Jews and the Military

A History

Derek J. Penslar

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781400848577
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

A historical reevaluation of the relationship between Jews, miltary service, and war Jews and the Military is the first comprehensive and comparative look at Jews' involvement in the military and their attitudes toward war from the 1600s until the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. Derek Penslar shows that although Jews have often been described as people who shun the army, in fact they have frequently been willing, even eager, to do military service, and only a minuscule minority have been pacifists. Penslar demonstrates that Israel's military ethos did not emerge from a vacuum and that long before the state's establishment, Jews had a vested interest in military affairs.Spanning Europe, North America, and the Middle East, Penslar discusses the myths and realities of Jewish draft dodging, how Jews reacted to facing their coreligionists in battle, the careers of Jewish officers and their reception in the Jewish community, the effects of World War I on Jewish veterans, and Jewish participation in the Spanish Civil War and World War II. Penslar culminates with a study of Israel's War of Independence as a Jewish world war, which drew on the military expertise and financial support of a mobilized, global Jewish community. He considers how military service was a central issue in debates about Jewish emancipation and a primary indicator of the position of Jews in any given society.Deconstructing old stereotypes, Jews and the Military radically transforms our understanding of Jews' historic relationship to war and military power.

CHAPTER ONE

The Jewish Soldier between Memory and Reality

Jews in the contemporary world have a remarkably static and homogeneous collective memory of their historic relationship with armed force. The memory’s origins lie in the historical consciousness, transmitted by public institutions and popular culture, in which the Holocaust and the state of Israel have assumed iconic status. As Jay Winter has noted, memory is rarely fixed, stable, and unidirectionally transmitted; institutions such as schools can instill memory but not impose it.¹ In most of the Jewish world since World War II, however, there has been little resistance to a classic Zionist narrative that lionizes the military prowess of the Jews in the ancient land of Israel but associates diaspora Jewry with timidity and an inability to defend itself against its persecutors. In this view, Jews who served in modern armies did so as either unwilling conscripts or deluded patriots.

For Ashkenazic Jews, who constitute the vast majority of world Jewry, the dominant image of Jewish soldiers comes from their experience in the imperial Russian army. Jews think of it as a teeming mass of coarse, aggressive, and frequently drunk peasants, barely kept in check by reactionary and disdainful, even sadistic, officers and fanatical Orthodox priests whose hatred for Jews was exceeded only by their zeal to convert them. According to this tragic narrative, the entire course of a young Russian-Jewish man’s life was stamped by the threat of military service. Some Jews were drafted as tender children; others were spared the draft, and granted the chance to lead a normal Jewish life, by being the only son in their family; others entered yeshivas or married at an unseemly young age in order to avoid conscription. Jewish families resorted to any subterfuge—from hiding birth records to bribing officials to sending their beloved sons abroad—and once in the army, Jews had few qualms about deserting, despite the risk of arrest and imprisonment.

This narrative of the army as a site of torment for Jews reinforces a deeply rooted perception by Jews that throughout most of their history they have been a meek and pacific people. The book of Genesis describes Jacob, the progenitor of the Jews, as a simple man who kept to his tent, unlike his brother, the ruddy huntsman Esau. The historical books of the Hebrew Bible narrate the military exploits of the ancient Israelites, yet the prophet Isaiah likens Jacob and his issue to a worm, weak and defenseless, and dependent upon God’s protection. Rabbinic texts are ambivalent toward and at times outright disapproving of military prowess. In late antiquity and the Middle Ages, rabbinic Judaism, the religious system of what has been called an “alienated minority,”² was detached from political power and the landed aristocracy that comprised the warrior elite. Rabbis had little reason to exult in the military exploits of Christians or Muslims or glorify wars in which Jews were more likely to be victims than participants. The dominant rabbinic view on the use of armed force was one of theological passivity—trusting that God, to cite the Jewish traditional prayer for the government, would give “salvation unto kings and dominion unto princes,” and would also determine and implement their downfall. The passive Jew was not part of the Gentile body politic but had no wish to be included, and he had no reason to fight in its wars.³

Passivity is hardly the same thing as pacifism. Jews have rarely espoused the principled and universal rejection of war found in some Protestant sectarian groups such as the Amish, Mennonites, Moravian Brethren, and Quakers. It has not been difficult for rabbis in modern times to employ the Jewish textual tradition to justify military service in the diaspora or to look favorably upon Zionism’s re-creation of the Hebrew warrior. We cannot appreciate the process by which a substantial component of Orthodox Judaism embraced Zionism, even unto its most militant forms, without emphasizing the distinction between passivity and pacifism, and the capacity of the former under the right conditions to mutate into activism, and even aggression.⁴

The corpus of Jewish sacred literature offers multiple and at times conflicting judgments regarding the ethics of military service or combat. We must neither read this literature selectively nor take it for granted that a textual tradition is indicative of lived reality. Over the span of Jewish history rabbinical authority has often directly impinged upon Jewish life, and a canon of legal and exegetical texts has been the common possession of the learned Jewish elite. Even in traditional Jewish societies, however, people did not simply do what their rabbis wanted of them. All the more so in modern times, where Jews have encountered multiple, competing sources of authority, emanating from their families, communities, civil society, or the centralizing state.

No historian interested in the social history of the military would turn first to, or rely primarily upon, the prescriptive writings of religious clerics. Similarly, students of Jewish society and culture are obliged to employ Judaic sources with care and always in juxtaposition with empirical data and a multivocal documentary base. This chapter will situate the different strands of Judaic thinking about war and military service within specific historical contexts before going on to document the extent to which military service impinged, and not always in a negative way, upon the lives of Jews in eastern Europe, the heartland of modern Jewish civilization. By juxtaposing text and context, on the one hand, and collective memory with lived reality, on the other, this chapter seeks to deconstruct popular and deeply entrenched ways of thinking about Jews and military service. It will prepare the ground for an alternative narrative of the encounter between modern Jews and the military in the chapters that follow.

War in Premodern Judaism

Judaic thinking about war and the military reflects the specific conditions of Jewish life. The Hebrew Bible glorifies the wars by which the Israelites conquered Canaan and defeated their enemies, particularly the Philistines. Rabbinic Judaism, in contrast, emerged from the destruction of the Second Temple and failure of the first- and second-century CE revolts against Rome. The rabbis accordingly elevated passivity to a legal and ethical imperative as per the Babylonian Talmud’s statement that “[a] man should always strive to be of the persecuted rather than of the persecutors because there is none among the birds more persecuted than the doves and pigeons, and yet Scripture made them [alone among birds] eligible for the altar” (Baba Batra 93a). The rabbis considered most wars to be optional, not obligatory, and permitted war within the land of Israel only with approval by the assembly of sages known as the Sanhedrin (a tall order, as it no longer existed during the final centuries of the formation of the Babylonian Talmud). The category of obligatory war was limited to the original conquest of Canaan, and therefore consigned to the distant and unrepeatable past.⁵

In late antiquity, talmudic study was verbally highly aggressive and employed the language of battle, of feint and charge, as a Jew faced off against his study partner cum opponent.⁶ Despite its combative form, the content of rabbinic discussion about war emphasized respect for human life, be it that of the Jew who is not compelled to fight in even a just war, or that of the enemy, which is not to be subject to wanton destruction. The rabbinic tradition follows the sages of the Mishnah (Shabbat 6:4) who prohibited the carrying of arms on the Sabbath: Rabbi Eliezer called them “adornments” and permitted them to be worn, but the majority, citing Isaiah 2:4 (“And they shall beat their swords into ploughshares”), deemed the bow, spear, shield, and lance to be no less than a disgrace. The biblical warrior was transformed into a forerunner of the rabbinic warrior of the spirit.⁷

Biblical commandments that constrained behavior in battle and talmudic condemnations of militarism have been passed down across generations and are well known among Jews today. Less familiar is a more militant stream of Jewish thought that developed in medieval and early modern Europe and North Africa. Some of the most illustrious rabbis of the period, including Moses Maimonides (1135–1204), Menachem Hameiri (1249–c. 1310), and Josef Karo (1488–1575), justified wars of territorial expansion. The celebrated rabbi Judah Lowe of Prague (the Maharal, 1520–1609) justified the collective slaughter by Simon and Levi of the men of Shekhem (Genesis 33) as an appropriate action against violators of a Noahide commandment (the rape of their sister Dinah) or simply as members of an enemy nation: “As they [the men of Shekhem] belong to the nation which did them [Israel] harm, they are allowed to wage war against them” even though “there are many [among the men of Shekhem] who did not do anything.”⁸

These rabbis did not advocate that the Jews take military action against their oppressors. But Maimonides as well as the twelfth-century polymath Abraham Ibn Ezra believed that the Jews’ passivity would be temporary. In the words of the historian Haim Hillel Ben-Sasson, these great thinkers saw

in the [Jews’] social degradation and suffering a blow and woe that must be borne so long as it is not possible to rise up against them in force; but if it is possible to cast off the yoke and to overturn the rule of those who humiliate the Jews, war is a good, as is the sword in hand, for this is the honor of the believers and the will of their God.⁹

This sort of thinking stimulated Jewish fantasies, and occasional acts, of vengeance against Gentiles in medieval and early modern Europe. It accounts for the enduring popularity of the Sefer Yossipon, a tenth-century paraphrase of Josephus’ account of the ancient Jewish war against Rome, which provided medieval Jews the solace that their ancestors had been heroes and warriors.¹⁰

Both talmudic and medieval rabbinic speculation about war usually addressed the distant past, not the present, and the land of Israel, not the Jews’ actual lands of residence. Medieval commentators did find a contemporary application in the Talmud’s discussion (Avodah Zarah 18b) about whether it is permitted for a Jew to attend gladiatorial arenas or circuses in an army encampment around a besieged city. The core of the text, the Mishnah, says it is forbidden, but the lengthy exposition, the Gemarah, notes that one may do so in order to save the life of a Jew who was kidnapped and put in the arena, or to beseech the troops leading the siege to spare the lives of the Jews within the encircled city. At the same time the Gemarah cautions that it is strictly forbidden to be “considered to be one of the Gentiles.” The eleventh-century commentator Rashi interpreted this phrase to mean taking part in the siege of the city, and later medieval commentators known as the Tosafists claimed it meant that Jews must not be “among the number of the army of the Gentiles.”

Was this a blanket prohibition against Jews serving in Gentile armies?¹¹ If so, Jews have violated it repeatedly, for Jews have been soldiers as long as there have been Jews—not only in the land of Israel but also throughout the diaspora. There are few signs of this activity in prescriptive Jewish texts, those legal and ethical writings that are central to the Jewish textual canon. But a wide variety of sources, especially historical chronicles, document stories about Jews as defenders of their communities and warriors for their lords, stories that are well known to scholars but have not penetrated into public consciousness.

Premodern Jews in War

In the ancient Near East, Jewish soldiering extended far beyond the wars of the Israelites that are chronicled in the Hebrew scriptures. As Judah fell under Babylonian, Persian, and then Hellenistic rule, Judean soldiers became increasingly common throughout the region. Jewish officers as well as simple fighters figured prominently in the armies of the Ptolemaic and Seleucid empires. The Christianization of Rome in the fourth century CE stimulated efforts to put an end to what was by then a millennium-old tradition of Jewish soldiering in imperial armies. Laws were promulgated, over and again, restricting Jewish access to military service and to the bearing of arms, but Jews in Christendom continued to serve as soldiers and commanders into the sixth century CE, and in the Islamic world throughout the Middle Ages.¹²

Jews in medieval Christendom were rarely soldiers but still engaged in armed combat. In the spring of 1096, after the calling of the First Crusade, a mob ostensibly en route to Palestine pillaged Jewish communities in the Rhine Valley, killing thousands. According to the Hebrew chronicle of Shlomo bar Shimon, the Jews of Mainz “donned their armor and girded on their weapons” and fought valiantly against the foe, although they were vastly outnumbered and weakened by fasting—whether motivated by the self-affliction of the penitent, or the practice of ancient warriors preparing for battle, is not clear. The Jews soon faced the grim prospect of forcible conversion or death, and they chose the latter via suicide.¹³ This famous chronicle has attracted attention because of its account of Jewish mass suicide, but no less fascinating is this document’s reminder that the Jews of medieval Ashkenaz had the legal privilege to bear arms, a privilege indicative of high social status, akin to knighthood.¹⁴ The right and importance of bearing arms is evident in Jewish law as well. During the thirteenth century, the permissibility of bearing arms on the Sabbath, first discussed in the Mishnah, appeared in the responsa of Rabbi Meir of Rothenberg, the writings of Rabbi Isaac ben Moses of Vienna and Eliezer of Worms, and communal regulations in Spain. A responsum attributed to Rabbi Meir of Rothenberg determined that learning how to wield a sword was a necessary skill.¹⁵

Jews in medieval Ashkenaz internalized the chivalric values of the ambient Christian culture and compared their acts of martyrdom to the noble behavior of knights.¹⁶ Images of warfare graced illuminated medieval haggadot, and in France Jews were wont to commission paintings, one of whose popular themes was the battle of David and Goliath.¹⁷ The attraction to military imagery and the memory of the ancient Jews’ triumphs over their enemies did not, however, mitigate an overpowering sense of Jewish victimhood. (The most common theme in paintings commissioned by medieval French Jews was the Binding of Isaac, which many Jews of the time, given the persecution and hatred they frequently faced, no doubt considered a form of self-portraiture.) In a number of early modern illuminated haggadot, from Barcelona (fourteenth century) to Prague (1526) and Amsterdam (1695), the wicked son was depicted as a soldier,¹⁸ suggesting discomfort with contemporary Jews who wielded weapons more easily than talmudic logic.¹⁹

The interconnections between carrying and wielding weapons for personal use, military service, and town defense are c...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter One: The Jewish Soldier between Memory and Reality
• Chapter Two: Fighting for Rights: Conscription and Jewish Emancipation
• Chapter Three: The Military as a Jewish Occupation
• Chapter Four: When May We Kill Our Brethren? Jews at War
• Chapter Five: The Jewish Soldier of World War I: From Participant to Victim
• Chapter Six: The World Wars as Jewish Wars
• Chapter Seven: 1948 as a Jewish World War
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index