Between Friends and Enemies: The Dilemma of Jews in the Final Stages of the War

Abstract

In the final stages of the war, the status of Jews as “friendly” minorities became heavily contested. While German Jews struggled with the aftershocks of the “Jew count” in the German army, British Jews faced debates about the military service of “friendly” alien Jews in their midst. The war’s catalyst effect on both nations increasingly blurred the boundaries between “friends” and “enemies”, but also between citizenship and ethnicity. Focusing on the subject of contested Jewish loyalties in times of national crisis, this chapter demonstrates the complexity of the Jewish situation between 1916 and 1919–1920. In so doing, it sheds new light on the contradictory legacies shaping the Jewish experiences of the First World War, thereby avoiding a one-dimensional narrative of Jewish “victory” or “defeat”.