April 6: World War I and the Jews

The United States entered World War I on this date in 1917. About a quarter of a million Jews were in the American armed forces during the war, close to 6 percent of the total enlistment, from a Jewish population that was under 4 percent of the general population. Among German and Austrian Jews, over 100,000 served and 12,000 died, yet the post-war period saw the festering of German anti-Semitism, with Jews blamed for the country’s defeat. An additional 350,000 Jews fought for Russia, and 20,000 for Britain and France. More than four million Jews lived in the areas of Europe where the war was most intense, and a quarter of a million of them died in battle. Many yeshivas and Jewish religious centers were destroyed, and over a million Jews became refugees, particularly after the Russian Tsar accused them of being German collaborators. This unprecedently violent, useless conflagration — and the Bolshevik revolution that ended it for Russia — radicalized Jews around the world. It also produced the Balfour Declaration, the destruction of the Ottoman Empire, and a rise in the hopes of the Zionist movement. The war also catalyzed Jewish communal tsedoke (philanthropy) with the formation of the Jewish Welfare Board and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.

“Before World War I, radical, racist antisemitism was confined to the fringe of right-wing politics throughout most of Europe and in the United States. . . . World War I brought antisemitism, including its racist variant, into the mainstream of European politics.” —United States Holocaust Memorial Museum