 Unimpressed by this request, Hausner and two other military rabbis, namely Rubin Färber (1869, Oświęcim  – 1955, Tel 61 ÖStA, KA, KM, Abt. 9, 1917, Kt. 1184. ÖStA, KA, KM, Abt. 9, 1918, Kt. 1381. 62 Asaf Kaniel, “Bernhard Hausner”, in  : http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Hausner_ Bernard_Dov (accessed December 11, 2018)  ; ÖStA, KA, KM, Abt. 9, 1918, Kt. 1381.

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Aviv) and Chaim Diller (?–1932, Jasło), were transferred to the eastern front because they knew Polish by October 1918. Hausner was transferred to Radom  ; Färber, to Kielce  ; and Diller became the head of the military chaplaincy in Lwów.63 After the end of the war, on November 30, 1918, the Austrian military administration finally shelved the request of dismissal, because Hausner had already become a Polish citizen.64 Disarmament and beyond Many military rabbis went back to their communities after the war ended. Due to the dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy and the return of military rabbis to the successor states, it is extremely difficult to track these rabbis after the war. Moreover, many communities and their archives were destroyed during the Shoah. There are, however, exceptions, as in the case of Bernhard Hausner. At the end of World War I, Hausner was an ardent Zionist and Polish patriot. He helped to reorganize the religious Zionist Mizraḥi movement and establish Jewish schools. In 1921, he was elected as the first president of Mizrahi in eastern Galicia and chairman of the Jewish National Fund in Galicia. From 1922 to 1927, Hausner served as a deputy in the Polish Sejm (parliament), where he dealt with both Jewish and general economic issues. As an executive member of Koło (the Jewish parliamentary faction), he tried to bridge the gaps between the Zionists in former Congress Poland, who radically opposed the authorities, and Galician Zionists, who promoted a more compromising approach. In 1927, Hausner was appointed as the economic adviser of the Polish government in Palestine. Therefore, he resigned from all his positions in Mizraḥi, declaring that the movement needed to evolve into a nonpolitical, ideological organization within the framework of the Zionist movement to reduce the polarization between secular and Orthodox Zionists. He earned a Polish state medal for his effectiveness in this position, and he was nominated as the Polish consul in Tel Aviv in 1932. In 1935, however, he resigned from his Polish government positions and remained in Palestine until his death in 1938.65 63 ÖStA, KA, KM, Abt. 9, 1918, Kt. 1387. 64 Asaf Kaniel, “Bernhard Hausner,” in  : http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Hausner_ Bernard_Dov (accessed December 11, 2018)  ; ÖStA, KA, KM, Abt. 9, 1918, Kt. 1381. 65 Asaf Kaniel, “Bernhard Hausner,” in  : http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Hausner_ Bernard_Dov (accessed December 11, 2018). Another example are the records on Josef Mises (1882, Przemysl – 1942, Przemysl), who became an Austrian military rabbi in 1916. In 1920, he was appointed as Chief Military Rabbi in the newly founded Republic of Poland. Natalie



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A year before his death, Hausner made an interesting claim in Irene Harand’s newspaper Gerechtigkeit about a Jewish military unit in Lwów at the beginning of World War I. According to Hausner, this Jewish Legion was supposed to fight under Józef Piłsudski. Prominent Jews, including the president of Lwów’s Jewish community Jakob Diamand, Prof. Mandel, Dr. Silberstern and Dr. Hausner, intended to establish this unit. Hausner’s task was to negotiate with the Austrian military leadership. The Austrian army was hesitant to accept the proposition  ; when they finally accepted it, the Russian occupation made it obsolete. The Jewish soldiers fled to the West and entered the Austrian army.66 As in the case of Hausner, World War I had an important impact on many rabbis in the interwar period. Most of the rabbis wanted to serve in the army for patriotic reasons. The war offered them a unique opportunity to encounter Jews from all Jewish denominations throughout the Habsburg Monarchy and reach out to the soldiers on religious and social grounds. For Hausner, the war experience built the foundation of his future career as a rabbi and a politician. Other military rabbis, like the aforementioned Majer Bałaban, followed a similar path. This pattern was not unique to the Habsburg Monarchy and its successor states. In other countries like Germany, Rabbi Leo Baerwald (1883–1970) started his career in the army, and Elkan Voorsanger (1889–1963) enlisted in the US army in May 1917 and started his impressive work in the French trenches.67 Most of the military rabbis returned to civil life and served as community rabbis after the end of World War I.

Aleksiun, “As Citizens and Soldiers  : Military Rabbis in the Second Polish Republic,” Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 13 (2014)  : 226–228. 66 Gerechtigkeit, April 22, 1937, 4. 67 Cf. Sabine Hank, Hermann Simon and Uwe Hank, Feldrabbiner in den deutschen Streitkräften des Ersten Weltkriegs (Berlin  : Hentrich&Hentrich, 2013), 34–39. Albert Slomovitz, The Fighting Rabbis  : Jewish Military Chaplains and American History (New York  : New York University Press, 1999), 52–53.

Gábor Schweitzer

Hungarian Neolog (Progressive) Rabbis During the “Great War” (1914–1918)

Introduction The outbreak of war in the summer of 1914 offered an opportunity for the Hungarian Jewry to express their unwavering loyalty to the old Emperor Franz Joseph and their affection for the homeland. Loyalty and patriotism were fully shared values among the different Jewish communities, which had sought different Judaic paths decades earlier, irrespective of whether those communities identified themselves as neolog (progressive), orthodox, or the status quo. “We full-heartedly connected with our nation. We are flesh of its flesh, so united that speaking of it separately now would be insulting and offensive.” This statement appeared in an editorial of Egyenlőség (Equality), the leading political weekly of Progressive Jewry at the time of the outbreak of war1. The enthusiasm for war and war rhetoric tempted the organs and representatives of the Progressive Jewry. Quite possibly, very few of these might have guessed at the time that the armed conflict would escalate into a prolonged world war, taking huge tolls in terms of human lives worldwide. In this paper, I would like to demonstrate how Hungarian Progressive rabbis reflected on WWI individually and collectively. Many of these rabbis served as military chaplains in the battlefields between 1914 and 1918, while the others pondered upon war and peace in the hinterland. My intention is to highlight such sources as sermons and other rabbinical articles, reflections and essays which dealt with the delicate issues of war and peace. In 1907, rabbis established an association in Hungary, which was called the National Rabbinical Association (Országos Rabbiegyesület). Major endeavors of the National Rabbinical Association included  : 1) fostering religious life  ; 2) upgrading Jewish religious, educational and philanthropic institutions  ; 3) asserting the intellectual and moral interests of the member rabbis  ; and 4) strengthening the authority of the rabbis within the congregation. Rabbis who joined the Association came typically from progressive/neolog congregations, and rabbis who maintained the status quo formed a minority. 1

Egyenlőség, August 2, 1914, 1.

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The initiators and founders of the Association hoped for a while that Orthodox rabbis would also join their ranks due to the objectives of the Association, which addressed the interests of the entire Jewry. This allowing the rabbis to at least bridge the structural divisions that had formed over the last three decades of the 19th century. However, it soon became apparent that Orthodox rabbis would not be engaged in the Association. The Association had an outstanding periodical, called Magyar Izrael (Hungarian Israel), which also raised different rabbinical questions in relation to wartime. The dilemmas of war and peace The firm conviction that WWI was legitimate and justified was echoed in the public statements made by many, including Progressive rabbis. There was a need, however, to create a harmony between taking a stance in support of the war, and the commitment to peace, and this need played a key role in traditional Jewish thought. This endeavor was voiced in an editorial of Magyar Izrael published in the fall of 1914. Although the author of the article expressed the idealistic concepts that were communicated through the prophets’ pro-peace arguments, he still argued in favor of the need to make war sacrifices in the current situation. This commitment was strengthened by his belief in a defensive war, as Hungary hid the truth about the enemies who were attacking the country under the circumstances. “We will come out gloriously triumphant, because violence will not trample the truth, tyranny will not tread down freedom, and barbarism will not overcome culture.”2 The defensive and, hence, just war, is a recurring motif in the sermons. In one of his sermons, Rabbi Mátyás Rubinstein (1867–1944) argued that “our troops fight for the law, the truth and to restore the integrity of the violated moral order.”3 One can find similar concepts in a sermon given by Rabbi Béla Krishaber (1869–1950), delivered on the occasion of Rosh HaShana in the fall of 1914. He also argued in favor of the legality of the war, and added that God was well aware that the truth is on their side (i.e., the Lord endorsed the Central Powers). “This war is about the struggle of morality, education and the love of freedom against evil, savagery and tyranny.”4 Arnold Kiss (1869–1940), Chief Rabbi of Buda, said that Franz Joseph “was forced by feelings of hostility to 2 Háborúban. Magyar Izrael, 1914. September 1. p. 125. 3 Rubinstein Mátyás, “A győzelemért,” in Háborús imák, beszédek (Szekszárd  : Molnár-féle Nyomdai Műintézet Rt., 1915), 11.   4 Krishaber Béla, “Újév napján. Ros-Hasono. 1914. szeptember 21,” in Világháború. Hitszónoklatok. (Erzsébetfalva  : Erzsébetfalvai Izraelita Hitközség Elöljárósága, 1915) 14.



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revert to war defense” in one of his Shabbat prayers, although Franz Joseph was widely considered to be the prince of peace. The Chief Rabbi was convinced that, due to this moral charge, the Lord Almighty would help the truth to triumph – and following the victory of the Empire – bring about peace.5 In war sermons, one can occasionally detect evidence of the demonization of the enemy. In the sermons of the world famous Chief Rabbi of Szeged, Immánuel Lőw (1854–1944), one can find references to heartless Russians, Serbian assassins, hate-fueled Frenchmen, conniving Englishmen, perfidious Italians and megalomaniac Americans.6 The rabbinical literature of the war period dealt extensively with the biblical interpretation of war and peace. In a paper written on the war concept of the Bible, the author, Rabbi Jakab Steinherz (1856–1921), came to the conclusion that a Jewish soldier should never indulge in cruelty or compromise his morals on the battlefields, although the Bible hinted positively at the ideals of Jewish military virtue.7 Some of the professors at the Rabbinical Seminary of Budapest were engaged in studying the historical and ethical connotations of war and peace during the period of the Great War. In a paper entitled “The World War from a Jewish Perspective,” published in a scientific review called Magyar Zsidó Szemle (Hungarian Jewish Review), Lajos Blau (1861–1936) pointed out that Jews did not engage in wars of conquest but coped bravely with wars of defense during the period of the ancient Jewish statehood, except during the age of King David. He also pointed out that, although peace is the ideal of the Jews, it would be a mistake to conclude that Jews lack combat skills and capabilities.8 In another piece of writing, published in a Zionist periodical called Múlt és Jövő (Past and Future), Professor Blau evoked the image of Jewish soldiers who fought in the armies of ancient empires. These fighters were career soldiers, like the ancient Greeks, with one exception  : They differed in their sense of loyalty, as Jewish soldiers did not go over to other armies in the hope of getting more money. History, however, proved that Jews were neither cowardly nor weak.9 The past provided guidance for the present. Professor Mihály Guttmann (1872–1942) wrote an extensive paper in which he reviewed the wars of ancient Israel on the basis of the Bible and Talmudic literature. Israeli soldiers – despite its historic task being in stark contrast with the 5 6 7 8 9

Arnold Kiss, “Péntek esti könyörgés,” Egyenlőség, August 16, 1914, 10. Lőw Immánuel, “A nyolcadik hadikölcsön,” Egyenlőség, July 6, 1918, 8–9. Steinherz Jakab, “A háború a bibliában II,” Magyar Izrael, March 28, 1915, 43–47. Blau Lajos, “A világháború a zsidóság megvilágításába,” Magyar Zsidó Szemle, 1916, 81. Blau Lajos, “Zsidó katonák az ókori birodalmak hadseregeiben,” Múlt és Jövő, January, 1917, 34.

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notion of the war – often found themselves in situations in which they had to draw their swords and interfere in world events with intrepid actions. The people rarely looked for wars, although their history was rich in warfare, because as peace-loving as the people of Israel were, they could not remain unsympathetic observers of bellicose antiquity.10 The war period had a seminal influence on the Midrashic literature and the interpretation of biblical texts. Chief Rabbi Bertalan Edelstein (1876–1934) of Buda drew parallels between the past and present in his exegetical writings entitled “War midrashim.” In his interpretation, which was offered in favor of the legitimacy of a defensive war, he argued that the Lord Almighty inscribes his name on the weapons of those who fight for truth and freedom and against oppression. He stated that people, however, who fight for unjust reasons and transgress the law, do call upon God in vain and engrave the name of the Almighty on their weapons. He continued, saying that the Lord would wipe it off and crush their swords and avenge blasphemers.11 According to this Midrash, the war waged by the Austro-Hungarian Empire and its allies was considered a just and defensive war, with the blessing of God. In the context of peace, Rabbi Edelstein quoted a well-known saying by Shimon ben Chalafta, a scholar from the Talmudic age. He said  : “The Almighty does not have any other vessel to keep a blessing, but Peace  !”12 The longer the war dragged on, the stronger the desire for peace became. This desire was expressed with increasing frequency in wartime sermons and writings. Chief Rabbi in Budapest, Illés Adler (1868–1924), published a text to this effect in the summer of 1916 on the occasion of the Jewish festival of Shavuot, which marks the giving of the Torah to the Jewish people. The chief rabbi wrote that the greatest gift of mankind, world peace, and its most precious treasure, the love of humanity, were presented by God on Shavuot. According to Chief Rabbi Adler, the most important task that needed to be accomplished during his time on earth was to regain the lost peace and love of humanity. He also stressed that the Hungarian nation should also regain and strengthen the sense of animated love for fellow human beings, which was indispensable for the progress of the nation, and sustain liberalism.13 Also in the summer of 1916, the noted literary historian, Chief Rabbi Ármin Kecskeméti (1874–1944) of Makó wrote about the dilemmas of peace and war and prayed for the coming of eternal peace to create a brotherhood of peoples. 10 Guttmann Mihály, “Izrael háborúi,” in Évkönyv, (Budapest  : Izraelita Magyar Irodalmi Társulat, 1915), 313. 11 Edelstein Bertalan, “Háborús midrások,” Egyenlőség, March 5, 1916, 17. 12 Edelstein Bertalan, “Háborús midrások,” Egyenlőség, December 19, 1915, 17. 13 Adler Illés, “Az angyalok koszorúi,” Egyenlőség, June 7, 1916, 16–17.



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The prophets of the Bible also contemplated eternal peace, an age in which “they shall beat their swords into plowshares  ; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore,” quoting prophet Michah’s prophesy on universal peace.14 Ármin Frisch (1866–1948), a teacher of Jewish religion in Budapest, argued at length in his text entitled “The Concept of Peace in Jewish Weltanschauung” that peace has been a central theme since ancient times in Jewish world view. In Judaism, the idea of peace is not just a belief  ; it is also a truth. He mentioned that, even if the Bible refers to war sometimes, it is instead to control its course and, to the extent that this is possible, to make it more humane.15 The National Rabbinical Association and the Great War The National Rabbinical Association, with approximately 150 members, had many war-time challenges to face. Some of its members served as military chaplains or auxiliary chaplains in the K. & K. Army or in the Royal Hungarian Army during the war. (By the end of the war, altogether 95 rabbis served as military chaplains or auxiliary chaplains in the joint forces and in the Hungarian army  !) They shared their war experiences with the public through the contemporary press. The National Rabbinical Association demanded on several occasions that the military should employ a sufficient number of qualified rabbis, in connection with the operation of the Jewish military chaplain corps.16 The accounts of military chaplains revealed that Jewish soldiers in the front lines wanted to participate in more regular religious services. They also wanted these services in order 14 Kecskeméti Ármin, “Örök harc – örök béke,” Múlt és Jövő, July, 1916, 262–265. 15 Frisch Ármin, “A békeeszme a zsidó világszemléletben,” in A Magyar Zsidó Hadi Archívum almanachja 1914–1916, eds. Hevesi Simon, Polnay Jenő and Patai József. (Budapest  : Magyar Zsidó Hadi Archívum – Országos Magyar Izraelita Közművelődési Egyesület, 1916), 122–124. 16 In times of peace, Israelite soldiers, due to their small population, had no institutionalized chaplaincy services, they were under the spiritual care of the rabbi responsible for the area. Prior to the Great War, new Jewish chaplaincies were organized, employing rabbis who were in draft age. During the Great War, the military chaplaincy at the army command consisted of a Catholic High Priest, a Protestant Chaplain and a Rabbi. Two chaplains served at the military divisions, and only 1 at lower rank military troops. Stencinger Norbert Honvéd tábori lelkészek szolgálata az I. világháború frontvonalaiban. See  : Stencinger Norbert  : A Magyar Királyi Honvédség tábori lelkész szolgálata 1868–1918 kiemelten az I. világháború időszakában folytatott tevékenységére. PhD-Dissertation. Budapest, Zrínyi Miklós Nemzetvédelmi Egyetem, 2011. 29., 50. (download 8.1.2019, http://ludita.uni-nke.hu/repozitorium/bitstream/handle/11410/10310/Stenc inger%20Norbert%20%c3%a9rtekez%c3%a9s  ?sequence=1&isAllowed=y).

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to be able to recite the traditional Jewish prayer, the Kaddish, for their dead fellow soldiers or to memorialize their deceased relatives. These accounts of the military chaplains shed light on the fact that pastoral and spiritual care were offered to injured soldiers. This care included officiation at the funerals of fallen soldiers, regardless of the religious affiliation. In the course of 1915, the association published 30,000 copies of a Hebrew-Hungarian prayer book to cater to the spiritual demands of the soldiers. The slim prayer book entitled “Shield and Armour. Prayers for Israelite soldiers” contained prayers that were appropriate for war situations, such as a prayer made before battle, a victory prayer, a prayer for a sick fellow soldier, or a prayer for the funeral of a fellow soldier, in addition to the traditional prayers. In this same year, another war prayer booklet was published, although not by the rabbinical association.17 The tri-lingual Hebrew-German-Hungarian booklet was compiled by Arnold Frankfurter (1881–1942), head chaplain of the Viennese Jewish military chaplaincy, in cooperation with Rabbi Ernő Deutsch (1886–1950) from Karánsebes, Hungary, who had also served as a military chaplain. Another, halachic question related to the war concerned how to find potential solutions for the agunah problem (“the chained wife”) and, namely, solutions for the treatment of women whose husbands were missing (probably dead) in action or in a prison camp. The major issue was to define the halachic terms under which a missing person could be pronounced dead, subject to an official confirmation or a credible witness testimony. The wife of the soldier would subsequently be declared a widow under Jewish law and would be permitted to remarry. The problem of the agunah had been a long-standing problem, dating back to the Talmudic age, but several such cases emerged over the course of the war. Although individual members of the National Rabbinical Association published their opinion on the agunah, the Association did not take a stand on it in any official form. The rabbinical opinions tended towards the more humane interpretations, which allowed the wife of a missing husband who presumably died during the war to remarry.18 The National Rabbinical Association encouraged rabbis in the hinterland to devote special attention to the war, as rabbis were compassionate soldiers of the holy war. An editorial of Magyar Izrael in 1915 dealt extensively with this subject.19 The author of the editorial called on his fellow rabbis to deal thematically with the war in their sermons. He suggested that they should encourage, animate 17 Arnold Schlesinger, Andachtsbüchlein für jüdische Krieger im Felde  – Hadbavonult izraelita ka­ tonák imakönyve 1915. (Wien  : Jos. Schlesinger, 1915). 18 “Izrael elhagyott leányai,” Egyenlőség, July 8, 1916, 11. 19 “Papi munkánk a háborúban,” Magyar Izrael, March 28, 1915.



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and give confidence to the worshippers. Simultaneously, rabbis were required to intensify their pastoral care activities. A priority was given to providing support for encouraging the emotionally distressed and making visits to hospitals. In later years, the Association provided guidance on how to restore religious life after the restoration of peace by offering many rabbinical activities, with a view toward rebuilding what had been destroyed in the war. Kashrut, Shabbat and Rosh HaShana on the front lines – as seen by military chaplains Although the observance of the Jewish religious dietary laws (i.e., Kashrut) on the front lines was obviously difficult, the National Rabbinical Association and individual Jewish congregations urged persistently and successfully that enough unleavened bread or matzah should be available for the eight days of the holiday for those Jewish soldiers who demanded it, at least on the occasion of Pessach. Observance of Kashrut required discipline from the military chaplains. Rabbi Lipót Fischer, who served in the joint forces in the theater of war in Galicia, wrote that he lived on bread and water for weeks to comply with the dietary rules, as even eggs and butter were in short supply. The army doctor then decided to commandeer a shochet (a person certified under Jewish law to slaughter cattle and poultry) and a Jewish cook from a nearby village to cater to the wishes of the military chaplain, but they provided the entire unit with delicious fare to comply with the Jewish dietary laws.20 In another war report, Lipót Fischer reported that he provided spiritual solace, regardless of the religious affiliation of the wounded, which was probably not an isolated phenomenon.21 In 1917, several Jewish congregations requested that Jewish soldiers receive kosher food. The Ministry of Defense permitted that units with more than one hundred Jewish soldiers could have kosher food prepared under the supervision of the military chaplains. The dishes required for the transportation of kosher food had to be provided by the Jewish congregations. Like the observance of Kashrut, the observance of the Shabbat  – the day of rest – was equally difficult. Rabbi Ödön Kálmán (1886–1951) of Jászberény, Hungary, who served as military chaplain in the Galician theater of war, reported that some of the rabbis in Galicia suspended the ancient provision on the

20 Fischer Lipót, “Egy magyar tábori rabbi jegyzeteiből,” Egyenlőség, July 25, 1915, 17. 21 Fischer Lipót, “Egy magyar tábori rabbi jegyzeteiből,” Egyenlőség, July 25, 1915, 9, 17.

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observance of Shabbat in the interest of the motherland.22 When he realized that a bakery was open in a shtetl, he was informed that “unser Rebbe hat den Sabesz bótl gemacht” (the rabbi had suspended the Shabbat). Later, the Rebbe himself informed Rabbi Kálmán that the special the case of pikuach nefesh [saving a life] applies in war situations, which breaks the Shabbat, as the defenders of the homeland need to be provided with food and drink. We should not jump to general conclusions on the basis of this individual case, but it is an indication that the war even disrupted the traditional value system in the shtetl. The observance of the day of rest and the ban on travel also applied to the Jewish High Holidays. On the first day of Rosh HaShana in 1914, Rabbi Gábor Schwarcz (1872–1942), a military chaplain in the Serbian theater of war, confessed that he used an automobile in Mitrovica in order to get to the synagogue, which was strictly forbidden in times of peace. “God should forgive me this sin, but I wanted to get to the synagogue…”23 This case is also a good example that demonstrates how ancient laws and traditions were rewritten under extraordinary circumstances as a last resort. World War and Antisemitism In spite of the Jewish war effort, antisemitic symptoms appeared early on. A number of baseless accusations were hurled at the Hungarian Jewry  : the number of Jewish soldiers who fell on the lines was proportionately too low, too many Jews received unjustified exemption from service and there were too many military millionaires among the Jews. Such views were spread not only among members of antisemitic political and social circles. Professor of Law Péter Ágoston (1874–1925) of Nagyvárad, was a social democrat with ties to the freemason secret society. In his unpublished diary, he made the following entry on July 7, 1915  : “… it is generally seen that the Jews try in every way possible to avoid military service in the front lines. Non-Jews try to do the same, however, they have fewer tools to succeed.” This also holds true for profiteering, he continues. According to the accusations, the Jews engaged in profiteering, but non-Jews did the same.24 The diary entries of Professor Ágoston are quite remarkable, not only because he recorded the critical voices echoed in the public discourse, but also because he, 22 Kálmán Ödön, “A felfüggesztett szombat. Egy tábori rabbi feljegyzéseiből,” Egyenlőség, November 22, 1914, 3. 23 Schwarcz Gábor, “Levelek a déli harctérről,” Magyar Zsidó Szemle, 1915, 70. 24 Ágoston Péter naplója. 1915. január 22. – 1915. December 20. Politikatörténeti Intézet Levéltára, 689 f. 4. ö. e.



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as a social democrat and freemason, described himself as the friend of the Jewry. These accusations indicated that the Jews engaged in profiteering, but non-Jews did the same.25 Naturally, Jewish community leaders and members of the Jewish press had to respond to the allegations. The progressive Egyenlőség weekly set up a special column dedicated to the heroism of Jewish soldiers and the commitment of the civilian population. The creation of the Hungarian Jewish War Archives (Mag­ yar Zsidó Hadi Archivum) served a double purpose  : In addition to documenting the war efforts of the Hungarian Jewry, it had to refute anti-Jewish allegations. Even in their festive texts published on the occasion of Jewish holidays, rabbis had to react to these accusations made against the Jewish population. In the second year of the Great War, Chief Rabbi Illés Adler refuted the false allegations in his piece of writing, which celebrated the Passover (Pessach). According to these common allegations, Jews were cowardly and stayed away from the war. Among the many accusations directed against them, only one was omitted  : namely, that they had gone over to the enemy’s side. Elderly Jews who stayed in their homes were also not spared  : They were accused of profiteering and usury. The Chief Rabbi pleaded with those spreading the accusations to listen to the prayers in the synagogues resounding for the homeland, the king and the army, and visit the ever growing number of graves of the Jewish war heroes. He stated that statistics would ultimately do them justice.26 It was quite rare for rabbis to enter the firing line. One of these rare occasions occurred in the case of military chaplain Adolf Kelemen (1861–1917), Rabbi of Fogaras, whose heroic death was contested in the press. Rabbi Kelemen volunteered for front service at the outbreak of the war – he had served as military chaplain before. The three year-long service on the front lines had harmful effects on the health of this middle-aged man, and he died in the Italian theater after contracting pneumonia in 1917. He was buried with full military honors. Lajos Szabolcsi, editor of Egyenlőség, reminisced in his memoirs on how this was criticized in the “right-wing press,” in which journalists argued that the Chief Rabbi had died due to heart failure rather than by cannon balls.27

25 Ágoston Péter naplója. 1915. január 22. – 1915. december 20. Politikatörténeti Intézet Levéltára, 689 f. 4. ö. e. 26 Adler Illés, “Nagy idők, nagy kérdések,” Egyenlőség, április 16, 1916, 17. 27 Szabolcsi Lajos, Két emberöltő. Az Egyenlőség évtizedei (1881–1931) (Budapest  : MTA Judaisztikai Kutatócsoport, 1993), 199.

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Conclusion Not long before the end of the war, a sharp remark was made by members of the Upper House of the Hungarian Parliament, which was also aimed at rabbis. During the debate that took place over the suffrage bill in July 31, 1918, the Roman Catholic Bishop of Székesfehérvár, Ottokár Prohászka, an outstanding personality of political Catholicism and even political antisemitism in Hungary28, launched an attack against the Social Democrats, which was an extra-parliamentary party at the time. The bishop alleged that Hungarian Social Democracy abused religion, as they constantly “hurt the Christian religion.” He claimed that, while they sent the priest to the bedside of dying Christians, nobody had ever heard of a rabbi being sent to the bedside of a dying Jew.29 Rabbi Illés Adler refuted the insulting remarks in a lengthy article. The article basically summarized the contributions that the rabbis had made during the Great War on the front lines and the hinterland  : in words, in their texts and with their deeds. Rabbi Adler stated that the rabbis always met their calling vis-à-vis the king, the homeland, the worshippers and their fellow human beings. He described how they viewed the devastations of war, the people in frenzy and weeping mothers with bleeding hearts and torn souls. He concluded his statement, writing that they wept with the grieving while giving encouragement and inspiration to all, prayed for victory and the glory of weapons “and still remained the apostle of peace following the spirit of the Bible.”30

28 See  : Bettina Reichmann, Bischof Ottokár Prohászka (1858–1927) – Krieg, christliche Kultur und Antisemitismus in Ungarn. (Paderborn  : Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh, 2015). 29 Az 1910. évi június hó 21-ére összehívott Országgyűlés Főrendiházának naplója. V. kötet (Budapest  : Athenaeum Irodalmi és Nyomdai Rt., 1919), 215. 30 Adler Illés, “Mi, a Magenduft Jakabok,” Egyenlőség, September 5, 1918, 21–22.

Eszter Balázs

The Image of the Jewish Soldier-Intellectual in Múlt és Jövő, the Hungarian Review Promoting Jewish Cultural Renaissance (1914–1918)1 Jewish participation in WWI was of great importance in every belligerent country  : due to the general conscription process followed in most of these countries2 and enthusiastic volunteering that took place during the early period, many young Jews went to the front and, at the same time, Jewish groups and individuals thought that their war effort – whether on the battlefield or on the home front – would strengthen or even extend their citizen’s rights.3 Approximately 1.5 million Jews were under arms in Europe  ; in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, they numbered 320,000, and every eighth of these died on the battlefield.4 In this paper, I aim to show the representations of the Hungarian Jewish soldier-intellectuals through the Hungarian Jewish cultural review Múlt és Jövő [Past and Future], which was launched in 1911 with the purpose of representing all aspects of Jewish culture. The editors of the review strove to create a strong sense of modern and secularized Jewish consciousness through the literature 1

This paper was supported by the János Bolyai Research Scholarship of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. I’m also very grateful to Miklós Konrád for his fruitful advice as well as András Zima for his help. The term Soldier-Intellectual is an extension of the expression Soldier-Poet and refers to writers and intellectuals turning into a soldier during WWI. A voir Nicolas Beaupré, « Écrivain combattant », Témoigner. Entre histoire et mémoire [En ligne], 118 | 2014, mis en ligne le 01 octobre 2015, consulté le 05 octobre 2016. URL  : http://temoigner.revues. org/1261 (accessed December 11, 2018)  ; DOI  : 10.4000/temoigner.1261. 2 In the lives of many Jews (including Hungarian Jews), WWI was the same as the levée en masse was to the French in 1793 (and which, therefore, served as a model for Europeans)  : the population of potential soldiers was supposed to be conscripted or become volunteers, and they became citizen-soldiers, a very important step forward to reinforce their citizens’ rights. 3 See, for example, Christard Hoffmann, “Between integration and rejection  : the Jewish community in Germany, 1914–1918,” in State, Society and Mobilization in Europe during the First World War, ed. John Horne (Cambridge  : Cambridge University Press, 1997), 89. 4 Péter Róbert, Egyenlő jog a hősi halálra. Magyar zsidók az első világháborúban [Equal Right to Death  : Hungarian Jews in WWI] (Budapest  : MTA-OR-ZSE, 2010). Before WWI the rate of Jews in the k. und k. army used to be 1,3% for their proportion which is much less than in the case of the majority population (6%). The proportion of the professional officers was very law among them, however the representation of Jews as reservist officers was quite high. (Róbert, Egyenlő jog a hősi halálra, 20–21.).

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and arts in the Hungarian language. These representations are partly related to the figure of the fallen intellectual. However, along with obituaries, I also had to consider a few general discourses on heroism and on death in WWI, as well as any representations of the living intellectuals and artists. It was not possible to avoid examining the Hungarian and European Jewish press releases when reflecting on these images. At last, it seemed inevitable to draw a comparison between the representations of the fallen intellectual and war poets depicted throughout Hungarian society and the discourse on heroism. In this study, an attempt was made to combine the history of Hungarian Jewish intellectuals, including the history of Zionism in Hungary and in Europe, with a cultural history of WWI. Múlt és Jövő: break from the ideology of assimilation The editors of Múlt és Jövő wanted to seek inner sources of Jewish self-esteem and force, as they were unhappy with the Neolog’s5 integration (“assimilation”) project into the majority of society ( Judaism was officially described as a mere religion in the project, while Neologs usually went far beyond this definition in practice6) and wanted to earn respect and acceptance from societal members by changing Jews’s attitudes and behavior. They wanted to distinguish themselves from the official Neolog project and stressed that Hungarian Jews would not cease to be a distinct entity. (In fact, Neologs also wanted the Jews who became Hungarians in their culture to remain a “good Jew.”) The editor-in-chief, József Patai (ex-author of the Neolog weekly Egyenlőség [Equality] between 1904– 1911), considered (re)integrating Hungarian-Jewish cultural orientation into the universal Jewish culture as the best way to help Jews self-re-create (assert their Jewish distinctiveness) and earn self-esteem.7 Between 1911 and 1918, the journal had the aim to direct secularized and cultivated Jews back to Judaism, and cultural Zionism seemed to be a helpful

5

The Neolog version of Judaism was an important Hungarian Jewish reformed observance that emerged in the 1820s. 6 Miklós Konrád, “Hungarian Expectationas and Jewish Self-Definitions, 1840–1914,” in Modern Jewish Scholarship in Hungary, ed. Tamás Turán and Carsten Wilkeaccess (Berlin  : De Gruyter Oldenbourg 2016), 329–348. 7 János Kőbányai, Szétszálazás és újraszövés. A Múlt és Jövő, a Nyugat és a modern zsidó kultúra megteremtése [Deconstructing and reconstructing. Múlt és Jövő, Nyugat and the creation of modern Jewish culture] (Budapest  : Osiris, 2014), 62. For the review, Jews formed a distinct entity and not only characterized by a religion unlike for their assimilationist opponent, Egyenlőség.



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device to use in this project.8 However, Múlt és Jövő only became a purely Zionist journal after the First World War, and, until its publication ended in 1944, it can be considered to be one of the most important mediums of Zionism in Hungary during the first part of the 20th century along with the Zionist periodical Zsidó Szemle [ Jewish Review] (1909–1938).9 Self-declared as the “journal of the Jewish intelligentsia,”10 Múlt és Jövő was initially a medium used to transmit ideas of a (re)invented and vibrant Hebrew culture as a modern secular, humanistic culture, which was considered as both an alternative to the traditional way of life and lacking Jewish characteristics due to the “assimilation” process. This Jewish cultural renaissance was similar to any other cultural nationalism, and, after World War One, it unambiguously became a proper medium to communicate Zionism in Hungary. David Aberbach formulated similar considerations related to the political role of Hebrew literature in the Tsarist Empire  : “Hebrew literature of 1881–1917 was inseparable from the rise of political Zionism. Yet, the nationalism of this literature was Herderian in its primary concern with Jewish culture rather than with politics.”11 The combination of literature and a strongly visual culture – graphic and plastic arts, most often based on styles of Secession (Art Nouveau) and Orientalism as well as photography  – was a genuinely modern initiative in Múlt és Jövő.12 The fine arts, along with the revitalization of Hebrew literature, became major vectors of “the Jewish renaissance” in Múlt és Jövő, which was “a virtual Jewish   8 See  : Zvi Gitelman, “A Century of Jewish Politics in Eastern Europe. The Legacy of the Bund and the Zionist Movement,” in The Emergence of Modern Jewish Politics. Bundism and Zionism in Eastern Europe, ed. Zvi Gitelman (Pittsburgh  : University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014), 15. József Patai came from a simple orthodox family that lived in the countryside, but he studied with Neolog rabbis in Budapest. His wife, Edith Patai, however, came from an educated Jewish bourgeois family that lived in Nagyvárad (actual Oradea).   9 See  : David Aberbach, “Hebrew Literature and Jewish Nationalism in the Tsarist Empire, 1881– 1917”, in The Emergence of Modern Jewish Politics. Bundism and Zionism in Eastern Europe, ed. Zvi Gitelman (Pittsburgh  : University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003), 152. The Zionist movement was launched in Hungary after the Basel congress of 1897. The Budapest Makkabea university association was the most important vector of the movement before WWI, similarly to the University of Vienna that was also a Zionist stronghold. The first Zionist journal of Hungarian language was Zsidó Néplap [ Jewish Journal] (1904–1905), followed by Zsidó Élet [ Jewish Life] in 1907 as well as by the journal of Zionist organisation of Hungary called in 1909 Zsidó Szemle [ Jewish Review]. 10 Editors, “Olvasóinkhoz” [To our Readers], Múlt és Jövő, 5 (Sept. – Oct.1914)  : 495. This attests that before WWI, Zionism drew more from the intelligentsia and the middle-classes than other social groups of Jews. However, a comprehensive study on the social stratification of Hungarian Zionists is still lacking. 11 Aberbach, “Hebrew Literature and Jewish Nationalism in the Tsarist Empire, 1881–1917”, 134. 12 Kőbányai, Szétszálazás és újraszövés, 160–161.

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nostalgic and modern medium” at the same time.13 It adopted the model of the German Jewish Ost und West (for its title, for example) and probably took the Hungarian greatest modernist literary review of the period, Nyugat [West], into consideration as well (launched in 1908).14 As literary historian János Kőbányai points out  : in the publications, the editors claimed all along to have made room for Zionism to the same extent as for every other stream of Jewishness, but (at least) the journal’s visual content revealed their preferences for cultural Zionism.15 Along with visual culture, many texts that appeared in the review also depicted Jewish life empathetically and for its own sake. They promoted a new artistic sense of self-perception in order to articulate, promote and disseminate the ideals of a secular Jewish culture and, partly, of Zionism.16 Nevertheless, Múlt és Jövő cannot be interpreted as “a counterculture” to the dominant Neolog religious culture17  : the Neolog weekly publications Egyenlőség and Múlt és Jövő shared many authors, and their editors worked together in the same cultural association, OMIKE (National Hungarian Israelite Cultural Association).18 Enthusiasm at the beginning of WWI At the outbreak of WWI, many Jewish movements, groups and individuals of all kind in Europe responded enthusiastically to their nation’s call to arms in both war camps. Accordingly, Múlt és Jövő warmly welcomed the war  : the editors and writers were convinced of the justice of the Austro-Hungarian and German cause and wanted to fulfil their patriotic duties.19 Like to European Zionists, who declared at the beginning of WWI that it was not contradictory to pledge 13 Kőbányai, Szétszálazás és újraszövés, 143, 169, 177. 14 Kőbányai, Szétszálazás és újraszövés, 296–297. 15 Kőbányai, Szétszálazás és újraszövés, 143, 177. 16 It was common for Zionists to try to use images to promote their cause. Michael Berkowitz, “Manly men and the attempted appropriation of the war experience, 1914–1918,” in Western Jewry and the Zionist project, 1914–1933 (Cambridge  : Cambridge University Press, 2002), 19. 17 For the importance of culture to early Zionism in general, see  : Gitelman, “A Century of Jewish Politics in Eastern Europe, 18–19”  ; and for Russian Jewish culture in particular  : Aberbach, “Hebrew Literature and Jewish Nationalism in the Tsarist Empire, 1881–1917,” 138–139. 18 The assimilationist OMIKE, the biggest institution of Jewish philanthropy in the first part of the 20th century also supported Múlt és Jövő during its publication run. (Kőbányai, Szétszálazás és újraszövés, 152.). 19 Simon Hevesi, “Újév – 5675” [New Year – 5675], Múlt és Jövő, 4 (Sept.-Oct.1914)  : 455–456.; anonymous, “Kozmopolita” és “A Cionisták” [“Cosmopolite” and “The Zionists”] Múlt és Jövő, 4 (Sept.- Oct.1914)  : 487, 488.



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loyalty to both European nations and Zionism20, as well as to other Jewish groups and individuals the journal’s authors expressed loyalty to the Monarchy and Hungarian patriotism by asserting a strong sense of Jewish distinctiveness and self-esteem. (A major debate that appeared in the pages of the review on the eve of WWI – April 1914 – touched precisely upon the possibility of a double identity  – Jewish and Hungarian  – for Hungarian Jews.21) Like many Jewish movements, groups and individuals with various national backgrounds (including Zionists), the authors whose articles appeared in Múlt és Jövő emphasized that the war also involved a specific Jewish interest, namely, the liberation of Eastern European Jews from Tsarist oppression.22 Since the third part of the nineteenth century, Russia had been viewed as “the great tormentor of the Jewish masses” (because of pogroms and state-financed discrimination)23 and this evoked passionate responses, especially among German Zionists in the German Kulturbereich.24 Their approach was perfectly suited to the more general German (and Austro-Hungarian) image of the Great War during WWI, which emphasized a bridgeless antagonism between European Kultur (that the Central Powers had to defend) and Asiatic barbarism. Múlt és Jövő was characterized by its specific war culture – discourse and representations based on the empathy of the editor and authors with the allies and their hatred of the enemy25 – at least until the end of 1915  : its authors showed a manifest interest in the Jewry of allies of Hungarians (Austria, Germany, Turkey) while it reported on antisemitism in the enemy countries (Russia, obviously, but also Great-Britain and France). General necrological discourse in the Hungarian Jewish press World War I was the first modern conflict that simultaneously implicated both combatants and non-combatants and which also had an impact on the process of 20 Berkowitz, “Manly men and the attempted appropriation of the war experience, 1914–1918,” 7, 20. 21 József Patai, “Nyílt válasz a Huszadik Századnak a Múlt és Jövő höz intézett nyílt levelére” [Open letter to the review Twentieth Century apropos its open letter to Past and Future], Múlt és Jövő, 5 (April 1914)  : 220–223. On this polemic with the writer Dezső Szabó see Róbert, Egyenlő jog a hősi halálra, 17–18. 22 Hevesi, “Újév – 5675” [New Year – 5675]. 23 Hoffmann, “Between integration and rejection  : the Jewish Community in Germany, 1914– 1918,” 90. 24 Berkowitz, “Manly men and the attempted appropriation of the war experience, 1914–1918,” 7. 25 On war culture see  : Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker, 1914–1918 Understanding the Great War, trans. Catherine Temerson (London  : Profile Books, 2002), 102–103.

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heroization. Not only Jews but also workers and women sought to promote their own soldier-heroes and, indeed, the heroism of those members of the group who contributed to the war effort on the home front. This type of hero production, which combined military virtues with civil virtues based on the nineteenth century model of heroism, was most intense in the early phase of the conflict  ; WWI offered minorities with a great opportunity to prove their patriotism and achieve a more complete integration into the majority of societies.26 As Michael Berkowitz says in rapport with Jews, WWI “gave rise to the expectation or wishful thinking that heroism could be translated into acceptance and rewards and that the stereotype of Jews as disloyal, uncourageous, and constitutionally unfit as soldiers would be convincingly overturned.”27 The Jews’ own heroic representations reflected a general belief that, as soldiers, they could earn a significant social esteem. In WWI, which was a total war, the greatest form of commitment to the nation was to go to the front, and, in principle, anyone who chose to become a soldier automatically became a hero.28 They were also fighting as Jews belonging to Hungary and the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. On the other hand, heroic representations served to fortify their own self-esteem as “manly men” capable of fighting physically for a cause. This could have a more specific Zionist interpretation according to Michael Berkowitz  : “The war rekindled the early Zionists’ call for the creation, in Max Nordau’s words, of a Muskeljudentum, a Jewry of muscle.”29 Still, according to Berkowitz, Jews were generally not immune from the majority society’s aspirations of heroism either. More particularly, youngsters were doing penance for their modern, consumption-oriented lifestyle and expected the war to return them to a life based on noble values.30 This was accompanied by a growing concern – which 26 Hoffmann, “Between integration and rejection  : the Jewish community in Germany, 1914–1918,” 90. 27 Berkowitz, “Manly men and the attempted appropriation of the war experience, 1914–1918,” 11. 28 Heroic self-representations also appeared by November 1914 in Múlt és Jövő in an article related to home front war efforts – when official permission was given for the valorisation of the home front efforts – but these were underplayed later on. Simon Hevesi, “Heroizmus” [Heroism], Múlt és Jövő, 4 (Nov.1914)  : 505–506.; Dr. Miklós Hajdu, “A mi erőpróbánk” [Our Trial of Strength], Múlt és Jövő, 5 ( Jan. 1914)  : 3–4. 29 Berkowitz, “Manly men and the attempted appropriation of the war experience, 1914–1918,” 10. Max Nordau was one of the most important Jewish public figures of the fin-de-siècle and founder of Zionism. His work entitled Degeneration (1892) was widely read by Hungarians. See on Hungarian reception of Nordau  : Clara Royer, Royaume littéraire. Quêtes d‘identité d‘une génération d‘écrivains juifs de l‘entre-deux guerres. Hongrie, Slovaquie, Transylvanie (Paris  : Éditions Honoré Champion, coll. « Bibliothèque d’études juives, 42 », 2011), 220–221. 30 Christopher Forth, Masculinity in the modern West  : gender, civilization and the body (New York  : Palgrave, 2008), 141.



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had been commonly expressed since the last third of the nineteenth century – about the presumed feminization of men.31 Necrological discourse related to fallen intellectuals in Múlt és Jövő During WWI, a specific and massive necrological discourse related to fallen intellectuals emerged in every belligerent country  : the loss of intellectuals, in particular young ones, was often interpreted as a major threat to the whole community.32 The national necrological discourse related to fallen intellectuals was also spread widely in the Hungarian mainstream literary press to argue for the importance of the presence of intellectuals on the battlefield and emphasize their loss. This was also a common European phenomenon  : many writers, artists and scientists on both sides of the front volunteered or were conscripted and went to the battlefield. Along with their fellow intellectuals who remained at the home front, they inspired a massive heroic image of the intellectual-soldier.33 In the first part of WWI, the celebration of soldier-heroes in Múlt és Jövő was limited to obituaries (i.e., dead soldiers), as well as to textual and visual representations of Biblical archetypes such as the Maccabees or to historical predecessors like Hungarian Jews in the War of Independence of 1848–1849. Nevertheless, Egyenlőség, the most significant Neolog journal provided an outstandingly important necrological discourse. Since October 1914, it had been publishing long lists of dead soldiers regardless of their profession, social status, and so on, in the column “Fallen heroes.” These records were mostly based news from the front which was provided by the military and family reports.34 Within a couple of months, by end of 1914, the column also began to relate the heroic deeds of surviving soldiers and mention their decorations. All this documenta31 Ibid. 32 See  : Nicolas Beaupré, “Nécrologies d’écrivains  : la survie littéraire des écrivains morts à la guerre (pratiques, hommages et figures imposées)”, in La Grande Guerre, un siècle de fictions romanesques, Pierre Schoentjes dir. (Genève  : Librairie Droz, 2008), 113–132. 33 See  : Field Frank, British and French Writers of the First World War  : Comparative Studies in Cul­ tural History (Cambridge  : Cambridge University Press, 1991)  ; Nicolas Beaupré, Écrire en guerre, écrire la guerre  : France, Allemagne 1914–1920 (Paris  : CNRS, 2006). For the Hungarian case see  : Eszter Balázs, “War Stares at Us Like an Ominous Sphynx. Hungarian Intellectuals, Literature and the Image of the Other (1914–1915),” in The New Nationalism and the First World War, eds. Lawrence Rosenthal and Vesna Rodic (New York  : Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 95–121. 34 Jewish heroism was treated from the very beginning  ; the third war issue of the journal accounted (with photographs) that even “Bohemian” intellectuals turned out to be soldiers. (Egyenlőség, 34 (30th Aug. 1914)).

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tion, checked by various censorship bureaus before publication, appeared regularly in a column that covered 8–9 pages every week. Home front heroism – a commitment to the war effort on the home front (charity, fundraising for patriotic war purpose) – was massively covered as well. The demonstration of both types of war efforts served to provide support for the deep integration of Hungarian Jews in the society and, at the same time, offer evidence against eventual complaints that Jews were shirking service.35 Egyenlőség, which had originally been launched in 1882 with the purpose of confuting political antisemitism born in the blood label of Tiszaeszlár only subsequently and gradually became a Hungarian Jewish weekly publication that described the hopeful cultural acculturation of Jews into the majority society.36 At the beginning of WWI the editors and authors regularly used polemics in their interactions with the German-language, Hungarian Jewish newspaper, Ungarlandische Jüdische Zeitung, about whether the war would make antisemitism disappear.37 Despite its intention, the demonstration of heroic efforts provoked hostility as early on as end of 191438– which was also remarked upon in the Múlt és Jövő.39 In the beginning, the contributors to Múlt és Jövő retained reservations when answering the question of the demonstration of the war efforts on the battlefield. In terms of presenting heroic deeds in this review, a shift in tone can be observed while comparing the articles that appeared at the first part of the war with those issued in the second part. During the first two years, it seems as though the journal’s editor was cautious regarding whether to demonstrate the commitment to the national war effort by publishing biographies of Jewish soldiers, praising their deeds, or distinguishing some of them. Would this action backfire and provoke adversarial reactions instead of admiration  ? Publishing obituaries of fallen Jewish soldiers seemed to be the right compromise  : it served the purpose of proving the Jews’ total commitment and “sacrificial heroism”40, and, at the 35 During the first months of WWI, due to politics of Burgfrieden, “only” the congregationist and antisemitic Catholic review, Magyar Kultúra included complaints about Jews. By 1915, antisemitism became more widespread and, after mid-1916, political antisemitism increased and the search for a scapegoat began. 36 Kőbányai, Szétszálazás és újraszövés, 48–50. 37 Róbert, Egyenlő jog a hősi halálra, 38. 38 Péter Bihari, Lövészárkok a hátországban. Középosztály, zsidókérdés, antiszemitizmus az első világháború Magyarországán [Trenches on the home front. Middle class, Jewish question and antisemitism in Hungary during WWI] (Budapest  : Napvilág, 2008). 39 József Patai talked about actual “Hamans” – described as young men staying at home – accusing Jews of being shirkers. (Secundus [ József Patai], “Levél sebesült öcsémhez” [Letter to my Injured Brother], Múlt és Jövő, 4 (Dec. 1914)  : 572.) See also Miklós Hajdu, “A mi erőpróbánk” [Our Trial of Strength], Múlt és Jövő, 5 ( Jan. 1914)  : 4. 40 See on “sacrificial heroism” – based on “fascination with suffering, fascination with man’s capac-



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same time, avoided accusations of bragging. Múlt és Jövő did not publish lists of dead soldiers, unlike Egyenlőség. What were their considerations  ? As a journal promoting a Jewish cultural renaissance, it placed a special focus on artists and writers. In order to express a strong opinion on Jewish distinctiveness, it wanted to exploit mainly cultural issues (that could articulate even a Zionist program).41 The editor was more prudent regarding the strategy applied to prove its commitment to and engagement in the war effort. Would representations of Jewish soldiers underline the successful Jewish integration into the Monarchy’s armed forces  ? If so, this could necessarily attenuate Jewish detachment, which had been a particular feature of Zionism since “emancipation and ‘equal rights’ were not supposed to be chief aims of Zionism.”42 This particular dilemma – would the answer be yes and, if so, how could these representations demonstrate the Jews’ commitment to the war effort in a cultural journal with a Zionist stance – clearly expresses what Michael Berkowitz describes as the general Zionist attitude to WWI  : “complicated and ambiguous.”43 The first obituary was published in the October 1914 issue  : Lajos Dömény, attorney, publicist and young leader of the Maccabeus (Association of the Zionist University Students, launched in Budapest in 1903) and of the Budapest office of the Jewish National Fund,44 died in the Lemberg battle on 7 September 1914. Miklós Hajdu, jurist and journalist openly expressed his hesitation to honor him publicly in his obituary in November 1914 or not.45 The fact that he mentioned that Dömény was one of the thousands and thousands who died for the homeland emphasized the fact that Hajdu was inclined to emphasize Dömény’ death as an individual loss. (A photograph-portrait was also published.) Finally, he chose to honor him, as he could deny accusations towards Zionists not to be patriots  : “a fingertip Zionist, but before that a fingertip Hungarian”  ; “the heroic leader of the Hungarian Zionists shed his blood for his Hungarian patria.”46 ity to surpass himself ” – during WWI also related to (French) Jews  : Annette Becker, War and Faith  : the Religious Imagination in France, 1914–1930 (Oxford – New York  : Berg, 1998), 20, 23. 41 There was also a quest for Biblical archetypes in the case of WWI poet-soldiers. (Dr. József Patai, “Héber költő és hadvezér” [Hebrew Poet and General], Múlt és Jövő, 4 (Nov. 1914)  : 509–511.; Dr. József Patai, “A próféták csataköltészete” [The War Poetry of the Prophets], Múlt és Jövő, 5 (Febr. 1915)  : 62–63.; Dr. József Patai, “Bibliai csataköltészet” [The War Poetry of the Bible], Múlt és Jövő, 5 (May 1915)  : 185–188.). 42 See also  : Berkowitz, “Manly men and the attempted appropriation of the war experience, 1914– 1918,” 12, 23. 43 Berkowitz, “Manly men and the attempted appropriation of the war experience, 1914–1918,” 11. 44 Róbert, Egyenlő jog a hősi halálra, 25. 45 Miklós Hajdu, “Búcsú egy hőstől” [Farwell from a Hero], Múlt és Jövő, 4 (Nov. 1914)  : 514–515. 46 Hajdu, “Búcsú egy hőstől,” 515.

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The second case also appeared in the November 1914 issue  : Aladár Radó, a 32-year-old musician and composer of three operas fell on the Serbian battlefield at the beginning of WWI. (Radó was a well-known artist in the Hungarian cultural scene, even beyond the narrower circles of music). His obituary in Múlt és Jövő exemplified how – through the aestheticization of his death – Jewish intellectualism and artistic talent were legitimized by the ultimate sacrifice in the defense of the home country  : He went singing to the battlefield, singing to death. I see as he raises his sword and directs his own dance macabre, with death’s violin playing above him. I see his dark eyes shining as that night [at the concert] when I heard that dissonant accord that puts an end to the dance. I see a black gentleman with his immobile face, arms crossed, regarding in his eyes with the calm of the other-world as Radó fell on the battlefield hit by a bullet…47

A portrait-photograph was also published representing him as a unconventional person, cigarette in hands.48 His music was compared to “a cedar tree from Lebanon on the Hungarian Puszta.”49 As Radó’s complete antidote, the painter and art critic Fülöp László was presented in the very same issue by József Patai  : he had not only converted to Catholicism, but he remained in Great Britain during the war.50 Rumors were spread that he even became a British subject. (In fact, Fülöp László had been staying in England since 1907 and received British citizenship in 1914, but which could not protect him from a one-year internment in England as a man of Hungarian nationality.) László was presented in Múlt és Jövő as a doubly “disloyal person.” The message is clear in a case of a Hungarian Jew, regardless his orientation or religious observance  : converting can also lead to the person being interpreted as having betrayed his / her home47 Pál Neubauer, Radó Aladár operája [The Opera of Aladár Radó], Múlt és Jövő, 4 (Nov. 1914)  : 525–527. Pál Neubauer was also young journalist of the German-language Pester Lloyd. Music was also a favourite theme in Múlt és Jövő, which published many music notes up until 1918. For more on Aladár Radó in the Austrian Jewish press, see  : Dieter J. Hecht, “Spuren der Vergessenen. Das ‘Jüdische Kriegsgedenkblatt’ – Ein Erinnerungsforum,” Zeitgeschichte 41 ( Juli-August 2014)  : 222–241. The translation oft he quotation is mine. 48 János Kőbányai emphasized that the former dominant “iconic” representation of figures changed during and after WWI, and persons – soldiers and rabbis – were pictured in action (on the home front or on the battlefield). The Jewish sense of self-integrity was recognizable in this way, and it served as a means of self-defence and compensation  : 1) Jews take part in war efforts on the battlefield  ; 2) Zionism is compatible with patriotism. (Kőbányai, Szétszálazás és újraszövés, 176.). 49 Neubauer, Radó Aladár operája, 526. 50 Secundus [ József Patai], “A renegátok útja” [The Road of the Renegades], Múlt és Jövő, 4 (Nov. 1914)  : 534.



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Fig. 1: Photography of Aladár Radó, musician and composer, published and subtitled by Múlt és Jövő: “Young musician Aladár Radó fallen in war”.

land.51 The question of the documentation of Jewish soldiers’ deeds – proofs of “Jewish heroism” – was highlighted from December 1914 and on in Múlt és Jövő. The later articles revealed that there were behind-the-scene debates on this topic. Beside “providing an alibi,” the aim was to create a “cultural work.”52 In March 1915, as part of an already running debate with the editors of Egyenlőség, the jurist and publicist Miklós Hajdu argued in favor of an unbiassed and well-documented presentation on the Vienna model in order to avoid the emergence of a war “cult of heroism” that could backfire and generate anti-Jewish sentiments. He suggested Jews’ deeds should be documented rather than assessed.53 As an 51 In a novel entitled A mi lengyelünk [Our Polack] (1903) by the major Hungarian novelist Mór Jókai, the protagonist (Negrotin) stresses the following  : “Anyone who is capable of denying his God, is also capable of denying his lover as well as his country.” (Miklós Konrád, Zsidóságon innen és túl. Zsidók vallásváltása Magyarországon a reformkortól az első világháborúig [ Jewishness and Beyond. Change of religions by Jews from the Hungarian Era up to WWI], (Budapest  : MTA Bölcsészettudományi Kutatóközpont – Történettudományi Intézet, 2014), 98.). 52 Dr. Miklós Hajdu, “A mi erőpróbánk,” 4. 53 Dr. Miklós Hajdu, “Tülekedés a zsidó hősök körül” [Rush around Jewish heroes], Múlt és Jövő, 5 (March 1915)  : 83–86. Egyenlőség included articles that had strongly critical stances to Zionism before WWI, and their authors seemed to consider it as “treasonous and incompatible with Hungarian patriotism.” Assimilationists thought that Zionism would have undermined the “social contract” between the Hungarian state and its Jewish inhabitants, which was seemingly

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example, Hajdu referred to the fallen Zionist leader as the real “hero” (he had the fallen Dömény in mind) as opposed the still-living son of an influential leader within the Jewish community. According to Hajdu, the former received a couple of lines, while the latter received an entire column in the Egyenlőség.54 This opposition between the dead Zionist and the living Neolog boy openly revealed the rivalry that existed over different expressions of commitment to the war efforts as well as overtly Jewish self-definitions in wartime. The assimilationist editor of Egyenlőség was convinced that publishing and popularizing all forms of Jewish sacrifice on the battlefield and the home front would hopefully raise the degree of sympathy held by members of the majority society and speed up the integration process. He was also convinced that the Great War would be a great domestic peacemaker and unifier. Meanwhile, Múlt és Jövő, which published articles that both advocated universal Jewish culture and voiced loyal support for Hungary’s war effort until the end of the conflict, was more skeptical and hesitant to support this view. Finally, an honorary book was printed (but never circulated) in 1916, which was supported by those working at Múlt és Jövő and edited by József Patai and his Neolog supporters, Simon Hevesi and Jenő Polnay, all of whom were representatives of a military archive of the Jews living in the territory of Hungarian Kingdom. Called “a monument commemorating young Jewry”55 by Polnay, the book’s aim was to precisely document and commemorate the participation of Jewish Hungarian soldiers in WWI based on their testimonies, pictures, portraits, reports and even music notes (called the “Gold Book” on the initiatives of the War Ministry headed between 1910–1917 by Samuel Baron von Hazai, himself of Jewish origins).56 Back to Spring 1915, the next time when Jewish front deeds were discussed in Múlt és Jövő  : in March 1915 (or five months after the first obituary was pubsuccessful at the time. (Borbála Klacsmann, The Reception of Early Zionist Movement in Budapest (1897–1914) (MA diss., Central European University, 2012), 45, 55. 54 Hajdu, “Tülekedés a zsidó hősök körül,” 84. In the next piece of the debate, he emphasized that he had particularly criticized book-sellers who wanted to do business with Jewish heroism (and not so much Egyenlőség). (Dr Miklós Hajdu, “Igenis  : tülekedés” [Yes  ! A rush], Múlt és Jövő, 5 (April 1915)  : 156.). 55 Hajdu, “A mi erőpróbánk,” 4. 56 1914–1916, A Magyar Zsidó Hadi Archivum Almanachja [Almanach of Hungarian Jewish War Archives], eds. Simon Hevesi, Jenő Polnay, József Patai, (Budapest  : Magyar Zsidó Hadi Archivum – OMIKE, 1916). The Hungarian Jewish War Archives were created – with presidency, sections and committees on local and national levels and deposited in the Hungarian Jewish Museum –, a so-called Jewish “pantheon” with the tasks of gathering, crediting, presenting and networking with Vienna and Berlin. (See also “Felhívás a Magyar zsidó háborús dokumentumok gyűjtésére” [Call for collection of Hungarian Jewish documents] Múlt és Jövő, 5 (March 1915)  : 115–116.



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lished), Edith Patai, wife of the editor-in-chief, founder of their journal and director of its art column57, wrote an obituary for the 31 year-old sculptor Kornél Sámuel.58 Art had played a particularly important role in Múlt és Jövő from the beginning. It was called “a new Jewish emancipation” by József Patai in the constitution of modern Jewish culture in that it visually represented the Jewish presence and self-consciousness.59 Emphasizing art could refute the accusations of societal members of the Jews’ aesthetic non-productivity.60 Along with the (re-)invention of Hebrew literature, visual art represented a fundamentally new approach taken to Jewish culture, which had previously been characterized by religious restrictions concerning visual representations.61 In a typically patriotic style (which generally represented the war culture of Hungarian intellectuals early on in the conflict), Edith Patai emphasized the Hungarian patriotism of Kornél Sámuel, who had defended the Uzsok Strait in the Carpathians during the Hungarian assault against the Russians  : “they defended the gate of their beloved homeland against the multitude of enemy pouring in, but many of them found their untimely death and lie in graves beneath of the snow-covered Carpathians forever.” Sámuel had died several months before, in the beginning of October 1914  ; at the time, the journal failed to pay tribute to him, even though the death of Sámuel was well-known right after the tragedy. Egyenlőség had published a rather long announcement in its pages to the effect that Sámuel’s widowed wife managed to obtain permission and help from the Hungarian authorities to exhume the dead body and transport it back to Hungary.62 Such an exhumation was quite rare  ; it was a privilege of some prominent people  – well-known writers or artists like Sámuel.63 Also the fact that these intellectuals fought against Russians – the only belligerent country where Jews were oppressed – advanced the cause of Múlt és Jövő as a cultural journal also 57 Kőbányai, Szétszálazás és újraszövés, 144–145. 58 Edith Patai, “Sámuel Kornél” [Kornél Sámuel], Múlt és Jövő, 5, (March 1915)  : 91. 59 József Patai, “‘Új zsidó emancipáció’” [“New Jewish Emancipation”], Múlt és Jövő, 4 (March 1914)  : 154. See on the role of art in “Jewish renaissance” in general  : Seth L. Wolitz, “Vitebsk vs. Bezalel. A Jewish ‘Kulturkampf ’ in the Plastic Arts”, in The Emergence of Modern Jewish Politics. Bundism and Zionisme in Eastern Europe, ed. Zvi Gitelman (Pittsburgh  : University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003), 152. 60 See on that  : Wolitz, “Vitebsk vs. Bezalel,” 152.; “Karl Emil Franzos and Bertha Pappenheim’s Portraits of the (Eastern European Jewish) Artist,” in Leonard J. Greenspoon ed., Studies in Jewish Civilization, Vol. 16, (Creighton University Press, 2005), 81. 61 Kőbányai, Szétszálazás és újraszövés, 145. 62 Egyenlőség, 34 (22 Nov. 1914)  : 6. 63 See Eszter Balázs, “Az első világháborús nekrológiai diskurzus sajátosságai Bányai Elemér író, újságíró halála, temetése és kultusza kapcsán” [The WWI necrology discourse related to the death, burial and cult of the writer and publicist Elemér Bányai], Aetas, 2017, No.1., 5–26.

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Fig. 2: Obituary by Edith Patai dedicated to the sculptor Kornél Sámuel published by Múlt és Jövő.

with a Zionist stance, emphasizing the idea that they were fighting on the right side.64 64 See for example  : A. S. Rabinovitz, “A szent börtönben. A pogromok országából” [In the Saint Prison. From the Country of Pogroms], Múlt és Jövő, 4 (Nov. 1914)  : 518–521  ; Béla Székely, “A nagy pogrom. Északi harctér” [The Big Pogrom. Northen Front], Múlt és Jövő, 5 (March 1915)  :



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Fig. 3: Photography of Kornél Sámuel in his atelier published and subtitled by Múlt és Jövő: “Kornél Sámuel, sculptor, fallen during the defense of Uzsok Strait in the Carpathians”. Fig. 4: Photography of David by Kornél Sámuel published by Múlt és Jövő.

Andor Boldizsár, a 36-year-old actor in the famous Medgyaszay Cabaret of Pest, fell in January 1915, and his obituary appeared in Múlt és Jövő in March 1915 like Kornél Sámuel’s.65 Boldizsár was massively masculinized in the obituary dedicated to him, which was also an extremely popular cliché in non-Jewish intellectuals’ obituaries in WWI, used to refute accusations that Jews were weak. In addition, the hypermasculinization fit the Maccabean tradition that was strongly emphasized by the journal. In the case of Boldizsár, the denial of being weak concerned pre-war negative stereotypes that stigmatized both artists and Jews. At the same time, he was described as the ideal-type of acculturated Jew  : during his military service before the war, “he was among the very first with his muscles, 99–101.On German Zionists during WWI see  : Hoffmann, “Between integration and rejection  : the Jewish community in Germany, 1914–1918,” 92. 65 Dr. Artúr Földes, “Egy hős színész halálára” [To the death of a heroic actor], Múlt és Jövő, 5 (March 1915)  : 101. It was not mentioned in the press, but we know, thanks to the Hungarian theatre databases, that Boldizsár, who originated from Kecskemét, had been acting before WWI mainly Hungarian peasant characters. (All the following quotations come from this same obituary).

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but he never paid attention to German words,” he was “a Hungarian Chauvin.” He fought for months until he was killed by a Serbian bayonet, and his death was represented as an absolute confirmation of his patriotism  : “the Jewish artist sealed his strong Hungarian commitment with his own blood.” Both the editors and authors of Múlt és Jövő and Egyenlőség – like many other Jewish groups and individuals in Europe – considered death, with respect to Jewish soldiers, as an important and much valued source of equality for Jews during the early war years. Edith Patai argued poetically late 1914 that death was a source of liberty, equality and a guarantee of a life of a higher quality.66 For Simon Hevesi, the rabbi of the Neolog synagogue in the Dohány street in Budapest and a leading figure of OMIKE, fallen Jewish soldiers were symbols of a bloodshed in which a new moral culture would be rooted and which would liberalize humanity.67 This editorial reflected the war culture discourse and representations typical to prestigious religious persons who spoke publicly during the first years of the conflict whether they were Catholics or Jews. Otherwise (not related specifically to artists and poets), the heroic self-sacrifice on the battlefield was demonstrated by historical archetypes in Múlt és Jövő during the first years of the conflict.68 In June 1915, Múlt és Jövő again published an overdue obituary by Jenő Molnár for the Austrian Jewish poet and a Zionist attorney, Hugo Zuckermann, who had prompted patriotic efforts in his poems and died in combat at the beginning of the war.69 The timing can be explained by the posthumous Austrian publication of the works of Zuckermann. Writing a Hungarian obituary for him (even if it was an overdue one) was an occasion used to write about peculiar Zionist heroism  : he was described as “a political Zionist who was the poet of the renewal of Jewish people” and whose poetry was “dualistic”  ; he was a poet of “both Zion and Austria.” At the same time, the stereotypes that appeared in his Hungarian obituary were identical to those that appeared in the mainstream Hungarian and German patriot war press  : Zuckermann was compared to Sándor Petőfi, the iconic poet of the Hungarian national revival of 1848, as well as to Theodor Körner, his German equivalent from the times of the Napoleonic wars. Zuckermann was described as equal to them  : first, because both represent the ver sacrum, the self-sacrificed youth of their respected country and, second, because all three of them served 66 Edith Patai, “Az első halál” [The First Death], Múlt és Jövő, 4 (Dec. 1914)  : 557–559. 67 Simon Hevesi, “A szabadság fiai” [The Sons of Liberty], Múlt és Jövő, 5 (April 1915)  : 123–124. 68 For example, Dr. Béla Vajda, “Zsidó várvédők” [ Jewish Defenders], Múlt és Jövő, 4 (Dec. 1914)  : 563–565. 69 Dr. Jenő Molnár, “Egy elesett bécsi költő” [A Fallen Poet from Vienna], Múlt és Jövő, 5 ( June 1915)  : 233–234. In one of his war poems, Zuckermann said that he was not afraid of the death on the battlefield, if only he could see Austrians attain victory over the Serbians before dying. (Walter Laqueur, The History of Zionism (London  : Tauris Parke, 2003), 172.).



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Fig. 5: Photography of Andor Boldizsár, actor published by Múlt és Jövő.

their country as poets with “lyre and sword.” (One of Zuckermann’s poems, the Reiterlied was later set to music by the Hungarian composer Ferenc Lehár, who also served on the front).70 That was the first occasion in the journal that the art of the fallen was presented as proper war poetry, “full of soul and force.” Moreover, Zuckermann was called “the only true poet of the war in Austria.” The deceased Austrian Zuckermann’s political Zionist activity was stressed much more than in the case of the Hungarian Dömény, who was previously commemorated. These also emphasized the aspect of engaging in fighting for their brothers – the Russian Jews – in the manner of the Maccabees. Fighting for the “oppressed Russian Jews” (and this was articulated as a purpose of the war for the Jews) was a typical spur to Zionism used by the Monarchy’s soldiers during the conflict, and “many were sensitized to notions of Jewish cultural nationhood.”71 Zuckermann’s obituary was the first necrology of the fallen intellectual that appeared Múlt és Jövő in which the author used documents for the sake of cred70 Róbert, Egyenlő jog a hősi halálra, 25.; Karl Katschthaler, “Hazafiasság és prófécia. A második bécsi iskola az első világháborúban” [Patriotism and prophecy. The second Viennese School during WWI] Accessed Feb. 7, 2017. https://dea.lib.unideb.hu/dea/bitstream/handle/2437/220857/ postfile_up_Katschthaler_H.pdf  ?sequence=1 (accessed December 11, 2018). 71 See Berkowitz, “Manly men and the attempted appropriation of the war experience, 1914–1918,” 13.

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ibility. None other than a German colonel canonized Zuckermann’s “war poetry,” and an extract of a letter serving as the proof was published. This post-mortem consecration of an individual by a high-ranked representative of the German army proved that talking about “war poetry” as well as “war poets” in the case of Jews was only considered unambiguous at this early phase of the conflict when the author was already dead and, in addition to this, recognized by the authorities. By comparison, Hungarian war poets belonging to gentiles were only being recognized as such by March 1915, with the main difference being that they had already became popularized during their lifetimes, unlike their Jewish counterparts. And the consecration of these individuals passed through literary and not military milieus. There are two other categories of writing about Jewish heroic deeds on the front, which complete the image of the fallen Jewish intellectual, which appeared in the journal by Spring 1915  : the fallen non-intellectual and the living intellectual having an experience on the front. Regarding the non-intellectual fallen in the first part of the conflict, Múlt és Jövő, if it could, published poems  : an example of this is the poem written by a certain Izidor Vázsonyi and dedicated to his dead son, which was kept in a private collection,72 and another example includes poems written by professional, home-front poets, which were dedicated to anonymous dead Jewish soldiers.73 Vázsonyi’s poem was a typically patriotic war poem which could have appeared in any kind of journal that energetically supported the war effort. Along with the dead Jewish intellectuals and artists, there were some living intellectuals who also worked on the battlefield or close to it as war journalists, and their works were presented in its pages  : these were journalists who also worked for Múlt és Jövő (Sándor Dénes, the non-Jew Mihály Lévai and Béla Székely who was also serving as a soldier.74) The discourse on Russia and refugees from Galicia that had appeared by March 1915 affected the Hungarian Jewish soldiers’ images as well in Múlt és Jövő, which had shown empathy towards refugees since the very beginning.75 Once again, this stance differed from that taken by the more hesitant, assimi72 Editors, “Vers egy hős apjától” [Poem from the Father of a Hero], Múlt és Jövő, 5 (March 1915)  : 117. 73 Zoltán Somlyó, “A hős” [The Hero], Múlt és Jövő, 5 (April 1915)  : 153  ; Jenő Molnár, “Halott katona” [The Dead Soldier], Múlt és Jövő, 6 ( Jan. 1916), 29. 74 Editors, “Három munkatársunk az északi harctéren” [Three of our Collaborators on the Northen Front], Múlt és Jövő, 5 (March 1915)  : 117.; Béla Székely, “Versek a harctérről” [Poems from the front], Múlt és Jövő, 5 (Dec. 1915)  : 464. (with photograph in uniform). 75 See for example  : Dr. Ernő Molnár, “A galíciai ahasverek” [The Ahashvers from Galicia] Múlt és Jövő, 5 (May 1915)  : 163–164.; József Patai, “Galíciai zsidó művészek” [ Jewish artists from Galícia] Múlt és Jövő, 5 ( July 1915), 246–249.



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lationist press, which was afraid of compromising war aims, namely, to obtain more equal rights for Jews. Refugees were described in Múlt és Jövő as war martyrs, whereas their saviors, the Hungarian Jewish soldiers, were described as heroes. Both images were treated as being rooted in diametrically opposed but complementary, historically Jewish self-images, that of the Wandering Jew and the Maccabees. A letter written by a soldier-rabbi attested that Jews from Galicia had pro-Hungarian feelings, and that they deserved pity and help from the gentiles.76 Progressively, both heroic front deeds and the heroes’ sufferings were presented in an equal manner in the journal. Consequently, Múlt és Jövő dealt with a delicate case of a Jewish musician in the Russian army, the opera tenor Albert Eisenberg who was described in his Hungarian captivity as a potentially loyal Hungarian citizen, capable of enriching Hungarian culture.77 Descriptions of the k. u. k army, in whose ranks Jewish soldiers served, indicated that it was an ideal, typical army where every soldier was equal, and which appeared even more civilized in the face of the self-sponsored discrimination and denial of rights of citizenship that characterized the Russian society and army.78 All this underlined – in the words of Aviel Roshwald – a “perceived contrast between conditions in Russia and the Central Powers.”79 Self-esteem and pride during the second half of WWI By 1916, Múlt és Jövő, like other Jewish groups and individuals in Hungary, was beginning to face the growing antisemitism in Hungary and which had already trickled down from the high ranks of parliamentary political parties.80 The editor of Múlt és Jövő seemed to realize more quickly than the assimilationist publica76 Antal Kertész (rabbi), “Azok a galíciai zsidók…” [Those Jews from Galicia…] Múlt és Jövő, 5 (May 1915), 194–195. 77 Múlt és Jövő, 6 (March 1916)  : 116. 78 See for example  : Béla Székely, “A nagy pogrom. Északi harctér” [The Big Pogrom. Northern Front], Múlt és Jövő, 5 (March 1915)  : 99–101. Secundus [ József Patai], “Nyolcvanezer orosz zsidó katona” [80 thousands Russian Jewish soldiers], Múlt és Jövő, 5 (March 1915)  : 116. See also on Russia  : Hoffmann, “Between integration and rejection  : the Jewish community in Germany, 1914–1918,” 90. 79 Aviel Roshwald, “Jewish cultural identity in Eastern and Central Europe,” in The Arts, Enter­ tainment and Propaganda, 1914–1918, Aviel Roshwald and Richard Stites (Cambridge  : Cambridge University Press, 2002), 92. 80 Péter Bihari, “Aspects of Anti-Semitism in Hungary 1915–1918,” in The Great War. Reflections, Experiences and Memories of German and Habsburg Jews (1914–1918), eds. Petra Ernst, Jeffrey Grossman, Ulrich Wyrwa, Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History. Journal of Fondazione CDEC, n.9 (October 2016).

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tion Egyenlőség that their previous efforts had convinced few beyond the Jews themselves. Consequently, Jewish heroism was no longer emphasized to provide proof of Jewish commitment for the majority society (to undermine stereotypes) by the Jewish cultural journal.81 Publishing photos by end of 1915 of living soldiers82 as well as presenting injured ones83 expressed more self-esteem and pride than attempts to refute accusations made by antisemites. For the first time in April 1916, the journal published names as well as portraits of its collaborators, who were serving as soldiers on the battlefield and who were not dead (Sergeant Mózes Bolgár, Hebrew historian Lipót Grünwald and voluntary Sergeant Jenő Szekula).84 It also began to publish notes or reports from different – the Northern and the Italian  – fronts (Izrael Klein, Géza Herczeg) as well as commemorative memoirs about the fallen that were written by family members or friends. In one of these, the author commemorated his own uncle, the fallen “simple grey bureaucrat” and called him a “hero.”85 The well-known mythical topoi of soldiers were also used – rising from the dead, returning from their graves to help their brothers-in-arms – which was widespread in German as well as in Hungarian patriotic descriptions. Here, the author reinterpreted these topoi  : the dead Jewish soldiers were climbing out of the graves to help the Jews accused by antisemites. Attesting Jewish heroism was not enough anymore… Even disappointment could be expressed (by poems)  : a recurring message was that Jewish blood had been spilled in vain because of the emerging antisemitism.86 During the first years the figure of the anonymous non-intellectual fallen soldier appeared only in Múlt és Jövő in patriotic war poems and was only described by war reporters who had experiences on the front, but by 1916 the journal began to publish front letters and testimonies written by all kinds of active soldiers as well as commemorations of both intellectual and non-intellectual fallen 81 Nevertheless, by the Spring of 1917 Múlt és Jövő also joined the debate related to the publication of the antisemite work, A zsidók útja [The Road of the Jews] written by the leftist jurist Péter Ágoston and the subsequent poll published by the review Huszadik Század on “the Jewish question.” The exceptional publication of a list of the fallen Jewish soldiers from Arad in 1917 needs to be interpreted in that specific context. (Editors, “Elesett aradi hősök” [Fallen heroes from Arad], Múlt és Jövő, 6 [ July 1917]  : 325). 82 Múlt és Jövő, 5 (Dec. 1915)  : 468–469 and 472–476. 83 Short stories and poems were starting to use these themes as well, and not only the theme of death. 84 Editors, “Munkatársaink a harctéren” [Our Collaborators on the Battlefield], Múlt és Jövő, 6 (April 1916)  :160. 85 József Szilágyi, “Egy magyar hős” [A Hungarian Hero], Múlt és Jövő, 6 ( June 1916)  : 225–227. 86 Henrik Lenkei, “Régi dal, régi dal…” [Old, old song…], Múlt és Jövő, 6 (April 1916)  : 97.



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soldiers that had been written by family members or friends. These intellectuals often died at the beginning of the conflict. An overdue obituary was published in July 1917 for the painter Oszkár Szirt, who had died two years before, in July 1915.87 He was described as behaving bravely and in a self-sacrificial manner, which was also explained in detail and confirmed by a letter written by a Protestant chaplain, which was published with the commemoration. Exceptionally, the letter reports the burial as well  : like many Jewish soldiers in WWI, Szirt was buried according to Christian (here  : Greek-Catholic) rites, and his tomb was marked by a wooden cross, a widespread symbol of the fallen soldier on every front – this was seen as a double tragedy in the case of a fallen Jew. The question of burying the fallen in a proper Jewish way began to be discussed in the journal by 1916  ; both accounts and photographs of tombs were published to prove that Jewish rites were respected on the front, but in fact, as this commemoration also showed, the respect for these rites was quite rare. By this time, a Jewish soldier-intellectual did not have to be dead in order to earn an account in the journal  : the painter Lajos Gimes, an officer, was celebrated for his work, which was exhibited in the Lemberg war.88 Even his portrait-photograph and his letter were published, which had been uncommon up until that time in the case of living intellectual soldiers. Such a representation, which emphasized the soldier’s sense of self-esteem, was repeated with the more balanced, pre-war, Jewish self-portrayals that were characteristic for Múlt és Jövő. For the first time, Hungarian Jewish soldiers – whether intellectual or not – who were decorated for heroic deeds were also mentioned in Múlt és Jövő.89 By comparison  : Egyenlőség had been publishing the names of decorated soldiers from early 1915 and on as well. However, in Múlt és Jövő, such a gesture was not meant to fight antisemitism but to emphasize the self-esteem and pride of the soldier  : a Jewish artist could fulfil his duty on the battlefield as a manly soldier. In 1918, it was not common to present somebody simply because he had been decorated  : Frigyes Weinwurm, whose photo detailing his injuries had been circulated in illustrated magazines from the beginning of the conflict and on, was presented in 1918, not because of his decorations but because of his role as a talented architect who was involved in projects on war memorials.90 By 1916, the journal was publishing more and more poems that expressed suffering (and no longer commitment or patriotism). Heroism also became re87 Menyhért Szász, “Szirt Oszkár” [Oszkár Szirt], Múlt és Jövő, 7 ( July 1917)  : 256–258. 88 Imre Szabó, Gimes Lajos [Lajos Gimes], Múlt és Jövő, 6 ( July 1916)  : 256–258. 89 Dr. Bolgár Mózes kitüntetése [The Decoration of Dr. Mózes Bolgár], Múlt és Jövő, 7 (Sept 1917)  : 369. 90 Dr. Géza Szász, Weinwurm Frigyes, Múlt és Jövő, 8 (March 1918)  : 103.

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lated to the sacrifice of parents who had sent their sons to the battlefield.91 For the first time, the journal began to emphasize the contribution of Jewish poets (from the homeland) to the pacifist movement in Hungary  : they contributed to shifts in national war poetry by highlighting the help given to sufferers and mourners instead of their glorification. By this time, even a young Jewish boy who helped the k. u. k. army deserved an account of his heroic deeds, such as the work performed by the camp rabbis and stories about religious observances on the front.92 Michael Berkowitz mentions such representations as consequences of WWI for Zionists  : the “war offered the unique opportunity to testify to the Jew’s mettle as able-bodied fighting men and as a stock worthy of equal rights.”93 In 1918, mourners gathered around Jewish soldiers’ war memorials were shown and pictures of the memorials themselves were shown. Photo-portraits of soldiers from the “Palestine battlefield” represented a complete novelty in the journal. The German, Zionist, art-nouveau, illustrator Ephraim Moses Lilien, whose works had been published by the journal since the beginning, was photographed in Palestine, and the pictures were published twice by Múlt és Jövő.94 As József Patai established as early as 1915  : “WWI made Palestine and Zionists ‘well-accepted’.”95 It was no longer possible to regard the Zionist as a marginal, albeit vocal, element in many Jewish societies96 due to the fact that Zionism was put on the international political map by the conflict.97 Michael Berkowitz claimed, like the West-European Zionists’ press releases, that “the transformation was imminent from war heroism during the war to heroism in pioneering in the Yishuv” (without celebrating violence, unlike many European (non-Jew) nationalists). 98 However, the defeat of Austria-Hungary, which led to two different left-wing political forces – a Democratic one and a Communiste one – succeeding each other in power in newly independent Hungary within nine months during 1918–1919, and loss of the one-third of the “historical” Hungarian territory, presented a complex challenge for and created a conflict of loyalties 91 92 93 94

Ch. Melicz, Hősök [Heroes], trans. Kálmán Löwenkopf, Múlt és Jövő, 7 (May 1917)  : 200–201. Béla Székely, Ábris, Múlt és Jövő, 6 ( July 1916). Berkowitz, “Manly men and the attempted appropriation of the war experience, 1914–1918,” 20. Editors, “E. M. Lilien a palesztinai harctéren” [E. M. Lilien on the Palestine Battlefield], Múlt és Jövő, 8 (Febr. 1918)  : 75  ; Múlt és Jövő, 8 (Aug. 1918)  : 309. 95 Secundus [ József Patai], Palesztináról [On Palestine], Múlt és Jövő, 5 (Febr. 1915), 74. Palestine reports were published since the very beginning of WWI. (see for ex. G. I. [  ?], “Jaffai level” [The Letter from Jaffa], Múlt és Jövő, 4 (Dec. 1914)  : 570–571.). 96 For the Viennese case see  : David Rechter, The Jews of Vienna and the First World War (London  : The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2001), 57. 97 Rechter, The Jews of Vienna and the First World War, 49. 98 Róbert, Egyenlő jog a hősi halálra, 24–25.



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among the editors and authors of Múlt és Jövő in the making of a proper Hungarian Cultural Zionist Review. Conclusion The heroic image of Jews on the front during WWI that appeared in Múlt és Jövő changed throughout the conflict. The monopoly of the dead soldier-intellectual gradually disappeared, replaced by living heroes, who appeared on the pages of this cultural journal that was taking a more and more outspoken Zionist stance. In addition, the monopoly of writers and artists came to an end during the second part of WWI, and “ordinary” Jews were presented as heroes, as well. At the beginning of the war, the Jewish warrior was a dead soldier – a manly man, a Hungarian patriot and someone who was loyal to the Monarchy. In the second part of the conflict, however, heroism became pluralized, and injured soldiers, camp rabbis and even simple boys could become war heroes. These individuals were all represented “as members of an embryonic nation they could show their worth as a fighting force.”99 All the accounts and documents published by the journal also helped “fight the stereotype of Jews unfit for war and unworthy of nationhood.”100 However, in the second stage of the war, representations of Jewish deeds – whether attributed to a fallen or a still living (intellectual-)soldier – served a new purpose  : not to fight antisemitism and prove the soldiers’ commitment to the national war effort (which rather characterized the first phase of the war), but to raise and articulate self-awareness in an effort to reinforce individual self-esteem, which was considered the only antidote to antisemitism and the moral basis of an emerging Jewish national self-awareness.

99 Berkowitz, “Manly men and the attempted appropriation of the war experience, 1914–1918,” 10. 100 Berkowitz, “Manly men and the attempted appropriation of the war experience, 1914–1918,” 24.

Eleonore Lappin-Eppel

Reflections on the Jewish War Effort in the Viennese Jewish Press 1918–1938 At the beginning of the war most Viennese Jews shared the patriotic fervour of the majority of their non-Jewish compatriots. They wanted to serve Emperor Franz Josef who had given them equal rights as citizens. Furthermore they hoped, that their contribution to the war effort would help them take the next step towards full equality by easing their way into Austrian society. The third important argument for the Jewish participation in the war was the fight against Tsarist Russia and the hope to liberate the Russian and Polish Jews.1 The Viennese Jewish press reflected and fostered these sentiments. However, by the end of September 1914 the Russian army had occupied Galicia, by the end of January 1915 also Bukovina. Hundreds of thousands inhabitants of the eastern theatre of war fled to the western parts of the monarchy or were transferred there by the Austro-Hungarian army. Tens of thousands of Jewish war refugees arrived in Vienna.2 Despite rigid censorship they were soon faced with antisemitism not only of the population but also of the Viennese municipal authorities, among them the Christian Social mayor, Richard Waiskirchner. Neither was the Jewish soldiers’ contribution to the war effort appreciated. On the contrary, rumours of Jewish shirkers and profiteers were rampant. Therefore, at the end of January 1915 the Zionist weekly Jüdische Zeitung published a call of the newly established Komitee Jüdisches Kriegsarchiv (Committee Jewish War Archive) asking its readers to collect information on Jewish volunteers for army service, on their deeds of valour and patriotism, on antisemitism in the army but also on expressions of appreciation of Jewish soldiers by non-Jewish superiors. In addition the Jüdisches Kriegsarchiv collected documentary material on the devastating effects of the war on the Jewish civilian population living in the eastern parts of the monarchy. With this material they hoped to raise sympathies for 1

Marsha L. Rozenblit, Reconstructing a National Identity. The Jews os Austria During World War I (New York  : Oxford University Press, 2001), 39–40. 2 For the first months of the war the exact numbers of refugees in Vienna is not known. On October 1, 1915, after the repatriation of app. 70.000 refugees 137.000 still remained in Vienna, of these 77.000 were Jews. See  : Beatrix Hoffmann-Holter, “Abreisendmachung”. Jüdische Kriegs­ flüchtlinge in Wien 1914–1923 (Vienna, Cologne, Weimar  : Böhlau Verlag, 1995), 25  ; Walter Mentzel, Kriegsflüchtlinge und Cisleithanien im Ersten Weltkrieg (PhD diss., University of Vienna, 1997), 268.

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the Jewish war refugees. Similar calls soon appeared also in the non-Zionist Jewish press. The Jüdisches Kriegsarchiv collected this information in order to be able to repudiate antisemitic slander. Although the majority of the founders of the “Jewish War Archive” were Zionists some of them also belonged to the liberal mainstream. They all saw the need to get ready to defend themselves and the Jewish population against vicious antisemitic attacks as soon as censorship would be lifted. They hoped to defeat the slander of antisemites with facts. Samples of the material collected were published between May 1915 and January 1917 in the five issues of the journal Jüdisches Archiv. Mitteilungen des Komitees Jüdisches Kriegsarchiv (Jewish Archive. Bulletin of the Committee Jewish War Ar­ chive). The issues included stories about courageous and patriotic Jewish soldiers, the names of fallen and decorated Jewish soldiers and officers but also reports about the suffering and the patriotism of the Jews in Galicia and Bukovina. Such the Jüdisches Archiv tried to tackle the two main issues of antisemitic slander  : the attacks against the Jewish war refugees and the denigration of Jewish soldiers. Although the effect of this publication was obviously minimal and antisemitism was soaring at the end of the war and during the first years of the republic, the five issues of the Jüdisches Archiv were re-published in one volume in 1920.3 The specificity of the Jüdisches Archiv was that it reported only about Jewish soldiers and Galician Jewish war refugees with the aim to fight antisemitism. However, lists of fallen and decorated soldiers were also published weekly in Dr. Bloch’s Österreichische Wochenschrift and to a lesser extent also in the Zionist Jüdische Zeitung. In addition there were also articles on Jewish war refugees, which had the aim to elicit the sympathies of the Jewish readers as well as castigate antisemitic attacks. In this paper my focus will be on the reflections on Jewish soldiers in the Viennese Jewish press in the years 1918–1938. I will try and show continuities and discontinuities in the portrayal of the Jewish participants of the war and investigate the aims that guided the press reports and commemorative acts. For the first years, 1918–1920, I am going to examine Dr. Bloch’s Österreichische Wochenschrift. Zentralrogan für die gesamten jüdischen Inter­ essen (Dr. Bloch’s Austrian Weekly  : Central Organ for all Jewish Interests), the Jüdische Korrespondenz. Wochenblatt für jüdische Interessen ( Jewish Correspondence. Weekly for Jewish Interests), the Jüdische Zeitung. National-Jüdisches Or­ 3

Jüdisches Archiv. Mitteilungen des Komitees “Jüdisches Kriegsarchiv” (Vienna  : Löwit 1915–1917)  ; reprint  : Vienna  : Löwit 1920. For a detailed discussion of the “Jüdisches Archiv” see  : Eleonore Lappin, “Zwischen den Fronten  : Das Wiener Jüdische Archiv. Mitteilungen des Komitees ‘Jüdisches Kriegsarchiv’ 1915–1918”, in Deutsch-jüdische Presse und jüdische Geschichte  : Doku­ mente, Darstellungen, Wechselbeziehungen / German-Jewish Press and Jewish History  : Documents, Representations, Interrelations, 2 vols., eds. Eleonore Lappin, Michael Nagel, (Bremen  : Edition Lumiére, 2008), vol. 1, 229–246.



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gan ( Jewish Newspaper. National Jewish Organ) and the Wahrheit. Unabhängige Zeitschrift für jüdische Interessen (The Truth. Independent Journal for Jewish Interests). Although these papers had a considerable readership during the war, all of them had either disappeared or had changed their editorial board and line by 1920. Therefore, for the years 1920–1938 I will analyse the newly launched Wahrheit, that had become the official journal of the Viennese Jewish community and of the Union österreichischer Juden (Union of Austrian Jews), the strongest faction on the board of the community, and the newly established Zionist journal Die Stimme. Jüdische Zeitung (The Voice. Jewish Newspaper). All papers presented were weeklies. Facts and figures On August 9, 1914 the Wochenschrift reported proudly, that the first fallen Austrian soldier was a Jew from Vienna.4 A week later it was sure that the good performance of the Jewish soldiers would finally put an end to antisemitic slander and wrote optimistically  : “The moment is too great for polemics against antisemitism. Nevertheless one can say that all its accusations belong to the past.”5 On August 23, 1914 the Wochenschrift started to publish long lists of Jewish soldiers and officers who had been decorated or who had died in combat.6 These dry lists were complemented by short biographies or descriptions of deeds of valour of fallen and/or decorated soldiers and officers.7 The lists with names of fallen Jewish soldiers disappeared from the pages already in September, what remained were personalized biographies of fallen soldiers with special emphasis on their patriotism and valour. Soon these lists did not only include decorated Austrian but also German Jewish soldiers. Short stories about Jewish soldiers who were decorated for their courage appeared until November 1918.8 The Zionist Jüdische Zeitung published such reports only about members of Zionist associations. They mentioned decorations and commemorated fallen Zionists.9 These soldiers did not only prove Jewish courage, but also the fact, that Zionists were just as patriotic and willing to sacrifice themselves for the Austrian monarchy as were non-Zionists. At the end of the war, however, fallen 4 5 6

“Der Welt-Tischobeaw 5674,” in Wochenschrift (9.8.1914), 547. “Der Kaiser Franz Josef I,” in Wochenschrift (16.8.1914), 561. “Kriegsdekorationen jüdischer Offiziere und Soldaten,” in Wochenschrift (23.8.1914), 529–530  ; “Weitere Auszeichnungen,” in ibid, 530. 7 “Auf dem Felde der Ehre gefallen,” in Wochenschrift (23.8.1914), 530. 8 “Auszeichnungen”, in Wochenschrift (1.11.1918), 695. 9 “Zionisten im Felde”, in Jüdische Zeitung (JZ) (9.10.1914), 2.

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soldiers were commemorated together with other prominent Zionists who had passed away.10 Their valour got special mention, but they were seen as part of the Zionist organisation, as comrades in the joint struggle for Jewish national rights. The Judenzählung ( Jew Count), the notorious Jewish census in Germany from 1916, introduced a new powerful weapon into the propaganda war between Jews and antisemites  : statistics. On October 11, 1916, the Prussian minister of war, Adolf Wild von Hohenborn, issued a decree to count all Jews serving in the German army on November 1 of this year. Of special interest was to find out whether a proportionate number of Jews served at the front lines. As Wild’s successor General Hermann von Stein claimed, the purpose of the census was to disprove the repeated accusations of antisemites that Jews were shirking front line service. But many of the German Jewish soldiers interpreted the census differently. They understood the order as an antisemitic act that, despite their contribution to the German war effort, put the Jews under the suspicion of shirking and – by counting only them – segregated them from their comrades, the general community of soldiers.11 As Jacob Rosenthal points out in his study on German Jewish soldiers in WWI, the Jewish census of the German army introduced a new climate  : religion, and particularly the Jewish religion became relevant, the percentage of Jews in certain professions was collected. However, as Rosenthal also points out, the idea to count how many Jews served in the army was first brought up by German Jewish associations who, just like the Austrian Jews, wanted to be prepared to counter antisemitic attacks. However, other than the Austrians, the German Centralverein deutscher Bürger jüdischen Glaubens (CV, Central Association for German Citizens of Jewish Faith) and the Verband der deutschen Juden (VddJ, Union of German Jews) did not rely solely on testimonies, but also established the “Committee for War Statistics” in order to be able to respond to antisemitic attacks with facts.12 Therefore, at the end of the war, German Jewish associations possessed a wealth of statistical material that could be used against the statistics of the German authorities and the antisemitic interpretations of them.13 There were no numbers of Jewish soldiers and officers who had served in the Austro-Hungarian army during the war. While the personal files of Austrian soldiers conscripted before the war mentioned their religious faith, those of the 10 See f.i.: JZ (25.10.1918), 6. 11 Jacob Rosenthal, “‘Die Ehre des jüdischen Soldaten’. Die Judenzählung im Ersten Weltkrieg und ihre Folgen” Campus Judaica, vol. 24, (Frankfurt – New York  : Campus Verlag, 2007), 14. 12 Ibid, 14, 42. 13 For a detailed description of the Jewish census and its effects during and after the war see  : Ibid, and Werner T. Angress, “Germany’s ‘Judenzählung’ of 1916. Genesis – Consequences – Significance,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook (LBIYB) XXIII (1978), 117–135.



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men conscripted during the war lacked this information. Furthermore, the Austro-Hungarian army disintegrated together with the monarchy. The new nation states showed no interest in the number of soldiers who had fought for a monarchy they despised. Furthermore, there was no willingness to share statistical material with other countries. Under these circumstances it was impossible to even try and find out the exact number of Jewish soldiers who had served during the war or the number of casualties. Furthermore, many documents of the soldiers conscripted in Galicia – and most Jewish soldiers came from this crown land  – had been destroyed during the fighting. The military of the Austrian Republic made an attempt to find out how many Jews from their territory had participated in the war. In 1924, Maximilian Paul-Schiff, one of the researchers, published the results of this survey. The study was exact and objective but the statistical material at hand covered no more than a section of the officer corps. There the number of Jews was over proportionate. About 1.000 Jewish officers had died.14 Considering the fact that every fifth NCO of the Austro-Hungarian army was Jewish these numbers are no surprise. For some reason these numbers did not make the Jewish press. This is even more surprising considering the fact that numbers from other countries were published, albeit not prominently. Surprisingly, the first numbers to be published were those of Jewish soldiers who had fought in the Entente armies. Already in 1919, the rift that had been caused by the fact that during the war Jews were fighting against Jews in enemy armies was overcome. The Viennese Jewish press considered the Jewish soldiers of the Entente armies as part of their collective  ; Jews were once again seen and portrayed as one people. Therefore the number of Jewish soldiers in the American or British army was of interest to Austrian Jewish readers. In March 1919, the orthodox Jüdische Korrespondenz reported that 200.000 Jews had served in the US-American army, of those 2.000 had lost their lives, 10.000 had been wounded.15 In August of the same year the same journal as well as the Zionist Jüdische Zeitung brought the numbers from the British armies – the English as well as that of the colonies.16 1925 the Wahrheit, reported about new studies on Jewish soldiers in the British, American and French armies. These studies investigated numbers as well as the performance of Jews in uniform. Due to additional statistical material the outcome was even more impressive than that of the earlier 14 Maximilian Paul-Schiff, “Teilnahme der österreichsch-ungarischen Juden am Weltkriege, Eine statistische Studie,” in Jahrbuch für jüdische Volkskunde 1924–25(Mitteilungen zur Jüdischen Volkskunde Nr. 26–27), 151–156. 15 “Rundschau (Die Kriegsverluste der amerikanischen Juden),” in Jüdische Korrespondenz (JK) (20.3.1919), 3. 16 “Rundschau (Der Anteil der Juden in der englischen Armee),” in JK (8.8.1919), 6  ; “Der Anteil der Juden in der englischen Armee,” in JZ (1.8.1919), 6.

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surveys. As the author of this article pointed out, the Jews of Britain had not only proven worthy of the civic rights they enjoyed, but also contributed to Jewish honour. Special attention was given the Australian General John Monash, who never made a secret out of his Jewish descent.17 As commander of the Australian Corps, at the time the largest corps on the Western Front, Monash had contributed decisively to the allied victory – and the defeat of the Central Powers. In 1925, however, Monash’s military success was a source of pride also for Austrian Jews. The article of 1919 as well as that of 1925 pointed out that Jews in the British armies were most often decorated for saving wounded comrades under mortal danger. As this was apparently both times quoted from the English original the image of Jews not as warriors but as faithful comrades and humanitarian helpers was a topos in the British-Jewish commemoration of the war that was adopted by the Viennese Jewish press as well. The most surprising number came from Poland. Quoting the Yiddish Hajnt the Jüdische Korrespondenz reported in 1919 that no less than 3.000 Jewish prisoners of war in France had joined the French army under the Polish General Józef Haller.18 The journal did not elaborate on the fact that Jewish and Polish soldiers from Austria had joined the French army. Neither did it mention that the “Blue Army”, as Haller’s troops were also called, returned to Poland to fight in the Polish-Ukrainian and Polish-Soviet wars where they soon became notorious for their brutal antisemitism. However, a few weeks later the Jüdische Kor­ respondenz reported about attacks on Jews in Cracow committed by the Haller army when it entered the town.19 This second notice did of course not mention the Haller army’s Jewish members. Reports on Jewish soldiers in foreign armies were quite obviously published quite randomly and uncritically when they arrived in the office of the editor. Still, the fact that Jews were fighting in many armies as well as their numbers were of interest to the readers. Already during the war the Viennese Jewish press had from time to time published names of decorated German soldiers. After the war the numbers of German Jewish soldiers were the most frequently quoted ones until they gained a symbolic meaning as will be shown later. This was not to be foreseen when they first appeared on the back-pages of the newly launched Wahrheit. Contrary to the liberal old Wahrheit that had been shut down at the end of 1918, Ludwig Hirschfeld, editor of the new paper, considered 17 Ben Jehuda, “Die Juden in den Armeen der Entente,” in Wahrheit (4.12.1925), 4  ; Ben Jehuda, “Die Juden in den Armeen der Entente,” in Wahrheit (25.12.1925), 8. Also  : “Kriegsmemoiren eines jüdischen Generals,” in Wochenschrift (31.10.1919), 658. 18 “Juden in der Armee Haller,” in JK (8.5.1919), 3. 19 “Rundschau,” in JK (13.6.1919), 6.



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the fight against antisemitism a central task.20 After quashing the left-wing revolution of 1918/19 in Hungary Miklós Horthy established a regime with antisemitism as its official ideology. 1920 the notorious “numerus clausus”-law was issued that limited the number of students at Hungarian universities to the percentage of Jews in the overall population. As Hungary was defined as a Christian nation state Jewish press and institutions were suppressed.21 In September 1920, the Wahrheit reported that the Hungarian conservative antisemitic soldiers’ association “Move” (Magyar Országos Ergyesület  ; Hungarian Association for National Defence) had submitted a petition with the Hungarian National Assembly to bar Jewish officers from the Hungarian army. In response to this anti-Jewish measure the Hungarian Jewish paper Egyenlöség asked Major General Géza Lukachich about his opinion on the performance of Jews in the Habsburg army. Lukachich’s answer reflected the official spirit of the Habsburg army but also became a standard argument in the post-war era when he said that in the field a soldier’s faith did not matter. Therefore he could not say how many Jews served under him. What he could however say was that there never were any complaints about Jewish soldiers.22 A year later the Wahrheit once again quoted Egyenlöség’s survey among Hungarian Generals about their opinion on the performance of Jewish soldiers. This time the general’s statement was used as general proof of Jewish valour. In support of this subjective opinion the paper published the numbers of Jewish soldiers that German Jewish associations had worked out  : 100.000 Jews had served in the German army, these were more than 17 percent of the German-Jewish population. 3.500 Jewish soldiers were decorated and 23.000 promoted, of those 2.000 to officers.23 The Wahrheit quoted the German numbers together with the praise of the Hungarian general in order to silence the slander of Jewish soldiers in Austria. In 1921 Erich von Ludendorff published his book “Kriegführung und Politik” (Warfare and Politics)24 that included vicious attacks against Jews. In the years to come Ludendorff ’s antisemitism and the response of German Jewish organisations were a recurrent topic in the Wahrheit. In response to Ludendorff ’s book of 1921 Der Schild, the periodical of the Reichsbund jüdischer Frontsoldaten (Imperial Union of Jewish Front Soldiers), published the later iconic numbers of the Jewish contribution 20 “An die Leser”, in Wahrheit (4.3.1920), 3–4. This article was the mission statement of the paper. As the first two pages of the Wahrheit were reserved for commercials, page 3 was actually the front page. 21 László Varga, “Ungarn,” in Dimension des Völkermords. Die Zahl der jüdischen Opfer des National­ sozialismus, ed. Wolfgang Benz (Munich  : Oldenbourg Verlag, 1991), 331–352, 331. 22 “FML Lukachich über die jüdischen Soldaten,” in Wahrheit (10.9.1920), 12. 23 “Juden im Weltkrieg,” in Wahrheit (18.8.1921), 12. 24 Berlin  : Mittler & Sohn 1921.

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to Germany’s war  : Of 540.000 German Jews 100.000 had served in the army, 12.000 had given their lives.25 In the following years the interest in the Jewish contribution to the war waned. However, in 1932, the Reichsbund published a memorial book for the German Jewish victims of World War I.26 The book gave not only figures but listed also more than 10.000 names and personal data of fallen soldiers as well as descriptions of their deeds of valour.27 Even in 1932 German Jews believed in the power of facts, figures and rational arguments and hoped that this book would have a positive influence on the anti-Jewish atmosphere in Germany. For Austria such figures or memorial publications still did not exist. In September 1937, Sigmund Edler von Friedmann, the leader of the Bund jüdischer Front­ soldaten Österreichs (Association of Jewish Front Soldiers of Austria) presented figures that were also published in the Wahrheit. At a large memorial rally of the Bund he talked about 200.000 Jewish soldiers in the army of the Austrian parts of the Habsburg monarchy, of whom 30.000 were killed.28 In November 1937, the Zionist Stimme published the same numbers.29 These numbers are to this day accepted also in historiography,30 although the source is unknown. Meanwhile, the 12.000 German Jewish soldiers killed during the war had been endowed with an international meaning. In 1933, the Nazis had come to power in Germany. When they started to delete the names of Jewish soldiers from war memorials this also became an issue of interest for Austrian Jews. As German Jews could no longer commemorate their fallen brethren the Austrian Bund initiated of memorial event for them in Vienna in November 1935 as a sign of solidarity.31 A few weeks later, on the occasion of the unveiling of a plaque for the unknown Jewish soldiers from Vienna’s 20th district Rabbi Benjamin Murmelstein pointed out that while the many Austrian Jewish soldiers who fell far away from their home were now commemorated in Vienna their 12.000 25 “Der Reichsbund jüdischer Frontsoldaten,” in Wahrheit (12.1.1922), 1  ; see also  : “Ludendorffs andere Lorbeeren,” in Wahrheit (1.1.1922), 11  ; “Kontra Ludendorff,” in Wahrheit (6.2.1922), 11. 26 Reichsbund jüdischer Frontsoldaten ed., Die jüdischen Gefallenen der deutschen Heeres, der Ma­ rine und der deutschen Schutztruppen 1914–1918. Ein Gedenkbuch, (Berlin  : Verlag “Der Schild”, 1932). 27 “Den 12.000 Toten,” in Wahrheit (21.10.1932), 6  ; see also  : “Wofür eigentlich  ? Die Zahl der gefallenen jüdischen Offiziere,” in Stimme (24.11.1932), 6. 28 “Heldengedenkfeier des Bundes jüdischer Frontsoldaten,” in Wahrheit (17.9.1937), 7. 29 “150.000 jüdische Tote im Weltkrieg. Jeder zehnte jüdische Soldat gefallen,” in Stimme (3.11.1937), 3. 30 Erwin A. Schmidl, “Jüdische Soldaten in der k.u.k. Armee,” in Weltuntergang. Jüdisches Leben und Sterben im Ersten Weltkrieg ed. Markus Patka (Vienna – Graz – Klagenfurt  : Styria, 2014), 45–51, 46. 31 “Eine Erklärung des Bundes jüdischer Frontsoldaten in Wien,” in Stimme (1.11.1935), 3.



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German brethren were extinct from collective memory.32 Events like this were in line with the definition of Austria by the austrofascist regime as the better German state. Commemorating the 12.000 fallen German Jewish soldiers became a form of protest against the anti-Jewish politics of Nazi Germany also in other countries. When in the fall of 1935 the Nuremberg Laws were issued, French Jewish veterans protested against them with an appeal to the League of Nations that also mentioned the 12.000 Jewish soldiers who had given their lives for Germany during the war.33 A few weeks later the Comité Mondial des Anciens Combattants Juif (World Committee of former Jewish soldiers) decided to establish a “village of the 12.000” in memory of the fallen German Jewish soldiers in Palestine. The village should become a home for their families.34 Such the 12.000 German-Jewish soldiers who had lost their life during the war became the rallying point for international Jewish anti-Nazi protest. Finding a place in the new nation state At the end of the war Viennese Jews had to come to terms with a new political reality  : Vienna was no longer the capital city of a multi-ethnic monarchy but of a small republican German nation state. The monarchy had recognized Jews as a religious minority and most Austrian Jews were content to keep this status also in the new Republic. All they wanted was that their rights as equal citizens were honoured. This opinion was unequivocally expressed in the liberal Wahrheit as well as in the orthodox Jüdische Korrespondenz and the Wochenschrift. All three papers rejected the Zionist demands for the recognition of the Jews as a nation and of national minority rights for them. On November 11, 1918 the Wahrheit expressed the opinion of the majority of Viennese Jews when it wrote that they did not want limited national minority rights in exchange for full equality as citizens. What made them particularly suspicious was the support of the Zionist demands by antisemites.35 This suspicion soon proved to be right, the victims were Jewish soldiers.

32 “Der jüdische Unbekannte Soldat,” in Stimme (29.11.1935), 2  ; “Enthüllung einer Votivtafel im 20. Bezirk,” in Wahrheit (6.12.1935), 6. 33 “Protest der jüdischen Frontkämpfer Frankreichs,” in Stimme (11.10.1935), 6. 34 “Ein Dorf der 12.000,” in Stimme (8.11.1935), 1. The proposal of the Vienna office was formally accepted by the international congress of Jewish war veterans in 1936. The plan was not realized. “II. Weltkongress der jüdischen Frontkämpfer,” in Wahrheit (19.6.1936), 5. 35 “Der Weg zur Einigung,” in Wahrheit (1.11.1918), 3.

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On November 4, 1918, the Zionists established a Jewish National Council as representation of Austrian Jewry.36 On November 8, this National Council organized an assembly of Jewish soldiers. In the course of this event the soldiers swore allegiance to the Jewish National Council and demanded the recognition of the Jews as a national minority. They passed a resolution to the effect that they would fulfil all duties of Austrian citizens, but refused to declare themselves as Austrians, as for them as Jewish nationalists this would be perjury. Finally they authorised the Jewish National Council to negotiate their status within the Austrian army.37 At this time the atmosphere in Vienna was tense. Tens of thousands of soldiers who were no longer under the control of the collapsed army passed through the city on their way home to the newly established states. Antisemitism was rampant among the Viennese and there was fear of pogroms. Therefore the Jewish National Council established a Jewish guard of demobilized soldiers and members of the Jewish youth movement in order to protect those parts of Vienna that were densely populated by Jews. When the National Council tried to get these Jewish soldiers incorporated into the new republican army as a separate national unit the secretary of military affairs, Georg Mayer, and the secretary for the interior, Heinrich Mataja, – both Christian Socials – rejected this request. However, as the Zionist Jüdische Zeitung reported with glee, both secretaries showed understanding for the Jewish soldiers’ claim that their oath on Austria would be perjury. Therefore the Jewish soldiers decided to join the Viennese Town Guard.38 The Jewish National Council represented only a small minority of Viennese Jews and Jewish soldiers. The majority of Viennese Jews were not even aware of these decisions and the following negotiations. They learned about it three weeks later when the army doctors of the monarchy were to be sworn in to the republican army. Among the 100–120 doctors there were also 25–30 Jews, all of them veterans of the war. To their surprise and outrage, Secretary for People’s Health, Ignaz Kaup, refused to let the Jewish doctors say the oath. He explained that as the oath was restricted to German nationals he first had to check with the Jewish National Council if the Jewish military doctors were eligible to take it. The deeply offended Jewish doctors left the room under protest. The next day they met with Austrian President Karl Seitz and Chancellor Karl Renner who both apologized.39 Kaup, Mayer and Mataja were 36 David Rechter, The Jews of Vienna and the First World War (London – Portland – Oregon  : The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2001), 168–169. 37 “Soldatenversammlung,” in JZ (8.11.1918), 4 38 “Jüdische Gruppe in der Wiener Stadtschutzwache,” in JZ (15.11.1918), 4. 39 “Ablehnung jüdischer Militärärzte bei der Angelobung,” in Wahrheit (29.11.1918), 4  ; “Zwischenfall bei der Angelobung von Militärärzten,” in JK (5.12.1918), 6.



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Christian Social antisemites. For them the claim of the Jewish National Council that Jews were not Austrians made sense. However, contrary to the hopes of the Zionists they did not want to give the Jews national minority rights, but simply segregate and discriminate them within the new Austrian nation state. The Zionists in their national fervour did not see the trap. The Jewish mainstream soon woke up from its post-war stupor and vigorously fought the demands of the Jewish National Council. The Republic recognized the Jews as a religious but not a national minority. The status of Jews as citizens was under dispute in many of the post-war successor states of the monarchy. As shown in the Viennese Jewish press, Jewish soldiers often were the first victims of segregation or discrimination. As mentioned above, in 1920, there were demands to exclude Jewish officers from the new national army in Hungary.40 Already in spring 1919, the Polish Vice-Minister of War ordered the release of all Jewish officers who were beyond the age of compulsory military service. After a protest of the Jewish Club in the Sejm, the Polish parliament, this order was withdrawn.41 From Lithuania and Belarus the press reported that Jews were considered foreigners and therefore barred from military service as well as voting.42 The treatment of Jewish soldiers and officers such clearly reflected the status of Jews as citizens in the post-war states. Therefore, reports about their fate were of interest for the Viennese Jewish press. The Jewish Legion The collapse of the Habsburg Monarchy and the establishment of new nation states was a time of crisis for the Jews of Eastern and East Central Europe. Pogroms erupted in Hungary, Poland and in the Czech Republic. During the wars between Poland and the Ukraine and Poland and the USSR attacks on Jews and Jewish property were frequent. However, there also was one positive outcome of the war  : in November 1917 the British had promised in the Balfour Declaration to support the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. In the months that followed the Britisch Army conquered Palestine from the Ottomans. Although Austrian and also Jewish Austrian soldiers fought on the side of the Ottoman troops in Palestine, the Zionist Jüdische Zeitung reported on the military prog40 “FML Lukachich über die jüdischen Soldaten,” in Wahrheit (10.9.1920), 12. 41 “Rundschau (Entlassung der jüdischen Offiziere in Polen.),” in JK (8.5.1919) 3  ; “Rundschau (Die Wiederaufnahme gewesener jüdischer Offiziere in die polnische Armee),” in JK (9.9.1920), 10. 42 “Rundschau (Keine Aushebungen in Litauen und Weißrußland),” in JK (8.5.1919), 3.

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ress of British troops in Palestine with barely hidden satisfaction.43 In October 1918 the paper pointed out  : “The British army and its auxiliary troops, among which the official military report also mentions the legion of Jewish volunteers, has occupied all of Palestine and continues inexorably northwards.”44 Pointing to the Balfour Declaration the paper added  : “This historic act of November 2, 1917 gave rise to immense gratefulness of the Jewish people.”45 As the war against the Entente was still going on the article ended with an appeal to the Austrian government to also declare its sympathy and support for the establishment of the Jewish homeland in Palestine. However, it was clear that the Zionists preferred British over Ottoman rule in Palestine and that also the majority of Austrian Zionists had changed into the camp of the Entente. The Jüdische Zeitung reported about administrative improvements in Palestine after the conquest by the British and pointed out that volunteers for the Jewish Legion were trained in Egypt.46 The fact the Jewish soldiers fought with the British meant that they participated in the conquest of the land the Balfour Declaration had promised them. Shortly after the outbreak of war the Zionist leaders Vladimir Jabotinsky and Josef Trumpeldor had started to lobby for the creation of a Jewish unit within the Entente forces. They hoped that this visible Jewish contribution to the war effort would strengthen the Zionist position in the negotiations for Jewish rights in Palestine after the war. The first Jewish unit was the Zionist Mule Corps that is best known for supplying British troops during their disastrous defeat in Gallipoli in 1915. The British only founded a true Jewish Legion after they had introduced conscription in 1916 and looked for ways to also mobilize the 30.000 Jewish male citizens of Russia who resided in England. Understandably, these Russian Jews were not willing to fight in an alliance with the Tsar. When in 1917 the United States where an even greater number of Russian Jews lived entered the war the Jewish Legion was established in order to attract them and their compatriots in Britain. The Legion consisted of five thousand men who came from Great Britain, North America and Palestine. While the soldiers from Britain primarily joined the Legion in order to avoid being sent back to Russia to fight on the Eastern Front or – after the fall of the tsarist regime – in order to be eligible for British citizenship, about a third of the American troops were members of Zionist organisations. Most of the Palestinian Jews were also of Russian origin and had therefore been expelled by the Ottomans as enemy 43 “Die Kämpfe in Palästina,” in JZ (27.9.1918), 1. 44 “Entscheidende Stunden, Zionisten im Felde,” in JZ (4.10.1918), 1. 45 Ibid. 46 “Die Lage in Palästina (Aus einem Brief ),” in JZ (4.10.1918), 4.



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aliens. They had found refuge in Alexandria where they had joined the Jewish Legion. These soldiers from the Yishuv, the Jewish sector in Palestine, hoped not only to get more rights in Palestine, but also to later become the nucleus of a Jewish army there. The British Commander-in-Chief, General Edmund Allenby, made it a point to include the British units of the Legion in his troops when they conquered Palestine. After the war the Jewish Legion became a liability for the British because they wanted to act as a Jewish army in Palestine which would have increased Arab unrest. Therefore most of the soldiers of the Jewish Legion were soon demobilized, only a part of the men was included in the First Judean Battalion that was used for guard duties and other ancillary works.47 In October 1918, when the Jüdische Zeitung reported about the Legion there were still additional volunteers trained in Egypt and hopes were high that they would indeed become the future Jewish army. “What we need are farmers and soldiers,” the author of the article declared, “they will give birth to a new Jewish spirit, that will help the Jewish people to convalesce, they will create the true Jewish centre.”48 Until the arrival of the Jewish Legion the ideal of the valorous Palestinian Jew was the Shomer, the Jewish farmer who also defended his colony. In the summer of 1918 the German translation of the book “Jiskor” was reviewed in the Jüdische Zeitung. The book commemorated fallen Shomrim, but as Robert Weltsch, the reviewer, pointed out, the book celebrated Jewish national life rather than death.49 In the militant atmosphere at the end of the war and particularly for the defeated Austrian Jewish soldiers the victorious Jewish Legion had more appeal than the modest Shomrim. Therefore the assembly of Jewish soldiers organised under the auspices of the Jewish National Council in November 1918 sent greetings to the Jewish Legion.50 It does not come as a surprise, that the Jüdische Zeitung called the troop of Jewish soldiers who watched over the Jewish population in Vienna at the end of the war also “Jüdische Legion” ( Jewish Legion).51 In October 1919 the non-Zionist Wochenschrift reported about disappointed members of the Jewish Legion in Palestine.52 However, also this paper soon changed its tone. One month later a reprint from the Dutch Algemeen Handelblad praised Jabotinsky as a leader and the deeds of the Jewish Legion.53 At the begin47 Derek J. Penslar, Jews and the Military. A History, (Princeton  – Oxford  : Princton University Press, 2013), 196–199. 48 “Die Lage in Palästina (Auseinem Brief ),” in JZ (4.10.1918), 4. 49 “Ein Buch des Gedenkens,” in JZ (23.8.1918), 1. 50 “Soldatenversammlung,” in JZ (8.11.1918), 4. 51 “Juden und Jüdinnen Österreichs  !,” in JZ (16.5.1919), 1. 52 “Wehrhafte Judeans in Palästina,” in Wochenschrift (10.10.1919), 628. 53 “Die jüdische Legion in Palästina,” in Wochenschrift (14.11.1918), 695.

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ning of 1920 the Wochenschrift reported about the foundation of the First Judean Battalion. This article claimed that all units of the Jewish Legion had contributed decisively to the conquest of Palestine, which was a gross overstatement.54 More realistic and better informed were the reports in the Zionist press. In December 1919 the Jüdische Zeitung wrote about the possible dissolution of the Jewish Legion, but added that there were hopes that parts of the men would remain in Palestine to keep law and order. The article also mentioned that American members of the Legion refused to fight outside of Palestine and demanded their demobilization. 100 of them intended to stay in Palestine and to establish the colony Balfouria with the help of the American Zionist Commonwealth.55 Balfouria was founded in 1922 as one of the first Moshavim – semi-private collectives – in Palestine. It soon became clear that the British would not create a Jewish army in Palestine but were determined to keep up law and order with their own troops. In March 1920 the Jewish settlements Metullah and Tel Hai in northern Palestine were attacked as a result of tensions in French controlled Syria and Lebanon. In Tel Hai Josef Trumpeldor, one of the fathers of the Jewish Legion, was killed. Other attacks on Jews followed and the Zionists complained that the British did to do enough for their safety. Their fears became true when during the Muslim Nebi Musa pilgrimage in the Judean desert in April 1920 three days of violence broke out in Jerusalem that left five Jews dead and 200 injured. Also four Arabs were killed and 25 injured. Jewish anger was directed against the British administration for not acting firmly enough. Vladmir Jabotinsky, who had tried to lead a Jewish self-defence in Jerusalem was sentenced to 15 years penal servitude. The sentence was later moved to one year. In May 1920 the San Remo conference granted Great Britain the Mandate for Palestine under the Covenant of the League of Nations.56 The Viennese Jewish press criticized the British authorities. Among the critics was the Jüdische Korrespondenz, the journal of the Agudas Jisroel, the international organisation of (ultra-)orthodox Jewry. The Agudas Jis­ roel also favoured the colonization of Palestine, however only in the spirit of the Thora. They were sharp antagonists of the secular Zionists and of course also of the British occupiers. Quoting the Times the Jüdische Korrespondenz criticized that the Judeans together with Indian troops were sent to quell an Arab uprising in Jericho, but were not allowed to interfere in Jerusalem.57 More extensive 54 “Ein jüdisches Schutzbataillon in Palästina,” in Wochenschrift (9.1.1920), 26. 55 “Jüdische Regimenter in Palästina,” in JZ (5.12.1919), 2. 56 Ian Black, Enemies and Neighbours. Arabs and Jews in Palestine, 1917–2017 (London  : Alan Lane 2017), 42–43. 57 “Rundschau (Aktion eines Battalions),” in JK (2.7.1920), 7.



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reports about the incidents are to be found in the Zionist Jüdische Zeitung. It accused the British of inciting the Arabs against the Jews. At the same time it expressed its satisfaction that the incidents in Jerusalem had secured the Jews the British Mandate in San Remo.58 This shows that despite all complaints the Zionists considered the British Mandate as a chance to build their homeland. As the Jüdische Zeitung closed down in 1920 and the Stimme started to appear only in 1928 no Zionist papers were analysed for this paper for the period in between. The Jewish Legion was mentioned by the liberal Wahrheit in 1921 when it reported about Jabotinsky’s leaving the Zionist movement. Without giving any details the Wahrheit called the effects of the Jewish Legions “not particularly happy” and Jabotinsky an “armed daredevil” who had forgotten “that the age of the Makkabeans cannot be combined with methods of the 20th century.”59 However, when Jabotinsky was to visit Vienna and give a speech there in 1924, the Wahrheit praised him and the members of the Legion who had defended the Jews of Jerusalem in 1920.60 That the evaluation of Jabotinksy and the Legion were so completely different in these articles shows that the paper had no editorial line on this issue. Also the Zionist Stimme mentioned the Legion only in November 1929, almost two years after its launch. The article reported favourably about Jabotinsky’s and the Zionist-Revisionists’attempts to found a Legion.61 This article shows that it was the Revisionists who saved the legacy of the Legion and used it for their political aims. In 1935 they invited Lieutenant-Colonel John Henry Patterson, the commander of the Jewish Legion during WWI, to give the opening lecture at the Revisionist meeting in Vienna.62 In his talk Patterson reminded the British government that it was the Jewish Legion that conquered Transjordan.63 The message was clear  : the Revisionists demanded a Jewish State on both sides of the Jordan, the conquest of the Transjordan by the Jewish Legion was supposed to justify this demand.64 58 “Das jüdische Jahr 5680,” in JZ (10.9.1920), 2  ; “Aus den Tagen des Pogroms in Jerusalem (Schreiben von E.F. Waschitz),” in ibid. 59 “Wladimir Jabotinsky,” in Wahrheit (15.2.1923), 14. 60 “Jabotinsky in Wien,” in Wahrheit (23.5.1924). 61 Dawid Schechet, “Die jüdische Legion,” in Stimme (28.11.1929), 3. 62 In 1923 Seev Jabotinsky had founded the Revisionist party within the Zionist World Organization. While the ZWO was dominated by leftwing Zionists Revisionists represented more radical rightwing national politics and even showed sympathy for Italian fascism. In 1935 Jabotinsky left the ZWO and founded in Vienna the “New Zionist Organization” that advocated instant mass immigration to Palestine and a Jewish state on both sides of the Jordan. 63 “Die jüdische Legion hat Transjordanien erobert,” in Stimme (13.9.1935), 6. 64 For the limited impact of the Legion on the Yushuv see  : Penslar, Military and the Jews, 199.

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While the Jewish Legion was of high symbolic value for the defeated Austrian Zionist soldiers at the end of the war this interest soon gave way to more pressing issues concerning the colonization of Palestine as well as life in Austria. Memory and commemoration65 The Austrian Jewish soldiers had fought for a large multi-ethnic monarchy and returned home to a small republic that did not believe in its own survival and hoped for a speedy annexation to Germany. Vienna was starving and freezing  ; the economy was in shambles. Many women and children had lost their husbands and fathers in the war and now had to manage without a breadwinner. A considerable part of the soldiers were crippled and unable to return to their prewar jobs. “Jewish misery” ( Jüdisches Elend)66 became an important issue for the Zionists who claimed that only the Jewish National Council organized help for demobilized soldiers and other Jewish poor.67 In fact, help for the impoverished Jewish population was a challenge for all Jewish organizations as well as the Jewish community. In order to tackle the problem of poverty they all cooperated, also with the Zionists.68 Another important aim of the Jewish community as well as the Zionist organization was the release of Jewish prisoners of war. This process took several years. In the meantime the Viennese rabbis Max Grunwald and Béla Fischer forwarded mail and money to Prisoner-of-War- camps.69 Nevertheless it was again the Zionist press that wrote most frequently about the issue of prisoners of war waiting to be repatriated.70 The present difficulties left little or no time for collective commemoration of the past. The first Austrian communities to commemorate fallen Jewish soldiers 65 Gerald Lamprecht, Jewish Soldiers in Austrian Collective Memory 1914 to 1938, 311-331 66 See the publication  : Bruno Frei, Jüdisches Elend in Wien (Vienna – Berlin – Leipzig  : R. Löwit, 1920). 67 “Juden und Jüdinnen Österreichs  !,” in JZ (16.5.1919), 1. 68 “Demobilisierten Fürsorge  !,” in JZ (23.5.1919), 8. See also  : “An der Schwelle einer neuen Zeit,” in Wahrheit (15.11.1918), 3  ; Josef Grob, “Die Wiener Kantoren im Kriege,” in Wahrheit (27.12.1918), 5. 69 See for example  : “Unsere Kriegsgefangenen in Italien,” in Wochenschrift (7.2.1919), 88  ; “Unsere Kriegsgefangenen in Italien,” in Wochenschrift (14.3.1919), 165  ; “Korrespondenz mit Kriegsgefangenen,” in JZ (28.3.1919), S. 6. 70 “Unsere Kriegsgefangenen in Rußland,” in JZ (14.2.1919), 5  ; “Das Schicksal der jüdischen Kriegsgefangenen in Sibirien,” in JZ (1.8.1919), 1  ; “Juden in der Kriegsgefangenschaft”, ibid, 6  ; “Unsere Kriegsgefangenen in Rußland,” in JZ (3.10.1919), 7  ; “Jüdischer Nationalrat für Österreich (Plenarversammlung am 9. März 1920),” in JZ (19.3.1920), 2  ; “Die Heimkehr der Kriegsgefangenen in Sibirien,” in JZ (6.8.1920), 7.



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were Döbling in Vienna in 191971 and Linz72 in 1920, the community of Baden followed on June 19, 1921. Chief Rabbi Wilhelm Reich had been a prominent and highly patriotic military chaplain during the war such that it does not come as a surprise that his community should be the first to establish a tradition of commemoration of their fallen brethren. The community not only erected a monument surrounded by heroes’ graves with stones that carried their names. In addition, in the ceremonial hall a memorial plaque with the names of all fallen Jewish soldiers from Baden was unveiled. The ceremony itself was a simple community affair.73 Contrary to Baden, the graves of Jewish soldiers who had succumbed to their wounds in Vienna during the war and had been buried in the old Jewish cemetery at Vienna’s Central Cemetery (Zentralfriedhof, Gate I) had no stones and there was no memorial. As the editor of the Wahrheit pointed out in 1921, a war memorial and grave stones were not only a pious duty towards the fallen soldiers, but also a visible proof of their sacrifice for their home country and therefore a repudiation of antisemitic slander.74 In 1922 the first Viennese memorial plaque was unveiled at the Ottakring Synagogue.75 When after a number of community memorials in different districts of Vienna and in the provinces in 1929 the Jewish war memorial on Vienna’s Central Cemetery was finally dedicated this was not a modest community affair. Besides representatives of the Jewish community of Vienna Austrian prime-minister Johann Schober and the Viennese army commander General Otto Wiesinger spoke, the band of Infantry Regiment Nr. 3 played the music, representatives of ministries, embassies and the church attended.76 The growing number of Jewish war memorials and memorial plaques could not make up for the lack of a Jewish veterans’ association that could develop a tradition of commemorating the fallen Jewish soldiers and defending the living Jews against antisemitism. The only veterans’ organization was the Verband jüdischer Invaliden und Heimkehrer (Association of Jewish Invalids and Homecomers) which had been established in 1919. At the constituent assembly its head, Lieutenant Walach, stated that this organization was made necessary by the rampant antisemitism Jewish veterans were faced with. They were discriminated against in the invalids’ association but also on the labour market. They 71 “Eine Gedenktafel für die jüdischen Kriegsopfer,” Wiener Morgenzeitung, October 1, 1919, 5. 72 Cf. Gerald Lamprecht, “Erinnern an den Ersten Weltkrieg aus jüdischer Perspektive 1914– 1938,” in  : zeitgeschichte, 41/4 (2014)  : 242–266, 252. 73 “Kriegerdenkmaleinweihung in Baden bei Wien,” in Wahrheit (7.7.1921), 11. 74 “Juden im Weltkrieg,” in Wahrheit (18.8.1921), 11. 75 “Einweihung einer Gedenktafel,” in Wahrheit (7.4.1922), 14. 76 “Kriegerdenkmäler für jüdische Soldaten. Eindrucksvolle Enthüllungsfeier auf dem Zentralfriedhof,” in Stimme (17.10.1929), 3.

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were insulted, attacked and driven into poverty. This antisemitism, so Walach, showed that the many thousand Jewish soldiers who had fallen during the war had died for nothing.77 The “Association of Jewish Invalids and Homecomers” was a Zionist initiative. The program of a large memorial meeting in January 1920, however, shows that it had become a general community affair. In the Konzerthaus, Vienna’s largest concert hall, patriotic poems by the fallen Zionist poet Hugo Zuckermann were recited, Vienna’s chief cantor Morgenstern sang the “Requiem” by Salomon Sulzer and Rabbi Max Grunwald gave the memorial speech.78 Still, the organisation was a badly needed welfare institution rather than a general representative of Jewish veterans. The defence of the honour of Jewish soldiers remained to a large extent the task of the Jewish press. In doing so the Wahrheit frequently quoted the German Reichsbund jüdischer Frontsoldaten (Imperial Association of German Front Soldiers).79 In August 1924, ten years after the beginning of WWI, the Wahrheit devoted three issues to Jewish soldiers. These issues painfully reflected the disappointment of Austrian Jews in the face of rabid antisemitism.80 Consequently, the Wahrheit reached the conclusion that Austrian Jews needed a veterans’ organisation like the Reichsbund jüdischer Frontsoldaten in Germany.81 It took until August 1932 that the Zionist Stimme could finally report the establishment of the Austrian Bund jüdischer Frontsold­ aten (Union of Jewish Front Soldiers) in Vienna. The president of the Viennese Jewish community, former chief staff surgeon Dr. Alois Pick, vice-president Josef Löwenherz and General Emil Sommer presided over the assembly, which according to the Stimme attracted an audience of several hundred. “This first public assembly of Jewish front soldiers,” wrote the Stimme, “was an impressive

77 “Konstituierende Generalversammlung des Verbandes jüdischer Kriegsteilnehmer und Kriegsbeschädigter,” in Wochenschrift (21.3.1919), 185  ; see also  : “Jüdische Kriegsteilnehmer und Kriegsgeschädigte  !,” in Wochenschrift (14.3.1919), 171  ; “Vereinsnachrichten. Verband der jüdischen Invaliden und Heimkehrer,” in JZ (21.11.1919), 7. 78 “Gedenkfeier zu Ehren der im Weltkrieg gefallenen Juden,” in Wochenschrift (16.1.1920), 41. 79 See for example  : “Der Reichsbund jüdischer Frontsoldaten,” in Wahrheit (12.2.1922), 1  ; “Der Reichsbund jüdischer Frontsoldaten,” in Wahrheit (23.2.1922), 12  ; “Kontra Ludendorff,” in Wahrheit (9.3.1922), 11  ; “Die Tagung des Reichsbundes jüdischer Frontsoldaten,” in Wahrheit (17.10.1924), 11. 80 “Kriegsgedenktag,” in Wahrheit (1.8.1924), 3  ; “Feuilleton. Jüdische Offiziere in Altösterreich,” in Wahrheit (8.8.1924), 2  ; “Die Lüge von der Kriegsschuld,” in Wahrheit (8.8.1924), 9  ; “Frieden im Kriege  : 1914 – Krieg im Frieden  : 1924,” in Wahrheit (15.8.1924), 7  ; “Frieden im Kriege  : 1914 – Krieg im Frieden  : 1924” (22.8.1924), 6. 81 “Die jüdischen Deutschen als Vorbild,” in Wahrheit (22.8.1924), 6  ; “Die Tagung des Reichsbundes jüdischer Frontsoldaten,” in Wahrheit (17.10.1924), 11  ; “Reichsbund jüdischer Frontsoldaten,” in Wahrheit (17.8.1925), 17.



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demonstration of Viennese Jewry that they are no longer prepared to allow the National Socialists to slander and attack them without a response.”82 The establishment of the Bund was a reaction to recent political developments in Vienna. At the elections for the Viennese municipal council in April 1932 the National Socialists had gained 15 mandates and three times as many votes as in 1930. With this they had reached third place behind the Social Democrats and the Christian Socials. Encouraged by this success they committed even more violent attacks against the Jewish population.83 In this crisis the Bund was founded as a Jewish defence organization. It was supposed to counter the defamation of Jewish soldiers and prove that they had fulfilled their duty just like other citizens. In addition to this the Bund also established a self-defence troop, although it insisted that the protection of Jews was the responsibility of the authorities.84 The Wahrheit did not report about this assembly but a few weeks later published a call of the Bund that invited veterans who could prove their service at the front and/or were decorated to join it.85 The Bund also introduced new forms of commemoration. Once again the Jewish community in Baden was a forerunner and organized the first joint memorial ceremony with the Bund. While the dedication of the war memorial had been a modest community affair, the event of 1932 attracted almost 1.000 participants. Rabbi Arnold Frankfurter, former Jewish chaplain for the Vienna garrison, held the memorial speech in which he praised Jewish heroism and protested against false accusations and hatred of Jews. A. Weiß, representative of the Bund greeted the mayor and vice-mayor of Baden, the commander of the local Frontkämpfer­ vereinigung (Union of Front Fighters) as well as generals and officers. General Sommer and a delegation of 400 members of the Bund had come from Vienna. The mayor of Baden as well as the head of the “Union of Front Fighters” praised their Jewish comrades. They pointed out, that during the war religious faith had been completely irrelevant as all soldiers had been suffering together. The commemoration ended with a military ceremony of the Bund.86 82 “Die jüdischen Kriegsteilnehmer protestieren gegen die Judenhetze,” in Stimme (4.8.1932), 3. 83 Albert Lichtblau, “Das fragile Korsett der Koexistenz  : Zu Verhältnis von jüdischer und nichtjüdischer Bevölkerung 1918 bis 1938,” in Zwischen großen Erwartungen und bösem Erwachen. Juden, Politik und Antisemitismus in Ost- und Südosteuropa 1918–45, ed. Dittmar Dahlmann (Paderborn et al.: Schöningh, 2007), 31–51, 37. 84 “Die jüdischen Kriegsteilnehmer protestieren gegen die Judenhetze,” in Stimme (4.8.1932), 3. 85 “Bund jüdischer Frontsoldaten Österreichs,” in Wahrheit (9.9.1932), 5. 86 “Ein Band, das alle eint. Gedenkfeier für die im Kriege gefallenen Juden in Baden bei Wien,” in Wahrheit (9.12.1932), 4. See also  : “Gedenkfeier für die im Krieg gefallenen Juden in Baden bei Wien. Sensationelle Ansprachen,” in Stimme (1.12.1932), 4  ; “Heldengedenkfeier des Bundes jüdischer Frontsoldaten Österreichs,” in Wahrheit (16.6.1933), 5.

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The Bund had been created because the Jewish soldiers did not get the esteem they deserved and were reviled and attacked. To counter slander effectively the Bund always invited high-ranking non-Jewish members of the army to speak at its ceremonies and to praise their Jewish soldiers or comrades. On these occasions the members of the Bund donned their medals and uniforms, the events invariably ended with a military parade. The memorial ceremonies of the Bund always drew a large audience just as the number of its members rose rapidly – in Vienna as well as in the provinces. The reason for its attraction was that the Bund also arranged social events and celebrated Jewish festivals like Chanukka, mostly in cooperation with the Jewish communities.87 Therefore the Wahrheit, the journal of the Vienna Jewish community, announced these events and depending on their importance wrote reports about them. At the end of December 1932 the first issue of the Bund’s own journal, Die Front (The Front), came out.88 In September 1934, the Bund fulfilled its promise and unveiled the first 100 memorial stones with the names of fallen Jewish soldiers who were buried in front of the Jewish war memorial on Vienna’s Central Cemetery. According to the Stimme 30.000 people attended the ceremony, which also reflected Austria’s political change from the republic to the Austrofascist authoritarian state. Besides leading figures of several Jewish communities high-ranking members of the Vaterländische Front (Patriotic Front), the only party allowed under the new regime, as well as their paramilitary organisations and representatives of the Austrian army were present. Despite the antisemitism of the reigning Christian Socials the Bund shared their conservative Austrian patriotism and their rejection of National Socialism. Therefore the Bund also joined the Vaterlän­ dische Front.89 The Jewish speakers praised Jewish heroism and expressed their hope that with the help of their non-Jewish war comrades they would finally achieve justice and equality. At the end of the ceremony 3.000 members of the Bund in uniform marched along the Simmeringer Hauptstraße.90 This time the Wahrheit did not report about the ceremony but quoted the introduction to the special issue of the Front penned by Major-General Wilhelm Zehner, secretary 87 See for instance  : “Der Bund jüdischer Frontsoldaten,” in Wahrheit (6.1.1933), 7  ; “Bund jüdischer Frontsoldaten,” in Wahrheit (10.3.1933), 7  ; “Lustiger Abend des Bundes jüdischer Frontsoldaten,” in Wahrheit (5.1.1934), 7  ; “Der Bund jüdischer Frontsoldaten,” in Wahrheit (9.2.1934), 6. 88 “Jüdische Feigheit,” in Stimme (5.1.1933), 4. 89 For the history and the ideology of the Bund jüdischer Frontsoldaten see  : Gerald Lamprecht, ‘Erinnerung an den Krieg  : Der Bund jüdischer Frontsoldaten Österreichs 1932 bis 1938,’ in Wel­ tuntergang. Jüdisches Leben und Sterben im Ersten Weltkrieg, (Katalog des Jüdischen Museums Wien), ed. Markus Patka (Wien – Graz – Klagenfurt  : Styria, 2014), 200–210, 205. 90 “Wiens Judenschaft ehrt ihre Kriegstoten,” in Stimme (21.9.1934), 5.



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of state in the ministry of defence. Zehner praised the Bund for commemorating the fallen Jewish war heroes and expressed the gratitude of the Austrian army towards them.91 When the memorial ceremony was repeated the next year it again drew a large audience.92 The Bund had succeeded to create a central ceremony for all fallen Austrian Jewish soldiers that also resonated with the Viennese Jews that lived in an increasingly (para-)militarized society under the shadow of Austrian fascism and of the threat of Nazi Germany. The Bund had established impressive rituals of commemoration and initiated the unveiling of a number of memorials or memorial plaques in different parts of Austria as can be seen by different articles in Stimme and Wahrheit. The fallen Jewish soldiers were not only remembered, but also defended. Defending the dead also meant defending the living Jews, their honour and their place in society that increasingly were put into question. International Activities In 1928 the Stimme reported of a call from Shalom Schwarzbart [sic  !] in Paris to found an international union of Jewish soldiers.93 In May 1930 his idea was partially realized with a meeting of European associations of Jewish veterans in Paris. President of the meeting was Zewi Heller, member of the Polish Sejm. This meeting also was rife with military rituals. After the first day of deliberations the participants laid down a wreath at the grave of the Unknown Soldier in Paris, the following day former Jewish volunteers of the French army held a festive commemoration of the 15th anniversary of the battle of Carency. Honorary presidents were the chief rabbi of France and the French minister of defence. As the Stimme pointed out, the German Reichsbund jüdischer Frontsoldaten did not participate in the meeting. The major aim of the conference was to prepare the establishment of a world association of former Jewish front soldiers.94 91 “Das Leben für Staat und Heimat,” in Wahrheit (26.10.1934), 5. 92 “Wiens Judenschaft ehrt ihre Kriegsgefallenen. Gedenken für die im Weltkrieg gefallenen jüdischen Soldaten,” in Stimme (29.6.1933), 9. 93 “Ein Weltverband der jüdischen Kriegsteilnehmer,” in  : Stimme (27.9.1928), 4. After the failed revolution of 1905 Schwartzbart had fled from Russia to Paris where he worked as a watchmaker. During the war he first fought with distinction with the French Foreign Legion and later joined the Red Guards in the Ukraine to fight the Cossacks that were massacring Jews. In 1926 Schwarzbard shot Simon Petlyura, leader of the Cossacks, in Paris, but was acquitted by a French court. See  : Who‘s Who in Jewish History  : After the period of the Old Testament. New edition revised by Lavinia Cohn-Sherbok, Joan Comay, (Oxford  : Routledge 2002). 94 “Für einen Weltverband jüdischer Frontsoldaten,” in Stimme (15.5.1930), 5.

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Five years later, in June 1935, Paris hosted the first world conference of Jewish soldiers. The conference was under the patronage of the French president and hosted by the municipality of Paris, high-ranking parliamentarians participated as guests. According to the Stimme the delegates represented 450.000 Jewish soldiers who had served at one of the fronts during World War I. The delegation of the Austrian Bund spoke in the name of its 22.000 members. The largest delegation came from Poland. The aim of the conference was to unify the Jewish veterans for the defence of Jewish rights and the fight against antisemitism. The delegations from different countries should prove that Jewish soldiers of all war faring countries had fulfilled their duty. The unity of the Jewish soldiers from former enemy countries was also meant as a contribution to world peace. Several speakers, among them French ministers, criticized the anti-Jewish policy of Nazi Germany.95 In their next issues Wahrheit and Stimme reported about another, rather ambivalent international veterans’ meeting in the name of peace  : German veterans visited England to improve the peaceful relations between the two countries. According to the paper The Star, which was quoted by the Viennese Jewish press, the English Jews greeted this delegation with more of less silent protest. Jewish members of the British Legion, the association of British veterans, shunned the official receptions of the Germans. The reason for this protest was the expulsion of the German Jews from the German Wehrmacht. The Board of Deputies of British Jews called this a severe legal discrimination of the German Jewish population that put the peaceful intentions of the German government in question. The anti-Jewish policies of Nazi German worked in favour of the standing of Austria  : Major Brunel Cohen, treasurer of the British Legion, announced that he was going to visit Vienna and contact the Austrian front fighters.96 Already at the Paris conference the British Ex Servicemen’s Legion made Sigmud Edler von Friedmann an honorary member  ; in July Major Brunel Cohen and Colonel S. W. H. Ashwanden visited Vienna and its veterans’ associations as members of a delegation of the British Legion. They also were received by the Bund jüdischer Frontsoldaten.97 For the Viennese Jewish press the good relationship between Jewish and non-Jewish British veterans became a repeatedly mentioned paradigm for best practice.98 95 “450.000 jüdische Frontkämpfer auf der Pariser Konferenz,” in Stimme (21.6.1935), 1  ; “Weltkonferenz jüdischer Kriegsteilnehmer geschlossen,” in Stimme (26.6.1935), 2  ; “Weltkonferenz jüdischer Kriegsteilnehmer,” in Wahrheit (28.6.1935), 5. 96 “Die Frontkämpfer-Besuche,” in Wahrheit (28.6.1935), 3  ; “Die deutschen Frontkämpfer in England,” in Stimme (28.6.1935), 4. 97 “Nach Abschluss der Weltkonferenz jüdischer Frontkämpfer,” in Wahrheit (5.7.1935), 7. 98 “Wie England jüdische Helden ehrt,” in Wahrheit (15.11.1935), 6  ; “Christliche Frontkämpfer Englands ehren jüdische Frontgefallene,” in Wahrheit (15.10.1937), 6.



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In June 1936 Vienna hosted the 2nd World Conference of Jewish Front Fighters. The Wahrheit published the ambitious program of the conference that had been organized by the Bund jüdischer Frontsoldaten. It was to discuss the role of Jewish front fighters in the pursuit of Jewish unity as well as measures to increase memorial activities for fallen Jewish soldiers. The most ambitious memorial project was the establishment of the village in Palestine in memory of the 12.000 fallen German Jews. In general, emigration and colonization were important topics of the conference as was the fight against antisemitism.99 At the opening ceremony in Vienna’s Musikvereinssaal 2.000 people gave standing ovations to the 100 delegates from 13 countries. Vienna’s Chief Rabbi as well as members of the Vaterländische Front and of associations of Austrian soldiers also welcomed them. As an innovation Captain Sigmund Friedmann, head of the Bund commemorated not only the fallen Jewish soldiers of World War I, but also those of Palestine. A central issue of the conference was the deplorable situation of the Jews in Germany.100 However, the conference could do little more than express its indignation. The only concrete decision was to boycott the Olympic games that were soon to take place in Berlin. Another solution to the situation of Jews in Germany was emigration. Palestine was the preferred, albeit not the only destination. Therefore the conference appealed to the British government to enable former front fighters to immigrate to Palestine. With their “discipline and prudence” they promised to be a positive element within the Jewish population. The delegates also demanded that the Jews of Palestine should have the right to defend themselves rather than having to rely on the British soldiers. In order to be able to fight antisemitism effectively the conference demanded an education of the Jewish youth in “the spirit of the front fighters”. The valour of the Jewish soldiers was no longer just a topic of commemoration but a paradigm for the Jewish future – in Palestine as well as in Europe. Given the growing influence of their enemies Jewish militancy seemed to be the appropriate solution. In order to realize the resolutions of the conference a steering committee of the Comité Mondial des Anciens Combattants Juif (World Committee of former Jewish soldiers) was established in Vienna. Captain Sigmund Friedmann was elected its president, lieutenant Ernst Stiaßny secretary general.101 However, the Jewish front fighters did not succeed in influencing the course of Jewish history. The Vienna conference was the last international meeting of Jewish veterans before World War II.

99 “II. Weltkongress der jüdischen Frontkämpfer,” in Wahrheit (19.6.1936), 5. 100 “2. Weltkongreß der jüdischen Frontsoldaten,” in Wahrheit (3.7.1936), 6. 101 “Die Beschlüsse des II. Weltkongresses jüdischer Frontkämpfer,” in Wahrheit (10.7.1936), 7.

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Conclusion Jewish soldiers were a recurrent but by no means central topic of the Viennese Jewish press between the wars. Austria had not just lost the war, but also the monarchy the soldiers had fought for. Jewish hopes that their contribution to the war effort would bring them social acceptance was shattered. The memory of their fallen brethren was overshadowed by antisemitic slander. The effect of this was that people and especially the Jews wanted to build up a normal life and forget the horror of war. However, accusations of Jewish shirking and Jewish profiteering remained part of the arsenal of the antisemites. The Jewish press did not tire to remind their readers of the valour of Jewish soldiers and to criticize the malevolent wrong accusations. Also rituals of commemoration of fallen Jewish soldiers were not only acts of piety, but also of defence of the living Jews. During the war the issue that hundreds of thousands Jews were fighting each other in enemy armies was hardly broached in the Jewish press. However, after the end of the war the press quickly restored the unity of the transnational Jewish people. A clear sign of this unity was that numbers of Jewish fallen soldiers of all war faring countries were of interest and Jewish heroism in former enemy armies became a source of pride. It seems that German Jews did not share these Austrian attitudes. The fact that the German Reichsbund jüdischer Frontsoldaten did not participate in the first world congress of Jewish soldiers in 1930 shows that they had obviously not overcome the rift caused by war-time antagonism. At the end of the war the Jewish Legion, a unit in the British and US armies, was seen as the core of a Jewish army in Palestine. When this did not materialize it would have been soon forgotten had not the Zionist Revisionist movement used it for its propaganda. For many years commemoration of the fallen Jewish soldiers was primarily an act of private mourning and sometimes a simple community affair. A cult of the Austrian Jewish war heroes and veterans was slow to develop. Only in 1932, when the Nazis became a threatening political force in Vienna the Bund jüdischer Frontsoldaten was established. Its remarkable growth reflects the need for an organization to defend Jewish honour and valour in an increasingly militarized society and in the face of Nazi aggression. However, neither the Austrian nor the international Jewish veterans’ organisations could prevent the catastrophe of the Jews of Europe.

Olaf Terpitz

Literary Notes and Historical Documents Shimon An-Ski’s Yiddish togbukh fun khurbn (1921–23) and Simon Dubnov’s Russian Story of a Jewish Soldier (1917)

World War I, undoubtedly, marked a decisive caesura in the twentieth century from geopolitical and geo-cultural perspectives. It entailed, eventually, the break up of three European Empires – the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, the Russian Empire, and the Ottoman Empire, as well as the German Empire, and, thus, the re-organization of Europe’s political landscape. However, not only the transition from the imperial to the national took place in its fault zones but also a new recognition of the individual and his or her experience. The traumata, ruptures and experiences of World War I became a central topos in the European literature, although with different perspectives and genre preferences. Several more or less well-known writers may be mentioned, such as Egon Erwin Kisch (Schreib das auf, Kisch [Write that down, Kisch], German edition, 1929), Erich Maria Remarque (Im Westen nichts Neues [All quiet on the Western Front], German edition, 1929), Ernst Jünger (In Stahlgewittern [Storm of Steel], German edition, 1920), Henri Barbusse (Le Feu. Journal d’une escouade [Under Fire], French edition, 1916), A. P. Herbert The Secret Battle (1919), May Sinclair A Journal of Impressions in Belgium (1915), W. Somerset Maugham Ashenden. Or the British Agent (1928), Ernest Hemingway A Farewell to Arms (1929), Sofya Fedorchenko (Narod na vojne [The people at war], Russian edition, 1917), or Olha Kobylanska (Snyt’sja [A Dream], Ukrainian edition, 1917).1 The war and its ensuing regional conflicts found entry, hence, into German, French, English, Russian, Polish, and other literatures. It also became a central topic, however, in Jewish literature and in Yiddish literature in particular, such as Isaak Babel’s Russian diary Konarmejskij dnevnik 1920 goda [1920 Diary] from 1

Recently, a German-Ukrainian anthology was published that compiles texts from the German, Ukrainian, and Yiddish literature that place a focus on the heavily embattled region of Galicia  ; see  : Alla Paslawska, Tobias Vogel, Wolodymyr Kamianets, eds., Galizien. Aus dem großen Krieg. Halyčyna. Z velykoj vijny, (L’viv  : VNTL-Klasyka, 2014). Other German-Jewish writers from Galicia who wrote about war experiences include  : Hermann Blumenthal, Galizien. Der Wall im Osten. Kriegserzählungen, 1915  ; Hermann Sternbach, Wenn die Schakale feiern, 1917  ; Simon Spund, Die Schreckensherrschaft der Russen in Stanislau. Selbsterlebte Schilderungen, 1915  ; Sigmund Bromberg-Bytkowski, Die Juden Lembergs unter der Russenherrschaft, 1917.

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1920, his collection of short stories Konarmija [Red Cavalry] based loosely on his 1920 Diary and his experiences, and Sholem Ash’s Yiddish account der yidisher soldat [The Jewish Soldier] from 1918. As Jillian Davidson shows in her recent study2 and David Roskies amply documents in his anthology,3 Jewish writers and poets, especially in Eastern Europe, located the sujet of World War I in the tradition of the khurban (Hebrew) resp. khurbn (Yiddish), meaning destruction or catastrophe. They put it in a cultural-historical trajectory that extended from the destruction of the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem (586 BCE resp. 70 CE) to the massacres during the Khmelnytsky Uprising (1648–57), on to the Kishinev pogrom (1903), then to World War I, and eventually to the Shoah. Despite the dynamics that accompanied the centenary of the Great War a number of documents and texts about the war fell into oblivion, lost their audiences, or were only recently rediscovered. To those belong, indubitably, Shimon An-Ski’s Yiddish war diary togbukh fun khurbn and Simon Dubnov’s Russian Istorija evrejskogo soldata [Story of a Jewish Soldier]. The aesthetics of both accounts of the Great War draw on the genre of the autobiography, stressing the moment of memory and remembrance that is so central to Jewish tradition.4 However, they transcend and expand it semantically inasmuch as they accentuate the category of “experience” and capture the voice of the individual. World War I, it appears, entailed not only political and societal ruptures, but also exerted a significant influence on the literature of the time and, specifically, on its aesthetics, themes, and genres.5 In An-Ski’s diary as well as in Dubnov’s story, the autobiographical impetus, which places a focus on the perspective of the respective life, is nuanced by moments of documentation and testimony in a more global sense.6 Literary representation was tied to ethics and gained the (po2 Jillian Davidson, “A ‘Secular Catastrophe’ in Eastern Europe. The Great War and the Reconstruction of Modern Jewish Memory” (unpublished PhD thesis, Jewish Theological Seminar ( JTS), New York, 2003). 3 David G. Roskies, ed., The Literature of Destruction. Jewish Responses to Catastrophe (Philadelphia, New York, Jerusalem  : The Jewish Publication Society, 1989), especially here 203–355. 4 See, for example, Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor. Jewish History and Jewish Memory. Foreword by Harold Bloom (Seattle, London  : University of Washington Press, 1996 [1982]). 5 See, for example, Olaf Terpitz, “Vom Rande Europas – Betrachtungen zur Performativität von Zugehörigkeit im Schreiben und Habitus von Lev Nussimbaum,“ Jahrbuch der Gesellschaft für europäisch-jüdische Literaturstudien/ Yearbook for European Jewish Literature Studies 1, ed. Petra Ernst (Berlin  : de Gruyter, 2014), 216–235. 6 Literature, in its function of giving evidence and testimony, has been widely discussed recently, see, for example  : Susanne Frank, ed., Evidenz und Zeugenschaft. Für Renate Lachmann (München  : Sagner, 2012)  ; Claudia Nickel and Alexandra Ortiz Wallner, eds., Zeugenschaft. Per­ spektiven auf ein kulturelles Phänomen (Heidelberg  : Winter, 2014)  ; Thomas Weitin, Zeugenschaft. Das Recht der Literatur (München  : Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2009).



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tential) “material” dimension of litigability that could only be redeemed after the Shoah.7 The witness and, to be more precise, the eyewitness, connected his or her testimony with his or her individual experience, a source of information that came to be acknowledged as valuable only after World War II and the Shoah.8 In the following reflections and analyses, I will discuss not only what was represented in An-Ski’s and Dubnov’s texts, but also the ways the two writers tried to represent the war atrocities committed against the Jewish population (and to make sense of them) in an ethnographic-factual manner and a textual-aesthetical way. Shimon An-Ski’s togbukh fun khurbn – recording voices Shloyme Zanvl Rapoport (1863–1920), who became known under his pen name Shimon An-Ski, displayed an impressive scope of interests and facets in his work.9 He worked in this way as a publicist and writer who published in Yiddish as well as in Russian.10 His presumably most famous text is the play The Dybbuk (Yiddish original  : der dibek. tsvishn tsvey veltn) that premiered in 1920 in War  7 See, for example, the studies of Laura Jockusch  : Laura Jockusch, “Khurbn Forshung  – Jewish Historical Commissions in Europe (1943–1949),” Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 6 (2007)  : 441–473  ; Laura Jockusch, Collect and Record  ! Jewish Holocaust Documentation in Early Postwar Europe (Oxford  : Oxford University Press, 2012).  8 See the multi-faceted work of Geoffrey Hartman on witnesses and testimony, e.g.: Geoffrey Hartman, The Longest Shadow. In the Aftermath of the Holocaust (Bloomington  : Indiana University Press, 1996)  ; Geoffrey Hartman, “Intellektuelle Zeugenschaft und die Shoah,” in Niemand zeugt für den Zeugen. Erinnerungskultur und historische Verantwortung nach der Shoah, ed. Ulrich Baer (Frankfurt/ Main  : Suhrkamp, 2000), 35–52  ; Geoffrey Hartman, “The Humanities of Testimony. An Introduction,” Poetics Today 27  :2 (2006)  : 249–260  ; but also case studies such as  : Stephan Braese, “Zwischen Trauma und Publikum. Zeugenschaft und Literatur am Beispiel Primo Levis,” Psyche – Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse 57 (2003)  : 9–10, p. 960–981  ; Michael Elm and Gottfried Kößler, eds., Zeugenschaft des Holocaust. Zwischen Trauma, Tradierung und Ermittlung. Heraus­ gegeben im Auftrag des Fritz Bauer Instituts (Frankfurt/ Main, New York  : Campus Verlag, 2007). 9 Rapoport chose his pen name “An-Ski,” as Roza Èttinger recounts in her memoirs, in connection to his journalistic activities  : When Rapoport started to collaborate with the journal “Russ­ koe bogatstvo” (“Russian wealth”) under Gleb Uspenskij, he needed a pen name since the name “Rapoport” was fairly widespread and, therefore, he chose “An-Ski” in remembrance of his mother Anna resp. Khana (the version of “Annenskij” was not possible since a leading contributor, the “narodnik” N.F. Annenskij already claimed it), Roza Nikolaevna Èttinger, Ierusalim, 1980, 12. 10 Due to his political interests, An-Ski also wrote the hymn of the Yiddish “Bund,” the General Jewish Labour Bund in Lithuania, Poland and Russia (algemeyner yiddisher arbeyter bund in lite, poyln un rusland), founded in 1897, which was a major political and cultural player at the turn of the 19th/20th century, with the title “di shvue” [The oath].

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saw. Apart from his creative work, An-Ski can be considered as co-founder of the Jewish ethnography in the Russian Empire. Together with Simon Dubnov and others, he founded – in the spirit of the OPE (the Society for the Promotion of Enlightenment among the Jews of Russia) – the “Jewish Historical-Ethnographic Society” in 1908 in St. Petersburg. Shortly before World War I, he conducted ethnographic expeditions, funded by Baron Vladimir Ginzburg, to the Pale of Settlement (Russian “čerta postojannoj osedlosti”) that was to be dissolved officially only by the end of the war. During those expeditions, he documented aspects of East European Jewish life, collected oral folktales, songs, and material artefacts together with colleagues such as the photographer Solomon Yudovin and the ethnographer Zusman Kiselgof.11 The experience An-Ski made with respect to the scientific approach and societal relevance would guide and enrich his journeys shortly afterwards through the war zones between Austria-Hungary and Russia. He travelled repeatedly as representative of the YeKoPo (Russian “yevreyski komitet pomoshtshi zhertvam voyny”), the Jewish umbrella relief organization for war victims in Russia, to Galicia, Bukovina, and Poland.12 During his sojourns in the war zones, AnSki drew up notes in Russian that he intended to publish in Russian periodicals. However, he decided to use them as material and re-worked them into his rhetorically detailed and factographically expanded Yiddish diary. This was published posthumously under the title “der yudisher khurbn fun poyln, galitsye 11 See Eugene Avrutin, ed., Photographing the Jewish Nation. Pictures from S. An-Ski’s ethnographic expeditions (Brandeis  : Brandeis University Press, 2009)  ; see this also for An-Ski’s efforts to establish a Jewish Museum in the imperial capital of St. Petersburg and its history (even during World War I, he tried to rescue and transfer precious items to preserve Jewish tradition to this museum, which was not preserved)  ; for his findings before World War I, see  : V.A. Dymšic and A. I. Ivanov and A. L. L’vov and A. V. Sokolova, eds., Pervyj evrejskij muzej v Rossii. Fotoarchiv èkspedicij An-skogo. Katalog (S.-Peterburg  : Izdatel’stvo Evropejskogo universiteta v Sankt-Peterburge, 2009)  ; Roza Nikolaevna Èttinger, 14f. 12 See, e.g., Kerstin Armborst-Weihs, “Jüdische Lebenswelten in den Ostfrontgebieten. S. An-skijs Kriegserinnerungen Die Zerstörung Galiziens,” in Yearbook for European Jewish Literature Studies 1 (2014), ed. Petra Ernst (Berlin  : de Gruyter), 62–77. Concerning the situation of the Jewish population in the war zones of Eastern Europe, see, e.g., the historiographical studies  : Eric Lohr, “The Russian Army and the Jews  : Mass Deportation, Hostages, and Violence during World War I,” The Russian Review 60 (2001)  : 404–419  ; Jonathan Frankel, “The Paradoxical Politics of Marginality. Thoughts on the Jewish Situation During the Years 1914–21 (An Introductory Essay),” in The Jews and the European Crisis (1914–21), ed. Jonathan Frankel (Oxford  : Oxford University Press, 1988), 3–21  ; Frank M. Schuster, Zwischen allen Fronten. Osteuropäische Juden während des Ersten Weltkrieges (1914–1919) (Köln, Wien, Weimar  : Böhlau, 2004)  ; Steven J. Zipperstein, “The Politics of Relief. The Transformation of Russian Jewish Communal Life during the First World War,” in The Jews and the European Crisis (1914–21), ed. Jonathan Frankel (Oxford  : Oxford University Press, 1988), 22–40.



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un bukovine (fun tog-bukh 5674–5677 [1914–1917])” in Vilne (Vilnius), Varshe (Warsaw), and Nyu York (New York) between 1921 and 1923. It is sometimes referred to as “Khurbn Galitsye” [The destruction of Galicia], which probably is a re-translation of the Polish short title included in the first edition – Zniszczenie Galicji. With respect to war literature, it appears as particularly momentous that An-Ski takes a decidedly Jewish perspective in it. Right at the beginning of his diary, An-Ski emphasizes the objectives and intention of his text  : Az di yedies fun galitsie hoben klor bevizen, vos far a khurbm dort kumt for, hob ikh beshtimt ontsevenden den ale koyekhes, kedey vi es iz areyntsukloybn zikh ahin, arumfahren di khoreve shtedt, festshtelen di grenitsen fun der katastrofe un di groys fun der noyt, un kumendig tsurik mit faktishe materialen, shoyn nisht beten, nor mohnen hilf far di galitsianer yuden. 13 When the news from Galicia clearly showed the reality of the devastation, I decided to do whatever I could to get into Galicia, tour the ruined towns, confirm the scope of the crisis and the destitution, and come back to Russia with facts and figures. Then I would not plead for but demand help.14

An-Ski identifies explicitly the extra-literary vectors of his writing endeavor at this point  : On the one hand, he aims to achieve a factual, virtually ethnographic-historical documentation of events and dispositions interspersed with his own views and, on the other hand, he strives to gain the actual material and spiritual support of the Jewish population, the organization of relief work, also with regard to providing assistance in dealing with the Russian authorities, and eventually the preservation of precious artefacts, mostly those from synagogues and prayer houses. Whereas An-Ski programmatically discusses the contents of his diary and his approach of “collecting voices” in the respective regions, he does not comment on the literary strategies applied or the aesthetic rhetorical means involved in the text’s composition. Nonetheless, An-Ski’s togbukh fun khurbn is characterized by its semantic dual encoding  : While the ethnographer and historian AnSki attempted to document the war atrocities and the social plight of the Jewish population by using as many facts as possible, the writer An-Ski had to find the appropriate cognitive textual and even literary form. This form transcends 13 Sh. An-Ski, “Der yudisher khurbn fun poyln, galitsye un bukovine (fun tog-bukh 5674–5677 [1914–1917]),” in Gezamelte shriften in fuftsehn bender, band 3–4, (Vilne, Varshe, Nyu York  : Farlag “An-Ski”), vol. 1, 16. 14 S. Ansky, The Enemy at his Pleasure. A Journey through the Jewish Pale of Settlement during World War I., trans., ed. Joachim Neugroschel (New York  : Henry Holt and Company, 2002), 9.

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the genres of autobiography and diary in the end due to the variety of incorporated text types, such as eyewitness accounts, letters, dialogues, observations, and announcements by the authorities. It is exactly this oscillation of An-Ski’s text between literary genres, between the knowledge realms of ethnography, historiography, and literature, and their respective objectives and implications, that made it a major societal and commemorative piece of World War I history, even if its reception was disrupted. The togbukh fun khurbn encompasses four parts and about 600 printed pages. In the first chapters, An-Ski defines programmatically the scope and method of his inquiry  : documentation and support, polyphony of individual voices (e.g., letters, conversations), documents, and his travel route/s that led from the political centers of Russia – notably St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kiev, and Warsaw – to the war-torn Austrian-Hungarian periphery of Galicia.15 After that, he meticulously and chronologically dissects the events in the war zone and the impact they had on the Jewish population. On the level of perception, he describes the rumors and legends that were spread about Jews in diverse societal strata (mainly the Russian army and authorities, but also the local Polish and Ukrainian populations) and the media16 and the accusations made against them (predominantly of espionage), all of which had the intent of discrediting Jews in any possible instance of power or authority. On the level of war atrocities, he addressed the regular looting of property, rapes, arbitrary killings, and the general deprivation of their civil rights. An-Ski had already outlined the common situation of the Jews in the war zone resp. selected motives of the Yiddish togbukh fun khurbn in his Russian notes, few of which were preserved, and in his correspondence with Roza Èttinger.17 In this way, in the Russian text Разрушение Галиции [The destruction of Galicia], he concisely identified facts about the course of the war, the impact 15 Unsurprisingly, the number of war cemeteries in this region is particularly high. See, e.g., Agnieszka Partridge, Otwórzcie bramy pamięci. Cmentarze wojenne z lat 1914–1918 w Małopolsce [Opening the gates of remembrance. War cemeteries from 1914–1918 in Little Poland] (Kraków  : Lettra-Graphic, 2005). 16 See here, e.g., the observations by Annette Werberger  : Annette Werberger, “Die Zerstörung Galiziens oder  : Der Ethnologe als Kriegsberichtserstatter,” in Zwischen Apokalypse und Alltag. Kriegsnarrative des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts, ed. Natalia Borissova, Susi K. Frank, Andreas Kraft (Bielefeld  : transcript, 2009), 133–151.; generally, the motif of “rumour” in literature was discussed ambiguously recently, see, e.g., Hyunyong Choi, Das Gerücht als literarisches Verfahren. Im Hinblick auf seine sujetbildende Funktion (Bochum  : Projekt-Verlag, 2002)  ; Manfred Bruhn and Werner Wunderlich, eds., Medium Gerücht. Studien zur Theorie und Praxis einer kollektiven Kommunikationsform (Bern, Stuttgart, Wien  : Haupt Verlag Bern, 2004). 17 Roza Nikolaeevna Èttinger, Ierusalim 1980, 27–49 (chapter “Pis’ma An-Skogo Roze Nikolaevne Èttinger”).



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of rumors, and also the attitude and conduct of the Russian Army – in particular the Cossacks – towards the Jewish population. In a bold general characterization, he stated  : Галиция, отрезанная от Австрии, фактически отрезанная от России, разоренная от войной, разгромами и в большой мере опустошенная и миллионой армией и вывозом товаров в Россию, оказалась в самом ужасном положении.18 Galicia found itself, cut off from Austria, de facto cut off from Russia, devastated by the war, by the havoc and above all ravaged by an army counting in millions and the export of goods to Russia, in an utterly awful situation.

As a central motif that described the relationship between the Christians of all denominations and the Jewish population, he reported  : Мотивом для нападения на евреев и разграбления их имущества обычно служила легенда, что евреи выказывали враждебное отношение к русской армии  : давали знаки, сигналы австрийцам, заманивали русских в ловушки, стреляли в них из засад и окон.19 As motif to assault the Jews and loot their property usually served the legend that the Jews showed a hostile attitude towards the Russian army  : that they gave signals to the Austrians, that they lured the Russians into traps, that they shot at them from hiding places and windows.

This general, analytically historical view expands in the description of the tog­ bukh fun khurbn  : Accounts of individual fates are presented – be it from victims, from Jewish soldiers, or from Jewish community workers, as well as accounts of 18 Sergeeva, I.A.: “S.A. An-skij. Razrušenie Galicii. Publikacija, vstupitel’naja stat’ja i kommentarii I.A. Sergeevoj,” Arkhiv evrejskoj istorii 3, glav. red. Budnickij, O.V. (Moskva 2006), 9–40, here 24. (O. Terpitz, Trans.). 19 Sergeeva, “S.A. An-skij. Razrušenie Galicii,” 18. Here, An-Ski mentions yet another detail that repeatedly figures in the testimonies incorporated into his togbukh fun kurbn – Christian shop owners marked their property with Christian symbols to avoid looting  : “Этим выбором еврейских магазинов и объяснялось, что почти повсюду, как в крупных городах, так и [в] деревнях, на христианских домах вывешены, выставлены в окнах и прибиты к дверям всевозможные иконы.” [That Jewish shops were chosen [to be looted] became clear due to the fact that, almost everywhere, be it in big cities or in villages, every possible icon was displayed in Christian buildings, put into windows or nailed to the doors.] (Sergeeva, “S.A. An-skij. Razrušenie Galicii,” 19. (O. Terpitz, Trans.).

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the events in the many smaller or bigger places of the embattled Austrian-Hungarian periphery. An-Ski captures the ruptures caused by the Great War in an exemplary way, namely, in the motif of the biblical fratricide, a motif that Dubnov was to adopt in his own story. Jews on both sides of the front were fighting and killing each other. An-Ski reconstructs a conversation between a dying soldier and the Rabbi of Lemberg, Dr. Hoyzner (Dr. Bernard Hausner) in this way. The soldier confesses to Dr. Hausner how he captured a rabbi during a pogrom incited by the Russian army, pressed him for money, and eventually stabbed him to death. Now he begs Hausner for forgiveness so he can die in peace (vol. II, ch. 6, p. 150f.). An-Ski’s narration resp. the composition of his polyphonic text is orchestrated by a spatio-temporal movement through Poland, Galicia, and the Bukovina that yields, though chronologically structured, only a few references to historical time or the Jewish calendar. The narrator resp. his alter ego An-Ski moves through the war zones primarily with the train that, in previous times of peace, epitomized connectedness and modern Europe. This means of transportation that, according to Karl Schlögel, not only connected Europe but,20 as it were, created it, now marked the break in cultural and actual time and space with all its delays and disruptions. An-Ski fluctuates in his presentation of World War I between general observations that recap the events of the war and a general interpretation, significantly in the term khurbn, and individual views, accounts, and considerations (e.g., letters, announcements, photographs). This alternation between the macro level and micro level mirrors An-Ski’s interest in the particular position or experience of the individual that, however, has the potential to be transcribed into a general commemorative statement. Moreover, by compiling and juxtaposing these different narrative instances and perspectives, An-Ski emphasizes the moment of testimony of eyewitnesses for the appraisal of events. This narrative strategy raises, not least, the questions of how and to which extent it is possible or impossible to comprehend the events cognitively, emotionally, and linguistically and, thereafter, to represent them. In the description of his impressions and perceptions of the war-ravaged Brest-Litovsk, one of the central links between Eastern, Central, and Western Europe at the time, An-Ski refers to metaphors of the body and wild nature in this way. To be more precise, he uses a different reference system in his description  : the civil, social, and cultural entity of the city becomes an animal that is mortally wounded by its enemy. An-Ski writes  : 20 See, e.g., the study of Karl Schlögel, Das russische Berlin. Ostbahnhof Europas (München  : Hanser, 2007).



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Es vert beshafert a gefihl, az di groyse sheyne shtodt, vos hot nokh ersht nekhten gelebt mit ale khushim, hot bekumen a toytlikhe vund un shtarbt ab. Es shtelt zikh vor, az dos iz a groyze, gezundte khaye, bay velkher m’hot geefent di odern un ihr blut flist aroys fun guf mit a heyzn shtrom. Fun minut tsu minut vert zi blaser, shvakher un bald vet zi ligen a kalte un a toyte. […] Un nokh boylet’er shtraykhen unter dem tragishen oyszikht fun shtodt di aeroplanen, velkhe shveben un drehen zikh in der luften, vi shvartse krohen iber a toytlekh fervundeten. Dokht zikh, az di groyse royb-foyglen varten mit ungeduld, az der fervundeter riz zol aroys­ lozen dem letsten otem, kedey aroyftseverfen zikh oyf ihm un nehmen raysen shtikervayz zayn nisht obgekihlten guf.21 The big and beautiful city, which, just yesterday, had been alive with all its senses, was now fatally wounded, as it were, and dying. Brest-Litovsk was like a huge, healthy animal whose veins have been opened, releasing a hot torrent of blood. Minute by minute the city grew paler, weaker, and soon it would lie there, cold and dead. […] The city’s tragic appearance was emphasized even more sharply by the planes, which were circling like black crows over a mortally injured man. The large birds of prey seemed to be waiting impatiently for the wounded giant to breathe his last so they could pounce on him and rip off pieces from his still-warm body.22

Simon Dubnov’s Story of a Jewish Soldier – the single voice as prism Whereas An-Ski meticulously and polyphonically recorded the effects of the war events on the Jewish population in Galicia, Bukovina, and Poland, Simon Dubnov’s Istorija evrejskogo soldata. Ispoved’ odnogo iz mnogich [Story of a Jewish Soldier. Confession by one of many] takes the perspective of a single individual in a condensed manner. Dubnow, who is known as eminent historian and literary critic,23 composed this prose text like An-Ski based on his immediate impressions of the Great War. It appeared in a severely censored form for the first time in 1916 in the periodical Evrejskaja nedelja [The Jewish week], while the periodical published an unabridged version in 1917 after the February revolution. The Petrograd-based publishing house Razum brought it out in 1918 as a book.24 21 Sh. An-Ski, Der yudisher khurbn, vol. 3, 171. 22 S. Ansky, The Enemy at his Pleasure, 192. 23 See, for instance, the extensive study on Dubnov’s life and work  : Viktor E. Kel’ner, Missioner istorii. Žizn’ i trudy Semena Markoviča Dubnova (Sankt-Peterburg  : Mir, 2008). 24 For a detailed summary of the reception of Dubnov’s story, including the translations into French, see the introductory notes by Stefan Schreiner, in Simon Dubnow, Geschichte eines jü­ dischen Soldaten. Bekenntnis eines von vielen. Aus dem Russischen übersetzt und kommentiert von

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The text has thirty pages and is preceded by a preface in which Dubnov outlines both the text’s formative context and his own writing strategy. He remarks  : Я должен объяснить происхождение этой своеобразной «Истории», сплошь исторической по содержанию, но не по форме. Я писал ее во второй год нынешней войны, под влиянием тогдашних тягостных переживаний еврея в тылу и в армии.25 I have to explain the origin of this peculiar “Story” that is absolutely historical in its content but not in form. I wrote it in the second year of the war under the influence of the onerous experiences of a Jew in those days in the hinterland and in the army.

In a next step, Dubnov sketches the background and the intention of writing resp. his writing strategy. Через мои руки проходила огромная масса документов, которые тогда не могли проникнуть в печать и когда-нибудь составят «черную книгу» – жуткую летопись еврейства в эти черные годы.26 A huge number of documents passed through my hands that could not be published then but that will once constitute the “Black Book” – the terrible chronicle of Jewry in those black years.

Dubnov’s Story of a Jewish soldier is based, thus, not only on a multitude of eyewitness documents but, furthermore, is intended to be the nucleus of a chronicle of Jewish suffering during the War and the last decades of the Russian Empire. An-Ski fulfilled this intention by the publication of his diary about the Great War. In other words, Dubnov condensed his own experiences and impressions and those of countless others in the text, merging them into the voice of his nameless, first-person narrator, thus, creating a collective, single voice. Vera Bischitzky und Stefan Schreiner (Göttingen  : Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2012), 9 and 22–25. The first French translation appeared as early as 1929 in the publishing house Éditions Erelji under the title Histoire d’un soldat juif, and the second appeared in 1988 in Éditions du Cerf with a preface by Léon Poliakov (23). A Hebrew translation was made by Dubnow himself and appeared in 1934 in the periodical Ha-Tekufah as Historya shel ish zava yehudi mi-ma’arekhot shenat 1915. Viddui shel ehad me-rabbim (24). 25 Quoted from  : Simon Dubnow, Geschichte eines jüdischen Soldaten, 123 (O. Terpitz, Trans.). (This edition contains the first censored Russian version, the full Russian version, and the German translation.) 26 Dubnow, Geschichte eines jüdischen Soldaten, 123 (O. Terpitz, Trans.).



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The Story of a Jewish Soldier encompasses the evolution of the “Jewish question” in the Russian Empire from 1881 up until the first two years of the Great War, i.e., over about 35 years of real historical and political time. In the first two of the overall five chapters, the narrator depicts examples of the societal and political implications of Emperor Alexander II. (1818–1881) for the Jews up until the Great War broke out. He describes their aggravating legal situation and the increasing discrimination against them in the 1890s  ; the disenchantment of the Jewish intellectuals, whose hopes were raised by the hopes and intentions of the Haskalah  ; the failure of integration  ; but also their self-empowerment (e.g., by performing in Russian as well as Jewish print media). In the next three chapters, which are dedicated to the war events of 1914 and 1915, the narrator outlines key motives of the actions directed against the Jews. These motives appear in An-Ski’s representation as well  : defamation, accusations of espionage (for the Austrians), rumors, and, ultimately, pogroms that were carried out predominantly by Cossacks. Alongside the descriptions of historical acts of war and real persons, such as the Russian Governor of Lemberg, Count Georgii Bobrinski, the narrator reflects particularly on the moral-intellectual dilemma faced by the Jewish soldiers in the Russian Army and their emotional inner conflict. Not only was their position in the army exceedingly instable and ambivalent, but they also found themselves involved in a fratricidal war. This ambivalence is intensified by the structure of the text  : Drawing on the five-act structure of the classical drama with exposition (the situation of the Jews before the war), climax and peripeteia (start of the war, renewed hope for integration), and catastrophe (actual historical course of the war and the death of the narrator), the catharsis of the hero resp. the anti-hero remains absent. It remains unresolved and is delegated to the future, to a future (historical) time beyond the narrative time. Several intertextual, symbolic references sustain this finding. For one thing, the narrator refers to King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon who, according to the biblical description, was responsible for the destruction of the First Temple in the sixth century BCE and, therewith, the expulsion of the Jews from Jerusalem. Secondly, the narrator quotes the prophetic poem of Hayim Nahman Bialik “In the City of Slaughter” (Hebrew original “Be’ir ha-haregah”) composed after the Easter pogrom (April 19/20 1903) in Kishinev. The first-person narrator, who at times merges with the narrative instance of the author Dubnov, situates his account in the traditional Hebrew representation of the khurban as well as in the modern Yiddish one of the khurbn. Finally, the text is embedded in a specific literary-historical resp. genre-historical reference system. The title already contains the terms istorija [story/ history] and ispoved’ [confession], and Dubnov also uses the term letopis’ [chronicle] in his preface. These terms (chronicle, (hi)

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story, and confession) point to the epistemic impact of transmission and lore and of individual accounts. They capture both the instance of testimony and refer to established genres in Russian and European prose fiction.27 Accordingly, Dubnov’s nameless narrator formulates as his legacy  : У меня сейчас нет никаких желаний, кроме одного  : излить душу в этой исповеди, завещать будущему поколению эту миниатюру переживаний предыдущего поколения, ибо моя история есть история моих интеллигентных современников.28 Now I have no more wishes but one  : to pour out my soul in this confession, to bequest to the next generation this miniature of the experiences of their predecessors, because my story is the story of my educated contemporaries.

He proceeds in his “testament” by making a claim that binds the categories of the ethical-moral together with those of the political and the litigable. Если есть мировая совесть, она должна дать решительный ответ на этот вопрос [еврейский вопрос], снять позорное пятно с истории человечества. Я умираю с этой верою в мировую совесть и в мой народ, единый и вечный, как мир, с которым его соткала история всех времен.29 If there is a world conscience it should give a definite answer to this question [the Jewish question] and remove this disgraceful stain from the history of humanity. I die believing in world conscience and in my people, united and eternal, like the world, the history of all times has it interwoven with.

Conclusion As different as An-Ski’s Yiddish togbukh fun khurbn and Dubnov’s Russian Story of a Jewish Soldier may be in their aesthetical designs, their narrative structures, and their textual scopes, they do share a number of similarities. 27 The oldest preserved letopis’ in Russian literature is the Old East Slavonic “Nesterova letopis’. Povest’ vremennych let” (“Primary Chronicle. Tale of Past Years”, 1113–1118)  ; the genre of is­ poved’ was used, e.g., by writers such as  : Nikolai V. Gogol’ (Avtorskaja ispoved’ [Confession of an author], 1847), Lev N. Tolstoy (Ispoved’, 1884)  ; Leonid P. Grossman provides a compilation of different ispoved’ – amongst others by Abram Kovner and F.M. Dostoevskij, Leonid P. Grossman, Ispoved’ odnogo evreja [Confession of a Jew], Moskva 1924 [1999]. 28 Dubnow, Geschichte eines jüdischen Soldaten, 152f. (O. Terpitz, Trans.) 29 Dubnow, Geschichte eines jüdischen Soldaten, 153. (O. Terpitz, Trans.)



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Both are characterized by their dual encoding as historical documents and literary texts. They participate in various fields of knowledge and draw on their respective methods and strategies  : literature (e.g., genre of the diary,30 textuality, narrative structures,31 metaphors), ethnography (e.g., interviews, witnessing, participatory observation) and historiography (e.g., history of events, use and interpretation of documents, missing reception). Moreover, both writers followed an ethical agenda they formulated as an imperative of moral and commemorative responsibility in their texts, not least because they shared a common intellectual background that originated in the Jewish experience in Russia. The War events and the resp. consequences they documented or referred to mark not only the disintegration of the Austrian and Russian Empires as political entities but, foremost, the dissolution of society, the dissolution of values, and the fragmentation of individuals. Both texts describe this decisive upheaval with all its repercussions for the Jews on all sides of the front and become symbols for transgression themselves in this way (not least because both writers crossed several borders and boundaries on their own). This becomes evident, firstly, through the linguistic disposition in the two texts and their mode of representing the history of events. An-Ski’s diary relies on personal experiences and a multitude of reports and documents, shaping a polyphony with (almost) every participating voice discernible in Yiddish, but, nevertheless, incorporating phrases in Polish and Russian. Dubnov, on the contrary, merges this polyphony  – from which he draws to another extent  – into a single voice that reports over a longer period than An-Ski in a condensed manner. Secondly, the way in which the individual and collective voices are orchestrated exposes the textual and narrative strategies applied by An-Ski and Dubnov to create a literary text. Both intended to make the events of the Great War graspable through the use of literary means and conventions in order to transcend the factuality of their reports and documentation. The reference to the figure and narrative topos of the khurbn in the case of An-Ski, or to the confession in the case of Dubnov, already associates their texts with literary traditions and, thus, inserts them into intertextual relations. Moreover, their texts and agendas found themselves moving along yet another trajectory  : The general 30 For detailed information on the development of the genre of the diary and autobiography in Jewish literatures see  : Marcus Moseley, Being for myself alone. Origins of Jewish autobiography (Stanford  : Stanford University Press, 2006). 31 For the relation between literature and historiography, in other words between fact and fiction, see e.g. the widely discussed analysis of Hayden White, Metahistory. The historical imagination in nineteenth-century Europe (Baltimore, London  : John Hopkins University Press, 1973).

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imperative in Jewish tradition to remember zakhor  ! was concretized in the nineteenth century by the growing interest in historiography and ethnography. The zamler [collector] movement that originated in that interest32 led not only to the establishment of the previously mentioned Jewish Historical-Ethnographic Society but also to the foundation of the YIVO in 1925. The testimonies that An-Ski and Dubnov gathered during World War I need to be considered in this context as (semantic) predecessors of what the Jewish Historical Commissions and the yizker bikher [memorial books] sought to achieve after World War II. Thirdly, and eventually, the reception history of both texts has to be considered. There is a remarkable gap in the reception history of An-Ski’s togbukh fun khurbn.33 Joachim Neugroschl’s translation of the Yiddish original into English made the text initially available to a wider lay and scholarly public, although it was presented in an abridged and, at times, imprecise manner. His publication was followed by a Polish translation that was based on the Hebrew translation made in 1929, which appeared in 2010 in the (formerly Galician town of ) Przemyśl.34 A German translation of An-Ski’s diary is not available 32 Cf. Jeffrey Shandler, Shtetl. A Vernacular Intellectual History (New Brunswick, New Jersey, London  : Rutgers University Press, 2014), esp. chapter “Forsht ayer shtetl,” 50–92. 33 It appears that the literary and ethnographic work of An-Ski received renewed attention only in the late 1990s, and this concerns both the accessibility of the diary itself and its perception in scholarship and literature. See, e.g., Delphine Bechtel, “D’Images d’un voyage en province (1891) de Peretz à La destruction de la Galicie (1921) d’An-Ski. Représentations des confins juifs entre expédition statistique et littérature,” Cultures d’Europe centrale 3 (2003)  : 57–76  ; Gabriella Safran and Steven J. Zipperstein, eds., The Worlds of S. An-sky. A Russian Jewish Intellectual at the Turn of the Century (Stanford  : Stanford University Press, 2006)  ; Annette Werberger, “Grenzgänge, Zwischenwelten, Dritte. Der jüdische Schriftsteller und Ethnograph S. Anskij,” transversal 1 (2004)  : 62–79  ; Polly M. Zavadivker, “Blood and Ink. Russian and Soviet Jewish Chronicles of Catastrophe from World War I to World War II,” (unpublished PhD thesis, University of California, Santa Cruz, 2013), here esp. chapter “The Witness as Translator,” 88–127. In prose literature, the historical figure of An-Ski and his influence on and importance for contemporary Jewish ethnography as well as Holocaust studies were re-introduced by the Hebrew Israeli writer Chaim Be’er, see his novel  : Chaim Be’er, Lifnei ha-makom (Tel Aviv  : Am Oved, 2007). The novel is available as a German translation  : Chaim Be’er, Bebelplatz. Aus dem Hebräischen von Anne Birkenhauer (Berlin  : Berlin Verlag, 2010). The Hebrew phrase lifnei ha-makom [before the place] refers to the very place in Berlin where the book burning (Bücherverbrennung) took place in March 1933  : the “Opernplatz” that was to be renamed in 1947 to “Bebelplatz” in honour of the Social Democrat August Bebel. 34 Shimon An-Ski, Hurban ha-yehudim be-Polin, Galitsyah u-Bukovinah. Tirgem Shmuel Leib Ts­ itron (Berlin  : Shtibl, 1929 [Tel Aviv 1936])  ; Simon Ansky, The enemy at his pleasure. A Jour­ ney through the Jewish Pale of Settlement during World War I., trans., ed. Joachim Neugroschel (New York  : Owl Book, 2004)  ; Szymon An-Ski, Tragedia żydów galicyjskich w czasie I wojny światowej. Wrażenia i refleksje z podróży po kraju. Z hebrajskiego przełożył Krzysztof Dawid Majus.



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to the present day.35 A similar finding applies to Dubnov’s text, although there are several translations into French. The break in reception, in which ever way it occurred, point out the missing or lost audience or readership and lack of interest in the topic. An interest, admittedly, that challenged the national states created after the imperial implosion/s to answer the question of whether and how they were inclined as society to react to the crimes committed against their Jewish population. An-Ski and Dubnov presented exactly this question in their texts, about twenty years before the Shoah and the efforts to document it afterwards. They proposed, furthermore, textual and narrative strategies that could be used to make this cognitively elusive catastrophe tangible. Thus, their texts accentuate the moments and dimensions of testimony, litigability, and international law avant la lettre. The portrayal of World War I in their texts becomes a “postmemorial”36 account of the war from a Jewish perspective with regard to their reception history and the fulfilment of their claims.

Wstęp, przypisy i opracowanie Krzysztof Dawid Majus i Stanisław Stępień, (Przemyśl  : Południowo-Wschodni Instytut Naukowy 2010). 35 A German translation of An-Ski’s togbukh fun khurbn will be published in 2019  : Shimon AnSki, Der Khurbn in Polen, Galizien und der Bukowina. Tagebuchaufzeichnungen aus dem Ersten Weltkrieg. Herausgegeben, kommentiert und mit einer Einführung versehen von Olaf Terpitz. Aus dem Jiddischen übersetzt von Lilian Harlander, Thomas Soxberger und Olaf Terpitz, (Graz  : Wien-Köln-Weimar  : Schriften des Centrums für Jüdische Studien Graz). 36 The term “postmemory” was introduced by Marianne Hirsch, see e.g. Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory. Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust (New York  : Columbia UP, 2012).

REFUGEES

Gintarė Malinauskaitė

Wandering Lithuanian Jewish Refugees during the First World War Hirsz Abramowicz and a Jewish Perspective on the War

First World War and Ober Ost: In Search of a Jewish Perspective After the outbreak of the First World War, Germany occupied Lithuania in 1915, and the Russian Army was forced to retreat along the entire front. On Yom Kippur, 19 September 1915, Vilna1 (Vilnius), which was “the most important rail artery of the Northwestern Territory”2 in the Russian Empire, was taken by the Germans. As the Germans advanced and the Russian Army retreated, Lithuanian Jews had to decide whether to stay at home or leave. The result of this development was a massive increase in the number of refugees. Strategically important towns, such as Vilna (Vilnius), Kovno (Kaunas), Memel (Klaipėda), and Shavl (Šiauliai), suffered severe bombings.3 Cities and villages were set on fire, as the retreating Russian armies “were determined to leave as little as possible to the advancing Germans.”4 Lithuania, which had formerly been part of the tsarist Russia, now was incorporated into the administrative unit Oberbe­ fehlshaber Ost (Ober Ost), which included present-day Lithuania and other parts of the Baltics, territories of Eastern Poland, such as Grodno (Hrodna) and Suwalki (Suwałki), as well as the western region of what is called Belorussia today. The aim of the Germany’s army, commanded by Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg and Major General Erich Ludendorff, who became his chief of staff in August 1914, was “to exploit the occupied territory for the economic benefit of Germany’s soldiers and the Reich”5 and civilize the allegedly “backward” local 1 2

In this paper, the names of all Lithuanian towns are written in Yiddish. Vėjas Gabriel Liulevičius, War Land on the Eastern Front  : Culture, National Identity and German Occupation in World War I (Cambridge  : Cambridge University Press, 2004), 19. 3 Klaus Richter, “Baltic States and Finland,” International Encyclopedia of the First World War, http://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/baltic_states_and_finland (accessed December 11, 2018). 4 Liulevičius, War Land on the Eastern Front, 19. 5 Jürgen Matthäus, “German Judenpolitik in Lithuania during the First World War,” in Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 43 (1998)  : 156.

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populations in the Eastern lands.6 Germany’s policy towards Lithuanian inhabitants, including Lithuanian Jews, was executed by the Deutsche Verwaltung für Litauen, which was established in September 1915 and controlled by the German military staff and its military governor, Prince Franz-Joseph von Isenburg-Birstein. In his book War Land on the Eastern Front  : Culture, National Identity and German Occupation in World War I, Lithuanian-American historian Vėjas Gabriel Liulevičius claims that “the eastern front-experience remains conspicuous by its absence in historiography” and could be designated as the “unknown war” or “terra incognita to historical scholarship.”7 Liulevičius argues that the eastern front-experience “constituted a hidden legacy of great importance,” which later influenced Germany’s relationship with the East. The eastern front, which went through the Jewish Pale of Settlement8, also touched smaller towns and their Jewish populations in Lithuania. Today little is known about the German policy in the East or their behavior with the Eastern Jews.9 Liulevičius notes that “the question of how antisemitic ordinary German soldiers and officials were upon first meeting the Ostjuden has no unequivocal answer,” he observes that “the documentary sources yield an ambivalent record, showing both expressions of sympathy and interest as well as a range of antisemitic responses, including casual prejudices, slurs and hatred.”10 German historian Jürgen Matthäus notes that “ethnic peace remained open to interpretation” during the war years, and Jews were often perceived by German officials “as a threat to the existing or desired equilibrium.”11 According to him, “the element of occupation policy that most effected Lithuanian Jews was the German attempt to restructure economy” and monopolize the exchange of goods.12 In this manner, German administration was “presenting themselves as safeguards” with their restrictions of the Lithuanian political, economic and cultural life and was claiming “to save the rural population from exploitation by the Jews.”13 Lithuanian Jew Hirsz Abramowicz remarks in his memoirs on   6 Ibid., 160.  7 Liulevičius, War Land on the Eastern Front, 5.   8 The Pale of Settlement was a region of tsarist Russia in which residence of Jews was allowed. It comprised around 1/5 of the territory of European Russia and corresponded to the historical borders of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which included much of present-day Lithuania, Belarus, Poland, Moldova, Ukraine and the western part of Russia.   9 Matthäus, “German Judenpolitik,” 155. 10 Liulevičius, War Land on the Eastern Front, 120. 11 Matthäus, “German Judenpolitik,” 166. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid., 167.



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the First World War that “Jewish artisans in the towns had no work”, and their only solutions “were to work for the Germans or to engage in smuggling.”14 Still, Matthäus states that this “predominantly negative German Judenpolitik in Lithuania was neither a state-sponsored attempt to destroy Jewish existence nor an effort to transform individual or group-related antisemitism into political practice,” but, nevertheless, he argues that these “negative elements of the First World War Judenpolitik in the German-occupied parts of Russia re-emerged during Operation Barbarossa” during the Second World War.15 The objective of this research is to understand the Jewish perspective of the First World War more profoundly, especially the experiences of the Lithuanian Jewish refugees and their relationships with non-Jewish Lithuanians during the period of German occupation. Therefore, the writings about the First World War of Hirsz Abramowicz, who was a prominent Lithuanian Jewish writer, journalist, and educator, will be analyzed. According to his daughter, Dina Abramowicz, the suffering of the Lithuanian Jewish refugees and their lives during the war is overshadowed by the Holocaust today.16 Moreover, “in the inter-war years and especially after the Holocaust, Lithuanian Jews tended to regard the time of the German occupation during the First World War as a period of relative security and Prussian benevolence.”17 However, Abramowicz denies this positive attitude towards the war in his memoirs by depicting the intense relationships between non-Jewish and Jewish Lithuanians as well as by revealing the antisemitic behavior of the Russian military and Germany’s occupation policy. He states that “Jews were in a special category among the dispossessed,” and the military used to be antisemitic.18 Abramowicz was born in 1881 in the district of Trok (Trakai), Vilna province, which was part of the Russian Empire at the time. His chronicles about the First World War and the German occupation of Vilna between 1915 and 1918 have remained an important and unique historical source of information about the First World War in Lithuania up until today. His writings reveal not only the German Judenpolitik and the stereotypical representation of Jews, but, first and foremost, record the everyday encounters between non-Jewish Lithuanians 14 Hirsz Abramowicz, Profiles of a Lost World. Memoirs of East European Jewish Life before World War I, eds. Dina Abramowicz and Jeffrey Shandler (Detroit  : Wayne State University Press, 1999), 202. 15 Matthäus, “German Judenpolitik,” 173. 16 Dina Abramowicz, “My Father’s Life and Work,” in Profiles of a Lost World. Memoirs of East European Jewish Life before World War I, eds. Dina Abramowicz and Jeffrey Shandler (Detroit  : Wayne State University Press, 1999), 24. 17 Matthäus, “German Judenpolitik,” 173. 18 Abramowicz, Profiles of a Lost World, 183.

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and Lithuanian Jewish refugees on the streets of Vilna and on the Lithuanian countryside roads during the First World War, a period during which a modern Lithuanian nation was created. According to his daughter, a former librarian at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and the editor of his memoirs, Dina Abramowicz  : He often visited their [his parents’] farm, despite the difficulties of communication and travel during the war. Father was also in touch with relatives and acquaintances who, for various reasons, traveled between the city and the countryside. They told him endless stories of hardships and horrors that the German occupiers inflicted on the local population.19

In his memoirs, he reveals the perspective of both an observer and participant. Many members of his and his wife’s family joined thousands of Lithuanian refugees escaping from the war zone. On the eve of the First World War, he was 33 years old, married with two small children, and living in Vilna. He and his wife decided to stay and look after their elderly parents, who lived in the countryside. In August 1915, when the Russian authorities allowed the organization of a municipal people’s militia, he also registered as militiaman in a soup kitchen for refugees in Vilna. He explained that most of the candidates for the people’s militia “felt that being a militiaman would offer some protection against forced labor, being dragged off to Russia, deportation, sudden capture in the streets, and the like.”20 He gave up teaching when Russia retreated from its western territories and Vilna was occupied by the Germans.21 In September 1915, during the German occupation of Vilna, he patrolled the city’s streets and very critically evaluated Germany’s “liberation” of Vilna  : “This Prussian ‘freedom’ endured for barely an hour. Orders were immediately given to tear down the proclamations. The local population might think they were the cream of the crop when, in reality, they should understand that it is always ‘woe be unto the conquered’.”22 His account about the war was written and published in Yiddish shortly after the end of the war in 1922. Later, in 1927, it was also used as a historical source of information on the First World War in Lithuania by other authors  ; for instance, some parts of his work were cited in an article by Louis Stein, which was published in Tel Aviv in 1927.23 His daughter Dina Abramowicz, who in 1999 19 Abramowicz, “My Father’s Life and Work,” 25. 20 Abramowicz, Profiles of a Lost World, 177. 21 Ibid., 23. 22 Ibid.,181. 23 Louis Stein, “The Exile of the Lithuanian Jews in the Conflagration of the First World War (1914–1918),” JewishGen, http://www.jewishgen.org/yizkor/lita/Lit0089.html (accessed December 11, 2018).



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collected her father’s writings, including those on the First World War in a book called Profiles of a Lost World, noted that her father “gathered material for this account very carefully, as the events unfolded, using the method of ‘participant observation’.”24 In the original version of his essay, Abramowicz comments that  : “I am writing this particular article from memory and on the basis of personal observations and conversations with people.”25 During the war, as previously mentioned, he often visited his father’s farm, despite the difficulties associated with travelling during these troublesome times. These road trips captured the moods of the inhabitants, relationships between non-Jewish and Jewish Lithuanians on the road, and the escape and return of Lithuanian Jewish refugees. He focused mostly on Vilna and its vicinity  ; henceforth, as his daughter remembers, he was called “a regional writer.”26 However, she claims that his regionalism “was both a deep emotional attachment to his native land and a conscious, intellectual conviction,” as he was “among the first to pay attention to local Jewish history during the interwar years in Eastern Europe.”27 In this paper, my aim is to reveal the encounters between Lithuanian Jewish refugees and non-Jewish Lithuanians on the roads and pathways presented in his memoirs. The concept of public space “on the road” presents a special zone “between intimacy of the home and the formality of the public,” and it is a space “where people’s political and social lives unfold” as well as ethnic relations and interactions take place.28 Thus, the encounters on the town and village roads not only reveal daily interactions between Lithuanian Jews and the majority population, but also allow me to contextualize the Jewish experiences, especially those of refugees, during the First World War in Lithuania. Jewish Refugees on the Road: “At night the red skies were terrifying” Between March and September 1915, when German forces were advancing into the territory of the Russian Empire, more than half a million of Jews were expelled from the frontline areas, among these also Jews from Lithuania.29 The first expulsion started in March 1915 in Polangen (Palanga), which was located 24 Abramowicz, “My Father’s Life and Work,” 24. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid., 34. 27 Ibid., 34–35. 28 Anna Cichopek-Gajraj, Beyond Violence  : Jewish Survivors in Poland and Slovakia, 1944–1948 (Cambridge  : Cambridge University Press, 2014), 8. 29 David Engel, “World War I,” The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/world_war_i (accessed December 11, 2018).

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next to the border with the German Reich, and then continued in other places. Over a period of two days in May 1915, all 40,000 Jews in the city of Kovno were removed by the expulsion decree from the town.30 Other Jews fled from war of their own volition, leaving their property and hometowns behind them, and moving mostly from the countryside into the city. In August 1915, Natali Friedman, a Jewish Member of Parliament who was from Kovno, stated in her speech in the Duma  : “I saw also the refugees of the Governorate of Kovno. Persons who only yesterday were still accounted wealthy were beggars the next day. (…) The Jews were loaded in freight cars like cattle.”31 In her speech, she pleaded with the authorities of the Russian Empire to treat the refugees more humanely  : There were cases in which the Governors refused outright to take in the Jews at all. I myself was in Vilna at the very time when a whole trainload of Jews was stalled for four days in Novo-Wilejsk station. Those were Jews who had been sent from the Governorate of Kovno to the Governorate of Poltawa, but the Governor there would not receive them and sent them back to Kovno, whence they were again reshipped to Poltawa. (…) Yes, we are beyond the pale of the laws, were oppressed, we have a hard life, but we know the source of that evil  ; it comes from those benches (pointing to the boxes of the Ministers). We are being oppressed by the Russian government, not by the Russian people.32

According to the German historian Ruth Leiserowitz, around 160,000 Lithuanian Jews from the Governorate of Kovno were forced to leave their homes  ;33 many of these were deported to the interior of Russia.34 By 1915, more than 22,000 Jews had fled to Vilna.35 Many Jewish families were in difficult economic situations and managed to survive only by receiving help from social agencies, acquaintances, or relatives, who sent them money from different parts of the world.36 Even before the beginning of the war, the emigration rate of Jews was very high  : “there was not a single family remaining in town that had not sent some member to the United States, Canada, or Africa.”37 The reason for this 30 Ibid. 31 American Jewish Committee, The Jews in the Eastern War Zone (New York, 1916), 115. 32 Ibid., 116. 33 Ruth Leiserowitz, Sabbatleuchter und Kriegerverein. Juden in der ostpreußisch-litauischen Grenzre­ gion 1812–1942 (Osnabrück  : Fibre, 2010), 270. 34 Dov Levin, The Litvaks. A Short History of the Jews in Lithuania ( Jerusalem  : Yad Vashem, 2000), 108. 35 Engel, “World War I.” 36 Louis Stein, “The Exile of the Lithuanian Jews.” 37 Abramowicz, Profiles of a Lost World, 89.



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emigration was the discriminatory anti-Jewish policies of Tsar Alexander III (1881–1894). On 15 May 1882, he issued a series of temporary laws which made the living conditions for the Jewry in the Russian Empire very harsh. Jews were prohibited from living outside towns and were forbidden to purchase any landed property. Abramowicz writes that “on the whole, the governments of Alexander III and Nicholas II38 pursued a policy of limiting or completely forbidding Jewish residency in villages and colonies. A Jew could remain in a village only through bribery,” which he designates as the “Russian habeas corpus.”39 Historian of Russian Jewry, John D. Klier, similarly observes that Jews “had been a target, for just over one hundred years of a convoluted process of social engineering directed by the Russian state.”40 Thus, this emigration was evoked by both economic hardships and anti-Jewish violence that occurred in other parts of the tsarist Russia. Even if in Lithuania, where pogroms were rare,41 Lithuanian Jews were still afraid of possible forthcoming violence.42 Therefore, it is not surprising that this emigration differed from the displacement of other ethnic groups, where (usually) young men were used to emigrating to earn money for their families. Jewish emigration from the Pale of Settlement represented the displacement of entire families who never returned.43 The policies of the Russian Empire did not change over the course of the war, as Abramowicz remembers  : At every encounter, Russian soldiers routinely made inspections and confiscated the Jews’ money, took away their boots, and the like  ; frequently they were beaten as well. No wonder that, with this ever-present insult and danger, people were eager for the transition period to end and for the “Split” (a code for the Germans) to arrive. If truth be told, the “Split” often brought deliverance from death.44

38 The ruling years of Nicholas II lasted from 1894 until 1917. 39 Abramowicz, Profiles of a Lost World, 76. 40 Moshe Mishkinsky, “‘Black Repartition’ and the Pogroms of 1881–1882,” in Pogroms. Anti-Jew­ ish Violence in Modern Russian History, eds. John Doyle Klier and Shlomo Lambroza (Cambridge  : Cambridge University Press, 1992), 70. 41 From the end of the XIXth century until the First World War, there were around ten pogroms in Lithuania, see in  : Darius Staliūnas, “Dusetos, Easter 1905  : The Story of One Pogrom,” Journal of Baltic Studies 43, 4 (2012)  : 495–514. 42 Vladimir Levin, “Socialiniai, ekonominiai, demografiniai bei geografiniai žydų bendruomenės Lietuvoje bruožai [Social, Economic and Geographic Features of the Lithuanian Jewish Community],” in Lietuvos žydai. Istorinė studija [The Jews of Lithuania. Historical Study], eds. Vladas Sirutavičius, Darius Staliūnas, and Jurgita Šiaučiūnaitė-Verbickienė (Vilnius  : Baltos lankos, 2012), 185. 43 Ibid. 44 Abramowicz, Profiles of a Lost World, 184.

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In the beginning of the war, many the Lithuanian intelligentsia expressed their solidarity with the tsarist regime “due to aggressive minority policies of the German Empire and expectations of a quick victory.”45 In addition, most of the intelligentsia, along with other displaced inhabitants, were likewise forced to go to the Russian Empire.46 The Jewish community of Vilna also issued a statement declaring their loyalty to the tsarist Russian Empire.47 Many Jews were drafted for military service. However, the growing antisemitism and violence in tsarist Russia made Lithuanian Jews believe that the arrival of the German army would improve this situation and that Germans would treat Jews in a more considerate manner. Abramowicz writes in his memoirs about the Russian rule during the war years  : “Everyone was so fed up with the persecution, libelous attacks, and high inflation that nearly all of Vilna wished to be rid of the Russians, having had enough of their barbaric behavior. The city’s residents expected that things could only be better under the Germans.”48 During this period, Jews were turned into scapegoats responsible for the retreat of the Russian army. Therefore, any correspondence or conversation in public in Yiddish was prohibited due to its similarities with German, the enemy’s language, and the negative image of Jews prevailed.49 Abramowicz remembers that this positive attitude towards the German military soon changed  : “(…) when the Germans occupied Lithuania and Belorussia in 1915, they proceeded, as was their custom, to reduce the number of ‘eaters’. The first victims were the mentally ill.”50 The escape of the Lithuanian Jews from their homes not only meant the “complete loss of all one’s property and stability, but also an uncertain future of wandering.”51 The Russian retreat was accompanied by the burning of farms and villages, and the Jews often became the victims. Those who stayed in their hometowns found themselves in constant danger. Thus, the majority of Jews were forced to choose the life of a refugee. Abramowicz asserts that only few people remained in their hometowns, while the others started wandering to other places  : While en route, the refugees’ tired and underfed horses often refused to go further. At such times, part of the load on the wagon would be taken off and left for the peasants.

45 Richter, “Baltic States and Finland.” 46 Tomas Balkelis, The Making of Modern Lithuania (London  : Routledge, 2009), 105. 47 Levin, The Litvaks, 106. 48 Abramowicz, Profiles of a Lost World, 178. 49 Richter, “Baltic States and Finland.” 50 Abramowicz, Profiles of a Lost World, 111. 51 Ibid., 183.



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When coming on a railroad line that was still functioning some people sold their horse and wagon for “next to nothing” and traveled by train to Russia.52

Many Jews wanted to go to Vilna, where they hoped to wait for the end of the war and then return home. However, the situation in Vilna in late summer of 1915 was very complicated  ; 200,000 civilians had to prepare for evacuation, and, at the same time, the streets were filled with refugees from other towns and countryside.53 Abramowicz, from his own observations, records these nights of wandering  : The scene was especially terrifying at night. All around the sky was red. Refugees, with their countless wagons packed with bundles and various household goods, trudged along with the troops. Many were herding cows, sheep, or hogs that were loudly protesting the hunger. The result was macabre music when combined with the thunder of the cannons, the crackling of gunfire, and the waiting of people, women and children in particular (…). At night the refugees stopped in fields, meadows or woods. They dug up potatoes and pastured their animals on the unharvested grain. To make matter worse, there were heavy rains, and diseases began to spread.54

It is crucial to mention that these Jewish refugees on the roads had to deal not only with the fire and pillars of smoke caused by the military actions, but they also had to confront antisemitism from non-Jewish Lithuanian refugees, as they both were among the wandering crowds. Abramowicz devotes a special place in his memoirs to the relationships between Jewish and non-Jewish Lithuanians while travelling  : The air was filled with hatred, and Jews were the subject of the usual accusations of espionage and consorting with the Germans, which all non-Jews believed. (…) It was said that any Jews and Christians found together would be “shot at once.” As a result, it became most difficult for Jews to find night’s lodging among the peasants. Jews kept themselves in the meadows and fields.55

The relations between non-Jewish and Jewish Lithuanians were tense in many Lithuanian towns and deteriorated even more when the Russian army was defeated in East Prussia. Several pogroms occurred in the Suwalki province, where 52 Ibid., 184. 53 Richter, “Baltic States and Finland.” 54 Abramowicz, Profiles of a Lost World, 182–183. 55 Ibid, 183.

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Jews experienced violent attacks and lost their properties. Abramowicz remembers that “the relationship between Jews and Christians in the town [he refers to shtetl Wysoki Dwor/Aukštadvaris] was very peaceful” in general  ; nevertheless, he observes that often “the town’s Christian intellectuals, who were extremely chauvinistic and bourgeois, interfered in the matters.”56 He gives an example of an antisemitic priest, who came to the town of Wysoki Dwor, and “exploited his opportunity to sway the masses from the church pulpit, inciting them against the town’s Jews.”57 Such priests or “intellectuals,” in words of Abramowicz, were “ideological antisemites who believed that the ‘fatherland’ needed to be rescued from Jewish hands.”58 Individuals holding antisemitic attitudes were also not an exception in other towns in Lithuania. Historian Matthäus describes the case in Kretinge (Kretinga), when “a local priest had tried to provoke the murder of Jews who had helped the German army.”59 Whereas in the district of Alite (Alytus) “the long suppressed frustration of the Lithuanians” unfolded in November 1918, it was directed against both the German officials and local Jews, whose “houses were plundered and damaged.”60 Thus, the most intimate acts of antisemitism occurred in the neighborhood and during daily interactions in towns and villages. Lithuanian Jewish historian Dov Levin notices that cases of robbery, rape, and informing against Jews began to increase during the war.61 Abramowicz’s observations about the antisemitism on the roads also correspond to reports in the Lithuanian press of the time. In April 1915, after the German military had captured the town of Raseyn (Raseiniai), which had many Jewish inhabitants, the editors of the newspaper The New Times (Novoije Vremja) expressed their joy that the town with its zhids had fallen into the hands of the enemy.62 Similarly, the newspaper The Storm (Groza) wrote  : Now it is the right time, once and for all, to put an end to the accursed “Jewish question”. All Jews should be gathered together in a single place that is expected to fall quickly to the enemy so that they will be forever expelled from Russian soil. Later, when our military takes the place back, the zhids can easily be expelled across the border as “foreigners”.63 56 Ibid., 94. 57 Ibid., 95. 58 Ibid. 59 Matthäus, “German Judenpolitik,” 173. 60 Ibid. 61 Levin, The Litvaks, 107. 62 Stein, “The Exile of the Lithuanian Jews.” 63 Cited in ibid.



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It is not surprising that these antisemitic attitudes also remained intact on the roads where both non-Jewish and Jewish Lithuanians met each other while fleeing from the battle. It is also important to notice that this atmosphere of hatred lasted during the whole course of the war, and unlike in the year of 1915, many Jews were afraid to appear on the roads at the end of the war. In his essay “April 1919” Abramowicz depicts the end of the war  : We did not encounter a single other Jew on the roads, and people wondered at our making the journey at such a dangerous time. We endured great moral pangs all the way from Landwarow to Vilna. Everyone we passed, women in particular, made a point of directing poisonous, biting, and humiliating remarks at us. Their first words were zydowskie komisary ( Jewish commissars). At one place we came across several peasants with their families. (…) The peasant women said that they had better stop doing business with Jews because “our people might shoot us for that.”64

Thus, antisemitism prevailed in Lithuania during the war years, and Jews were often associated with the supporters of the Russian Empire. Lithuanian historian Tomas Balkelis argues that “modern Lithuanian identity was articulated through the negotiation of its attributes with other ethnic groups (Russians, Jews, and particularly Poles).”65 At the end of the nineteenth century, Lithuanian intellectuals sought to achieve independence from the Russian Empire and create a modern Lithuanian nation, which had to be based on ethnicity and language and have Vilna as its capital.66 Balkelis claims that “the increasing economic competition with Jews in the Lithuanian towns and cities, mingled with traditional Catholic antisemitism, helped to delineate them as outsiders and offered a new understanding of what it meant to be ‘a Lithuanian’ in those times.”67 Lithuanian historian Vygantas Vareikis explains that these ideas encouraged “ethnic Lithuanians” not only to speak one language but also to create a stable economic basis for the well-being of their nation. Therefore, he claims that Lithuanian antisemitism at the end of the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth century was economic in nature  : “in Lithuania, a comprehensive antisemitic ideology was not created and the antisemitism here 64 Abramowicz, Profiles of a Lost World, 217–218. 65 Balkelis, The Making of Modern Lithuania, 123. 66 Darius Staliūnas, “Lietuvių ir žydų politinio bendradarbiavimo epizodai XX a. pradžioje [The Episodes of the Political Cooperation between Lithuanians and Jews in the Beginning of the XXth Century],” in Lietuvos žydai. Istorinė studija [The Jews of Lithuania. Historical Study], eds. Vladas Sirutavičius, Darius Staliūnas and Jurgita Šiaučiūnaitė-Verbickienė (Vilnius  : Baltos lankos, 2012), 271. 67 Balkelis, The Making of Modern Lithuania, 123.

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did not develop extreme forms, confining itself to the propagation of economic fight against the Jews.”68 Nevertheless, antisemitic expressions, as previously mentioned, especially in the media, contributed to the way a negative “cultural code” of “an imagined Jew” developed, even if there was no organized movement against the Lithuanian Jewry.69 Returning Home: Lithuanian Jews and Nation-Building Many refugees, especially those who escaped to Vilna, returned home after the Germans’ arrival in 1915, while others were deported to the interior of the Russian Empire, reaching their hometowns only after the end of the war. Abramowicz recalled that already on the second day after the Germans’ arrival, masses of refugees gathered on the Lukiškiai Square in Vilna in order to receive permits to return home.70 He remembers that it was impossible to issue permits to tens of thousands of people in several days  ; therefore, many people simply “began to ride or walk back to their ruined homes without authorization.”71 On their road home, they usually met a mass of German troops  : “On the roads, German soldiers either confiscated the returning refugees’ horses or ‘traded’ them for their own animals, which were on their last legs. True, no one suffered physical harm. When they requisitioned a driver and his wagon, he was given something to eat.”72 Abramowicz’s parents, who lived on the front line, and abandoned everything to escape the wave of the war for a short period of time in 1915, also returned home after the arrival of the German army. However, they  – like many other 68 Vygantas Vareikis, “Preconditions of Holocaust. Anti-Semitism in Lithuania (19th Century to mid 20th Century (15 June 1940),” Report to the Historical Commission, 2002, 16. “The International Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupation Regimes in Lithuania,” http://www.komisija.lt/en/body.php  ?&m=1194863779 (accessed December 11, 2018). 69 Vladas Sirutavičius, “Notes on the Origin and Development of Modern Lithuanian Antisemitism in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century and at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century,” in The Vanished World of Lithuanian Jews, eds. Alvydas Nikžentaitis, Stefan Schreiner and Darius Staliūnas (Amsterdam  : Rodopi, 2004), 69. Sirutavičius distinguishes between two concepts of antisemitism  : modern antisemitism, which is explained as an ideology and as an organized political movement, and antisemitism as a special “cultural code” (concept taken from Robert Wistrich). The latter he defines as a latent antisemitism, usually expressed at individual levels, and which aim is to destroy Jews as a separate cultural entity. 70 Abramowicz, Profiles of a Lost World, 185. 71 Ibid, 186. 72 Ibid.



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refugees returning home – “suffered extreme poverty.”73 According to Abramowicz, the “poverty of the Jewish population was so great that many families in small towns simply died of hunger.”74 He portrays how, in April 1919, “Jews wandered like ghosts through the streets, having nothing to do. Soldiers were billeted in every house, and both the householders and their ‘lodgers’ suffered the same degree of hunger.”75 This is Abramowicz’s description of towns and countryside that refugees found after having returned home  : In many places dead soldiers lay there as well. The towns had been torched and plundered. The fields had been trampled and dug up, except for a few potatoes. (…). On estates both large and small, only piles of bones remained of whatever livestock the owners have left behind. (…). Houses that had not been burned down often had no windows or doors, and the furniture had been destroyed by fire.76

Many of the abandoned houses were not only left without any belongings, but also occupied by squatters.77 At the time, the German authorities were issuing regulations on how to use the abandoned buildings.78 According to the figures, around 8,000 Jewish homes in 98 localities had been demolished during the war, whiles others were taken over by local inhabitants.79 In many cases, it was German soldiers who had to force non-Jewish Lithuanians to return their stolen property to their Jewish neighbors.80 The war forced more than 75–80 % of Lithuania’s Jewish population to leave their homes, which also brought “economic shock to the province.”81 Those Jews who stayed in areas untouched by the waves of deportation had to obey the new authorities. Abramowicz affirms that  : “World War I and the German occupation introduced a great change in the social structure of the Jewish community. Wealthier classes either left the country or became poorer. Food was scarce.”82 Hence, as he states, the First World War “dealt a fatal blow to the Jewish villages”  :

73 Ibid. 74 Ibid., 202. 75 Ibid., 210. 76 Ibid., 186. 77 Richter, “Baltic States and Finland.” 78 Ibid. 79 Levin, The Litvaks, 109. 80 Ibid., 110. 81 Ibid., 109. 82 Abramowicz, Profiles of a Lost World, 269.

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Many Jewish homes were burned down as a result of military action  ; in many places people barely escaped with their lives. Tsarist officials drove the Jews out of the district of Kovno. When the refugees returned to their villages they found nothing. The village population was greatly impoverished and one could hardly make a living there. Moreover, the policies of the newly created republics of Lithuania and Poland discriminated against rural Jews. (…) All told, there no longer was a place for Jews in the villages.83

Therefore, it is not surprising that only some of the Lithuanian Jews returned after the war. The “evacuations” of the First World War “led to a long-term decrease in the ( Jewish) population in the region.”84 It is also important to observe that the year of 1922, when Abramowicz published his war observations, was also the year when Lithuanian officials were still registering inhabitants wishing to return to Lithuania.85 Still, Abramowicz does not mention the fact that by August 1922 “increasing numbers of Jewish and Polish refugees were denied entry to Lithuania in comparison with the numbers of ethnic Lithuanian refugees” in any part of his historical account.86 This negative development was influenced by the public campaign, which was supported by the political party of Christian Democrats87, who urged the government to reduce the numbers of non-Lithuanian refugees.88 The liberal immigration policy, which was conducted by the Lithuanian Ministry of Interior, was presented as a danger to the Lithuanian state, and the minister was accused of “filling Lithuania with Jews.”89 According to Balkelis, such antisemitic statements could be related to the fact that “World War I strengthened the role of nationality in determining loyalties, defining identities and creating frameworks for collective action among many population groups,” and the Lithuanian nation-state was constructed as a mono-ethnic project.90 Not all Lithuanian Jews wished to return, and especially those who had grown up during the years of the war stayed in the interior of Russia  : “they hesitated 83 Ibid., 76. 84 Richter, “Baltic States and Finland”. 85 Balkelis, The Making of Modern Lithuania, 116. 86 Ibid. 87 The Lithuanian Christian Democratic Party was officially established in 1917. This party originated from a Christian Democratic movement which was created at the end of the 19th century by the intellectuals and the Roman Catholic clergy. This movement fostered Lithuanian patriotism, anti-Polish sentiments and nationalist aspirations. In the 1920 elections, this political party won the elections (with 24 seats out of 100). 88 Balkelis, The Making of Modern Lithuania, 116. 89 Ibid. 90 Ibid., 118.



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to take up wandering again to return to destroyed and ravaged towns.”91 Those Lithuanian Jews who decided to create their life in Lithuania in the interwar years experienced not only bursts of antisemitism, but also created a rich and vivid Jewish culture. After the war, Abramowicz continued to live in the city of Vilna, which was known as the “Jerusalem of Lithuania” in the interwar years. At the end of June 1939, he left Vilna for a summer vacation in Canada and the United States to visit his relatives, who had emigrated at the beginning of the century. His daughter Dina Abramowicz remembers that “father took the trip, but instead of a tourist he became a refugee.”92 Later, he turned into a resident of New York, where he worked as a journalist. The most important work was his special series of articles titled Images of a Lost World, published from 1949 to 1953 in the Paris Yiddish daily Unzer shtime (Our Voice), which portrayed the life in Vilna before the Holocaust.93 His daughter notes that, after the Holocaust, his father “no longer wrote about tears,” as he started “to commemorate, to bring to life those whose existence had been brutally cut off.”94 During the Holocaust, which, according to historian Matthäus, could be seen as the continuation of the First World War, which actually “foreshadowed what the future held in store,95” he lost his wife and one of his daughters, who did not join him on his trip and stayed in Vilna. Abramowicz revealed that the First World War changed the cohabitation of different nationalities in Lithuania in his exploration of the war years. Still, he hoped that these relations could be improved,96 but as his daughter remarked  : “little did he know what was to come.”97

91 92 93 94 95 96 97

Stein, “The Exile of the Lithuanian Jews.” Abramowicz, “My Father’s Life and Work,” 29. Ibid., 30. Ibid., 29. Matthäus, “German Judenpolitik,” 173. Abramowicz, “My Father’s Life and Work,” 33. Ibid., 29.

Ines Koeltzsch

Familiar Strangers? Perceptions of Galician- and Bucovinian-Jewish Refugees in the CzechJewish Press and Fiction during the First World War

During the First World War, between 100,000 and 150,000 Jewish refugees from Galicia and Bucovina sheltered in the Lands of the Bohemian Crown. They were not the only, but the biggest group of war refugees in the modern history of Bohemia, Moravia and Austrian Silesia, and their number correlated with that of the local Jewish population. Most of the Eastern European Jewish refugees were housed in makeshift barracks in the Bohemian-Moravian-Austrian borderlands, in Prague and other cities as well as in numerous small towns and villages in the Bohemian and Moravian countryside. Many of these small towns had already been confronted with the migration of their Jewish inhabitants to urban centers and the loss of cultural and social infrastructures before the First World War. The number of Jewish war refugees, thus, frequently exceeded the number of local Jewish inhabitants. For a short period, the refugees revived Jewish communal life in the Bohemian, Moravian and Moravian-Silesian provincial towns and localities, while often being confronted with expressions of resentment from local Jews and hostility from non-Jews.1

1

The topic has gained more attention in recent years from historians, even though more profound and detailed research on the daily lives of the Jewish war refugees in the Bohemian lands still needs to be done. See above all Marsha Rozenblit, Reconstructing a National Identity, The Jews of Habsburg Austria during World War I, (Oxford  : Oxford University Press, 2001), esp. 59–81 (chapter “Mobilizing the Home Front. Patriotic War Work and Helping Jewish Refugees”)  ; Martin Welling, “Von Haß so eng umkreist,” Der Erste Weltkrieg aus Sicht der Prager Juden, Frankfurt am Main 2003  ; Klára Habartová, “Jewish Refugees from Galicia and Bukovina in East Bohemia During World War I in Light of Documents of the State Administration,” Judaica Bohe­ miae, 43 (2007/2008)  : 139–166  ; Rebekah Klein-Pejšová, “Beyond the ‘Infamous Concentration Camps of the Old Monarchy’  : Jewish Refugee Policy from Wartime Austria-Hungary to Interwar Czechoslovakia,” Austrian History Yearbook, 45 (2014)  : 150–166  ; Sarah Panter, Jüdische Erfahrungen und Loyalitätskonflikte im Ersten Weltkrieg, (Göttingen  : Vanenhoeck& Ruprecht, 2014)  ; Michal Frankl, “Exhibiting Refugeedom. Orient in Bohemia  ? Jewish Refugees During the First World War,” Judaica Bohemiae, 50/1 (2015)  : 117–129  ; Michal Frankl/Miloslav Szabó, Budování státu bez antisemitismu  ? Násilí, diskurz loajality a vznik Československa (Praha  : Nakladatelství Lidové noviny, 2015), 173–190  ; Claire Morelon, “L’arrivée des réfugiés de Galicie en

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Unlike other Central European regions or cities, such as Budapest, Vienna, or Berlin, the Bohemian lands had not experienced a significant immigration by Eastern European Jews in the years before the First World War. The war situation alone led to the first mass encounter between “East” and “West” which belonged to one of the most important Jewish war experiences in the Bohemian lands.2 However, fugitive encounters with migrants, merchants, tourists visiting spas and artists, as well as closer contacts with a few rabbis, cantors and merchants who had settled down, had already taken place in the decade leading up to the First World War. Still, the Eastern European Jewish ways of life, which were often not known from personal experiences and contacts, were ambivalently discussed  ; these discussions oscillated between rejection and romanticism.3 The immediate encounter between local Jewish inhabitants and refugees from Galicia and Bucovina during the First World War was a giant caesura and presented Jews in the Bohemian lands with both material and ideological challenges  :4 On the one hand, they significantly extended and modernized relief work, and many local Jews supported the activities of local relief committees, and, on the other hand, the presence of Galician and Bucovinian refugees affected the reformulation of Jewish concepts of identity in the transitional period between the Habsburg Monarchy’s imperial rule and the Czechoslovakian democratic and national order. The reformulation was often based on negative demarcation of the “other” Jews. The label of “Polish Jews” (polnische Juden, polští židé) in the Czech press and/or of Ostjuden in the German ( Jewish) press releases was interpreted by the Jewish public in the Bohemian lands – as it was everywhere in Central Europe  – as a collective term that referred to the various Jewries in Eastern Europe and was sometimes accompanied by positive, but mainly by strongly negative exaggerations. Jews from Eastern Europe were perceived as backward with regard to their religious, cultural, social and economic characteristics.5 The discussion about polští židé or Ostjuden – that also took on antisem-

2

3 4 5

Bohême pendant la Première Guerre mondiale  : rencontre problématique et limites du patriotisme autrichien,” Histoire@Politique 10/1 (2016)  : 5–18. On other war experiences of Bohemian and Moravian Jews see, e.g.: Marsha Rozenblit, “Jews in the Bohemian Lands during World War I,” in Jüdische Publizistik und Literatur im Zeichen des Ersten Weltkriegs, ed. Petra Ernst and Eleonore Lappin-Eppel (Innsbruck – Wien – Bozen  : Studien Verlag, 2016), 205–215. On Zionist reorientations towards the “East,” see esp.: Scott Spector, Prague Territories. Na­ tional Conflict and Cultural Innovation in Franz Kafka’s Fin de siècle (Berkeley  : University of California Press 2000), 160–194. Hillel J. Kieval, “Galicia in Prague, Prague in Galicia,” in idem., The Making of Czech Jewry (New York  : Oxford University Press, 1988), 174–178. On the emergence, formation and various meanings of the ambivalent term Ostjuden and its



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itic forms in non-Jewish press releases and fiction6 – was not completely new to the Jewish (and non-Jewish) public in the Bohemian lands, but now took on major significance. The “interior Ostjudenfrage,” as Sarah Panter in her book Jüdische Erfahrungen und Loyalitätskonflikte im Ersten Weltkrieg called the debates about the presence of Eastern European Jewish war refugees and their perceptions as religious and cultural “others” by members of the local Jewish population, was mainly discussed by scholars in its (Prague) German liberal and Zionist versions. Continuing a topic introduced by Marsha Rozenblit, Sarah Panter commented that the (Prague) debate had “more similarities with the inner ‘Ostjudenfrage’ in the German-Jewish community than in the circles of the Viennese-Jewish community”.7 Rozenblit mainly explained the differences in the perspectives of people living in Vienna and Prague (and Bohemia and Moravia) by pointing out the lack of experience and presence of Eastern European Jews in the Bohemian and Moravian societies. This was, however, not the case in Germany (and mainly Berlin), to which Eastern European Jews had already migrated before the First World War. Among German Jews, they faced similarly strong, negative reactions, even though many German Jews were also actively engaged in carrying out social relief activities for migrants and refugees. In contrast to the German situation, the Galician and Bucovinian refugees were Austrian citizens and not foreigners. Therefore, social relief offered to the Jewish refugees and co-religionists – as Rozenblit convincingly explained – was understood primarily as “an act of patriotism.”8 However, this seems to be only partly true for the Bohemian lands and especially for Bohemia. The Zionist and German liberals living in Prague and, in part, Brno carried out discussions about the perceptions of refugees in the Bohemian lands, but mainly ignored the Czech-Jewish9 perspective. Although the comments made forerunner polnische Juden, see esp.: Anne-Christin Saß, “Ostjuden,” in Enzyklopädie jüdischer Geschichte und Kultur, Bd. 4, ed. Dan Diner (Stuttgart – Weimar  : Verlag J. B. Metzler, 2013), 459–464. 6 Oskar Donath, Židé a židovství v české literatuře 19. a 20. století, Díl II, Od Jar : Vrchlického do doby přítomné (Brno  : Nákladem vlastním 1930), 173–177. 7 Sarah Panter, Jüdische Erfahrungen und Loyalitätskonflikte, 124. German original  : größere Ähn­ lichkeiten mit der inneren ‘Ostjudenfrage’ in der deutsch-jüdischen Gemeinschaft auf[wies] als etwa in Kreisen der jüdischen Gemeinde Wiens. 8 Rozenblit, Reconstructing a National Identity, 60. 9 I use the terms Czech-Jewish/Czech-Jews for those Jews living in the Bohemian lands who identified with the goals of the idea of “assimilation” into Czech culture. Czech-Jews had had their own institutional frame since the 1870s, which is referred to here because of this movement. In contrast, Bohemian and Moravian German-speaking Jews did not have their own

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by members of the Czech-Jewish integrationist movement address only parts of the heterogeneous and often bilingual Jewry of the Bohemian lands  – like comments made by the Zionist and German liberals. Still, more than half of the Jewish inhabitants in Bohemia had declared Czech as their language of daily use by around 1900. Especially Jews living in the Bohemian countryside and Jews who had emigrated from the Bohemian countryside to the urban centers were closely tied to the Czech language and culture, even though their choice did not necessarily reflect a political or national statement, but rather a social reality. Jews living in the borderlands, and especially in the North Bohemian industrial towns, as well as Jews in Moravia, were more attached to the German language and culture than those living in central parts of Bohemia.10 In the following text, I will focus on the perceptions of the Eastern European Jewish war refugees in the Czech-Jewish debates – not only to add another aspect to the “whole” picture – but also to determine why the public debates might have differed between Vienna, Prague and Berlin. First, I will briefly outline the ideological and social background of the Czech-Jewish movement before and during the First World War. Second, I will discuss comments on Czech-Jewish perceptions that appeared in the contemporary press and political pamphlets, which were mainly characterized by their strong rejection of the Jewish “others.” This rejection, in turn, was based on the fear that the thus far successful integration into Czech society would fail. Third, I will argue that the assumption made  – that the Czech-Jews avoided every “appearance of togetherness” with the Galician and Bucovinian refugees through their commitment to refugee relief and that they perceived them as strangers, not as brothers  – nevertheless, has to be modified if we carefully examine examples of Czech-Jewish fiction that were published during the First World War.11 Obviously, fiction offered a certain space for authors to transcend ideological boundaries. In their wartime short stories, Czech-Jewish authors called for readers to empathize with the refugees and their different religious and cultural ways of life. These authors also tried to individualize the group of Eastern European Jewish war refugees, which integrationist organizations, as in the case of the Centralverein in Germany, but were engaged in liberal German press, parties and organisations (e.g., B’nai B’rith). 10 For the demographic and linguistic changes, see esp.: Kieval, The Making of Czech Jewry (New York  : Oxford University Press, 1988) and Kateřina Čapková, Czechs, Germans, Jews  ? National Identity and the Jews of Bohemia (New York – Oxford et al.: Berhahn Books, 2012). 11 Welling, “Von Haß so eng umkreist,” 150–158, esp. 153. On Czech-Jewish perceptions of East European Jews during the First World War, see also  : Kieval, The Making of Czech Jewry, and most recently  : Magdaléna Fottová, “Obrázy východních Židů v českožidovských a česky psaných sionistických časopisech 1910–1915,” in Cizí i blízcí. Židé, literatura, kultura v českých zemích ve 20. století, ed. Jiří Holý (Prague: Akropolis, 2016), 135–183, esp. 143–151.



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was mainly depicted as seemingly homogeneous in the political press releases. I argue that these Czech-Jewish literary attempts to draw a slightly more positive picture of the refugees that was based primarily on a nostalgic rediscovery of their “Jewishness,” i.e., of the Jewish culture and the traditions maintained by their ancestors in the countryside. Petra Ernst stated that these fictional stories are part of the “fragmentation of experiences, emotions and perceptions,” suggesting that other researchers should read fictional texts and press releases from and about the First World War. Czech-Jewish writings about the First World War, thus, should be read as fragments, each of which shows its own specific reality.12 Contexts: The Czech-Jewish movement before and during the First World War The Czech-Jewish movement began in the 1870s, in the first decade after the civil emancipation of the Jews living in the Habsburg Monarchy and the establishment of Czech grammar schools. The affinity with the Czech language and culture was the central motif of the Czech-Jewish activists, who wanted to spread and deepen the knowledge of the Czech language among members of the Jewish population in the Bohemian lands. While the Czech-Jewish organizations were centered in Prague, their founders and representatives came originally from the Bohemian countryside, and the majority of their adherents and addressees still lived outside Prague. With the exception of the Bohemian borderlands and large parts of Moravia, most of the Jews lived in a rural and small-town Czech environment at that time, but attended Jewish schools with German as the language of instruction. These schools had been established in course of the Josephinian reforms at the end of the eighteenth century. Their high level of bilingualism encouraged Jews to decide to follow on a Czech or German educational path or (even if increasingly rarely) following both paths after moving to Prague. After the split of the Charles University into German and Czech universities in 1882, it became possible for non-Jews and Jews to pursue an academic career solely in the Czech language.13 12 Petra Ernst, “Galizien im Ersten Weltkrieg im Spiegel deutschsprachig-jüdischer Literatur und Publizistik,” in Jenseits des Schützengrabens. Der Erste Weltkrieg im Osten  : Erfahrung – Wahrneh­ mung – Kontext, ed. Bernhard Bachinger and Wolfram Dornik (Innsbruck  – Wien  – Bozen  : Studien Verlag, 2013), 413–436, esp.: 436. See also in general  : Petra Ernst and Eleonore Lappin-Eppel eds., Jüdische Publizistik und Literatur im Zeichen des Ersten Weltkrieg. 13 On the foundations of the Czech-Jewish movement see above all  : Kieval, The Making of Czech Jewry, 23–35, and Čapková, Czechs, Germans, Jews  ?, 92–104.

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By the end of the nineteenth century, the Czech-Jewish movement had turned from a small group of academic elites into the most important representative group of Jews in the Czech (national) society. This led to its differentiation and a split  : In a reaction to the increasingly antisemitic attitudes displayed by Czech national politicians and the antisemitic riots that took place at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, several Czech-Jewish intellectuals founded the Svaz českých pokrokových židů (Union of Czech Progressive Jews), which was similar to the Česká strana lidová pokroková, the Realist Party that had been founded by Tomáš G. Masaryk. Some of these Czech-Jewish intellectuals had also been members of this party from the time it began in 1900.14 The adherents of the so-called progressive Czech-Jewish group did not follow the program of ‘total assimilation,’ as the older generation had. Instead, they emphasized the compatibility of ‘Czechness’ and ‘Jewishness,’ meaning that they did not support the complete refusal of Jewish cultural and religious ties. The journalists and writers who are discussed in this text belonged to this moderate group of CzechJews, which was by no means homogeneous. Some of its members, for example, the journalists and writers Eduard Lederer, Vojtěch Rakous and Viktor Vohryzek, belonged to the so-called second generation, which fought resolutely against German cultural ties in the years just before the First World War. Meanwhile, a third generation became active that was characterized by their rather moderate attitudes towards alternative concepts of identity. As Hillel Kieval pointed out, members of this younger generation considered their integration into Czech society and culture as a matter of fact, and they no longer fought against German-speaking Jews, but rather against the position of national indifference. Their crucial questions had now become one of how to understand the “Jewish component” in their own lives and how to deal with the Jewish heritage of their ancestors.15 However, the First World War fundamentally changed the positions of Czech-Jews within Czech politics. Due to the war, the movement was organizationally paralyzed  : Many members of Czech-Jewish institutions served as soldiers in the Austrian army, leading to the shutdown of the Czech-Jewish weekly publication Rozvoj (Progress) in late 1915. Although Viktor Vohryzek founded a new journal – called České listy (Czech newspaper) – published in the Eastern Bohemian regional town Pardubice, he and his co-editor Bohdan Klineberger 14 Hillel J. Kieval, “Masaryk and Czech Jewry  : the Ambiguities of Friendship,” in T. G. Masaryk (1850–1937)  : Thinker and Politician, ed. Stanley B. Winters. (London  : Palgrave Macmillan, 1990), 302–327. On the role of antisemitism in Czech national politics around 1900 see  : Michal Frankl, “Prag ist nunmehr antisemitisch”. Tschechischer Antisemitismus am Ende des 19. Jahrhun­ derts, (Berlin  : Metropol-Verlag, 2011). 15 Kieval, The Making of Czech Jewry, 154–163.



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were temporarily arrested at the fortress at Terezín (sic). They were accused of holding anti-Austrian views, and the publication of the journal was suspended. In the summer of 1917, the situation improved, and a new Czech-Jewish weekly publication, Rozhled (Perspective), and a sporadically published journal, Ko­ respondence Svazu českých pokrokových židů (Correspondence of the Union of Czech Progressive Jews), were founded. While Korespondence was published by the adherents of the Realist Party for only a few months, Rozhled was merged with the re-established Rozvoj, which became the main political organ for the unified Czech-Jewish movement Svaz Čechů-židů (Union of Czech-Jews) during the early period of the First Czechoslovak Republic.16 Despite these attempts to gain new strength, Czech-Jews lost their predominant position in Czech politics by the end of the First World War and during the state-building process of Czechoslovakia. Zionists became the most important Jewish partners of the Czech politicians, above all, Tomáš G. Masaryk, who was later to become president and openly supported Zionism to some point. In contrast, Czech-Jews had to deal with the strong conflict that existed between the Jewish and non-Jewish members of the Realist Party, and many prominent non-Jewish party members demanded the exclusion of Jews from Czech politics. This split led to a crisis in the former Czech-Jewish political group that lasted through the 1920s and 1930s.17 Initially, Czech-Jews and Zionists seemed to differ in their attitudes towards Jewish war refugees  : Adherents of both movements were engaged in refugee relief, but later this became the domain of Zionist activists who had intensified their social, cultural and political work in the years before and during the war. Although many Zionists shared the Czech-Jews’ ambivalent feelings towards the refugees and often looked down on them from a Western colonialist perspective, they admired the “natural” relationships Eastern European Jews had to Jewish religion and culture. The extensive organization of education for Jewish refugee children was primarily the achievement of Zionist activists, while Jewish representatives in the countryside – most probably adherents to Czech-Jewish assimilationist politics  – partly opposed these schools, which had Yiddish or “jargon” as they called it as the language of instruction.18 16 Kieval, The Making of Czech Jewry, 183–186. On the history of Czech-Jewish press see also  : Donath, Židé a židovství, II, 181–191. 17 Kieval, The Making of Czech Jewry, 183–186. On the conflict within the Realist party and the public demands by prominent Czech politicians to exclude Jews from Czech politics see especially  : Frankl/Szabó, Budování státu bez antisemitismu  ?, 124–125. 18 See for instance correspondence between the Zionist educational activist Alfred Engel who coordinated the establishment of school instruction for young Jewish war refugees in the Bohe-

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It would be too simple, however to focus purely on this clear opposition between Zionists and Czech-Jewish integrationists. Activists from both groups often shared the same socio-cultural background  ; they were rooted in the experiences of rapid urbanization and situated in bilingual environments that had become increasingly nationalist and antisemitic since the end of nineteenth century. The reception of Eastern European Jewish refugees and their ‘otherness’ as compared to the reception of Western European Jewish ways of life in the Czech-Jewish press and fiction took place against this background of transformation  : the transformation of Jewish politics in the Bohemian lands and the weakening of Czech-Jewish integrationist politics before and during the First World War. Us and Them. Ambivalent perceptions of Galician- and Bucovinian-Jewish war refugees in the Czech-Jewish press The arrival and presence of Galician- and Bucovinian-Jewish war refugees since late summer 1914 had been controversially discussed in the Bohemian and Moravian German-Jewish, Zionist and Czech-Jewish press releases. The debate, which was set against the background of the First World War, corresponded to the former depictions of Ostjuden and polští židé, respectively, in examples of German and Czech Jewish writing, but now took on new qualities and dimensions. The debate reached its negative climax in the summer of 1915, when an appeal to the Jewish war refugees was published by the Zionist weekly Selbstwehr. The anonymous author asked the refugees to get rid of payot (sidelocks) and caftan, which were perceived as signs of backwardness. Although many people raised their voices against this appeal, the overall impression of the debate was one of ambivalent attitudes towards the refugees. These seemed to be rooted in the general image of Ostjuden in the German intellectual discourse and had strong similarities to the contemporary inner Jewish debate going on in Germany, as Sarah Panter has pointed out.19 Nearly a month later, Eduard Lederer,20 a leading and well-known activist in the Czech-Jewish movement, published an article in the weekly Rozvoj with the mian lands and the Jewish community of Přestice from 1916, Archive of the Jewish Museum in Prague, fond Přestice, signature 29697. 19 Panter, Jüdische Erfahrungen, 123–124. 20 Eduard/Edvard Lederer (1859–1944) was born into a Jewish family of a leaseholder at the Southern Bohemian countryside. He finished a German grammar school in Prague, studied law at (still bilingual) university in Prague and in Vienna. As a lawyer he settled in the southern Bohemian provincial town Jindřichův Hradec (Neuhaus) and moved again to Prague after the



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title Židé haličtí a židé u nás (Galician Jews and our Jews), which also provoked controversial reactions. This debate can be understood as an equivalent to the Zionist debate but with a different ideological tendency. In his article, Lederer used the first (partial) departure of Galician Jews from the Czech lands back home in the summer of 1915 as an occasion to summarize an encounter that had taken place between Jewish refugees and Jews on the home fronts in Bohemia and Moravia during the first year of war. He praised the enormous and self-sacrificing charity of the local Jewish population and underlined the fact that these relief activities unified Jews with different political orientations – Czech-Jews, German-Jews and Zionists all did their best together. The refugees sincerely thanked those who helped them, but Lederer pointed out that it was time that “we,” (the Czech-Jews) advance an opinion about “them,” (the refugees). Lederer’s text was hostile and filled with stereotypes. The Jewish refugees did not share the same denomination or the language of local Jews  : According to Lederer, orthodoxy was a religion followed by ritual fanatics and the “jargon,” as he pejoratively called Yiddish, was “a philistine mixture of Hebrew and Slavic words, embedded in a medieval German.” He concluded that “our Christian Czech and German co-citizens” stood closer to the Czech-Jews than “our Polish co-religionists.”21 The editors published divergent opinions in the following issues of Rozvoj, including those of several Czech-Jewish activists, who had lived in Galicia for several years and often were in close contact with Galician Jews, and that of a Galician Jew, who had lived in Bohemia for a longer period of time and had not come as a refugee.22 These individuals rebutted Lederer’s statements from various perspectives and underlined the cultural, religious and social diversity among refugees. Nevertheless, the discussion was closed by Lederer, who again stressed the cultural, religious and ethnic differences between the local and establishment of the First Czechoslovak Republic, where he became a high-ranking official at the ministry of education and opened a lawyer’s office. Since the 1890s Lederer was engaged in the Czech-Jewish movement and emerged as one of its leading representatives. He published numerous articles and fiction (under the pseudonym Leda) in behalf of the Czech-Jewish movement. Lederer died in Terezín in 1944. On Lederer’s ideological background see above all Miloslav Szabó, National Conflict and Anti-Semitism at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century  : The Case of the Czech Slovakophiles Karel Kálal and Eduard Lederer, Judaica Bohemiae, 2009, no. 1, 49–81  ; and on his extensive, but less successful literary activities see  : Donath, Židé a židovství, II., 204–214. 21 Edvard Lederer, “Židé haličtí a židé u nás,” Rozvoj, no. 15 ( July 24 1915)  : 1–2. 22 M. Schönbaum, “Halič a – Čechy,” Rozvoj, no. 16 (August 7 1915)  : 3–4  ; Ludvík Feigel, “Židé haličští a židé u nás,” Rozvoj, no. 17 (August 22 1915)  : 2–5  ; Bornislav Schwarzwald, “Na adresu p. Lederera,” (translated from German into Czech by Edvard Lederer) Rozvoj, no. 17 (August 22 1915)  : 5–6.

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Galician Jews.23 The statements of refugees, if any were sent to the journal, were not published. The discussion about the Galician Jewish refugees was not the first one to appear in the Czech-Jewish press, but it was the first to provoke a broad range of reactions. In February 1915, another journalist who belonged to the Czech-Jewish movement, most probably Max Lederer,24 a man who had no family ties to Edvard Lederer, had already expressed the ambivalent attitudes held by Czech-Jews in several feuilletons. As Max Lederer had stated at the beginning of the series, two worlds had clashed together in the Bohemian lands since the summer of 1914. Unlike members of the Jewish and non-Jewish local population, who did their best to help, the refugees failed to adjust to the situation. While the poor refugees took their “dirty Galician villages” with them, the rich refugees “wined and dined” in Vienna, Prague and the Bohemian spa resorts. Max Lederer gave even more examples of the mental and cultural shortcomings of the refugees, which he perceived as more important than their “material poverty.”25 Nevertheless, in the second part of his series, he mentioned the psychological consequences the refugees faced due to the lack of possibilities to work, their existential uncertainty and their involuntary separation from their homes. To Max Lederer, these psychological problems were more relevant than the religious, cultural and social “shortcomings” he perceived in the refugees and which he had discussed in the first part of his series. Lederer, thus, suggested offering more opportunities for work to the refugees, mainly in agriculture and handicrafts, than had been offered up until that point. At this point, Lederer generated some sympathy for the refugees. He also did not completely exclude the possibility of “assimilation” into Bohemian and Moravian society, i.e., the Western Jewish society and, thus, he concluded the series with a plea for “assimilation” after all.26 He strengthened this plea in the third and last part of his feuilletons about refugees. Max Lederer believed that the time they spent in the Bohemian lands could help them start a new life if they were willing to “assimilate.” Furthermore “assimilation” into the Western Jewish society would 23 Edvard Lederer, “Můj závěrek,” Rozvoj, no. 17 (August 22 1915)  : 6. 24 Max Lederer (1875–1937) worked as a railways clerk in various Bohemian and Moravian localities, but spent most of his life in Eastern Bohemia. He was an activist of the Czech-Jewish movement and wrote numerous feuilletons and short stories for Czech-Jewish press. At the same time, he was one of the protagonists of Czech Amateur Theatre and co-founded the still existing international festival of amateur theatre Jiraskův Hronov in 1931. See  : Donath, Židé a židovství, II., 222–223 and Era, “Šedesátka Maxe Lederera,” Rozvoj, no. 31 (October 18 1935)  : 2–3. 25 M. L. [Max Lederer  ?], “Beseda,” Rozvoj, no. 3 (February 5 1915)  : 1–2. 26 M. L. [Max Lederer  ?], “Beseda,” Rozvoj, no. 4 (February 20 1915)  : 1–2.



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encourage the refugees to create a new Jewish life after their return to Galicia and to build a “new Galicia.”27 This more moderate, but still ambivalent tone expressed by Max Lederer is one that can also be found in other articles and essays written by members of the Czech-Jewish movement. In his essay entitled O současném českožidovství (About the Contemporary Czech-Jewry) the attorney and sociologist Evžen Stern,28 who represented the youngest generation of leading Czech-Jewish thinkers on the eve of the First World War, also admitted considering the possibility of integration. He referred to the English society and its assumed “loyal tolerance” as one successful example. At the same time, Stern wrote that Czech antisemitism was, in fact, an important obstacle to the integration of refugees in the Bohemian lands. The integration of the “other Jews” could only be successful if an interplay occurred between the “willingness” of these “other Jews” to “assimilate” (Assimilationsbereitschaft) into Western Jewish society and the “pursuit” of “small nations” to solve “the Jewish problem” without violence but with the support of an “intensive inner cultural colonialization.”29 The articles and pamphlets written by Edvard Lederer, Max Lederer, Evžen Stern and others show the variety of opinions that were held by members of the Czech-Jewish movement, ranging from a total refusal to accept the integration of the refugees to a cautious expression of acceptance of them. Among others, Max Lederer was one of the few prominent, non-academic representatives of the Czech-Jewish movement. Unlike Eduard Lederer and Evžen Stern he tried to understand the social and psychological problems of the refugees and supported their integration into the labor market. However, he also demanded that the refugees assimilate and change their previous ways of life. All these articles and pamphlets were based on Czech-Jewish ideology and varied only in the way assimilation was understood. The authors mostly viewed the refugees as a threat to 27 M. L., “Beseda”, Royvoj, no. 5 (March 3 1915)  : 1–2. 28 Evžen Stern (1889–1942) was born into a Jewish merchant family in the Central Bohemian town Čelakovice. He studied at a secondary school in Prague and later law and sociology at Charles university and in Paris. Already as a student he became an active supporter of Tomáš G. Masaryk, but joined the Czech Social Democratic party in 1911. Stern became one of the leading social politicians in the First Czechoslovak Republic and served between 1926 and 1939 as the general director of the Central Social Insurancy in Prague. At the same time Stern actively supported the Czech-Jewish movement and belonged to the representatives with a less radical program of integrationist politics. Because of his engagement in the Czech resistance he was arrested in summer 1942, deported to Terezín and later to Mauthausen, where he was murdered at the end of the same year. 29 Evžen Stern, O současném českožidovství, Reprint from Kalendář česko-židovský 1915/16, Prague (Právo lidu) 1915.

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their thus far successful project to assimilate into Czech society and were especially afraid that Czech nationalists would carry out antisemitic attacks because of the presence of Eastern European Jewish refugees. Even though some of the authors were against the construction of the picture of a homogenous group of Eastern European Jews, the individual voices and experiences of Jewish war refugees did not really appear in the Czech-Jewish press releases. If they were quoted, they were mentioned as anonymous persons or people who were probably given fictional names, such as a certain Leib Veilchenduft, who was quoted in one of the feuilletons written by Max Lederer.30 Recalling the past. Galician and Bucovinian war refugees in Czech-Jewish fiction There are only a few war testimonies written by Czech-Jewish authors that individually characterize the refugees, reflect on concrete experiences made by them, or tell about their previous lives and futures.31 It is not by chance that these are mostly fictional texts, which are set in Czech-Jewish villages or small towns. Some examples were written by the popular Czech-Jewish writer Vojtěch Rakous, who was perceived as the “Czech Kompert,”32 and, above all, by Max Lederer. The latter was less well-known as a writer but, like Rakous, he was 30 Lederer picked up the name in his short story Přeasimiloval se (Overassimilated), in  : Kalendář česko-židovský 1915/1916, 51–67. Reprinted in  : Max Lederer, Za zrezavělými dráty. Příběhy pravdivé a skoro pravdivé (Prague  : Akademický spolek Kapper 1924), 239–263. 31 For war testimonies about refugees in German-Jewish literature see  : e. g. Otto Abeles, Jüdische Flüchtlinge. Szenen und Gestalten (Wien – Berlin  : Löwit Verlag, 1918). 32 Vojtěch Rakous (1862–1935), born as Adalbert Österreicher, was the son of a rural Jewish family and raised in a Czech-speaking environment. At the age of 13 he was sent to Prague to become an apprentice for a haberdashery. He later returned to the countryside before he finally settled down in Prague where he worked for the footwear company of his brother. Since the 1880s he has become an active member of the Czech-Jewish movement and was asked by intellectual representatives to write down short stories about the Jewish life in the countryside. Rakous’ stories became successful in Czech Jewish and non-Jewish public above all at the beginning of the 20th century because of its affectionate style often romantizising Jewish-Christian relationships in villages and small towns. He also depicted the rapid urbanization of Jews in these stories. Rakous’s Jewish village stories were often compared with the German-Jewish writer Leopold Kompert who depicted Jewish life in the countryside at the treshold of emancipation. Rakous’s stories were also translated into German by Emil Saudek and Anna Auředníčková, two Bohemian-Moravian translators residing in Vienna until the 1920s. On Rakous, see esp.: Donath, Židé a židovství, II., 219–222.



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one of the most important Czech-Jewish political journalists before the First World War. Rakous and Lederer were popular writers who wrote about the lives of ordinary Czech Jews.33 Like the authors of the German-Jewish Ghettoges­ chichte, they both wrote about Jewish village- and small-town-life in the age of emancipation and urbanization in a very authentic, sometimes romantic manner. Rakous, who belonged to an older generation than Lederer, had moved from the countryside to the industrial suburb of Libeň in Prague. He was employed at a footwear company belonging to his brother before becoming a professional writer and journalist. Lederer remained in the countryside and worked until the end of his life as an official for the railway company in several Bohemian small towns.34 Without academic backgrounds, both authors remained attached to the Jewish rural- and small-town culture. Thus, their perspectives differed from those of most of the other important representatives of the Czech-Jewish movement, who had academic backgrounds and urban views, even though they had been raised and partly also worked outside Prague. Max Lederer had published a few comprehensive war stories since 1914/15 in the yearbook Kalendář česko-židovský, which were later edited and published under the title “Temnín za války” (The small town Temnín during war) in his volume Za zrezavělými dráty (Behind Rusted Wire Fences), which was published by the Czech-Jewish association Kapper in 1924.35 Rakous wrote a small series of short stories which appeared under the title Když přišla válka (When the war came) and were published in the short-lived journal Korespondence Svazu českých pokrokových židů in early 1918. A few years later, these stories were re-edited and appeared in his famous volume of short stories Vojkovičtí a přespolní (People from Vojkovice and Přespolná). Two stories about Jewish war experiences, written by each author, deal with encounters between local Jews and Galician-Jewish refugees. Lederer and Rakous used the well-established, anti-Jewish clichés and stereotypes, such as their exaggerated religiousness, their appearance (payot and caftan), salesmanship, poverty and traditional family observances. Unlike the articles that had appeared in Czech-Jewish press, Lederer and Rakous partly questioned these stereotypes by using literary strategies such as exaggeration, 33 In both cases the authors were often asked, mainly by the editors of Kalendář česko-židovský, to write a short story. It is not known, if Lederer was asked to write about refugees or if it was his own choice. 34 For some vague biographical information, see  : Era  : Šedesátka Maxe Lederera, Rozvoj, no. 31 (October 18 1935)  : 2–3. 35 Max Lederer  : Za zrezavělými dráty. Příběhy pravdivé a skoro pravdivé, Praha 1924. The volume had most probably two editions which were sold out in the 1930s. See  : Era, Šedesátka Maxe Lederera, 2.

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irony and satire, which they also used in the depiction of local Jews and their non-Jewish neighbors. These almost-unknown short stories by Max Lederer are important, especially today, because he attempted to give the refugees a name and a face, even if it was a fictional one. We do not know the extent to which Lederer‘s stories were based on his personal encounters with refugees. But he had worked as a railways clerk at this time in the small town of Světlá nad Sázovou,36 which is situated close to the district town Německý Brod at the Bohemian-Moravian border. This was a region where many Jewish refugees were found, and he most probably witnessed their arrivals, how they were welcomed and first gathered at railways stations in the district towns, then moved on into numerous small towns, villages and localities. It is, thus, not by chance that Lederer’s character Pinchas Hirschfeld, a young Galician tailor, describes the arrival of Jewish refugees at a railway station in a Bohemian small town in detail at the beginning of his story Přeasimiloval se (Overassimilated). Here, he gives an impressive account of the dehumanizing practices that took place at the station, where the refugees were distributed to various localities of the district. The waiting hall was divided by long benches into two parts. The commissar, the representatives of the municipality and the Jewish community as well as the minute writer were located on one side, and “the stranded figures with caftan and payot,”37 who were often members of families, including many children without parents, stood on the other side  : [Mr.] Chile Wind from Lisko’. Unavailingly he jostled through the mass of figures who all looked similar to him. There was certainly a big difference between Ire Mantel, a rich merchant from Jassel ( Jasło) and Moshe Goldfischer, a peddler from the neighboring village, when they went to the Jassel synagogue on Saturday morning. Just like there was a big difference between Aron Robinson, a farm and sawmill lessee in Kolomea and Jakub Fuhrmann, the director of a large enterprise. But as they now stood in the twilight on a cold autumn morning in the humiliating certainty of the loss they had suffered and in the complete uncertainty of the fate that waited them, their individual differences seemed to disappear as they changed into an army of nameless poverty, equalizing as it was disenfranchising.38

36 See  : Era, Šedesátka Maxe Lederera, 1. 37 Max Lederer, Přeasimiloval se, 240. 38 Max Lederer, Přeasimiloval se, 240–241. English translation from Czech original by I. K. I thank Tim Corbett for the careful proofreading of my translations in this article.



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In the story, the adult refugees try to convince the officials to let them stay in the (fictional) small town Temnín39 and not send them on to the villages in the surrounding areas. The head of the Jewish community decides at least to keep the children and unmarried people in the town, including the young Pinchas Hirschfeld, who receives shelter from a local, wealthy, Jewish merchant family. Hirschfeld, whose father has already died before the Great War, has fled with his mother and two younger sisters, but they have lost one another in the huge group of refugees at a Galician train station. Hirschfeld, thus, does not know what happened to them. The Karpeles – the name of the local Jewish family in the story – behave kindly and empathize with Hirschfeld, but also try to force him to adapt to local habits and customs. For example, they do not keep a kosher household and want to change Pinchas Hirschfeld’s outlook. In contrast, a Galician Jewish family named Veilchenduft wants to bind Pinchas closer to the refugee community and especially to the tavern they run in Temnín. Still, Pinchas finds his own way, eventually opening up a small branch of a sewing company in Temnín and offering work for other refugees. The main company is based in a neighboring town, and is owned by a local Jew. The more professionally successful Pinchas becomes, the more he feels estranged from his Jewish origins. He falls in love with a Czech-Christian woman, which finally leads to Pinchas’s downfall, because she and her family steal his money. When the refugees learn about the recapture of Galicia by the Austrian army, they start to prepare for their return back home. Pinchas, who has been informed of the death of his mother, also decides to go back and take care of his sisters. The story ends as Pinchas makes a promise in the train back home to grow his payot again. Lederer, thus, told a story of assimilation that fails because the approach taken is too radical and the cultural roots are obscured. The most important obstacles to the integration of the Jewish refugees, as presented in this story, were not the local co-religionists but  – first and foremost  – the hostile Czech non-Jewish surroundings. At first glance, the story seems to suggest that Eastern European Jewish refugees could not be fully integrated into the Western society, a sentiment that had often been repeated in the Czech-Jewish press releases, because they were still too closely attached to their traditions, even if they tried to leave them behind. The story fully fits the Czech-Jewish ideology by presenting this perspective. On the other hand, the reader sympathizes with Pinchas Hirschfeld  ; he is a sympathetic protagonist. The story also seems to hold a vague plea to maintain 39 The artificial name Temnín refers to ‘darksome.’ It is most probably a reference to the town Světlá (nad Sázavou), where Lederer was located as a clerk official during the First World War and which means ‘bright’ in Czech.

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various Jewish identities as well as critisicm of radical “assimilation.” Despite all clichés that appear in the story and the failure of Pinchas Hirschfeld – who returns home as poor as he had been upon his arrival – his deep sense of being rooted in Eastern European Jewish culture helps him overcome the tragedies he experiences. The story suggests that returning to one’s cultural and religious roots and staying true to them is more important than economic success and an existence away from home. However, the limit of Lederer’s more positive approach towards Eastern European Jews is also clearly defined  : Pinchas will most probably find his way back to his roots and be successful again “at home” in Galicia, but not in the Bohemian lands. Looking for and returning to one’s cultural and religious roots was one of the most important motifs that appears in these Czech-Jewish stories, serving as a bridge between the local Jews and the refugees. Even though it was clear that the local Jewish characters in these stories did not want to fully return to their traditional ways of life, they lacked something that would help them cope with the feelings of loss and dramatic changes experienced in modern life. Especially in the story by Vojtěch Rakous, Zpívající vlak (The Singing Train),40 it becomes clear that certain, even if idealized bonds existed between local Jews and refugees. The protagonist in Rakous‘s story observes a train filled with refugees passing through the train station in an unnamed, small town. He suddenly hears an odd church chorus  : The first cars pulled slowly through the station. Unlit cattle cars, in which through the bright moonlight men, women, and children were seen crowded closely together… and they all sang that song with the odd melody, and every car and the whole, endless train sang it. One car after the other passed until the last arrived in the station. This one was not dark. Because of the gaping, wide open entrance, the brightly illuminated interior became visible. For a moment it looked like in a fairy tale. A table with a white tablecloth stood in the middle of the car, on which burnt a few candles in antique candleholders. The candles shed a bright light on grave, praying men wrapped in a prayer shawls, who filled the whole car. A prayer room in a cattle car… And the men in the illuminated car sang the same song that resounded through the whole train  ; only they seemed to sing even louder and more fervently. I thought that I must have already heard this song before, maybe in my early childhood, maybe once in my dreams…41

40 Vojtěch Rakous, “Když přišla válka – Zpívající vlak,” in Korespondence Svazu českých pokrokových židů, 3. 5. 1918, č. 2, 7. Reprinted in  : idem Vojkovičtí a přespolní, 4. dopln. vyd., (Praha  : Obelisk 1923), 168–170. 41 Ibid. English translation from Czech original by I. K.



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In this moment, the narrator (alias Rakous) remembers his parental home, the parlor of a farmhouse in the Central Bohemian village of Brázdím, where he stood together with his siblings and parents, and the father introduced the Sabbat with the song Lecho dodi [Lekhah Dodi]. This sequence arouses a positive, nostalgic emotion, which establishes ties between the local Jews and Jewish refugees. It also connects the readers of Rakous’s earlier stories about the Jewish village life of members of the first generations after their emancipation to readers of contemporary stories about the countryside. Rakous presents the religious traditions of the refugees not as strange, as they were often introduced in the articles by journalists, but indicates that they reflect some of the customs with which the generation of Jewish grandparents living in the Bohemian lands were familiar. The nostalgic views of former Jewish life in the Bohemian countryside that were described by Vojtěch Rakous and Max Lederer, thus, were crucial for creating an appealing picture of refugees. It corresponded with parts of Czech-Jewish ideology that were reformulated on the eve of First World War  : “In [our] lives and culture, we are Czech  ; in memory, Jews. We have completely merged with the Czech present, and the Jewish past gives us value,” as Viktor Teytz, a leading representative of the Czech-Jewish movement, pointed out in 1913.42 Vojtěch Rakous and Max Lederer somehow reflected this reorientation in their stories about Jewish rural life before and during the First World War. Although the statements that they made in their political articles were often as radical as those made by the journalist Eduard Lederer, their fictional stories about war refugees – potentially based on their own experiences in the suburbs of Prague and at the Bohemian-Moravian border – created a more positive, even if still ambivalent, picture of the “Polish Jews.” Petra Ernst correctly noted that there was a certain synchronicity between the fact that the German Jewish Ghettoges­ chichten vanished and the Ostjuden images appeared in German-Jewish fiction and examples of journalism before, during and after the First World War.43 In the case of Max Lederer and Vojtěch Rakous, the two genres – Jewish village/ small-town stories (as successors of the Ghettogeschichte) and Ostjuden images – did not replace each other but merged. By the 1920s, less than a fifth of the Bohemian Jews still lived at the countryside. Shortly before the dissolution of rural Jewish culture, it seemed necessary to remind people of Jewish traditions in the 42 Quoted after Kieval, The Making of Czech Jewry, 156. See also  : Viktor Teytz, Několik poznámek k otázce českožidovské (Prague  : 1913), 16. 43 Petra Ernst, “Das Verschwinden der Ghettogeschichte und die Erfindung des Ostjuden im Zeichen des Ersten Weltkriegs,” in Jüdische Publizistik und Literatur im Zeichen des Ersten Weltkriegs, eds. Ernst/Lappin, 307–327.

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countryside by representing the “Polish Jews,” who had temporarily revived the depopulated Bohemian (and Moravian) Jewish communities. The stories written by Vojtěch Rakous and Max Lederer did not support the main points in the Czech-Jewish debate about the arrival and presence of Eastern European Jewish refugees, but they were well-known representatives of the Czech-Jewish movement. While Vojtěch Rakous was a successful writer in Czech and German-Jewish publications as well as in non-Jewish Czech publications, Max Lederer did not belong to the close literary canon of Czech literature in the First Czechoslovak Republic. His stories received especially controversial attention. The Moravian, bilingual, Jewish, literary scholar Oskar Donath received, for example, the stories by Max Lederer very well and considered the abovementioned war story Přeasimiloval se as one of his best pieces.44 In contrast, the leading Czech-Jewish activist Eduard Lederer, who himself had literary ambitions, considered the stories written by Max Lederer and especially the stories about the “Polish Jews” to be his weakest.45 The criticism of his namesake did not come as a surprise  : After the foundation of the First Czechoslovak Republic, Max Lederer took a partly divergent position within the Czech-Jewish movement. He did not support the optimistic approach taken by many Czech-Jewish integrationists, because he addressed the high costs of loyalty in the old and new political order. In his stories, and not only those about the refugees, Max Lederer expressed his disappointment with the “limits of assimilation” and the rejection of Jewish integration into Czech society before, during and after the First World War. Max Lederer was one of few Czech-Jewish authors who openly condemned Czech antisemitism and the persistence of anti-Jewish stereotypes in the Czech public press, which, according to him, reached new heights during the First World War. In the foreword of his collected volume of short stories, Max Lederer stated self-critically that the Czech “revolution” of 1918 was one of the Czech-Jews‘ best experiences, but the creation of a “new Czech life” was different than the Czech-Jews had expected.46 Conclusion For historians, working with fictional texts is often like skating on thin ice, but as Martina Winkler convincingly showed, it is necessary in many cases to in-

44 Donath, Židé a židovství, II. díl, 223. 45 Edvard Lederer, “Za zrezavělými dráty”, in Rozvoj, no. 12 (1924)  : 2–3. 46 Max Lederer  : Za zrezavělými dráty, 5.



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clude and reflect on stories as part of historical work.47 It is not only necessary to fill the gaps because of the lack of sources, as in the case of the Eastern European Jewish refugees in the Bohemian lands during the First Wold War. It is also necessary because fictional texts reflect world views that are part of the given “realities,” which sometimes differ from “official” interpretations one can find in the administrative files or press releases. The short stories written by Czech-Jewish authors, thus, revise the existing narrative of complete rejection of Eastern European Jewish refugees that was promoted by Czech-Jews during the First World War, even though they do not represent a full counter-narrative. Paradoxically, the writers Max Lederer and Vojtěch Rakous belonged to a group of rather radical advocates of Czech-Jewish integrationist ideology in the Czech-Jewish press both before and during the First World War. In their short stories, however, they take more moderate tones and provoke a certain sense of sympathy for the refugees and their life stories. The stories present more complex pictures of the perceived “otherness.” It seems as though Max Lederer and Vojtěch Rakous used the “polyphony” of fiction,48 including irony and satire, to express fewer radical positions than they had in their political feuilletons, which were published in Czech-Jewish publications. The short stories – most probably inspired by, but not necessarily based on, individual experiences – may have been read by local Jewish members of society who still felt attached to or resided in the countryside. The presence of Eastern European Jewish refugees in the Bohemian countryside dramatically reminded many local Jews of the rapid decline that had taken place in rural and small-town Jewish life since the second half of the nineteenth century, as well as the loss of traditional Jewish culture. Although the Czech-Jewish authors promoted the dismissive views on Eastern European Jewish refugees that had appeared in the Czech-Jewish press releases in their fictional stories, these were congruent with the future perspectives  : The return home after the end of the Great War was the only option. Galicianand Bucovinian-Jewish war refugees living in the Bohemian lands did not make pleas for a permanently stay in and culturally enrich the region. Czech-Jews did not perceive the refugee relief as a “patriotic act,” or an expression of loyalty towards the Habsburg Monarchy, but rather as an act of aid for their co-religionists. Czech-Jewish authors felt primarily loyal towards the Czech national program, which was enacted during the First World War. Because of the fragile positions held by Czech-Jews in the Czech national project, Czech-Jewish 47 Martina Winkler, “Vom Nutzen und Nachteil literarischer Quellen für Historiker,” in Digitales Handbuch zur Geschichte und Kultur Russlands und Osteuropas, Nr. 21 (2009), https://epub.ub.unimuenchen.de/11117/3/Winkler_Literarische_Quellen.pdf (accessed December 11, 2018). 48 Winkler, Vom Nutzen und Nachteil, 15.

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journalists and writers believed that their own integration would be threatened if Eastern European Jewish refugees were allowed to stay permanently. Their contested journalistic and fictional texts are fragments, which are part of the polyphony of Jewish loyalties and identities that existed in the Bohemian lands during the transition from an imperial to a national state order.

NEW LOYALTIES

Nino Gude

Dual Loyalties of Jewish Soldiers in the Ukrainian Galician Army 1918/1919 Introduction The picture of the relationship between Jews and Ukrainians, which has survived up until this day, is characterized by isolation, conflict and mutual separation. Such segregation was attributed to the shared, violent experiences which people of both nationalities have experienced through history. The Jewish-Ukrainian relations during the Second World War proved to be a particularly difficult and were characterized by insurmountable antagonism, as it became known that Ukrainian police1 and OUN members had been actively involved in the Holocaust.2 For a long time, a critical discussion and objective Jewish-Ukrainian historiography seemed to be impossible due to the dramatic events that occurred during World War II. In this context, it should also be emphasized that the pogroms carried out on the territory of the Ukrainian National Republic by Ukrainian military forces in 1918/1919 among others3 led to the fact that the history of Jews and Ukrainians was mainly written from the point of view of “two solitudes.”4 Such “imaginary boundaries” were maintained by both Jewish and Ukrainian scholars, who argued that religious, linguistic and cultural reasons presented obstacles to a shared past. Misunderstandings, mutual prejudices5 and violent conflicts strengthened the picture of isolation and contributed to the fact that contemporary historians, especially when referring to the period of the Austrian 1 See  : Gabriel N. Finder and Alexander V. Prusin, “Collaboration in Eastern Galicia  : The Ukrainian Police and the Holocaust,” East European Jewish Affairs 34/2 (2004), 95–118. 2 See  : John-Paul Himka, “The Lviv Pogrom of 1941  : The Germans, Ukrainian Nationalists, and the Carnival crowd,” Canadian Slavonic Papers, 53/2–4 (2011), 209–243. 3 Statistics of recorded pogroms can be found in  : Henry Abramson, A prayer for the government  : Ukrainians and Jews in revolutionary times, 1917–1920 (Cambridge  : Harvard Univ. Press, 1999), 114–121. 4 See  : Howard Aster and Peter J. Potichnyj, Jewish-Ukrainian relations  : Two Solitudes (Oakville  : Mosaic Press, 1983). 5 The Jewish term “pogromshchiki” is based on the idea that Ukrainians are eternal anti-Semites, which is firmly rooted in contemporary writings. See  : Ezra Mendelsohn, “Ukrainian-Jewish relations in historical perspective,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 14 (1/2) (1990), 180, Book review.

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Crownland Galicia and Lodomeria, have solely referred to separate Jewish and Ukrainian historiographies.6 To create a description of a modern and entangled Jewish-Ukrainian military history, therefore, it is useful to replace the usual stereotypes and established paradigms with common reference points and spatial categories, which can serve as orientation points for both Jews and Ukrainians. In this case, the Ukrainian Galician Army (UGA) has assumed these tasks and offered common benchmarks for them. Researchers have an opportunity to describe the simultaneous loyalty of soldiers both to their Jewish origin as well as to the modern Ukrainian culture, accompanied by their personal experiences in the military. The analysis of the spatial environment does not necessarily have to be based on individuality, but can also be negotiated on a common basis,7 which allows researchers to write a collective and unifying Jewish-Ukrainian history, instead of a segregated history that is overloaded with national narratives from the past. A promising concept is the model of the contact zone as introduced by Mary Louise Pratt, which is applicable not only in colonial situations, but also can be applied to other cultural relationships. Pratt treats the contact zone as the connecting point between different cultures where syntheses are established between previously isolated groups.8 In my paper, the contact zone is to be understood as a juncture between different cultures, where groups or individuals adopt forms of coexistence, interactions and similar behavior patterns. In my article, I address the ways in which the lives of Jewish soldiers were changed by the military service, and I regard these changes as the result of a comprehensive process of modernization in which the Jewish and Ukrainian soldiers were equally involved. Therefore, soldiers who met at the contact zone experienced “coexistence, interaction, blend6 A revaluation of Jewish-Ukrainian historiography, combined with new approaches can be observed for the Russian Empire, but not for Galicia. See  : Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern and Antony Polonsky, eds., POLIN  : Studies in Polish Jewry, vol. 26, Jews and Ukrainians (Oxford  : Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2014)  ; Irena R. Makaryk and Virlana Tkacz, eds. Modernism in Kyiv  : Jubilant Experimentation (Toronto  : University of Toronto Press, 2015)  ; Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, The Anti-Imperial Choice  : The Making of the Ukrainian Jew (New Haven  : Yale Univ. Press, 2009)  ; Myroslav Shkandrij, Jews in Ukrainian Literature  : Representation and Identity (New Haven  : Yale Univ. Press, 2009)  ; Amelia Glaser, Jews and Ukrainians in Russia’s Literary Borderlands  : From the Shtetl Fair to the Petersburg Bookshop (Evanston  : Northwestern Univ. Press, 2012). 7 Anna Lipphardt, “Wo liegt Osten  ? Zur (Selbst-) Verortung osteuropäischer Juden,” in “Ostju­ den”  : Geschichte und Mythos, eds. Philipp Mettauer and Barbara Staudinger (Innsbruck  : Studien Verlag, 2015), 26. 8 See  : Marie Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes  : Travel writing and Transculturation (London  : Routledge, 1992), 6–7.



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ing understanding and action,”9 which included the adoption of cultural and political values. During this study, I assumed that Jewish soldiers, influenced by the spatial entity of the Ukrainian Galician Army, were consequently transformed into loyal Ukrainian Jews of the West Ukrainian People’s Republic. To make a more radical statement  : The short-term existence of the Ukrainian army created Jews who oriented themselves toward Ukraine at a situational level, while still maintaining their Jewish principles. Considering the limitations of such a transformation, the following text refers to the style of the descriptions and interpretations of intercultural Jewish-Ukrainian relations, which were established by the army policies. Mobilization of Jewish soldiers Since the entry of Jewish soldiers into the ranks of the UGA must be considered in the context of the events that took place in November 1918, it is necessary to provide some historical background. After the collapse of the Habsburg monarchy, Poles and Ukrainians tried to take advantage of the weakness of the central government in Galicia. On October 18, 1918, several political groups founded the Ukrainian National Council in Lviv. This constituent assembly, led by Jevhen Petruševyč, claimed sole control over the areas inhabited by Ukrainians within the Habsburg monarchy. At the same time, Ukrainian leaders officially declared that all ethnic minorities – Poles, Germans and Jews – would benefit by receiving the national autonomous rights guaranteed by the constitution of the future Ukrainian state. On the other hand, on October 28, 1918, the Polish Liquidation Committee was constituted as a provisional government for Galicia in Cracow, and the Polish Military Organization (Polska Organizacja Wojskowa, POW) simultaneously strengthened its position of power by mobilizing and forming paramilitary units at various locations. At that time, while the rule of law was absent, and general political disorder dominated, armed Ukrainian units headed by Dmytro Vitovs’kyj took the initiative in Lviv on November 1. They occupied important strategic points of the city and subsequently imprisoned Karl Georg von Huyn, the last governor of Austrian Galicia. On the same day, the West Ukrainian People’s Republic was proclaimed, and the representatives of the newly established Ukrainian government reiterated their promise to guarantee equal rights, including civil and political rights, to all national groups living on the Ukrainian territory. They supplemented this promise by issuing a pledge that political dep9 Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 27.

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uties from groups of all nationalities would be represented in the future National Council.10 The Ukrainian takeover marked the beginning of the Polish-Ukrainian War, a struggle for the control of Eastern Galicia which ended with the withdrawal of Western Ukrainian forces from the territory of Eastern Galicia in mid-July 1919. The military conflict between the Poles and Ukrainians had an impact on the Jewish population. Any active involvement with either of the two sides would have had fatal consequences  ; therefore, the Jewish parties agreed to issue a declaration of neutrality to stay out of the Polish-Ukrainian War. The reactions to this attitude were quite varied. The Ukrainians accepted the Jewish neutrality positively, since the Jews, who had been accused of being solely associated with Polish culture and politics in Galicia, were no longer regarded as opponents. In contrast, people on the Polish side regarded the Jews’ neutral position as a “betrayal” of Polish interests.11 Instead, they expected an official offer of support in their fight against the Ukrainian troops, in accordance with the policy of those members of the Jewish intelligentsia who had considered themselves to be “gente Judaeus, natione Polonus”.12 This type of pro-Polish movement was emphasized by the activities of Agudas Akhim, who spread the belief that Poland was the true homeland of Polish Jews. Against this background, a neutral Jewish position was simply not acceptable, since the Polish intelligentsia was not willing to grant the Jews national concessions. Instead, they intended to adhere to the policy of Polonization. The Jewish reactions to the declaration of neutrality were also negative. The Jewish Social Democrat Salomon Goldelman argued that “Jewish neutrality neither represents the existing nor the expected interests of the future of the Jewish masses.”13 Other Zionists reacted in similar ways because the Ukrainian government had recognized the Jews as an independent nation, which resulted in outstanding support for the government among Galician Jews. A quotation from a Jewish newspaper reveals the Jewish sympathies toward the Ukrainian proclamation  :

10 Oleh Pavlyšyn, “Jevrejs‘ke naselennja Schidnoji Halyčyny u 1918–1919rr.: socialnyj aspekt,” in Halyčyna 12/13 (2006/2007), 103. 11 See  : Frank Golczewski, Polnisch-Jüdische Beziehungen 1881–1922 (Wiesbaden  : Franz Steiner Verlag, 1981), 213–217. 12 Leila P. Everett, “The rise of Jewish National Politics in Galicia, 1905–1907,” in Nationbuilding and the Politics of Nationalism. Essays on Austrian Galicia, eds. Andrei S. Markovits and Frank E. Sysyn (Cambridge  : Harvard Univ. Press, 1982), 156. 13 Salomon Goldelman, Juden und Ukrainer. Briefe eines jüdischen Sozialdemokraten (Wien  : Hamojn, 1921), 34f.



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For us Jews, the Ukrainian proclamation is a very important issue, as the Ruthenians are the first who recognized the Jewish nation and invited their representatives to the Ukrainian assembly. The Ruthenians will have sincere friends in the Jews in their fight for freedom.14

The government of the West Ukrainian People’s Republic provided the most progressive constitutional project concerning Jews at this time, whereby Yiddish and Hebrew were admitted as official languages, and Jewish deputies were also adequately represented in the National Council.15 The Ukrainians, therefore, were prepared to grant the Jews the highest degree of national and personal liberties. These guarantees encouraged the Galician Jews to take their destiny into their own hands, regardless of the political decision that would be made by the Jewish national council. They also adapted themselves to the new circumstances to be part of the Polish-Ukrainian struggles in Eastern Galicia. The Zionist parties were especially driving forces behind the formation of the Jewish militia in different cities of Eastern Galicia which were created to ensure the security of the civilian Jewish communities. The Jewish militia in Lviv was under the command of Julian Eisler, a former soldier in the Austrian army, while Dr. Israel Waldmann assumed political responsibility for the establishment of militiamen in Ternopil. From the beginning of December 1918 and on, an organized militia of 120 men existed in Ternopil, which guarded the city and obtained the right to imprison any person (civilian or military) from the Ukrainian authority for up to five days for violating the law. The binding regulations stated that every militiaman had to perform his service faithfully and honestly and had no right to claim any payment, since service in the militia was voluntary. The commanders of the militia itself were responsible for the recruitment process, and they prepared a text in Yiddish with the following content  : We demand that all Jews who were born from 1892–1900 should report to the militia command within three days. At the end of these three days, we will find out who has failed to do so. Ternopil, November 18, 1918. The command of the Jewish militia.16 14 Der jüdische Arbeiter, Wien, 1. November 1918, quoted after  : Reuven Fahn, Geshikhte fun der Yudisher natsyonal-oytonomye  : in‘m period fun der Mayrev-Ukraynisher republik (Lemberg  : coop. ferlag “kultur”, 1933), 23. 15 Svjatoslav Pacholkiv, “Zwischen Einbeziehung und Ausgrenzung. Die Juden in Lemberg 1918– 1919,” in Vertraut und fremd zugleich  : jüdisch-christliche Nachbarschaften in Warschau – Lengnau – Lemberg, eds. Alexandra Binnenkade, Ekaterina Emeliantseva and Svjatoslav Pacholkiv (Köln  : Böhlau, 2009), 173. 16 Fahn, Geshikhte fun der Yudisher natsyonal-oytonomye, 18.

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A large number of 800 Jews responded to this call, resulting in the short-term idea of creating an additional reserve unit. The Ukrainian government was highly sympathetic to the Jewish militia, because it helped maintain order in the country, while the Ukrainian troops sent their forces to struggle against the Polish military. The Poles regarded this development with skepticism, and a separate treaty was needed to ratify the recognition of the Jewish militia by Polish representatives. This agreement did not resolve the Polish-Jewish tensions, but exacerbated the situation stemming from the confusion surrounding the roles and tasks of the militiamen at war time. Officially, the Jewish national council only gave the Jewish militia the order to maintain order as patrols and secure the lives of urban inhabitants, including those living in the Jewish communities. During the course of the war, however, some members of the Jewish militia joined the ranks of the Ukrainian army. Rumors of a Jewish-Ukrainian coalition were spread by the Polish press after the Ukrainian military commando had added the members of the Jewish militia to their own forces. A corresponding report from November 7, 1918, stated that 273 Jewish militiamen altogether helped the Ukrainian forces fight against the Poles over a period of six days.17 Even though military operations of the Jewish militia can be ruled out, at least regarding the events that occurred in Lviv. The Jews, due to these accusations of collaboration with the UGA, were targeted by increasingly hostile actions, which brought strong suffering to the entire Jewish community. In particular, the Polish military officers accused Jews of collaborating with the Ukrainian side, which ultimately resulted in anti-Jewish outrages, carried out by Polish legionaries in many places in Galicia.18 The tragic culmination was marked by the Lviv pogrom, in which a total of 73 Jews were murdered.19 Because of this wave of violence perpetrated by the Polish military, and the fact that no significant anti-Jewish riots took place on the territories controlled by the West Ukrainian government20, the stance of Jewish neutrality was unofficially abandoned by the Jews who had voluntarily entered the UGA armed 17 Oleh Stecyšyn, Landsknechty Halyc‘koji Armiji (L‘viv  : Centr doslidžen‘ vyzvol‘noho ruchu, 2012), 117. 18 The most terrible anti-Jewish outrages took place in Brzesko, Chrzanów and Przemyśl. For Chrzanów see  : Golczewski, Polnisch-Jüdische Beziehungen, 205–208. The others are reported at YIVO, Elias Tcherikower Archive, RG 80–89, Signature 94, Folder 94. 19 Lviv Pogrom. See  : Golczewski, Polnisch-Jüdische Beziehungen, 185–205  ; Pacholkiv, Zwischen Einbeziehung, 171–194  ; and Alexander V. Prusin, Nationalizing a Borderland. War, Etnicity, and Anti-Jewish Violence in East Galicia, 1914–1920 (Tuscaloosa  : Univ. of Alabama Press, 2005), 75–91. 20 Anti-Jewish outrages were reported in Ternopil. See  : Goldelman, Briefe, 36 and Fahn, Geshikhte fun der Yudisher natsyonal-oytonomye, 18.



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forces. According to Polish reports, mainly young Jewish men who had served as militiamen in Lviv joined the ranks of the Ukrainian army.21 The historian Yaroslav Tynchenko estimated that altogether 2000 Jews served voluntarily in the ranks of the UGA.22 Members of the Jewish population, as well as members of other national minorities living on the territory of the West Ukrainian People’s Republic, were legally exempt from military service, while the Polish military drafted men by force into the army in Lviv and other cities in East Galicia. These methods were even strongly criticized by Polish-supporting Jews, such as Tobiasz Aszkenaze, who was a co-founder of the democratic-liberal Polish Progressive Party. Under no circumstances did he consider it tolerable that military authorities forced ordinary Jewish people to join the Polish army and fight against Ukrainian units. He later wrote a memorandum to the international state community in which he blamed the Polish legionaries for the destruction, robbery and killing of Galician Jewry.23 Similar observations were made by representatives of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, who went to Eastern Galicia to report on the situation of the Jewish communities there after the Lviv pogrom. These representatives concluded that the Polish administration had introduced a system of forced military labor for ordinary Jews in the trenches. Any Jew, whatever his age or physical condition, was sent to the front, often by force. Even members of the Jewish intelligentsia were not spared these practices. In response, Jewish notables in Lviv came to an agreement with the Polish authorities, which allowed them to issue exemption cards as poll taxes for those who refused to work at the front.24 In contrast, the Ukrainians took a more liberal attitude towards the drafting of Jews. In a decree, released by the Secretary of State for Military Affairs of the West Ukrainian People’s Republic on February 23, 1919, the following resolutions were passed  : All people of Ukrainian nationality belonging to the former Austro-Hungarian army, who are on the German-Austrian territory, namely, officers up to the age of 50 and soldiers born between 1883 and 1901, should immediately report for service in the Ukrainian army at the gathering point in Vienna. People who have been proved to be incapable of military service by the Austro-Hungarian Army and who are citizens of the West Ukrainian People’s Republic are asked to come to the office of the Ukrainian 21 Stecyšyn, Landsknechty, 124. 22 Tynchenko, The Jewish Formations, 212. 23 Fahn, Geshikhte fun der Yudisher natsyonal-oytonomye, 27. 24 Elias Tcherikower Archive, RG 80–89, Signature 94, Folder 94.

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consulate in Vienna for medical examinations during the period from 10–15 March 1919.25

The West Ukrainian People’s Republic had a recruiting office in Vienna within the framework of the Ukrainian National Council. Some Jewish soldiers made voluntary applications for the Ukrainian army. All applicants without distinction had to meet certain requirements. The candidates were given the possibility to serve either in the same or in the next higher military rank and branch, into which they had already been subdivided by the Austro-Hungarian Army. Knowledge of the Ukrainian language in word and writing was essential. However, applicants with no command of the Ukrainian language were given the possibility of taking language courses, which had to be completed within one year. In addition to financial grants, full admission into the army was linked to the acceptance of Ukrainian citizenship. Everyone who refused this obligation had to keep in mind that his application might be rejected, and that he could, at best, sign a temporary contract with the army. How strictly the requirements were observed is demonstrated by the fact that many applications were refused by Ukrainian representatives. Among the rejected candidates were also Jews, although the decisive reason was not always apparent.26 Conversely, this meant that all accepted Jewish candidates agreed with the conditions of admission and were willing to accept the Ukrainian citizenship, which was an expression of loyalty to or identification with the Ukrainian national state. Those who were offered only a one-time contract showed their willingness to incorporate cultural knowledge and expressions, which consequentially meant that they shared not only a common language but also similar cultural values and patterns. For Mother Ukraine The entry of Jews into the Ukrainian army was not exclusively connected with the events that took place in November 1918. In fact, some Jewish soldiers regarded themselves as being part of the Ukrainian society and, thus, their struggle for Ukrainian independence was a logical consequence. Such a powerful stance was particularly held by those who had already developed sympathy towards the Ukrainian national movement, by belonging to national sporting organizations, such as the Sič movement, or by visiting Ukrainian schools where they had their initial experiences in military training. In 1911/12, classes for the training of 25 Fremdenblatt vom 08.03.1919, quoted after  : HHStA, Zeitungsarchiv, Karton 121. 26 AdR, Ukrainischer Militärbevollmächtigter, Karton 2.



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military exercises were introduced for students in the upper classes of Ukrainian secondary schools by the school administration, including a total of 23 lessons and subsequent shooting lessons. The permanent confrontation with models of conflict prevention was both new and essential, as were the warfare possibilities and the combination of shooting exercises and sport competitions. Jews such as Jakob Nass, who had undergone this type of military training, displayed the same qualities and abilities as their Christian fellows. They were taught not only how to use bayonets, but also reading, writing, arithmetic, geometry, statutes and signs. The militarization of Jewish pupils ultimately led to their visual adaptation, either due to the established dress codes or by their use of the same emblems, which symbolized the fact that they belonged to a single community. Conversely, the athletic and military organization allowed the Jewish and Ukrainian students to form an entity which appeared to be uniform and acted in solidarity, and whose members displayed a sense of unity rather than individual national or denominational peculiarities. Students of all religions participated equally, although the requirements and how they were fulfilled were established and controlled by Ukrainian authorities. By receiving this form of education, Jakob Nass developed his enthusiasm for the Ukraine’s national movement, which he expressed by entering into the Association of Sič-Riflemen, a decision that had an impact on his later life. He showed that he belonged to the Sič-Riflemen by wearing the prescribed badges, which he never took off even during his civilian life, according to the memoirs of Jaroslav Daškevyč.27 Ludwik Rosenberg, who found himself in a Ukrainian environment early on, took a similar path of life. He completed his school education at the Ukrainian high school in Rohatyn. Between 1914–1916, he fought side-by-side with Ukrainian soldiers as a Sič-Riflemen in the k.k. Ukrainian Legion, which served under the command of the k.k. Landwehr. On September 25, according to an order from Field Marshall Hofmann, who mentioned the candidate being at the front with the Ukrainian Legion since September 1914, he was awarded with the Bronze Medal for Bravery for his war efforts. “He especially distinguished himself on the 3rd and 4th of September, 1916, by taking part in heavy battles around the south-east of Brzežany, by his boldness and fearlessness  ; he stormed several enemy positions and inflicted considerable losses on the enemy. Was wounded in these battles.”28 Ludwik Rosenberg, who additionally expressed his pro-Ukrainian sentiments by using the Ukrainian pen name Volodymyr Čornij, was not the only Jew27 Interview with Jaroslav Daškevyč, http://www.jewishheritage.org.ua/ua/202/interv-039-ju-zprof-ja-dashkevychem.html (accessed December 11, 2018). 28 KA, MBA 622.594 vom 25.9.1916. Karton 569.

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ish soldier who gained recognition and honor for his military efforts. There are many reports of Ukrainian officers who considered the Jews to be strong soldiers, who fought in the same manner as their Christian comrades. Salko [Salomon] Rotenberg was also characterized by his fighting spirit and discipline, and his involvement in the UGA can be seen as a continuation of the Jewish-Ukrainian connection he had already established during his time in the Austro-Hungarian Army. Salko was appointed its commander [of the Mounted Machine Gun Company of the 4th Brigade]. Was he a Jew  ? Yes, Salko Rotenberg was a Jew, but, you know, a Ukrainian Jew. In the winter, he was wounded and returned to the brigade. […] Ah, what a wonderful combat unit that company was. […] And didn’t the boys love their commanders  ! Did you ever see them on a march  ?29

These awards signal the symbiosis of the Ukrainian Jews within the Ukrainian army, which was expressed by mutual respect and appreciation. However, not only individuals were praised in the memoirs of Ukrainian soldiers  ; the struggle of an entirely Jewish unity was also often emphasized. The so-called “Jewish Shock Battalion” enjoyed high popularity due to its exemplary and humane leadership. This battalion, which was under the command of Solomon Leinberg, was known for its far-reaching administrative liberties. Leinberg acted as a responsible commander of the Jewish militia in Ternopil, which had been organized back in December 1918, and was given the task of drafting and organizing a Jewish unit by the city council in Ternopil. The struggle of this Jewish Shock Battalion was described as follows  : Unfortunately, typhus and relapsing fever decimated the ranks of those [ Jewish] idealists who fought for a better fate and freedom for their families, who were groaning under both Lyakh [derogatory Ukrainian term for Poles, N.G.] oppression and the Muscovite yoke – the fate and freedom of the Jewish and Ukrainian peoples. The harvest of death was a rich one. Two-thirds of the Jewish Shock Battalion, two-thirds of the sons of that oppressed people […], departed with honor, glory and good repute to the land where neither hatred, nor envy, nor malice are known… may the earth rest lightly on their graves  !30

29 Yaroslav Tynchenko, “The Jewish Formations of Western Ukraine in the Civil War,” in POLIN  : Studies in Polish Jewry, vol. 26, Jews and Ukrainians, eds. Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern and Antony Polonsky (Oxford  : Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2014), 204f. 30 Tynchenko, The Jewish Formations, 210.



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This quotation describes the common history of Jews and Ukrainians who shared their fates, which brought them together in their struggle to achieve an independent Ukraine, a motif that has been examined in detail by writers like Ivan Franko or politicians like Vladimir Žabotinskij. In the poem Mojsej, Franko created a harmonious link between the Jewish and Ukrainian horizons by illustrating the parallels between Jewish history, a forty-year search for the Promised Land and the attempts made by the Ukrainian population to gain independence and sovereignty.31 Franko tried to shape the text of the poem in such a way that stories and descriptions of the Ukrainian past and present were supplemented by Jewish history and legends.32 The prospect of personal, national autonomy within the Ukrainian state was more promising for the soldiers than continuing their unsatisfying lives under Polish domination, because the authorities did not make any attempts to recognize the Jews as a separate nation at that time. Many Jewish students also began joining the ranks of the Ukrainian army to take revenge against the Polish legionaries who were responsible for anti-Jewish outrages in Eastern Galicia and perhaps because they had perceived the differences between Polish rule and the short-lived existence of the West Ukrainian People’s Republic.33 Jewish soldiers went through radical transformations during their time as troops. They believed in the justice of Ukrainian authorities, which is indicated by a statement made by an unknown Jewish soldier  : “I fought for Mother Ukraine and will fight for her until death.”34 Despite their identification with the Ukrainian objectives, Jewish soldiers never gave up their emotional ties to their Jewish heritage. Judaism within the Military The army offered a range of opportunities for soldiers to break away from the traditional Jewish way of life. The community leaders, however, insisted that Jewish soldiers should carry out their religious duties and reconcile these with their military commitments, values and practices. In this context, the army could be seen as a test for each individual soldier to survive as a Jew. The neglect of reli31 Ivan Franko, Mojsej, Nju Jork 1968. 32 The different aspects of Ivan Franko’s complex perceptions of Jewish-Ukrainian relations as represented in his political, journalistic and literary writings are analyzed in  : Alois Woldan, Olaf Terpitz ed., Ivan Franko und die jüdische Frage in Galizien (Göttingen  : Vienna University Press, 2016). 33 Por. Nachman G–r, “Peredistorja i istorja žydivs’koho probojevoho kurinja I. korpusa U.H.A,” in Ukrajins’kyj skytalec’ 5 (1921)  : 22. 34 Stecyšyn, Landsknechty, 52.

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gious duties was, at least to some extent, tolerated as long as the neglect had been caused by military regulations. The following quote from the military chaplain, Dr. Arnold Frankfurter, provides an example of this. He explained this type of tolerance toward religious commandments in a speech made to Jewish soldiers in Vienna in 1917 as follows  : If you should be compelled to omit one or the other of the commandments, then you must know that the Talmud teaches  : “… Auneßrachmonoputreh (Tractate Baba Kama, Fol. 29b.) – In a case of absolute necessity, religion itself frees from fulfilling the commandments.” It would only be sinful, if one violates the religious statutes by false shame, indifference, or convenience.35

Nevertheless, the moral implications were clear  : Jews serving in the army should not observe their commandments to a lesser extent than their co-religionists in the Shtetl. The Jewish soldier was a person who was obliged to follow the conditions set up by the UGA, but also one who was able to maintain connections to his own community. These connections were expressed through various forms of responsibility, resulting in direct assistance received from the members of Jewish communities. Such support took place in Ternopil, the provisional capital of the West Ukrainian People’s Republic, where ordinary Jews provided not only their own soldiers with kosher food, but also supported the Ukrainian units by giving them money.36 Most armies found it challenging to take the religious observances of their Jewish soldiers into consideration. However, according to several memoirs, the Jewish Shock Battalion had its own supply system and draft commission37 which allowed them to eat separately. Especially while performing services at the front, it was often not possible for them to eat kosher food  ; instead, they had to share the food with their Ukrainian comrades in the barracks or the field kitchen. It was most common to prepare Jewish dishes for the resting Jewish combatants in areas that had a large number of Jewish communities, such as in Eastern Galicia. The ties with Judaism changed from a way of life into a credo, which was maintained by sporadic prayers.38 The Jewish soldiers in the UGA expressed 35 Erwin A. Schmidl, Habsburgs Jüdische Soldaten 1788–1918, (Wien  : Böhlau, 2014), 175f. 36 Tynchenko, The Jewish Formation, 203. 37 Ibid., 207. 38 Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, Jews in the Russian Army, 1827–1917. Drafted into Modernity (Cambridge  : Cambridge University Press, 2009), 196.



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their belonging to Judaism not by their everyday practices, but by their patterns of behavior or use of symbols, in order to keep their traditional habits alive while in the modern army. One example that showed the impact of the Jewish culture on the Ukrainian Galician Army is connected to the Jewish Shock Battalion, and was described by the Ukrainian writer Stepan Hajdučok in his memoirs when he made the following observations  : “At the front [of the column] are musicians, organized by the commander. Two violins are playing, and some other kind of instrument. The men’s broad chests swell with the smooth strains of a marching song.”39 The musicians were likely to be Jews because the violin is a typical instrument used to play Jewish Klezmer music, which was unknown among Ukrainian soldiers and not used in marches. Instead, the Ukrainians used the Kobza. What the memoir writer meant when he described the musical instrument as a “kind of instrument,” might have been a Shofar, an ancient musical horn used for Jewish religious purposes. Although Jewish artists were frequently connected to armies, it remains unclear which marching songs the Jewish musicians were playing. The combination of Jewish and Ukrainian symbols and values was regulated in the order of the ceremonies, such as the marching ceremony and the blessing under the army’s banner. National and religious aspects, Ukrainian and the Jewish soldiers, were united to form a complex, heterogeneous whole. Concerning the visibility of their belonging to Judaism, a difference can be observed between Jewish soldiers in the UGA and the Jewish militiamen. The Jewish militia was established as a Jewish organization and had no organizational ties to the Ukrainian army, but it sometimes formed a situational bond with the Ukrainian army in the course of the war. In this context, the Polish newspaper “Pobudka” accused the Jewish militiamen of wearing not only Zionist symbols but Ukrainian insignia as well.40 The truth of these assertions cannot be clearly verified. Due to the anti-Jewish nature of this newspaper, which was particularly known for disseminating rumors or false and misleading news concerning the alleged participation of the Jewish militia in the events that took place in November in Lviv, these accusations can probably be dismissed.41 However, at a later time some Jewish militiamen did join the ranks of the UGA. In any case, Jewish militiamen were distinguished from regular troops by their emblem. All of them wore a blue-white emblem on their left sleeve. The colors blue and white 39 Stepan Hajdučok, “Kinna skorostril’na sotnja,” in Litopys Červonoji Kalyny 2 (1930)  : 16. 40 Stecyšyn, Landsknechty, 120. 41 The propaganda newspaper “Pobudka”, which appeared in the Polish-occupied part of Lviv, accused the Jewish militiamen of hostility toward Poland. Pacholkiv, Zwischen Einbeziehung, 177.

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are given the highest importance in Jewish history  ; white stands for wisdom, purity and birth, and the color blue represents God and faith. Conclusion As a space of cultural contact, the Ukrainian Galician Army was an area of tension for Jewish soldiers as they attempted to adapt to military regulations and uphold Jewish habits  : Jews and Ukrainians were connected and separated at the same time. The army served as a space in which cultural differences were exposed, but also in which the distance between the cultures was overcome. The Ukrainian Galician Army played an essential role in the transformation of the Jewish soldiers, and was also a space where Jews and Ukrainians oriented themselves equally. Their spatial proximity usually also meant that they had social contact with one another and, therefore, shared common interests, behavior patterns and lifestyles. The Jewish soldiers assumed a situational identity as Ukrainian Jews. They were patriotic and loyal, believed in Mother Ukraine and were willing to sacrifice their lives. They shared language, clothing, food, everyday responsibilities, training, war experiences, economic crises and material values with their Christian brothers. They were united by the same goals and hopes through the struggle. During their military service, Judaism became exclusively a religion and did not determine their whole way of life.42 On the other hand, Judaism played an important role in some contexts for the Jewish soldiers in the military. For example, this was expressed when they wore their own symbols or preserved their cultural traditions in the form of playing musical instruments. The narrower these connections were, the more Jewish soldiers were inclined to adapt themselves to the given circumstances and, in this case, those that occurred in the Ukrainian Galician Army. The presence of Jewish soldiers in the Ukrainian army resulted in the formation of a mutual relationship of trust between them and the Ukrainian population and elites. The UGA served as a catalyst for the development of Jews as a modern nation on the Ukrainian territory. Overall, Jewish soldiers developed a dual sense of loyalty  : they were loyal toward their traditional Jewish values as well as the Ukrainian Galician Army and, ultimately, the young Ukrainian state.

42 See  : Petrovsky-Shtern, Jews in the Russian Army, 166.

Ana Ćirić Pavlović

Yugoslavs of the Mosaic Faith? Public Discourse about Jewish Loyalty in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, 1918–1941

The aim of this study was to offer an overview of the dynamic interconnectedness between the Yugoslav Kingdom and its diverse Jewish population, which existed in the delicate balance of powers generated in Europe in the aftermath of the Great War. The contemplation of the interwar events in countries that later became socialist deserves special consideration. Socialist regimes introduced a sudden discontinuity as compared to the previous, mainly monarchist regimes, causing many personalities and occurrences to fade into obscurity for half a century. The aforementioned phenomenon is even more pronounced when examining a history of a minority, indicating that one ought to be rather cautious when developing conclusions and generalizations about the interval between the two World Wars. The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (from the 1929 Kingdom of Yugoslavia) was a complex, multinational and multi-confessional system formed from the Kingdom of Serbia and parts of the disintegrated Empires, representing both the formal end of these entities and their continuation. The Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires left rather heterogenic legacies in the newly created state, which directly mirrored the diverse economic, social, and cultural background of its inhabitants. Similarly, the Kingdom of South Slavs encompassed Jewish communities with a significantly different emancipation history, which perceived their new Yugoslav reality from a divergent perspective. Moreover, the state itself, during its first years of its existence, did not take a uniform strategy to address the diverse Jewish communities living on the recently acquired territories. For instance, no one questioned that Bosnian Jews, mostly Sephardim, belonged to Yugoslavia, since they had been part of the local milieu for several centuries in a special millet, a form of a religious-national, organizational unit within the Ottoman Empire. Indeed, except for a few minor, isolated incidents, there is no historical evidence that since their arrival on the Balkans (late fifteenth to the beginning of the sixteenth century) Sephardim of Serbia and Bosnia had endured such violent persecution and pogroms as their Ashkenazi brethren were faced with in the territories of Western and Central Europe or

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Russia. This favorable position was maintained until 1941, when Ustaše from the Independent State of Croatia and other Nazi collaborators dismembered Yugoslavia and began the infamous killings of members of the Jewish, Serbian, and Roma populations.1 Back in the 1920s, the Kingdom of Serbia arose as a victorious party out of the ashes of the First World War, but at a tremendous cost  : the war was a severe demographic catastrophe for Serbia, loosing more than twenty-five percent of its inhabitants and had more casualties per capita than any other belligerent on either side. What is more, scholars estimate that more than 62.5 percent of males between the age of fifteen and fifty-five died.2 Such a profound collective trauma and joyous reestablishment of the state found a lasting place in national consciousness and collective memory of the people. Serbian Jews shared the fate of war with the rest of the population, a fact that had a deep impact on the public discourse surrounding them. In the decades following the Great War, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes and the Serbian Jewish community outwardly expressed their mutual fondness, in a manner that was unparalleled anywhere else in Europe. Precisely for that reason, in this paper a special attention is given to Serbian Jewry, who were seemingly in a most favorable position  : their devotion to the Serbian and Yugoslav Kingdoms was beyond any doubt, as they fought with the Serbian Army in the Great War. To supplement the significant literature dealing with this phenomenon, the present study provides some critical retro-vision points of the manifestations that concern the manifold relations between Jews and the Yugoslav Kingdom. Three particular issues are explored  : the relation of the Yugoslav state to the legacy from WWI, the possibility of a Yugoslav Jewish nation, and lastly, several illustrations related to Jewish patriotism. The monarchy’s vs. Serbian soldiers The South Slavs’ Kingdom, proclaimed in 1918, was a political entity assembled from territories and inhabitants that had belonged to the vanished Habsburg Monarchy. The new state unified the Slavic brothers, but it also represented a 1

Jasenovac, the Balkan Auschwitz, was the only non-Nazi-led extermination camp. The methods of killing men, women, and children there were so violent that even the Nazis found them bestial. See more in  : Stuart J. Kaufmann, Modern Hatreds  : The Symbolic Politics of Ethnic War (New York  : The Cornell University Press, 2001), 169. 2 Mark Cornwall, “Introduction,” in Andej Mitrović, Serbia’s Great War 1914–1918 (West Lafayette  : Purdue University Press, 2007), vii.



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controversial reality  : approximately more than a half of the Kingdom’s members came from former Austro-Hungarian lands. Thus, its population had been mobilized into the Habsburg Monarchy’s army in order to fight against the Kingdom of Serbia in the Great War. Willingly or not, Croatians, Muslims of Bosnia, Slovenians, and even ethnic Serbians stood against Serbia, a state that was at the forefront of the South Slavic unification and considered to be a Yugoslav Piedmont after the Great War. Nevertheless, the latter controversy was rarely mentioned, seemingly for the sake of practical reasons. This controversy, however, would be (ab)used in future arguments between Slavs during the twentieth century. In the interwar period, it appeared that there was a tacit mutual agreement between the parties involved to seemingly disregard the past because it could have ruined the relations among the South Slavic brothers, as many of them considered themselves. The position of Yugoslav Jews in this matter followed the general pattern of forgetting the reality of the Great War. Jewish communities disregarded that they had fought against each other in the conflict, rapidly adapting to the South Slavic Kingdom that emerged while assuming new social roles. During the existence of this kingdom, Jewish communities were more preoccupied with the future as well as with questions concerning the creation of their own state. Various forms of proposed Zionism, partial or complete assimilation into the local environments, and even conversion (for a small minority) were all options for the Yugoslav-Jewish congregation. Nonetheless, the Great War indirectly determined the fate of divergent Yugoslav Jewry  : Serbian Jews contributed to its victorious outcome. They appeared to be closer to the king and, thus, many of them were often accused of being too highly assimilated and not Zionist enough. On the other hand, the beginning of the Great War had provided a possibility for Habsburg Jewry to reaffirm their allegiance  : Jews in Croatia, Slavonija, and Vojvodina as well as elsewhere were believed to strongly support the war efforts of the Central Powers, both by making financial contributions and joining the army.3 The community of neighboring Slovenia was small and merged with that of their Zagreb co-religionists, most probably following their manifestations of loyalty to Kaiser Franz Joseph. However, from the point of view of Jewish popularity, this merger was evidently useless. By the end of the conflict, with the monarchy’s downfall, the 3

Filip Hameršak and Ljiljana Dobrovšak, “Croatian-Slavonian Jews in the First World War,” in The Great War. Reflections, Experiences and Memories of German and Habsburg Jews (1914–1918), eds. Petra Ernst, Jeffrey Grossman and Ulrich Wyrwa, Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish His­ tory. Journal of Fondazione CDEC, n.9 October 2016, www.quest-cdecjounal.it/focus.php  ?id=378 (accessed January 30, 2017).

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local population became increasingly exhausted and impoverished, repeatedly blaming their Jewish neighbors for their defeat.4 It was comparatively harder for these Jews than for the Slavs to become Yugoslavs  : many of them did not speak Serbo-Croatian and had been born elsewhere. As Marsha Rozenblit affirms, after the collapse of the monarchy, the Jews who had lived there underwent a collective, strong identity crisis, because as a supranational entity, it had provided them with a sense of belonging. The monarchy had allowed them, as the author argues, to develop a “tripartite identity,” for they belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire politically (their patriotism was defined as loyalty to the emperor), to surrounding nationalities (Germans, Poles, Croatians, Hungarians) culturally, and, finally, they were Jewish ethnically.5 Consequently, many of the Austro-Hungarian Jews were attached to the Monarchy, aligning themselves with both integrationist and Zionist currents. However, as these Jews rapidly integrated and acculturated, the resistance to their full acceptance and antisemitism grew paradoxically. This behavioral paradigm associated with the non-Jewish population continued after the disintegration of the Habsburg Monarchy  : antisemitism was particularly strongly pronounced in Croatia, Slavonija, and Vojvodina in Yugoslavia, that is to say, the former parts of the Empire.6 It seems that Yugoslavia offered similar multi- and supranational frameworks to former Habsburg Jews, and they only had to shift their loyalty from the Emperor of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to the King of Yugoslavia. Following that line of thinking, divergent Jewish communities should have had relatively harmonious relations among themselves. Conversely, the Federation of Jewish Religious Communities7 was in a constant crisis during the entire interwar period due to the perpetual disputes among its members.8 Some of these disputes 4 5 6 7

8

A phenomenon of antisemitism without Jews had a tradition in Slovenia, apparently due to clericalism in rural areas, see  : Laslo Sekelj, Vreme beščašća  : ogledi o vladavini nacionalizma (Beograd  : Akademija Nova, Institut za evropske studije, 1995), 65. Marsha L. Rozenblit, “The Dilemma of National Identity  : the Jews of Habsburg Austria in World War I,” http://web.ceu.hu/jewishstudies/yb03/14rozenblit.pdf (accessed December 11, 2018), 147–49. Ana Ćirić Pavlović, “Antisemitism in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia  : The Case of Croatia,” Topola, Journal of the Memorial Zone Donja Gradina 2 (2016)  : 105–6. The Federation of Jewish Religious Communities, established in 1919, was an umbrella organization for all Jewish congregations in Yugoslavia, performing multiple functions within its realm  : it performed coordinative, cultural, educational, and even arbitrary tasks in the interwar period. The claim could be verified in any of Jewish weeklies issued between the wars. For instance, Jevrejski glas ( Jewish Voice) was a weekly distributed to the Bosnian Jewish communities, published between 1928 and 1941, which faithfully represented inter-Jewish relations in the kingdom and everything that was relevant to them.



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certainly were caused by their rather strong local expressions of patriotism or nationalism, which mirrored the conflict existing between the larger nations to which they had belonged. The latter was particularly the case with the Hungarian Jews who underwent an intensive process of Magyarization during the nineteenth century. Reports of the Yugoslav government from the 1920s and 1930s describe events at which the strong Hungarian feelings of nationalism and revisionism were displayed in Vojvodina, especially in the Bačka region and by the veterans of the Austro-Hungarian army. In contrast, members of the younger generations of Hungarian Jews in the kingdom were more receptive to Zionism than Hungarian nationalism. Furthermore, they were not reluctant but willing to learn Serbo-Croatian, even accepting a dual identity as both Yugoslav and Hungarian citizens.9 Forging a Jewish-Yugoslav Nation The new Yugoslav state demanded the strengthening of a new, Yugoslav identity under the Serbian Royal Family of Karađorđević. Given that it was a state of “one three-named people,” that is, of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes with numerous national minorities (Germans, Muslims, Hungarians, Jews, and many others), Yugoslavism had to be an inclusive notion that would encompass all the differences extant in the kingdom. It implied that both national and religious freedoms had to be respected. Both Constitutions of 1921 and of 1931 held provisions for officially recognized religions.10 In 1929, a special law about Jewish communities was enacted by King Alexander, the Law on the Religious Community of Jews in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. In the years preceding this enactment, a discussion about the law had produced a fierce debate among the representatives of the Ashkenazi (Neolog), Sephardi, and Orthodox communities.11 In the end, the enactment did not bring many innovations but rather “clarified and strengthened the legal position of the community as a whole,” confirming its organizational framework and granting them benefits enjoyed by other officially recognized religious groups.12 Many   9 Milan Koljanin, Jevreji i antisemitizam u Kraljevini Jugoslaviji 1918–1941 (Beograd  : Institut za savremenu istoriju, 2008), 69–70. 10 The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes officially recognized seven religions, including Judaism. 11 In the Yugoslav context, these three communities always appeared separately in Jewish communal affairs, although Orthodox communities were also Ashkenazi by origin. 12 Harriet Pass Freidenreich, The Jews of Yugoslavia  : A Quest for Community (Philadelphia  : The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1979), 71–2.

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authors share the opinion that interwar Yugoslavia treated its Jewish minority fairly  ;13 however, it was not immune to antisemitic voices that had become louder by the end of the 1930s. In the first years of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, discrimination against members of some Jewish communities was more closely related to the fact that they were foreign citizens and did not speak the domestic language than to antisemitism. Namely, the Minister of Internal Affairs, Svetozar Pribićević, issued a secret decree in 1919 to remove all the “foreign elements” from the provinces of the former monarchy. Chief Rabbi Isak Alkalaj reacted promptly and prevented the further implementation of the order, although it had already affected dozens of Jewish families who were deported from Bosnia.14 Nonetheless, another similar decree was enacted the following year in an attempt to banish all the citizens of the defeated countries (Hungarians, Austrians, Germans, Bulgarians, Turks), which would have potentially impacted more than a million inhabitants of the kingdom, including thousands of Jews. Fortunately, the massive deportations were also stopped. Moreover, the Yugoslav government considered the proponents of a socialist revolution and bolshevism as enemies of the regime. In Vojvodina, the government questioned some people who were suspected to be Bolsheviks, most of whom were Hungarians. Even though some were Jewish, the Yugoslav authorities abstained from applying the usual stereotype of the Jewish, worldwide, Bolshevik conspiracy, as many contemporary European governments did, but accused the Hungarians instead.15 On the other hand, the government of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia took some anti-Jewish measurements that were directed against particular Jewish communities in the early 1920s. In 1921 and 1922, a number of Polish Jews who had applied for visas to remain in Yugoslavia gave rise to suspicions, and they were banned temporarily. Even when the authorities issued these visas again, they were marked in a special manner, which indicated that the doubts still existed.16 Additionally, the territory of the contemporary Republic of Macedonia, as a part of the Kingdom of Serbia that was acquired during the Balkan Wars (1912/1913), was incorporated into the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Apart from the Slavic majority population, several thousand Sephardi Jews lived there as well, 13 Ibid., 189. 14 These were Ashkenazi Jews from the monarchy who had settled in Bosnia during the Austro-Hungarian reign (1878–1918). Because they were citizens of a vanished and inimical empire and did not speak the Serbo-Croatian language, they were not perceived as domestic inhabitants. 15 Koljanin, Jevreji i antisemitizam, 144–7. 16 Ibid., 149. These were mostly Orthodox Jews from Poland who sought permission to reside in the northern town of Senta, near Yugoslav-Hungarian border.



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mostly in two towns  : Monastir (from 1912 and on, called Bitola, Bitolj) and Uskub (Skoplje). Of all the Yugoslav Jews, these individuals probably had the most complex identity issues. After the Ottoman rule, the ownership of the area was contested by Serbia, Bulgaria, and Greece, all of which claimed their cultural, religious, linguistic, and other rights to the land. The argument used in the Serbian propaganda was historical  : it was Old Serbia, as this area had belonged to the Serbian medieval state of the Emperor Dušan before the Ottomans conquered it.17 Another point that differentiated this region from the rest of Yugoslavia was that the Alliance Israélite Universelle maintained schools for Jewish children there from the mid-nineteenth century up until the time of the Balkan Wars. This institution promoted education and cultural emancipation, but also influenced the demise of their mother language, Judeo-Spanish, by promoting French, which was perceived as more sophisticated and civilized.18 As Klara Volarić proposes, Ottoman Macedonia was characterized by a-national and fluid identities.19 From the sixteenth century on these Sephardi Jews lived within the borders of the Ottoman Empire, while maintaining cultural, economic, and personal connections with the nearby Salonica’s (Thessaloniki) Sephardi community, their biggest settlement after their expulsion from Spain. Having entered the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, Macedonian Jewry was separated by the border from their brethren in Salonica.20 Some of them accepted a Serbian21 and later a Yugoslav identity, while others embraced an exclusive version of Zionism or emigrated elsewhere. Conversely, some authors affirm that Jews of Yugoslavia considered their feelings of Yugoslav patriotism and increasing Zionism to be two complimentary issues. Harriet Freidenreich argues that the younger generations of Jews born on the South Slav lands, predominately in accordance with their social status, 17 Bogdan Trifunović, Memory of Old Serbia and the Shaping of Serbian Identity (Warszawa  : DiG Wydawnictwo, 2015), 11–3. 18 For a case study on the Alliance’s educational influence on the curricula in the Ottoman Empire, see Ana Ćirić Pavlović, “French vs. Judeo-Spanish  : An Overview of the Alliance Israélite Universelle’s Language Policy in the Ottoman Empire at the Turn of the Twentieth Century” in Judeo-Spanish and the Making of a Community, ed. Bryan Kirschen (Newcastle upon Tyne  : Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015), 143–5. 19 Klara Volarić, “Carigradski Glasnik  : A Forgotten Istanbul-based Paper in the Service of Ottoman Serbs, 1895–1909” (Master Thesis, Central European University, 2014), 88–98. 20 In the system of newly created nation-states, Salonika became part of Greece, while the territory of today’s Republic of Macedonia was first joined to the Kingdom of Serbia (during the Balkan Wars 1912–1913) and then to Yugoslavia in 1918. 21 Ženi Lebl, Do “konačnog rešenja”  : Jevreji u Beogradu, 1521–1942 (Belgrade  : Čigoja, 2001), 195.

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belonged to one of three major groups  : the Zionist, the Communist, and the apolitical.22 From the period of the Serbian Kingdom and on, kings of the Karađorđević dynasty maintained rather close relations with the domestic Jewish communities. Fine example is the great confidence invested in two prominent Serbian Jews, Avram Lević and David Albala, during the Great War. Avram Lević, an officer in the Ministry of Finance, was given complete, albeit temporary custody of the state treasury, which contained around 200 boxes of gold, while Serbia was occupied and the king, members of the government, and soldiers were retreating across the Albanian mountains in 1915–16. Additionally, he was tasked with safeguarding an even more valuable Serbian treasure, a priceless twelfth-century, illuminated manuscript Mirosavljevo jevanđelje (Miroslav’s Gospel).23 Nowadays, this exceptional piece of medieval literature is preserved by Belgrade’s National Museum and occasionally displayed to the broader audience. Captain David Albala, a Serbian Sephardi and Zionist, was a medical doctor during the Great War who fought and suffered with the Serbian Army, surviving the aforementioned retreat through Albania (Albanian Golgotha), as well as injuries and disease. In 1917, the Serbian government sent him as a special envoy to the United States to acquaint the American public with the Serbian position and gain support from the American-Jewish community. Thanks to him, Serbia was the second country after the United Kingdom to endorse the Balfour Declaration, which promised the establishment of a “national home” for the Jewish people in Palestine.24 Bonds between the Yugoslavian and Jewish populations were strengthened even more during the early 1930s. Because the rulers of the house of Karađorđević actively endorsed Zionism, they received an homage in Palestine. Namely, in 1930, a memorial forest was planted for King Petar I the Liberator and, subsequently, for King Aleksandar I the Unifier, in 1934, after his assassination in Marseille. Jevrejski kalendar (The Jewish Calendar), an important annual publication that Yugoslav Jewry distributed throughout the kingdom, reported the event in the following year, providing a speech delivered by Menachem Ussishkin, a renowned Zionist leader and the head of the Jewish National Fund, at the ceremony. Ussishkin mourned the loss of both Yugoslav rulers, King Aleksandar I and his father, Petar I, stating that it was a tragedy for the whole cultural world and especially the Jews, since they had always been righteous and kind to them. 22 Freidenreich, The Jews of Yugoslavia, 163, 180–82. Koljanin, Jevreji i antisemitizam, 68. 23 Mihajlo B. Milošević, Jevreji za slobodu Srbije 1912–1918 (Beograd  : Filip Višnjić, 1995). 24 Paulina Lebl Albala, Vidov život  : Biografija dr Davida Albale (Beograd  : Aleksandar Lebl, 2008), 135–51.



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He reaffirmed that the government of King Petar had been the first one to officially recognize the Balfour Declaration and had constantly promoted Zionism and the righteous demands of Jewish people at the meetings of the League of Nations. Additionally, Ussishkin was confident that Yugoslav pioneers and their descendants would enjoy remembering their beloved King-Knight Aleksandar, during whose reign they had lived peacefully as equal citizens, in the shadow of those forests.25 Indeed, a short time later, the conditions of the Yugoslav Jewry would deteriorate and be permanently altered, as they would everywhere else in Europe. Another prominent person of Jewish origin who participated in the Great War along with members of the Serbian Army was Rudolph Archibald Reiss (1875–1929), a German-Swiss pioneer in the field of criminology, forensic scientist, professor, and writer (Figure 1). He was commissioned by the Serbian government, as an independent expert from the neutral party of Switzerland, to investigate war atrocities that had been committed by the invading Central Powers against the domestic Serbian civilian population. Reiss’s detailed findings were published in two main reports26 and in many articles in journals during and after the Great War.27 He was overwhelmed by what he believed was the heroic Serbian struggle against a more powerful enemy. He, therefore, quit his successful professional career, joined the Serbian Army, and even decided to accept the king’s invitation to live in postwar Yugoslavia. Archibald Reiss made precious contributions to the Yugoslav people  : he was one of the founders of the Serbian Red Cross, he supported the creation and development of the police sector, and left a rather inquisitive and thoroughly political testament for the Serbian people, Écoutez, Serbes  !28 published posthumously. His sincere devotion to this country was reflected in his final request  : he was buried at the Topčider Cemetery in Belgrade, while his heart, according to his wishes, was taken to 25 “Gora Kralja Aleksandra, Givat Meleh Aleksander u Erec Jisraelu” in Jevrejski narodni kalen­ dar, eds. David A. Levi- Dale and Aleksandar Klein (Beograd – Zagreb  : Biblioteka jevrejskog narodnog kalendara, 1935/36), 22–25. 26 R.A. Reiss, Report upon the atrocities committed by the Austro-Hungarian Army during the first invasion of Serbia submitted to the Serbian Government (London  : Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co., LTD., 1916)  ; second report- R.A. Reiss, The Kingdom of Serbia  : infringements of the rules and laws of war committed by the Austro-Bulgaro-Germans  : letters of a criminologist on the Serbian Macedonian front (London  : George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1919). 27 Zdenko Levental, Rodolphe Archibald Reiss, criminaliste et moraliste de la Grande Guerre (Lausane  : L’Âge d’Homme, 1992), 18–78. 28 Listen, Serbians or Čujte, Srbi in Serbian. In this manuscript, he strongly praises the Serbian people, but also comments negatively on what he was convinced were their faults, advising them to be aware of themselves.

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Fig. 1: Rudolph Archibald Reiss (source: Archives of Yugoslavia).

Kajmakčalan, a mountain on the border between Greece and the Republic of Macedonia, and the site of the biggest victory the Serbian Army had achieved during the Great War. Lamentably, the urn containing his heart was later demolished by the Bulgarian Army during the Second World War. Commemorating Jewish patriotism The Jewish contribution to the Serbian Army during the Wars for the Unification and Liberation (1912–1919)29 was often utilized as an argument to strengthen Serbian-Jewish brotherhood. In memorials, both former and contemporary, as well as in spoken and written praise, this symbiosis is described in terms of patriotism, joint martyrdom, and extreme bravery. Beyond the usual narrative, the recurring thematic word that is often used in Serbian is rodoljublje, which is stronger in its sense than the term patriotism. The former term evokes a sense of a more profound bond between individuals, a love for one’s family, blood kinship, equality, and fraternal connection. The dominant narrative and a major leitmotif highlighted the similarities between the Serbian and Jewish 29 The Balkan Wars (1912/1913) and the First World War are generally considered as integrally and mutually interconnected units.



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fates, as two peoples that had endured many injustices and moments of suffering throughout their histories.30 In 1927, a Monument to the Fallen Jews in the Wars for the Unification and Liberation (Figure 2 and 3) was solemnly erected at the Sephardi Cemetery in Belgrade, a ceremony that was attended by many state officials, members of the diplomatic corps, family members of the fallen soldiers, and other members of the Jewish community.31 The monument contains both Jewish (Magen David, lions, inscriptions in Hebrew, vase with burning flame – ner neshama) and Serbian (Cyrillic letters, Serbian military hat šajkača) symbols, representing their dual identification with their Jewish faith and Serbian fatherland. A two-headed eagle perches on the highest point of the monument with one head facing the sky, as a sign of victory, and the second one facing the ground, as a sign of mourning for the deaths of the soldiers. In addition, the complex contains the tombs of the fallen soldiers with their names and the places of their deaths. The dedication, in Serbian and Hebrew, is situated in the central part  : To the Jews fallen for justice, liberty, and unification, for the memory and glory of Serbian Jews32

Beneath, there is a quotation from a renowned masterpiece of Serbian literature, a national epic poem Gorski Vjenac (Mountain Wreath) by Petar II Petrović Njegoš,33 written in Serbian Cyrillic script  : Generation made for a song, fairies will reach across the centuries to wrap you in a decent wreath  ; your example will teach the poet how one should speak with immortality.34

30 For instance, see  : Rabbi Šlang’s praise in Ignjat Šlang, Jevreji u Beogradu (Beograd, 1926), 106– 20. 31 For more detailed analysis of this pantheon, please consult the article Vuk Dautović, “A Monument to Fallen Jewish Soldiers in the Wars Fought between 1912 and 1919 at the Sephardic Cemetery in Belgrade,” Acta histroriae artis Slovenica 18/2 (2013)  : 43–58. 32 In Serbian  : “Јеврејима палим за правду, слободу и уједињење, у спомен и славу српски Јевреји”. 33 Njegoš was a nineteenth-century Prince-Bishop of Montenegro, a philosopher, and poet. His work is rather influential among South Slavs, laying the foundations for Yugoslavism. Thus, it is, perhaps, one of the reasons for the aforementioned quotation election. 34 In Serbian  : “Покољење за пјесму створено, виле ће грабит у вјекове да вам вјенце достојне саплету, ваш ће пример учити пjевача, како треба с бесмртношћу зборит.”

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Fig. 2: Monument to the Fallen Jews complex at the Sephardi Cemetery in Belgrade (source: author’s private collection). Fig. 3: Detail from the frontal side of the monument “Victims fallen for the Fatherland 1912–1919”, on the ground: a Serbian military hat šajkača along with a saber and rifle crossed, symbolizing the Serbian Army (source: author’s private collection).

This memorial, combining both sacral and profane elements, is designed as a continuous reminder of the Jewish sacrifice and devotion to the Serbian State and, consequently, it is often referred to when rekindling the memories of the Great War. On the occasion of the Great War’s centenary, the Jewish Historical Museum of Belgrade published a bilingual, Serbian-English monograph dedicated to the Jewish heroes of this epoch. It displays a modest but valuable collection of war photos that the museum possesses. Apart from the photos of the aforementioned personalities, it contains portraits of distinguished Jews, such as the Ashkenazi Rabbis Ignjat Šlang and Natalija Neti Munk, both of whom participated in the Balkan Wars and the Great War and were honored by the Serbian State with many decorations for their bravery. Particularly striking and authentic



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Fig. 4: Neti Munk carrying a sick man (source: Jewish Historical Museum of Belgrade).

is the photo of Neti Munk, the first Serbian nurse volunteer in the Wars for the Liberation and Unification, who holds a sick and exhausted man on her back and is possibly depicted as taking him out of the tub after bathing him (Figure 4).35 Neti, having survived wars and disease, died in 1924 and was buried with military honors. Ignjat Šlang (Figure 5), a Polish-born Ashkenazi chief rabbi came to Belgrade at the beginning of the 1900s and apparently soon became a supporter of the Serbian national cause, given that he had fought in all three wars between 1912 and 1918. Well-educated and respected in Yugoslav society, he published his scientific research and experience in an important book, “Jevreji u Beogradu” ( Jews in Belgrade), which appeared in 1926. Chapters XVIII.-XIX. depict the first decades of the twentieth century, emphasizing the patriotism and bravery expressed by the “Serbians of the Mosaic Faith” in the Great War and providing examples of Jewish personal sacrifice and courage. Considering the almost complete annihilation of Serbian Jewry in the Shoah, this book – although it is a slightly romanticized ode to Serbian-Jewish relations – presents a significant testimony that bridges the gaps within Serbian Jewish historiography and represents a necessary reference point for the investigators. Rabbi Šlang shared the 35 Milan Koljanin and Vojislava Radovanović, Serbian Jews in World War One (Belgrade  : Jewish Historical Museum, Federation of Jewish Communities of Serbia, 2014), I.-XVI.

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Fig. 5: Rabbi Ignjat Šlang (source: Jewish Historical Museum of Belgrade).

sorrowful fate of most of his co-religionists, perishing in Belgrade’s extermination camp of Banjica in 1942. Conclusion Serbia emerged as a triumphant party from the Great War, choosing to continue its sovereignty by forming a larger entity of South Slavs. The framework of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes offered Austro-Hungarian Jews a sense of continuity, allowing them to shift from one multinational state to another. Likewise, the bonds between Orthodox Serbians and Jews were fostered through the joint suffering and victory they experienced in the Great War. At the same time, although Yugoslav Jews made up a rather small minority – slightly more than 0.5 percent of the population  – their positions within the state were affirmed by legal regulations.36 Both constitutions that were published during this period proclaimed Judaism as an official religion, and the law enacted in 1929 that concerned Jewish religious communities confirmed their status. Even though it was evident that Jews and Zionism enjoyed a greater level of acceptance in Yugoslavia than in other European countries, the explanation 36 Freidenreich, Jews in Yugoslavia, 189.



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Fig. 6: Serbians of the Mosaic Faith – volunteers taking a military oath while Chief Rabbi Isak Alkalaj blesses them, 1914 (source: Yugoslav Film Archives, Belgrade).

for this is still somewhat unclear. Several factors entwined in a complex way, endorsing this acceptance. The traditionally fond relations between the Serbian Jews and members of the Royal Family of Karađorđević, reinforced by the Jewish contribution to the Serbian Army in the Great War, continued during the era of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and included other Jewish communities as well. The reason why Zionism was conceived as complementary to Yugoslavism still needs to be clarified. Obvious differences existed in the ways soldiers who participated in the Great War were commemorated. While Jewish soldiers who had been members of the Austro-Hungarian Army were neglected, Serbian soldiers were venerated for their heroism and contribution to the Serbian, and later Yugoslavian, cause. Nevertheless, Europe headed in the opposite direction during the 1930s as fascistic ideas rapidly spread across the continent, eventually arriving in Yugoslavia. After antisemitic laws were enacted in 1940, the Nazis and their allies occupied the country in the subsequent year, the side on which the Jews had fought in the Great War became irrelevant, because they all became victims of the Final Solution. More than eighty percent of the Jews of Yugoslavia perished in the Holocaust. Some of those who survived stayed on in the region and sup-

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ported the reconstruction by the socialist Yugoslavia, while more than half chose to emigrate to Israel. Among the many political and economic explanations provided for Yugoslav disintegration, one intrinsic explanation stands out  : der Narzissmus der kleinen Differenzen, that is, the narcissism of small differences.37 Despite numerous challenges, Yugoslavia helped the Slavic peoples, and equally its heterogenic Jewish communities, forming associations with their slightly different brethren. Finally, in the State of Israel, Yugoslav-Jewish survivors and their descendants are still connected by an appealing but non-existent notion  : Yugoslavia.

37 Sigmund Freud, Civilization, Society and Religion  : Group Psychology, Civilization and its Discon­ tents and Other Works, Volume 12 (London  : Penguin, 1991), 131.

ANTISEMITISM

Thomas Stoppacher

The Jewish Soldiers of Austria-Hungary in the Austrian Parliament Debates during World War I and the Post-war Years (1917–1920)1

Introduction and Sources In the summer of 1914, Austrian Jews hoped that the non-Jewish population would finally recognize their patriotism and loyalty towards the homeland and accept them as equal citizens because of their participation in the war. Many Jews shared a general sense of enthusiasm for the war. Moreover, the war objectives of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy were also seen as Jewish ones, as the successes on the Eastern front against the Russian Empire would liberate the Jews living under oppressive tsarist rule, thereby improving their situation. The often discussed “dual loyalty” of the Jewish population, which was, on the one hand, to the state and, on the other hand, to the Jewish people, did not evoke great inner conflicts in Austrian Jews. The Habsburg Monarchy was perceived as securing the rights of the Jewish population in times of increasing antisemitism.2 The tripartite identity, as Marsha Rozenblit has called it – politically Austrian, culturally German (or Czech, Polish, etc.) and ethnically Jewish– was an unproblematic idea for the Jews living in the monarchy, but became problematic in the new nation states.3 Thus, Jewish soldiers from all areas of Austria-Hungary went to war “for Emperor and Fatherland.” The military conscription for Jews had already existed since 1788. It was introduced – with some resistance from the War Council – 1

This article is an expanded and revised version of my lecture given at the International Conference Jewish Soldiers in the Collective Memory of Central Europe. The Remembrance of World War I from a Jewish Perspective on 24 May 2016 at the University of Graz. In the course of this thesis, partial results from my current dissertation project The Radicalization of Antisemitism in Austria 1914–1923 (Centre for Jewish Studies, University of Graz, Supervisor  : Gerald Lamprecht) are presented. This project is supported by a doctorate scholarship from the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah in Paris. 2 Erwin A. Schmidl, Habsburgs Jüdische Soldaten 1788–1918 (Vienna  : Böhlau Verlag, 2014), 125– 126. 3 Marsha L. Rozenblit, Reconstructing a National Identity. The Jews of Habsburg Austria during World War I (New York  : Oxford University Press, 2001), 107–110.

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under Joseph II.4 The introduction of a Jewish military service was an important and essential step towards granting the Jews their civil rights and promoting their integration into the predominantly Christian society of the Habsburg Monarchy.5 Despite this loyal attitude towards the war effort and the war objectives of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, debates on various aspects of the service of Jewish soldiers in the multinational army of the Habsburg Monarchy had already arisen during the war years and continued in the years thereafter. In this paper, I will elucidate the extent of these debates as part of the political discourse that went on in the Austrian Parliament, taking into account the fact that antisemitic agitations that took place during the early years of the war were still largely suppressed by the ritually invocated party truce (Burgfrieden)6 and the rigidly enforced censorship provisions of the war press bureau (Kriegspressequartier).7 The Imperial Assembly (Reichsrat) – the Parliament of the Austrian half of the Habsburg Monarchy – was adjourned on 16 March 1914 under the auspices of the then Prime Minister Karl Stürgkh and, despite the repeated requests from representatives of various parties, was not reconvened in favor of an authoritarian style of government.8 It was only in November 1916, when his successor, Emperor Karl I, reconvened the Imperial Assembly in May 19179 after the death of Emperor Franz Joseph, that antisemitism became once again an integral part of public and political discourse in the wake of conflicts over nationality and social crises. Most of the verbal attacks were directed towards the Jewish war

4 Schmidl, Habsburgs Jüdische Soldaten, 29–33. Schmidl, in his work on the history of the Jewish soldiers in Austria, supplies all the important facts about the introduction of the military service, but also its further development up until the First World War, including many statistics on the fields of activity and the ranks of the Jews in the Austro-Hungarian army. 5 Ibid., 12. 6 Many articles in the German-language Jewish newspapers published in Vienna, for example, in Dr. Bloch’s Österreichische Wochenschrift, point to the connection between the party truce (Burg­ friedenspolitik) and antisemitism. 7 Tamara Scheer, Die Ringstraßenfront  – Österreich-Ungarn, das Kriegsüberwachungsamt und der Ausnahmezustand während des Ersten Weltkriegs (Vienna  : Schriftenreihe des Heeresgeschichtlichen Museums 15, 2010). 8 On Karl Stürgkh and the adjournment of parliament, see  : Alexander Fussek “Ministerpräsident Karl Graf Stürgkh” (PhD diss., Univeristy of Vienna, 1959) and John Zimmermann, “Karl Reichsgraf Stürgkh,” in Politische Morde. Vom Altertum bis zur Gegenwart, ed. Michael Sommer (Darmstadt  : WBG, 2005), 183–191. 9 On the reconvention of the Imperial Assembly, see  : Manfried Rauchensteiner, Der Erste Welt­ krieg und das Ende der Habsburgermonarchie 1914–1918 (Vienna  : Böhlau Verlag, 2013), 734– 738.



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refugees,10 but antisemitism was also used as a political strategy in various conflicts. After the Parliament reconvened, anti-Jewish agitation and accusations that occurred in 1917 and 1918 were placed on the agendas of several parties of the Imperial Assembly to varying degrees.11 The last two years of the war are also the focus of this paper. I will show how the deployment of the Jewish soldiers was discussed in domestic politics  : What were the allegations made against them by various members of Parliament  ? To what extent did antisemitic practices exist in the officially multi-ethnic Habsburg army that claimed to be free of antisemitic prejudice  ? Were these singular, isolated incidents within the army or did Jewish soldiers serve as examples for the antisemitic argumentation patterns of certain politicians in larger contexts, such as the dissemination of an Austrian version of the stab-in-the-back legend  ? I will also analyze who campaigned in favor of the Jewish soldiers and which strategies these parliamentarians used to refute allegations. Before concluding the thesis, I include a brief epilogue that deals with further discourse in the First Republic and explores the consequences that the war service of Jewish soldiers had on the war and post-war periods. Here, attention will be paid to the long-term effects these debates had on the Imperial Assembly during the war, still ongoing at the time. The stenographic protocols of the Imperial Assembly served as the main and basic sources. Antisemitic speeches and utterances by politicians from the Christian Social Party and other parties, as well as complaints about antisemitic incidents in the army made by Jewish and Social Democratic delegates, will be presented and analyzed. Regarding the relevance of speeches and queries pertaining to the Imperial Assembly, the radicalization and transformation of antisemitism in the war and post-war years is reflected in the parliamentary discourses, and specifically in the use of antisemitic argumentation patterns as well as defense strategies employed by Jewish representatives.12 To analyze the discourses, it was necessary to pay attention to the Parliament’s specific context – the sessions were widely covered by the press, giving them a broad public reception and, thus, an interface between the public and politics – and the various intentions of those giving antisemitic speeches and statements.13 10 David Rechter, The Jews of Vienna and the First World War (London  : Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2001), 95. 11 Werner Bergmann, “Das antisemitische Bild vom jüdischen Soldaten von der Emanzipation bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg – am deutschen Beispiel,” in Weltuntergang, Jüdisches Leben und Sterben im Ersten Weltkrieg, ed. Markus G. Patka (Graz – Vienna – Klagenfurt  : Styria Premium, 2014), 60. 12 On this topic, see the current study  : Matthias Falter and Saskia Stachowitsch, Jüdische Iden­ titäten und antisemitische Politiken im österreichischen Parlament 1861–1933 (Vienna  : Böhlau Verlag, 2017), 93–208. 13 On this topic, see a recent work  : Susanne Wein, Antisemitismus im Reichstag. Judenfeindliche

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After the Reconvention of the Imperial Assembly: Debates about the Jewish soldiers Already in the first meetings, after the Imperial Assembly reconvened in May 1917, the military service of Jewish soldiers was the subject of heated discussions. In particular, accusations of those “shirking” military service on the front were brought forward by some members of Parliament. The party-independent Jewish deputy Heinrich Reizes,14 elected in 1911 in a post-election in a Galician constituency, held a speech on June 15, 1917 to defend the Jewish soldiers against these accusations  : The number of Jewish reserve officers – and the reserve officers are the backbone of the people’s army – is very high compared […] to the percentage of Jews in the total population. […] And I add, not only in the hinterland, but also on the front. Thousands and thousands of Jewish soldiers and heroes have fallen on all battlefields […] The share of Jewish doctors in the military service is overwhelming. […] The Jewish soldiers, the immense number of awards prove it, have fought brilliantly on all fronts.15

In further statements, he referenced military orders that discriminated against Jewish soldiers and commented that he suspected the authorities of planning a Jewish census based on the model of the German army.16 He concluded his speech with a request made to the Minister of Defense to comment on the “outrageous suspicions” which were based on medieval prejudices.17

14 15

16

17

Sprache in Politik und Gesellschaft der Weimarer Republik (Frankfurt/Main  : Peter Lang, 2014), here concretely 446. Günther Schefbeck, “‘Nach einem Schreiber kommt kein Schönerer mehr…’ Jüdische Parla­ mentarier im österreichischen Abgeordnetenhaus,” Das jüdische Echo 54 (2005)  : 103–111. Stenographic protocols on the meetings of the House of Deputies in the Austrian Imperial Assembly. XXII. Session. 7th meeting on June 15, 1917. The protocols and accompanying annexes from the Imperial Assembly can be found here  : http://alex.onb.ac.at/spa.htm “ALEX – Historische Rechts- und Gesetzestexte Online” (accessed 8 October 2018). All quotations of the protocols of the parliamentary debates as well as other quotes used in this text have been translated by the author. For the Jewish census in the German Army and its devastating signal effect, see, e.g.: Jacob Rosenthal, “Die Ehre des jüdischen Soldaten.” Die Judenzählung im Ersten Weltkrieg und ihre Fol­ gen (Frankfurt/Main  : Campus Verlag, Campus Judaica 24, 2007) and Michael Berger, Eisernes Kreuz – Doppeladler – Davidstern. Juden in deutschen und österreichisch-ungarischen Armeen. Der Militärdienst jüdischer Soldaten durch zwei Jahrhunderte (Berlin  : Trafo Wissenschaftsverlag, 2010), 50–106 (Chapter “Judenzählung und Zerfall des Burgfriedens”). Stenographic protocols on the meetings of the House of Deputies in the Austrian Imperial Assembly. XXII. Session. 7th meeting on June 15, 1917.



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The most frequently cited antisemitic accusation lodged against Jewish soldiers concerned their alleged underrepresentation in the army and especially at the front. Although there are still no exact figures on the service of Jewish soldiers in the Austro-Hungarian Army, researchers have assumed that more than three hundred thousand Jewish soldiers served in the Imperial and Royal Armies of Austria-Hungary in the First World War, and approximately thirty thousand of these died for the Habsburg Empire.18 As Reizes pointed out in his speech, Jews made up a large proportion of the officers and were represented disproportionately in several areas, especially as reserve and sanitary officers. Both Emperor Franz Joseph and his successor Karl, as well as high-ranking military representatives, repeatedly praised the patriotism and fortitude of the Jewish soldiers in the war.19 One day later, Anton Jerzabek, delegate of the Christian Social Party, in which he belonged to the right wing, replied to Reizes’s speech.20 Jerzabek was one of the most ardent antisemites in the Imperial Assembly  ; after the war, he founded the Antisemite Association (Antisemitenbund) in 1919. Demonstrations of this association were regularly accompanied by violent attacks against the Jewish population.21 He began his reply to Reizes with a polemical introduction, in which he trenchantly and deprecatingly referred to Jews as “hyenas of the hinterland”  : Parliament  ! In this debate, the heroes of the front and the heroes of the plaice have been mentioned repeatedly. But where there is light, unfortunately, there is also always shade. The heroes of the front are opposed by the hyenas of the battlefield, and the

18 These rounded figures are stated in general in works on this subject, see, e.g.: Danielle Spera, “Vorwort. Mutig hinaus für Kaiser und Vaterland,” in Weltuntergang, Jüdisches Leben und Sterben im Ersten Weltkrieg, ed. Markus G. Patka (Graz – Vienna – Klagenfurt  : Styria Premium, 2014), 8. 19 Bruce F. Pauley, Eine Geschichte des österreichischen Antisemitismus. Von der Ausgrenzung zur Aus­ löschung, (Vienna  : Verlag Kremayr & Scheriau, 1993), 102–103 – Original title  : From prejudice to Persecution  : A history of Austrian Anti-Semitism (Chapel Hill  : University of North Carolina Press, 1992). 20 For more information on Jerzabek`s political career, see  : Wolfgang Benz, “Der Antisemitentag in Wien 1921, Organisierte Judenfeindschaft in der Ersten Republik,” David. Jüdische Kulturzeitschrift 92 (4/2012). Online available at  : http://davidkultur.at/artikel/der-antisemitentag-in-wien-1921 (accessed October 8, 2018). 21 On the Antisemitenbund see  : Pauley, Eine Geschichte des österreichischen Antisemitismus, 233–235 and Herbert Rütgen, Antisemitismus in allen Lagern  : Publizistische Dokumente zur Ersten Re­ publik Österreich 1918–1938 (Graz  : DVB-Verlag für die Technische Universität Graz, 1989), 358–366 and 580–582.

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heroes of the plaice by the hyenas of the hinterland. The hyena is, as is well known, an oriental animal  ; strangely, these hyenas of the hinterland are also of oriental origin.22

Subsequently, he disagreed with Reizes and reported on his experience as a regimental physician in Galicia, where he had observed “crookery in large numbers” in the examination of Jews liable to military service.23 In another speech made in December 1917, Jerzabek claimed that he had made his own experiences while carrying out medical examinations during his job as a senior physician in Vienna and authoring a book on medical aid and Samaritanism. He told the delegates that, even in Hungary, in contrast to the “real Magyars,” “those who were only later included in this nation,” had been caught in a “position of crookery.”24 The claim made by Jerzabek and by antisemites in general, that Jews were slightly underrepresented in the army, as compared to their representation in the total population, is attributable to the sociocultural environment in the regions in which most Jews lived, namely, Galicia and Bukovina. This claim has the least support, at least, in Galicia.25 Even without Jerzabek’s “crookery,” a high percentage of Galician Jews were unfit for service due to their circumstances of life. In addition, regarding the military, there was a great deal of mistrust among the members of the deeply religious orthodox community.26 Those Jewish soldiers who served in the military vehemently denied accusations that they had not sufficiently participated in the fight. The Viennese-born Zionist Wolfgang von Weisl, for example, who was an officer himself deployed in the war, writes in his memoirs – these are private impressions and not based on documented research – about the Jews in the Austrian-Hungarian army. He claims that the percentage of Jews on the front line “despite all the slander by the antisemites, and in contrast to the numerous ‘jokes’ about Jews who managed to get safe positions in the hinterland,” was even higher than their percentage in the total population. He refers to statistics from the last two years of the war with regard to the award of the Kaiser-Karl-Truppen-Kreuz, which was given to soldiers who uninterruptedly served in the front lines of a combat group for at least twelve weeks.27 How22 Stenographic protocols on the meetings of the House of Deputies in the Austrian Imperial Assembly. XXII. Session. 8th meeting on the 16th of June 1917. 23 Ibid. 24 Stenographic protocols on the meetings of the House of Deputies in the Austrian Imperial Assembly. XXII. Session. 47th meeting on the 3rd of December 1917. 25 Erwin A. Schmidl, Juden in der k. (u.) k. Armee 1788–1918 (Eisenstadt  : Österreichisches Jüdisches Museum, Studia Judaica XI, 1989), 82. 26 Schmidl, Habsburgs jüdische Soldaten, 75–76. 27 Wolfgang von Weisl, Die Juden in der Armee Österreich-Ungarns/Illegale Transporte/Skizze zu einer Autobiographie (Tel Aviv  : Meir and Shem-Tov Printing Press, 1971), 14–15.



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ever, according to the official statistics, the number of Jewish reserve officers was disproportionately high, while the total proportion of Jews in the armed forces and especially at the front was considerably lower than the proportion of Jews in the total population.28 To counter Jerzabek’s antisemitic agitation, Benno Straucher, a lawyer and president of the Jewish community in Czernowitz who sat in the Imperial Assembly as a Jewish representative of Bukovina, took the floor at the same meeting in June 1917.29 Like his colleague Reizes, he vehemently spoke against the allegations of Jewish “shirking.” According to his deliberations – as compared to the entire population – a disproportionate number of Jews served in the military, which is why he would accept and support the idea of a “Jewish census.” The accusation against Jews regarding the withdrawal from the military service is completely unfounded. If statistical surveys were to be carried out in this respect, or in relation to the service of Jews, they could only prove the opposite of the allegations, and therefore only be of use to benefit the Jews.30

The Jewish census in the German Army, which had been mentioned several times in this debate, had also been proposed by both the Jewish and antisemitic sides for Austria-Hungary, but the Minister of Defense, Karl Czapp von Birkenstetten, rejected the idea of such a statistical survey. Thus, the political representatives rejected the accusations of disloyalty against the Jewish soldiers. The Habsburg Army was officially an institution in which there was no discrimination against any ethnic or religious group.31 The political and military leaders were aware that taking a census in the labile environment of the Austro-Hungarian Army was a very risky proposition. The antisemitic mistrust against Jewish soldiers could also have turned against groups of other religious minorities or nationalities. The national struggle, which had already been seething for years,

28 Erwin A. Schmidl, “Davidstern und Doppeladler. Jüdische Soldaten in Österreich(-Ungarn),” in Geschichte und Politik, Heft 250 ( Jänner/Februar 1991)  : 25 and Istvàn Deàk, Der K.(u.)K. Offizier. 1848–1918 (Vienna  – Cologne  – Weimar  : Böhlau Verlag, 2. revised edition 1995), 236–237. 29 Schefbeck, “Nach einem Schreiber kommt kein Schönerer mehr…,” 103–111. 30 Stenographic protocols on the meetings of the House of Deputies in the Austrian Imperial Assembly. XXII. Session. 8th meeting on June 16, 1917. 31 Sarah Panter, Jüdische Erfahrungen und Loyalitätskonflikte im Ersten Weltkrieg (Göttingen  : Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Veröffentlichungen des Instituts für Europäische Geschichte Mainz 235, 2014), 205.

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and which had been painfully suppressed only by forming a party truce, could have escalated if such a census had been carried out.32 However, it is indeed a fact that the highly negative, antisemitic stereotyping of Jewish soldiers had begun during the war, and after the Imperial Assembly reconvened, this was being discussed in Parliament and, consequently, by the broader public, and – of this there is no doubt, according to statements by the Jewish delegates – Reizes and Straucher. In addition to their speeches, the two delegates also initiated and participated in parliamentary enquiries concerning Jewish soldiers. They frequently presented the topic of the prohibition of using the Jewish language and script (i.e., Yiddish and Hebrew) for communication in the military postal service. They claimed that this not only harmed the soldiers’ morals, but also did damage to the Habsburg Monarchy’s international prestige, because it was being reported abroad and especially in the major American newspapers. The reasons for this ban, which presented great problems in the everyday communication via exchange of letters, especially for the Jewish soldiers from Galicia and the Bukovina, are not known exactly. In their inquiries, Reizes and Straucher mention that they suspect the fear of “treason, espionage or other indiscretions,” the use of court chancery decrees dating from 1814 and 1846 and the lack of officials “capable of censoring Jewish letters” as reasons. In the first interpellation on the subject, however, there was a definitive “immediately after the outbreak of war” ban to be imposed.33 In addition, Yiddish and Hebrew were not nationally recognized languages – this could have also been a reason for the ban.34 The two Jewish delegates also reported incidents of administrative abuses and blanket prejudices against Jews in the army. Similar complaints made by the Czech, Polish and Ukrainian delegates about discrimination against soldiers of their respective nationalities give an indication of the specific conditions facing the military within the multi-ethnic empire and, thus, of the relevant, overall Austrian problematic.35

32 Albert Lichtblau, “Antisemitismus 1900–1938, Phasen, Wahrnehmung und Akkulturationseffekte,” in Wien und die jüdische Erfahrung 1900–1938  : Akkulturation-Antisemitismus-Zionismus, eds. Frank Stern and Barbara Eichinger (Vienna  : Böhlau Verlag, 2009), 41. 33 Annex to the stenographic protocols of the House of Deputies in the Austrian Imperial Assembly. XXII. Session. Interpellation 98/1. 4th meeting on June 12, 1917, Annex to the stenographic protocols of the House of Deputies in the Austrian Imperial Assembly. XXII. Session. Enquiry 247/1. 10th meeting on June 26, 1917 and Annex to the stenographic protocols of the House of Deputies in the Austrian Imperial Assembly. XXII. Session. Enquiry 2155/1. 57th meeting on February 5, 1918. 34 Thanks for the note to Eleonore Lappin-Eppel. 35 Panter, Jüdische Erfahrungen und Loyalitätskonflikte im Ersten Weltkrieg, 202–203.



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Jewish organizations and newspapers had already dealt with antisemitic accusations made against Jewish soldiers before Parliament was reconvened, and censorship bans were loosened’. Between May 1915 and January 1917, the “Jewish War Archives” Committee published five issues of the Jewish Archive Journal, attempting therein to gather as much material as possible regarding the situation of Jews in the embattled eastern territories of the Monarchy, as well as about Jewish war refugees from Galicia and Bukovina in the west. The objective was to gather arguments for the recognition of Jews as a national minority and to demonstrate the great loyalty of the Austrian Jews to the Habsburg Monarchy  ; therefore, the committee also gathered evidence of the courage of Jewish soldiers.36 The reconvention of the Imperial Assembly led to the very debate that had been expected, which had hitherto been subliminally subdued or prevented by the censors. Description of antisemitic Incidents in the Army In addition to the above-mentioned debates on the participation or non-participation of Jewish soldiers in the war, another aspect of the political discourse that took place in the Imperial Assembly was that of antisemitic incidents that occurred in the Austro-Hungarian Army, which were mentioned by some members of parliament. The lawyer Adolf Groß, representative of the Jewish quarter in Krakow37 described some of these incidents in a speech given in July 1917. He primarily referred to orders of the Ministry of War in Kraków which prohibited Jews from crossing the border from “Russian-Poland”, which was conquered in the war or did not recognize Jewish witnesses in court.38 The Social Democratic deputy Max Winter, who meticulously researched antisemitic incidents, was also meritorious in the demonstration of grievances within the military. On July 13, 1917, he described how lieutenants repeatedly offended a Jewish soldier in front of a gathered troops. His question to the Federal Defense Minister was  : 36 Eleonore Lappin, “Zwischen den Fronten  : Das Wiener ‘Jüdische Archiv. Mitteilungen des Komitees ‘Jüdisches Kriegsarchiv’ 1915–1918,” in Deutsch-jüdische Presse und jüdische Geschichte. Dokumente, Darstellungen, Wechselbeziehungen / The German Jewish press and Jewish history, Bd.1  : Identität, Nation, Sprache. Jüdische Geschichte und jüdisches Gedächtnis. Der Westen im Osten, der Osten im Westen. Konzepte jüdischer Kultur, eds. Eleonore Lappin and Michael Nagel (Bremen  : Ed. Lumière, Presse und Geschichte, Neue Beiträge 37, 2009), 229. 37 Dr. Adolf Groß, https://www.parlament.gv.at/WWER/PAD_33926/index.shtml (accessed October 8, 2018). 38 Stenographic protocols on the meetings of the House of Deputies in the Austrian Imperial Assembly. XXII. Session. 13th meeting on July 3, 1917.

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Is it true that Lieutenant Czychinski, as well as Senior Lieutenant von Höfern, spoke to a soldier using the words ‘dirty Jewish sow,’ and the two gentlemen attacked the crew and troops by slapping and kicking them  ?39

Similar violations occurred, according to a complaint made by Benno Straucher in October 1917 at the celebration of the Jewish New Year in the powder factory in Moosbierbaum, when the service being performed by the Jewish soldiers was disturbed and interrupted by another troop. One of the soldiers involved said  : “It would be expedient to put this entire Jewish troop in a row and to butcher them all with a machine gun.” In addition to the description of the ruthless act, Straucher explicitly emphasized that such a disturbance was completely against military rules, because it is formulated in the service regulation that “the soldiers of all confessions must be given the possibility of carrying out their religious prayers and holding services, and that the High Holy Days of all confessions must be respected.”40 In an enquiry that took place in September 1917, Delegate Winter quoted a letter from a Jewish soldier to the Arbeiterzeitung, in which the soldier announced that he intended to commit suicide because he had received antisemitic insults from and been tormented by his superior. He later actually carried out his threat to commit suicide.41 Another report made by Winter in January 1918 revealed how a well-known doctor, the head of a department in the Ministry of War, drove a seriously ill Jewish soldier into a fit of rage with opprobrious anti-Jewish insults.42 The Social Democrat Max Winter was not only a politician, but also a journalist and a pioneer author of social reports in the German-speaking world. For many years, he wrote reports for the Arbeiterzeitung with the goal of improving the living conditions of workers and socially ostracized persons. He made social wrongdoings public by means of providing concrete evidence, and did not hesitate to give the names of the persons he criticized as well as demand improvements in his position as a delegate.43

39 Annex to the stenographic protocols of the House of Deputies in the Austrian Imperial Assembly. XXII. Session. Enquiry 652/1. 19th meeting on July 13, 1917. 40 Annex to the stenographic protocols of the House of Deputies in the Austrian Imperial Assembly. XXII. Session. Enquiry 1193/1. 34th meeting on October 26, 1917. 41 Annex to the stenographic protocols of the House of Deputies in the Austrian Imperial Assembly. XXII. Session. Enquiry 855/1. 25th meeting on September 28, 1917. 42 Stenographic protocols on the meetings of the House of Deputies in the Austrian Imperial Assembly. XXII. Session. 56th meeting on January 30, 1918. 43 About Max Winter see  : Hannes Haas, Max Winter, Expeditionen ins dunkelste Wien. Meisterw­



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The most detailed speech on antisemitic incidents against Jewish soldiers came from Benno Straucher. On July 15, 1917, he presented a reserve order which stated  : “Jews, Italians and Czechs are not allowed to be commanded to guard duty in this prisoner-of-war officer group,” and “Strict control of the Jewish guards, as well as all their less than reliable elements.” Straucher pointed out how unfair these and other discriminatory and spiteful orders against Jewish soldiers were. He also mentioned that such measures caused unrest among Jewish soldiers, as well as in the “outside world.” In his highly-esteemed speech, Straucher also dealt with the ban on verbal and written correspondence in the Jewish language, as well as frequent verbal abuse and mockeries in the army. The notes in the stenographic protocols refer to “lively applause” and “the speaker was often congratulated,” both remarks that were an absolute rarity in pro-Jewish speeches. He concluded his remarks with a clear announcement  : That is why, in the name of the entire Austrian Jewish community, I raise a solemn and vigorous protest against the suspicion of unreliability or lesser reliability of the Jewish troops, and reject these accusations indignantly.44

The examples given here, as well as the passionate riposte by Straucher, prove that antisemitic assaults in the army were known and the subject of political discourse. Their scope ranged from verbal to violent attacks of varying degrees, but also included official commands, although antisemitic acts were officially prohibited by the political representatives and the army. Apparently, the wider public was aware that such incidents took place. However, these transgressions were added to the parliamentary agenda mainly by Jewish mandataries. An exception was the Social Democratic Delegate Max Winter, who was the only non-Jewish representative to regularly detect antisemitic incidents in the army. Complaints about Jewish soldiers There were, however, also inquiries in the Imperial Assembly that seem to have had contrary intentions, namely, those that comment on the allegedly “privileged position of the Jews in the army,” as well as their “systematic withdrawal from the service in the trenches on the front due to their assignment to tasks behind erke der Sozialreportage (Vienna  : Picus Verlag, 2006) and Stefan Riesenfellner, Der Sozialreporter. Max Winter im alten Österreich (Vienna  : Verlag für Gesellschaftskritik, 1987). 44 Stenographic protocols on the meetings of the House of Deputies in the Austrian Imperial Assembly. XXII. Session. 21st meeting on July 15, 1917.

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the front.” Wincenty Witos, a co-founder of the Polish People’s movement, and later, in the early 1920s, the head of government of independent Poland,45 made an inquiry on July 17, 1917, into the claim  : It is notoriously known, both in the population left behind in the Hinterland and the soldiers in the trenches, that the soldiers of Jewish nationality are almost never used in the trenches, which provokes great exasperation.46

Subsequently, the signatories of the inquiry complained that the Jewish soldiers were underrepresented compared to the Polish and Ukrainian soldiers, and that they were dominating the trade instead of the military service. This is also connected to the entry of delegate Antoni Banás, a member of the Polish People’s Party,47 on the activities of the war headquarters (Zentralen), a widely-criticized institution of the Austrian war economy, which regulated the distribution of food. He claimed that the headquarters were solely headed by “Jews serving in the military and representing the Ministry of War,” who were only “working in the interests of the headquarters and towards the destruction of trade in the country.”48 Since some of the members in the war headquarters, who were responsible for the distribution of food, were wealthy Jewish merchants and bankers, they served the Christian Social Party as perfect targets for antisemitic rhetoric.49 The Reichspost, a newspaper that closely reflected the views of the Christian Social Party, strengthened this argumentation regularly by publishing articles in which the Jews were blamed for the food crisis, and, thus, exposed the discourse to the general public.50 Benno Straucher responded to the two motions of the Polish members of parliament with a reply in which he rejected the allegations and again pointed out that he was open to a statistical 45 Stephanie Zloch, Polnischer Nationalismus. Politik und Gesellschaft zwischen den beiden Weltkrie­ gen (Vienna – Cologne – Weimar  : Böhlau Verlag, Industrielle Welt. Schriftenreihe des Arbeitskreises für moderne Sozialgeschichte 78, 2010), 37. 46 Annex to the stenographic protocols of the House of Deputies in the Austrian Imperial Assembly. XXII. Session. Enquiry 514/1. 16th meeting on July 7, 1917. 47 Franz Adlgasser, Die Mitglieder der österreichischen Zentralparlamente 1848–1918. Konstituier­ ender Reichstag 1848–1849. Reichsrat 1861–1918. Ein biographisches Lexikon. Teilband 1  : A-L (Vienna  : Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Studien zur Geschichte der österreichisch-ungarischen Monarchie 33, 2014), 42–43. 48 Annex to the stenographic protocols of the House of Deputies in the Austrian Imperial Assembly. XXII. Session. Enquiry 731/1. 22th meeting on September 25, 1917. 49 John W. Boyer, Culture and political Crisis in Vienna. Christian Socialism in Power 1897–1918 (Chicago and London  : The University of Chicago Press, 1995), 419. 50 Maureen Healy, Vienna and the Fall of the Habsburg Empire. Total War and Everyday Life in World War I (Cambridge  : Cambridge University Press, 2004), 62–63.



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survey of Jews in the army, because the antisemitic accusations would turn out to be unfounded.51 The war headquarters and the often suspected disproportionate presence of Jews there were also the topics of a speech held by the Christian Social Delegate Josef Grim52 in September 1917, in which he complained about the delivery of hay in his Lower Austrian hometown  : “dissenters” with a high military rank were in the town “to be off duty from the trenches,” and caused “unsustainable conditions.”53 Complaints were even received from Dalmatia about the fisheries organized by the military authorities, which were described by Anton Korošec from the Croatian-Slovenian club as “sinecures and cheating opportunities for Magyar Jews, who, furthermore, have no idea about fishing.”54 In the complaints made about Jewish soldiers presented here, two central antisemitic pictures of this period are provided, and correlations are drawn between them. The opinion that the Jews were “cowardly by nature” and not suitable to serve in the army led to the accusation of “shirking” during the First World War  ; this also played a central role in this contribution.55 Jews have been equated with capitalism in the stereotypes associated with modern antisemitism since the middle of the nineteenth century, and these stereotypes were integral parts of the propaganda used by antisemitic parties and organizations.56 Here, the Jewish soldiers were, on the one hand, accused of avoiding the front line as much as possible and, on the other hand, of being the beneficiaries and profiteers of the war economy at the headquarters, which already had a terrible reputation.

51 Annex to the stenographic protocols of the House of Deputies in the Austrian Imperial Assembly. XXII. Session. Enquiry 855/1. 25th meeting on September 28, 1917. 52 Josef Grim, https://www.parlament.gv.at/WWER/PAD_00482/index.shtml (accessed October 8, 2018). 53 Annex to the stenographic protocols of the House of Deputies in the Austrian Imperial Assembly. XXII. Session. Enquiry 3144/1. 83th meeting on July 26, 1918. 54 Annex to the stenographic protocols of the House of Deputies in the Austrian Imperial Assembly. XXII. Session. Enquiry 2830/1. 76th meeting on July 16, 1917. 55 Volker Ullrich, “‘Drückeberger’. Die Judenzählung im Ersten Weltkrieg,” in Antisemitismus. Vorurteile und Mythen, eds. Julius H. Schoeps and Joachim Schlör (München  : Piper Verlag, 1995), 210–217. 56 Avraham Barkai, “Der Kapitalist,” in Antisemitismus. Vorurteile und Mythen, eds. Julius H. Schoeps and Joachim Schlör (München  : Piper Verlag, 1995), 265–272.

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1918 – The Year of Upheaval and Turmoil – Antisemitic Agitation increases The tone in the Imperial Assembly became increasingly aggravated as the negative course of the war for Austria-Hungary became steadily clearer. Jews were increasingly and more openly defined as the scapegoats for all sorts of developments as time went on. This also concerned the discussions about the Jewish soldiers. The Styrian Delegate Michael Schoiswohl of the Christian Social Party57 accused the Jewish Colonel Heinrich Deutsch not to treat his soldiers according to their abilities and merit, but rather to transfer “all the Jewish shirkers […] to the infantry regiment No. 38,” which has, thus, “become a refuge for the Jews, and would meet its demise.”58 In March 1918, his party colleague, Anton Jerzabek, pointed out that Jewish “shirking” played an important role at the university  : Apart from a few praiseworthy exceptions, which did not want to subdue their Christian colleagues in courage and willingness, the majority of the Semitic audience preferred to pay tribute to the principle of “caution is the better part of valour  !” in order to avoid the danger and therefore also hated military service.59

The proportion of Jewish students of 31 per cent in 1914/1915 during the First World War rose to over 50 per cent – while the Jewish proportion of the total population of Vienna was 10 per cent. This fueled antisemitism at universities60 and also explains why Jerzabek added this topic to the agenda in Parliament.61 The summer of 1918 was the climax of antisemitic agitation during the war. The German-National Parties and the Christian Social Party were actively engaged in Jew-baiting at the Imperial Assembly, but also in the Viennese Muni-

57 Michael Schoiswohl, https://www.parlament.gv.at/WWER/PAD_01765/index.shtml (accessed October 8, 2018). 58 Annex to the stenographic protocols of the House of Deputies in the Austrian Imperial Assembly. XXII. Session. Enquiry 2224/1. 59th meeting on February 7, 1918. 59 Annex to the stenographic protocols of the House of Deputies in the Austrian Imperial Assembly. XXII. Session. Enquiry 2568/1. 69th meeting on March 6, 1918. 60 Klaus Taschwer, “‘Ein seltsamer Körper war diese Universität im Krieg’. Über die Alma Mater Rudolphina in den Jahren 1914 bis 1918 – und danach,” in Im Epizentrum des Zusammenbruchs. Wien im Ersten Weltkrieg, eds. Alfred Pfoser and Andreas Weigl (Vienna  : Metroverlag, 2014), 388. 61 On this topic, see in detail  : Klaus Taschwer, Hochburg des Antisemitismus. Der Niedergang der Universität Wien im 20. Jahrhundert (Vienna  : Czernin Verlag, 2015).



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cipal Council, in the press, at the university and at public events.62 These activities reached a peak at the so-called German Volkstag in June 1918. The speakers, which included high-ranking representatives of the Christian Social Party such as the mayor of Vienna, Richard Weiskirchner, who had taken over the chairmanship, Leopold Kunschak, chairman of the Christian Social Workers’ Union, and Heinrich Mataja, who later became Secretary of State, surpassed each other in portraying the Austrian Jews as disloyal citizens, war profiteers and made them not only responsible for all the problems in Vienna but also the collapse of the Monarchy.63 Although the thousands of Jewish refugees from Galicia and Bukovina were the main targets of public antisemitic agitation the “Jewish army service holdouts,” the “shirkers,” also repeatedly came up in discussions.64 The Jewish Community of Vienna (Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Wien) and representatives of many other communities of the Habsburg Monarchy assembled in a plenary session in reaction to this escalation of public antisemitic agitation and issued a protest resolution on July 26, 1918, specifically directed against the “systematic subversive activities” of antisemitism in Austria, which, “under tacit permission from the authorities,” instigated the “Christian population […] to riots against the Austrian Jews.”65 The last enquiry presented below also comes from a representative of the Christian Social Party. Heinrich Mataja criticized the censorship of antisemitic passages in a series of articles published in September 1918 in the Christian So­ cial News Correspondence on the topic of Judaism in the war. One of the passages that, in his opinion, was wrongly deleted, sums up the antisemitic accusations against Jewish soldiers  : It is with deepest regret that we are in the position to establish that, at the same time as our Aryan brothers are contending against a supremacy of enemies, are enduring immense strains and deprivation, Judaism in its outrageous manner, is doing everything in its power to withdraw from military service. It is an undeniable fact that no nation, no people, has used such means so as not to have to face the front, as the Jewish population has […] striking and characteristic of the behavior of the Jews is the joke which claims that the only places free of Jews are the trenches.66 62 Rechter, The Jews of Vienna and the First World War, 95. 63 George E. Berkley, Vienna and its Jews. The tragedy of success. 1880s–1980s (Cambridge  : Abt Books/Madison Books, 1988), 154. 64 Rechter, The Jews of Vienna and the First World War, 96–97. 65 Panter, Jüdische Erfahrungen und Loyalitätskonflikte im Ersten Weltkrieg, 303. 66 Annex to the stenographic protocols of the House of Deputies in the Austrian Imperial Assembly. XXII. Session. Enquiry 3436/1. 89th meeting on the 9th of October 1918.

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As is clear from the examples cited here, members of the Christian Social Party were presenting a scapegoat for the imminent defeat by stirring up increasingly aggressive antisemitic agitation against Jewish soldiers. Already in the summer of 1917, several serious controversies had taken place within the party, which was in the process of formulating a party program in which a conscious sharpening of antisemitic agitation was called for by authoritative forces and especially Leopold Kunschak and Heinrich Mataja, who have been previously quoted.67 The attacks on the Jewish soldiers described above can be interpreted as the result of this new “party line” of the Christian Social Party. The Discourse about Jewish Soldiers in the New State of (German-) Austria After enthusiastically supporting and participating in the war to demonstrate their loyalty to the state, as well as increasingly integrating into society, the Jews bitterly viewed their confrontation with the hitherto unknown vehement antisemitism in the last years of the war and the first post-war years.68 After the end of the Habsburg Monarchy, the resulting phase of upheaval in the newly formed nation states ushered in difficult times for the Jews of Austria. Politicians of almost all parties assumed antisemitic positions for various reasons.69 Jews were the “scapegoats” for political instability, the economic crisis, and most of all, for the loss of the war.70 The high number of Jewish officers in the war, which was also mentioned in this article, was often discussed  ; as protagonists of the “old state,” they did not have a good reputation in the republic.71 In addition, Jews were accused of undermining the home front, thus, contributing to the defeat of the Central Powers.72 An antisemitic line of argumentation was that, while the soldiers on the front and their families at home were starving, Jews held back food and supplies to increase their profits.73 The accusation of treason – in this case against the Fatherland and the soldiers fighting honestly – is an antisemitic image with which Jews have been linked since Judas Iscariot, the disciple who delivered 67 Boyer, Culture and political Crisis in Vienna, 434–435. 68 Gerald Lamprecht, “Erinnerung an den Krieg  : der Bund Jüdischer Frontsoldaten Österreichs 1932 bis 1938,” in Weltuntergang, Jüdisches Leben und Sterben im Ersten Weltkrieg, ed. Markus G. Patka (Graz – Vienna – Klagenfurt  : Styria Premium, 2014), 201. 69 Schmidl, Habsburgs Jüdische Soldaten, 140. 70 Bergmann, “Das antisemitische Bild vom jüdischen Soldaten,” 71. 71 Schmidl, Habsburgs Jüdische Soldaten, 140–141. 72 Bergmann, “Das antisemitische Bild vom jüdischen Soldaten,” 67. 73 Schmidl, Habsburgs Jüdische Soldaten, 140–141.



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Jesus,74 and which was being presented in the post-war debates as an example of national betrayal against the German-Austrian people. In September 1919, the Reichspost wrote in an article on the peace treaty of St. Germain, stating the Jewish “leaders of the class struggle” “who live well in this stage of the fight,” were against the treaty although the population wanted internal peace between all parts of society. This rhetoric was a quote from a speech made by Leopold Kunschak, the leader of the World Movement of Christian Workers. The militarized language and the identification of the Social Democratic leaders as Jews contains all the characteristics of the stab-inthe-back legend, which was so widespread in the Weimar Republic, and this pattern of argumentation now gained popularity in the political discourse in Austria.75 The rhetoric of Kunschak and the Reichspost targeted leading Jewish Social Democratic politicians such as the party leader Otto Bauer and Julius Deutsch, the Minister of Defense (Staatssekretär für Heereswesen). Following the argument about the stab-in-the-back legend, the allegedly high proportion of Jews in the war economy and in the “hinterland” would have been responsible for the collapse of the Habsburg Monarchy and, subsequently, for the defeat. In 1931, the Austrian writer Rudolf Jeremias Kreutz described the allegations of the antisemites against the Jews for being culpable for their defeat and laying down their weapons after his war deployment, his subsequent captivity in eastern Siberia and conversion to pacifism, as follows  : The famous “stab-in-the-back” myth apparently became effective by three components. Fear of futile sacrifice, is the first, greed for purposeful enrichment, the second, and radicalization of the defence against a system that unsuccessfully fought to the death, is the third.76

The fact that the wartime deployment of Jewish soldiers, from both Jewish and non-Jewish perspectives, has remained important in various aspects, is illustrated by the following incidents from the immediate post-war period and from 74 Erhard Stölting, “Der Verräter,” in Antisemitismus. Vorurteile und Mythen, eds. Schoeps and Schlör, 218–228. 75 Patrick J. Houlihan, “Was There an Austrian Stab-in-the-Back Myth  ? Interwar Military Interpretations of Defeat,” in From Empire to Republic  : Post World-War I Austria, eds. Günter Bischof, Fritz Plasser and Peter Berger (New Orleans  : University Press, Contemporary Austrian Studies 19, 2010), 77. On the Stab-in-the-Back Myth in Germany see e.g.: Boris Barth, Dolch­ stoßlegenden und politische Desintegration. Das Trauma der deutschen Niederlage im Ersten Weltkrieg 1914–1933 (Düsseldorf  : Droste Verlag, Schriften des Bundesarchivs 61, 2003). 76 Rudolf Jeremias Kreutz, Die Krise des Pazifismus, des Antisemitismus, der Ironie (Vienna  : Saturn-­ Verlag, 1931), 79–80. Cited in  : Schmidl, Habsburgs jüdische Soldaten, 141.

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the later interwar period  : In the Republic of (German-) Austria, Jewish soldiers were looking for new tasks after their return from the battlefields. Thousands of soldiers returned to Vienna during the weeks of upheaval in October and November 1918. Due to the unclear political situation and the unrest caused by food shortages, a city guard was formed. In the Leopoldstadt and Brigittenau areas, which had a high percentage of Jewish inhabitants, Jewish battalions loosely integrated into the official guard to protect Jewish families and businesses from antisemitic provocations or attacks.77 Jewish soldiers from the Austro-Hungarian Army were primarily deployed in these protection troops. Former Jewish soldiers from the Austrian-Hungarian Army were also deployed in these protection forces to, protect the Jewish population, particularly before and during elections and during antisemitic demonstrations.78 Thus, former Jewish soldiers were also actively involved in the effects of antisemitic discourses and, in this way, actively resisted them. As a late reaction to the antisemitic attacks on Jewish soldiers and their service in the First World War, the League of Jewish Front Soldiers of Austria (Bund Jüdischer Frontsoldaten) was formed in 1932. It vehemently fought the accusations, which were raised belatedly in the political discourse of the interwar period against the Jewish soldiers and, at the same time, insisted on maintaining the tradition of the old Austrian Army. With reference to the Jewish service in the First World War, they wanted to defend themselves against the permanent slander of the “Jewish name and Jewish honor.”79 Even after the “annexation” of Austria to Nazi-Germany in March 1938 and the beginning of the National Socialist era, many Jewish soldiers still falsely believed that their status as front fighters in the First World War would protect them from persecution.80

77 Rechter, The Jews of Vienna and the First World War, 173–175 and Schmidl, Habsburgs jüdische Soldaten, 146–147. 78 Harriet Pass Freidenreich, Jewish Politics in Vienna (Bloomington  : Indiana University Press, 1991), 53. 79 On the League of Jewish Front Soldiers, see  : Lamprecht, “Erinnerung an den Krieg,” 201–210 and Michael Berger, “Kampf gegen Antisemitismus und Ehrung der gefallenen Soldaten am Beispiel des Bundes jüdischer Frontsoldaten Österreichs (BjF) und der jüdischen Kriegerdenkmäler in Wien und Graz,” in Jüdische Soldaten – Jüdischer Widerstand in Deutschland und Frank­ reich, eds. Michael Berger and Gideon Römer-Hillebrecht (Paderborn  : Ferdinand Schöningh, 2012), 226–235. 80 Lichtblau, “Antisemitismus 1900–1938,” 41.



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Conclusion In the course of the First World War, during the last months of the Habsburg Monarchy and in the early days of the First Republic, a radicalization of antisemitism took place. Above all, politicians from the Christian-Social Party and German National Parties used different thematic contexts of anti-Jewish arguments during this phase of upheaval. In the political discourse of the years of the war, Jewish soldiers were accused of disloyalty, “shirking,” or profiteering from the war economy. The Parliament was a central venue of articulation, transformation and continuity of antisemitic politics, whether in the reconvened Imperial Assembly of May 1917, in the last months of the Monarchy, or in the turbulent first years of the republic.81 As the presented debates show, both antisemitic accusations and a passionate defense by Jewish delegates emphasized the achievements of the Jewish soldiers during the war. Antisemitic discriminatory incidents within the army were often presented in Parliament. These incidents clearly contradict the often-presented thesis that there was no antisemitism in the Austro-Hungarian Army. Erwin Schmidl, in his book on Habsburg’s Jewish Soldiers, came to the conclusion  : “On the whole, Jewish soldiers in Austria-Hungary were probably less exposed to antisemitic prejudice and discrimination than in other armies, or in daily life.”82 In principle, the Austrian-Hungarian military managed to integrate Jewish soldiers. Those in charge recognized that the army of a multi-ethnic state had to reflect the ethnic and religious diversity thereof in order to play a political role.83 To this extent, Schmidl’s verdict on the circumstances within the army is probably correct – especially in comparison to the German Army.84 Outside of the military, in the press and in politics, the discourse on Jewish soldiers, their loyalty, morals, etc., was, however, by no means free of anti-Jewish resentment. Also, the 81 Matthias Falter and Saskia Stachowitsch, “Das jüdische Wien im Parlament – Jüdische Identitätspolitik, regionale Interessenpolitik und antisemitische Widerstände von 1861 bis 1922,” in transversal. Zeitschrift für Jüdische Studien 1 (2012)  : 83. 82 Schmidl, Habsburgs Jüdische Soldaten, 80. See also  : Werner Bergmann and Ulrich Wyrwa  : “In marked contrast to the German army, antisemitism doesn’t appear to be a serious problem in Austria-Hungary,” in Antisemitismus in Zentraleuropa. Deutschland, Österreich und die Schweiz vom 18. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart, eds. Werner Bergmann and Ulrich Wyrwa (Darmstadt  : Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2011), 63. 83 Michael Berger, Eisernes Kreuz und Davidstern  : Die Geschichte jüdischer Soldaten in deutschen Armee (Berlin  : Trafo Wissenschaftsverlag, 2006), 241. 84 Marsha L. Rozenblit felt the same, she highlights the number of concrete complaints about antisemitic incidents in the army. See  : Rozenblit, Reconstructing a National Identity, 92–93.

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optimism that was displayed at the beginning of the war, that the shared struggle in the multinational Habsburg army would improve the integration of Jews into Austrian society, proved to be unfounded.85 When the discourse regarding national affiliation arose at the end of the war, it became clear that this hope of belonging remained an illusion, and that the new political and governmental circumstances complicated the position of the Jewish population. The Jews, as a minority, had a precarious foothold, and their previous loyalty to the Habsburg Monarchy would no longer help them establish a new “national” identity. A reaction to the experiences of the First World War in the formation of the successor states of the multi-ethnic empires was the “demarcation to the outside” and the struggle for hegemony regarding the definition of a separate culture or nation. Difference and heterogeneity within a state were no longer desirable.86 These heydays of nationalism created an extremely difficult situation for Jews across Europe, as they were always viewed as subversive, “aliens”, even though they were able to speak the respective language of each new state.87 In this phase of Austria’s extremely difficult establishment of a national identity – nobody was happy with the “truncated state” left over from the former Habsburg Empire – antisemitic theses came into play.88 With antisemitic patterns of argumentation, it was possible to define a clear and majority position on various political issues, including the role of Jewish soldiers in the war, during the phase of transition from the multinational Austria-Hungary to the nearly homogeneous nation state (German) Austria. The war service of Jewish soldiers was not viewed positively in the First Republic. On the contrary, the conspiracy theory that the Jewish soldiers were to blame for the lost war was also well-known in Austria, and “the Jews” in general, as well as the Jewish soldiers or those responsible in the war headquarters in particular, were blamed for the defeat. The interaction between Jewish and non-Jewish “memory discourses” about Jewish soldiers, which emerged in the political discourse of the debates that occurred in the Imperial Assembly, reflects the different perspectives and different intentions of the participating actors. The formulation of an Austrian version of 85 Ibid., 82. 86 Petra Ernst, Sabine A. Haring and Werner Suppanz, “Der Erste Weltkrieg – Zeitenbruch und Kontinuität,” in Aggression und Katharsis. Der Erste Weltkrieg im Diskurs der Moderne (Vienna  : Passagen Verlag, Studien zur Moderne 20, 2004), 21–22. 87 Pieter Judson, The Habsburg Empire. A New History (Cambridge, Massachusetts  ; London, ­England  : The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,), 442–445. 88 On antisemitism and nation see  : Samuel Salzborn, “Antisemitismus und Nation. Zur histo­ rischen Genese der sozialwissenschaftlichen Theoriebildung,” in Österreichische Zeitschrift für Politikwissenschaft 39, no. 4, (2010)  : 393–408.



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the stab-in-the-back legend is apparent in the speeches of and the parliamentary queries made by antisemitic politicians and can already be recognized at an early stage after the fall of censorship. This notorious antisemitic conspiracy theory served to explain the defeat in neighboring Germany  : Jews were seen as traitors of the home front. While this claim became a fundamental component of the ideology of right-wing political parties in interwar Germany, there is relatively little evidence to support this claim in Austria.89 This may be due to the fact that high-ranking officers from the monarchy played no important role in politics in Austria  – in contrast to the Weimar Republic,90 and that there were other popular scapegoats in Austria, such as the Czech minority in Vienna. The speeches and enquiries made in the Imperial Assembly presented here, in which the blame for the loss of the war was gladly assigned to the “hyenas of the hinterland” or the “Jewish shirkers” prove that a discourse about the stab-inthe-back myth existed in various facets91 also in Austria. The hereby responsible political figures in the speeches presented were overwhelmingly politicians from the Christian Socialist camp. That high-ranking public figures of the party such as Anton Jerzabek, Heinrich Mataja, or Leopold Kunschak led this discourse can most definitely be seen as proof of this party’s deliberately chosen political strategy. The speeches and enquiries of Jewish delegates illustrate their dilemma  : They had to defend themselves against increasing antisemitism, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, were powerlessly exposed to the impending, and ultimately real, demise of the Habsburg Monarchy and the respective consequences thereof. The debate on the participation of Jewish soldiers in the Habsburg Army during war times was one of many such topics discussed in Parliament, in which antisemitic patterns of reasoning and, thereupon, reactive defense strategies become visible.

89 Houlihan, “Was There an Austrian Stab-in-the-Back Myth  ?,” 67. 90 Ibid., 73. 91 Patrick Houlihan comes also to this conclusion, see  : Houlihan, “Was There an Austrian Stabin-the-Back Myth  ?,” 76.

Miloslav Szabó

“Jewish Reign of Terror”? Campaigns Against Jewish Officers and Antisemitism in Slovakia During the Period of the First Czechoslovak Republic1

The history of antisemitism in Slovakia has rarely been the subject of historical research in the past. It was only “rediscovered” in the context of the Holocaust studies after the political changes of 1989.2 As far as earlier manifestations of Slovak antisemitism are concerned, however, the state of knowledge is still poor. For example, the findings of a detailed investigation of the beginnings of modern, political antisemitism in Upper Hungary (i.e., on the territory of presentday Slovakia) have only recently become available.3 The author of this study also examined the significance of antisemitic semantics and practices with respect to the Slovak national movement and the Slovak nation-building process in the former Kingdom of Hungary around 1900 and the period immediately after the First World War.4 However, the history of antisemitism in the late 1920s and 1930s remains a desideratum of historical research. This gap in research is also striking in view of the fact that earlier historiographers classified the Slovak hostility expressed towards Jews in the interwar period as a serious social phenomenon. Ezra Mendelsohn explains this by pointing out the alleged “backwardness” of the majority of Slovak society and contrasting them with their Jewish fellow citizens. The latter were over-represented in many areas, especially in the liberal professions, and increasingly regarded Hungarian as their “mother tongue” before 1918.5

1 2

3 4 5

This study originates from the project SASPRO, no. 00079/01/03 “A Comparative Study on the Evolution of Modern Antisemitism in Austria and Slovakia, 1918–1938”. Ivan Kamenec, On Trials of Tragedy  : The Holocaust in Slovakia (Bratislava  : Hajko & Hajková, 2007). Vgl. Miloslav Szabó, “Zwischen Geschichtspolitik und Wissenschaft. Der Holocaust in der slowakischen Historiografie nach 1989,” Einsicht. Bulletin des Fritz Bauer Instituts 11 (2014)  : 16–23. Petra Rybářová, Antisemitizmus v Uhorsku v 80. rokoch 19. storočia (Bratislava  : Prodama, 2010). Miloslav Szabó, “Von Worten zu Taten”. Die slowakische Nationalbewegung und der Antisemitismus 1875–1922 (Berlin  : Metropol, 2014). Ezra Mendelsohn, The Jews of Eastern Central Europe between the World Wars (Bloomington  : Indiana University Press, 1983), 131–140.

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In the early years of the Czechoslovak Republic, anti-Jewish tendencies could be detected during the developments in Slovakia. The political establishment that emerged was quick to resolve the alleged “Jewish question in Slovakia.” Formed in December 1918, the authoritative Minister Plenipotentiary for Slovakia, which was subordinate to the government in Prague, carried out an audit of allotments for state liquor, tobacco and cinema licenses in order to abolish the “privileges” Jews would have received for their “anti-Slovak activity” before 1918. Those “privileges” would have been granted to Jewish inn-keepers living in Upper Hungary for helping the Hungarian authorities in their efforts to “Magyarize” the “Slovak people.”6 The new rulers, and above all the employees of the Minister Plenipotentiary for Slovakia, were composed of Slovak, pre-war democrats, who continued to support the policy of “economic antisemitism” they had fought for as early as 1900. On the one hand, they did so by establishing credit and consumer cooperatives and boycotting campaigns and, on the other hand, by reacting in this way to the widespread hostility expressed towards Jews by members of the Slovak population. This hostility had been expressed clearly and immediately after the end of the war through the act of looting of Jewish houses and businesses.7 It was precisely the consideration of this “popular” antisemitism that was to shape the Slovak political landscape during the early 1920s and accompany the national efforts of the right-wing parties in particular. These not only included the opposition Catholic Slovak People’s Party of Andrej Hlinka, which was later renamed the Slovak People’s Party Hlinka’s (Hlinkova Slovenská ľudová strana, HSĽS) and soon demanded political autonomy for Slovakia, but also the loyal, state-run Slovak National and Peasant’s Party (Slovenská národná a roľnícka strana). These efforts already became visible during the 1920 election campaign, when both parties openly encouraged the hostility of Slovak voters towards Jews in the struggle to win their votes. But antisemitism also shaped the propagandistic campaigns against “Jewish Bolshevism,” which accompanied the division of the Czechoslovak Social Democracy into socialists and communists.8 The fact that fewer instances of openly antisemitic agitation appeared over the course of the 1920s initially seems to confirm the prevailing opinion in historical research that antisemitism was actually not an integral part of Czechoslovak political culture.9 The new political establishment of the young state also en6 Szabó, Von Worten zu Taten, 289–313. 7 Szabó, Von Worten zu Taten, 266–281. 8 Szabó, Von Worten zu Taten, 313–333. 9 Martin Schulze Wessel, “Entwürfe und Wirklichkeiten  : Die Politik gegenüber den Juden in der Ersten Tschechoslowakischen Republik 1918 bis 1938,” in Zwischen großen Erwartungen



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deavored to emphasize that antisemitism only was practiced by the “enemies of the state” in Slovakia, meaning the Hungarian revisionists and the autonomists of HSĽS.10 This view is also reflected in the few historical works that mention Slovak antisemitism in the interwar period, the increase of which could no longer be ignored by the mid-1930s at latest. In these works, however, only radical supporters of HSĽS are considered genuine antisemites.11 In this way, they too actually came into close contact with the Czechoslovak National Fascist Community (Národní obec fašistická), which also distinguished itself as anti-Communist and advocated a “vulgar form of antisemitism,” at least in the Slovak context, which already supported racist arguments as a rule.12 The following text does not address the question of antisemitism in the context of political and social radicalization or the ideological and propagandistic conflicts that have escalated in Slovakia since the mid-1930s in reaction to the Spanish Civil War.13 Using the example of newspaper campaigns that took place at the beginning of the 1920s and then again at the beginning of the 1930s as examples, instead the extent to which the antisemitic discourse began to influence political culture in Slovakia – as it did around 1900 – will be addressed. These campaigns were directed against the so-called “Jewish guards” who fought against the looting that occurred in Upper Hungary/Slovakia in the autumn of 1918. These attacks were carried out by rioters led by returning frontline soldiers against local representatives of the Hungarian state and affluent classes and, above all, against Jewish merchants and innkeepers whose property was stolen or plundered. At the suggestion of and often led by family members of the Jews who were attacked, usually returning frontline officers, the Hungarian authorities organized punitive expeditions against the looters and executed several of them.

und bösem Erwachen. Juden, Politik und Antisemitismus in Ost- und Südosteuropa 1918–1945, ed. Dittmar Dahlmann and Anke Hilbrenner (Paderborn and Munich  : Schöningh, 2007), 121–135. 10 Szabó, Von Worten zu Taten, 334–342. 11 Livia Rothkirchen, “Slovakia  : II. 1918–1938,” in The Jews of Czechoslovakia  : Historical Studies and Surveys, Vo. 1 (Philadelphia  : Society for the History of Czechoslovak Jews, 1968), 85–124, 111  ; James Ramon Felak, “At the Price of the Republic”  : Hlinka’s Slovak People’s Party, 1929–1938 (Pittsburgh  : Pittsburgh University Press, 1994), 126. 12 Ivan Kamenec, “Prenikanie fašistickej ideológie a organizácií Národnej obce fašistickej do slovenského politického života v medzivojnovom období,” Historické štúdie, 24 (1980)  : 68. 13 Miloslav Szabó, “Auf dem Weg zum Holocaust  ? Der slowakische Antisemitismus in der Ersten Tschechoslowakischen Republik,” S  :I.M.O.N.  – Shoah  : Intervention. Methods. Documentation, 2 (2015) 1, 11–24. http://simon.vwi.ac.at/images/Documents/Articles/2015-2/2015-2_ART_ Szabo/ART_Szabo01.pdf (accessed December 11, 2018).

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It is clear from the sources that the looting was directed primarily against the Jews in many places. A certain continuity can even be observed among the anti-Jewish actions that occurred in regions that had been strongholds of Upper Hungarian political antisemitism since the 1880s, such as Senica/Szenic in southwestern Slovakia, where the Slovak national movement was strong.14 Therefore, the answer to the following question is sought  : What significance did the First World War have on the development of Slovakian antisemitism  ? Should the armed conflict in the Slovakian case – as in the Hungarian case15 – also be regarded as an “antisemitic moment”16 that polarized society, made Jews into “scapegoats” who were responsible for all the negative effects of the war and promoted their exclusion  ? Despite the occasional tactics employed by Slovak nationalists to distance themselves from Hungarian antisemitism, and in particular those used by the only Slovak MP in the Budapest Parliament, Ferdinand/Nándor Juriga or the journalist Anton Štefánek,17 one can hardly expect that the antisemitic polarization in Upper Hungary/Slovakia would not have left any traces. In the following text, I will examine the extent to which the “contrast between the bloody front and the people on the home front (mostly Jews), who would have profited from the war (‘turning blood into gold,’ the contrast between rivers of blood and rivers of gold)”18 was also reflected in the Slovak environment. Specifically, I will examine the contrast between the metaphors of the “holy” sacrifice on the altar of the Fatherland and its “desecration” by “scrounging profiteers,” which, according to Roman Holec, had an increasing influence on the discussion about the socio-economic consequences of the war in Hungary from 1915 and on. The campaigns against the “Jewish guards,” which strengthened the image of the “Slovak people” as victims  – an image that was carried over from the 19th century – appear here to be a suitable subject of investigation. This 14 Michal Frankl and Miloslav Szabó, Budování státu bez antisemitismu  ? Násilí, diskurs loajality a vznik Československa (Praha  : NLN, 2016), 53–56. 15 Péter Bihari, “Aspects of Anti-Semitism in Hungary, 1915–1918,” Quest  : Issues in Contemporary Jewish History, 9 (2016), http://www.quest-cdecjournal.it/focus.php  ?id=377 (accessed December 11, 2018). 16 The term “antisemitic moment” was suggested by Pierre Birnbaum for the Dreyfus-Affair. See Pierre Birnbaum, The Anti-Semitic Moment  : A Tour of France in 1898, transl. J. M. Todd (Chicago  : Chicago University Press, 2003). 17 Szabó, Von Worten zu Taten, 282–286. 18 Roman Holec, “Antisemitizmus, jeho zdroje a prejavy v čase 1. svetovej vojny,” Katolícka cirkev a Židia na Slovensku v 19. storočí, ed. Mária Spišiaková, https://www.kbs.sk/obsah/sekcia/h/dokumenty-a-vyhlasenia/p/zborniky-z-konferencii/c/bratislava-konferencia-kczi2014-04 (accessed December 11, 2018).



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represents a potentially and particularly serious variant of “victim blaming” in the Slovak case which, according to Klaus Holz, is a characteristic feature of the semantics of “national antisemitism.”19 While Jewish innkeepers, civil servants and intellectuals had been stereotyped merely as socio-economic or national exploiters of the “Slovak people” since the first half of the 19th century (the sources often use the word “suck,” which signals the semantic proximity between the stereotypes “profiteer” and “vampire”20), the accusations of ritualistic murder that were made at the turn of the century were already indicative of the ethnic criminalization of Jews.21 This escalated after the First World War in that “Jews” were accused of committing brutal murders of “Slovaks.” In this sense, officers who led the punitive expeditions against the looters in November 1918 were accused of acting out of a sense of “Jewish vindictiveness.” These accusations were revived in the early 1920s and then again as part of a broad campaign that took place in the spring of 1932 in the context of the trial of a Czech “liberation fighter”, the legionnaire Karel Horák, who murdered seven Jewish civilians in the summer of 1919. “Jewish Guards” Immediately after the First World War, at the end of October and beginning of November 1918, numerous Slovak and Hungarian National Councils were formed in Upper Hungary/Slovakia.22 As the state structures underwent the dissolution processes, the National Councils established the so-called National Guards in many places. These were responsible for maintaining public order and protecting property and life.23 According to the available sources, one of their tasks was to protect the Jewish population. Alone, the way in which this task was carried out was often problematic. For example, the chairman of the Slovak National Council in Ružomberok/Rózsahegy/Rosenberg and the later “leader” of HSĽS, Andrej Hlinka, demanded the considerable sum of “at least 500,000 19 Klaus Holz, Nationaler Antisemitismus. Wissenssoziologie einer Weltanschauung (Hamburg  : Hamburger Edition, 2001), 159–160. 20 Joanna Tokarska-Bakkir, “The Figure of the Bloodsucker in Polish Religious, National and Left-Wing Discourse, 1945–1946  : A Study in Historical Anthropology,” Dapim  : Studies on the Holocaust 27 (2013) 2, 75–106. 21 Szabó, Von Worten zu Taten, 148–175. 22 Vgl. Ismo Nurmi, Slovakia – a Playground for Nationalism and National Identity. Manifestations of the National Identity of the Slovaks 1918–1920 (Helsinki  : Suomen Historiallinen Seura), 1999. 23 Marián Hronský, Slovensko na rázcestí. Slovenské národné gardy a rady v roku 1918 (Košice  : SAV, 1976).

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crowns” to protect “Jewish possessions” or meet Slovak “national needs” from his “fellow citizens of Jewish nationality” (of course, there was no such thing in Hungary, since Judaism was only recognized as a denomination). Hlinka justified his demand by falling back on the well-known stereotype of the Jewish war profiteer, according to which “Jewish companies did indeed benefit from the war.” The new Czechoslovak Minister Plenipotentiary for Slovakia, Vavro Šrobár, endorsed Hlinka’s approach, merely recommending that he request “contributions should be categorized as voluntary taxes.”24 Like their colleagues in Ružomberok, the members of the Slovak National Council in Nitra/Nyitra/Neutra also supported this approach. These members included the later President of the Slovak Republic from 1939 to 1945, Jozef Tiso, who financially blackmailed the local Jewish population repeatedly. In addition to being accused of spreading anti-Czech rumors, the “Jews” were accused of being “all rich people, war profiteers, who would have no trouble paying a few thousand crowns.” The total amount in this case reached 250,000 crowns.25 In some regions and especially in rural areas the situation was more complicated. For example, in Stará Bystrica/Óbeszterce in Trencsén County, where returning front soldiers, accompanied by women and children, plundered Jewish property and murdered two Jews on 5 November 1918. The Catholic clergyman Anton Bérhelyi then founded a National Council and a National Guard. Most of these members, however, were recruited from among the group of plunderers themselves, so they could not provide reliable protection.26 Shortly after the looting occurred in Óbeszterce/Stará Bystrica, a punitive action committee arrived in the region, which another Catholic clergyman and chairman of the local Slovak National Council considered as a “Budapest Jewish Guard.”27 In this case, members of the expedition were most likely members of military units that had been formed by the revolutionary Hungarian government at the beginning of November 1918 to suppress dissention in the province. These units were said to have been exclusively made up of Hungarian Zionists.28 According to a report issued by the German Foreign Office, these units were “the only effective force at the government’s disposal that could be used to halt the attack of Ukrainian and Slovakian gangs.”29 A “Jewish Guard” was also founded at the end 24 Štátny archív v Bytči, Liptovská župa II, prez. 3640–1919–14. 25 James Mace Ward, Priest, Politician, Collaborator  : Jozef Tiso and the Making of Fascist Slovakia (Ithaca  : Cornell University Press, 2013), 48. 26 Literárny archív Slovenskej národnej knižnice (LA SNK), 94 A 15. 27 LA SNK, 94 A 31. 28 Livia E. Bitton, “Zionism in Hungary – the First Twenty-Five Years,” Herzl-Yearbook 7 (1971)  : 305–309. 29 Ibid., 308.



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of October 1918 in Pozsony/Pressburg (in 1919 renamed to Bratislava). Apart from the protection of the Pressburg Jewry, its members were engaged in the suppression of looting in the surrounding area. Their creation, however, was apparently a result of the initiative of the Pressburg Jews.30 The situation in Upper Hungary/Slovakia was additionally complicated by the fact that, in addition to the Hungarian, Slovak, or even Jewish National Guards mentioned above, other armed units were operating in the region, including the so-called “green cadres” (deserters who usually found shelter in forests),31 returning front soldiers and regular army units. Complaints about the fear evoked by the actions of the “Jewish guards”, who were supposed to identify those guilty of the looting and search for the stolen goods, were not uncommon.32 Punitive expeditions carried out by loyal troops or the punishment of rebelling Slovak soldiers were generally perceived by the Slovak population as a “revenge of the Jews” taken on the plunderers. A letter written by the correspondent of the “Slovak National Council” from Prešov/ Eperjés/ Eperies provides drastic evidence for this. The mutiny of a battalion which was supposedly composed of ethnic Slovaks on 31 October 1918, which escalated into looting, was followed by a mass execution of 41 of the soldiers. The correspondent of the “Slovak National Council” noted that he would have liked to have observed “laughing faces [of the members, M. S.] of the chosen people” among those watching the execution, “because Christian and mostly Slovak blood flowed there.”33 The new Czechoslovak authorities took a similar line of argument. A particularly revealing case was the investigation of “Sergeant” Jakob Preger, who was accused of having been sent by the government in Budapest together with other soldiers of a “Zionist guard” to suppress the looting in several communities in Nyitra County. On 5 November 1918, a freight train carrying kerosene was robbed at the Siladice/Szilád railway station. This event was followed by the robbery of the large Lukáb estate. According to a Czech gendarme, his 30 Samuel Komlósi, “Geschichte der jüdischen Garde anno 1918,” in Die Juden und die Judenge­ meinde Bratislava in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart, ed. Hugo Gold (Brünn  : Jüdischer Buchverlag, 1932), 151–157. It is unclear if the Jews in Bratislava were inspired by the events in Vienna, where in response to a number of serious anti-Jewish outbreaks in the city “Jewish battalions” were formed. Cf. David Rechter, The Jews of Vienna and the First World War (Oxford  : The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2008), 175. 31 Jakub Beneš, “‘Zelené kádry’ jako radikální alternativa pro venkov na západním Slovensku a ve středovýchodní Evropě,” Forum Historiae, 9, 2 (2015), http://forumhistoriae.sk/documents/10180/1273455/2_benes.pdf (accessed December 11, 2018). 32 LA SNK, 94 G 6 and 94 F 14. 33 Hronský, Slovensko, 52.

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lease had been “in Jewish hands, and the people liberated as a result of the change in the state wanted to at least partially get back at this administration for their long-standing oppression and mockery of their nationality.”34 In order to prevent the outbreak of violence, the stationmaster ordered an army unit from Sereď/Szered, which is thought to have consisted mainly of “Zionists.” Preger was arrested in December 1918 while travelling from Budapest to Nové Mesto nad Váhom/Vágújhely/Neustadl an der Waag together with three other persons. He was denounced by a Slovak soldier, who claimed that Preger had tortured him after the looting and had other three Slovaks and a Russian prisoner of war shot. The suspects were imprisoned “because none of them could justify their visit to Budapest seriously, and they are also all Jews.”35 However, since Preger could not be identified by any other witness, the authorities had to withdraw the accusation. A conspiracy of “Jewish tenants” and “Jewish guards” against the “Slovak people” and their Czech (and/or Slovak) guardians also influenced the interpretation of the events in Chtelnica/Vittenc/Wittenz in Nyitra County. A Czech police protocol, which was recorded later, stated that a “green cadre” that had been ordered and was led by “the Jews” (i.e., the employees and tenants of the large local agricultural enterprise) was supposed to have killed eleven people and seriously injured seven more on 11 November 1918. The perpetrators were arrested and convicted by the new Czechoslovakian investigative authorities. However, the police record does not mention the previous looting that took place on 3 November 1918.36 How controversial the perception and interpretation of the immediate postwar period in Upper Hungary actually was is illustrated by the following testimonies on the events that occurred in Chtelnica. According to an eyewitness, “all Jewish shops were completely robbed, most goods and furniture were destroyed and the Jews were scattered” on 3 November 1918 in Chtelnica. The punitive expedition that went out on 11 November had been organized by Jewish front soldiers, who were relatives of those robbed.37 Later investigations revealed that a total of three punitive expeditions had actually been sent to Chtelnica. During the last of these, the citizens opened fire on the gendarmes and two army troops (including those in a machine gun unit under the command of Lieutenant Artúr Meisl) before they arrived in Chtelnica, and the fighting began. 34 Štátny archív v Nitre (ŠAN), Štátne zastupiteľstvo v Nitre (ŠZN), IV/1919–260. 35 ŠAN, ŠZN, IV/1919–260. 36 Slovenský národný archív (SNA), Ministerstvo s plnou mocou pre správu Slovenska (MPS), 269/641. 37 Karol Anton Medvecký, Slovenský prevrat, Vol. 3 (Trnava  : Spolok sv. Vojtecha, 1931), 94.



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Captain Schmaus was injured on the leg, one soldier was killed and another was seriously injured and shot. The coachman, Benedikt, who drove the officers to Chtelnica was among those injured. The army entered Chtelnica, and those suspected of having fired at the military were shot.38 According to Ľudovít/Lajos Winter, a Jewish convert to Catholicism who was the leaseholder of the public baths in Piešťany/Pöstény/Püschtin and had organized a home defense there at the end of October 1918, the inhabitants of Chtelnica had even asked him for help against the soldiers who were perceived as “Jews.”39 In the autumn of 1920, a group of Czechoslovakian legionaries (members of the Czechoslovakian army who had fought against the central powers on the side of the Entente and enjoyed a high level of prestige in Czechoslovakia) was led by Josef Sudek in a campaign against Ľudovít/Lajos Winter. Mr. Sudek was an agent of the propaganda office at the ‘punitive action committee’. At the end of this campaign, Winter was arrested and detained for several weeks. The influential Národní listy (National Papers) of Prague, the press organ for the state-supporting National Democracy, published a letter to the editor (its author was probably Sudek himself ) which appeared on the title page and in which the death penalty for Winter was demanded. Winter and Captain Seidl were accused of the following  : The local people had to travel along a true path of suffering, and the conditions that developed during the rampage carried out by these two blackguards in Piešťany can probably only be compared with conditions in the darkest Africa. Murders, robberies and the worst acts of violence were committed by this group with truly animalistic bestiality.40

At the same time, Josef Sudek interrogated the people who lived in the vicinity of Piešťany and Nové Mesto nad Váhom and had been affected by the punitive expeditions, writing up protocols with their statements. In the spring of 1932, when the “atrocities of the revolutionary period” were once again being passionately discussed among members of the Czechoslovakian public, Sudek significantly made these protocols available to the investigative bodies. At that time, he had already attained the position of Secretary in the Republican Party in Kolín, Bohemia.41 In 1920, he had provoked anti-Jewish riots in Nové Mesto 38 SNA, Hlavné štátne zastupiteľstvo v Bratislave (HŠZB), 433–IV–1932. 39 Ľudovít Winter, Spomienky na Piešťany (Piešťany  : Balneologické múzeum, 2001), 47. 40 “Strašná ukázka pomerov na Slovensku,” Hronské noviny, October 10, 1920, 1  ; Winter, Spomienky, 52–53. 41 Národní archiv Praha (NA), Ministerstvo spravedlnosti 1918–1945 (MS), 914-VI/d/1.

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nad Váhom at a time when the people had been agitated by the campaigns calling for “national cleansing.”42 Now, he narrowed the focus of his agitation to the Magyars  : This time, he did not talk about the “Jewish Magyars,” but only about “Magyar hordes.” Neither in 1920 nor in 1932, however, did Sudek mention looting as the cause of the punitive expeditions  ; on the contrary, he misrepresented it as an expression of Jewish or Magyar chauvinism.43 An alarming tendency toward victim blaming can also be observed in the letters that were first written in 1922 to the Slovak Section of the Czechoslovak National Council (Národná rada Československá). The latter complained of “one-sidedness” displayed by the newly founded “Organization of the Citizens of Slovakia Damaged by the Revolution,” whose members in many places again blamed culprits for looting that had taken place in the autumn of 1918.44 The Czechoslovak President Masaryk then granted general amnesty45 after the Minister for the Administration of Slovakia, Vavro Šrobár, had already decreed a “moratorium” on 6 May 1919, which resulted in the suspension of all ongoing civil law proceedings related to the looting in the autumn of 1918. (Despite occasional attempts to lift the “moratorium,” it remained in force throughout the period of the First Czechoslovak Republic).46 In 1922, in an alleged effort to rule out these “one-sided” aspects of the depictions of those damaged by the looting in the autumn of 1918, the Slovak Department of the officially apolitical Czechoslovak National Council urged “all Slovaks” to send them reports of known losses of property and lives in the autumn of 1918 conducted “either by irresponsible local masses or by armed Jewish and Magyar gangs.”47 Most of the letters received refer precisely to crimes committed against the allegedly innocent Slovaks by “Jewish Guards” (Chtelnica),48 a “Magyar Jewish horde” (Vysoká nad Kysucou/Hegyeshely),49 or merely by “any Jews” (Beluša/Bellus in the county Trenčín/Trencsén).50 (In Beluša in the spring of 1922, after the Jews had been accused of committing a “ritual murder” here, “great looting by the Jews”51 threatened the people again.) A widow from Vyhne/Vihnye in Tekov/Bars county even wrote about “wild Jewish beasts” who 42 Szabó, Von Worten zu Taten, 330. 43 Josef Sudek, “Kalvarie slovenského lidu v době převratu,” Prokůpkův kraj, February 4, 1932. 44 Ján Robl, “Rabovky v roku 1918,” Slovenská domovina, August 10, 1922, 1–2. 45 SNA, HŠZB, 433–IV–1932. 46 Szabó, Von Worten zu Taten, 278. 47 “Výzva,” Slovenský denník, July 29, 1922, 1. 48 LA SNK, 94 U 1. 49 LA SNK, 94 U 1. 50 LA SNK, 94 U 1. 51 NA, Ministerstvo vnitra – 225 (MV 225), 251.



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had mistreated her children and shot her husband, who allegedly had nothing to do with the looting that occurred at the beginning of November 1918  : “And because the Jews could not find the real culprits, they took revenge on a few, completely innocent people.”52 “Jewish vindictiveness.” The campaigns of the spring of 1932 While the hostility expressed towards Jews during the stabilization phase of the Czechoslovak Republic seemed to be reserved for the “enemies of the state,” members of Czechoslovak right-wing parties began to exploit antisemitism again politically at the beginning of the 1930s, at the height of the economic crisis. This can be illustrated by the results of the local elections of September 1931. As in 1920, antisemitism was also strategically used for the election campaign this time, as people feared a general shift toward the left-wing would occur as a result of the economic crisis. In Slovakia, Ľudová politika (People’s Politics), the tool of the centralist, Catholic, Czechoslovak People’s Party (Československá strana lidová, ČSL) provided the most prominent example. Its editorial staff denigrated not only the socialists, but also the two largest Slovak parties, the agrarians and, above all, the competing Catholic-autonomist HSĽS, calling them “Jewish,”53 which, in turn, overlaid antisemitic tones on the election campaign.54 At the height of the election campaign, the anti-Jewish feelings of members of the Czechoslovak public, who were unsettled by the economic crisis, were additionally fueled by the trial of Karel Horák in the Prague District Court at the end of September 1931. Horák, a non-commissioned officer of the Czechoslovak Army, was accused of robbing and shooting seven young Jewish men near the East Slovak community of Víťaz/Nagyvitéz on 12 June 1919. They had previously been arrested by the advancing Czechoslovak military for alleged sabotage that benefitted the Hungarian Red Army, which had been established in the spring of 1919 to defend the Hungarian Soviet Republic and had reconquered large parts of the former Upper Hungary during the summer. However, the case only came to court years later. Horák, who was at large during his first trial in the early 1920s, then left the country. After he returned to Czechoslovakia in 1931, his case was brought before the Prague District Court at the instigation of the defense. The defense hoped that, by transferring the trial to the Czech part of the country, the jury would be more indifferent or even sympathetic with the 52 LA SNK, 94 U 1. 53 “Židia na kandidátkach ľudovej strany  !,” Ľudová politika, September 20, 1931, 4. 54 “Katolíci a voľby v Bratislave,” Slovák, September 27, 1931, 4.

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accused, who was known as a member of the Czechoslovak Liberation Army. These hopes seem to have been fulfilled, because Horák was actually acquitted. The verdict was finally confirmed by the Supreme Court.55 Between 1931 and 1932, this case triggered a vicious backlash in Slovakia. For weeks, the Slovak (but also the Czech) press reported waves of arrests or even trials against “Jews” who were thought to have executed innocent Slovak looters in the autumn of 1918. While there had already been similar campaigns in the immediate post-war period, the trial against Horák evidently triggered the next wave of denunciations. The development of a far-reaching, right-wing, antisemitic consensus was driven by the press organs of Slovak agrarians, who had largely refrained from using such propaganda in the run-up to the local elections in the autumn of 1931. The Slovenský denník (Slovak Daily) simply depicted the autumn of 1918 as a “Jewish reign of terror.”56 The ČSL Ľudová politika struck comparably aggressive, antisemitic notes. The Slovák, the organ of the HSĽS, first interpreted Horák’s acquittal as a “strange misunderstanding of our circumstances right at the beginning of the emergence of our republic […] The Prague jurors certainly had Horák in mind as the ‘hero’ who had liberated Slovakia and defended it from the Magyar Bolshevists, and apparently regarded the shooting of seven Jews as an acceptable sacrifice for their homeland.”57 Within a few weeks, however, the editors of Slovák seem to have completely changed their minds and published a commentary in which the “Jews” were generally attacked  : Since they allegedly regarded their “racial instincts as insulted,” they now saw only the guilt of Horák and not that of Jewish officers who had been in the service of the “Magyar guards” and had murdered Slovak farmers in the autumn of 1918, whereby they had been driven by their “hatred of the Slovaks.”58 One of those officers had been the “Jew Weiszberger” who was accused and arrested by Czechoslovak gendarmes and referred to in the lower courts as the perpetrator of the “atrocities at the time of the revolution” during the spring of 1932. In November 1918, Weiszberger was said to have “treacherously” shot two Slovak peasants in Eastern Slovakia. The district court in Košice/Kassa/ Kaschau supported the charge by stating that “the accused Samuel Weiszberger as well as other Jews from Michalovce”59 were among the men taking part in the punitive expedition against those who had looted in Michalovce/Nagymihály/Großmichel on 10 November 1918. The public prosecutor’s office objected, 55 56 57 58 59

Friedrich Bill, “Der Fall Horák und die Gerichte,” Die Wahrheit, No. 19, 1931, 6. “Hrôzovláda v Hriňovej v dobe prevratu,” Slovenský denník, February 9, 1932, 1. “Causa Horák,” Slovák, November 7, 1931, 4. “Rassoví ‘humanisti’,” Slovák, January 22, 1932, 4. NA, MS, 914-VI/d/1.



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stating that the peasants had been shot while fleeing, and that the punitive expedition had “no Jewish members.”60 It was suggested that the investigations be dropped, and not only because the politicians in Hungary wanted to use the “post-revolutionary attacks” to achieve their own revisionist goals.61 News of the affair threatened to spread internationally, which alarmed the state authorities, who actively sought to protect the country’s good reputation abroad.62 The Supreme Prosecutor’s Office in Bratislava received instructions from the Prague Ministry of Justice to make the “atrocities committed at the time of the revolution” appear as though they were “political acts” so that they could be subsumed in President Masaryk’s amnesty agreement. This amnesty agreement, signed on 7 September 1922, referred to Article 76 of the Trianon Peace Treaty, which states “No inhabitant of the territories of the former Austro-Hungarian Monarchy shall be disturbed or molested on account either of his political attitude between 28 July 1914, and the definitive settlement of the sovereignty over these territories, or of the determination of his nationality effected by the present Treaty.”63 While the district court of Košice refused to classify the execution of the looters as a “political act” in the sense of the peace treaty, the public prosecutor’s office in Banská Bystrica/Besztercbánya/Neusohl followed the instructions of the higher authorities. Further arrests of authors of the “atrocities committed at the time of the revolution” near Lučenec/Losonc fell under their jurisdiction. The lootings of 1918 primarily affected the “Jews and notaries,” but tended to be directed against the entire middle class. In this respect, they could have been appropriate as a “collective act of self-defense,” although individual perpetrators could have had unfair motives. Accordingly, the public prosecutor’s office considered the looting of 1918 to be the “beginning of the Bolshevization of [historical] Hungary,” which the new Czechoslovak nation-state had put a stop to in Slovakia.64 Thus, the judicial bodies distanced themselves from their earlier interpretation, in which the lootings of 1918 and 1919 were considered as revenge carried out by the common people on the “Jews, their former leeches,” protesting the “yoke that had been worn for thousand of years.”65 In other words  : The 60 NA, MS, 914-VI/d/1. 61 NA, MS, 914-VI/d/1. 62 See Andrea Orzoff, Battle for the Castle  : The Myth of Czechoslovakia in Europe 1914–1948 (Oxford and New York  : Ofxord University Press, 2009). 63 “Treaty of Trianon  : Treaty of Peace Between The Allied and Associated Powers and Hungary And Protocol and Declaration, Signed at Trianon June 4, 1920,” The World War I Document Ar­ chive, http://wwi.lib.byu.edu/index.php/Treaty_of_Trianon (accessed December 11, 2018). 64 SNA, HŠZB, 433–IV–1932. 65 Szabó, Von Worten zu Taten, 280.

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highest representatives of the Czechoslovak state had approved of the popular antisemitism expressed by the Slovak population shortly after its foundation, so long as their loyalties were still fluctuating. But in the early 1930s at the height of the world economic crisis, they regarded the aftershocks of this antisemitism as somewhat subversive, albeit primarily due to the foreign policy concerns. Outside the highest governmental levels, however, the affair was viewed differently. Even individual representatives of police and judicial bodies seemed unwilling to go against public opinion, and the public wanted to identify the perpetrators of the “atrocities at the time of the revolution” as “Jews.” For example, in his report on an evening lecture given for the League for Human Rights in Bratislava, a police officer emphasized that the lawyer Friedrich Bill criticized the acquittal of Karel Horák by the Supreme Court in Brno  : “[Bill’s] lecture seemed somehow to be fully understood by the Jewish participants, because they constantly nodded in agreement[  ;] I note that eighty percent of the visitors at this lecture are Jewish participants.”66 The individual police and judicial bodies, which recorded the “bestial murders” of 1918 in January and February 1932 and arrested the suspected perpetrators, were also extremely proactive. The activities of the gendarmes in the vicinity of Lučenec/Losonc on the Czechoslovak-Hungarian border represent a prominent example of this. In November 1918, massive looting also took place there, which immediately called for punitive expeditions, which were subsequently led by front officers and the family members of the robbed Jewish merchants and innkeepers. They searched for stolen objects and executed those considered guilty in many places. Even at that time, these events were being interpreted as a “revenge of the Jews against the Slovaks.” The chairman of the local Slovak National Council and a well-known Slovak nationalist, Ľudovít Bazovský, described the situation in November 1918 as follows  : Here, the Czechs and Slovaks are being hunted down without mercy […] troops made up of Jews are being sent to the villages, where they take violent revenge on the Slovak people, shoot the people without compunction and take everything, canvas and other materials, while explaining that it was taken from the Jews. We are facing a terrible act of terror against the Czechoslovak people.67

This interpretation was passed on, and it influenced the Czech gendarmes as well. In January and February 1932, these initiated extensive investigations against several former officers of the Imperial and Royal Armed Forces  – only a few 66 SNA, Policajné riaditeľstvo v Bratislave, 1468. 67 LA SNK, 94 A 7.



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weeks after the trial had been carried out against Karel Horák, which strongly polarized the public opinion. During these investigations, they recorded dozens and even hundreds of testimonies. On the basis of these, the district courts in Zvolen/Zólyom/Altsohl and Lučenec issued warrants for the arrest of those accused of the crimes. Although the contradictory nature of the witnesses’ testimonies, which were taken more than thirteen years later, make it difficult to gather a truthful reconstruction of events, it is highly probable that the accused officers exceeded their powers of authority and actually used exceptional brutality when dealing with the suspected looters. Notwithstanding this consideration, the protocols testify to a strong tendency towards victim blaming, a clear symptom of national antisemitism. On 2 and 3 November 1918, the inhabitants of Hriňová/Herencsvölgy and the surrounding area looted the shops of local merchants and finally set them on fire. According to the police records, the peasants specifically targeted “Jewish possessions.” A punitive expedition was carried out under the command of Lieutenant Béla Markstein, accompanied by Emanuel Schneller and Móric Schlesinger. These men ruthlessly searched for the stolen property, which had belonged to their families, whereby Markstein tortured the arrested peasants and executed several of them. Nevertheless, the investigating Czech gendarmes – obviously as a result of the disputes surrounding the trial against Karel Horák – were biased by their antisemitic beliefs against the accused when they cited “revenge and profit-seeking” as the motives for the actual or alleged acts committed by Markstein, Schneller and Schlesinger, stating that their families “had made a name for themselves by acquiring wealth and large amounts of supplies, and especially of food” before the looting.68 In Látky/Látka on 3 November 1918, a drunken crowd looted the shop of Adolf Freisinger among others. On November 9, the son of the robbed merchant and a man who had witnessed the looting, Lieutenant Eugen Freisinger, organized a punitive expedition in which soldiers of the 25th Infantry Regiment took part. After the change of power in Budapest, the 25th Infantry Regiment was deployed by the Hungarian National Council in Lučenec as law enforcement. Freisinger had several suspected looters beaten and imprisoned, some of whom were to be executed the next day. The first to be convicted were two “gypsies,” Ján Oláh and Ján Berky, whom Freisinger was said to have cynically told  : “You fought badly, so you will be shot.”69 This assertion suggests a projection of the antisemitic stereotype that falsely presented “Jews” as unfit soldiers, which was

68 Štátny archív v Banskej Bystrici (ŠABB), Krajský súd v Banskej Bystrici (KS), Tk 1932. 69 Ibid.

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also widespread in Hungary during the First World War.70 The Jewish officer Eugen Freisinger, therefore, would have projected this stereotype, which was held by the non-Jews, onto his alleged victims, the generally respected Roma. This supposition is supported by the fact that the inhabitants thought they recognized the participants of the punitive expedition as “Jews.” The statement of the auxiliary gendarme Ján Čomais, who stated on record that he and other policemen had not tried to stop looters who “plundered Jewish shops,” tends in a similar direction.71 They had, thus, failed to fulfill their duty for exactly the same reason as the looters, who attacked the merchants because they were Jewish. At the beginning of November 1918, Horný Tisovník/Felsőtisztás was also looted. The crowd, which comprised almost the whole village, first robbed the merchant Gábor Lengyel, and then the notary was chased out of the village. Lengyel’s younger son, Ignác, who was then a lieutenant general and later a business traveler, organized a punitive expedition shortly afterwards. This expedition arrested the suspected “primary culprits,” which included “some gypsies.” One of them was executed. The crown witness of the gendarmes investigating the former Jewish officers was the landowner Viktor Goldperger. Goldperger found Lengeyl guilty of being the commander in charge of the punitive expedition, referring to him as “some kind of Jew, first lieutenant.” The aforementioned “gypsy,” Ján Oláh, who had been rescued after Lengyel’s cousin recognized him as his comrade on the front, also stated that the participants of the punitive expedition were “mostly Jews.”72 Ignác Lengyel denied having beaten or starved those arrested. The only exception seems to have been a woman, Anna Konôpková, who had received “blows with a rod to her buttocks.” Regarding the reason for her punishment, Konôpková said the following  : When she went to the notary to pick up her war aid on the same day that it was looted, “a Jew” told her that a state of emergency had been declared. She then said to him  : “So now that our men have fought and come home by the grace of God, they are to be hanged  ; one should hang the Jews instead of them.”73 Given how biased the investigators were, it comes as no surprise how sensational the corresponding reports in the Slovak press were. In February 1932, the Slovak daily Slovenská politika (Slovak Politics), a tool of the state-run Republican Party, published several editorials to illustrate the brutality practiced by the “Magyarised Jewish intellectuals” from Lučenec toward the allegedly in70 Bihari, “Aspects”. 71 ŠABB, KS, Tk 1932. 72 Ibid. 73 Ibid.



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nocent, simple, “Slovak people,” including women and children.74 Even before he began describing the “skyrocketing crimes,” an anonymous author already knew how he would name the culprits. He stated that the punitive expeditions had been “prepared and organized by the representatives of the acting ‘Magyar nemzeti tanács’ [Hungarian National Council], whereby Jewish intellectuals from Lučenec acted as executioners or organized and carried out the ‘punitive expeditions’ themselves.”75 The anonymous author, however, was not satisfied with this statement and included the entire Slovak Jewry in his accusation, calling upon them to condemn their sadistic “fellow believers”  : We are convinced that the other Jews in Slovakia will turn away with disgust from their fellow believers, who have lost their respect for humanity to such an extent that they felt a desire to kill peace-loving, innocent Slovak people. The Jews of Lučenec, who even now harbor no good feelings about the Republic, consider these things to be sources of shame, and the Slovak public will do well not to forget how the Jews of Lučenec behaved during and after the Revolution.76

The campaign against the former officers from Lučenec led to an interpellation in the Czechoslovak Parliament. The parliament members expressly pointed out that “if this persecution of Jews becomes known abroad, it will give in any case rise to the presumption that such action is impossible in a constitutional state and incompatible with the most important principles of democracy.”77 The Czech police officer responsible for the arrests, Captain Josef Mareš, argued in his justification that, in 1918, these were by no means isolated acts but were cases of “dozens of innocent Slovak people executed with unheard-of brutality.”78 The Minister of Justice tried to justify Mareš’s actions in his response to the interpellation. At the same time, however, he ordered the Supreme Prosecutor’s Office in Bratislava to issue a press release announcing that the “atrocities committed at the time of the Revolution” fell under the amnesty agreement of 7 September 1922.79 The press campaign against the “Jewish reign of terror” then came to a standstill, but the journalists suspected that “Jewish machinations” were taking 74 75 76 77

“Čo sa dialo na Látkach začiatkom novembra 1918  ?,” Slovenská politika, February 13, 1932, 1. “Strašné odhalenia  !  !,” Slovenská politika, February 9, 1932, 1. “Strašné odhalenia  !  !,” Slovenská politika, February 9, 1932, 1. “Sürgős interpelláció az Igazságügyi és Belügyi Miniszter Urakhoz, a Herencsvölgyi, Felsőtisztás és Rimakokova községben Mareš csendörtiszt által eszközölt önkényes letartoztatások ügyében. Beadják Törköly József dr. képviselő és társai,” Poslanecká sněmovna N. S. R. Č., 1932, III. volební období, 5. zasedání, 1636. 78 NA, MS, 914-VI/d/1. 79 NA, MS, 914-VI/d/1.

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place here as well. Shortly after the press release was issued by the Supreme Public Prosecutor’s Office, Slovenský denník reported on a “piquant incident,” referring to the Prager Tagblatt  : The Jewish MPs in the Prague Parliament, Angelo Goldstein and Emil Margulies, were said to have paid a visit to the Minister of Justice and, on this occasion, they had been promised “that there would be no further arrests of Jews in Slovakia.”80 Summary To what extent can an analysis of archive sources and the contemporary press releases contribute to a clarification of the questions that were initially formulated  ? First, the general thesis that serious antisemitism existed in Slovakia during the interwar period should be revised. Despite the popular hostility that was expressed towards Jews during the First World War and especially in its final phase, and despite the multiple efforts to raise a “Jewish question,” especially in the press, no genuinely antisemitic milieu – let alone an actively antisemitic policy – developed in Slovakia for a long time. This situation only changed in the 1930s when a radical young generation emerged, the members of which wanted to play active roles in transforming the conditions they interpreted as the cause of political and socio-economic misery. These conditions led to a steady increase in political antisemitism. The influential role of acts of foreign policy should not be underestimated here, which included primarily Hitler’s seizure of power as well as the popular front policy adopted by the Soviet Union, which indirectly promoted the invocation of “Jewish bolshevism.” However, antisemitism continued to exist on a subliminal level in the 1920s, only to be revived in the early 1930s. The campaigns carried out against the “Jewish guards” in the spring of 1932 were indicative of this and overlapped with the incipient right-wing shift of Czechoslovak politics as a result of the economic crisis. For this reason, we can explain why the efforts of the Czechoslovak National Council to make the victims appear to be perpetrators ran aground in 1922, while an identical campaign ten years later elicited a huge media response. Other circumstances that are worth mentioning are the trial against Horák and the fact that the events that took place in Lučenec and the surrounding area in 1932 resonated with the public stir. These circumstances made it possible to emphasize the victim role of the “Slovak people” because the “Jews” there could only be represented as perpetrators. This contrasted with the circumstances in 80 “Židovská strana a poprevratové búrky na Slovensku,” Slovenský denník, February 28, 1932, 1.



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Chtelnica, for example, where the majority population acted much more violently in the autumn of 1918. It is understandable that the majority population that was involved in the looting was only too happy to be viewed as victims. The victim blaming mechanism that was hidden behind the accusation of the “Jewish reign of terror” protected them from feeling remorse, and it continues to do so to recent days, as an investigation based on interviews with the looters’ descendants proves.81 It is more complicated to actualize this accusation under the conditions of Czechoslovak parliamentarism and the rule of law. None of the numerous press reports mention what the main cause of the violence against the civilian population truly was. They also do not address whether the real victims were Slovak peasants or even “Gypsies”, as in the case of the Lučenec punitive expeditions, or their Jewish neighbors, as in the case of the legionary Karel Horák  ; namely, “Habsburg’s dirty war” and its aftermath, as in Eastern Slovakia in 1919, which cost more and more civilians their lives.82 A distortion of the punitive expeditions against the perpetrators of the looting that took place in November 1918 to express “Jewish revenge” or carry out a “Jewish reign of terror” is thus clearly a sign of victim blaming. The aim was to relativize the guilt of the looters, but to establish the national identity of the allegedly threatened group at the same time in the sense of the “self-empowerment of the national community.”83 Since we are dealing with a variant of “national antisemitism” (Klaus Holz) in the campaigns against the “Jewish guards,” we can by no means relativize them as mere expressions of socio-economic and national-political competition. This is despite the fact that the anti-Jewish stereotypes of the “profiteer” and “Magyarizer,” which had been part of the Slovak national movement since the 19th century, were revived during the First World War. The Jewish inn-keepers in Slovak villages who allegedly exploitated and denunciated the “Slovak people” were the source of constant complaints by the Slovak nationalists. These complaints which were used to legitimize their proposed “solution of the Jewish question,” namely, the revision of the state bar licenses, took on a new meaning during the First World War. According to the Hungarian antisemitic discourse, they tended to become the negative pole of the proto-racist dichotomy between the “bloody front” and the “profiteer on the 81 Martin Lacko, Prevrat 1918 v obci Modrová (2001), 25–26. 82 Hannes Leidinger et al., Habsburgs schmutziger Krieg. Ermittlungen zur österreichisch-ungarischen Kriegsführung (Vienna  : Residenz, 2014)  ; Rudolf Kučera, “Exploiting Victory, Sinking into Defeat  : Uniformed Violence in the Creation of the New Order in Austria and Czechoslovakia, 1918–1922,” The Journal of Modern History, 88, 4 (2016)  : 846–848. 83 Michael Wildt, Hitler’s Volksgemeinschaft and the Dynamics of Racial Exclusion  : Violence against Jews in Provincial Germany, 1919–1939 (New York and Oxford  : Berghahn, 2012).

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home front.” However, the “Slovak people” rather than the Hungarian/Magyar heroes were being sacrificed, not only as a result of exploitation by the Jewish innkeepers, but also by their Magyarized sons, officers and “intellectuals,” who supposedly let themselves be lured into a carrying out “barbaric vendettas” in a perverse way. The instigators of and actors in these campaigns were by no means autonomists surrounding the HSĽS, but agents of state parties and local police and court authorities. This has serious consequences with respect to the assessment of antisemitism during the period of the First Czechoslovak Republic, which cannot be reduced to the propaganda of the “subversive elements of the state”. Antisemitism lived, as it was, behind the façade of everyday democracy and the rule of law, only to reappear in crisis situations that evoked memories of the anti-Jewish atmosphere that was present during the founding of the state.84 When politicians and propagandists from those surrounding the HSĽS and the Czechoslovak fascists began to pose a “new Jewish question” during the second half of the 1930s,85 Slovakia was by no means a blank slate in this respect.

84 Frankl and Szabó, Budování státu. 85 Rebekah Klein-Pejšová, Mapping Jewish Loyalities in Interwar Slovakia (Bloomington  : Indiana University Press, 2015), 133–142.

MEMORY

Hildegard Frübis

“To Mothers of the Twelve Thousand” Max Liebermann and the Commemoration of Front-Line Jewish Soldiers in the First World War

In 1923 the Berlin artist Max Liebermann sketched a drawing which in 1924 he made into a lithograph for the Reichsbund jüdischer Frontsoldaten (Reich Federa­ tion of Jewish Front Soldiers) which was entitled To Mothers of the Twelve Thou­ sand (fig. 1). The Reichsbund, whose signet can be seen in the lower right-hand corner of the drawing on a graveslab, was founded after the First World War in 1919 as a reaction to rapidly growing anti-Semitism.1 The number of 12,000 Jewish dead – which Liebermann changed from the figure of 10,000 in his original draft of the drawing – was arrived at through research conducted by Jewish organizations to counterbalance the “Jew Count” of 1916.2 Officially this “Jew Count” was to “identify those Jews who had been drafted into army service.” It was ordered in October 1916 by the Prussian War Minister Adolf Wild von Hohenborn as a reaction to widespread anti-Semitism in the officer corps and the imputation that the Jews were draft-dodgers evading service on the front.3 It was with the 1924 commemorative sheet and Liebermann’s conjoint involvement in promoting the Jewish Reichsbund that the artist continued to counter these anti-Semitic currents even after the First World War. In the lithograph he portrays a standing female figure whose right hand is clasped over her eyes in a gesture of grievance. Behind her and extending to the horizon are the graves of fallen soldiers in the form of old Jewish commemorative stones. On the ground before her is a graveslab adorned with the Star of David, which draws attention to the Jewish connotations of the commemorative 1 The Reichsbund promoted and supervised the settlement to Palestine of Jewish soldiers who had served on the front in the First World War. In 1935 the association published War Correspon­ dence of Fallen German Jews (Berlin  : Vortrupp Verlag, 1935). 2 See  : Vera Bendt, ed., Judaica-Katalog, Berlin-Museum, Abteilung Jüdisches Museum (Berlin  : Berlin Museum, 1989), 68. 3 It was in 1916, at request of Reichstag deputy Ludwig Werner, that the census was mandated and became the source of disputes regarding whether Jews, statistically speaking, had done a proportionate share of fighting and dying on the front in relation to the rest of the population. On the “Jew Count” see Michael Berger, “Judenzählung,” in Enzyklopädie jüdischer Geschichte und Kultur (EJGK), ed. Dan Diner, vol. 3 (Stuttgart, Weimar  : Metzler, 2012), 242–244.

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Fig. 1: Max Liebermann, To Mothers of the Twelve Thousand, drawing, 1924 (archives of the author).

sheet, as well as a young woman who is kneeling next to the graveslab and would seem to be planting a sprig. The 19 March 1924 issue of the Vossische Zeitung keeps with the commemorative sheet’s naturalistic depiction and, wholly in sync with contemporary war virtues, it underscores the heroism of the dead  : “It is to the RjF [Reich Federation of Jewish Front Soldiers] that Professor Max Liebermann has dedicated a commemorative sheet which depicts a grieving mother in noble pose and behind whom are rows upon rows of graves. To one side of her is the kneeling figure of a woman who plants a sprig on a hero’s grave.”4 But in contrast to the naturalistic depiction one can observe that in her grieving attitude, in the mourning veil which covers head and hair, and in her half-naked body the female figure is somehow set apart from the seemingly realistic narrative events. In her anonymity she is a representative symbol of the grieving Jewish Mother and thus the people of Israel. Closest to this imagery of suffering is the biblical figure of Rachel who “mourns her children.”5 The lithograph’s 4

“Prof. Max Liebermann hat dem RjF ein Gedenkblatt gewidmet, das eine in edelster Haltung klagende Mutter darstellt, hinter der sich Grab an Grab reiht. Eine kniende Frauengestalt an ihrer rechten Seite pflanzt einen Reis auf ein Heldengrab (…).” As cited in Vera Bendt, Judaica Katalog. Abteilung Jüdisches Museum (Berlin  : Berlin Museum, 1989), 66. 5 “Rachel weint um ihre Kinder und will sich nicht trösten lassen” ( Jer 31,15 EU)  ; “Rachel mourns her children, she refuses to be consoled.” ( Jeremiah 31,15  ; The New American Bible, New York 1971).



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Fig. 2: Max Liebermann, title page, Illustration to Kriegsbriefe gefallener deutscher Juden (War Correspondence of Fallen German Jews), ed. Reichsbund Jüdischer Frontsoldaten e.V. (Berlin: Vortrupp Verlag 1935).

implicit interpretation of the woman as mother indicates the biblical Jewish understanding of woman as leader of the people of Israel, this conceptualized in the notion of matriarch, of which Rachel is one.6 Several years later it was in a similar context – commemoration of Jewish military dead in the First World War – that Liebermann drafted a colored drawing. It decorated the title page of Kriegsbriefe gefallener deutscher Juden (War Corres­ pondence of Fallen German Jews), a work assembled by the Reichsbund Jüdischer Frontsoldaten in 1935 (fig. 2).7 In the foreground – before a sketchily intimated landscape  – we see a grieving female figure sitting on a casket and beneath a lowered German flag. In a melancholy gesture of sorrow her right hand supports her head which is covered in a dark veil. In combination with the German flag, which serves as backdrop to the woman and trails out onto the casket, this figure 6

See Max Joseph, “Frau im Judentum,” in Jüdisches Lexikon  : Ein enzyklopädisches Handbuch des jü­ dischen Wissens Herlitz, eds. Georg Herlitz and Bruno Kirschner, vol. 2 (Berlin  : Jüdischer Verlag 1927), 778–780  ; Hugo Fuchs, “Erzmütter,” in Jüdisches Lexikon  : Ein enzyklopädisches Handbuch des jüdischen Wissens Herlitz, eds. Georg Herlitz and Bruno Kirschner, vol. 2 (Berlin  : Jüdischer Verlag 1927), 490–492  ; Rachel Monika Herweg, Die jüdische Mutter. Das verborgene Matriarchat (Darmstadt  : Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1994), 11–13. 7 Kriegsbriefe gefallener deutscher Juden, ed. Reichsbund Jüdischer Frontsoldaten e.V. (Berlin  : Vortrupp Verlag, 1935  ; see also  : Sigrid Achenbach and Matthias Eberle, Max Liebermann in seiner Zeit. Ausstellungskatalog Nationalgalerie Berlin (München  : Prestel, 1979), 640.

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is to be understood as a personification of the Jewish people  ; her female body also represents the ideal of a community that weeps for its fallen soldiers. As proclaimed by the book’s title, this agenda is wholly in line with the project of Jewish emancipation as elaborated in the nineteenth century, namely the wish that German Jews  – even in death  – be assimilated into the German nation. These hopes had been articulated as early as the Revolution of 1848 in an emphatic summons by the Frankfurt liberal, Rabbi Leopold Stein  : Henceforth we see our cause as being not of a particular nature but as one with that of the Fatherland and by which it will triumph or fall …. We are and want only to be German  ! We have and wish no other Fatherland than the German one  ! We are solely Israelites in matters of faith, in all other matters we fervently belong to that State in which we live  !8

From a historical-motif standpoint, Liebermann drew from sculptures by Benno Elkan. In the 1920s this Dortmund sculptor was among the most famous in the Weimar Republic.9 In 1913/14 he designed the figure “Hero’s Lament” which was purchased by the city of Frankfurt am Main in 1919 as their monument honoring the dead of the First World War (fig. 3).10 The motif of the mourning woman – bereft of all heroic pathos – is to commemorate the fallen soldiers. A few years later Elkan availed himself of this motif for the cenotaph that was consecrated in 1925 in Völklingen in the Saarland.11 Here too we see a commemoration of fallen soldiers as embodied in this figure of the grieving woman held captive to her sorrow. Representing a collective commemoration of the victims, the figure sits atop an unadorned pedestal engraved with the words “To All The Victims” and is emplaced in the middle of a round basin of water. In the years following 1933, Elkan’s sculptures themselves fell victim to the National Social  8 “[…] Wir erkennen unsere Sache fortan als keine besondere mehr, sie ist eins mit der Sache des Vaterlandes, sie wird mit dieser siegen oder fallen […]. Wir sind und wollen nur Deutsche sein  ! Wir haben und wünschen kein anderes Vaterland als das deutsche  ! Nur dem Glauben nach sind wir Israeliten, in allem übrigen gehören wir aufs Innigste dem Staate an, in welchem wir leben  !” As cited in Shulamit Volkov, Die Juden in Deutschland 1780–1918 (Munich  : Oldenbourg, 1994), 36.   9 On Elkan see  : Fritz Hofmann und Peter Schmieder, Benno Elkan. Ein jüdischer Künstler aus Dortmund, ed. Rosemarie E. Pahlke (Dortmund, Essen  : Museum am Ostwall und der Stadt­ sparkasse, 1997)  ; Hans Menzel-Severing, Der Bildhauer Benno Elkan (Dortmund  : Histor. Verein, 1980), 11. 10 See http://www.ffmhist.de/ffm33-45/portal01/portal01.php   ?ziel=t_hm_elkan (accessed December 11, 2018). 11 See Achim Becker, red., Stadtarchiv Völklingen, Völklinger Schätze, Sonderausgabe zu Benno Elkans Mahnmal zum Gedenken an die Opfer des Ersten Weltkrieges (Völklingen, 2008), 3.



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Fig. 3: Benno Elkan, Heldenklage (“Hero’s Lament”), Memorial “The victims” Frankfurt/Main, 1913/14, Sculpture. Menorah  : jüdisches Familienblatt für Wissenschaft, Kunst und Literatur, 1929, Heft 9/10, 457.

ists and their iconoclastic mania to extirpate what they deemed to be unheroic and Expressionistic works produced by Jewish artists. What the figures of Liebermann and Elkan share is a design vocabulary (see fig. 1, 2, 3) which renders the woman’s body – progressively showing more bared skin  – an allegorical and community-creating representation of mourning. Moreover, Liebermann’s drawings make allusion to the nation’s “ideal of community.” Liebermann’s concern is not to commemorate “all the victims” but more particularly the Jewish dead, which is bespoken in the motif of the grieving Jewish mother as well as the Star of David. It is in such a way that Liebermann touches on a conflict which had been integral to the era of Jewish emancipation, namely the so-called Jewish Question, which (this my thesis  :) became especially virulent in periods of military conflict and ultimately concerned the relationship of a religio-cultural minority to the majority society – in this case the German nation.

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The French Revolution was the central historical event behind the formation of the modern national idea in Europe. On the one hand this national idea entailed an internal sense of communal identity, while on the other hand it constituted an external demarcation vis-à-vis other nations defined as enemies. These newly formed national identities were represented visually in the pictorial genre of personifications. Standing in a direct line of succession with those municipal personifications of ancient times, in nineteenth-century Europe there emerged personifications of the nation-state. Two extremely popular depictions of this time were Michael Veit’s Germania (1848) and Léopold Massard’s Marianne (no date). Both are typical national representations from this period. The garb of Veit’s Germania is dominated by the colors of the national flag, namely red and gold, while the blue is symbolic of national hope and also colors the background landscape. The figure of Germania stands erect, directly facing the viewer, and has cast off shackles which are to be seen in the picture’s lower left-hand corner. In the background the rising sun radiates beams of light to indicate the dawning of a new age. In her left hand she holds that central symbol of the modern nation-state, the national flag, and in her right hand an olive branch and a sword which underscores her ability to defend herself. It was under the gaze of this programmatic picture that the Frankfurt National Assembly met during the German revolutionary years of 1848/49. The French counterpart to Germania can be seen in Massard’s Marianne. Here too this national personification has put aside or rather burst open her shackles and the king’s crown lies discarded on the ground. The mantle she wears exposes her left breast and is in a red that matches that of the national flag. Outfitted with those national symbols of the Phrygian cap and the tricolor, she seems wildly determined to defend that Revolution which spawned the French nation. Delacroix’s painting Liberty Leading the People (1830) is a more explicit indication of the close connection between the French Revolution and development of the national idea in Europe. Delacroix’s Marianne, as a personification of the French people, likewise bears symbols of the French nation – the Phrygian cap and the tricolor in the national colors of red, white and blue. Depicted as a woman of the people and armed with a bayonet, Delacroix’s Liberty goes to the barricades in defending those civil freedoms won in the French Revolution. As in Liebermann’s Jewish-connoted female figures, in these personifications such abstract ideas and ideals as people and freedom are represented through the womanly form. But these are not stand-ins for concrete women but represent the communal ideal of the French, German and – in Liebermann’s case – Jewish nation. It was as early as start of the First World War that Liebermann made recourse to a female figure to represent the Jewish people. In 1914 a Liebermann lithograph entitled Kishinev appeared in the illustrated magazine Kriegszeit pub-



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Fig. 4: Max Liebermann, Kischinew, Lithography, 1914, Kriegszeit, no. 5/1914, Berlin: Verlag Paul Cassirer (archives of the author).

lished by Paul Cassirer (fig. 4).12 In the picture’s foreground is the figure of a woman who has her head thrown back in a gesture of grief and her despairing gaze directed heavenward. This upright figure, seen from the side, carries a small child on her right arm, the child’s arm in turn wrapped behind the woman’s neck  ; another child is clinging to the woman’s skirts. In the background are some sketchily intimated houses. Between the female figure in the foreground and the houses in the background are armed horsemen in action. Through these pictorial motifs as well as the title of the drawing, Kishinev, Liebermann is in all likelihood commenting on the pogroms in Eastern Europe. Since 1880 the situation for the Jewish population had drastically worsened through the increase in pogroms. With advent of the First World War the threatening situation intensified, for which the Kishinev pogroms from 1903 to 1905 became synonymous.13 12 It appeared in issue 5 of 1914. Liebermann contributed a number of drawings to the magazine, which was published from 1914 to 1916 in Berlin by Paul Cassirer. It was edited by the Austrian art dealer Alfred Golg. Here assembled were the leaflets of a wide range of artists (among them Hans Baluscheck, August Gaul, Max Beckmann) who all rendered homage to the current jingoism. But as the war drew itself out, the magazine was discontinued. 13 Kishinev was a center of Jewish culture in the Russian Empire. In April 1903 during the Easter holidays there was an outbreak of anti-Semitic riots which led to murder, pillage and other mayhem impacting the Jewish population, inclusive the accusation of ritual murder. In October 1905 there was a further pogrom in Kishinev which incited vehement reactions in the inter-

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At the upper edge of Liebermann’s drawing are the handwritten words “To my dear Jews (the Czar)” which is a sarcastic commentary on the Russian Empire’s Jewish policy under the Czar, who remained unimpressed by protests emanating from the West.14 The figure of the unarmed woman carrying the small child symbolizes the danger with which the Czar threatened the Jews under his control, and it is through this figure of the mother that a plea is entered for help and protection – not least from the side of their “relatives” in the West. As mentioned, Liebermann’s lithograph was reproduced in the magazine Kriegszeit, which was devotee of a “jingoism” to which many artists subscribed, among them Liebermann, whose lithograph appeared on the cover of this 1914 issue and at the bottom of which are the words “Jetzt wollen wir sie dreschen…” (“Now we want to thrash them…”). With this phrase Liebermann was taking up the statement of Kaiser Wilhelm II in the first days of the war – a phrase that was depicted in innumerable pictorial motifs by many artists, caricaturists and postcard manufacturers so as to educe the current bellicose patriotism. The “Jewish policy” of the Czar was also one of the central arguments for deployment of Jewish soldiers in the First World War. In August 1914, together with its Austro-Hungarian counterpart, the German General Staff issued a proclamation whereby the Germans styled themselves liberators of the Jews from Russian bondage  ; at the same time the Russian and Polish Jews were called upon to support the German troops – a self-stylization and a call that found much positive resonance within German Jewish society.15 Liebermann’s figure of the “Jewish Mother”  – entitled “Kishinev” and published in 1914 – is thus to be understood in its national context  ; she is a personification of Jewry and represents their concerns in contradistinction to the Russian Empire, embodying those conflicts emerging with the First World War. And my thesis is that the figure reflects a historical movement within modern national press – even in the Russian Empire itself. Theodore Roosevelt came forward as well as the Hilfsverein der deutschen Juden (German-Jewish Aid Society) under the chairmanship of Paul Nathan – which did nothing to influence the policies of Czar Nicholas II. See  : Jeffrey Kopstein, “Kischinjow,” in Enzyklopädie jüdischer Geschichte und Kultur (EJGK), ed. Dan Diner, vol. 3 (Stuttgart, Weimar  : Metzler, 2012), 357–362. 14 At the beginning of the war the Czar had issued a decree reminding the Jews of all the benefits they had enjoyed under rule of the Romanoff ’s, the dynasty of the Czar. He therefore expected them to support the Russian war effort. The German and Austrian Jewish press citicized this decree as an act of despicable cynicism. 15 Salmon Adler-Rudel, Ostjuden in Deutschland 1880–1940. Zugleich eine Geschichte der Organi­ sationen, die sie betreuten (Schriftenreihe wissenschaftlicher Abhandlungen des Leo Baeck Instituts 1) (Tübingen  : Mohr, 1959), 56–157, as cited in  : Steven E. Aschheim, “Eastern Jews, German Jews and Germany’s Ostpolitik in the First World War,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook (1983)  : 351.



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Judaism, namely its self-image as “nation” in the sense of a community that is stamped by its own history, tradition and language – just like those communities which emerged in nineteenth-century Europe.16 Beyond Max Liebermann we can see the development of a national representation of the Jewish people in depictions that were less eminent but on that account all the more popular. During the First World War, in 1916, there appeared an anthology of ghetto tales entitled Das Volk des Ghetto (People of the Ghetto). It was edited by the Berlin writer and literary/film critic Artur Landsberger.17 The volume’s cover illustration (fig. 5) foregrounds the kneeling figure of a young woman who possesses all those features which were typical for depictions of the “Beautiful Jewess” – dark and mostly long hair, ostentatiously dark eyes, “red lips and fine, well-proportioned limbs.”18 In a beseeching gesture she turns her torso toward two soldiers who stand behind her with sinister looks on their faces and clad in army coats and Cossack hats. In allusion to the pogroms in the Russian Empire, the Jewess in this depiction appears as the victim of violent excesses. Typical for visual figurations of the “Beautiful Jewess” is accentuation of her exotic beauty – which conspicuously distinguishes her from her otherwise non-Jewish environment and marks her as strange and other.19 This different kind of beauty evokes a certain ambivalence that lies betwixt fascination and resistance while likewise expressing the “in-between” nature of her situation as a border-crosser.20 On the one hand, in her foreignness, she represents something which is identified with alien Jewish society  ; on the other hand, it is this very alienness which generates the fascination. Insofar as the figure of 16 See  : Dieter Langewiesche, Nation. Nationalismus. Nationalstaat in Deutschland und Europa (Munich  : Beck, 2000)  ; Benedict Anderson, Die Erfindung der Nation. Zur Karriere eines fol­ genreichen Konzepts (Frankfurt am Main, New York  : Campus, 1996). 17 See  : Artur Landsberger, ed., Das Ghettobuch (München  : Georg Müller, 1914)  ; Artur Landsberger, ed., Das Volk des Ghetto (München  : Georg Müller, 1916). Landsberger’s sister Else was married to Louis-Ferdinand Ullstein, who brought Landsberger into the editorial offices of his newspapers B.Z. am Mittag and the Vossische Zeitung for which Landsberger among other things was a trial reporter. It was in reaction to Hugo Bettauer’s book Stadt ohne Juden (1922) that Landsberger penned the novel Berlin ohne Juden (1925) where he anticipated the power grab of an anti-Semitic party. Between 1914 and 1930, Landsberger wrote some twenty screenplays for both silent films and talkies. 18 Florian Krobb, Die schöne Jüdin. Jüdische Frauengestalten in der deutschsprachigen Erzählliteratur vom 17. Jahrhundert bis zum 1. Weltkrieg (Tübingen  : Max Niemeyer, 1993), 1. 19 For a more extensive treatment see Hildegard Frübis, Die “Jüdin” als Orientalin oder die “orien­ talische Jüdin.” Zur Konstruktion eines Bild-Typus (Graz  : Leykam, 2014). 20 There are overlaps here with that extremely popular figure of the late nineteenth-century imagination – the femme fatale. She is most clearly evidenced in portrayals of Salome, for instance Gustave Moreau’s Salomé (1871) and Salome Dancing Before Herod (1876).

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Fig. 5: Book cover, Georg Landsberger. Das Ghetto­ buch, München: Georg Müller, 1914 (archives of the author).

the “Beautiful Jewess” is also never intended as the depiction of an individual person, she is proxy for “Jewishness” plain and simple – which once more moves her into the realm of the personification modus. As in Liebermann’s “Kishinev” from 1914 (see fig. 4) the cover illustration for the tales from Das Volk des Ghetto referred to the current threats to Eastern European Jewry. The soldiers in Cossack dress along with their threatening gaze and stance – implying among other things the threat of rape – make the menacing situation of Eastern European Jews explicit. The figure of the “Beautiful Jewess” is a surrogate here for Eastern European Jewry as such and it above all transposes this threatening danger to the purview of Western public perception. As in the Jewish connoted woman in Liebermann’s drawings (fig. 1, 2, 4) the “Beautiful Jewess” (see fig. 5) has the contours of a figure which are to be read as a personification, namely as a proxy for Jewry. In a time of war and increasing anti-Semitism – this my concluding thesis – she is a visual formulation of that crisis in the relationship between the German nation and the Jewish people.

Gerald Lamprecht

Jewish Soldiers in Austrian Collective Memory 1914 to 1938 Even though World War I and the Jewish war service and Jewish engagement in war are overshadowed and often buried under the events of the Second World War and the trauma of the holocaust, the latest research and publications make clear that the Great War and its consequences were seminal years of transformation for European and particularly for Central European Jewry.1 Jews all over Europe experienced these years as a time of crises, which had its roots in the political and social transformations that mainly occurred after 1918 and the breakdown of the Central European empires. Furthermore, the perception of these years as years of crises was reinforced by the radicalization and brutalization of antisemitism and antisemitic violence.2 In particular, the breakdown of the Habsburg Monarchy and the foundation of the new Austrian nation-state led Austrian Jews to question well-practiced narratives of Jewish identity and the positioning of Jews within state and society.3 By the time the Monarchy ended and the new republic was proclaimed, the status of Jews as a distinctive religious group among others in the state became uncertain for some time. Both Jews and gentiles were momentarily uncertain whether Jews should become a religious or national minority within the new state. In addition, the revolutionary process of the foundation of the republic in 1918 was accompanied by antisemitic menaces

1

Cf. eg. Sarah Panter, Jüdische Erfahrungen und Loyalitätskonflikte im Ersten Weltkrieg (Göttingen  : Vandehoeck & Rupprecht, 2014)  ; Tim Grady, A Deadly Legacy. German Jews and the Great War (New Haven-London  : Yale University Press, 2017). 2 Lisa Silverman, Becoming Austrians. Jews and Culture between the World Wars (Oxford  : Oxford University Press, 2012), 11–14  ; Marsha L. Rozenblit, “Sustaining Austrian ‘National’ Identity in Crisis  : The Dilemma of the Jews in Habsburg Austria, 1914–1919,” in Constructing Nationalities in East Central Europe, eds. Pieter M. Judson, Marsha L. Rozenblit (New York  : Berghahn Books, 2005), 178–92  ; Harriet Pass Freidenreich, Jewish Politics in Vienna 1918–1938 (Bloomington  : Indiana University Press, 1991), 2. 3 See for example David Rechter, The Jews of Vienna and the First World War (Oxford  : The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2001), 161–89. According to Marsha Rozenblit after the war the narrative of the tripartite identity of Austrian Jews, for which the imperial dynasty had played a central role, came to an end. Marsha L. Rozenblit, Sustaining Austrian “National” Identity in Crisis, 178–92.

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and public violence, which created a sense of permanent uncertainty among Jews, especially in Vienna in their everyday lives.4 Expectation – Experience – Memory These events led to the mentioned crises, which also had great impacts on the narratives of the Jewish war experience and Jewish war memory.5 The discrepancies between the Jewish expectations in war service, in the Jewish engagement in war and the particular events shaped the narratives of war memory and war experiences.6 Both experience and memory are results of processes of endowment with meaning, in which people as individuals as well as groups give meaning to particular events. In the process of gaining experiences and creating memory, particular events become embedded culturally and socially, which means that their cultural processing is interlinked with the expectations people held.7 Reinhart Koselleck stated that there is no “expectation without experience, no experience without expectation.”8 This means that the Jewish expectation in war as well as the Jewish experience in the course of war are both based on the history of the Jewish emancipation and embourgeoisement, on religion and tradition, as well as in common 4

5 6 7

8

Bruce F. Pauley, Eine Geschichte des österreichischen Antisemitismus. Von der Ausgrenzung zur Aus­ löschung (Wien  : Kremayr & Scheriau 1993), 116–31  ; Peter G. J. Pulzer, Die Entstehung des politischen Antisemitismus in Deutschland und Österreich 1867–1914 (Göttingen  : Vandenhoeck & Rupprecht, 2004), 299–332. Cf. Petra Ernst, “Der Erste Weltkrieg in deutschsprachig-jüdischer Literatur und Publizistik in Österreich” in Krieg, Erinnerung, Geschichtswissenschaft, ed. Siegfried Mattl, Gerhard Botz, Helmut Konrad, Stefan Karner (Wien-Köln-Weimar  : Böhlau Verlag 2009), 47–72, here 62–8. For Jewish war experience, see eg. Ulrich Sieg, Jüdische Intellektuelle im Ersten Weltkrieg. Kriegser­ fahrungen, weltanschauliche Debatten und kulturelle Neuentwürfe (Berlin  : Akademie Verlag 2008), 109–72, here 109–11. Vgl. Jörg Rogge, “Kriegserfahrungen erzählen – Einleitung,” in Kriegserfahrungen erzählen. Ge­ schichts- und iteraturwissenschaftliche Perspektiven, ed. Jörg Rogge (Bielefeld  : transcript, 2016), 9–30, here 13 f  ; Nikolaus Buschmann, Aribert Reimann, “Die Konstruktion historischer Erfahrung. Neue Wege zu einer Erfahrungsgeschichte des Krieges,” in Die Erfahrung des Krieges. Erfahrungsgeschichtliche Perspektiven von der Französischen Revolution bis zum Zweiten Welt­ krieg, eds. Nickolaus Buschmann, Horst Carl (Paderborn-München-Wien-Zürich  : Ferdinand Schöningh, 2001), 261–72, here 261–65. Reinhart Koselleck, “‘Erfahrungsraum’ und ‘Erwartungshorizont’  – zwei Kategorien,” in Ver­ gangene Zukunft. Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten, ed. Reinhard Koselleck (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2000), 349–75, here 352. See the English translation  : “Space of Experience and Horizon of Expectation  : Two Historical Categories,” in Futures Past  : On the Semantics of Histor­ ical Time (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), 255–275, 310–311, here 257.



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discourses on masculinity, militarism, patriotism and nationalism. They have intersected with the processes of identity transformation since the Jewish enlightenment in the 18th century. This transformation stands at the intersection of religious tradition and secular enlightenment as well as the national demand of equality and the necessity of Jewish particularism. Again, referring to the work of Reinhart Koselleck, we have to state that experiences are not fixed once they have been gained. They can change  ; they are time-, and perspective-dependent and can also include false memory. Experience is present past, whose events have been incorporated and can be remembered. Within experience a rational reworking is included, togehter with unconscious modes of conduct which do not have to be present in awarness. There, is also an element of alien experience contained and preserved in experience conveyed by generations or institutions.9

With this in mind, we understand that expectations and experience influence memory. Both experience and memory are always dynamic and related to the processes of identity building.10 Thus, war memory is always part of political discussions and the political culture.11 The political death cult is, therefore, crucial for the political entity, which is usually the nation, state, or people, to legitimize or stabilize itself. Within discourses of memory, questions of participation and inclusion within or exclusion from the political unit are negotiated. Since the 19th century, the individual citizen soldiers’ deaths on the battlefield have stood at the center of all these discourses and have represented, therefore, on the one hand, the ultimate evidence of each citizen’s loyalty to the state, and, on the other hand, have lent meaning to the individual soldier’s senseless death.12 In   9 Ibid., 259. 10 See Nikolaus Buschmann, Aribert Reimann, “Die Konstruktion historischer Erfahrung. Neue Wege zu einer Erfahrungsgeschichte des Krieges”, 261–271  ; Jan Assmann, “Kollektives Ge­ dächt­nis und kultureller Identität,” in Kultur und Gedächtnis, eds. Jan Assmann, Tonio Hölscher (Frankfurt a. M  : Suhrkamp, 1988), 9–19. 11 Vgl. u.a. Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning. The Great War in European Cultural His­ tory (Cambridge  :Cambridge University Press, 1995)  ; Reinhart Koselleck, “Einleitung” in Der politische Totenkult. Kriegerdenkmäler in der Moderne, eds. Reinhart Koselleck, Michael Jeismann (München  : Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1994), 9–20. 12 Reinhart Koselleck, “Einleitung”, 9  ; E.g.: Ute Frevert, “Bürgersoldaten – Die allgemeine Wehr­ pflicht im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert,” in Die Wehrpflicht und ihre Hintergründe. Sozialwissen­ schaftliche Beitrage zur aktuellen Debatte, eds. Ines-Jacqueline Werkner (Erlangen  : Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften 2004), 45–64, 48–9  ; Nikolaus Buschmann, “Vom ‘Untertanensoldaten’ zum ‘Bürgersoldaten’  ? Zur Transformation militärischer Loyalitätsvorstellungen um 1800,” in Jahrbuch des Simon-Dubnow-Instituts XII (2013)  : 105–26, here 105.

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the Jewish history of emancipation, discourses of Jewish military service as well as those about the Jewish war memories have consequentially always considered the questions of whether Jews could be equal citizens of the states in which they lived and which citizens they truly felt themselves to be and generated particular Jewish expectations in the war service. For these reasons, many Jews in Austria and their gentile fellow citizens welcomed the war enthusiastically and hoped that they could express their patriotism through their unrestricted military service and their supportive engagement in the Jewish communities and associations. Consequently, approximately 300,000 Jewish soldiers fought loyally in the Austrian-Hungarian Army from 1914 to 1918. It is estimated that 30,000 of them died on the battlefields.13 Furthermore, both Jewish communities and individual Jews subscribed for Austrian war loans to a considerable extent, and rabbis preached in support of the Austrian war aims and Emperor Franz-Joseph I. In addition, Jewish associations aligned all their activities to meet the needs those fighting the war  ; this meant, for example, that they provided aid for wounded soldiers and war refugees in the Austrian cities and collected alms for the soldiers afield. At first glance, this means that both individual Jews and Jewish communities and associations did the same things as their gentile fellow citizens from 1914 onwards. Jews were soldiers just like the gentiles  ; they were supporters as well as victims of the war and suffered its consequences. Nonetheless, we can see that Jews gained particular war experiences and created particular Jewish war memory to some extent. A matter of fact, we only can understand what was really happening, if we consider that Jews had both particular expectations beside the general expectations of war. In 1914, many Jews in Austria and in all other belligerent countries expected that the legal emancipation, which was implemented in Austria in 1867, would have occurred after the war and received the full social and cultural acceptance of the gentile Austrians.14 In the first years of the 20th century, many Jews were firmly convinced that antisemitism would be overcome in the future, and that the Jewish war service would be an important contribution to this aim. But despite these expectations, the Jewish military service, Jewish refugees and, in general, 13 Because the Austrian Army did not count the Jewish soldiers officially, we have no valid data on the number of Jewish soldiers in the Austrian army. It is estimated that 300,000 Jewish soldiers fought in the army, and approximately 10 percent of these died on the battlefield. See. Erwin A. Schmidl, Habsburgs jüdische Soldaten 1788–1918 (Wien-Köln-Weimar  : Böhlau Verlag, 2014), 115  ; Jonas Kreppel, Juden und Judentum von heute. Ein Handbuch (Zürich-Wien-Leipzig  : Amalthea Verlag, 1925), 139  ; Philo-Lexikon. Handbuch des jüdischen Wissens (Frankfurt am Main  : Jüdischer Verlag, 1992), 799–801. 14 Cf. Rozenblit, Reconstructing a National Identity, 39.



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Jewish loyalty came under dispute immediately after the beginning of the war, and antisemitism increased considerably.15 Antisemitic agitations started with the arrival of Jewish war refugees from Galicia and the Bucovina in the German-speaking parts of the Monarchy in 1914 and 1915. And from at least the midpoint of the war and on, antisemitism became an even more important issue in public discourses. This was because, during the first years of the war, the Austrian censorship board had tried to suppress antisemitism and attempted to preserve the party truce. This course changed fundamentally after the death of Emperor Franz-Joseph I in November 1916 and upon the reconvention of the Austrian parliament in May 1917. From that point on, and especially during the pivotal years of 1918 and 1919, Jews were more and more commonly named the scapegoats for all political, social and cultural crises.16 To the antisemites, Jews were shirkers of military duty, cowards, had no fatherland or patriotic feelings and were accused of being war-profiteers and instigating revolutionary uprisings and upheavals.17 Antisemitism had always been an part of Austrian culture and society. However, while Jews represented one minority amongst others in the multiethnic Monarchy, they were often viewed as the only minority in the new nation state. For this reason, antisemitism played a central role in the major debates about the formation of Austrian national identity. Antisemites were members of political parties and could be found on the editorial staffs of newspapers and journals and in various associations. One field of antisemitic agitation during and after the war was war memory. So, for example, the “Front-line Soldiers Association of German-Austria,” which was founded in 1920, was one of the leading antisemitic organizations in Austria during the interwar period.18 All these ways in which the Jewish expectations of war were disappointed influenced particular Jewish narratives of war experiences and war memories, 15 Peter Pulzer, Die Entstehung des politischen Antisemitismus in Deutschland und Österreich 1867– 1914, 299–308  ; Bruce Pauley, Eine Geschichte des österreichischen Antisemitismus, 100–31. 16 Cf. eg. Marsha L. Rozenblit, “Sustaining Austrian ‘National’ Identity in Crisis  : The Dilemma of the Jews in Habsburg Austria, 1914–1919”, 185. See also the paper of Thomas Stoppacher in this book. 17 Cf. Ezra Mendelsohn, “Zwischen großen Erwartungen und bösem Erwachen  : Das Ende der multinationalen Reiche in Ostmittel- und Südosteuropa aus jüdischer Perspektive,” in Zwischen großen Erwartungen und bösem Erwachen. Juden, Politik und Antisemitismus in Ost- und Südosteu­ ropa 1918–1945, eds. Dittmar Dahlmann, Anke Hilbrenner (Paderborn  : Ferdinand Schöningh Verlag, 2007), 13–30  ; Gerald Lamprecht, “Juden in Zentraleuropa und die Transformationen des Antisemitismus im und nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg,” Jahrbuch für Antisemitismusforschung 24 (2015)  : 63–88. 18 Cf. Wiener Stadt- und Landesarchiv (WStLA), A32–5442/1922 (Frontkämpfervereinigung Deutsch-Österreichs).

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which consist both narratives about the demand of observance of the granted civil rights and civil equality and narratives of Jewish self-consciousness and the insistence for Jewish identities to be recognized within the national society of Austria. Agents, Spaces and Media of Jewish War Memory Within the Jewish population, individual agents of memory became active from 1914 and onwards. They linked their war memories to specific concerns and expectations and interpreted the war within a specific Jewish framework. Apart from the families, for whom – according to Jay Winter19 – war memory signified a way to grieve and come to terms with trauma in the first place, these individual actors were rabbis, Jewish military chaplains, Jewish religious communities, editors of journals and newspapers, individual intellectuals and members of associations such as the Federation of Jewish War Veterans of Austria (BJF).20 From 1914 to 1938, many discourses that dealt with various topics concerning Jews and the war appeared in German-Jewish journals and publications or took place in synagogues, cemeteries and the political process of creating war memorials and memorial plaques. Thereby, the German-Jewish journals published in Vienna played important roles. First and foremost was Dr. Bloch’s Oesterreichi­ sche Wochenschrift, which more or less represented the voice of the hegemonial Jewish groups living in Vienna and Austria during wartime.21 Other important journals were the Wahrheit, the Jüdische Zeitung, the Jüdische Volksstimme and the Jüdische Korrespondenz.22 These journals represented different Jewish groups with their particular expectations. They took up different positions, whereby it can be stated that, despite their ideological differences, all editors of German-Jew19 Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning. The Great War in European Cultural History  ; Jay Winter, Remembering War. The Great War between Memory and History in the Twentieth Century (New Haven  : Yale University Press, 2006). 20 Gerald Lamprecht, “Erinnerung an den Krieg  : der Bund jüdischer Frontsoldaten Österreichs 1932 bis 1938,” in Weltuntergang. Jüdisches Leben und Sterben im Ersten Weltkrieg, ed. Marcus G. Patka (Wien  : Styria premium, 2014), 200–10. 21 Cf. Jacob Toury, Die Jüdische Presse im Österreichischen Kaiserreich 1802–1918 (Tübingen  : Mohr Siebeck, 1982), 82  ; Eleonore Lappin, “Zensur und Abwehr des Antisemitismus  : Dr. Bloch’s österreichische Wochenschrift im Ersten Weltkrieg,” in Judenfeindschaft und Antisemitismus in der deutschen Presse über fünf Jahrhunderte Band I, ed. Michael Nagel, Moshe Zimmermann (Bremen  : edition lumière, 2013), 299–316. 22 Cf. Eleonore Lappin-Eppel, “Gedanken zu Judentum, Krieg und Frieden in der Wiener jüdischen Presse während des Ersten Weltkrieges am Beispiel von ‘Die Wahrheit’, ‘Jüdische Zeitung’ und ‘Jüdische Korrespondenz’,“ zeitgeschichte 41/4 (2014)  : 200–21.



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ish journals stressed the Jewish service for their fatherland and associated the Jewish military service and other examples of Jewish sacrifice with the demand that the state and the gentile fellow citizens should honor them and guarantee them their civil rights. All journals published more or less patriotic texts, especially Dr. Bloch`s Oesterreichische Wochenschrift, which also published the names of both fallen and decorated soldiers, biographies of Jewish heroes and war letters in almost every issue. Rabbi Joseph Samuel Bloch, the editor of Dr. Bloch’s Oesterreichischer Wochenschrift, argued in his memoires that he had to do this because, in 1915, the Austrian war ministry did not fulfill the Jewish demand to publish statistics on the numbers of fallen and decorated Jewish soldiers in order to document Jewish patriotism.23 In addition to these weeklies, specific commemorative publications also were produced, such as the Jüdisches Kriegsgedenkblatt24, which was edited in six volumes between 1914 and 1917 by the Austrian journalist Moritz Frühling. Each volume collected biographies and documents from fallen Jewish soldiers and war heroes. From May 1915 onwards, the committee of the Jewish War Archive, which had been founded by Austrian Zionists  – and particularly the Jewish national association  –25 but which also included non-Zionists, published the Jüdisches Archiv.26 While the Kriegsgedenkblatt represented a paper memorial for Jewish soldiers, officers and Emperor Franz Joseph, the Zionist initiators of the Jüdisches Archiv attempted to combat antisemitism and the antisemitic accusations of alleged Jewish disloyalty and cowardice.27 Under the leadership of Nathan Birnbaum, the Jewish War Archive collected the names of fallen as well as decorated Jewish soldiers, all kinds of reports and documents of Jewish heroism and reports of experienced antisemitism.28 To them, examples of Jewish war service and Jewish suffering served as arguments in favor of social equality 23 Joseph Samuel Bloch, “Die Österreichischen Juden im Weltkriege,” in Erinnerungen aus meinem Leben von Dr. Joseph Samuel Bloch Bd. III, ed. Morris Bloch (Vienna  : Appel & Co Verlag, 1933), 228–29. 24 Cf. Dieter Hecht, “Spuren der Vergessenen. Das ‘Jüdische Kriegsgedenkblatt’  – Ein Erinnerungsforum,” zeitgeschichte 41/4 (2014)  : 222–41. 25 Cf. Österreichisches Staatsarchiv (ÖStA), KA ZSt KM KÜA 156 Nr. 83871 (“Jüdisches Kriegsarchiv” Unzulässige Propaganda) 26 Cf. Eleonore Lappin, “Zwischen den Fronten  : Das Wiener Jüdische Archiv. Mitteilungen des Komitees Jüdisches Kriegsarchiv 1915–1917,” in Deutsch-jüdische Presse und jüdische Geschichte I  : Dokumente, Darstellungen, Wechselbeziehungen, ed. Eleonore Lappin and Michael Nagel (Bremen  : edition lumière, 2008), 229–46. 27 “Mit einem Worte, wenn wir in unserem Kampfe gegen das Uebelwollen und für unser volles Recht gerüstet sein wollen, dann müssen wir das ‘Jüdische Kriegsarchiv’ schaffen”. “Die Mitarbeit am Jüdischen Archiv,” Jüdisches Archiv, May 1915, 2–4. 28 Cf. Robert Stricker, “Die Juden im Weltkrieg,” Neue Freie Presse, December 29, 1915, 11.

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during and after the war. For example, in July 1924 in the Viennese Zionist daily Wiener Morgenzeitung, the well-known Austrian Zionist Benno Straucher asked  : “Where is the Jewish War Archive  ?” He recommended that the collected materials of Jewish heroism and experienced antisemitism could be the basis for a new Central Archive of Antisemitism in Austria.29 However, while the state welcomed the emphasis placed on Jewish heroism and patriotism by the Jewish War Archive leaders, the state authorities tried to prevent the collection and publication of documents and reports of antisemitic experiences made by Jewish soldiers and civilians during the war. According to a report from the summer of 1916, the Austrian War Supervision Office (Kriegsüberwachungsamt) investigated the activities of the Jewish War Archive and confiscated some material, in particular reports of Jewish soldiers from the Eastern front.30 Nonetheless, the Jewish War Archive could continue its work after a period of time and was able to publish nine volumes of the “Jewish Archive” between 1915 and 1917, which was then reissued in 1920 in one volume. Emphasizing Jewish heroism was, therefore, an argument used in Austrian political discussions but also in inner-Jewish discussions.31 As all the mentioned Jewish journals und publications had an almost exclusively Jewish readership, we can assume that the texts published in these attempted to convey the meaning of the war and the Jewish sacrifices made in the war to a Jewish audience. These endowments of meaning were made using references to the political situation, in general, as well as to a specific Jewish context. For example, in December 1914, Rabbi Wilhelm Reich32 from Baden near Vienna, who had penned a series of patriotic articles in 1914 and 1915, published a text in Dr. Bloch’s Oesterreichischer Wochenschrift entitled  : “Jewish war heroes.” In this text, he stated that the history of war in our times provides us with evidence that the Jewish heroism in war didn´t slip away. Hundreds and hundreds of our religious companions who are in the war were decorated on the field of honor  ; they are in no way inferior to any denomination or nation in the fight for the fatherland, and when the book of war will be closed with the help of God, we will point out with pride and satisfaction the golden 29 Cf. Benno Straucher, “Wo ist das jüdische Kriegsarchiv  ?,” Wiener Morgenzeitung, July 21, 1924, 8. 30 ÖStA KA ZSt KM KÜA 156 Nr. 83871 (“Jüdisches Kriegsarchiv” Unzulässige Propaganda) 31 E.g. The Kriegsgedenkblatt was announced in the German-Jewish as well as German Press. See. “Jüdisches Kriegsgedenkblatt,” Neue Freie Presse, December 20, 1914, 32  ; “Kriegsgedenkblätter,” Neue Freie Presse, January 28, 1916, 9. 32 Cf. Thomas E. Schärf, Jüdisches Leben in Baden. Von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart (Wien  : Mandelbaum Verlag, 2005), 120–22.



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book, in which also a considerable number of names of Jewish heroes will shine for the glorification of Jewry. The names of the Jewish heroes are the dignified followers of the Maccabees.33

Rabbi Reich, as well as other authors writing in German-Jewish journals, put the war, military service and deaths that occurred on the battlefield into a Jewish religious or historical context and, in doing so, they gave meaning to the massive number of soldiers’ deaths and also legitimized the war, in general. For them, as well as for many other Jews all over Europe, the war against the czarist regime was a holy war34, and the czar himself was called “Amalek,” the enemy of the Jewish people.35 Therefore, the objectives of the Habsburg Monarchy in the war were also the objectives of the Austrian Jews. Jewish heroism, seen in the light of the tradition of the Maccabees, was equivalent to heroism with respect to the fatherland, the Monarchy, and the faith and honor of Judaism. Jewish military service and the accompanying discourses, as well as Jewish heroism, counteracted antisemitism and aimed to strengthen Judaism and Jewish identity. These addressed Jewish and Gentile members of the public. Heroes’ Cemeteries Jewish memory discourses appeared not only in German-Jewish journals, publications and sermons, but also in discussions that took place when Jewish communities and other members of Austrian towns and villages began planning the erection of military cemeteries or war memorials. Hereby, the state and the communities had to initially address the questions of how to bury the individual fallen soldiers in dignified ways and how to convey the idea that the soldiers’ deaths were greatly important. During the 19th century and especially during WWI, the death of the individual soldier on the battlefield was considered the last and ultimate sacrifice for the fatherland, and the practices of memory for the fallen soldiers changed fundamentally. Therefore, it was considered that all fallen soldiers should be remembered through a process of democratization and equalization, without highlighting their ethnic, social, or military status, as heroic sons of the father33 Wilhelm Reich, “Jüdische Kriegshelden,” Dr. Bloch´s Oesterreichische Wochenschrift, December 11, 1914, 855. 34 “Der Kaiser Franz Josef I.,” Dr. Blochs Oesterreichische Wochenschrift, August 14, 1914, 1. 35 Cf. Adolf Altmann, “Jüdische Gemeinden, leget Kriegschroniken an  !,” Dr. Bloch´s Oesterre­ ichische Wochenschrift, February 6, 1915, 154.

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land and as equal members of the nation. The collectively constructed, idealized trench experience and the equally idealized experience of comradeship as well as the often-invoked picture of the party truce suggested that all soldiers should be equal in death.36 This national endowment and the unprecedented number of soldiers who fell during WWI resulted in the designs of the military cemeteries and war memorials. “The immediate symbol of wartime camaraderie was the military cemetery  : linking the living comradeship of the trenches with that of the fallen comrades.”37 Thus, not only generals, officers and aristocrats were memorable  ; it was argued that every fallen soldier should get his own tombstone, which had to be equal to that of his comrade. Furthermore, it was argued that the cemeteries should have uniform and predominantly geometric designs, which, as George L. Mosse pointed out, often included Christian symbols  ; in many military cemeteries, a cross appeared in the center.38 While Jews and Jewish communities accepted the presence of Christian symbolism in the cemeteries and in the rhetoric of the public grief and commemoration in many cases, especially in the Entente countries,39 we can see that the erection of inter-denominational military cemeteries in Austria-Hungary triggered fundamental discussions within the Jewish communities. These discussions concerned basic questions about the age of emancipation and focused on the difficult relationship between Jewish particularism and the national demand for equality, as well as the demand for complete assimilation. As an example, the city of Vienna decided to erect an inter-denominational military cemetery in the central cemetery of Vienna in 1914 for all soldiers who had died in Vienna. To realize this plan, Richard Weiskirchner, the Christian social mayor of Vienna, wrote a letter to the Jewish community and invited them to bury their fallen soldiers in this cemetery as well. In their first response, the board of the Jewish community seemed to welcome this idea rather enthusiastically and indicated that they would, therefore, not create a special burial ground for the Jewish soldiers in the Jewish section of the central cemetery.40 They only imposed certain conditions on the city of Vienna  : The Jewish soldiers should be buried according 36 Cf. George L. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers. Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (New York  : Oxford University Press, 1990), 80–94. 37 Cf. Geroge L. Mosse, “The Jews and the German War Experience, 1914–1918,” in Masses and Man. Nationalist and Fascist Perceptions of Reality, ed. George L. Mosse (New York  : Howard Fertig, 1980), 268. 38 Cf. George L. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers, 70–80. 39 Cf. Geroge L. Mosse, “The Jews and the German War Experience, 1914–1918,” 267. 40 Cf. Protocol of the boardmeeting, September 22, 1914. Central Archive for the History of Jewish People (CAHJP), Archiv der IKG Wien, A/W 1477.



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to Jewish funeral rites and, if there were religious symbols on the tombstones, the Jewish tombstones should receive Jewish symbols. This stipulation meant that they should be identified with the Star of David and the common abbreviation of the benediction from the first book of Samuel, 25  :29.41 Furthermore, the city of Vienna also had to respect the wish of the parents, if they wanted to bury their sons in a Jewish cemetery.42 After a short while, however, the board of the Jewish community reconsidered their decision on the basis of various misgivings and planned to bury the Jewish soldiers in a specific heroes’ section on the Jewish cemetery. They had concerns related to their need to observe the religious rules and fulfill the demands of the families to have a Jewish place to express their grief, but another underlying argumentation for this change in opinion was clearly stated in a letter to the editor published in Dr. Bloch’s Oesterreichische Wochenschrift in January 1915. We appreciate the fact that the city of Vienna does not want to differentiate between the heroes who had sacrificed their lives for the fatherland. Nevertheless, I would like to suggest that the fallen Jewish soldiers should be buried, if possible in a separate area, in the Jewish cemetery because it should be possible in the quieter times ahead to also honor the Jewish cemetery through the erection of a war memorial. We should do this because the lack of a memorial shouldn’t be criticized by the next or even the next but one generation, when the son asks his father  : Didn’t the Jews fight in the year 1914, because in the Jewish cemetery there isn’t a war memorial  ?43

The Jewish community in Vienna as well as in other Austrian cities already had begun to worry about the existing and future antisemitism by the end of 1914 and the beginning of 1915. To prevent and check the growth of antisemitism, they needed to maintain the Jewish cemeteries and future war memorials as arguments against antisemitic attacks. They needed them as visible representations of the fallen Jewish soldiers, their sacrifices for the fatherland and Jewish loyalty. Consequently, a separate heroes’ section with war graves was built in the Jewish cemeteries in almost every Austrian town with a Jewish community as particular Jewish place of memory. In addition to their justified fear of antisemitism, the Jewish communities also had other reservations about the Christian appropriation of fallen Jewish 41 Jewish community of Vienna to mayor, September 13, 1914. CAHJP, Archiv der IKG Wien. A/W 1477. 42 Protocol of the boardmeeting, September 15, 1914. CAHJP, Archiv der IKG Wien, A/W 1477. 43 Hermann Stern, “Ein jüdisches Kriegerdenkmal,” Dr. Bloch`s Oesterreichische Wochenschrift, January 8, 1915, 24–25.

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soldiers and their commemoration, which were not unfounded. From the very beginning of the war and on, the commemorations and expressions of public grief for the huge number of deaths in the Habsburg Monarchy were composed of Christian, dynastic and patriotic elements. The Habsburg soldiers died “for god, Emperor, and fatherland.”44 The official commemorations for the fallen soldiers of the Habsburg Monarchy and, later on, in the First Republic were influenced or affected by the Christian practices of the commemoration of the dead. Beginning during the wartime and especially after the end of the war, war memorials were built around Christian churches and in Christian cemeteries in almost every Austrian town or village, and many of these displayed either German-nationalistic or Christian symbols. The sacrifice of the soldiers was equated to the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, as Heidemarie Uhl, Stefan Riesenfellner45 and Oswald Überegger46 have shown in their studies. Accordingly, the official commemorations ceremonies took place every year on All Saints’ Day when in Vienna, for example, thousands of people made a pilgrimage to the central cemetery to commemorate the fallen soldiers at the previously mentioned central war memorial, in which a tentative wooden cross had been erected at the center. This was also located behind the Lueger Church, named after the notoriously antisemitic mayor of Vienna.47 Although this commemorative practice did not have the character of a governmental decree, the Jewish communities faced considerable public and political pressure to attend. For example, the military agency in Styria also asked the Jewish community to celebrate an All Saints’ Commemorative Service on November 2, 1916, in the Jewish cemetery in memory of the Jewish soldiers buried there.48 In his first reaction, Rabbi David Herzog, who had published his patriotic war sermons the year before49, did not have any objections, but decided not to undertake this ceremony under any circumstances after a short period of consideration with the mutual consent of the board members of the Jewish community and the board members of the Chevra Kadisha, the burial society.50 44 “Für Gott Kaiser und Vaterland”. Cf. Heidemarie Uhl, “Kriegsallerseelen 1914–1918,” in Im Epizentrum des Zusammenbruchs, ed. Alfred Pfoser et. al. (Wien  : Metropolverlag, 2013), 114. 45 Cf. Todeszeichen. Zeitgeschichtliche Denkmalkultur, eds. Stefan Riesenfellner, Heidemarie Uhl (Wien  : Böhlauverlag, 1994). 46 Cf. Oswald Überegger, Erinnerungskriege. Der Erste Weltkrieg, Österreich und die Tiroler Kriegser­ innerung in der Zwischenkriegszeit (Innsbruck  : Universitätsverlag Wagner, 2011). 47 Cf. e.g. “Allerseelenfeier für die verstorbenen Krieger,” Neue Freie Presse, November 2, 1916, 3–4. 48 Cf. Protocol of the board meeting of the Chevra Kadisha, October 23, 1916. RGWA, 709–1–7. 49 Cf. David Herzog, Kriegspredigten (Frankfurt am Main  : Verlag von J. Kauffmann, 1915). 50 Cf. Protocol of the board meeting of the Chevra Kadisha, November 6, 1916. Russian State Military Archiv (RGWA), 709–1–7.



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However, this does not mean that the Jewish communities did not attend any public commemorative activities. On the contrary, they usually joined them and supported these activities and ceremonies, but they also wanted to preserve their Jewish religious particularism. For example, when the committee for the preservation of the war graves in Austria pursued a joint objective to collect money for war graves during the commemorative services on All Saints’ Day by organizing the “Public War Graves Day”51 in 1917, the German-Jewish journals also published the advertisements for the “Public War Graves Day.”52 Furthermore, Jews as individuals as well as members of the Jewish communities and Jewish associations like the Federation of Jewish War Veterans of Austria participated during and after the war in many public commemorative activities and ceremonies, if they were not excluded due to antisemitic agitations. By attending all these public commemorative activities, they demonstrated their belief that Jews were naturally part of the Austrian society and state and that they appreciated the Christian hegemony to some extent. They also demanded, however, that Christian mainstream society respect Jewish particularism, on the one hand, and Jewish loyalty, patriotism and war sacrifices, on the other. War Memorials and Memorial Plaques Despite the fact that many intersections between the Jewish and gentile political and public practices of memory occurred, the primary spaces for Jewish war memory and memory discourses, both during and after the war, were the German-Jewish journals and, in particular, the specific memoire publications, synagogues and Jewish cemeteries. After the war, almost every Jewish community in Austria erected war memorials or memorial plaques in synagogues or in Jewish cemeteries, normally in the middle of the war grave sections. The list of the fallen soldiers was placed at the center of all these memorials and plaques, just as in the gentile memorials, usually without making any reference to their military or social status. The inscribed names were framed by religious or patriotic symbols and followed by some religious references to the Book of Samuel – the more martial one – or references to the book of the Prophet Isaiah, if the initiators of the memorial wished to lend a sense of peacekeeping to their commemoration.53

51 Cf. “Allgemeiner Kriegsgräbertag Österreich 1917,” Badener Zeitung, October 31, 1917, 1. 52 Cf. Dr. Bloch’s Oesterreichische Wochenschrift, October 26, 1917, 684  ; Jüdische Zeitung, October 19, 1917, 5. 53 Cf. Protocol of the meeting of the committee for the erection of the war memorial on the central

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All of these memorials carried the typical abbreviations that appear on Jewish tombstones. The first memorial plaques and war memorials in Austria were erected in the Synagogue of Döbling in Vienna in 191954 at the Jewish cemetery in Linz in 192055, at the Jewish cemetery in Baden in 192156 and at the Jewish cemetery in Floridsdorf in 192357. With reference to these early memorials, and particularly for the memorial plaque in Döbling, it is characteristic that the Zionist daily Wiener Morgenzeitung did not call it a heroes memorial but a memorial for the Jewish “Victims of War.” In general, it is striking that the first welfare associations for the victims of war, such as the “Association of Jewish War Veterans, Widows and Orphans”,58 were founded immediately after the end of the war and in the first years of the Austrian republic, when political upheavals and enormous misery were on the agenda.59 Like those running the German-Jewish press, these associations were primarily interested in relieving the hardship of the Jewish veterans,60 the war-disabled and widows, and only secondly in supporting specific activities of commemoration, such as erecting war memorials.61 The Association of Jewish War Veterans, Widows and Orphans, which has its roots in an appeal made by Nathan Birnbaum, which appeared in German-Jewish journals from December 191762 and which was then rediscovered in 1919, drew particular attention to the survivors and the wounded, mutilated soldiers as well as to dependents of the fallen soldiers. The organization initiated some work programs and set up social support for the members. In 1917, although cemetery, April 4, 1926 and the program of the call for bids, August, 1926. CAHJP, Archiv der IKG Wien, A/W 1176 a-d. 54 “Eine Gedenktafel für die jüdischen Kriegsopfer,” Wiener Morgenzeitung, October 1, 1919, 5. 55 Cf. Gerald Lamprecht, “Erinnern an den Ersten Weltkrieg aus jüdischer Perspektive 1914– 1938,” in  : zeitgeschichte, 41/4 (2014)  : 242–266, here 252. 56 Cf. “Kriegerdenkmaleinweihung in Baden bei Wien,” Die Wahrheit, July 7, 1921, 11. 57 Cf. “Chewra Kadischa, Floridsdorf,” Die Wahrheit, April 1, 1923, 18. 58 Cf. For the Association of Jewish war veterans, widows and orphans  : WStLA, A32–1807/1929. 59 Beside the “Association of Jewish War Veterans, Widows and Orphans” in 1919 also the “Association of the Jewish Invalids and Repatriates in Vienna” was founded. Cf. “Verband der jüd. Invaliden und Heimkehrer in Wien,” Jüdische Zeitung, November 21, 1919, 7. 60 In July 1926 in Danzig an International Congress of the Jewish Invalids took place and discussed the situation of the Jewish war veterans from an international perspective. In the center of the discussions stood the hardship of the Jewish war Veterans and the lack of acceptance. Cf. “Internationaler Kongreß der Jüdischen Invaliden,” Wiener Morgenzeitung, July 14, 1926, 6  ; “Die erste Weltkonferenz jüdischer Invalider,” Wiener Morgenzeitung, July 18, 1926, 7. 61 Cf. “Helfet den jüdischen Kriegsinvaliden,” Wiener Morgenzeitung, July 24, 1924, 7. 62 Cf. Nathan Birnbaum, “Verband jüdischer Kriegsteilnehmer und Kriegsbeschädigter,” Dr. Bloch’s Wochenschrift, December 28, 1917, 814–16.



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Nathan Birnbaum argued that such an organization not only had to work for the “interest, the fame and honor of the combatants and war-disabled,”63 but also for the Jewish collective and its reputation in the years immediately after the war, there was no place for activities that concerned the questions of the symbolic recognition and representation of the Jewish soldiers and victims of war in the public sphere. This may be because the economic and social crises required all the efforts of the Jewish communities and organizations and pushed all symbolic issues into the background. Another reason could be that the injured, disabled, or shell-shocked soldiers in Austria, which had lost the war, and especially the Jewish ones, did not lend themselves to a national heroic narrative or the narrative of the “fallen hero.” For such a narrative, only the ultimate sacrifice (that of the hero’s death) counts, which Derek Penslar also interpreted as a situation existing in Germany, in contrast to that existing in the victor states of France and England.64 While the Association of Jewish War Veterans, Widows and Orphans was not primarily interested in the erection of Jewish war memorials, we can see that Jewish war memorials and memorial plagues were erected all over Austria from 1919 and especially since the late 1920´s and on. Jewish communities, burial associations (Chevra Kadisha) and the Federation of Jewish War Veterans of Austria, which was founded in Vienna in 1932, were responsible for these. The Federation of Jewish War Veterans was founded by former Austrian Jewish Soldiers after a severe increase in the number of antisemitic agitations and assaults by National Socialists.65 Its main aim was to protest the “permanent defamation and daily defilement of the Jewish name and Jewish honor”66 and to put up an active fight of resistance against both antisemitism and the observance of the civil rights of Jews in Austria. The members of the BJF legitimized their activities by citing their loyal military service for the Habsburg Army, as the head of the federation, off-duty Captain Sigmund Edler von Friedmann, argued in his speech at the general muster on May 5, 1935  : “Was the Jewish 63 “Verband jüdischer Kriegsteilnehmer und Kriegsbeschädigter,” Jüdische Zeitung, December 21, 1917, 1. 64 Derek Penslar, Jews and the Military. A History (Princeton  : Princeton University Press, 2013), 169. 65 Cf. Gerald Lamprecht, “The Remembrance of World War One and the Austrian Federation of Jewish War Veterans,” in The Great War. Reflections, Experiences and Memories of German and Habsburg Jews (1914–1918), eds. Petra Ernst, Jeffrey Grossman, Ulrich Wyrwa, Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History. Journal of Fondazione CDEC, no.9 (October 2016) (url  : www. quest-cdecjournal.it/focus.php  ?id=381, download  : October 13, 2018). 66 “Aufruf zur Gründungsversammlung des Bundes Jüdischer Frontsoldaten im Juli 1932” in Drei Jahre Bund jüdischer Frontsoldaten Österreichs (Vienna n.y.), 18.

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blood that was shed worth less than the blood of the Gentiles  ? No  ! It was the same lifeblood that was shed, the same lifeblood that was wept over by Jewish and gentile mothers. Thus, we do not beg for equality, we do not beg for equal rights, we demand them  !”67 The founders of the BJF did more than raise the idealistic claim for social recognition  ; they also strove for the unification of the fragmented Jewish population in Austria under the leadership of the BJF. They based their claim to leadership on their military service and argued that only former soldiers with their war experiences and the experiences of comradeship would be able to successfully wage the struggle against antisemitism. Based on this conviction, it was only logical that the BJF had a vital interest in bringing Jewish war memory into public discourses and erecting new Jewish war memorials and memorial plaques. Memorials One of the best-known and most impressive Jewish war memorials in Austria was inaugurated in October 1929 on the Jewish section of the central cemetery in Vienna.68 It included all the formerly mentioned symbols and elements and, every year until the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany in March 1938, commemoration ceremonies took place in front of the war memorial. The Jewish community of Vienna initiated the construction of this memorial. Already in 1919, the department responsible for the Jewish cemetery had made its first observations of lending the heroes’ section in the Jewish cemetery an artistic form. To do so, they wanted to hold a competition to gather ideas from Jewish architects in Vienna.69 Due to the difficult economic situation after the war, however, this first initiative could not be carried out, and it took a while until the idea was revived in 1926, and a new call for tender was launched.70 In the fall of 1926, under the leadership of the famous architect, Prof. Clemens Holzmeister, the selection committee decided to accept the memorial concept created by the Viennese Jewish architect Leopold Ponzen71 which had the title “Drawn Star of David in a circle between two horizontal lines.” 67 Drei Jahre Bund jüdischer Frontsoldaten Österreichs, 54. 68 Cf. Gerald Lamprecht, “Erinnern an den Ersten Weltkrieg aus jüdische Perspektive 1914–1918,” 254–256. 69 IKG Wien, Referatsbogen vom 15.1.1919. CAHJP, Archiv der IKG Wien, A/W 1176. 70 Sitzung des Komitees zur Errichtung eines Denkmals am Zentralfriedhof für die jüdischen Krieger, 18.4.1926. CAHJP, Archiv der IKG Wien, A/W 1176. 71 Cf. Iris Meder, “Von Wien nach Shanghai  : Der Architekt Leopold Ponzen,” David. Jüdische Kulturzeitschrift. http://david.juden.at/2008/78/14_meder.htm (accessed November 10, 2018).



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According to the plan, the names of all soldiers who were buried in Vienna as well as all the fallen Jewish soldiers who had died on the various battlefields and were members of the Viennese Jewish community before 1914 were to be inscribed on the memorial.72 For this reason, it was at first necessary to collect the names.73 Therefore, in 1927 and 1928, the Jewish community made calls in German-Jewish as well as other newspapers in Vienna74 and invited the readers to submit all relevant data on their fallen relatives, particularly the name, rank, military force, burial date and burial place.75 Many people responded to this call and, when the memorial was inaugurated in 1929, 400 names of fallen Jewish soldiers were inscribed.76 The main inscription from the book of Isaiah (2  :4) was placed in the center of the memorial along with the listed names of the fallen Jewish soldiers  : “Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore.”77 This inscription was a clear statement for framing the Jewish war memory in terms of peacekeeping, and it corresponded to the Viennese war memorial, which has been designed by sculptor Anton Hanak and was inaugurated in 1925. This war memorial, placed next to the Jewish memorial in the Viennese central cemetery, also connected the memory of the fallen soldiers with the call “Never Again War  !”78 The inauguration of the Jewish war memorial took place on October 13, 1929, and was combined with the inauguration of a memorial plaque that commemorated the Jewish prisoners of war who had died in Vienna and were buried in the Jewish section. In addition to leading members of the Jewish community, the Austrian chancellor, Johann Schober, from the Christian social party and various representatives of Austrian political parties, administrative offices and Polish, Hungarian and German diplomats, a bishop from the Old Catholic Church, a guard of honor from the third infantry regiment and a delegation of the Deutsch­ meisterbund veterans’ organisation attended the ceremony.79 The commemora72 “Kriegerdenkmal der israelitischen Kultusgemeinde,” Neue Freie Presse, July 7.1928, 6. 73 Cf. “Kriegerdenkmal der israelitischen Kultusgemeinde Wien,” Neue Freie Presse, July 9, 1927, 2. (Abendausgabe). 74 We can find announcments in  : Neue Freie Presse, Neues Wiener Tagblatt, Neues Wiener Journal, Extrablatt, Oesterreichische Volkszeitung, Der Tag, Die Stunde, Der Abend, Arbeiterzeitung, Allge­ meine Zeitung, Wiener Mittagszeitung, Sonn- und Montagszeitung, Der Morgen. CAHJP, Archiv der IKG Wien, A/W 1176 a-d. 75 Cf. “Kriegerdenkmal der Israelitischen Kultusgemeinde,” Neue Freie Presse, July 7, 1928, 6. 76 CAHJP, Archiv der IKG Wien, A/W 1176 a-d. 77 Cf. Sitzung des Komitees zur Errichtung eines Denkmales am Zentralfriedhof, 18.4.1926  ; Programm der Ausschreibung, August 1926. CAHJP, Archiv der IKG Wien, A/W 1176 a-d. 78 Cf. “Nie wieder Krieg,” Wiener Morgenzeitung, October 25, 1925, 5. 79 “Enthüllung der Kriegerdenkmäler für jüdische Soldaten,” Neue Freie Presse, October 14, 1929, 4.

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tive address was held by the Viennese Rabbi Julius Max Bach.80 In his speech, which was entitled “The only true war aim is peace,”81 he connected the Jewish death on the battlefield with the “idea of peace among the people,”82 the Jewish loyalty to the fatherland and the rehabilitation of Judaism.83 The President of the Jewish community, Alois Pick, sang the same tune, as well as the following speakers, General Wiesinger and Major Seifert from the Deutschmeisterbund.84 All speakers emphasized the willingness of the Jewish soldiers to make sacrifice and their patriotism. The Viennese memorial from 1929 indicates, on the one hand, like all other Austrian Jewish war memorials and memorial plaques, that the Jewish community in Austria had its particular Jewish places for mourning and memory. On the other hand, the inauguration ceremony and the composition of the memorial convincingly shows the intersections between Jewish and gentile war memory. While we can see that Jews and gentiles remembered the events of the war in separate places but still together, as shown in the cases of the Viennese war memorial and the erection of the Graz war memorial in 193585, we also have very different practices of war memory in Austria. When several memorial activities took place throughout Tyrol in May 1925 in Innsbruck, ten years after the Italian entry into the war, the Jewish Community of Innsbruck also participated and inaugurated a war memorial at the Jewish cemetery.86 In contrast to the events that had taken place in Vienna and Graz, neither high-ranking polit80 Until 1938 Rabbi Bach was Rabbi of the so called “Huber Tempel” in the Hubergasse in Vienna. Cf. Pierre Geneé, Bob Martens, Barbara Schedl, “Jüdische Andachtsstätten in Wien vor dem Jahre 1938,” David. Jüdische Kulturzeitschrift (Dezember 2003)  : 34  ; Evelyn Adunka, “Jüdische Institutionen,” in Evelyn Adunka, Gabriele Anderl, Jüdisches Leben in der Wiener Vorstadt Ot­ takring und Hernals (Wien  : Mandelbaum Verlag 2013), 48–54. 81 “Das einzig wahre Kriegsziel ist der Friede,” Die Wahrheit, October 18, 1929, 3. 82 “Tausend Tote. Das Kriegerdenkmal auf dem Wiener jüdischen Friedhof,” Die Neue Welt, October 18, 1929, 3. 83 Rabbiner Prof. Dr. J. M. Bach, “Das einzig wahre Kriegsziel ist der Friede,” Die Wahrheit, October 18, 1929, 4. 84 Cf. “Kriegerdenkmäler für jüdische Soldaten,” Die Stimme, October 17, 1929, 3. 85 Cf. Gerald Lamprecht, “Der Bund jüdischer Frontsoldaten und das Grazer jüdische Heldendenkmal,” in  : Friedrich Bouvier, Nikolaus Reisinger, Stadtgeschichte aktuell “Graz 1914–1934– 1944… und darüber hinaus…” (Historisches Jahrbuch der Stadt Graz, 44) (Graz  : Leykam Verlag, 2015), 133–148. 86 Cf. Martin Achrainer, “Die jüdische Abteilung am städtischen Friedhof in Innsbruck 1864– 1945,” in Judenbichl. Die jüdischen Friedhöfe in Innsbruck, ed. Thomas Albrich (Innsbruck  : Hamon Verlag, 2010), 81–125, here 108–114  ; Sabine Albrich-Falch, “Jüdisches Leben in Nordund Südtirol,” in Jüdisches Leben im historischen Tirol Bd. 3  : Von der Teilung Tirols 1918 bis in die Gegenwart, ed. Thomas Albrich (Innsbruck  : Haymon Verlag, 2013), 11–186, here 78–82.



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icians nor representatives of the Tyrolian administration, the Austrian Army, or other stakeholder attended the inauguration, because they decided to participate in the general, non-Jewish memorial activities that had been organized by the antisemitic “Front-line Soldiers Association of German-Austria.” Consequently, the initiator of the memorial emphasized their sacrifice for their fatherland in their speeches and stated that they would fight to achieve positions in the state as equal citizens.87 Conclusion Jewish war memory and commemoration practices in Austria had many overlapping elements and similarities with those of the gentiles. By analyzing the Jewish discourses, we can see that the Jewish and gentile agents of memory used the same terms and strategies to lend meaning to the massive numbers of deaths. They invoked the idealistic community of the trenches and comradeship and interpreted the deaths of the soldiers in religious and political ways. Jews have always participated or tried to participate in the public and political commemoration events in Austria and, in doing so, they have stated their intent and willingness to integrate into the society and join the national collective. This integration, however, did not mean that they were willing to abandon their Jewishness and give in to the pressures of cultural and religious alignment and assimilation. Instead, they insisted on expressing their self-consciousness as loyal citizens and Austrian Jews.88 There were also differences between Jews and gentiles due to the historical references that had shaped specific Jewish expectations about the war and Jewish military service. These expectations were part of the particular history of Jewish emancipation and were linked to questions of Jewish identity, religious traditions and political considerations, placing a special emphasis on the position of Jews in state and society. Hereby, antisemitism played an important role. Jewish military service and war memory over the course of the war, as well as during the interwar period, was always connected to aspects of the fight against antisemitism, as well as the wish for social acceptance and the formal guarantee 87 Cf. “Kriegerdenkmal-Einweihung der Innsbrucker Kultusgemeinde,” Die Wahrheit, June 26, 1925, 12  ; “Ein jüdisches Kriegerdenkmal in Innsbruck,” Wiener Morgenzeitung, May 26, 1925, 4. 88 Cf. Marsha L. Rozenblit, “Jewish Ethnicity in a New Nation State. The Crisis of Identity in the Austrian Republic,” in In Search of Jewish Community. Jewish Identities in Germany and Austria, 1918–1933, ed. Michael Brenner, Derek J. Penslar (Bloomington  : Indiana University Press 1998), 134–53, here 135.

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and protection of civil rights lent by the state. Hereby, unlike gentile discourses, the Jewish commemoration of WWI has developed a transnational perspective. Jewish veterans from various countries – also those who had been wartime enemies – founded the “World Federation of Jewish War Veterans” in 1935 in Paris to fight against antisemitism and protect Jewish honor and interests.89

89 Sigmund Edler von Friedmann, the leader of the Federation of Jewish War Veterans of Austria was also the leader of the World Federation of Jewish War Veterans from 1935 to 1940. “Avissar Eitan (Friedman, Sigmund),” in International Biographical Dictionary of Central European Emi­ grés 1933–1945 Bd. 1, directed by Herbert A. Strauss and Werner Röder (München  : K G Saur, 1983), 27.

Ljiljana Dobrovšak

Fallen Jewish Soldiers in Croatia during the First World War As citizens of a country at war, the citizens of the Kingdom of Croatia and Slavonia (then part of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy) participated in all wartime activities during the First World War, regardless of their faith or nationality. Therefore, the Jewish community of Croatia also adapted itself to the wartime circumstances and was included in all war-related activities. Young Jewish men fit for military service were mobilized and sent to various fronts  ; their fathers, grandfathers and brothers were too old or declared unfit for military service but financed the war through their everyday work and purchase of war bonds  ; their mothers, sisters, daughters and wives were active in numerous charity organizations and spent their days collecting monetary aid or food in various ways. The social and political life of the Croatian Jewish communities was frozen until mid1917, while their religious life was limited to celebrating religious holidays. The Zionist and, in part, the Jewish cultural societies ceased their activities, leaving only the charities active. The number of mobilized Croatian Jews remains unknown, as does the number of their dead, since there are still no general summary data on the demographic losses in Croatia during the First World War (died in wartime operation, died of wounds, or died of epidemics, which spread at the fronts). Dead Jewish soldiers were usually buried near the place of their passing, and only a small number lie in graves near their homes. Their names were only rarely inscribed on family tombs or recorded in death registers. It is currently known that there were 33 Jewish communities in the Kingdom of Croatia and Slavonia on the eve of the First World War, 28 of which were included in this study (those which are situated in what is now the territory of Serbia as well as the ones in Istria and Dalmatia have been left out). Only three of these have erected memorials to commemorate the Jewish soldiers who died during the First World War. In this study, I provide provisional estimates of the number of Jewish soldiers from Croatia who died in the War based on the available evidence. Introduction The number of studies that have been published on the First World War in Croatia over the last hundred years is unacceptably small. Although, thanks to

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the recent First World War centenary, some topics that were marginalized or ignored until recently have finally received scholarly attention, many others remain untouched. The works that have been written up until now are mostly related to the political history of Croatia during the First World War and the activities of the Yugoslav Committee and Croatia’s incorporation into the newly-created Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. The average Croat attained his knowledge about the ‘Great War’ from the works of the Croatian writer Miroslav Krleža or the Czech author Jaroslav Hašek, and there were no exhaustive scholarly monographs on the topic. Studies on the number of Croatian victims of the war are few and present a specific problem. In addition, no Yugoslav state or their successors have tried to collect data on the dead, who are buried in the various First World War graveyards and which are scattered throughout the battlefields on which Croatian citizens fought as part of the Austro-Hungarian armed forces. Neither did they maintain the monuments erected to the victims of the First World War. I need only mention that Croatia, unlike the majority of European countries, until recently lacked any official day upon which the victims of the First World War are commemorated. Similarly, Croatian historiographers have performed little research on Croatian Jews in the First World War. The reasons for this are manifold  ; some were already stated in the introduction, while others include the de facto disappearance of Jewish communities – and their documentation – in Croatia after the Second World War, the general lack of histories of local Jewish communities (and what monographs do exist barely mention the First World War at all) and imprecise data on losses. Three scientific reviews and two original scientific papers (both translated into English) on this topic have been published to date. They cover the history of the Jews in Croatia during the First World War,1 but overall research on this topic still lags far behind that of other topics of European historiography,2 1

The first paper on the position of Jews during the First World War was published in  : Ljiljana Dobrovšak, “Fragmenti povijesti Židova u Hrvatskoj za Prvoga svjetskoga rata (1914–1918),” in 1918. u hrvatskoj povijesti, Zbornik radova (Zagreb  : Matica Hrvatska, 2012), 427–454  ; Ljiljana Dobrovšak, “Fragments from the history of the Croatian Jews during the First world war (1914– 1918),” Review of Croatian History X, no. 1 (2014)  : 113–136  ; Ljiljana Dobrovšak, “Fragmenti iz povijesti Židova u Hrvatskoj za Prvog svjetskog rata (1914–1918),” Novi Omanut, Zagreb 124, 4 (2014)  : 1–4  ; Ljiljana Dobrovšak, “Izginuše div junaci,” Novi Omanut 124, 4 (2014)  : 4  ; Filip Hameršak and Ljiljana Dobrovšak, “Croatian-Slavonian Jews in the First World War”, in The Great War. Reflections, Experiences and Memories of German and Habsburg Jews (1914–1918), eds. Petra Ernst and Jeffrey Grossman and Ulrich Wyrwa, Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History. Journal of Fondazione CDEC, n.9 October 2016, 94–121, url  : www.quest-cdecjournal.it/ focus.php  ?id=378. 2 Henry Abramson, A prayer for the Government  : Ukrainian and Jews in Revolutionary Times 1917–1920, (Cambridge, Mass  : Ukrainian Research Institute and Center for Jewish Studies,



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including that of Germany,3 Austria,4 Hungary5 and Serbia6. In addition, several Harvard University, 1999)  ; Mark Levene, War, Jews, and the New Europe  : The Diplomacy of Luc­ ien Wolf 1914–1919 (Oxford  : Oxford University Press, 1992)  ; Aviel Roshwald, “Jewish Cultural Identity in Eastern and Central Europe during in the Great War,” in European Culture in the Great War  : The Arts, Entertainment, and Propaganda 1914–1918, eds. Aviel Roshwald and Richard Stites (Cambridge  : Cambridge University Press, 1999)  ; Anne Lloyd, “Between Integration and Separation  : Jews and Military Service in World War I Britain,” Jewish Culture and His­ tory 12  :1–2 (2012)  : 41–60  ; Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, Jews in the Russian Army, 1827–1917  : Drafted into Modernity (Cambridge – New York  : Cambridge University Press, 2009)  ; S. Ansky, The Enemy at his Pleasure  : A Journey Through the Jewish Pale of Settlement During World War I (New York  : Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company, 2002). 3 Werner E. Mosse, ed., Deutsches Judentum in Krieg und Revolution 1914–1923 (Tübingen  : Mohr, 1971)  ; Steven E. Aschheim, “Eastern Jews, German Jews and Germany’s Ostpolitik in the First World War,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 28 (1983)  : 351–365  ; Michael Berger and Gideon Römer-Hillebrecht, eds., Jüdische Soldaten – jüdischer Widerstand in Deutschland und Frankreich (Paderborn et al.: Schöningh, 2012)  ; Tim Grady, The German-Jewish Soldiers of the First World War in History and Memory (Liverpool  : Liverpool University Press, 2012)  ; Jacob Segell, Die deutschen Juden als Soldaten im Kriege 1914–1918 (Berlin  : Philo-Verlag, 1922). 4 Erwin A. Schmidl, Habsburgs Jüdische Soldaten 1788–1918 (Wien, Köln, Weimar  : Böhlau Verlag, 2014)  ; Erwin A. Schmidl, Juden in der k. (u.) k. Armee 1788–1918  : Studia Judaica Austriaca XI (Eisenstadt  : Österreichisches Jüdisches Museum, 1989)  ; Erwin A. Schmidl, “Jews in the Austro-Hungarian Armed Forces, 1867–1918,” Studies in Contemporary Jewry 3 (New York, Oxford  : Oxford University Press, 1987)  : 127–146  ; István Deák, “Jewish Soldiers in Austro-Hungarian Society,” Leo Baeck Memorial Lecture 34 (1990)  : 1–29  ; István Deák, Beyond National­ ism  : A Social and Political History of the Habsburg Officer Corps, 1848–1918 (New York  : Oxford University Press, 1990)  ; Béla K. Király and Nándor F. Dreisziger, eds., East Central European Society in World War I.: War and Society in East Central Europe, Vol. XIX (New York  : Columbia University Press, 1985)  ; Albert Lichtblau, ed., Als hätten wir dazugehört. Österreichisch-jüdische Lebensgeschichten aus der Habsburgermonarchie (Wien, Köln, Weimar  : Böhlau, 1999)  ; Marsha L. Rozenblit, Reconstructing a National Identity. The Jews of Habsburg Austria during World War I (Oxford  : Oxford University Press, 2001)  ; David Rechter, The Jews of Vienna and the First World War, (London, Portland, Oregon  : The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2001)  ; Erwin A. Schmidl, “Jüdische Soldaten in der k. u. k. Armee,” in Weltuntergang. Jüdisches Leben und Sterben im Ersten Weltkrieg, ed. Marcus Patka (Wien, Graz, Klagenfurt  : Styria, 2014), 45–51  ; Marsha L. Rozenblit, “The Dilemma of Identity  : The Impact of the First World War on Habsburg Jewry,” in The Habsburg Legacy  : National Identity in Historical Perspective, eds. Ritchie Robertson and Edward Timms (Edinburgh  : Edinburgh University Press, 1994)  ; Marsha L. Rozenblit, “For Fatherland and Jewish People  : Jewish Women in Austria during the First World War,” in Authority, Identity and the Social History of the Great War, eds. Frans Coetzee and Marilyn Shevin-Coetzee (Providence, RI et al.: Berghahn Books, 1995)  ; Michael Berger, Eisernes Kreuz, Doppeladler, Davidstern  : Juden in deutschen und österreichisch-ungarischen Armeen  : Der Militär­ dienst jüdischer Soldaten durch zwei Jahrhunderte (Berlin  : Trafo, 2010)  ; Maureen Healy, Vienna and the Fall of the Habsburg Empire  : Total War and Everyday Life in World War I (Cambridge et al.: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 5 A magyar zsidó hadi archívum almanachja (War Almanac of the Hungarian Jewish Archives), eds.

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monographs have been published on the Jewish communities in Zagreb, Požega, Osijek and the Međimurje, but these only briefly touched upon the subject of Jews in the First World War.5 Since no extensive scientific research is currently being conducted on the victims of the Great War from Croatia, and only a single monograph exists in which the author offers an estimate of the victims (including the Jews) of the First and Second World Wars in northwest Međimurje,6 this work is a pioneering attempt to use various sources to produce an estimate of the number of Croatian Jews who perished in the Great War – even though the final numbers will never be known. The First World War The First World War, also known as the Great War by contemporaries (1914– 1918), was the first global conflict that had occurred in the history of mankind. Hevesi Sion, Polnay Jenő and Patai József, (Budapest  : Mag. Zsidó Hadi Archivum, 1916)  ; Péter Bihari, “A forgotten home front. The Middle Classes and the ‘Jewish Question’ in First World War Hungary” (PhD diss., CEU Budapest, 2005)  ; Péter Bihari, Középosztály, zsidókérdés, an­ tiszemitizmus az első világháború Magyarországán (Budapest  : Napvilág Kiado, 2008)  ; Géza Komoróczy, A zsidók története Magyarországon, II., 1849.-től a jelenkorig (Pozsony  : Kalligram, 2012), 328–354  ; József Galántai, Hungary in the First World War (Budapest  : Akadémiai Kiadó, 1989)  ; Ignác Romsics, Magyarorság az első világháborúban (Budapest  : Kossuth Kiadó, Hadtörténeti intézet és múzeum, 2010)  ; Márton Hegedüs, A magyar hadviselt zsidók aranyalbuma  : Az 1914– 1918-as világháború emlékére (Budapest  : Hungária, 1941). 6 Spomenica poginulih i umrlih srpskih Jevreja u balkanskom i svetskom ratu 1912–1918 (Beograd  : Odbor za podizanje spomenika palim jevrejskim ratnicima, Štampa M. Karića, 1927)  ; Milan Koljanin and Vojislava Radovanović, Jevreji Srbije u Prvom svetskom ratu [Serbian Jews in World War One] (Beograd  : Jevrejski istorijski muzej, 2014). 7 Ivo Goldstein, Židovi u Zagrebu 1918–1941 (Zagreb  : Novi Liber, 2004), 25–57  ; Ljiljana Dobrovšak, Židovi u Osijeku od doseljavanja do kraja Prvoga svjetskog rata (Osijek  : Židovska općina Osijek, 2013), 275–297  ; Alen Budaj, Vallis Judaea, Povijest požeške židovske zajednice (Zagreb  : D-Graf, 2007), 139–14  ; Vladimir Kalšan, Židovi u Međimurju (Čakovec  : Muzej Međimurja Čakovec, 2006), 15–16. 8 Branimir Bunjac, Ratne i poratne žrtve sjeverozapadnog Međimurja 1914–1947 (Čakovec  : Povijesno društvo Međimurske županije, 2012), 228. In this monograph, the author mentions a manuscript in Hebrew written by Tibor Grünwald on the history and extinction of the Jewish confessional municipality in Čakovec (Tel Aviv, 1977) 5 B. Bunjac uses Grünwald’s data, which mentions that 188 Jews from Međimurje participated in the First World War, of which 17 died and two were seriously wounded. No names are given, and neither is the source used by Grünwald for these numbers, so this number of dead must be approached with caution, especially since the common memorial erected to all fallen soldiers from Čakovec contains the names of 10 Jews.



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It was originally envisioned as a ‘lightning war’, but soon turned into a long, drawn-out war of attrition. The beginning of the Great War was greeted with enthusiasm in Austria-Hungary because it was believed it would be short and without many casualties, and that territorial expansion would significantly improve the state of Austria-Hungary’s economy.9 In accordance with this general fervor, the Austro-Hungarian Jews, as loyal citizens of the Monarchy, stood with the other nationalities in the first lines of their homeland’s defense. This wasn’t the first time that Jews had participated as soldiers in Austria-Hungarian wars.10 The outcome of the Great War had a profoundly negative effect on its population. The precise data on the number of people who were killed, wounded, mobilized, starved to death, or resettled will probably never be known, since proper records often did not exist, countless bodies were left unburied on the battlefields, states collapsed, civilian losses were difficult to separate from military ones, many wounded died after the end of the Great War but still due to its effects and so on. Here is some approximate of the statistical data available for Austria-Hungary. Finding itself at war with Russia, Serbia and Montenegro, some 54,000 reserve officers and around 2.85 million soldiers (first and second call-ups) were called up to serve in the army, according to the Mobilization Law. They were joined by the peacetime forces that included 36,000 professional officers and 414,000 soldiers who were performing compulsory military service. This meant that altogether some 3,350,000 soldiers were available. However, only around 1.4 million of these served on the front lines, while the others served in the rear areas and in the country’s interior. The national make-up of the troops corresponded to the results of the final census  : 25.2% Austro-Germans, 23.1% Hungarians, 12.9% Czechs and Moravians, 9% Croats and Serbs, 7.9% Poles, 7.6% Rusyns and Ukrainians, 7% Romanians, 3.6% Slovaks, 2.4% Slovenians and 1.3% Italians. The final total came to 8.2 million mobilized soldiers (according to some estimates, 9 million11 and, according to others, 7.8 million12) or around 15.6% of the   9 Miklós Molnár, A concise History of Hungary (Cambridge  : Cambridge University Press, 2001), 240–241. 10 István Deák, “Jewish Soldiers in Austro-Hungarian Society,” Leo Baeck Memorial Lecture 34 (1990)  : 1–29  ; Erwin A. Schmidl, Habsburgs Jüdische Soldaten 1788–1918 (Wien, Köln, Weimar  : Böhlau Verlag, 2014). Erwin A. Schmidl, Juden in der k. (u.) k. Armee 1788–1918, Studia Judaica Austriaca XI (Eisenstadt  : Österreichisches Jüdisches Museum, 1989)  ; Erwin A. Schmidl, “Jews in the Austro-Hungarian Armed Forces, 1867–1918,” Studies in Contemporary Jewry 3 (1987)  : 127–146. 11 International Labour Office, Enquête sur la production. Rapport general, 1923–25. Tom 4, II Les tués et les disparus, (Paris  : Berger-Levrault, 1923), 29. 12 United States War Dept. figures for Austro-Hungarian casualties are  : total mobilized force 7,800,000  ; total casualties, 7,020,000 (including those who were killed and died, 1,200,000  ;

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population.13 According to the official data, 1.4 million people or 17% of the total population died in the Great War. According to other available data, 1.2 million soldiers and 300,000 civilians perished, which would mean that the total number of dead would be equal to 1.5 million and the total number of wounded, 3.62 million.14 In newer publications, the total number of dead has been reported to be 2.2 million people.15 The number of soldiers who were mobilized in the Hungarian part of Austria-Hungary was around 3.8 million, 661,000 of whom lost their lives, 700,000 were wounded and a similar number were captured.16 Since Austro-Hungarian statistics (especially those referring to Transleithania, but also those referring to modern Slovenia) made during the Great War and in the years following it contain a great deal of confusing data on the nationalities, first languages and religious affiliations of members of the population (thus, including the mobilized, wounded and dead), it is difficult to express these in numbers with any degree of certainty.17

wounded, 3,620,000  ; prisoners and missing, 2,200,000) “Military Casualties-World War-Estimated,” Statistics Branch, GS, War Department, 25 February 1924  ; cited in  : William L. Hosch, ed., America at War  : World War I  : People, Politics, and Power (New York  : Britannica, Educational Publishing, 2010), 219. 13 http://1914-1918.com.hr/wp-content/uploads/Tekst%201.%20svjetski%20rat%203.html (accessed April 20, 2016)  ; Österreichisches Bundesministerium für Heereswesen (1938). Österreich-Ungarns letzter Krieg, 1914–1918 Vol. 7. Vienna.VII, Beilage 37  ; John Ellis and Michael Cox, The World War I Databook. The Essential Facts and Figures for All the Combatants (London  : Aurum Press, 2001), 269. 14 “Statistics of the Military effort of the British Empire during the Great War, 1914–1920,” The War Office, March 1922, London, published by his Majesty’s stationery Office, 357. The U.K. War Office estimate for Austro-Hungarian casualties up to 31 December 1918  : total casualties of 7,020,000 including 1,200,000 killed, 3,620,000 wounded and 2,200,000 prisoners. 15 Bryan Cartledge, The Will to Survive. A History of Hungary (London  : Timewell Press Limited, 2006), 312  ; “Military Casualties-World War-Estimated,” Statistics Branch, GS, War Department, 25 February 1924  ; cited in  : William L. Hosch, ed., America at War  : World War I  : People, Politics, and Power (New York  : Britannica, Educational Publishing, 2010), 219. 16 Miklós Molnár, A Concise History of Hungary, (Cambridge  : Cambridge University Press, 2001), 241  ; Iván Bertényi and Gábor Gyapay, Magyarország Rövid Története, (Budapest  : Maecenas 1992), 496   ; https://www.ksh.hu/docs/hun/xftp/idoszaki/haboruvalsag/nagy_haboru.pdf (accessed December 11, 2018). 17 http://1914-1918.com.hr/wp-content/uploads/Tekst%201.%20svjetski%20rat%203.html (accessed April 20, 2016).



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Jews in Austria-Hungary Starting in the 1788s, the Habsburg Monarchy’s Jews were allowed to serve in the armed forces. According to one source, no fewer than 157 Jewish officers served in the Austrian army in 1859 – a number which probably included medical officers and officials. Still, the idea of Jewish officers was apparently not fully accepted until the new Army Law of 1868. In 1872, the first year for which detailed information is available, the number of Jewish soldiers in the I&R Army was reported to be 12,471 or 1.5%. In 1902, this number reached 59,784 or 3.9%.18 During the First World War, some 350,00019 Jewish soldiers were mobilized in the army, although other sources claim the total was 320,00020 or 300,000. There is however, general agreement, that among them there were 25,00021 men with a higher education who served as reserve officers.22 Twenty-five Jews or men of Jewish origin (some were converts) achieved the rank of general.23 A considerable number of these were awarded medals for their bravery.24 Both before and during the First World War, the Jews expressed strong patriotism and solidarity towards the land they were living in. By serving in the military units, the Jews demonstrated their loyalty towards their ruler (Kaiser) and Austria-Hungary. 18 http://ww1.habsburger.net/en/chapters/jewish-soldiers-austro-hungarian-army (accessed December 11, 2018)  ; Schmidl, Juden in der k.u.k. Armee 1788–1918, 96, 102–103, 118–120. 19 Marsha. L. Rozenblit, Reconstructing a National Identity. The Jews of Habsburg Austria during World War I. (Oxford  : Oxford University Press, 2001), 83. 20 h t t p s : / / w w w. g e n i . c o m / p r o j e c t s / G e r m a n - A u s t r o - H u n g a r i a n - J e w i s h - S o l diers-Killed-in-WWI/12439 (accessed December 11, 2018). At the time, of the 2,250,000 of the kingdom’s Jews loyal to Emperor Franz Joseph who fought for ‘the new Europe’, 320,000 joined his army. At this time, Jews enjoyed all civilian rights in the constitutional monarchic union of central Europe. The Jewish soldiers in the emperor’s army did not forget their identity, and the army authorities provided them with religious services. The number of rabbis reached 76 during the war, and they were all granted the officer’s rank of captain. In the Austro-Hungarian Army, Jewish soldiers were given the opportunity to mark the High Holidays in mass prayers held in the field and by sending postcards to their relatives on the home front. Some of these rare postcards are kept in the IDF and Defence Establishment Archive and are being presented here for the first time. The Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed at the end of the First World War. Some 40,000 of its Jewish soldiers were killed in battle. 21 Bihari, A forgotten home front, 126. Data from  : Schmidl, Juden in der k.u.k. Armee 1788–1918, 82–122. 22 Istvan Deák, “Pacesetters of Integration  : Jewish officers in the Habsburg Monarchy,” Eastern European Politics and Societies 3 (1989)  : 22–50  ; István Deák, “Jewish Soldiers in Austro-Hungarian Society,” Leo Baeck Memorial Lecture 34 (1990)  : 1–29. 23 Deák, “Jewish Soldiers,” 1–29. 24 Rozenblit, Reconstructing a National Identity, 82–85  ; Raphael Patai, The Jews of Hungary  : History, Culture, Psychology, (Detroit  : Wayne State University Press, 1996), 459.

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This was most evident on the Eastern Front, where the Austro-Hungarian Jews fought against Russian units, which included many Jewish soldiers, but also fought for the liberation of Russian Jews from Russian rule. On the home front, where there was no direct military activity, Jewish women, wives and mothers worked as nurses in military and civilian hospitals, while the more distinguished female members of the Jewish communities worked as chairwomen of numerous humanitarian associations and, by carrying out various humanitarian actions, participated in the collection of aid for Austro-Hungarian citizens who were negatively affected by the Great War regardless of their faith or nationality (e.g., widows, orphans, or soldiers on the front).25 The Austro-Hungarian Jews were particularly active in funding the war effort. Both Jewish companies and individuals participated in the signing of war bonds, contributing ten percent of the total value. Some individuals were rewarded for this service directly by the ruler with titles of nobility  ; among them also people from Croatia.26 Similarly, a large proportion of Jewish capital was present in arms and war materials production. As some people profited greatly from this and acquired vast wealth, they were treated with suspicion after the Great War ended and were considered usurers and war profiteers, which later contributed to the increase in antisemitism.27 At the same time, while a number of wealthy Jews funded the war effort through bonds, others died on the Serbian (Balkan), Russian, or Italian Fronts. Those who survived the horrors of the war and captivity were often wounded, disabled, or seriously ill, and sometimes even suicidal.28 Jews in Croatia – identity and status until the beginning of the First World War Until the end of the First World War, most members of the Jewish communities in the Kingdom were Ashkenazim, except those in the Jewish communities in Zemun and the Jewish communities in Dalmatia (Split, Dubrovnik), who were mostly Sephardim. The Jews had moved to the Kingdom of Croatia and Slavonia from neighboring and western Hungarian counties or, less often, from Bohemia, Poland, or Galicia. Until the mid-nineteenth century, the Jews 25 Rozenblit, Reconstructing a National Identity, 9–10, 43–44. 26 Patai, The Jews of Hungary, 460  ; Ivan Mirnik, “Obitelj Alexander ili kratka kronika izbrisanog vremena,” Radovi Zavoda za hrvatsku povijest 38 (1995)  : 96–127  ; Narodne Novine (N.N), June 16, 1917  ; “Odlikovanje Š. A. Alexandera,” NN., June 18, 1917  ; Since he donated one million Austrian gold crowns to the state at the beginning of the First World War, Šandor Alexander (1866–1929) was granted the hereditary Hungarian title of nobility ‘Sesvetski’. 27 Patai, The Jews of Hungary, 460. 28 Budaj, Vallis Judaea, 139  ; Magyar Zsidó Lexikon, ed. Péter Ujvári, (Budapest  : 1929), 950.



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in Croatia settled in villages and small towns but, after the Hungarian Revolution of 1848/1849 was put down, they began moving to the cities, where they founded their communities and began keeping registries (mostly from 1852 and on). In the mid-nineteenth century, some of the Jewish communities in Croatia opted for religious reforms. When the Jewish congress met in Hungary in 1868– 1869, the majority of Jewish communities in Croatia opted for the Reformed / Neologs. However, Orthodox communities continued to exist as an integral part of the majority Neolog communities, rather than as separate communities, although some of them kept separate administrations and statutes. A few Jewish communities declared themselves as Status Quo communities after the schism, but eventually they would also become Reformed / Neolog communities in the early twentieth century. The only exceptions were the Jewish communities in Zemun and Ilok. The Zemun community had separate Reformed Ashkenazi (German) and Orthodox Sephardic communities, while the Jewish community in Ilok, although small in terms of population, had as many as three separate religious streams  : Neolog, Sephardic and Orthodox. The Jews in Croatian society in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were considered to be a religious / confessional minority and were noted as such in official censuses. This was not something that specifically characterized them, since people of all nationalities, including Croats, were seen primarily through the prism of confession rather than national affiliation and were recorded according to their stated religious and linguistic affiliations. Until the outbreak of the First World War, the Jewish communities in Croatia were bilingual (German / Croatian), and sometimes trilingual or multilingual (German / Hungarian / Croatian / Yiddish / Polish). Their identification with the majority Croatian population was a slow process. Until the late nineteenth century, most Jewish communities in Croatia spoke German but, at the beginning of the twentieth century, Croatian became dominant (e.g., in 1900, 68.36% of the Jews in Osijek spoke German and 13.09% Croatian, while in 1910, 44.74% spoke German and 31.24% Croatian) while Jewish speakers of Hungarian, Yiddish, or Polish were very few in number. After achieving emancipation in Croatia in 1873, Jews began participating in Croatian politics, mostly supporting the ruling parties (e.g., Ljudevit Schwarz,29 Oskar Weiszmayer,30 Hugo Spitzer31), though some aligned themselves with the 29 Ljudevit Schwarz (1858–1943), lawyer and politician. Member of the Unionist Party (1887– 1906 and 1910–13) and, as such, the first Jewish member of the Croatian Parliament. He was also a member of the Common Croatian-Hungarian State Parliament in Budapest (1892–1913) and a city councilor in Zagreb’s Assembly (1892–1904). 30 Oskar Weiszmayer (1855–1931), banker and financial expert from Osijek. Member of the People’s Party. Lived in Osijek, later in Zagreb. 31 Hugo Spitzer (1858–1934), attorney and politician from Osijek. President of the Osijek Jewish

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Party of the Right – Josip Frank32 became the leader of the newly-established Pure Party of the Right (Frankists) after the schism in the party and the death of Ante Starčević, while others later joined the Croat-Serb Coalition (Hinko Hinković33). The Social-Democratic Party of Croatia and Slavonia was founded in 1894 and was small at the time, having a quite limited number of members. The Zionist movement that appeared in Austria-Hungary in the late nineteenth century resonated poorly in Croatia, but was nonetheless noticed. Three representatives from Croatia (two rabbis, who later emigrated to Palestine, and one businessman) participated at the First Zionist Congress, while four Zionist congresses were held in Croatia  : Osijek 1904 and 1906, Zemun 1908 and Slavonski Brod 1909. Zionist associations were founded from 1904 and onwards, while the Jewish (Zionist) magazine Židovska smotra [ Jewish Review] was established in 1906. But all of this was not enough for the Zionist idea to become popular among the Croatian Jews. This would all change during and after the end of the First World War, when the majority of Jewish communities in Croatia became Zionist. We can conclude that the assimilation or, more accurately stated, the acculturation of the Jews into Croatian society began after they achieved emancipation in the 1880s and ended on the eve of the First World War.34 Because community in the Upper Town, honorary president of the Zionist Federation of Yugoslavia and honorary president of the Zionist Federation of Yugoslavia. Elected as an Osijek city government representative multiple times (1901, 1907, 1919). 32 Josip Frank (1844–1911), attorney and politician. Converted. City councilor from 1880  ; member of parliament from 1884 till 1911. In 1884, he became affiliated with the Party of the Right  ; after the schism of 1895, he and Ante Starčević founded the Pure Party of the Right and he became its leader after Starčević’s death. 33 Hinko Hinković, (11 Sep 1854–3 Sep 1929), Croatian politician and attorney. Born Heinrich Moses. Member of the Party of the Right (1884–1886). In 1909, he was the main attorney at the show trial against members of the Serb Independent Party. Sentenced to six months in prison due to a statement made for the press. Emigrated. After returning to Croatia in 1913, he joined the Croat-Serb Coalition. Spent the First World War in emigration, where he was active in an anti-Austro-Hungarian campaign. Participated in the founding of the Yugoslav Committee, but came into conflict with it in 1918 due to independent political activity. Also came into conflict with Nikola Pašić and other advocates of centralism and Serbian hegemony. In the Yugoslav state, Hinković was a prominent opponent of centralism and unitarism, advocating a reform of the monarchist Yugoslavia along federalist principles. http://www.enciklopedija.hr/natuknica. aspx  ?id=25584 (accessed December 11, 2018). 34 Ljiljana Dobrovšak, “Odjeci Dreyfusove afere u hrvatskoj javnosti od 1894. do 1906,” Historijski zbornik LX (2007)  : 129–159  ; Ljiljana Dobrovšak, “Prvi cionistički kongres u Osijeku 1904,” Časopis za suvremenu povijest 37, 2 (2005)  : 479–495  ; Ljiljana Dobrovšak, “Razvoj židovskih zajednica u Kraljevini Hrvatskoj i Slavoniji (1783–1873)” (PhD diss., Zagreb, 2007), 444–451  ; Dobrovšak, Židovi u Osijeku, 263–276  ; Naida Mihal Brandl, “Židovski identiteti/i u Hrvatskoj nakon drugog svjetskog rata  : kratak pregled,” in Zbornik radova Nacionalne manjine u Hrvatskoj



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of all this, when one speaks of the Jewish identity in Croatia at the turn of the twentieth century, it is better to speak in terms of identities (note the plural). I can also refer to Marsha L. Rozenbilt, who wrote in her book that the identity of Jews in the Habsburg Monarchy was three-fold, i.e., a tripartite identity  ; it was expressed first through political loyalty to Austria, then through loyalty to the Germans (or Croats, Hungarians, etc.) and finally through loyalty to Judaism as an ethnicity. All of these identities existed simultaneously.35 The First World War, Jews and Croatia Once war had been declared, the population of the Kingdom of Croatia and Slavonia, as citizens of a country at war, were required to participate in the war effort.36 After war broke out, Jewish men of military age, regardless of their social status, were mobilized and sent to various battlefields (first the Serbian Front). Numerous soldiers from Croatia died in these military operations. In the early stages of the Great War, those whose bodies were recovered and those who died in military hospitals were buried in local cemeteries with the highest honors,37 but as the War dragged on, the battlefields became more distant, and the fighting grew more brutal, so that only the news that a soldier had died, been buried, or went missing reached the home front. The exact number of victims of the First World War in Croatia still has not been determined. According to estimates made by some historians, almost one million people (around 496,000 ethnic Croats) from the territories of the Kingdom of Croatia, Slavonia and Dalmatia, Istria and Bosnia and Herzegovina were mobilized during the Great War, while between 170,000 and 190,000 lost their lives.38 Official statistics collected during and after the First World War show that some 100,000 soldiers from the Kingdom of Croatia and Slavonia died from wounds or diseases during the Great War. Statistical estimates paint a different picture, citing from 95,000 to 370,000 irrecoverable losses (i.e., killed, i Hrvati kao manjina  – europski izazovi, eds. Ljiljana Dobrovšak and Ivana Žebec Šilj, (Zagreb  : Biblioteka ZBORNICI, 2015), 167–194  ; Naida Mihal Brandl, “Die Natur der jüdischen Identitäten in den kroatischen Ländern im langen 19. Jahrhundert,” in Das Judentum im pann­ onischen Raum vom 16. Jahrhundert bis zum Jahr 1914, (Internationales Kulturhistorisches Symposium on Mogersdorf, 2009), 65–70. 35 Rozenblit, Reconstructing a National Identity, 4, 20. 36 Budaj, Vallis Judaea, 140. 37 Budaj, Vallis Judaea, 140  ; Dobrovšak  ; Fragmenti, 430. 38 http://1914-1918.com.hr/wp-content/uploads/Tekst%201.%20svjetski%20rat%203.html (accessed April 20, 2016).

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missing, died of war-related causes, or died of epidemics).39 The unreliability of the contemporary statistics becomes most obvious when examining the data published in newspapers. In a report by Rudolf Horvat published in a Varaždin newspaper in February 1918, the author cited official military district data from September 2, 1917, according to which only 6,433 soldiers born in Croatia and Slavonia had died in the war by then. This number includes only those who had died in the field, i.e., those found dead and buried, while those who had disappeared or died later from their wounds or disease were not counted. At the beginning of 1918, the author stressed that the number of Croats from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Istria, Dalmatia and the Međimurje who died was unknown, as was the number of those who died in captivity (POW camps in Russia, Italy and Serbia), but he estimated the number of Croatian victims as falling between 15,000 and 50,000.40 Since there are no detailed studies on lists of losses, talking about the exact number of dead remains a ‘mission impossible.’ The situation with regard to estimates of Jewish deaths in Austria-Hungary is similar. Some historians claim that 10,000 Hungarian Jews or 40,000 Austro-Hungarian Jews perished.41 No detailed research on these numbers has been performed, however, so the number of Austro-Hungarian Jews who died remains unknown. As we have noted, the estimates of deaths for Hungary range from 5,000 to 10,000.42 Considering the Jewish victims in Croatia, the situation becomes even more complex, since the total number of fallen Croatian soldiers is based on estimates, and there is little data on the number of Jewish victims. If a study of the number of dead Croatian Jews were begun, one could refer to several sources, but most do not contain all the necessary data. If the population censuses of 1910 and 1921 were compared, they would not reveal anything about the demographic 39 Branko Ostajmer and Vlado Geiger, “Spomenici-kenotafi poginulim, nestalim i od posljedica rata preminulim vojnicima iz Đakova i Đakovštine u Prvom svjetskom ratu,” Zbornik Muzeja Đakovštine 11 (2013)  : 139–156. 40 “Koliko je Hrvata poginulo u ovom ratu  ?,” Hrvatsko pravo, Varaždin, February 9, 1918. 41 Rozenblit, Reconstructing a National Identity, 15. The final census of 1910 was conducted several years before the outbreak of the First World War and recorded 932,458 Jews (4.5% of the total population) in the Hungarian part of Austria-Hungary (Transleithania) and 1,313,687 Jews (4.6%) in the Austrian part of the state (Cisleithania). The largest groups of Jews in Austria lived in the northeast provinces  : Galicia (871,906) and Bukovina (102,919), while some parts of the state (e.g., the Alpine provinces, the Adriatic coast) had few or almost no Jews at all. The remainder of the Austrian Jews lived in Bohemia (85,826), Moravia (41,158), Silesia (12,442) and, of course, Vienna (175,318). According to other statistical indicators, there were 2,157,458 Jews in Austria-Hungary in 1910, including 1,225,000 (4.7%) in Austria, 911,227 (5%) in Hungary and 21,231 (0.8%) in the Kingdom of Croatia and Slavonia. 42 http://www.holocaust-history.org/hungarian-photos/ (accessed February 25, 2014)  ; Magyar Zsidó Lexikon, 950.



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losses of Jews in Croatia, since in the meantime Croatia had become part of a new state, and many changes in its internal borders took place. According to the 1910 official statistical data from the Kingdom of Croatia and Slavonia (sans Dalmatia, Baranja, Međimurje, Istria and Rijeka), there were 21,231 Jews living in Croatia, representing 0.8% of the total population. Most were living in Zagreb, followed by the counties of Srijem, Virovitica and Požega.43 On the eve of the war in 1914, a total of 21,220 Jews were living in Croatia (out of a total of 935,196 living in the Hungarian part of Austria-Hungary), and 21,065, in 1915 (933,316 in the Hungarian part).44According to the post-war population census from 1921, there were 20,562 Jews living in Croatia, Slavonia and Međimurje, and only 314 living in Dalmatia.45 These differences between the censuses from 1915 and 1921 indicate that the Jewish population in Croatia and Slavonia dropped by 503 persons. The number of Jews kept falling as the years went by, but this was not only the result of Jews dying on various battlefields, but also the result of lower birth rates due to the mobilization of young men and lower number of marriages and newborn children. Furthermore, the mortality rate in late 1918 and early 1919 was higher due to the ‘Spanish flu’ that struck the whole world, including Croatia, where it arrived in July 1918 and reached its peak in October.46 The number of Jewish dead in the Kingdom of Croatia and Slavonia (preliminary research) The precise number of Croatian Jews who perished during the Great War can only be determined by creating a list of victims by name, which is something I have attempted to do. Although this effort does not offer us full insight into the number of persons who died during the Great War, it represents the first step in an attempt to determine the number of victims, although the exact number may never be known. The list of the dead has been compiled on the basis of several sources, including the death registers from existing Jewish communities, obituaries published in newspapers, lists appearing in official publications and reports, 43 Magyar Statisztikai évkönyv, XXII, 1914, (1916)  : 14  ; Popis žiteljstva od 31. XII. 1910. u Hr­ vatskoj i Slavoniji, demografske prilike i zgrade za stanovanje, (Zagreb  : Kr. zemaljski statistički ured u Zagrebu, 1914), 364–365. 44 Magyar Statisztikai évkönyv, XXII, 1914, (1916), 48. 45 Definitivni rezultati popisa stanovništva od 31. januara 1921 (Sarajevo  : Državna štamparija, 1932), 2–3. 46 Goran Hutinec, “Odjeci epidemije ‘španjolske gripe’ 1918. godine u hrvatskoj javnosti,” RadoviZavoda za hrvatsku javnost 38 (2006)  : 227–242.

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memoires and even the lists carved into memorials erected to honor the fallen soldiers of the First World War. The death registers of Jewish communities (bearing in mind that some of these were lost during the Second World War) rarely contain the names of the Jews who died in combat, since they were usually buried at or near their place of death on the Eastern, Balkan or Italian Fronts (in Galicia, Serbia, or Italy), i.e., outside their homeland and their native region, except for those who died after being sent back home due to injury or disease.47 One must also bear in mind the existence of the territorial principle, which meant that the register-keeper, in this case the rabbi, noted down only those deaths that occurred on the territory of his parish, i.e., the appropriate territorial unit. A register-keeper in a given confessional unit was prohibited by law from noting down the death of a parish member beyond the boundaries of his territorial jurisdiction, whether it was in the neighboring parish or in faraway Galicia. However, the findings of this research confirm that this rule was not always obeyed to the letter, and that confessional registrars – whether due to ignorance or the pressure of their circumstances – sometimes recorded deaths that occurred outside their territory.48 It should be mentioned here that the death registers of some Jewish communities (e.g., Vukovar, Zagreb, Osijek and Varaždin) also include the names of Jewish POWs who died in hospitals due to disease or other war-related causes. These names have been omitted from this compiled list. Although I mostly referred to death notices published in daily or local newspapers when compiling this list, these could not be fully relied upon, because not all Jewish families published them. In addition, in many areas where Jewish communities were present (there were 33 Jewish communities in the territory of the Kingdom of Croatia and Slavonia), newspapers simply did not exist during the relevant period (1914–1918). Furthermore, newspapers only published notices about a soldier’s death if it had been confirmed, i.e., if his body had been found. Many bodies were never recovered  ; some soldiers died in POW camps, others on their way to the camps, during their return from captivity, in hospitals, or after the war ended. Their deaths were confirmed in the years after the war, so that the exact number of the dead remained unknown even in the interwar period. The only fully reliable indicators for Jewish victims are the inscriptions on tombstones that were erected during and after the Great War, and even these do not contain all relevant data. This research encompassed 28 Jewish communities within the frame of the Kingdom of Slavonia and one outside it (Međimurje), for 47 “Ekshumacije palih junaka” Hrvatsko pravo, Varaždin, October 14, 1916. 48 Filip Hameršak, “Prilog povijesti matičarstva u kraljevinama Hrvatskoj i Slavoniji s obzirom na Prvi svjetski rat,” Manuscript, (Zagreb, 2014), 25–26.



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a total of 29 communities. Although 33 Jewish communities were recognized up until 1918, those which are currently found on the territory of the Republic of Serbia (Mitrovica, Erdevik, Ruma and the Orthodox and Reformed community in Zemun) as well as the three Jewish communities of Istria and Dalmatia (Split, Dubrovnik and Rijeka) were not included in this research. Due to the fact that this research is still ongoing and incomplete, the names of the fallen Jews are not listed here. Instead, a focus is placed on the analysis of the verifiable data that has been collected up until now. Partial data has been collected for sixteen of the 29 Jewish communities mentioned above. A total of 107 victims are known by name and surname. For some of these, full data is available, such as the military unit they served with, date and place of birth, rank, place of death, place of burial and cause of death, but in most cases, these data are missing or non-existent. It was not possible to determine where most of them died. The most common listed place of death is the Russian Front (Galicia), followed by the Serbian Front and, finally, the Italian Front. Some of these victims died of their wounds in one of the hospitals, usually located in Zagreb, Varaždin, or in Hungary. Three of the 29 Jewish communities erected memorials to the Jews who died in the First World War  : in Križevci, Koprivnica and Zagreb. The memorial in Zagreb also bears the names of Jews from outside the city. According to the available data (extracted from newspaper reports) from the Jewish communities in Bjelovar, three of its members died  : two on the Russian Front49 and one on the Serbian Front.50 A memorial that was erected in Čakovec’s central city park in 1929 bears the names of 72 fallen Austro-Hungarian soldiers, but does not include data on their places of death or military ranks. According to historian V. Kalšan, this list includes the names of eleven Jews from Čakovec,51 while historian B. Bunjac claims there are only ten of them.52 Even though a photo panel with the names of 133 fallen Austro-Hungarian soldiers from Đakovo has been made,53 this panel contains no data on their religious 49 Ženi Lebl, Da se ne zaboravi, (Beograd  : latinica, 2008), 204–205  ; Adolf Benau and Oskar Grof/ Graf, “Mrtvim drugovima”, Gideon 9–11, ( June 1922)  : 184  ; “Pali hrvatski junaci”, Ilustrovani list, July 29, 1916. 50 Zoran Abramović et al., Bjelovar u velikom ratu 1914–1918 (Bjelovar  : Gradski muzej Bjelovar, 2014), 67. 51 Kalšan, Židovi u Međimurju, 15. 52 Bunjac, Ratne i poratne žrtve, 225. 53 Vladimir Geiger, “O nekim popisima poginulih, nestalih i od posljedica rata preminulih vojnika iz Đakova i Đakovštine u Prvom svjetskom ratu,” Zbornik muzeja Đakovštine 9 (2009)  : 85–102  ; Đakovo i Đakovština u Prvom svjetskom ratu 1914–1918, eds. Branko Ostajmer and Vladimir Geiger (Đakovo  : Muzej Đakovštine, 2014), 22–23.

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affiliations, and their surnames do not suggest their Jewish decent  ; thus, these names cannot be considered without a more detailed analysis. The only reliable data available for a fallen Jewish soldier from Đakovo was taken a family cenotaph in a Jewish cemetery, which contained his portrait, name, surname and place of death (in Serbia).54 According to the available data (newspaper reports), three Jews from Karlovac, two of whom were brothers, died in the war. One brother died on the Italian Front, while the other died of his wounds in Serbia.55 There are no data on the third except for his name and surname.56 Six Jews from the Križevci community perished. Their names were carved into a memorial erected at the Jewish cemetery in Križevci in 1935. This memorial was built as a result of the initiative of several members of the Jewish community in Križevci and the Chevra Kadisha charity. The memorial holds the names of the fallen soldiers, their ranks and places of death. Four died on the Russian Front, one on the Italian Front, while the final soldier’s place of death remains unknown.57 This is one of the rare examples of a memorial that has been preserved in its original form. At least nine members of the Jewish community in Koprivnica died in the war. The Chevra Kadisha also erected a collective memorial to these soldiers at the city graveyard in 1934.58 The memorial contains the name of nine fallen Jews, their ranks and their ages at the times of their deaths. In 1975, this monument was modified to include the names of the Jews who died during the Nazi period, i.e., to the numbers ‘1914’ and ‘1918’ ‘1941’ and ‘1945’ were added. Nothing else was changed on the monument.59 One soldier from the Kutina Jewish community (i.e., from Čazma) is currently known to have died in the war. We know his name and surname as well as the data related to his death.60 One member of the Ludbreg Jewish community died of his wounds. Since he died in a hospital in Zagreb, his name was recorded on the memorial erected in honor of the fallen 54 Ostajmer and Geiger, Spomenici-kenotafi, 139–156. 55 “Pali hrvatski junaci”, Ilustrovani list, February 20, 1915. 56 “Poginuli”, Židov, July, 1, 1918. 57 Renée Weisz- Maleček, Židovi u Križevcima (Zagreb  : Židovska općina, 2012), 96  ; “Spomenik na groblju u Križevcima, popis imena. Posvećenje spomenika palim ratnicima u Križevcima,” Židov, August 23, 1935  ; “Križevci, Otkriće i posvećenje spomenika ratnicima palim u ratu 1914–18,” Židov, September 27, 1935. 58 “Stogodišnjica Hevre Kadiše u Koprivnici,” Židov, June 1, 1934  ; “Otkrivanje spomenika palim Židovima u svjetskom ratu,” Podravske novine, November 17, 1934. 59 Krešimir Švarc, “Prilozi za povijest Koprivničkih Židova,” Podravski zbornik 17 (1991)  : 169  ; Hrvoje Petrić, ‘Sukob sjećanja i simbola’ O spomeničkoj baštini i sjećanju na svjetske ratove u kopriv­ ničkoj Podravini, Podravski zbornik (Koprivnica  : Muzej grada Koprivnice, 2012), 44–48. 60 “Pali hrvatski junaci,” Ilustrovani list, May 19, 1917  ; Prvi svjetski rat u čazmanskom kraju, Pre­ dratno, ratno i poslijeratno razdoblje 1912–1920 (Čazma  : Gradski muzej Čazma, 2014), 27.



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Jews found in Zagreb. There are various sources for the number of Jews from Osijek who died in the war, which are mostly inscriptions on family tombs or death notices in newspapers.61 According to these, eight Jews from Osijek perished, including three at the Russian Front,62 one at the Italian Front,63 two at the Serbian Front,64 one in an Osijek hospital who died from the Spanish flu contracted in the field65 and one whose place of death remains unknown.66 A memorial erected at the town cemetery in Pakrac lists the names of the local Jews who died in the Great War. It includes the names of fallen soldiers from the area around the town. Since it contains only their names and surnames, it is only possible to confirm that four died.67 In addition, this memorial mentions the name of another soldier who died of his wounds in a hospital in Zagreb and was buried there. His name is not to be found on the Zagreb memorial, but is present in the Register of Military Persons  – Jews who died in Zagreb from 1914–1918.68 According to the research performed by A. Budaj, three Jews from the Požega community perished in the Great War  : one was fatally wounded on the Russian Front,69 while two died of their wounds in hospitals in Zagreb. Their names are found on the memorial in Zagreb. One member of the Sisak community perished. He died soon after war broke out, probably on the Serbian Front, and he was buried in Zagreb.70 The total number of the Jewish dead from the Varaždin Jewish community remains unknown. Some data are available for eleven of these men  ; specifically, data on where some were wounded, where some died and even where some were buried, but for some, these data are still unknown. Most were wounded on the Russian Front (5), followed by the Serbian Front (4) and the Italian Front (1), while the last one was wounded at an unknown location. Most of them were in a hospital in Varaždin when they succumbed to their wounds, 61 Dobrovšak, Židovi u Osijeku, 284–286. 62 Hrvatska obrana, July 26, 1915  ; Hrvatska obrana, May 22, 1918. 63 Vjesnik županije virovitičke, July 15, 1915. 64 “Hesped za židovske vojnike u Nišu,” Židov, July 20, 1923. 65 “Ervin Krauss,” Židov, December 15, 1918. 66 Jüdisches Archiv, Mitteilungen des Komitees “Jüdisches Kriegsarchiv,” Nr. 8–9, Jänner 1917. 67 Photographs, private archive. 68 Croatian state Archives, HDA-75, Matične knjige vojnih osoba – Židova, Matična knjiga umrlih 1914–1918 / Register book of Military Person-Jews / Death Records 1914–1918. 69 Gideon, June, 1922  ; Budaj, Vallis Judaea, 141  ; Jüdische Archiv, mitteilungen des Komitees “Jüdisches Kriegsarchiv,” liefern 2–3, August, 1915, 27. 70 Croatian state Archives, HDA-75, Matične knjige vojnih osoba – Židova, Matična knjiga umrlih 1914–1918 / Register book of Military Person-Jews / Death Records 1914–1918  ; Budaj, Vallis Judaea, 141–142.

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while one died in a hospital in Bijeljina (Bosnia).71 Most were buried at the Jewish cemetery in Varaždin.72 Data are available for two soldiers from the Vinkovci Jewish community, but their places of death remains unknown.73 Most of the dead hailed from the Zagreb Jewish community. The memorial erected in 1930 in the Jewish part of Mirogoj is a testament to this. With this memorial, the Chevra Kadisha immortalised not only the names of Zagreb’s Jewish soldiers who died in the Great War, but also of all other Jewish soldiers who were buried in Zagreb but did not hail from the city itself, being members of other Jewish communities (e.g., Ludbreg, Našice). One side of the memorial contains the names of 23 fallen Jews from Zagreb, while the other bears the names of 26 Jews from other municipalities.74 There are no detailed data alongside the names, but a comparison with the Register of Deaths allowed me to obtain more detailed information about each of the victims.75 Conclusion I can conclude that, after analyzing various sources, data for sixteen Jewish communities were obtained, but even these are not complete. The names and surnames of 107 victims are now known. For some of these, a complete set of data is available, including data on the military unit, date and place of birth, rank, 71 “Obavijest o smrti,” Hrvatsko pravo, September 19, 1914, 4  ; Croatian state Archives, Register books, E, 285, DVD 80, Varaždin, Matične knjige umrlih varaždinske židovske općine 1878– 1943  ; Filip Škiljan, “Prvi svjetski rat u Europi i Hrvatskom Zagorju,” Zagorsko lice boga rata (Gornja Stubica  : Muzej Zagorja, 2014), 55  ; Hrvatsko pravo, April 7, 1917  ; “Prevoz smrtnih ostanaka sa ratišta”  ; Hrvatsko pravo, April 28, 1917. 72 HDA, Register Books, E, 285, DVD 80, Varaždin, Matične knjige umrlih varaždinske židovske općine 1878–1943 (Death Records of Jewish community in Varaždin)  ; Škiljan, Prvi svjetski, 55  ; “Obavijest o smrti”, Hrvatsko pravo, September 19, 1914  ; April 7, 1917  ; April 28, 1917  ; “Obavijest o smrti,” Hrvatsko parvo December 6, 1914  ; “Pali Hrvatski junaci”, Ilustrovani list, July 17, 1915  ; “Hrvatski junaci,” Hrvatsko pravo, May 8, 1915  ; “Pali Hrvatski junaci,” Ilustrovani list, November 7, 1914  ; Hrvatsko pravo, September 23, 1916  ; “Obavijesti o smrti,” Hrvatsko pravo, November 8, 1916  ; “Pali Hrvatski junaci”, Ilustrovani list, February 13, 1915. 73 Tomo Šalić, Židovi u Vinkovcima i okolici, (Osijek  : Židovska općina Osijek, 2002), 66, 413  ; Ivan Ćosić Bukvin, Vrbanjci u Velikom ratu 1914–1918 (Vrbanja, 2014), 62. 74 “Hevra Kadiša posvećuje spomenik ratnim žrtvama,” Židov, September 26, 1930  ; “Zagreb, Posvećenje spomenika židovskim vojnicima koji počivaju na groblju u Zagrebu,” Židov, October 3, 1930, 7  ; Croatian state Archives, HDA-75, Matične knjige vojnih osoba – Židova, Matična knjiga umrlih 1914–1918 / Register book of Military Person-Jews / Death Records 1914–1918. 75 Croatian state Archives, HDA-75, Matične knjige vojnih osoba – Židova, Matična knjiga umrlih 1914–1918 / Register book of Military Person-Jews / Death Records 1914–1918.



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place of death, place of burial and cause of death. For most soldiers, however, this information is incomplete or missing. The most common place of death identified was the Eastern Front, followed by the Serbian (Balkan) Front and, finally, the Italian Front. Only three of 29 Jewish communities have erected memorials to the fallen Jews, while the names of those from other communities are found on collective memorials (Pakrac, Čakovec). The greatest number of those who perished hailed from the territory of the Zagreb Jewish community, followed by the territories of the Koprivnica and Osijek communities. It will probably never be possible to learn the exact number of Croatian Jews who perished, but the findings of the research presented here at least presents researchers with a foundation that can serve as the basis of further research.

Veronika Szeghy-Gayer

Jewish War Memory as a Local Community Building Project – the Heroes’ Memorial in Prešov, Slovakia1 In this paper, I examine the WWI memorial in Prešov, Slovakia, which was erected in 1937 by the local Neolog Jewish community.2 The original idea was to build a transnational monument to commemorate all WWI heroes from the city  ; therefore, the initiators of the project attempted to mobilize the entire population of the city (Slovaks, Magyars, Germans, Jews and Rusyns) in the second half of the 1920s, regardless of their ethnic or denominational background. The main purpose for conducting this analysis was to show why the original idea was not carried out and how the Prešov Neolog Jewry created its own, separate WWI memorial. Furthermore, I explore and describe the attitude of the local Czech, Slovak and Hungarian elites toward the erection of the Jewish War memorial of 1937. As the Jewish memory of WWI in interwar Slovakia is a topic that has been relatively poorly studied,3 it is worth examining the case of the Prešov Jewry in detail, and the Neolog community in particular, that established the first Jewish Museum and erected one of the first Jewish WWI memorials in Slovakia. In the paper, I consider Jewish identity neither as an ethnic nor national category, but as an origin and religious affiliation, since the investigated Neolog community itself defined its Jewishness as such. However, when I describe the Jewish national politics in interwar Czechoslovakia, I refer to Zionism, although 1 2

The paper was written as part of the project OTKA n. K109173. Neolog Judaism is a Jewish religious movement in Hungary which differentiated itself from the traditionalist and conservative Orthodox organization. It was institutionalized after the Hungarian Jewish Congress was created in 1868–1869. There were a few congregations which did not join the Neolog or Orthodox community, but retained their former pre-congress status, so they were called status quo ante congregations. In the territory of interwar Slovakia, the majority of Jewish communities were Orthodox (120). The thirty Neolog religious organizations together with the 25 status quo ante communities created their own central institution, the so-called Jesurun in 1928. Socially, but also from a religious point of view, Neologs were characterized by their more liberal and modernist ways of thinking. They were more inclined to accept their integration into the Hungarian society than the Orthodox Jews. 3 The only paper that deals with this question to a certain extent describes the Heroes’s Temple Commemoration Project in Budapest, as investigated by Rebekah Klein-Pejšova. Rebekah Klein-Pejšova, Mapping Jewish Identities in InterWar Slovakia (Bloomington and Indianapolis  : Indiana University Press, 2015), 109–114.

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I am aware that some scholars make a distinction between Jewish nationalism and Zionism. In interwar Prešov, Zionists and Jewish nationalists were not clearly differentiated.4 The term Slovakia is understood here as a geographical and administrative unit within the first Czechoslovak Republic. It was a territory that belonged to the Hungarian Kingdom, also called Upper Hungary, before 1918. This territory consisted of sixteen counties inhabited by mainly ethnic Slovaks. However, I use the terms Slovak or Hungarian elite or community to refer to the ethnic groups living in Prešov that were mostly represented by ethnic political parties, such as the Hlinka’s Slovak People Party or the (Hungarian) Christian Socialist Party. The term Czechoslovak elite is understood as group of people that identified with the state politics and the idea of Czechoslovakism. When writing about the local aspects of the Great War memory and local community building, I also refer to regionalism. In doing so, beyond Prešov, I refer to the entire Šariš region that is situated in the northeastern part of Slovakia. Šariš (in Hungarian  : Sáros) was a predominantly Slovak and Rusyn region.5 Its inhabitants still had a strong sense of regional consciousness in the interwar period,6 and regional dialects prevailed until the first half of the twentieth century. It is also worth considering that the Russian army invaded this territory and burned down villages in the northern region during the first years of WWI. Consequently, the memory of the Great War left its mark not only on the landscape, but also on the civilians who were in direct contact with the armies of both sides. Although no comprehensive monograph has been published so far on the history of Jews in interwar Slovakia, different authors more or less agree that the Jewish population after 1918 was characterized by its dissimilation from the Hungarian community and gradually reoriented its loyalty toward the new Czechoslovak Republic.7 In this paper, I do not intend to challenge this state4

The same was true of Bohemia, where Jewish nationalists and Zionists overlapped to a great extent. See  : Kateřina Čapková, Czechs, Germans, Jews  ? National Identity and the Jews of Bohemia (New York – Oxford  : Berghahn Books, 2012), 169. 5 According to the Hungarian census of 1910, they formed more than 70% of the county population. A magyar Szent Korona országainak 1910. évi népszámlálása. Hatodik rész. Végeredmények összefoglalása (Budapest  : Magyar Kir. Központi Statisztikai Hivatal, 1920), 114. 6 Ablonczy Balázs, “Virtuális vármegye  : Sáros, 1820–1940. Nemzetiségközi kapcsolatok az emlékiratok tükrében,” Pro Minoritate 24 (2001)  : 126–140. 7 Eduard Nižňanský, Židovská komunita na Slovensku medzi Československou parlamentnou demok­ raciu a slovenským štátom v stredoeurópskom kontexte (Prešov  : Universum, 1999), 14–19  ; Katarína Hradská, “Postavenie Židov na Slovensku v prvej Československej republike,” in Emancipácia Židov  – antisemitizmus  – prenasledovanie v Nemecku, Rakúsko-Uhorsku, v českých zemiach a na



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Fig. 1: View of interwar Prešov. Východoslovenské múzeum v Košiciach, VII. 1701–8691.

ment. However, I attempt to highlight the complexity of the problem of loyalty and dissimilation by examining the case of the Prešov Jewry, and especially the Neologs. According to the results of recent research by Rebekah Klein-Pejšova, Jews in interwar Slovakia built a new collective identity based on three elements. These included Jewish refugee aid received during WWI, which forstered bonds of solidarity among Galician Jewish refugees and Jewish communities of Slovakia  ; Jewish national politics and identity  ; and the transformation of Jewish territoriality.8 With reference to her findings, in this paper, I underline a fourth element that is strongly related to Jewish war memory as well  : the role of Jews Slovensku, eds. Jörg Konrad Hoensch, Stanislav Biman and Ľubomír Lipták (Bratislava  : VEDA Vydavateľstvo Slovenskej akadémie vied, 1999), 131–138.; Peter Salner, “Židia v meštianskej spoločnosti Slovenska,” in Meštianstvo a občianska spoločnosť na Slovensku 1900–1989, ed. Elena Mannová (Bratislava  : Academic Eletronic Press, 1998), 137–146  ; Kovács Éva, Felemás asszi­ miláció  : a kassai zsidóság a két világháború között, 1918–1938 (Somorja and Dunaszerdahely  : Fórum Kisebbségkutató Intézet  – Lilium Aurum, 2004), 123  ; Ješajahu Andrej Jelínek, Dávi­ dova hviezda pod Tatrami. Židia na Slovensku v 20. storočí (Praha  : Vydavateľstvo Jána Mlynárika, 2009), 168. 8 Klein-Pejšova, Mapping Jewish Identities, 144.

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in building local communities as opposed to involving themselves in national politics. Therefore, I argue that the memory discourse of the investigated Jewish elite group was characterized by the neutralization of the parallel Czechoslovak, Slovak, Hungarian and Jewish national politics in interwar Slovakia. Based on the Prešov archival sources and the interwar local press releases,9 the first part of the study provides an overview of the multi-ethnic society and the Neolog Jewish community in Prešov during the period. The second part investigates the circumstances surrounding the erection of the WWI monument in 1937, as well as the memory discourse and the political affiliations of the Jewish group that collected funding for the memorial. Jews in Prešov after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy The end of the Great War and the creation of Czechoslovakia had negative impacts on Jewish communities in Slovakia, including the Šariš region. Like other Slovak towns, several Jewish traders and shopkeepers in Prešov were plundered and robbed after the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in 1918,10 and their restitution was not satisfactorily resolved later by the Czechoslovak government.11 What is more, the transition of 1918/1919 in Šariš was marked also by the massacre of two Jewish families. Karol Horák, a Czech legionnaire, brutally executed seven members of the Fleischer and Lefkovits families in Víťaz (earlier called Veľké Vitézovce and, in Hungarian, Nagyvitéz) in June 1919. The criminal trial process of Horák, who received amnesty at the beginning of the 1930s,12 as well as the case of the murdered Jews was followed by the national press13 and caused outrage among the Jewish communities in Šariš. From a religious point of view, apart from Subkarpathian Ruthenia, Šariš and Zemplín were the regions in interwar Czechoslovakia that were most densely populated by Jews. In the Košická župa – which was a territorial unit that included the former counties of Šariš, Zemplín and the northern part of Abov –   9 By interwar local press, I mean mainly the Hungarian weekly edited in Prešov, entitled Új Világ (1919–1941), which is available in the National Széchényi Library in Budapest, as well as different Slovak journals that, unfortunately, are not completely available in the Slovak libraries. 10 Miloslav Szabó, “Von Worten zu Taten.” Die slowakische Nationalbewegung und der Antisemitismus 1875–1922 (Berlin  : Metropol, 2014), 266–281. 11 Štátny archív v Prešove, pôbočka Prešov, fond Obchodné Grémum, krabica 24, č. spisu 2/1931, Správa o vyrabovaním a situácii prešovských obchodníkov, Prešov, dňa [  ?]– ho januára 1923. 12 “Likvidálják a Horák-ügyet,” Új Világ, March 6, 1932, 1. 13 Miloslav Szabó, “Rabovačky v závere prvej svetovej vojny a ich ohlas na medzivojnovom Slovensku.” Forum Historiae 16 (2015)  : 51, accessed on September 28, 2016, ISSN 1337-6861.



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Fig. 2: The Neolog Synagogue of Prešov demolished after WWII. Východoslovenské múzeum v Košiciach, VII. 1712–8717.

7.93 percent were Jewish.14 Jews populated the towns of the župa in an even higher proportion  : For example, according to the Czechoslovak census of 1921 in Bardejov, they formed 33.45 percent, in Michalovce, 17.75 percent, in Košice, 16.62 percent, in Humenné, 9.93 percent and in Prešov, 19.78 percent of the town population.15 Prešov was the historical and administrative center of the former Šariš County before 1918. Even in the era of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, the majority of its population was composed of non-Hungarian citizens. While the percentage of inhabitants with Hungarian mother tongue reached 48.9 percent of the population in 1910,16 the first Czechoslovak census in 1921 already showed that Prešov was a city with a Czechoslovak majority  : Slovaks and Czechs made up 69 percent of the population.17 It is worth mentioning that, while the Hungarian concept of nationality was based on the native language, as language was 14 The Košice župa officially had 603,603 inhabitans in 1921. Československá statistika – svazek 9. Sčítaní lidu v Republice československé ze dne 15. února 1921, I. díl (Praha  : Státní úřad statistický, 1924), 121. 15 The Košice župa officially had 603,603 inhabitans in 1921. Československá statistika – svazek 9, 102. 16 A magyar Szent Korona, 128–129. 17 The Košice župa officially had 603,603 inhabitans in 1921. Československá statistika – svazek 9, 29.

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considered the marker of nationality during the censuses, Czecohoslovak statisticians defined nationality as “internal conviction.”18 Therefore, at the time of the extraordinary Czechoslovak census in 1919, the population was asked by the census commissioners to declare their nationality. From 1919 and on, Czechs and Slovaks were included in the statistics as “Czechoslovaks.” Later, from 1921 and on, the Jewish nationality category was also introduced. In light of the statistical data, Prešov was undoubtedly considered an overwhelmingly Slovak or Czechoslovak town in the interwar period. However, the number of votes obtained by the Hungarian parties, the multilingualism present in the public sphere and the everyday language usage patterns show a completely different picture. The (Hungarian) Christian Socialist Party was the most popular political force in the City Assembly, and one-quarter of the associations used Hungarian as their official language.19 Moreover, Hungarian language usage was common among Jewish inhabitants who had been socialized and educated in the pre-war Hungarian school system. Several Jewish memoirs from Prešov reveal that the older generation still had contact with members of the Hungarian middle classes in the interwar period.20 Regarding the religious composition of Prešov, two-thirds of the population was Roman Catholic, while the proportion of Israelites grew from 15 percent in 1900 to 18.5 percent by 1938.21 They formed the second largest denominational group in the town. The majority of these individuals were Orthodox.22 In his memoirs, Giora Amir mentions that 3,200 Orthodox and 1100 Neolog Jews lived in Prešov.23 Within the Orthodox community, a small branch of Hassids stood somewhat apart.24

18 Klein-Pejšová, Mapping Jewish Identities, 47. 19 Szeghy-Gayer Veronika, Felvidékből Szlovenszkó  : Magyar értelmiségi útkeresések Eperjesen és Kas­ sán a két világháború között (Budapest  : Kalligram Kiadó, 2016), 109, 148. 20 Kalinová Agneša and Juráňová Jana, Agneša Kalinová v rozhovore s Janou Juráňovou. Mojich 7 životov (Bratislava  : Aspekt, 2012), 14–16  ; Ján Kalina, Zavinili to židia a bicyklisti. Autobiogra­ fománia 1971–1974 (Bratislava  : Vydavateľstvo PT, 2000), 34  ; Yehuda Lahav, Zjazvený život (Levice  : Koloman Kertész Bagala, 2003), 20  ; Interview with Juraj Szántó in Košice on the 14th April 2016. 21 Szeghy-Gayer, Felvidékből Szlovenszkó, 69. 22 Eugen Bárkány and Ľudovít Dojč, Židovské náboženské obce na Slovensku (Bratislava  : Vydavateľstvo VESNA, 1991), 164  ; Róbert J. Büchler, ed., Enciklopédia židovských náboženských obcí. II. Zväzok. (Bratislava  : SNM and Múzeum židovskej kultúry, 2010), 164–165. 23 Giora Amir, Prešov, osud židovskej obce, jednej z mnohých (Bratislava  : SNM and Múzeum Židovskej kultúry, 2004), 58. 24 Štátny archív v Košiciach, fond Košická župa, krabica 695, Stanovy Autonómnej ortodoxnej židovskej naboženskej obce v Prešove, 2.



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Chart 1: Nationality declaration in Prešov, 1900–1938.

*1900–1910 tót [Slovak], 1919–1930 českoslovenké, 1938 Czechs and Slovaks separately. Chart 2: Religious composition of Prešov, 1910–1938.

As is well-known, the Czechoslovak censuses (in 1921 and 1930) introduced the category of Jewish nationality. In the census from 1930, 51.3% of the Jewish population of Slovakia was declared to be Jewish  ; 32.3%, Czechoslovak  ;

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7.3%, German  ; and 7.1%, Hungarian as nationality.25 Unfortunately, the statistical data related to Prešov were not published by the Czechoslovak authorities. The available data indicate only that 55 percent and 43 percent of Prešov Jewry declared to have Jewish nationality in 1921 and 1930 respectively.26 There are no exact data on the other half of the local Jewish population, which presumably claimed to be Hungarian or Czechoslovak during the censuses. In any case, the results of the censuses did not radically transform Jewish identity. Instead, scholars claim that declaring Jewish nationality was a way to express loyalty toward the Czechoslovak state.27 Jews were not only active in the Jewish Party, the Zionists, whose local organization was led by Karol Ferbstein, but also in the local parties (for example, in the local City Party or in the Economic Community of Traders, Industrialists, Landlords and Middle Classes), as well as in the Czechoslovak Communist Party, the Hungarian National Party and the Czechoslovak pro-governmental parties. Consequently, Prešov Jewry was just as politically fragmented as other ethnic or religious groups in the republic. Jewish national politics enjoyed the stable, almost unchanging support of the Jewish population in Prešov.28 However, it is not possible to determine with absolute certainty whether all citizens who declared Jewish nationality also voted for the Jewish Party in Prešov. Although Orthodoxy constituted a majority, it has to be taken into consideration that the local public life was dominated by the Neolog Jewish intellectuals and politicians. Members of this group promoted the idea of a local Great War memorial. 25 Československá statistika – svazek 98. Sčítání v Republice československé ze dne 1. prosince 1930. I. díl (Praha  : Státní úřad statistický, 1934), 106. 26 Československá statistika – svazek 9, 102–103.; Československá statistika – svazek 98, 100–101. 27 Simon Attila, “Kettős szorításban, A dél-szlovákiai zsidóság Trianon és Auschwitz között,” Fórum Társadalomtudományi Szemle 61 (2014), 6. See also  : Hillel Kieval, ’Conflict Zones, Empire, War, and Jewish Destinies in East Central Europe’ in this volume. 28 Elections results see here  : Čechoslovakische statistik – Band 1. Die Wahlen für die Nationalversam­ mlung im April 1920 und Allgemeine Wahlen für die die Gemeindevertretungen in Böhmen, Mähran und Schlesien im Juni 1919 (Prag  : Statistisches Staatsamt, 1922), 34–35  ; Štátny archív v Prešove, fond Okresný úrad v Prešove 1923–1945, krabica 28, inv. č. 212, Voľby do obecných zastupiteľstiev (1923)  ; Československá statistika – Svazek 31. Řada I. (Volby, sešit 2.) Volby do poslanecké sněmovny v listopadu roku 1925 (Praha  : Státní úřad statistický, 1926), 66  ; “Levizsgáztunk,” Új Világ, October 23, 1927, 1  ; “8151 leadott szavazat megoszlása,” Új Világ, September 16, 1928, 1  ; “A tartományi és járási választások számszerű eredményei” Új Világ, December 9, 1928, 1  ; Čechoslovakische Statis­ tik – Band 70. Die Wahlen in das Abgeordnetenhaus Im Oktober 1929 (Prag  : Statistisches Staatsamt, 1930), 44  ; Štátny archív v Prešove, fond Mestský úrad Prešov 1923–45, krabica 12, inv. č. 129, Výsledok obecných volieb konaných dňa 25. IX. 1932  ; Čechoslovakische Statistik – Band 134. Die Wahlen in das Abgeordnetenhaus Im Mai 1935 (Prag  : Statistisches Staatsamt, 1936), 52.

Chart 3

Chart 4

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The Great War over memory from a local perspective The promoters of the Heroes’ Memorial of Prešov were mainly Neolog Jewish entrepreneurs and intellectuals who held key positions in local politics and cultural life. They edited the local Hungarian weekly, Új Világ (New World), which was one of the most popular press products in interwar Prešov and was published between 1919 and 1940. The Czechoslovak authorities considered it an unbiased newspaper,29 probably because its owners were able to integrate even members of the local Hungarian opposition parties into the editorial staff. Christian socialist priests, Hungarian Lutheran intellectuals and teachers, members of the liberal Hungarian National Party founded in 1925, as well as the representatives of the Neolog Jewish elite collaborated on the editorial board of Új Világ.30 This kind of cooperation between the Neolog Jewish and Hungarian elites, including many of the local Jews with Hungarian identity such as Zsigmond Stark,31 Mór Rosenberg, or Simon Horovitz, was due to the efforts of Artúr Spányi. As the editor-in-chief and the owner of the weekly this influential Jewish entrepreneur and journalist aimed to address all Hungarian readers, including the Hungarian-speaking Jews of Šariš. Spányi was the first and passionate initiator of a local WWI memorial. In September 1927, just before the municipal elections, he published an article in which he promoted the idea of the creation of a huge city memorial dedicated to the citizens of Prešov who had fallen during WWI.32 As a war veteran himself, he called on the entire population and the city administration to create a memorial fund to support the erection of a transnational war memorial in the city center on Main Street. His passionate and lyrical writing addressed to two main elements associated with aspects of the local community and war memory. On the one hand, he pointed out that the future monument should commemorate the selfless sacrifice of those citizens who had died during the Great War. He did not emphasize any aspects of national sacrifice or sacrifice for the motherland, but rather the importance of remembering the sacrifices of the fallen soldiers 29 Štátny archív v Košiciach, fond Košická župa, krabica 260, inv. č. 5. č. spisu 66.  – prez.1923, Pravidelná mesačná situačná zpráva z okrese prešovského za mesiac apríl 1923. A. Časť politická, 1. 30 Gayer Veronika, “Spányi Artúr és az ‘eperjesi középosztály’ a két világháború között,” Régió  : Kisebbség, kultúra, politika, társadalom 23 (2015)  : 109–135. 31 Patrík Derfiňák, “Žigmund Stark – Propagátor elektrifikácie Východného Slovenska a spoločnej európskej meny,” in Židia pred a za Karpatmi v priebehu stáročí, ed. Peter Kónya (Prešov  : Vydavateľstvo Prešovskej univerzity, 2013), 202–195. 32 Spányi Artúr, “Állítsunk emléket Eperjes háborús áldozatainak, – hőseinek  !” Új Világ, September 18, 1927, 1.



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Fig. 3: Artúr Spányi. Veronika Szeghy-Gayer.

themselves. He expressed his astonishment that the city had seemingly forgotten about its local heroes in the nine years that had elapsed since the end of the Great War. On the other hand, he highlighted the idea of brotherhood. According to his plan, the memorial should, first and foremost, symbolize the brotherhood of the residents of Prešov. He argued that such a memorial would be able to unite the entire local population, regardless of their ethnic or denominational background, as every family had had to cope with war losses. As he wrote, “I want to wake up the conscience of all of us, I want all of us to unite again in friendship in remembering our beloved brothers, citizens of Prešov.”33 In his argumentation, he did not represent the fallen heroes of Prešov as soldiers of a national army, but as members of an urban community. Interestingly, Spányi’s project did not refer to the memory of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. What is more, he linked the war memory and the act of remembering the heroes’ sacrifices with the celebration of the Czechoslovak national holiday. This took place on October 28, which was the day that the Czechoslovak Republic had been established. He proposed that the memorial should be inaugurated on this national holiday. However, he also called attention to the WWI memorial fund that had been created in 191534 33 Ibid. 34 “Emléket hőseinknek  !” Eperjesi Lapok, September 12, 1915, 4.

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and urged the city administration to investigate how much money was left in the fund after the postwar inflation of 1920s. Finally, he encouraged the readers of his weekly to collect money for the memorial and asked for the support of the city administration. Unfortunately, hardly any direct reaction to Spányi’s article can be found either in the Slovak press or among the archival documents from the time. In the protocols of the City Assembly, no written record on the project remained,35 so the matter may not even have been discussed by the city representatives. However, the idea of creating a WWI monument in Prešov can be placed in a larger context, as the plan reflected the local political agenda of Spányi and the Neolog Hungarian-Jewish intellectual circle that supported Új Világ. In 1921, they established a political party, the so-called Városi Polgári Párt (Party of Burghers, in Slovak  : Mestská občianská strana), a local interest group. Hungarian and Jewish intellectuals and entrepreneurs were its leaders and supporters, for example, Jenő Bárkány and Tivadar Austerlitz, founders of the Jewish Museum of Prešov in 1928. The party could expect to receive, at most, ten percent of the votes. On the one hand, party members defined themselves as mainly opposed to the Communist and Catholic movements. On the other hand, they criticized the measures of centralization taken by the Czechoslovak government. At the level of discourse, they expressed dissatisfaction with the domestic policy of Czechoslovakia by forming a virtual community of all city burghers, regardless of their ethnic background. Because largely Hungarian and Jewish intellectuals and entrepreneurs represented the leaders and supporters of Városi Polgári Párt, this type of local political agenda might also be understood as an alternative to the Jewish and Hungarian national politics at a local level. In fact, there were neither Slovaks nor Czechs in the membership of the party. Furthermore, the founders of the party came from the liberal middle class and for social or religious reasons, did not want to identify with the politics of either the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia or the Hungarian Christian Socialist Party. The latter were the most popular political groups among voters in interwar Prešov. The only political ally of Városi Polgári Párt was the Hungarian National Party, a countrywide political group that had been in large part established by the Magyarized Jewish middle-class in the cities of Slovakia.36 That is one of the 35 Štátny archív v Prešove, pôbočka Prešov, fond Mestský úrad Prešov 1923–45, krabica 35, inv. č. 5, Výťah zo zápisnice sostavenej dňa 8-eho októbra 1927 v riadnom zasedaní mestského zástupiteľstva držaného pod predsednictvom startostu Dr. KAROLA FLÓRIÁNA. It was the first session of the City Assembly after the publication of Spányi’s article. 36 Filep Tamás Gusztáv, “Hungarian Jews of Upper Hungary in Hungarian public life in Czecho-



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Fig. 4: Statue of Masaryk from 1930 in Prešov. Východoslovenské múzeum v Košiciach, VIII. 5015.

reasons why Városi Polgári Párt was in permanent conflict with the local Zionists and, especially, with Karol Ferbstein, leader of the Zionist Party in Prešov, who viewed this political enterprise as a Hungarian movement that was supported by Hungarian political forces.37 In 1927, when Spányi published his plan for the WWI memorial, the mayor of Prešov was Károly Flórián, a representative of the Városi Polgári Párt. Since the forthcoming local elections would be held in October 1927, the memorial project became part of its agenda. Flórián had a good reputation in the Czechoslovak circles as well  ; thus, Spányi could expect him to be re-elected and support the plan for the memorial. However, if we observe the situation across the country, it was probably not the best time to call for a new WWI memorial. Between August and October of 1927, several protests had been organized against Lord Rothermere, who had published an article in June about the revision of the peace settlement in favor of Hungary.38 When Flórián and his party did not distance slovakia,” in Between Minority and Majority. Hungarian and Jewish/Israeli ethnical and cultural experiences in recent centuries, eds. Hatos Pál and Attila Novák (Budapest  : Balassi Institute, 2013), 167–187. 37 Ferbstein Károly, “Tehát a keresztényszocialistákkal,” Kassai Napló, September 14, 1923, 2. 38 Miroslav Michela, “‘A magyar lordok és magyar mágnások újabb rohamra indultak’. A Rothermere-ellenakció Csehszlovákiában, 1927-ben,” in Trianon labirintusaiban. Történelem, emléke­

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themselves from the demands of Lord Rothermere this had negative consequences. Although Flórián was re-elected at the end of 1927, he soon decided to resign after being targeted with various accusations from the Zionist Party.39 These accusations echoed by country-wide opposition against the revisionist plans of Lord Rorthermere. From that point in time and on, members of the Slovak and Czechoslovak elite viewed the Party of Burghers and the Hungarian weekly as exponents and supporters of the Hungarian oppositional politics in Prešov. Obviously, this created a situation in which the idea of a WWI monument financed by the city administration was quickly marginalized. In May 1931, a statue for Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk was erected on the Main Street of Prešov, exactly on the spot Artúr Spányi had intended for the WWI memorial. This monument, symbolizing the Czechoslovak statehood, was a definitive rejection of a transnational memorial or, in fact, any WWI memorial. From 1929 on, Spányi himself also began to distance himself from the Hungarian elite. Most of the Hungarian Jews of Prešov had been disappointed and disillusioned by the politics of the Hungarian National Party, which allied itself with the Hungarian Christian Socialists in 1929. As a consequence, the Spányi’s weekly no longer supported these parties. However, he considered his own weekly to be a Hungarian one, and continued cooperating with different Hungarian political and intellectual groups on a cultural level. Finally, Spányi sold his newspaper at the beginning of 1937, so he did not play any role in the creation of the Jewish WWI memorial later this year. In the meantime, Bárkány and Austerlitz had opened their Jewish Museum in Prešov in 1928, which, according to the original plans of Bárkány, should have become a City Museum to present the local and regional history of Prešov and Šariš. In any case, Bárkány was a member the City Assembly between 1928 and 1938, representing the Party of Burghers. He designed the tomb of ten Jewish soldiers who had died in the Great War and had been buried in the Neolog Jewish cemetery of Prešov. The Neolog burial society, the Chevra Kadisha, had ordered the marble tomb monument from Bárkány. There was no particular celebration held during the inauguration ceremony in 1929  ; instead, it was an internal event of the Neolog Jewish community.40 zetpolitika és párhuzamos történetek Szlovákiában és Magyarországon, ed. Miroslav Michela (Békéscsaba – Budapest  : Magyarországi Szlovákok Kutatóintézete – MTA BK TTI, 2016), 29–56. 39 Štátny archív v Prešove, fond Mestský úrad Prešov, 1923–45, krabica 35, inv. č. 5. Zápisnica sostavená v Prešove dňa 29. decembra 1927 roku v mimoriadnom zasadnutí mestského zastupiteľstva, vydržiavaného pod predsedníctvom podstarostu Júliusa Rovó-va. 40 “Hősök síremlékének avatása az izr. sírkertben,” Új Világ, October 13, 1929, 1  ; Besides, the bodies of 16 fallen WWI soldiers rest in the Orthodox Jewish cemetery of Prešov.



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War of memory from a local Jewish perspective After these political and local events, which largely influenced the identity strategies of the Prešov Jewry, the Neologs were beginning to gradually dissimilate from the Hungarian community. As a result, the religious community decided to pay homage to its dead on its own in 1937. The so-called Heroes’ Memorial of Prešov is located today on the northern part of the local Neolog Jewish cemetery, which was established in 1876.41 The memorial was erected for fourteen Jewish soldiers from Prešov who fought and died during WWI, most of whom were buried on one of the battlefields. The memorial, which was planned by Jewish architect, Gyula Groszmann, was, just as in 1929, funded solely by the Neolog Chevra Kadisha. However, this time, the religious community asked a Roman Catholic sculptor to prepare a bronze plaque, which made up the main decorative element of the memorial. It portrayed Abraham’s sacrifice of his son, Isaac. Unfortunately, the plaque has disappeared. The project was coordinated by Tivadar Austerlitz, who was the head of the Neolog Chevra Kadisha during that period. He opened the inauguration ceremony with a solemn speech, initially speaking in Slovak language, but after he had unveiled the memorial, he continued in Hungarian.42 The Slovak part of his speech had one main unmistakable message  : peace, which he claimed “is the Jewish message”.43 He argued that the Jewish soldiers had also died for peace. In the same way, he also wanted the inauguration to be viewed as a symbol of mutual understanding and peace among people of all religions. At the inauguration of his statue in Prešov he quoted Masaryk, who had said that “a monument is always a reminder of the past, warning in the present and a guide for the future”.44 Austerlitz deliberately began the Slovak part of his speech by making a reference to Masaryk’s Czechoslovakia as a state where different cultures live peacefully side by side. The Hungarian part was dominated by three elements  : fulfillment of duty, loyalty and self-sacrifice. He argued that these soldiers had not died for the (Hungarian) motherland as the recent propaganda claimed, but out of a sense of duty and loyalty. He felt that the message of the memorial “should not be guns, bombs, weapons, but – ardent sacrifice.” At the end of his speech, he added that this WWI memorial also demonstrates the brotherhood of the people of Šariš. As the fallen soldiers belonged first of all to the Šariš re-

41 Bárkány and Dojč, Židovské náboženské obce, 338. 42 “A hősök emlékművének avatása,” Új Világ, May 8, 1937, 1–2. 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid.

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Fig. 5: The Heroes’ Memorial of Prešov in 1937. Photograph published in the Sunday supplement of Prágai Magyar Hírlap, 16th May 1937.

gion, he did not feel that any ethnic or nationalizing state political group could appropriat their memory. Nevertheless, the case of the Heroes’ Memorial of Prešov provided a pretext for the Czechoslovak authorities to investigate the Neolog Jews and their cooperation with the local Hungarian political forces. The memorial project was perceived as a Hungarian, anti-Czechoslovak enterprise that had received Jewish assistance.45 The police report established that no member of the Czechoslovak or Slovak community was invited to the ceremony. To make things worse, Hungarian politicians had participated at the unveiling of the memorial, an event in which approximately 250–300 according to the reports,46 and 1300 persons according to the newspaper Kassai Újság, had participated. 47 Furthermore, the ceremony was not only an internal event of the Neolog religious community, because Austerlitz invited two Hungarian veterans to place a wreath on the grave of the fallen Jewish soldiers, József Kissóczy and Géza 45 Samo Bindinger, “Zmätok po odhalení pomníku padlým v Prešove,” Novosti, June 6, 1937, 3. 46 Štátny archív v Prešove, fond Okresný úrad v Prešove 1923–1945, krabica 14, inv. č. 205, židovská neologická náboženská obec-pomník padlým, č. spisu 1407/37.prez.-, Pomník padlým v Prešove, 2. 47 “Megható ünnepségek közepette leplezték le a sárosi hősök emlékművét,” Kassai Újság, May 8, 1937, 9.



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Fig. 6: The Heroes’ Memorial of Prešov today (2016). Veronika Szeghy-Gayer.

Schöpflin, with whom they had fought together. In addition, one of the main speeches was held by Viktor Fábry, a Hungarian Lutheran priest, who was a military chaplain during WWI. Fábry compared the devastation of WWI to the great city fire of 1887, when two-thirds of the buildings of Prešov had been destroyed. In his speech, Fábry described how the citizens had been able to rebuild the city after the fire and “live together in peace regardless of linguistic, ethnic and religious differences.” However, he underlined that WWI had “left behind even blacker ruins.”48 With these remarks, he expressed – intentionally or unintentionally – a certain kind of nostalgia for the times of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy when, according to Fábry, there was seemingly no ethnic conflict among the citizens. It was undoubtedly a crucial element of the unveiling event, that the commemorators were not only members of the Neolog religious community but also non-Jewish individuals who had personally known the fallen Jewish soldiers. Consequently, they also contributed to how Jewish memory of WWI was shaped and, thus, put into local and transnational perspectives. It was a local approach, as the memorial speeches did not relate to state or national politics, but to local events, the Prešov citizens and the sacrifices they made during the 48 “A hősök emlékművének avatása,” Új Világ, May 8, 1937, 2.

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Great War. At the same time, this memory was also transnational, because all Jewish and non-Jewish commemorators refused to shape the memory of the Jewish soldiers from an exclusively national point of view. That is why they commissioned a Roman Catholic sculptor to prepare the bronze plaque and invited members of the Christian Hungarian elite to participate in the commemoration. Reactions to the inauguration ceremony in Hungary, where the relatives of most of the fallen Jewish soldiers lived, were positive.49 Conversely, Slovak intellectuals criticized the presence of the members of the Hungarian political elite and recommended that the Jewish community add “more Slovak elements” to the memorial.50 One of the Czechoslovak police reports underlined the participation of Mór Rosenberg, an Orthodox Jewish lawyer and member of the Hungarian National Party. These reports alleged that the presence of Mór Rosenberg had transformed the event into a political demonstration by the Hungarian politicians.51 Another report claimed that the speech of Fábry “deeply evoked the days of the Hungarian regime.”52 Because of these reactions, the Chevra Kadisha forced Austerlitz to resign from the leadership of the association shortly after the event. The Neolog community was, thus, most probably divided over the question. However, Austerlitz argued that remembering the heroes was not a political event, only an act of piety. In one of his last articles to appear in Új Világ, he wrote about the cemetery as a place where “Hebrew writings and crosses stand next to each other in a peaceful brotherhood.”53 Due to these frictions, is does not come as a surprise that the Neolog Jews were the only community in Prešov that erected its own WWI memorial in the interwar period. Conclusions As the analysis of the evidence shows, the local community building project in Prešov was based mainly on a cooperation between Neolog Jewish and liberal Hungarian members, which was unable to integrate neither Orthodox and 49 Dr. Austerlitz Tivadar, “A temetőt járom,” Új Világ, July 31, 1937, 3. 50 Samo Bindinger, “Zmätok po odhalení,” 3. 51 Štátny archív v Prešove, fond Okresný úrad v Prešove 1923–1945, krabica 14, inv. č. 205, židovská neologická náboženská obec-pomník padlým, č. spisu 2478/1937 prez., Pomník padlým v Prešove, 2. 52 Štátny archív v Prešove, fond Okresný úrad v Prešove 1923–1945, krabica 14, inv. č. 205, židovská neologická náboženská obec-pomník padlým, č. spisu 147/1937.prez.-, Oslava odhalenia pomníka padlich vo svetovej válke neolog. náboženskou cirkvou v Prešove, 1. 53 Dr. Austerlitz Tivadar, “A temetőt járom,” Új Világ, July 31, 1937, 3.



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Zionist Jewry nor the other nationalities. It represented primarily the identity strategy taken by Neolog Jews, who gradually, but not definitatively, dissimilated from the Hungarian society. From a Jewish point of view, commemorating the Great War in Prešov did not mean discussing Jewish warfare, Jewish military service, or Jewish identity, but highlighting the role of Jews in the peace-building process and in the political consolidation of the Czechoslovak Republic. Thus, Neolog Jews in Prešov tried to position themselves as promoters and protectors of the local and regional culture, as well as intermediaries between cultures and nationalities. However, the memory of WWI was an integral part of the memories of the pre-1918 period, when Prešov was part of Hungary and Neolog Jews, in particular, were rapidly Magyarized. From a Slovak point of view, the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy signaled the end of the Hungarian regime and the beginning of their national self-determination. Therefore, they perceived the memory of WWI in a different, Czechoslovak and Slovak, context. The Czechoslovak authorities along with members of the Slovak intelligence rejected the Jewish politics of memory. It is much more difficult to identify the attitude of Zionists and local Orthodox Jews toward the building of the monument, insofar as any reaction can found in sources of the time. It is tempting to speculate that they refused every kind of Jewish strategy related to memory policy that – even if unintentionally – allowed Czechoslovak authorities to question the loyalty of Jews toward the Czechoslovak Republic. The cooperation with members of the Hungarian minority elite can be considered as such. Furthermore, the example of the Prešov Jewry is related to larger problems as well. It shows that, while Jews supported local patriotism, as evinced by their political and cultural strategies, other ethnic groups based their communities on an exclusive nationalism. The Party of the Burghers, the idea of a transnational WWI monument, and even the Jewish Museum of Prešov testify to the local and regional consciousness of Neolog Jewry. Since the Zionist movement could not win the entire community over to their side, the most appropriate expression of loyalty toward the state was Czechoslovakism. Therefore, as the number of the Magyarized Jews was dwindling quickly, the building of local communities was an important Jewish strategy as an alternative to the nationalizing politics. Finally, in such a context, the memory of WWI marked the role of the Jewish community in the reconciliation and consolidation of the interwar Czechoslovak society.

Contributors

Eszter Balázs, PhD, is assistant professor at János Kodolányi University of Ap-

plied Arts, Department of Media and Communication Studies (Budapest). She holds a PhD from École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris) and Eötvös Loránd University (Budapest) in ‘Histoire et Civilisations’ (2008), title: “En tête des intellectuels”. Les écrivains et la question de la liberté et de l’autonomie littéraires (1908–1914). She published a book on Hungarian classical modernist literary journals (1908–1914) and co-authored another (with Phil Casoar) on press journalism during the 1956 Revolution entitled Les Héros de Budapest (Paris: Les Arènes, 2006 and Budapest: Vince-Scolar, 2016). She is an occasional contributor to the review Mil Neuf Cent. Revue d’histoire intellectuelle (since 2010) and she is on the editorial board of the Hungarian review  Médiakutató  [Research on Media] (since 2012). She is member of Committee on Press History of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Since 2017 she has been researcher at Petőfi Literary Museum–Kassák Museum on avant-garde journals. [email protected] Jason Crouthamel is professor of history at Grand Valley State University in

Michigan. He has published on the history of psychological trauma, memory and masculinity in Germany during the age of total war.  He is the author of An Intimate History of the Front: Masculinity, Sexuality and German Soldiers in the First World War (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and The Great War and German Memory: Society, Politics and Psychological Trauma, 1914–1945 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009).  He is currently working on a book titled Trauma, Religion and Spirituality in Germany during the First World War. [email protected] Ljiljana Dobrovšak, PhD, is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Social

Sciences Ivo Pilar in Zagreb. Her major field of scientific interest is history of minorities, history of Jews in Croatia, Hungary and the Habsburg Monarchy in the 19th century and the history of the First World War. She is the author of two books (Židovi u Osijeku od doseljavanja do kraja Prvoga svjetskog rata/ jews in Osijek from the Early Settlement until the End of the World War I (Osijek, 2013); Židovi u Srijemu. Od doseljenja do Holokausta/Jews in Srijem. From the Early Settlement to the Holocaust (Vukovar: Državni arhiv u Vukovaru, 2017) [email protected]

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Contributors

Hildegard Frübis (Berlin) is Lecturer (Privatdozentin) at the Humboldt University Berlin. She completed her PhD with the Eberhard-Karls-University Tübingen in 1993 (Die Wirklichkeit des Fremden. Zur Entdeckung Amerikas in den Bildprägungen des 16. Jahrhunderts (Berlin: Reimer 1995); her habilitation followed 2004 with a work on Max Liebermann and his illustrations to Heinrich Heine’s „Rabbi von Bacherach“ (Humboldt University Berlin). From 2015 to 2017 she was a research assistant at the University of Graz (Lise Meitner-Program, FWF Austria). Her recent research focuses on Jewish modernism in the pictorial arts and photography in Jewish Eastern Europe. Recent publications: Photographien aus den Lagern des NS-Regimes. Beweissicherung und ästhetische Praxis, (eds.) Frübis, Hildegard, Clara Oberle, Agnieszka Pufelska (Wien, Köln, Weimar: Böhlau 2019); “Die Evidenz der Fotografie und die fotografischen Erzählweisen des Judenmords,” in: Darstellen, Vermitteln, Aneignen – Gegenwär­ tige Reflexionen des Holocaust, eds. Bettina Bannasch, Hans Joachim Hahn (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2018), 257–280. [email protected] Nino Gude studied European and Eastern European History at the Universities

of Chemnitz and Vienna. He wrote his master thesis on the topic “Between Germans and Poles. The Jews in the Polish Spring of Nations 1848”. During his studies he worked at the Polish Academy of Sciences (Scientific Centre in Vienna) as well as a specialist tutor in history at the University of Vienna. From 2013–2017 he received his PhD at the Doctoral College of Galicia at the University of Vienna with a dissertation on the history of the intertwining of Jews and Ukrainians in Lviv and Przemyśl 1867–1919. Publications: Becom­ ing Ukrainian, remaining Jewish. An intertwining history of Jews and Ukrainians in Lviv and Przemyśl 1867–1919, Vienna 2018 (dissertation in review); Coeditor of the anthology Galicia in Motion – Perceptions, Encounters, Interconnec­ tions (Göttingen, 2018); “Between Isolation and Exchange. The School as Jewish-Ukrainian Meeting Place,” in: Galicia in Motion – Perceptions, Encounters, Interconnections, eds. Baran-Szołtys, Dvoretska, Gude, Janik-Freis (Göttingen, 2018), 127–140. [email protected] Dieter J. Hecht, PhD, historian, works at the Institute of Culture Studies and Theater History (IKT) at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. From 2013 to 2016 he worked on a project about Jewish military chaplains in the Austrian-Hungarian Army during World War I at the Center for Jewish Studies of the Karl-Franzens-University Graz. Fields of specialization: Jewish Studies, Gender Studies, the Jewish press, restitution of looted art in Austria, Holocaust Studies. Selected



Contributors 

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publications: Topographie der Shoah. Gedächtnisorte des zerstörten jüdischen Wien, together with Eleonore Lappin-Eppel and Michaela Raggam-Blesch (Wien: Mandelbaum, 2015), second edition 2018; Der Weg des Zionisten Egon Michael Zweig. Olmütz-Wien-Jerusalem, German/Hebrew (Baram: Korot, 2012). [email protected] Hillel J. Kieval is the Gloria M. Goldstein Professor of Jewish History and Thought at Washington University in St. Louis. A historian of Jewish culture and society in Central and Eastern Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries, his research interests range from pathways of Jewish acculturation and integration to the impact of nationalism and ethnic conflict on modern Jewish identities; from cross-cultural conflicts and misunderstandings to the discursive practices of modern antisemitism; and from theories of Jewish citizenship to the phenomenology of “ritual murder” trials at the turn of the 20th century. Among his publications are The Making of Czech Jewry: National Conflict and Jewish Society in Bohemia, 1870–1918 (1988); Languages of Community: The Jewish Experience in the Czech Lands (2000); and, forthcoming, Blood Inscriptions: Science, Modern­ ity, and Ritual Murder in Fin de Siècle Europe. [email protected] Ines Koeltzsch, PhD, historian, focuses on the modern history of Jewish/ non-Jewish relations in (East) Central Europe. Between 2013 and 2018 she was a research associate at the Masaryk Institute and Archives of the Czech Academy of Science in Prague and worked on a project about Jews in the countryside and their (trans-)regional migration to the cities after 1848. She has taught Czechoslovak and Jewish history at the Free University of Berlin, the NYU in Prague and the Universities of Regensburg and Passau. In 2014/15 she was a research fellow at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies. She is the author of the book Geteilte Kulturen. Eine Geschichte der tschechisch-jü­ disch-deutschen Beziehungen in Prag (1918–1938) (Munich, 2012), and recently of the articles “Utopia as Everyday Practice: Jewish Intellectuals and Cultural Translation in Prague before and after 1933” (Catastrophe and Utopia, ed. Ferenc Laczó et al. (Berlin-Boston: DeGruyter, 2018), and “Migration als Herausforderung. Die politischen Judengemeinden in Mähren und ihr ‚Niedergang‘ um 1900”, in Judaica Bohemiae, 53/2018, no. 1. [email protected] Gerald Lamprecht is Professor for Jewish and contemporary history and head of the Center for Jewish Studies of the University of Graz. His fields of research are: European Jewish History, sntisemitism, memory studies and history of

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Contributors

National-­Socialism and the persecution of the Jewish people. Among his recent publications: “The Remembrance of World War One and the Austrian Federation of Jewish War Veterans,“ in Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History. Journal of Fondazione CDEC. 9. 2016, 122–143. (http://www.quest-cdecjournal. it/focus.php?id=381); Geschon Schoffmann, Nicht für immer. Erzählungen (Graz: Literaturverlag Droschl, 2017 (translated from Hebrew by Ruth Achlama); Shanghai  – Eine Jugend im Exil, ed. together with Ingeborg Radimsky (Graz: Studienverlag, 2015); “Juden in Zentraleuropa und die Transformationen des Antisemitismus im und nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg,” in Jahrbuch für Antisemitis­ musforschung, Vol. 24, (Berlin 2015), 63–88; “Erinnern an den Ersten Weltkrieg aus jüdischer Perspektive 1914–1938,” in Zeitgeschichte  41/4 (2014): 242–266. [email protected] Eleonore Lappin-Eppel, is a historian living in Vienna. She is staff member

of the Institute of Culture Studies and Theater History (IKT) at the Austrian Academy of Sciences and director of the project: „Responses to Persecution: The Jews in Austria, 1941–1945“. Her main areas of research are the National Socialist persecution of Jews in Austria, memory politics of the Holocaust in Austria, German language Jewish press during World War I. Recent publications: Jüdische Publizistik und Literatur im Zeichen des Ersten Weltkriegs, ed. together with Petra Ernst (Innsbruck et al: Studienverlag 2016); Topographie der Shoah: Gedächtnisorte an das zerstörte jüdische Wien, together with Dieter Hecht und Michaela Raggam Blesch, 2nd revised Edition, (Vienna: Mandelbaum, 2018). [email protected] Gintarė Malinauskaitė, PhD, is a research fellow at the Branch Office Vilnius

of the German Historical Institute Warsaw and teaches at the University of Mainz. She received her doctoral degree in History at Humboldt University of Berlin in 2017. Her research interests focus on Holocaust research, memory studies, war crimes trials, and the history of Lithuania (19th and 20th centuries). Publications include: “From Private to Public Memories: Vilna Ghetto Female Prisoners and Their Resistance in Documentary and Narrative Films,” in: Women and Holocaust: New Perspectives and Challenges, eds. Andrea Pető et al. (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo IBL, 2015), pp. 206–232; “Erinnerung an den Holocaust und Antisemitismus in Litauen. Die Kehrseiten der Erinnerungen an den Zweiten Weltkrieg,“ in: Jahrbuch für Antisemitismusforschung 23 (Berlin: Metropol Verlag, 2014), 57–64. Her first monograph Mediated Memories: Holocaust Narratives and Iconographies of the Holocaust in Lithuania will appear in 2019 at the publishing house of the Herder-Institute. [email protected]



Contributors 

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Ana Ćirić Pavlović is a Marie Skłodowska Curie Fellow exploring the intertwine-

ment of post-communism and antisemitism in CEE region. She is a PhD fellow in History holding MA in Human Rights and International Law (European Institute, Spain) and in Jewish Studies (Central European University, Hungary). Ana obtained a Bachelor degree in International Relations (Faculty of Political Science, Serbia). Pavlović previously worked as a human rights consultant and lecturer in Jewish history and antisemitism, as well as interpreter in English, French and Spanish. Among other publications she authored book chapters “A Multinational Haven for Refugees? The Interwar Kingdom of the South Slavs,” in: Anisa Hasanhodžić, Rifet Rustemović & Heidemarie Uhl (eds.), Being a Refugee: A European Narrative (Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences, 2018) as well as “French vs. Judeo-Spanish: An Overview of the Alliance Israélite Universelle’s Language Policy in the Ottoman Empire at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” in: Bryan Kirschen (ed.), Judeo-Spanish and the Making of a Commun­ ity (Newcastle upon Tyne : Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015). [email protected] Gábor Schweitzer studied legal and political sciences at the Faculty of Legal

and Political Sciences at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest from where he received his PhD in 2008. Since 1993 he is working, now as a senior research fellow, in the Institute for Legal Sciences of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Between 1996 and 2013 he was teaching legal history in the department of legal history in the Faculty of Legal and Political Sciences at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. Since 2013 he is an associate professor in the Institute of Constitutional Law (previously Department of Comparative Public Law) of the National University of Public Service, Budapest. His special areas of interest: history of Hungarian public administration, history of the science of Hungarian constitutional law, the history of legal education in Hungary, the constitutional regulation of church and state relations, Hungarian Jewish history in modern times. [email protected] Veronika Szeghy-Gayer, PhD, Historian in the State Scientific Library of

Košice, Slovakia and external lecturer at the Department of History, Pavol Jozef Šafárik University of Košice. Her field of research are interethnic relations and urban elites in the territory of Eastern Slovakia until 1948. She studied history and Italian language at the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, where she earned a PhD degree. She also spent her studies at universities and research institutes in Paris, Bratislava, and Košice. Between 2012 and 2017 she was a research fellow in the Institute of Minority Studies of the Hungarian Academy

376  |

Contributors

of Science in Budapest. In 2013 she co-edited the book entitled “Remembering of the Remembering the City: A guide through the past of Košice,” (Budapest, Košice: Rok Vydania 2013). Her first monograph “Felvidékből Szlovenszkó. Magyar értelmiségi útkeresések Eperjesen és Kassán a két világháború között. (Felvidék becomes Slovensko. Trajectories of Hungarian intellectuals in interwar Prešov and Košice) (Pozsony: Kalligram, 2016). [email protected] Thomas Stoppacher, historian and project assistant at the Centre for Jewish

Studies and at the Department of History of the University of Graz. He is working on the completion of his dissertation with the title “The Radicalisation of an­ ti-Semitism in Austria 1914–1923” and as a mentor for Master’s students. Prior to that, Stoppacher was a fellow at the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah (Paris). He presented aspects of his dissertation project at various conferences in Austria and abroad, as well as published articles in scientific journals – among others, in Jewish Culture and History –, and anthologies. Stoppacher also works at CLIO – Association for History and Education – in various capacities. He also published the extended version of his award-winning MA thesis on the topic of the Jewish summer health resort in Bad Gleichenberg there. Selected publications: “A time of upheaval in an anti-Semitic environment – the representation of the Jewish population in Austria in the parliamentary debates from 1917–1919,” in Jewish Culture and History (2016), Volume 17, Issue 3, 217–232; Jüdische Som­ merfrische in Bad Gleichenberg – Eine Spurensuche (Graz: CLIO, 2013). [email protected] Miloslav Szabó, PhD, is lecturer at the Faculty of Arts, Comenius University in Bratislava. He was Marie Curie Fellow at the Institute of History, Slovak Academy of Sciences (2015–2018), Research Fellow at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust-Studies (2013–2014), and Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Center for Research on Antisemitism, Technische Universität Berlin. Recent publications: ‘From Protests to the Ban: Demonstrations Against the “Jewish” Films in Interwar Vienna and Bratislava,’ Journal of Contemporary History, 54 (2019), No. 1, 5–29; “Von Worten zu Taten”. Die slowakische Nationalbewegung und der Antisemitismus, 1875–1922 (Berlin: Metropol 2014). Olaf Terpitz (PhD University of Leipzig, Habilitation University of Vienna)

teaches Jewish literatures at the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Graz. His research interests include Comparative literature studies, Jewish cultures in Eastern and Central Europe, European-Slavic-Jewish encounters, translation and transformation. He has published widely in the field of Euro-



Contributors 

| 377

pean-Jewish literature studies. Amongst others he is co-editor of the volumes Jüdische Räume und Topographien in Ost(mittel)europa. Konstruktionen in Lit­ eratur und Kultur (with Klavdia Smola, Wiesbaden: Harrasowitz, 2014), Ivan Franko und die jüdische Frage in Galizien (with Alois Woldan, Göttingen: V&R Unipress, Vienna: Vienna University Press, 2016), Concepts of Translation (with Marianne Windsperger, in: geveb. A Journal of Yiddish Studies, [to appear 2019]), as well as co-editor of the book series of the Center for Jewish Studies Graz and of the book series Wiener Galizien-Studien. [email protected] Ulrich Wyrwa, Professor of modern History at the University of Potsdam and

currently Senior Fellow at the Centre for Holocaust-Studies, Munich. From 2005 to 2015 he has led together with Werner Bergmann two international Graduate Schools on Antisemitism in Europe (1879–1914/1914–1923) at the Centre for Research on Antisemitism at the Technical University Berlin. His research interests are the history of antisemitism and Jewish history in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Europe with special focus on Italy. He had held visiting professorships in Frankfurt/M., Graz and Jerusalem. He is the author of the book Gesellschaftliche Konfliktfelder und die Entstehung des Antisemitismus. Das Deutsche Kaiserreich und das Liberale Italien im Vergleich (Berlin: Metropol Verlag, 2015). Together with Werner Bergmann he has published the article “The First World War and the Conflicted Postwar Order (1914–1923) or the Rad­ icalisation of Antisemitism in Europe,” in: European Holocaust Studies 1 (2019), pp. 209–219; and the entry Antisemitism for the online International Encyclopedia of the First World War. [email protected]

SCHRIFTEN DES CENTRUMS FÜR JÜDISCHE STUDIEN HERAUSGEGEBEN VON GERALD LAMPRECHT, OLAF TERPITZ

Band 27: Petra Ernst Schtetl, Stadt, Staat Raum und Identität in deutschsprachigjüdischer Erzählliteratur des 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhunderts 2017. 474 Seiten, gebunden € 48,00 D | € 50,00 A ISBN 978-3-205-20608-8

Die Studie untersucht erstmals deutschsprachig-jüdische Erzähltexte des 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhunderts (u.a. von Leopold Kompert, Karl Emil Franzos, Nathan Samuely, Fritz Mauthner, Max Grünfeld, Eduard Kulke, Selig Schachnowitz, Theodor Herzl, Ernst Sommer, Karl Teller, Hugo Bettauer, Georg Hermann, Leopold Hichler, Sammy Gronemann). Das Forschungsinteresse gilt den Zusammenhängen zwischen Raum, Ort und Identität, und wie diese in Novellen, Kurzgeschichten und Romanen narrativ entfaltet werden. Die zentrale Grundannahme bezieht sich darauf, dass die in den deutschsprachigen Ländern entstehende säkulare jüdische Literatur dieser Zeit nicht nur als selbstbewusster Ausdruck ästhetischer Produktion, sondern im Zuge der Debatten über ein zeitgemäßes jüdisches Selbstverständnis auch als wichtiges Medium außerliterarischer Sinnverständigung zu verstehen ist, und zwar in einem Ausmaß, das in der Literaturwissenschaft und Geschichtswissenschaft bisher zu wenig gewürdigt worden ist.

SCHRIFTEN DES CENTRUMS FÜR JÜDISCHE STUDIEN HERAUSGEGEBEN VON GERALD LAMPRECHT, OLAF TERPITZ

Band 30: Stefan Vogt | Hans Otto Horch | Vivian Liska | Malgorzata Maksymiak (Hg.) Wegweiser und Grenzgänger Studien zur deutsch-jüdischen Kultur- und Literaturgeschichte 2018. 455 Seiten, mit 5 s/w-Abb., gebunden € 60,00 D | € 62,00 A ISBN 978-3-205-20647-7 Auch als eBook erhältlich

Mit über hundert Publikationen zur deutsch-jüdischen Literatur und Kultur prägte Mark Gelber wie kaum ein Zweiter die deutsch-jüdischen Studien. In seinen Arbeiten verbindet er Germanistik, Geistesgeschichte und Jüdische Studien auf das fruchtbarste miteinander. Er hat Perspektiven der Gender Studies, der Migrationsforschung oder der Postcolonial Studies in seine Arbeit integriert und so einen bedeutenden Beitrag zur inhaltlichen und methodischen Weiterentwicklung dieses Forschungsfeldes geleistet. Die in der Festschrift versammelten Studien zur deutsch-jüdischen Kultur- und Literaturgeschichte, zur jüdischen Geschichte und zur Geschichte des Zionismus sowie zur vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft folgen diesem interdisziplinären und methodisch innovativen Ansatz und sind nicht nur ein Hommage an das Werk und die Person Mark Gelbers, sondern bieten auch selbst neue Perspektiven auf die deutsch-jüdische Geschichte und Kultur.

SCHRIFTEN DES CENTRUMS FÜR JÜDISCHE STUDIEN HERAUSGEGEBEN VON GERALD LAMPRECHT, OLAF TERPITZ

Band 31: Hildegard Frübis | Clara M. Oberle | Agnieszka Pufelska (Hg.) Fotografien aus den Lagern des NS-Regimes Fotografien aus den Lagern des NS-Regimes 2019. 325 Seiten, mit 127 s/w-Abb., gebunden € 50,00 D | € 52,00 A ISBN 978-3-205-20647-7 Auch als eBook erhältlich

Dieses Buch geht auf die Konferenz „Fotografien aus den Lagern des NS-Regimes“ zurück, die im November 2016 am Centrum für Jüdische Studien in Graz stattfand. Forschungsgeschichtlich gehört die Fotografie mittlerweile zu den Schlüsselmedien der Erforschung des Holocaust, was darauf zurückzuführen ist, dass in den Konzentrationslagern massenhaft und vielfältig fotografiert wurde – trotz aller offiziellen Verbote. Der thematische Spannungsbogen der hier publizierten Beiträge reicht von den privaten Knipser-Fotografen aus den Reihen der SS über die Fotografien des Erkennungsdienstes bis zu den heimlichen Aufnahmen von KZ-Häftlingen. Präsentiert werden noch selten publizierte Bildquellen aus den Archiven West- und Osteuropas sowie den USA.

JÜDISCHE SOLDATEN IN DER K.U.K. ARMEE

Erwin A. Schmidl Habsburgs jüdische Soldaten 1788–1918 2014. 264 Seiten, 62 s/w-Abb., 12 Grafiken und 2 Karten, gebunden € 35,00 D | € 36,00 A ISBN 978-3-205-79567-4

In Österreich wurden Juden erstmals 1788 ins Militär eingezogen. Im Ersten Weltkrieg dienten etwa 300.000 jüdische Soldaten in der k.u.k. Armee. Entgegen dem Klischee vom jüdischen Militärarzt oder Trainsoldaten dienten die meisten Juden in der kämpfenden Truppe. Unter den Berufsoffizieren war ihr Anteil geringer, während fast ein Fünftel aller Reserveoffiziere jüdischer Religion waren. Mehrere jüdische Offiziere erreichten Generalsränge. Obwohl es Benachteiligungen durch traditionelle antijüdische Vorurteile sowie den im 19. Jahrhundert aufkommenden „Rassen-Antisemitismus“ gab, verstand sich die k.u.k. Armee als über den Nationalitäten stehend; ihre Loyalität galt dem Kaiserhaus, nicht einer bestimmten Volksgruppe. Das vorliegende Buch bietet einen vollständigen, gut lesbaren Überblick über diesen wichtigen Teil sowohl der österreichischen wie der jüdischen Geschichte.

EIN BEITRAG AN DER SCHNITTSTELLE VON JUDENTUMS-, ANTISEMITISMUS- UND PARLAMENTARISMUSFORSCHUNG

Saskia Stachowitsch | Eva Kreisky (Hg.) Jüdische Identitäten und antisemitische Politiken im österreichischen Parlament 1861-1933 2017. 336 Seiten, gebunden € 37,00 D | € 38,00 A ISBN 978-3-205-20094-9

Dieses Buch widmet sich der Beteiligung von Jüdinnen und Juden an der Entwicklung des österreichischen Parlamentarismus sowie ihren Konfrontationen mit Antisemitismus als Strategie parlamentarischer Politik. Das vielfältige Wirken jüdischer ParlamentarierInnen in Abgeordnetenhaus und Herrenhaus des Reichsrats sowie im Nationalrat der Ersten Republik wird anhand einer Kollektivbiographie und einer Analyse von Parlamentsdebatten sichtbar gemacht. Die Untersuchung geht außerdem den Transformationen von Antisemitismus im Parlament sowie den dagegen entwickelten Widerständen nach. Damit stellt das Buch einen politikwissenschaftlichen Beitrag an der Schnittstelle von Judentums-, Antisemitismus- und Parlamentarismusforschung dar.

EIN UMFANGREICHER UND INTERDISZIPLINÄRER BLICK AUF DEN ÖSTERREICHISCHEN ANTISEMITISMUS

Gertrude Enderle-Burcel | Ilse Reiter-Zatloukal (Hg.) Antisemitismus in Österreich 1933-1938 2018. 1.167 Seiten, 53 s/w-Abb., gebunden € 80,00 D | € 82,00 A ISBN 978-3-205-20126-7 Auch als eBook erhältlich

Der umfangreiche Band zeichnet ein erschreckendes Bild von der Vielfältigkeit des Antisemitismus in Österreich in den Jahren vor dem „Anschluss“ an NSDeutschland 1938 – dies obwohl auch die Verfassung von 1934 die Gleichberechtigung aller Bundesbürger unabhängig vom Religionsbekenntnis garantierte. Die Beiträge behandeln neben der offiziellen Regierungspolitik insbesondere den Antisemitismus in Verbänden, Parteien, Religionsgesellschaften, in der Kultur- und Bildungspolitik, der Wissenschaft und Wirtschaft, aber auch jüdische Strategien gegen den Antisemitismus sowie innerjüdischen Antisemitismus. Die Autorinnen und Autoren gehören den unterschiedlichsten Fachrichtungen an, v.a. Geschichte, Politik-, Literatur- und Musikwissenschaft sowie Rechtswissenschaften.