The centennial of the First World War has inspired many stimulating studies with a transnational or global reach and helped to shed new light on the situation of minorities in general, and Jews in particular. How did Jews cope with their experiences of the war, and how did they shape Jewish belonging and remembrance afterward? This volume focuses on Jewish soldiers in the collective memory of central Europe. In doing so, it aims at “bridg[ing] the gap between the war and the post-war period, between the empires that existed during the pre-war period and the successor states” (13). The volume's title is partly misleading because the issue of collective memory is addressed most systematically in its last chapters. It contains sixteen contributions organized along five thematic dimensions: soldiers, refugees, new loyalties, antisemitism, and memory. Two introductory essays, one by Hillel J. Kieval on conflict zones in east-central Europe, and one by Ulrich Wyrwa, a historiographical overview about Jews in Europe during the First World War and beyond, set the thematic and theoretical framework.

The first three chapters in the section on soldiers reconstruct how rabbis in Austria and Hungary experienced the war in the trenches (Dieter Hecht and Gábor Schweitzer, respectively) and whether Jewish soldiers in the German army were able to bridge cultural and religious differences by shared concepts, such as masculinity and comradeship (Jason Crouthamel). Other contributions provide more insight into how the war and its legacies featured in the Jewish and Yiddish writings of Shimon An-Ski and Simon Dubnov (Olaf Terpitz), as well as in the Jewish press of Hungary (Eszter Balázs) and Vienna (Eleonore Lappin-Eppel). Following the paths of Jewish soldiers, they connect individual experiences of the war with the collectivizing efforts of Jewish communities in the postwar period.

The war not only impacted Jewish soldiers, but also uprooted many Jewish civilians on the eastern front, turning them into refugees. Even though Gintarė Malinauskaitė's claim that “little is known about the German policy in the East or their behavior with the Eastern Jews” (188) is exaggerated, she provides an empirically rich case study on one such wandering Lithuanian Jew: writer, journalist, and educator Hirsz Abramowicz. The perception of refugees can be reconstructed not only from individual life stories or the Jewish press but also from fictional writings. Ines Koeltzsch convincingly shows the potential of including fictional texts “to fill the gaps because of the lack of sources” (221) for the case of refugees from Galicia and Bukovina in the Czech-Jewish discourse.

Jews faced debates about conflicting loyalties before and throughout the war, yet the dissolution of empires and its aftermath challenged them to negotiate their new loyalties. Instead of viewing the loyalties of Jewish soldiers in the years 1918–1919 through the lens of “segregation” (225), Nino Gude focuses on a shared history of Jews and Ukrainians in the military. In the kingdom of Yugoslavia, the legacies of both the Ottoman and the Austro-Hungarian empires came into play. Because Yugoslavia saw the shift from “one multinational state to another” (252), it appears that its Jewish citizens, with their strong links to Serbian Orthodox Christians, did not experience as much rupture in the interwar period as other Jewish communities (Ana Ćirić Pavlović).

Antisemitism in the warring armies, always connected to debates about conflicting loyalties, was bound to different local realities of Jewish/non-Jewish relations. In this context, the case of Jewish soldiers in Austria-Hungary is especially interesting. As Thomas Stoppacher sketches out, their service was rooted in a multiethnic institution whose existence and legacy came into question between 1917 and 1920. In Slovakia, by contrast, antisemitism against Jewish soldiers took on quite another form during the First Czechoslovak Republic, where so-called “Jewish guards” (283–289), that is, Jewish officers in charge of preventing looting, were accused of conducting a reign of terror against the Gentile population (Miloslav Szabó). Both chapters illustrate how, within the context of antisemitic debates, accusations against Jews took on many forms and painted them as everything from disloyal shirkers from military service to perpetrators of violence.

The chapters discussing how the commemoration of the war found artistic expression in the interwar period (Hildegard Frübis) and in the local context of community building (Veronika Szeghy-Gayer) point to the diverse presence of Jewish soldiers in the collective memory of central Europe. As Ljiljana Dobrovšak demonstrates in the case of Croatia, tracing the place of Jewish soldiers in the memory of east-central Europe is not always an easy undertaking. In this context, Gerald Lamprecht discusses the broader relationship between the Jewish soldiers’ expectations, experience, and memory in Austria between 1914 and 1938, and convincingly shows that “war memory and commemoration practices” (329) of Jews did not always differ from non-Jewish ones.

This edited volume offers important insights into how Jewish soldiers experienced the First World War in central Europe and beyond, but its approach is not always coherent. For example, some chapters do not systematically address how Jews took an active part in constructing the collective memory of central Europe. Another question concerns the arrangement of its themes: it remains unclear whether there is a binding thread connecting soldiers, refugees, new loyalties, antisemitism, and memory. Finally, we do not learn much about how Jewish soldiers (re-)constructed central Europe as a cultural and geographical space after 1918. Even though the volume presents a vivid picture of often-overlooked experiences in Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Croatia, Poland, and Germany, this polyphony sometimes loses itself in the details. As a result, the study does not always provide a satisfying answer to the question of what was specific in one local context and what was a larger trans-regional, transnational, or trans-imperial trend in remembering the war from a Jewish perspective.