In his impressive new study, Jews and the Military: A History, Derek Penslar investigates over three centuries of Jewish attitudes toward military conflict and involvement in military service. At the core of his scholarship are two larger arguments. First, Penslar uncovers a profound and complicated history of the Jewish soldier in the modern era; he demonstrates that between the French Revolution and the creation of the State of Israel, Jews throughout the world cared deeply about military service. Second, Penslar maintains that Israel's military culture grew out of Jews' historical relationship with military service and from Jewish experiences in, and interpretations of, several specific twentieth-century military conflicts. He finds that Jewish integrationist visions of conscription in the Diaspora significantly shaped Israeli political understandings of citizenship, service, and sacrifice.

Penslar seeks to “rescue from oblivion” the place of the Jewish solider in the history of the Diaspora, a narrative that has been eclipsed by the Holocaust and the creation of the State of Israel, as well as the anti-Vietnam war movement and the Six-Day War. Collective memory imagines Jews in the Diaspora as timid, meek, and incapable of defense. It assumes that Jews who participated in modern armies (outside of the State of Israel) were either reluctant draftees or mistaken patriots. Penslar offers a corrective by investigating the Jewish soldier as a historical subject. He teases out several threads of Judaic thinking about military service and war, considers how these ideologies reflected specific conditions of Jewish life, and examines the influence of military service on Jewish lives. Penslar begins his study in the ancient world, contrasting the Hebrew Bible's glorification of war with the tendency of rabbinic Judaism to imagine pacifism as a legal and ethical necessity, and follows his examination into the medieval and early modern periods. The bulk of his study, however, is devoted to the period of 1789–1948, when Jews increasingly expressed their willingness to serve in armies, and when armies articulated greater openness to Jewish service.

Place of origin, class, religion, ethnicity, and gender shaped Jewish relationships with military service and culture. Consider the late eighteenth- / early nineteenth-century discussions about Jewish military service, frequently prompted by the desire of modernizing states to increase conscription in order to amass more power. In the Habsburg Empire, a small group of Jewish reformers, who believed that state and Jewish interests were congruous, supported conscription. However, the majority of the Jewish population wished to avoid it, and their rabbinic authorities vacillated between their desire to protect Jewish communal and religious life and their wish to obey the government. Elsewhere, when the military was imagined as progressive, Jews expressed far more eagerness to serve. During the French Revolution, for example, Jews volunteered for military service because they wished to be included in the body politic and because they felt thankful for emancipation. During the revolutions of 1848, French Jews then had to choose between defending the state that had emancipated them in the previous century, but that had become increasingly controlling, and the possibility of a new regime that might offer them a freer world. As nation-states increasingly embraced universal conscription and Jews concomitantly identified with the military, armies gradually became more receptive to Jews and accommodated their religious needs.

A new series of tropes, which depended on time and place, emerged. Jews' willingness to fight other Jews in the enemy army during a time of war, for example, reflected both patriotic sentiments and anxieties about perceptions of Jewish masculinity, service, and citizenship. The number of Jewish dead could be interpreted as a specific form of Jewish suffering or as illustrative of a universalist spirit. With World War I, Penslar argues, novel associations of Jews and military service developed. In addition to fighting out of a desire to elevate masculine honor and achieve social recognition, Jews also began to invoke the notion that they were liberating Jews in enemy lands or occupied territory. During the Second World War, American Jews imagined themselves as fighting a global war with a particular Jewish goal of destroying Hitler and his armed forces. Many then took part in the 1948 War using American values as justification for their involvement in the fight for the Jewish state.

Penslar's second line of analysis considers the connections between the origins of Israel's military and the Jewish soldier as a historical subject. The late nineteenth century, he argues, saw two countervailing forces, each of which shaped the Zionist project. On the one hand, the period's political oppression, antisemitism, and poverty helped to create a group of Jewish radicals who supported the use of violence against the state and against other Jews. According to Penslar, this shaped the Zionist movement, which distrusted the non-Jewish state and imagined it as incapable of coming to Jewry's aid. On the other hand, this period also saw the development of a group of well-disciplined Jewish soldiers who were considered to be great patriots as well as individuals who had benefited from an emancipation that still resonated strongly within their historical memory.

This blending of patriotism and Bildung persevered in the State of Israel, “where the army assumed the dual roles of protector and schoolhouse of the nation” (81), and where sacrifice and military service were felt to guarantee the freedom of Israel's Jewish population. Ironically, Jewish integrationist visions in the Diaspora thus contributed to Israeli political understandings of citizenship, service, and sacrifice. Penslar devotes two chapters to the linkages between twentieth-century forms of Jewish military activity and the establishment of the State of Israel. He demonstrates how the mobilization of ideas and manpower during World War I, the Spanish Civil War, World War II, and the 1948 War had an impact on the Zionist movement.

Penslar's dense study offers several historiographical contributions, only a few of which I will address here. First, in his examination of the Jewish soldier as a historical subject, Penslar explains that contemporary understandings of Jewish passivity are shaped by the supposed memories Ashkenazi Jews have of their family members' experiences in the tsar's army. According to Penslar, these Jews remember the army as a horrific, antisemitic space, which therefore shapes their narratives of pacifism, timidity, and escape. Second, Penslar offers an important corrective by studying Jewish mid-level career officers—something most historians have overlooked—and by looking to cases other than the Dreyfus Affair as a way to examine the integration of Jews into the French Officer Corps. Penslar points out that thousands of Jewish career military officers and administrators served in western and central Europe. He also suggests that Jewish members of the French Officer Corps were better integrated than previously imagined. Third, in his exploration of German and British Jewish apologetics after World War I, he shows that the German Jewish statistical project initiated during the First World War must be interpreted as a long-standing “form of statistical inquiry” and not a response to the Jew Count. Finally, in his examination of the 1948 War, Penslar turns to an understudied phenomenon: the connections between international Jewish assistance and the military success of the nascent Jewish state. Penslar argues that the 1948 War relied heavily on volunteers, philanthropic giving, and material donations sent by Jews in the Diaspora; he points out the ways in which some American Jews disregarded the law in order to support the establishment of a Jewish state.

Jews and the Military: A History offers a nuanced study of the Jewish relationship to warfare. Grounded in meticulous research and wide ranging in scope, it will serve as a welcome contribution to the fields of Jewish, European, and military history.