Fighting in National Armies 89
which removed some restrictions and was followed by an edict(1788) which mandated military service for Jews , but without extending full citizenship. All this came after the cruel repressive measures of his mother Maria Teresa (1744) which expelled Jews from vast areas of her empire in mid-winter. Although the Jewish community welcomed Joseph II ’s step toward rights, they hated the conscription. When twenty-five Jewish recruits were assembled in Prague , the Jewish community went into mourning. Yet Ezekiel Landau encouraged them with the words with which this paper began even though military service was for a period of seven years. Many Jews saw this asa step toward emancipation. Others understood it as an additional burden and destructive. It placed Jews into a non-Jewish setting, led to the desecration of the shabbat, the consumption of forbidden foods, etc.
The leaders of the Jewish community appealed to remove compulsory military service, but failed except for a short period in some provinces. Even there compulsory service was re-introduced
The mass levees for the large armies of the French Revolution and subsequently napoleonic wars raised the number of Jews serving in national military armies. This began with the“War of the First Coalition ”(1792—1793) which sought to spread the revolution to the rest of Europe . All unmarried men between 18 and 25 were called to arms and so an army of half a million men was raised quickly. As the Jewish population of France was negligible, few Jews were involved. Soon, however, Napoleon expanded these forced call-ups into the newly liberated lands, so that his Grand Army of 1812 consisting of 611,000 soldiers of whom only 230,000 were French . A greater number of Jews were involved; many adopted new names in order to conceal their Jewish identity for fear of anti-Semitism.’" Therefore the number of Jews who served remains unknown. Jews , although not full citizens, were forced to participate. Some along with many non-Jews emigrated to the New World to escape military service, as later from Tsarist Russia .