The past few years have seen an increase in scholarship tying together the histories of Jews and war, Jews and the Left, and the study of Yiddish culture and history. Gerben Zaagsma's Jewish Volunteers, the International Brigades and the Spanish Civil War fits within this historiographical context. For those working on Jewish history in the interwar years, the publication of this important book was highly anticipated. By capitalizing on the aforementioned trio of areas of recent scholarship, Zaagsma pieces together a study that will prove helpful to many scholars of modern Jewish history and culture. In fact, Zaagsma directly seeks to entangle the histories of the Spanish Civil War and Jews’ participation in the International Brigades, writing, “the experiences of Jewish volunteers in the International Brigades were first and foremost past of the manifold histories of Jews and the Left” (7).
The volume features a three-part analysis that contextualizes and links together the formation of the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War, the development of a specifically Jewish company—the Naftali Botwin Company—and the postwar impulse to mark volunteers as “Jewish.” Indeed, the third part of Jewish Volunteers centers on the role that historical memory played in naming and remembering the Botwin Company as an explicitly “Jewish” brigade.
Parts 1 and 2 are structured around a wide range of English, French, Yiddish, Dutch, and German secondary sources to illuminate the foundations of the International Brigades and demonstrate their importance for any study dedicated to the Spanish Civil War, primarily because of the memorial aspect the Brigades took on after the war. Zaagsma used an impressive level of documentation in this study: records from the International Brigades archives in Moscow and London; the Police Prefecture archives and French Communist Party archives in Paris; the Bund archives at YIVO in New York; the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives at New York University; as well as archives in Warsaw. In addition to these secondary and archival sources, particularly for his analysis of the war years, Zaagsma relies heavily on the Parisian Yiddish press's documentation of Jewish volunteers who fought in the Spanish Civil War as part of the Botwin Company.
Zaagsma's detailed textual analysis leads to several key insights into how the Yiddish press in Paris covered and celebrated the volunteers who went to fight in Spain. In his reading of the Parisian Yiddish newspapers, his primary focus is on the Yiddish communist daily newspaper, Naye prese, published between 1934 and 1939, before it went underground during the German occupation of France. For comparison, Zaagsma analyzes the Zionist-leaning Parizer haynt (an outpost of the Warsaw-based Haynt, which ran in Paris from 1926 to 1940) and, when available, the Bundist Undzer shtime, which ran from 1935 to 1936 and again from 1938 to 1940. This comparative analysis helps us understand how these Parisian Yiddish newspapers represented the Botwin Company and what that representation means for our broader understanding of Jews and the Spanish Civil War. In the Naye prese, as late as 1938, “the Spanish Civil War was … described as a conflict where fascist dictators conducted the ‘final rehearsal for the total war.’ … Never before had such an outspoken message been published in which fascism in Europe was directly linked to Jewish survival” (92). Zaagsma demonstrates that Jewish communists in 1930s Paris portrayed this Jewish activism as an act of national defense. He also highlights that in other newspapers, specifically Parizer haynt, “articles about Jewish volunteers were scarce,” though Parizer haynt did cover the event, relying on reports from other news outlets (95). By contrast, Naye prese had its own correspondents covering the war, demonstrating the centrality of the Jewish volunteers to the communists’ narrative of the war. Ultimately, Zaagsma's interrogation of the news media in 1930s Paris seemingly supports the longstanding historiography on Yiddish-speaking Jews in interwar France that has tended to focus on the various French Jewish communities’ political and cultural stratification. His layered textual analysis, however, adds some nuance to this perception, highlighting that despite the newspapers’ differences, there were some overlaps in how they covered volunteers in the war, especially, as he demonstrates, after the Munich crisis in September 1938.
Evaluating how scholars have analyzed volunteers’ motivation and how chroniclers described Jewish action in the face of fascism in Europe is the centerpiece of the third part of Jewish Volunteers. “As the relatively high proportion of volunteers with Jewish origins is often interpreted as proof of a special Jewish motivation, attention [is] paid to the meaning of these statistics and their possible explanations,” writes Zaagsma. “Theories of motivation as well as the question of self-identification [are analyzed] with a view to establish to what extent it makes sense to actually speak of Jewish volunteers” (7). It is this impulse that his chapters seek to chip away at in order to see how the understanding of motivation developed over the past several decades. There is a disconnect, however: whereas the first two parts of the book focus on France and Spain, the third's focus is global, evaluating cases of commemoration primarily in Israel, the United States, and Poland. It would have been satisfying to see this part of the book return to Paris to understand whether or not there were similar movements to describe and document the Jewishness of some volunteers. Ultimately, however, Zaagsma connects these aspects of his study and shows that “there is a clear symbolic continuity between postwar discourse and debates about Jewish volunteers, and the way in which their experiences were represented on the pages of Naye prese during the Spanish Civil War: their participation is seen as an argument against accusations of Jewish cowardice or submissiveness” (160).
Gerben Zaagsma's Jewish Volunteers, the International Brigades and the Spanish Civil War will be of interest to anyone in the field of Jewish studies working on Jews and war, Jewish communism and the Jewish Left more broadly, Yiddish culture, the Yiddish press, the Spanish Civil War, interwar France, as well as historical memory. The compartmentalized nature of the study means that even if some chapters do not obviously lead into the next, they are, at the very least, extremely valuable as stand-alone pieces and can be easily assigned in a course focused on any number of the aforementioned historical issues. Zaagsma's work is an excellent addition to the new literature on Jews in France, and will be a touchstone for many in the field.
