Australia's Jewish Anzacs

The first Anzac Day my father experienced was the 12th anniversary of the landing at Gallipoli.

It was in 1927, just a few days after he arrived in Melbourne as a new immigrant from Palestine. Years later, he would tell me, still in awe, about the  600,000 people, half the city’s population at the time, who lined the streets to watch the 1927 march.

But what really stunned him was the resplendent figure of  John Monash in full general’s regalia, sword and all, striding out at the front of 30,000 World War 1 veterans as they marched down St Kilda Road to the Shrine of Remembrance.

My father watched Monash in disbelief because although he came to Australia via Tel Aviv, he had grown up in Warsaw under the Tsar where the idea of a Jewish general, let alone commander-in-chief, was preposterous.

Here the army’s Jewish leader was not only a national hero, but he was soon to become the Zionist Federation of Australia’s first national president. Little wonder that on his first Anzac Day my father instantly became a fervent Australian patriot.

Anzac Day 2006 next Tuesday is the 91st anniversary of the Gallipoli landing and, inevitably, Monash is bound to figure in the commemorations and special media tributes.

As he should. It’s quite a story.

The greatest Jewish general since Bar-Kochbah was a civil engineer and citizen soldier from Melbourne who, at the age of 49 in  August, 1914, had never fired or heard a shot in anger.

Yet by April, 1915 he brilliantly led the expeditionary 4th Infantry Brigade at Gallipoli, went on to become the most outstanding allied general on the Western Front, and is today revered as the greatest military commander this country has produced.  The war over, he emerged as a visionary pioneer of technology and, less well known, a dedicated democrat who prevented the only serious attempt at a right-wing military coup in Australian history.

But inspirational though the Monash saga may be as an individual’s story, it has tended to overshadow the collective story of World War 1’s Jewish Anzacs.  Few in (the Jewish) community know about the 2000 Australian and 200 New Zealand  Jews who voluntarily enlisted in the Australian  and New Zealand Army Corps. But they should. It is its own remarkable, if poignant story.  

Remarkable, because of  those who served, over 200 were killed on active duty, and a large percentage were wounded. Some 200 held commissioned rank, and about 100 received honours and distinctions, amongst them Lieutenant Leonard M Keysor, of the 42nd Batallion, New South Wales, who received the  Victoria Cross “for most conspicuous bravery and devotion to duty at  the Lone Point trenches in the Gallipoli Peninsula”.

Remarkable, too, because given the relative numbers this voluntary enlistment was even more significant. In 1914 Australian Jewry’s total population was 20,000. Of the approximately 10,000 males, only about 3000 would have been in the eligible age range and, of those, a percentage would have been medically unfit. It’s clear, then, that almost every able-bodied young Jewish man volunteered.

Remarkable indeed. But poignant when we ask why such zeal for a war in faraway Europe? While the answer may not accord with our current sensibilities, it can only be sought and understood in its historical context. Thus a contemporary account published in 1923 in Perth, the “Australian Jewry Book of Honour” by Harold Boas, sets out  “to establish beyond question that Jewish citizens of the Empire, no less than members of any other Faith, are prepared to share the full burden of its citizen responsibilities as well as its privileges.”

Poignant, therefore, because in 1914 Australian Jews, like their non-Jewish compatriots, saw themselves as holding “dual citizenship”—that of Australia and the British Empire. Just as other Jews whom they fought, and killed, saw themselves as citizens of the Prussian and Austro-Hungarian Empires.

Poignant, therefore, because World War 1 was a senseless conflict between moribund imperial powers which created a  massive slaughterhouse on both the Western and Eastern fronts. Moloch-like, it consumed  a generation of Europe’s young men, and opened the gates of Hell for World War ll.   And poignant,  too, because while Australia was on the victorious side on November 11, 1918, the Gallipoli campaign itself ended in disaster, death, and retreat for the Anzacs.

Yet on … Anzac Day none of that diminishes the respect and honour we owe those who served, Australian  and New Zealand Jewish citizens of the British Empire amongst them. Nor does it detract from the increasingly significant place, as a commemoration more in abhorrence of war than its glorification, which the day has come to assume in the Australian national psyche.