Habsburg Sons describes Jewish participation in the Habsburg Army, 1788-1918, concentrating on World War I. Approximately 300,000-350,000 Jews fought in the Austro-Hungarian Armies on all fronts; of these, 30,000–40,000 died of wounds or illness, and at least 17% were taken prisoner in camps all over Russia and Central Asia. Many soldiers were Orthodox Ostjuden, and over 130 Feldrabbiner (chaplains) served among them. Antisemitism was present but generally not overt. The book uses personal diaries and newspaper articles (most available in English for the first time) to describe their stories, and compares the experiences of Jews in German, Russian, and Italian armies.

Habsburg Sons: Jews in the Austro-Hungarian Army 1788–1918
By Peter C. Appelbaum. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2022. Pp. 366. Paperback $25.95. ISBN: 978-1644696903.
Alison Rose
University of Rhode Island/Capital University

Over 300,000 Jewish soldiers from all corners of the Habsburg Empire served in the Austro-Hungarian Army in the First World War. Jewish chaplains (Feldrabbiner) accompanied them to provide for their spiritual needs, while tens of thousands of them became prisoners of war. Peter C. Appelbaum draws attention to this fascinating and understudied topic. Using war diaries, memoirs, and other writings, he provides detailed descriptions of soldiers’ experiences in their own words and paints a rich portrait of their diverse lives. His stated goal is “to put flesh on the bones of the long dead, allowing their voices to be heard” (18). Although the book’s scope is 1788-1918, it actually spends most pages on World War I with only one chapter on the pre-war period.

Drawing a contrast with Germany, Appelbaum emphasizes the favorable treatment accorded to Jews in the Habsburg Army. It was the first European army to allow Jews to serve (in 1788, even before France) and the only European army to address the religious needs of Orthodox Jewish soldiers. Overt antisemitism was rare. The author points out the irony that in the First World War, Eastern European Jews saw the Central Power armies as liberators, in contrast to Russian troops who committed murder, rape, and pillage, a situation that would be “turned on its head two decades later” (71).

Habsburg Jews reacted to the declaration of war with loyalty and calls for unity, embracing the war as an opportunity to liberate the Russian Jews from Tsarist oppression. The initial Russian invasion of the eastern provinces of Galicia and Bukovina led to mass expulsions of Jews, the flight of Jewish refugees to other parts of the empire, and brutal treatment of those who remained. In chapter 4, Appelbaum uses writings of Jewish soldiers who served on the Eastern Front to show that “Orthodox and assimilated Jews fought bravely despite poor leadership” and that there were “no significant differences in the attitudes of Jews from the different Habsburg nationalities” (120) despite rumors of Czech disloyalty. Teofil Tobias Reiss’s war diary (2016) and Avigdor Feuerstein’s (Hameiri) Hebrew war novel, The Great Madness (1984) paint a vivid picture of the diversity of Habsburg Jewish soldiers. The experiences of Jewish soldiers on other fronts are described in chapter 5. The war diary of Egon Erwin Kisch (1930) “provides a blow-by-blow account of the failed Austro-Hungarian invasion of Serbia” (145). In the Balkans, many Jewish soldiers encountered Sephardic Jews for the first time. The Tyrol and Isonza, on the Italian front, were perhaps the most brutal terrains of the war

The story of Jewish chaplains (Feldrabbiner) is told in chapter 6. Habsburg Jewish chaplains were provided with special uniforms, salaries, authorized kosher kitchens, and ritual prayer objects. Their duties included spiritual care, holding services, visiting the sick, burials, and care for Jewish prisoners of war. By the end of the war, 133 Jewish chaplains from all parts of the empire had served, a much larger number than in the German Army. “They were modest men, imbued with supranational loyalty to the empire, which made them count amongst the most loyal of the Kaiser’s subjects. They wrote little, but acted greatly” (228). Tragically, many would be murdered in the Holocaust.

Chapter 7 describes Jewish prisoner-of-war experiences. Habsburg Jewish soldiers in captivity encountered Jews from all over the Russian Empire and witnessed the Russian Revolution, which often delayed their repatriation. Hameiri’s book Hell on Earth (2017) sheds light on conditions in a variety of camps. Georg Breithaupt’s autobiography, The Fight for Survival (1919) gives an account of life as a prisoner physician in a Russian prisoner-of-war camp. Adolf Epstein (1935) provides a lengthy description of a Bukharan Passover seder, at which “their host explained that Bukharan men had the right to marry more than one wife, if the first one remained barren” (276). Kaspar Blond (n.d.) who served as a camp physician, witnessed the Armenian Genocide in Aleppo and reported on its victims.

Appelbaum concludes by looking at the aftermath of the war, the fate of Habsburg Jewish veterans, and their influence, drawing attention to the role of Jewish veterans in founding the ill-fated 1919 Hungarian Soviet Republic and the rise of political antisemitism in Austria. The Austrian Army, for its part, resisted antisemitism, at least initially, and elaborate war memorials were erected for fallen Jewish soldiers. However, this tolerance was short-lived and ended with the rise of Nazism, Austro-fascism, and the Anschluss. Many highly decorated Jewish soldiers were sent to Theresienstadt, most of whom were then deported and murdered in Auschwitz.

It is not surprising that a book about Jews in the Austrian Army with the title Habsburg Sons focuses on the experiences of Jewish men. In two instances, Appelbaum explicitly states that his goal is to give “long-dead men” a voice (xxvi, 179). When women appear, they figure as prostitutes, victims, or annoying girlfriends desperate for attention. For example, we read at length of Reiss’s “escapades with ladies, who pop up everywhere during his service” (90). The only account by a woman cited, that of Lilian Bader, reports on her husband’s service. Accounts of Jewish women serving as nurses, reporters, and photographers at the front are notably absent. Appelbaum sometimes seems surprised that “even the most Orthodox Jews served with bravery and honor” (42), and his descriptions of them as “fierce fighters, not averse to going into battle waving their tallitot, with phylacteries on their heads and left hands, shouting Sh’ma Yisrael (Hear O Israel)” (57), "fierce-looking, bearded soldiers storming into battle with tallit and tefillin yelling Sh’ma Yisrael (Hear, O Israel)" (71), and "religious Jews charging into battle yelling Sh’ma Yisrael" 112) come across as stilted. References to Jewish civilians on the Eastern Front as Orthodox Peyes- and Kaftanjuden (8) similarly seem peculiar. The book would benefit from more careful editing. Repetition and inconsistencies in spelling and translation distract from its valuable content and insights. For example, the Judenerzählung (Jewish census) in Germany is referenced several times but not translated until page 173 and never fully explained; a hagadah is not “a seder prayerbook” (185) but rather a guidebook to the Passover meal. Still, Habsburg Sons succeeds in what it sets out to accomplish. It draws attention to a frequently overlooked chapter of Habsburg Jewish history and gives a voice to Jewish soldiers whose stories have for so long been neglected.

"Faithful Sons of a Dead Empire: A retired microbiologist has brought back the voices of long-dead jewish soldiers of the austrohungarian army for a modern audience. – Read the full review from Ami Magazine”
October 6, 2022 by — Yossi Krausz Click here to read the full review.

“The Jewish soldier in the diaspora deserves to be rescued from oblivion and subjected to serious historical study” (Penslar, 2). This was the theme of a ground-breaking 2013 work by Derek Penslar, Jews and the Military–A History. This challenge has been accepted by Peter Appelbaum who, in retirement from a career as a micro-biologist, has triangulated his two previous studies, Loyalty Betrayed: Jewish Chaplains in the German Army during the First World War (2014) and Loyal Sons: Jews in the German Army in the Great War (2015), with his new book Habsburg Sons: Jews in the Austro-Hungarian Army 1788–1918.

Applebaum summarizes his findings at the outset:

Austro-Hungary was the first country [sic.] in Europe to allow Jews into the army, and, throughout the sixty-year reign of Kaiser Franz Joseph overt antisemitism in the army was rare. Austro-Hungarian soldiers fought bravely but often surrendered to the enemy out of exhaustion, bad leadership, atrocious weather, poor nutrition and incompetence. Unlike their German counterparts, who were well led, Habsburg soldiers recognized and complained loudly about incompetent leadership. Czech regiments had a reputation for disloyalty but closer analysis reveals that their performance was often due to bad leadership and other factors. Language problems with Hungarian and Slavic speakers in the multiethnic army complicated smooth functioning, but were largely overcome by Jewish soldiers, who usually spoke German and/or Yiddish (1).

The polyglot Habsburg Empire comprised numerous nationalities, including Jews who represented four to five percent of its 52 million subjects. By 1914, the Austro-Hungarian army comprised soldiers from approximately 20 different nationalities, with different languages and traditions. In the First World War, some 100,000 Jews served in the German army, 180,000 in the Russian army, and 300,000–350,000 in the Austro-Hungarian army, totalling some 600,000. Of those in the Austro-Hungarian army, some 30,000–40,000 died. Habsburg Jewish soldiers comprised two main groups: assimilated Jews from large cities such as Vienna, Budapest, and Prague; and Orthodox Jews primarily from Galicia, Bukowina, and northern Hungary. Many Habsburg Jewish families had up to eight sons serving simultaneously and suffered multiple casualties. Jews served in disproportionately higher numbers in the infantry, with one infantry regiment containing so many Jews that it was dubbed the “Rothschild Regiment” (39, 42, 113). As in other countries, Jews were also disproportionately represented in the medical corps, and many of the military physicians on the Eastern Front were Jewish. Appelbaum has tried to include only Jewish soldiers but cautions that statistics do not always distinguish between them and baptized Jews or “Jews of Jewish origin” with one Jewish parent (44).

The progress of Jewish officers in the Habsburg armies saw four phases. They are the first half of the nineteenth century, when generally only converts could make a career in the military; the liberal period between the 1860s and the end of the century, which witnessed a rapid increase of Jews in the Officer Corps; a period of decline in the years prior to 1914; and the Great War, when the number of Jewish officers again increased rapidly and comprised a significant number of the Corps (30). Before the First World War, Habsburg Jews strove to assimilate, if necessary, through baptism. Several baptized families were ennobled, and all of them sent their sons, as the crowning achievement of their assimilation, into the Professional Officer Corps. While Jews represented only four to five percent of the population of the Austro-Hungarian empire, they comprised about one third of high school students before the First World War, and about one fifth of the Reserve Officer Corps, for which a high school diploma was required. Jews played a significant role in the army; officer status and senior rank were not closed to them, although the journey was painstaking. Prussia by contrast had not allowed Jews to become officers, so that Germany entered the First World War without a single Jewish officer.

The Pale of Settlement was home to millions of Jews, and the Eastern Front ran through it. Jews caught between the two great armies suffered greatly. The destructive effects of the fighting were enormous. Towns and villages changed hands, some many times; each time Jews bore the brunt of murder, rape, pillage, and displacement, mostly at the brutal hands of the Russians. More than 200,000 Jews died, and hundreds of thousands were expelled by the Russians on suspicion of espionage or collusion. The suffering Jewish civilians frequently looked on the armies of the Central Powers as liberators and sometimes aided Austrian soldiers by feeding them and helping prisoners to escape.

Habsburg Jews saw the war against Russia, with its Pale of Settlement, pogroms, and antisemitic oppression, as a war to liberate Russia’s Jews from Tsarist oppression. They, and especially Orthodox Jews from Galicia, Bukowina, and northern Hungary, were thus amongst the most loyal subjects of the empire in the fight against “the forces of darkness,” and their loyalty echoed from pulpits all over the empire. The sight and sound of these fierce-looking soldiers with their long beards and sidelocks storming into battle with their tallitot (prayer shawls) flying and with tefillin (phylacteries) on their left arms, shouting Shema Yisrael and firing with their right hands, must have terrified the Russians as the Jews vented their hatred on them.

Reflecting Appelbaum’s wide, deep, and multilingual research, the book cites extensively from diaries, memoirs, and reports from the Eastern, Balkan, Italian, and Palestine fronts and from soldiers taken as prisoners of war. In graphic and sometimes horrifying detail, some exemplify at a personal level the futility of war. Their authors include Avigdor Hameiri, a Hungarian Jew who wrote in Hebrew in “auto-fiction” or “non-fiction” novels, of his war experiences in Hashiga’on Hagadol (The Great Madness), translated by Appelbaum in 2021, and of his captivity in Russia and Central Asia in Bagehinom Shel Mata (Hell on Earth). Both novels contain extraordinary casts of characters: simple Magyar peasants, sophisticated Budapest artists, shady underworld characters, Serbs, Croats and Italians, Talmud scholars, haughty Austrians, nationalistic Czechs, Gypsies, “spicy” Hungarian cabaret girls, and Russian soldiers and Russian Jews living in the Pale of Settlement.

Whereas chaplains in the German army, Feldrabbiner, remained civilians, Habsburg chaplains were commissioned as captains. The Austro-Hungarian army facilitated Jewish religious observance and facilities for kosher food. Rabbi Edmund Kálmán described how at a dressing station on the Eastern Front in 1915, at the violent climax of a battle, “We walked amongst them: chaplains of four religions, whose differences disappeared until only one religion remained, the holy religion of help to the suffering” (190). Rabbi Viktor Kurrein was appointed specifically to minister to Russian prisoners of war. At the age of 53, Rabbi Adolf Keléman volunteered for service, and although he could have stayed in the rear, he pressed for front line service. In March 1917, when he was 55, he was seriously wounded on the Romanian front and died in a field hospital. He is the only serving chaplain in the armies of the Central Powers whom Appelbaum was able to identify as having died at the front.

On the Italian front, there is an account of a religious service conducted by Rabbi Samuel Link attended by more than 200 Austro-Hungarian soldiers of many nationalities together with some Russian and Serbian prisoners of war. In 1916, Hungarian Jewish soldiers built a synagogue. In February 1917, Rabbi Béla Diamant chose to remain with the troops during an infantry attack on an Italian trench position, for which he was mentioned in dispatches.

Colonel Emil Sommer was born in 1869 and served in the First World War on the Russian and Italian fronts. Ordered to clean the streets after the Anschluss in 1938, he presented himself in full uniform with all of his decorations. Even the Nazis were humiliated and sent him home. He and his wife survived Theresienstadt, and he died in 1947.

I thoroughly commend Peter Appelbaum’s scholarship, which has extended the frontiers of knowledge into an authoritative and most readable book.
— Jonathan Lewis Middlesex, UK

Jewish soldiers fought in all European armies during the First World War. We are in Peter Appelbaum’s debt for telling the story of Jews in the Austro-Hungarian army, and for bringing out their dignity and their pride in being both Jewish and Austrian. This is a part of Austrian history the Nazis could never erase.
— Jay Winter, Charles J. Stille Professor of History Emeritus, Yale University

Habsburg Sons brings to light a wealth of sources documenting the experience of World War I for Jewish soldiers, prisoners of war, and military chaplains across a vast empire that was home to one of the world’s largest Jewish communities. A meticulously researched and deeply moving book
— Derek Penslar, author of Jews and the Military: A History

“Peter Appelbaum’s impressive research contributes to a profound understanding of not only the Austro-Hungarian military as an institution, but also of the social history and Jewish emancipation and identity in the Habsburg empire from the late 18th century. For the first time, a number of important sources, especially on Austrian military Rabbis and the fate of Jewish POWs during and after World War I, are made accessible to the English-speaking reader. Appelbaum’s comprehensive approach makes Habsburg Sons as relevant for the expert as it is fascinating for the interested reader.”
— Michael Haider, Director, Austrian Cultural Forum New York

“Jewish soldiers fought in all European armies during the First World War. We are in Peter Appelbaum’s debt for telling the story of Jews in the Austro-Hungarian army, and for bringing out their dignity and their pride in being both Jewish and Austrian. This is a part of Austrian history the Nazis could never erase.”
— Jay Winter, Charles J. Stille Professor of History Emeritus, Yale University

“Habsburg Sons brings to light a wealth of sources documenting the experience of World War I for Jewish soldiers, prisoners of war, and military chaplains across a vast empire that was home to one of the world’s largest Jewish communities. A meticulously researched and deeply moving book.”
— Derek Penslar, author of Jews and the Military: A History

“This book fills a painful gap in research. The leading specialist on the subject writes in his typical style with a mixture of profound scientific analysis and vivid rendering of the central sources.”
— Dr. Georg Wurzer, author of The Prisoners from the Central Powers in Russia During WWI

“‘We had such a beautiful Army, it was the most beautiful Army in the world. And what did they do with the Army? They sent them to war!’ This quip, which could easily have represented Jewish humor, is well known in Austria today. Although a joke, it reveals that even a hundred years ago, war was considered a legitimate means in the pursuit of securing political interest. Following the explosion of ethnic nationalism in the whole of Europe and the catastrophe of the Second World War, this multi-ethnic approach of the Habsburg Monarchy became questionable, if not dubious. Appelbaum’s latest work on diversity, presented here, deploys the example of Jewish soldiers and their devoted loyalty to illustrate how a multi-ethnic and religiously grounded State, can be viable—despite its subsequent political destruction. The confirmation of this principle of inclusion and diversity is presently observed in the existence of the European Union.”
— Ministerialrat Magister rer.soc.oec. Martin Senekowitsch, Oberst der Reserve