Brother Against Brother

Jews in WWI and why they fought Brother against Brother

‘Brother against Brother’ first appears with the murder of Abel by his brother Cain, as is recorded in all the various editions of the Bible, Old Testament, Book of Genesis. Here, the Torah asks a question which rings down through the centuries: “Am I my brother’s keeper?” This source is arguably the oldest source available. There are other sources in the Ancient World in which this history is repeated. Please note some of them in the endnote:

The three most prominent conflicts in which Jewish Brothers were pitted against Jewish Brothers were the American Civil War, the Franco-Prussian War, and the most destructive of all, World War I

Previously, we heard of Jews defending their cities or supporting this or that monarch in military adventures. Still, never before that did the wars take such a nationalistic aspect sufficient enough to bring European and East European Jews into conflict with one another.

I will attempt to answer two questions.  The first is, how did this nationalism start, and did they think that they might be called to kill Jews of another nation, spread among the Jews?

The second is, once they either volunteered (and many did) or were conscripted (as were most), how did they deal with the probability that they might have to kill brothers, Jews of another nation?

The steps leading to Jewish willingness to participation in the wars of the late 19^th Century and Early 20^th century may have been formed during the enlightenment period and strengthened following the Jewish emancipation. The enlightenment and then the emancipation witnessed the creation of a powerful Jewish bourgeois that identified far more with the non-Jewish European bourgeois than with their fellow Jews. This gap was contracted as more Jews joined the lower middle class; however, for the Orthodox Jews, the change moved slowly, if at all.

Petra Wilhelmy-Dollinger writes about the effect women had on the Enlightenment and the emancipation, in which she argues that there was a tendency among well-to-do enlightened Jewish women in Berlin to reach out to their Christian bourgeois counterparts for fellowship and intellectual entertainment. The Enlightenment caught the imagination of both Jewish men and women as they became acquainted with many revolutionary ideas that were sprouting up.[1] She writes that in the Berlin salons, the interrelation between the German Enlightenment and Haskalah attracted young, educated Jewish women from well-to-do families. They were searching for a new role in life outside the patriarchal structures of their traditional families. The salons had been criticized as a symptom of failing Jewish tradition by more traditional Jewish groups. However, liberal, educated Jewish women saw them as a positive symbol for emancipation and acculturation. Whatever one’s attitude, the importance of the salon culture in the process of women’s emancipation in Germany cannot be denied. It was not until the end of the Seven Years’ War (1764) that the first Jewish salons came into their own. The founders were Sara Levy in Berlin and Fanny von Arnstein in Vienna, based on the Bildungsbürgertum (educated middle-class women) model, which later became the prototype of the Berlin salons.[2]

Wilhelmy-Dollinger argues that these salons provided a chance for Christians and Jews (the intellectuals, financial, and scientific elite) to sit side by side at the tea tables. Enlightenment philosophy provided the social, political, and intellectual basis, augmented by the poetical and philosophical emancipation of individual feeling.

In the age of Bismarck, many distinguished politicians were either Jews or of Jewish origin, and many of them were habitués in the salons. Soon, the Kulturkampf against the Catholic Church led to civil marriage, which in turn facilitated matches between persons of different creeds.

Salo W. Baron considers the emergence of the Jewish salon instrumental in breaking down the old Jewish loyalties. In their place, the Salon helped to create a feeling of belonging to the nation. Baron writes concerning intermarriage that intermarriage became a factor that drew the upper classes of both groups, Christian and Jew, together. This new social relationship soon developed into much more than that.

Baron writes that Reform Rabbis, such as Bernhard Wechsler of Oldenburg, officiated at marriages between Jews and non-jews.  Impoverished German noblemen saw this as a financial opportunity and married into wealthy Jewish families. He quotes Bismarck as saying that, “such mating of German stallions with Jewish mares is an accession to national strength.

Baron sees the enlightenment and emancipation as a good thing; however, he quotes Berthold Auerbach, a loyal and assimilated German Jew who, during Adolphe Cremeux’s visit to Berlin on behalf of the Alliance to facilitate assistance to Jewish emigrants from Fruss. Auerbox, who was warmed by this evidence of international Jewish community interest, spoke at the reception for Cremieux.  Baron maintains that he was unaware of what he was saying; Baron quotes part of the speech, “…about the mission of the Jews who are to become full-fledged Frenchmen in France, full-fledged Germans in Germany, and so forth. It was their mission to help establish a state and nationality in a superior place, not on the basis of blood descent but on that of the spirit.”

The stage is set. By 1914, when WWI broke out, as a result of enlightenment and emancipation, Jews had diluted the ancient call of Jew to Jew by blood. They suborned it with the idea each Jew is also a member of a nation of the world, and they split their loyalties by placing the allegiance to their country over their allegiance to fellow Jew’s Though patriots, they still felt obligated to provide for the support and welfare for their fellow Jew regardless of where he lived. The call of their blood was secondary to the call of their nation, for which they were ready to shed their blood first.

Similar statements were made following the American Civil War in collected articles published in Isaac Maken’s book The Hebrews In America, published in 1888.[5] For the most part, the articles and stories in the book skirted the issues of brother against brother. Instead, they focused on the need for Jews to make a conspicuous contribution to American society. During the American Civil War, the question of Jewish loyalty was a subject that was debated by Jewish historians after the war.

One of the contributors to this was Simon Wolf, B’nai Brith’s representative in Washington. He chose to differ with the other, rather bland approaches by different contributors. Instead, he chose to provide another approach when he wrote candidly in an article titled The American Jew as a Patriot, Soldier, and Citizen, which was published in 1895.   He points out that, for the most part, Jews, both north and south, fought for their countries regardless of their race and heritage. Mendleson writes about him, “Wolf’s political and polemical purposes allowed him to point safely to Jewish service in both the armies of the North and South as evidence of Jewish loyalty and adaptability. The service by southern Jews in the army of the Confederacy was proof that, while retaining his racial and religious distinctiveness, (The Jew) identifies with the people, among whom he dwells, if he is not deliberately excluded from doing so. (Wolf, American Jew as Patriot, 104)

The simple answer to the first question this essay proposed to answer: “How did this nationalism develop among the Jews?” could be summed up in the adage, Be careful what you wish for.  The Jews were inspired by the success of Napoleon, who freed them from the Ghetto. They wanted citizenship in their various countries, intermarried, and became, in their heads, more German than the Germans, more Austrian than the Austrians, and so forth, depending on whichever country gave them emancipation. They never realized or did not care to think about the fact that emancipation brings obligation.  Citizenship brings conscription. There were Jews who volunteered to be conscripted during the first months of the war. Penser specifically calls attention to one example in which he writes: “In France, eastern European immigrant Jews, although banned as noncitizens from serving in the French army, streamed to volunteer for the French Foreign Legion. [7] From the time of Jewish enlightenment and emancipation, Jews had slowly moved away from the idea of “one people.” They lost that traditional identity as belonging to a gentile homeland superseded it. The idea of “one people” had been altered as the enlightenment and emancipation threw down social barriers that had for millennia kept them separate as a nation with a nation. By the war, the Jewish people had been conditioned to see themselves as German, or Austrian, or British, French, or Russian Jews.

This essay will now address the second question: “How did they deal with the probability that they might have to kill brother Jews of another nation?

In view of the 100 years preceding the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, great strides were made by the Jewish people in Europe. As a result of enlightenment and emancipation, there followed a breakdown of the former brotherhood of all Jews. They settled into their respective countries, becoming citizens, and taking on the social and moral attitudes resultant from emancipation. Any residual loyalties they might have felt for their brother Jew, in the enemy camp, were swallowed up in war fever. The rabbis of all participating countries rushed to encourage enlistment.  This rabbinical support justified any wavering young Jew to see his service to his country as above and beyond all other considerations. There was no hesitation in sending ‘their Jews’ to fight and kill the “other Jews” on the field of battle for the safety and glory of the fatherland.

The sermons of the rabbis from Italy, France, and Germany show how the rabbis were also caught up in war fever. Several examples should suffice to give the flavor of “my country overall.”

Rav S. Zvi Hirsch Margulies: wrote prayers for the homeland in which he prayed, “Father of the Universe … it is clearly known that it is not from hatred or cruelty of heart that I have gone out to the battlefield, but in order to fulfill a sacred duty toward my home land which is fighting for its honour, for its rights and for the liberation of its sons who groan under the yoke of the stranger.  Therefore, O Lord, do not charge me as guilty if I must use weapons against Your creatures since I do so with a pure conscience and with clean hands.       Save, O Lord, and bless my beloved homeland(Patria).

In Giacomo Bolaffio’s sermon of May 1915, he writes, “In preaching before you today, may I evoke the national patriotic feeling that the glory of this town was able to be achieved during the national independence should be remembered, and it cannot possibly be forgotten and denied today.”

Rosh Hashanah, 1914. Rabbi Dr. Julius Jelski of the Reform Gemeinde in Berlin writes, “You stand here before G-d to enter into your covenant. … We will forgive each other according to the Kaiser’s words, ‘what each has said to the other is forgotten. German Jews, like all other Germans, have been prepared to give both their possession and their life’s blood for the vaterland.”

Rabbi Korb, who was the rabbi of Nantes, wrote, “An edifying spectacle: thousands of our coreligionists, who came as foreigners and have not yet obtained French nationality as they wish, have spontaneously presented themselves to military authority and asked for the honor of fighting under the folds of the tricolor.”

Brother against Brother is the sad story of the denial of self and what Jews always stood for. “Am I My Brother’s Keeper?” It took the Holocaust and the creation of the State of Israel to answer, “Yes, thank G-d finally, we are.”

The Jewish soldiers who served in the Great War had been fully conditioned that it was their honor and duty to fight for their homeland. They suffered no more trauma than any other soldier who fought in the trenches that took part in that horrible war than did any other soldier. During the heat of battle, there were few examples of knowingly killing a fellow Jew. Combat hardened, they felt more admiration for the courage of their Jewish enemy than for the actual act of killing him in the heat of battle. The enlightenment and emancipation robbed them of the feelings of being a part of an international Jewish Brotherhood, separating each brother from another by the gulf of nationalism and a feeling of gratitude to the nations that freed them. They immediately strove to be like their fellow citizens, so much so that intermarriage and becoming academics, businessmen, bankers, and tolerance, and, most importantly, with limited acceptance by the gentile bourgeois, were more important than adhering to their ancient culture.  As the Jews formed their own banking houses and became upwardly mobile, they shed the guise of Judaism, which linked them to the past. Once again, I am reminded of Rabbi Wolf Boskowits, both a Talmudic Scholar and a student of the natural sciences, who prophetically wrote,” If the nations desired us to assimilate with them only externally, then we would have some excuse for shedding the heavy yoke of exile and becoming like them. But this is not the case…their true desire is not for us to change our garments and the like, but they desire our souls and our religion, for they wish us to be like them in our inner selves and not only outwardly.”