Jews and the Military by Penslar Derek J.;

Author:Penslar, Derek J.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2013-05-30T04:00:00+00:00

Writing from exile in Amsterdam in the 1930s, the German-Jewish journalist Fritz Heymann fantasized about Jewish power. As a teenager, he had volunteered to fight for Germany; shortly after the war he served with a Freikorps unit in the Rhineland. A fifth-generation soldier and strident German nationalist in his youth, Heymann became during the 1920s a staunch political Zionist, an admirer of Herzl and Trumpeldor. In the early 1930s, Heymann began research for a book on Jewish adventurers throughout history, a book that he thought would thrill Jewish youth and inspire them to greatness. “Perhaps Jewish history would have followed a different course,” he writes at the beginning of Der Chevalier von Geldern (1937), “if it had been written differently.”95 The book is about heroes: “A hero is he who accomplishes the impossible, attains the unattainable, achieves the unreachable, takes hold of the taboo, masters the monstrous.”96 Heymann’s heroes are a motley lot: not only kings, warriors, viziers, and generals but also Marranos, false messiahs, rebels, conquistadores, pirates, swindlers, highwaymen, boxers, and gangsters. It is a curious mixture of those on or beyond the fringes of the law and respectable society and those deeply embedded in, indeed pillars of, the state. They share little in common save a repugnance for book learning and a love of action, often of a violent sort. Jewish children, Heymann wrote, love the story of the biblical robber-king David and other Hebrew heroes of the Bible: “Here Jews fight! … The lad in the Jew-alley dreams of the clash of weapons no less than the Christian child.”97 Heymann expresses his own yearning to take vengeance against those who drove him from his own country, and to mobilize the Jewish nation into battle, through the words of the fourteen-year-old Ferdinand Lassale, the future Socialist leader who in 1840, at the time of the Damascus Affair,98 wrote in his diary of his longing to lead masses of armed Jews in a struggle for independence: “Cowardly people, you deserve no better fate! … You do not know how to die, you do not know the meaning of proper vengeance, you do not know how to bury yourself with your enemy and to rip him asunder while locked in the death struggle. You are born to be slaves!”99

Heymann would not live to see Lassale’s, or his own, dreams fulfilled. He went into hiding when the Nazis occupied Holland in 1940, was ferreted out and sent to Westerbork, and thence to Auschwitz, where he was murdered. Focused as he was on exceptional individuals, Heymann may well have gone to his death unaware of a seismic wave of political and military transformations that overtook Jews throughout the world during the 1930s and 1940s. I do not speak of the battering of World War I’s Jewish participants into victims, but rather of the mobilization of Jewish men of all sorts—soldiers and civilians, young and old, from all the inhabited continents of the planet—into participants in the global fight against fascism and the struggle for a Jewish state.

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