An old anti-jewish argument that many of those promoting critical perspectives on the subject of jews and Judaism are largely unaware of: is the argument that jews are under-represented among front-line soldiers as well as frequently in the military itself. This argument can be traced back to the debates around jewish involvement in First World War when it was variously argued that jews were under-represented; in terms of their population percentage, in the trenches and front-lines of that war. (1)

While this argument has largely been forgotten by critics of the jews: the jews themselves have not forgotten it completely. Indeed we not infrequently see features in jewish periodicals about jewish soldiers and how Israel's military is allegedly one of the best in the world. This we may reasonably argue is down to the fact that the jews want to project themselves as a confident and pioneering people (like David fighting Goliath) in direct contrast to the old jewish stereotype of the fat, weak and cowardly jew who spends his days hondling (2) in the market places of the world.

Jews historically have tried to argue from the individual to the general or put more succinctly: they argue that because there have undoubtedly been jewish commanders and soldiers throughout history (usually citing individuals rather than groups) who were good at fighting and did win medals/awards for doing so. It therefore means that the idea that jews would shirk front-line military duty in the First World War and after is unfounded. (3)

The problem with this argument is that those making it tend to conflate two separate assertions as being one and the same. To wit: the claim that they are answering is that jews have never been good soldiers, have never fought for their country at the front and have never earned awards for doing so. This has; to my knowledge, never been argued by any intellectual proponent of the theory and indeed even anti-jewish work from the Third Reich explicitly allowed the possibility and implicitly allowed that it had occurred. (4)

The more accurate claim that has been argued by many anti-Semites and critics of jews historically is that the jews have been disproportionately under-represented among the front-line troops and have; as a rule of thumb, not been good soldiers, have not fought for their country and have earned proportionately less awards and distinctions for doing so. (5)

Where the conflation comes from is the consistent habit of the jews; and their apologists, of taking the necessarily greatly simplified ideas of a cartoon, political speech, pamphlet and/or newspaper article as being representative of the intellectual case behind them. This then allows the jews and their apologists to make the absurd claim that anti-Semites and critics of the jews believe that jews have never been good soldiers and so forth: thus allowing them to find a few examples of jews who have been these things and wave them in the air for all to see. (6)

The more sophisticated jewish apologist however prefers instead; if this manic waving of unrepresentative examples does not suffice to convince an opponent, to resort to an intellectual shell game with the use of statistics.

The British Armed Forces in the First World War

An apt example is provided by the Jewish Defence Campaign's 'Speakers' Handbook' from 1937, which includes; as Appendix D, some statistics about the jews who; it alleges, fought for the British Empire from 1914-1918.

The jewish author of that handbook; Frank Renton, gives the following statistics: (7)

50,000 Jews fought for the British Empire out of a population of 400,000 across the Empire
10,000 of these volunteered before conscription
39,000 of these fought in 'fighting units'

Total of 9,000 casualties (or 19% of those in fighting units)
Of those 2,245 were deaths and 6,800 were wounds.
Awards for bravery included five Victoria Crosses and some 1,590 other honours and distinctions

This all sounds kosher and impressive: doesn't it?

Lets begin by de-constructing these superficially impressive figures by using like-for-like comparisons.

If we calculate the percentage of jews who died in service; Renton doesn't state whether this was by enemy action, disease or other means fair or foul, then we get a figure of only 0.6% when compared to the total jewish population of the British Empire.

When we switch our attention to the percentage of jews who were wounded in service we get a measly 1.7% of the total jewish population of the British Empire.

You might here interject that Renton was only comparing jewish deaths against those who served, but then what that analysis doesn't indicate is that Renton is manipulating the statistics by taking the lowest possible numbers to give him the highest possible percentage in his comparison. In doing so he maximises the rhetorical effect of the number, but that number doesn't give us a representative or reasonably comparable statistic.

The reader will note that Renton takes the lowest possible total statistic (jews in 'fighting units') and compares it against all jewish dead and wounded in the First World War. Nothing is included in those statistics to tell you why only those in fighting units could be casualties or why war dead are only those who died as a result of enemy action.

In essence the percentage Renton gives is dishonest, because it inflates the percentage of jewish contribution well beyond that allowed by the raw data.

If we compare the statistics from the British Empire more widely however we get a sense of just how different the dead and wounded rates between jews and non-jews were.

The total population of the British Empire (8) in 1914 was some 58.4 million individuals of this some 1,041,410 were killed during the First World War. (9) This gives us a percentage death rate of circa 1.8% of the British Empire's population.

If we exclude the colonies as well as the dominions and just take the British Isles; including Ireland, we have a total population of 45.4 million individuals of these some 886,939 were killed during the First World War. This gives us a percentage death rate of circa 2.0% [to be more precise 1.95%]of the population of the British Isles.

If we move onto those injured the picture is little different with 2,020,998 wounded from the British Empire, which gives us a wound rate of circa 3.5% of the British Empire's population.

If we again exclude all territories other than the British Isles we have 1,663,435 wounded, which gives us a wound rate of circa 3.7% of the population of the British Isles.

Just by doing a like-for-like comparison we can see that the number of jews killed or wounded in the British Armed Forces in the First World War was disproportionately low when compared to the percentage for both the troops from the British Isles [where most jews were resident] and from across the Empire.

We should further observe that the significant difference between the jewish and total rates of death and wounding cannot be reasonably explained in any positive way by the jews and their apologists.

However before we go into the implications of this: we still have not dealt with Renton's claims about medals/awards and volunteering before conscription was introduced These will; and indeed should have in Renton's case, inform the preliminary conclusions that we can make from this data.

Renton cites the number of Victoria Crosses (10) and the number of honours and distinctions given to jewish troops, but again the devil is in the detail. Renton once again presents an absolute number, which might seem like a lot but in reality it is but a drop in the sea of the huge number of medals and awards that were made in the First World War by the British Army to its troops.

Renton lists the number of Victoria Crosses awarded to jews as 5 which he implies describes the bravery of the jews in question: now while I don't doubt that the context is rather lacking. In that some 628 Victoria Crosses were awarded in the First World War. That makes the number of Victoria Crosses awarded to jews as being 0.8% of all those awarded for acts of heroism during the war.

We should bear in mind that that this means that non-jews were awarded 623 Victoria Crosses or 99.2% of them.

That rather deflates Renton's claim: doesn't it?

Further when we move onto the awards and distinctions it doesn't get any better for Renton's absolute numbers as he cites a figure of 1,590 awards and distinctions having been awarded. However again vital context is missing from that statement in that over 300,000 such awards were distributed by the British Army at that time. (11)

If we again put that into a percentage of the awards and distinctions given by the British Armed Forces to its soldiers during the First World War (I have used 300,000 as the lowest possible number it could be) it comes in at a paltry 0.5%.

To give this further perspective if we work out the percentage of the British Empire's population who were jews then we come to 0.7% (or to be precise 0.68%). This means that the jews have significantly underperformed in the winning of medals as an element of the population by a significant margin of between 20- 40%. In addition the very slight over-achievement in the winning of Victoria Crosses can be reasonably accounted for by the relatively low number of these medals that were awarded during the First World War.

One can thus see that a pattern is beginning to become apparent in that the jews are heavily under-represented in both the number of casualties taken and the number of medals won in the British Armed Forces at this time. This means that we are facing the conclusion that jews cannot; as Renton claims, have been taking a representative part in the fighting at the front for the simple reason that they didn't win as many medals or take nearly enough casualties to suggest this.

Another nail in Renton's coffin is his figure of 10,000 jews volunteering for military service before conscription was introduced in the British Isles in January 1916. The irony with that figure is that it means that while 50,000 jews ultimately joined the British Army (already only circa 12.5% of all the jews in the Empire) only 20% of these (Renton's 10,000) joined before January 1916.

This means that Renton is already in trouble given that only 2.5% of the jewish population of the British Empire volunteered for the British Armed Forces until they were legally compelled to. Or put another way: in one and half years of total war only 10,000 jews would volunteer fight for Britain in spite of allegedly being a 'loyal minority'.

That another 40,000 jews were conscripted after January 1916 also removes the argument that the jews concerned were not eligible for military service as it tells us that there can only have been a large number of jews who were of military age and fit for front-line service, but who chose not to volunteer to serve.

Compare that to the non-jewish population of the British Isles of whom 750,000 (or 1.7% of the population) had enlisted by September 1914 and who reached the same percentage of enlistment as the jews; as part of the population, by January 1915. A full year before the jewish figure of 10,000 individuals (or 2.5% of the jewish population) had been achieved.

This clearly indicates then that the jews were holding back and actively not enlisting in the British Armed Forces in the First World War before it became legally mandatory to do so in January 1916. Shukman has recently pointed out; however tacitly, that there was a large population of jews in Britain who were Russian citizens and who were effectively using Britain as a hiding place from military conscription in their own country. (12)

This became a cause of ongoing concern to the British home front authorities in 1916 and 1917 with the introduction of conscription and the presence of Russian jews who didn't want to go home as they would be conscripted themselves but who refused to joined the British Armed Forces as well. This; in addition to the disproportionate frequency of far left wing political views among this Russian jewish diaspora, lead to the British government to keep trying new ways of getting the Russian jews to fight including offering to set up special units for jews to serve under British command and using the incentive of a homeland to try and tempt them to side with the Allies.

The reality that underlay this was that the British Armed Forces had been bled white by incompetent generals on the Western front; (13) with the singular exception of General Edmund Allenby's Middle Eastern Command (although even they suffered one or two major military disasters), (14) and the British forces were desperate for manpower to plug the many gaps in the ranks of their understrength units on the Western front. (15)

This was represented in other arenas by the British habit of promising anything to anybody if it would get them more manpower, (16) which they fervently (and ultimately quite stupidly) believed would win them the war regardless of the massive superiority in tactics and weaponry [as well as increasingly in manpower and experienced units] enjoyed by the Central powers (in particular Germany and the unfairly traduced Austro-Hungarian Empire).

For those somewhat perplexed by what I have said above I should point out that First World War history has been heavily revised in recent years by a succession of younger historians who have looked less at what the generals and propaganda claimed, but at the raw data that was produced during and after the war.

This has lead these scholars to roll back the years of misrepresentation and jingoistic sabre-rattling about Allied superiority (or at least equality) in the First World War to show that the French; for example, mutinied because they were being thrown at pointless objectives (that they had attacked for days and had been declared 'taken' by the Allied press) and mown down literally in their thousands for the sake of the pride of a general and his staff. The British; as even conservative scholars like Niall Ferguson, have noted had a less extreme, but yet very similar time of it.

This context gives us a situation where we have a British government that is desperate for replacements for its soldiers and what we may conjecture happened is very simple.

By January 1916 only 10,000 jews had volunteered for service in the British Armed Forces and with a population of some 400,000 to recruit from the British military began to pursue all angles to try and force the jews of Britain into fighting for the country they professed themselves loyal citizens of.

This then accounts for why between January 1916 and November 1918 (although conscription lasted until 1919) some 40,000 jews were brought into the British Armed Forces by legal coercion.

That in spite of this the jews still underperformed as substantially as they did suggests to us that the jews were far less-likely to be on the front-line with the infantry, but rather in the rear and performing support roles. This would account; with the fact that very few jews volunteered to serve, for the fact that the jews both took disproportionately less casualties and won disproportionately less medals than their non-jewish counterparts.

The jews were hardly 'patriotic' then; in spite of their loud exclamations to have been so, (17) were they?

(1) Most modern discussions of this assertion are brief and focus solely on the German Kaiserwehr to the exclusion of the Russian, Austro-Hungarian, French and British armies all of whom had similar accusations leveled at them during (and after) the war. This is obviously unbalanced and needs to be corrected as even a little bit of research quickly indicates that such ideas were rife among on both the front-line and the home front of the warring parties.
(2) Yiddish for bartering/aggressively negotiating.
(3) For example Geoffrey Green, 2007, 'England expects...: British Jews under the white ensign from HMS Victory to the loss of HMS Hood in 1941', Jewish Historical Studies, Vol. 41, p. 63; alternatively see Joseph Bendersky, 2000, 'The “Jewish Threat”: Anti-Semitic Politics of the U.S. Army', 1st Edition, Basic: New York
(4) Curt Hermann, 1936, 'Der Jude und der Deutsche Mensch', 1st Edition, Heinrich Handels Verlag: Breslau, pp. 15-16; for a contrasting view of the statistics (but one that I disagree with) see Franz Oppenheimer, 1922, 'Die Judenstatistik des preußischen Kriegsministeriums', 1st Edition, Verlag fur Kulturpolitik: Munich.
(5) Hermann, Op. Cit., pp. 15-16
(6) Two examples; one older and one recent, are: E. Rubin, 1952, '140 Jewish Marshals, Generals and Admirals', 1st Edition, de Vere: London; Ronald Winch, 2009, 'They Were There: From Ploughshares into Swords: Jews in the American Military from 1634-1978', 1st Edition, Self-Published: Palm Springs [this later author claims to have been an Israeli diplomat but I am doubtful].
(7) Frank Renton, 1937, 'Jewish Defence Campaign: Speakers' Handbook', 1st Edition, Woburn Press: London, p. 78; Rubin, Op. Cit., p. 17 supports Renton's figures
(8) I have excluded the Indian Empire in all my figures here because of the lack of conscription and huge population it would massively skew the data.
(9) For the sake of convenience for the reader to check what I have said: I have taken the statistics offered by Wikipedia, which are available at the following address: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I_casualties#Casualties_by_1914_borders
(10) The highest medal that can be awarded for gallantry in the British Armed Forces.
(11) http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/pathways/firstworldwar/service_records/med_awarded.htm
(12) Harold Shukman, 2006, 'War or Revolution: Russian Jews and Conscription in Britain 1917', 1st Edition, Vallentine Mitchell: Portland, pp. 7-12; supported by Kenneth Collins, 1990, 'Second City Jewry: The Jews of Glasgow in the Age of Expansion, 1790-1919', 1st Edition, Scottish Jewish Archives: Glasgow, p. 191
(13) For example John Mosier, 2001, 'The Myth of the Great War: A New Military History of World War I', 1st Edition, Harper Collins: New York, pp. 240-241
(14) Sean McMeekin, 2011, 'The Berlin-Baghdad Express: The Ottoman Empire and Germany's Bid for World Power 1898-1918', 1st Edition, Penguin: New York, p. 275
(15) Mosier, Op. Cit., pp. 312-313
(16) T G Fraser, Andrew Mango, Robert McNamara, 2011, 'Makers of the Modern Middle East', 1st Edition, Haus: London, pp. 64-65; 71-72; to be fair to the British the Germans also acted similarly as per McMeekin, Op. Cit., pp. 89-90; 93
(17) Collins, Op. Cit., pp. 181-184

This was originally published at the following address: http://semiticcontroversies.blogspot.com/2012/09/jews-and-military-service-debunking.html