By Morris Malakoff, JTNews Correspondent
Popular culture often depicts Jewish men as wimpy individuals of small stature who are ardently pacifist in thought and deed. If there is an image of a Jewish fighter, it might be a military hero such as Moshe Dayan defending Israel or Alfred Dreyfus, known more for being victimized by institutional anti-Semitism than military prowess.
“Jewish military involvement has not penetrated the collective memory,” said Dr. Derek Penslar, keynote speaker at the University of Washington and Hillel-sponsored conference “Sovereigns & Subjects: Jewish Political Thought in the 20th Century,” which was held over the weekend of Feb. 24 and 25 at Hillel. “Even Jews have internalized those stereotypes, those funny Woody Allen type characters.”
Penslar, who is the Samuel Zacks Professor of Jewish History and Director of the Centre of Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto, delivered a lecture titled “Uniform Identities: Jews and the Military in Modern Europe” to an audience of academics and others on the first night of the series.
“Those stereotypes could not be further from the truth,” he said. “In fact, going back into history, Jews had a history of engaging military powers in the world.”
Judaism also has a history of engaging in the call for duty.
“Judaism has no proscription to military service,” he said. “Rabbis have continually counseled that service in the military is a duty that should be honored. There is also no notion that Jews cannot be combatants against Jews in the service to a nation…. Jews faced each other across the trenches of Europe in World War I.”
He recounted stories of Jewish valor in battles such as the defense of Prague in 1648 and similar battles in central and eastern Europe in places such as Buda.
But the situation diverged with the Diaspora that resulted as the Pale began its slow decay. Penslar recounted the dichotic experience of Jews in 19th-century Europe, illustrating the difference in attitudes toward national service between those Jews who had fled the Pale and those who stayed behind, particularly with the outbreak of the First World War in 1914.
“In Russia, service was mandatory and many assiduously avoided it while others figured it was something they had no choice but to do,” he said. “But there was no real sense of duty. But for those in France, where many ended up after fleeing, service was performed with a sense of duty and honor.
“There was a feeling in France and England that service would mean assimilation, a way to gain rights and gain freedom,” he said. “That was not the case in Russia.”
That form of thinking extended into Imperial Germany in the years between the establishment of the nation in 1871 and the end of the Weimar Republic.
But WWI would be a confusing time for Jews, as geopolitics would cause their allegiances to be turned on their heads.
“Germany and the Kaiser were seen as great liberators for their battles with the hated Czarist Russians,” he said. “The adoration for the Germans extended to things like naming a synagogue for Hindenberg. Then, when the Czar was toppled in 1917, resistance to the Russians and service in the Russian Army subsided. In fact, many Jews went on to become military leaders in the early Soviet Union. They were pillars of the Red Army.”
With the rise of Nazism and World War II, military and other allegiances with Germany came to an end. But in other European countries, notably Great Britain, brigades had been formed in both wars that were comprised completely of Jews. Inadvertently, even the United States had some ersatz Jewish units in Europe as well.
“Those were generally a result of units that had been formed in places with a concentrated Jewish population, such as New York,” Penslar said.
After the war, those British brigades, along with a number of fighters from Russia and even a small number of former German soldiers, would find their way to Palestine to fight in the War of Independence in 1948.
Penslar summed up the Jewish military experience in modern Europe by pointing out that while Jews do have a passive ethos, that does not mean they have been pacifists in the eyes of many until relatively recently.
“The stereotype of the often somewhat ‘pink,’ liberal, radical Jew does not come into being until pacifist ideology comes into mainstream culture around the time of World War I,” he said. “And, in fact, Jews continue to serve honorably in the military everywhere.”