Few scholarly works, especially doctoral dissertations, should be published without careful review and often substantial revision. This monograph by Tracey Hayes Norrell definitely could have benefited from a more rigorous review process. Its problems are legion, beginning with a title that does not accurately reflect the book's content. Norrell's study does deal in part with German Jews, about two dozen of them among the tens of thousands who made their way in some capacity to the Great War's eastern front. It also discusses other German Jews, mainly from the industrial and financial elites, men such as Walther Rathenau and Albert Ballin, who had nothing to do with the eastern front and little to say about it. The book also devotes many pages to Eastern European and especially Polish Jews, but not always from the perspectives of German Jews, and thus comes up short in analyzing the impact of what the latter actually experienced and how they interpreted it. In short, Norrell's book lacks thematic focus, and as a consequence, the author's transitions among her divergent themes are forced, where they exist at all.

A thesis is never clearly stated in either the book's introduction or its conclusion, but the following may be hazarded: German Jews entered the Great War as enthusiastic German patriots and ended it as disillusioned ones, especially as their dedication to the Kaiserreich’s cause began to be questioned by their fellow citizens. Jewish soldiers were subjected to a special head count (the infamous Judenzählung), and responsibility for the war's misfortunes was too easily placed upon Jewish shoulders, especially in the war's final phase, thus shattering the illusions of acceptance into German society shared by many of Norrell's protagonists. German-Jewish intellectuals, professionals, and religious leaders who made their way east, especially as German forces occupied imperial Russia's western borderlands, saw themselves as participants in a civilizing mission only to become transformed by a cultural and religious awakening resulting from their encounters with the Judaism of the Hasidim. As bad as German Jews had it during the war, Eastern European and especially Polish Jews had it worse, victimized by massive population displacement, antisemitic violence, economic pauperization, and abandonment by their presumed German liberators to radicalized Eastern European ethno-nationalists. In the spirit of Fritz Fischer, Norrell reads the Holocaust back into the Great War in “an overall continuity of historical motive” (163).

None of this is particularly new, much of it gleaned from existing secondary sources and restated. What is new is Norrell's discovery that German Zionist leader Max Bodenheimer's idea of establishing an eastern Jewish satellite state in permanent alliance with imperial Germany actually received an airing with Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff early in the war only to be dismissed with their armies’ actual territorial conquests in 1915. What is also new is the use of reports and other documentary evidence from ten field rabbis who ministered to the spiritual needs of Jews in German uniform and their coreligionists among the occupied population. Most notable among these Feldrabbiner was Leo Baeck. Nonetheless, this source material remains underutilized, especially given the book's purported focus is on German Jews on the eastern front. The same can be said of documents emanating from Bodenheimer and Martin Buber's Committee for the East and especially the Hilfsverein der deutschen Juden, a relief organization committed to providing assistance to Jews in the east. We also hear little from the German Jewish soldiers who served on the eastern front, though their letters and reports are admittedly available in “large numbers” (163) at the Centrum Judaica in Berlin.

Finally, Norrell's account contains far too many basic factual errors, which should have been excised at the dissertation phase and definitely before publication. I offer here a few examples. Nikolai Yanushkevich was not the governor of occupied territories in East Galicia (1), but chief of the Russian general staff. Alexei Brusilov was not the Russian commander who directed the campaign in East Prussia at the outset of the war (2), but the commander of the Eighth Army in Galicia. Russian forces were not forced to retreat eastward from Galicia by the armies of the Central Powers by the end of 1914 (7), but in the middle of 1915. Russian soldiers participating in the Brusilov offensive in Galicia of 1916 did not resume “their familiar violence” of 1914–1915 against Jews (they were actually far more disciplined), nor did Russian forces again reach the Carpathians (73); in fact, they fell well short and failed to reach Lemberg. The Treaty of Versailles did not deprive Germany of “all of the Polish partition and East Prussia” (146). Finally, in September 1939 eight Einsatzgruppen did not move “through Poland and Belarus rounding up Poles, Russians and Jews,” at which time “they executed an estimated one million people” (159). 1939 should not be confused with 1941, even if the violence of Einsatzgruppen characterized both campaigns.

Upon receiving Norrell's monograph, this reviewer expected to read a concentrated analysis and testing in wartime conditions of themes originally highlighted by Steven E. Aschheim in his Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German Jewish Consciousness, 1800–1923 (1982). The need for such a study is beyond doubt. It requires, however, a far more extensive mining of available sources, a far greater degree of familiarity with the eastern front, and a much more consistent focus on German Jews than is offered by this slim volume.