THE MYTH OF THE VIOLENCE-AVERSE JEW
Penslar takes issue with the common supposition that Jews had an ingrained antipathy to violence. In fact, Jews frequently participated in the defense of their towns against bandits, and fought back during pogroms, such as those that occurred during the Crusades. (pp. 22-23).

Jews actually celebrated wars--that is, their wars. Throughout history, including the Middle Ages, Jews recounted the military exploits of ancient Israel. (pp. 68-69). Leading Jewish medieval thinkers, such as Moses Maimonides and Menahem Ha-Meiri, spoke favorably of war as a policy. (pp. 20-21).

As Jewish military service, in gentile armies, became relatively common in the last two hundred years or so, rabbis stressed the fact that there is no halakhic prohibition against Jews using deadly force. (p. 45). Those Jews, in recent times, who objected to serving in gentile armies were, unlike, for example, the Quakers, seldom motivated by pacifism (p. 18), although they sometimes invoked pacifism as a smokescreen for other motives. (pp. 209-210).

RELIGIOUS ISSUES

The Talmudic prohibition against Jewish participation in gentile army encampments (Avodah Zarah 18b) was sometimes understood, by Jews, as a blanket prohibition against Jewish participation in gentile armies. However, this teaching was never followed consistently by Jews. (p. 21).

Engaging in combat did not itself violate the Sabbath, as one is permitted to disregard the strictures of the Sabbath in extreme circumstances. However, the performance of everyday routines, while in the armed forces, does constitute work on the Sabbath, and is therefore in violation of it. (p. 275). This consideration can be broadened. Various rabbis warned that military service, by its very nature, would tend to draw Jews away from religious observance and away from their communities. (p. 46, 275). Much the same reasoning is used by certain Orthodox Jews (the HAREDIM), in Israel today, in order to justify their usual avoidance of military service. (pp. 260-262).

[The reader should be aware of the fact that the issues raised in previous paragraphs were a factor in Polish objections to the so-called Minorities Treaty (this was around 1918). The Minorities Treaty, had it been successfully forced on Poland in its fullest sense, would have effectively made Jews a separate nation on Polish soil. Emboldened by this arguably-special status, Poland’s Jews could have refused to serve in the Polish Army on putative religious grounds.]

EARLY JEWISH NATIONALISM

There is no mystery to the fact that, until fairly recent times, Jews seldom served in gentile armies. For most of history, the Jews did not consider themselves to be in allegiance with the nations among whom they lived. Penslar writes of the Jews having "a sense of divinely sanctioned wariness toward the Gentile world." (p. 268).

However, the author does not fully develop the theme of Jewish separatism and its implications. "Jewish nationalism" hardly began with modern, secular, political movements such as Bundism and Zionism. Since time immemorial, Jews had thought themselves distinct from the other nations (GOYIM), and moreover were a nation of their own. Their statelessness was temporary (e. g, "Next year in Jerusalem."), and they would once again have armies of their own. Undoubtedly, the active remembrance of past Jewish military exploits implied a mindset of fighting for their own nation and not, with rare and circumstance-driven exceptions, for the gentile nations.

BEREK JOZELEWICZ DECONSTRUCTED?

All-in-all, Penslar exaggerates the Jewish support for Polish insurrectionary efforts for independence. (e. g, p. 37, 56). For corrective, please click on, and read my detailed review, of Poles and Jews: A Failed Brotherhood (The Tauber Institute Series for the Study of European Jewry).

The actions of merchant Berek Jozelewicz (1764-1809), in the 1794 Kosciuszko Uprising, are usually celebrated as the acts of a prominent Jew expressing his love for Poland. Author Derek J. Penslar throws some cold water on this narrative. First of all, he considers the regiment of Jewish volunteer cavalry a legend, and suggests that it may have been a part of the urban militia defending Warsaw from the Russians, and not an independent regiment. (p. 56).

More important, Penslar raises sensitive issues that include opportunism and ephemeral loyalties. The following is a direct quote:

Berek was not so much a Polish patriot as an adventurer and activist who sought to enhance his own personal honor as well as that of the Jews under his command. Although Berek is most famous for his service for Poland, in 1796 he proposed to the Habsburg emperor the raising of a corps of six thousand to eight thousand Jews who would be divided into cavalry and infantry units to fight against the French. (pp. 56-57). [End of direct quote]

On a related Jewish personage, Penslar examines the motives of Dov Ber Meisels, the chief rabbi of Krakow, a prosperous banker, and supporter of the Poles’ January 1863 Insurrection. The author notes that Meisels was, in his words, a "reactionary antinationalist", and proposes that Meisels’ support for the Polish cause owed to his long-standing close associations with the Polish nobility. (p. 58). However, Penslar does not go far enough. Was the fact that Meisels was a banker imply that he had a financial stake in a Polish victory in the 1863 Uprising?

JEWISH DRAFT DODGING

The author’s analysis of this subject is disappointingly superficial. He asserts that both Jews and non-Jews have exaggerated the extent of Jewish evasion of military service (p. 36), but fails to provide a coherent body of data to support his argument. For instance, he briefly cites a comprehensive, late 19th-century Habsburg Austrian archival source (p. 48, referring to No. 31 on page 276) that shows a variable rate of draft evasion, in place and time, among Jews and non-Jews. However, his rather skimpy references to this detailed source prevent a direct comparison between the rates of draft dodging among Jews and non-Jews.

The degree to which Jews participated in military service, among nations, in recent centuries, varied according to the Jews’ emancipation, as well as their perception of the military as a prestigious activity. (p. 36). Penslar candidly points out that, "Throughout modern times, Jews willingly served in the military when it furthered their individual and collective interests to do so." (p. 15).

LINGERING JEWISH COSMOPOLITANISM

Despite the increasing presence of Jewish soldiers and Jewish officers in the European armies of the 19th and 20th centuries, and the manifestations of Jewish patriotism towards the nations they lived in, questions persisted about Jewish loyalties. The following, which are direct quotes from Penslar, may shed some light on why this was so:

Even for assimilated French Jews, loyalty to the state was not the same as unreserved identification with the nation. [Emile] Mayer’s letter of 1916, in which he alludes to his German origins, asserts a form of transnational identity. His decrial of the Great War [WWI] as a "civil war" is reminiscent of a substantial body of writings of the time by European Jews whose support for the war, however passionate at its outbreak, quickly turned to uneasiness, even strident opposition. That opposition had little to do with pacifism…but rather fear of facing their coreligionists on the other side of the line of battle. (p. 120).

Modern Jewish identities have frequently blended national attachments to a homeland with a transnationalist, pan-Jewish sensibility. (p. 121). [End of direct quotes].

Obviously, by Penslar's tacit admission, there was something to the notions of Jewish internationalism and dual loyalties. The foregoing quotes also make it easier for reader to understand why the Endeks doubted if Polish Jews, even if assimilated and professing a loyalty to Poland, were either fully or permanently identified with the Polish nation.

THOSE INTERNATIONAL JEWISH BANKERS

Penslar condemns the anti-Semitic trope that posits that Jewish bankers finance both sides, and egg them on to go to war with each other so as to profit from the warfare. However, he is candid about the fact that, "Revulsion against hateful stereotypes should not blind us to the sizable presence of Jews in finance and business who made money from war…It is a fact, not an anti-Semitic fantasy, that Jews played vital roles in coordinating the allocation of raw materials during the First World War, not only in Germany but also in the United States." (p. 145, 150).

The author rejects the premise, of international bankers in collusion, by pointing to the disagreements, between them, as to which nation to finance (e. g, Schiff (no) vs. Morgan (yes) on Russia: p. 147). He also repudiates any notion of "racial solidarity" among Jews, by pointing out that Jewish bankers are driven primarily by business considerations (p. 146, 151), moreover even when these are not helpful to Jews as a whole. As an example, many Jewish bankers (e. g, the Rothschilds of several European nations, Mendelsohn, Bleichroeder, but not Schiff) financed tsarist Russia even though Russia was scorned by Jews in general. (pp. 146-147). Penslar also alleges that international bankers oppose wars, since they realize that wars can bring major financial losses as well as profits. (pp. 147-149).

ANTI-SEMITISM AND ANTI-POLONISM DURING WWI

Disparaging remarks were often made about the conduct of Jewish soldiers, even in recent times, and it is interesting how they tried to shift the blame to the Poles. Referring to WWI and the tsarist army, Derek J. Penslar comments, "While Russians accused Jews of having secret telephones with which they communicated with the enemy, Jewish versions of the rumor identified the true perpetrators as Poles disguised as Jews". (p. 157). [The reader may be interested in the fact that Jews used a similar foil when accused of shooting at Polish troops. They said that the shooters were Russian snipers that were deliberately shooting out of Jewish homes!]

THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR (1936-1939)

Consider the International Brigades, which fought on the Communist (Republican) side. Penslar estimates that at least one-fifth of them were Jews. (p. 201).

Jewish support for the Communist efforts in Spain went far beyond that of card-carrying Communists. In western Europe and the United States, the Bund and Poalei Tsion (Poalei Zion) Left, also supported what Penslar called "international Marxism" and "global proletarian revolution", which, of course, meant backing the Communist side in Spain. (p. 206).

January 16, 2016
Jan Peczkis