More than a moment: German Jews and the First World War

Abstract

With the spotlight on the census, other aspects of the German-Jewish war experience gradually faded into the background. In the post-war years, few people wanted to talk about army rabbis or Jewish sailors. The charitable efforts of synagogue communities or Jewish female volunteers in hospitals and at railway stations was also quickly forgotten. What had once been an extremely varied and diverse experience of conflict descended into little more than a public battle over statistics. For the most part, this narrative of national sacrifice rewarded with a brutal betrayal has been the mainstay of historical writing too. Yet, for German Jews, the census was always just a single brief moment in what was a much longer First World War.