Jewish involvement in the First World War was far more extensive than I ever realised. I discovered this — and many other things — when walking from Switzerland to the North Sea along the old Western Front for my book The Path to Peace .
As I describe in the book, last year I walked 1,000km from the Swiss border, where the Western Front ended, to the North Sea in Belgium where it began, one million steps, through soil where 10 million died or were so severely injured they could not continue to pick up their ordinary lives again.
I have spent my life in education, running two schools, Brighton College and Wellington College for 20 years, and then as Vice Chancellor of the University of Buckingham.
27. Walking with the ambassador
Walking the famous route today
My books have mostly been about recent British history, including biographies of the six Prime Ministers after Margaret Thatcher. So deciding to write a book on this walk was a fresh departure, a chance to delve into the history of those who died and also that of my own family.
The original idea for the walk came from a young British soldier, Douglas Gillespie, a notion which laid buried for 100 years until I came across it some years ago. His younger brother died very close to where he was fighting, and feelings of grief and perhaps guilt troubled him.
So he came up with the novel idea, which he wrote about to his old headmaster and his parents in June 1915. His hope was that “when peace comes, our government might combine with the French government to make one long avenue between the lines from the Vosges to the sea”. He called it the “Via Sacra”, the “sacred street”.
That vision is now beginning to flower. The “Western Front way” as we call it is now mostly marked out in Belgium, and is beginning to be marked out in France as a walking and cycling route for all to enjoy and to try to find greater peace and meaning in their lives.
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“England has been all she could be to Jews, Jews will be all they can be to England”, stated the Jewish Chronicle on the outbreak of war in 1914.
Out of an estimated Anglo-Jewish community of around 250,000, about 50,000 Jews enlisted. Many fought with the Jewish Brigade in Mandate Palestine. But others fought and died on the Western Front.
Five Victoria Crosses were awarded to British Jewish soldiers. One was Issy Smith, who participated in a doomed attack during the Second Battle of Ypres in April 1915. “During the attack several members of his unit were seriously injured just yards from the enemy position.
8. Hartmannsweilerkopf battlefield
A Great War battlefield
Rather than flee, Issy tended to several of these wounded men, carrying them over 250 yards back to the safety of their own trench, returning for other wounded comrades with no regard for his own safety under heavy enemy fire,” read his citation.
Though wounded, he survived the battle, and was welcomed back to England as a hero, though in one chilling incident was refused service at a restaurant because he was Jewish.
Another Jewish Victoria Cross winner was Captain Robert Gee, an officer who fought at both the Somme and Cambrai.
During the latter battle, he was briefly captured during a German attack, escaped, organised a party of the Brigade Staff for a counterattack, recaptured the position, and then personally neutralised a German machine gun. Though wounded, he refused to leave the field until he was satisfied that the defensive positions were properly organised.
Seldon1
Anthony Seldon
Unlike Smith and Gee, war poet and artist Isaac Rosenberg did not return from the front line. He wrote that “nothing can justify war”, but joined up in October 1915 anyway because “we must all fight to get the trouble over”.
He wrote in his haunting poem August 1914: “What in our lives is burnt/ In the fire of this?/ The heart’s dear granary?/ The much we shall miss?”. He was killed in April 1918 near Arras, during the German Spring Offensive.
One of the most talented commanders on the Western Front was General Sir John Monash, an Australian of German-Jewish ancestry. He proved himself a good divisional commander, despite the terrible conditions of the Third Ypres campaign in 1917.
He was promoted to commander of the Australian Corps in mid-1918. His meticulously planned operations would see the Australian Corps spearheading the British victories at Amiens, Peronne, and on the Hindenburg Line.
These victories brought the German army to its knees and they were forced to sign the Armistice in November.
Second World War commander Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery later wrote that Monash was “the best general on the Western Front in Europe”.
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Before the war, my father’s parents Philip and Masha Margolis emigrated from the Ukrainian town of Pereiaslav near Kyiv (then part of the Russian Empire), and the 1911 census places them in Whitechapel. They had escaped from Tsarist persecution, pogroms and poverty, but in London’s East End, with Jews and Christians divided by streets, as my father’s brother Cecil recalls in his memoirs, “fighting and brawling was commonplace among the young”.
The family eked out a living converting the downstairs room into a haberdashery shop despite the family business suffering from periodic burglaries; but they felt safe at last from mortal danger.
Safe at least until the influenza epidemic of 1918 struck.
Then, as during the Covid pandemic, relatives could not see loved ones close-up, so the older children waved a final goodbye to their parents in London Hospital from a safe distance. Philip and Masha died on 16 and 21 July , 1918, and are buried in Edmonton Jewish Cemetery.
As soon as the funerals were over, household goods piled up in the front room were auctioned off to raise money, and the three boys, aged four, ten and 12, were dispatched to the Jewish orphanage in Norwood, South London where they were given the numbers 45, 82 and 126. My Aunt Bess, after running away from foster homes, was taken in by relatives.
Abraham, my father, the fifth and youngest child, posed a different kind of problem. Born on 29 May 1916 in a midwife’s home in Petticoat Lane (the family joked he was the only bargain to emerge from that shopping thoroughfare), he was two when his parents died.
30. Arthur Seldon
Arthur Seldon
Too young for the orphanage, he was fostered by one Jewish couple after another, until eventually adopted by Marks and Eva Slobodian, Russian émigrés who may or may not have known his parents.
Tragedy struck again when Marks, listed in the 1921 census as a boot repairer, died soon after, leaving young Abraham (now Arthur) with his foster mother, who scrambled to make a life for him. My father was deeply shaped by the experience. Without the war, the flu would not have spread as it did, and he might have been brought up in a secure loving family with brothers and sisters. As it was, he learned he had siblings only when he was 12.
The story is that his brothers found out where he was living and wrote “Abraham is our brother” in chalk in large letters for him to see on the street outside. The shock of discovery helped induce his lifelong stutter.
I think of my father often, overhearing hushed voices in the night talking about him, wondering whether he was wanted, and from where his next meal was coming. In restaurants, I remember he would scoop up his bread roll and slip it in a paper napkin into his pocket, just in case.
He was a wonderful man but the early traumas scarred him for life and cannot but have affected my brothers and me.
In the East End of London, my father must have heard the sirens at 11 am on 11 November 1918, signalling the end of the war, but aged just two and a half would not have understood what the sound meant. Nor did local people, who thought it was to announce a Zeppelin raid.
Young Arthur must have been disorientated after his parents had suddenly died, his siblings had disappeared, his home had changed not once but several times, and now he had a new mother looking after him. But he prevailed. “The intellectual architect of both Blairism and Thatcherism”, The Economist said of him on his death in 2005.
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At German cemeteries of the First World War on the Western Front there are 3,000 grave markers with the Star of David.
They date from the 1960s, when, together with the Central Council of Jews and the Rabbi Conference, the German Volksbund erected memorials to recognise the Jewish soldiers who died for the Kaiser. The markers read: “May his soul be woven into the circle of the living.” How, I asked myself, could such sacrifice be repaid with such horror just a generation later?
Pilot Lieutenant Josef Zürndorfer, who died in a plane crash in Berlin on 19 September, 1915, wrote in his will : “As a German, I went into the field to protect my beleaguered fatherland. But also as a Jew, to fight for full equality for my fellow believers.”
The Path of Peace Jacket
Anthony's Seldon's book
Many Jews held strong patriotic feelings for Germany and they also believed that the war against the Russian Empire would bring the liberation of their fellow Eastern European Jews from pogroms and persecution. More than 100,000 German Jews fought during the First World War, and 12,000 were killed. Eighteen thousand won the Iron Cross.
Next year, I intend to walk from Alsace to Auschwitz, to learn more about how the relatively tolerant country of 1914 became the monstrosity soon after. Having people of all ages and all nationalities walking side by side to discover common ground is the aim of the walk imagined by a brave soldier more than 100 years ago.
The Path of Peace: Walking the Western Front Way by Anthony Seldon, Atlantic Books
