Reviewed by: Jews and the Military: A History by Derek J. Penslar Jeffrey S. Gurock Jews and the Military: A History. By derek j. penslar. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2013. 376 pp. $29.95 (cloth). One of the most common family traditions harbored by American Jews of Russian descent is that the calamity of conscription into the Tsarist army in the nineteenth century drove their frightened ancestors to the freedom of the West. As the story goes, their great-grandfathers would have been subjected to up to twenty-five years of service in a merciless military among the dregs of Christian society under the heels of sadistic officers. And they would have been subject to unrelenting pressure to convert by aggressive Russian Orthodox prelates. This narrative of horrific circumstances also recounts emphatically that to make matters worse, the selections of those who were forced to go were conducted by an oligarchic Jewish community that hired its own bands of kidnappers to impress the powerless. This oft-told tale is one of the several half-truths that Derek Penslar nuances and contextualizes in his far-reaching study of the Jewish encounter with armies in many times and places. Jews and the Military [End Page 191] calmly explains that while Russian Jewish soldiers were surely unfortunates, their difficulties were part of a larger Tsarist policy that was committed to making various groups of problematic subjects more useful through the army experiences. In fact, Penslar avers that while some seventy thousand Jewish males were pressed into the military over a fifty-year period—and many of them were child conscripts—Jewish soldiers were not “coerced to convert” and the vast majority “persever[ed]” in their ancestral faith. Moreover, even under the most repressive tsar, Nicholas I, “the army did allow exemptions from certain kinds of work on Sabbath and holidays” (p. 30). And under the somewhat liberal-minded Alexander II Jewish communities were allowed to donate Torah scrolls to military camps and help build soldiers’ synagogues. Most revealing, when universal conscription was introduced in 1874, so many Jews showed up for induction—they did their duty rather than dodge the draft—that a renowned Torah sage, the Chofetz Chaim (Rabbi Israel Meir ha-Cohen Kagan), published a guidebook for soldiers to assist them in maintaining Jewish tradition while under arms. This same rabbi, twelve years later, would admonish the Jews not to migrate to America since their religion would be lost. Penslar’s take on the military-migration nexus deepens our understanding of the complexity of decision making that Jews contemplated when considering migration out of Russia. With similar comprehensiveness, Penslar enriches our understanding of how in premodern times Jews were ready and able to take up arms to defend their own communities and even defended the lands within which they lived. In his account, “Jews have been soldiers as long as there have been Jews—not only in the land of Israel but also throughout the Diaspora.” To be sure, with the struggle for their emancipation, gaining acceptance within an adopted country’s fighting force became a community-defining situation with Jews anxious to serve shoulder to shoulder with their fellow citizens. So disposed, they might even fire at will at fellow Jews who were wearing another country’s uniform. But clearly they brought to eighteenth- through twentieth-century battlefields prior experience with weapons, an expertise that was used not only to protect their own lives and limbs but also to stand guard on a town’s ramparts “along with everyone else.” Penslar writes, for example, of a “self-confident Jewish community” in sixteenth-century Poland “where synagogues were fortified and occasionally housed cannons on the roofs” (p. 23). Penslar’s thought-provoking study, thus, questions one of the most powerful half-truths of modern Jewish history. He evaluates the regnant Zionist narrative that their state rose against great odds due uniquely to [End Page 192] the homegrown heroes of the Haganah and the Irgun, who reclaimed a “Maccabean” spirit that had been lost for millennia. Penslar argues alternatively that many of these stalwart fighters learned their military arts abroad in Europe during the First World War and the Bolshevik...