Jewish Integration in the German Army in the First World War

Abstract

The last few years have seen the publication of a number of studies on Europe’s Jewish communities and the First World War. With the centenary of the conflict not far off, this flurry will undoubtedly increase further. Considering the relatively small size of Germany’s Jewish population, their military participation in the First World War was considerable. Somewhere in the region of 100,000 German Jews served in the army both at the front and behind the lines. What turns this relatively minor aspect of the war’s history into one of major significance is Germany’s fatal turn towards Nazism after the war. Less than twenty years later, these same soldiers were persecuted and then brutally murdered often by their own wartime comrades. For this reason, historical writing has tended to view the German-Jewish soldiers within the context of the National Socialists’ later genocidal policies. Rather than slotting himself into this existing narrative, though, David Fine chooses to take a very different approach. In this slim volume, based closely on his 2010 dissertation, he argues that the Jewish war experience should not be seen as ‘a prelude to 1933’ (p. 1). According to Fine, this is because antisemitism, which he views as limited, ‘did not play any substantive role in the integration of Jews in the army’ (p. 127). While there is certainly considerable merit in attempting to rethink the history of the conflict and German Jews’ involvement in it, at times Fine’s conclusions fail to convince.