JEWS IN THE WAR

Evening Star, Issue 19617, 25 July 1927, Page 6

JEWS IN THE WAR

OVER A MILLION AND A-QIJAR-TER ENROLLED. The notion Dint the Jews are not a fighting people seems to bo contradicted by recent military statistics. So at least contends Dr Felix Mulder as the result of elaborate studies, published in the ‘ Israelitish Archives.’ He recalls the fact that in Russia Tsar Nicholas 1. began the practice of imposing upon his Jewish subjects military service of the most rigorous and exacting character, strongly discriminating against them. Indeed, innumerable Jewish boys from the age of twelve years upward wore forcibly dragged from their homes and coerced into camp life. Under his successors this practice was ameliorated a little, but in the first years of the present century fully 170,0O Jews wore enlisted in the Russian army. This number was greatly increased in the World War, when at the outset •there were 400,000 Jewish soldiers in the Russian army, a number which was increased during’the war to (300,000, or 36 per cent, of the entire Jewish population. in the Austrian army there were 300. 1,100 Jews, and in (ho German array 100,000. Nor were they lacking elsewhere, fully 200,000 having been enrolled in the armies of the Allies. In the American Expeditionary Forces there were scores, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of Jews, so that in the. entire World War the number of Jewish fighting men was well above a million and a-qnarter, perhaps as much as a million and a-half. Nor is there the slightest ground for suggestion that they were not the equals of any of their comrade's in loyalty, efficiency, and valor. The race has not outgrown tbs spirit of Joshua, David, and Judas Maccabeus.