Abstract
Just decades after the experience of intense persecution and struggle for recognition that marked the end of the nineteenth century, Jews across the globe found themselves at an unprecedented crossroads. The frenzied military mobilisation of European societies from 1914, along with the outbreak of revolution in Russia, the collapse of the Central European empires and the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East had a profound impact on Jewish communities worldwide. The First World War thus constitutes a seminal but surprisingly under-researched moment in the evolution of modern Jewish history. This introductory chapter explores the variety of social, cultural, and political phenomena that combined to the make the ‘war to end all wars’ such a key turning point in the Jewish experience of the twentieth century.
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Notes
- 1.
For analyses of the myth of widespread war enthusiasm, see Gerhard Hirschfeld (2011), ‘‘The Spirit of 1914’: A Critical Examination of War Enthusiasm in German Society’, in Lothar Kettenacker and Torsten Riotte, eds. The Legacies of Two World Wars: European Societies in the Twentieth Century (New York, Berghahn), 29–40; David Silbey (2004), The British Working Class and Enthusiasm for War (Abingdon, Frank Cass) 1–15; and Jay Winter (1992), Nationalism, the Visual Arts and the Myth or War Enthusiasm in 1914, History of European Ideas 15:1–3, 57–62.
- 2.
Paul Reynolds (2013), ‘The Man Who Predicted the Great War’, History Today, 63:5. On Bloch’s relationship with, and influence on, the staff officers of the British army, see especially Michael Welch (2001), ‘The Centenary of the British Publication of Jean de Bloch’s Is War Now Impossible? (1899–1999)’, War in History, 7:3, 273–294. Jean Colin’s Les Transformations de la Guerre was first published in 1911 and translated into English the following year, see Edward Madigan (2013), ‘‘Sticking to a Hateful Task’: Resilience, Humour, and British Understandings of Combatant Courage, 1914–1918’, War in History, 20:1, 84–86.
- 3.
On the complexity of popular responses to the outbreak of war in Britain, Germany, and France; see Catriona Pennell (2012), A Kingdom United: Popular Responses to the Outbreak of the First World War in Britain and Ireland (Oxford, Oxford University Press); Jeffrey Verhey (2000), The Spirit of 1914: Militarism, Myth and Mobilization in Germany (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press); and Patrick J. Flood (1990), France 1914–1918: Public Opinion and the War Effort (Basingstoke, Palgrave), 43–56.
- 4.
Dan Todman (2005), The Great War: Myth and Memory (London, Hambledon), 7.
- 5.
For more on Lissauer, see Guide to the Papers of Ernst Lissauer (1882–1937), 1722–1967 AR 25209/MF 700 evadible online in the Leo Baeck Institute archive http://findingaids.cjh.org/?pID=121527#secIII-6-B.
- 6.
Stefan Zweig (1943), The World of Yesterday: An Autobiography (London, Cassel and Company), 179.
- 7.
Ibid., 180.
- 8.
James Gerard (1917), My Four Years in Germany (New York, Grossert & Dunlap), 224.
- 9.
Im Deutschen Reich (September 1914), 339.
- 10.
Jüdische Rundschau: Allgemeine jüdische Zeitung (7 August 1914), 333.
- 11.
Herman Cohen (1915), Deutschtum und Judentum, mit grundlegenden betrachtungen über staat und internationalismus (Gießen, Verlag von Alfred Töpelamann), 37.
- 12.
Ulrich Sieg (2002), Jüdische Intellektuelle im Ersten Weltkrieg: Kriegserfahrungen, weltanschauliche Debatten und kulturelle Neuentwürfe (Berlin, Akademia Verlag). For further examples see: Rolf Vogel (1914), Ein Stück von uns: deutsche Juden in deutschen Armeen 1813–1976; eine Dokumentation (Mainz, Hase und Koehler).
- 13.
The Jewish Chronicle, 7 August 1914, 5.
- 14.
Lucian Wolf (1915), Jewish Ideals and the War: An Address Delivered by Lucien Wolf on 7 December 1914 (London, Central Committee for National Patriotic Organizations).
- 15.
Ibid.
- 16.
See in Joachim Utz (1990), ‘Der Erste Weltkrieg im Spiegel des deutschen und englischen Haßgedichts’, in Jan Assmann and Dietrich Harth, eds. Kultur und Konflikt (Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp Verlag), 373. Gronemann also write about Lissauer in chapter XIX of his memoirs: Sammy Gronemann (2014), Erinnerung an meine Jahre in Berlin (Hamburg, Eropäische Verlaganstalt). More broadly on the topic see in Christoph Jahr (1994), ‘Das Krämervolk der eitlen Briten: Das deutsche Englandbild im Ersten Weltkrieg’, in Christoph Jahr, Uwe Mai, and Kathrin Roller, eds. Feindbilder in der deutschen Geschichte. Studien zur Vorurteilsgeschichte im 19 und 20 Jahrhundert (Berlin, Metropol-Verlag), 115.
- 17.
Henri Bergson (1920), The Meaning of the War (London, T. Fisher Unwin Ltd).
- 18.
Benjamin Segel (1920), Der Weltkrieg und das Schicksal der Juden: Stimme eines galizischen Juden and seine Glaubensgenossen in der neutralen Länder insbesondere in Amerika (Berlin, Stilke Verlag), 143.
- 19.
Florence Kiper Frank (1914), ‘The Jewish Conscript’, Poetry Magazine of Verse, 66.
- 20.
American Jewish Committee (1916), The Jews in the Eastern War Zone (New York, American Jewish Committee), 7. The American Jewish Committee was founded in 1906 to address the need to defend Jewish civil rights in the United States and throughout the world. It should be added that the report also deals with the situation of Jews in Palestine under Ottoman rule.
- 21.
Sabeti B. Rohold (1915), The War and the Jews: Bird’s Eye View of The World’s Situation and The Jews Place in It (Toronto, The Macmillan Company of Canada), 11.
- 22.
This connection was not lost on contemporaries in the 1940s. See, for example, Eliezer Kalier’s (1943) detailed account of the German occupation of his home town in Poland with the telling title: The Fathers of the Nazis: Memoirs of the German occupation in Poland during the First World War [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv, Achdot Publishing), or the pamphlet of the Research Institute on Peace and Post-War Problems of the American Jewish Committee (1942) entitled The Two World Wars – A Comparison and Contrast, Jewish Post-War Problems: A Study Course (New York, Research Institute on Peace and Post-War Problems).
- 23.
Since 2014 there has been a growing number of publications on Jewish engagement with the war. The most prominent English-language collections are Petra Ernst, Jeffrey Grossman, and Ulrich Wyrwa. eds. (2016), The Great War. Reflections, Experiences and Memories of German and Habsburg Jews (1914–1918) a special issue of the online journal Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History available at http://www.quest-cdecjournal.it/index.php?issue=9; and Marsha L. Rozenblit and Jonathan Karp. eds. (2017), World War I and the Jews: Conflict and Transformation in Europe, the Middle East, and America (New York, Berghahn Books). Both of these publications should be regarded as pioneering texts. Beyond the very useful introduction to World War I and the Jews by Rozenblit and Karp, the first three articles of this collection by Marsha Rozenblit, David Engel and Carole Fink provide stimulating overviews of the main topics at hand, along with very informative bibliographical references. A forthcoming volume, which we did not have the opportunity to review while preparing this book for publication is: Jason Crouthamel, Michael Geheran, Tim Grady, and Julia Barbara Köhne, eds. Beyond Inclusion and Exclusion: Jewish Experiences of the First World War in Central Europe (New York, Berghahn books).
- 24.
Hannah Arendt (1946), ‘Privileged Jews’, Jewish Social Studies 8, 30.
- 25.
Yuri Slezkine (2004), The Jewish Century (Princeton, Princeton University Press).
- 26.
No Author mentioned, ‘An die Leser!’ Jüdisches Archiv Mitteilungen Des Komitees Jüdisches Kriegsarchiv 1 (1915), 1. See also Max Gottschalk, ed. (1942), How The Jewish Communities Prepared for Peace During the First World War (New York, Research Institute on Peace and Post-War Problems).
- 27.
Zweig (1943), The World of Yesterday, Chapter 1.
- 28.
Michael Berkowitz (1997), Western Jewry and the Zionist Project, 1914–1933 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press).
- 29.
‘An die Leser!’, 1.
- 30.
No author given, ‘Historical position’, Hatzfira (26 March 1917), 1.
- 31.
Hannah Arendt (1973), The Origins of Totalitarianism (San Diego, A. Harvest), 267.
- 32.
See footnote 22 for some very recent publications on the topic.
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Reuveni, G., Madigan, E. (2019). The First World War and the Jews. In: Madigan, E., Reuveni, G. (eds) The Jewish Experience of the First World War. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54896-2_1
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