Jewish Soldiers on the Lower Austrian Military Establishment (1802)

While removing many previous legal restrictions and humiliating practices which had marked Jewish life in the Habsburg Monarchy up to that date, Joseph II’s 1782 Edict of Tolerance for Lower Austria remained firm that the actual Jewish presence in that province was to be kept as low as possible. Except for Vienna, where several hundred well-off Jews lived as tolerated individuals rather than as an organised community, Lower Austria remained off-limits to Jewish settlement. A Jew wishing to live outside the capital had first to build a factory at his own expense. While the edict de facto impeded internal Jewish migration into Lower Austria, Joseph II’s other policies helped – albeit inadvertently – to renew Jewish presence in the province. The conscription reform of 1781 codified the regional character of army recruitment in the Habsburg Monarchy. Lower Austria, whose population at that time numbered less than a million people, was allocated five regiments of line infantry. In addition, like other regiments in the Monarchy’s ‘German’ establishment, each of these units was allotted an auxiliary conscription district in Galicia – the lands Austria took from Poland in the First Partition of 1772. The regiments drew heavily on this source of manpower, and by the end of the Turkish War in 1791 as many as 40 per cent of the soldiers in the Lower Austrian infantry units were actually Galicians. Galicia was also the province in which the largest Jewish population in the Habsburg Monarchy lived. Jews had been drafted into the army since 1788, initially under the assumption that they would all serve in the non-combat Imperial-Royal Military Transport Corps. After Joseph’s death in 1790, the service obligation was replaced with a hefty exemption fee. However, the growing pressure of the French Revolutionary Wars meant that recruits became more valuable than money so that from September 1796, Jews began to be drafted directly into the infantry. Through the network of Galician auxiliary districts, Jewish recruits were fed into regiments belonging to provinces of the Monarchy where Jews were officially banned – including Lower Austria outside of Vienna. In September 1802, the Habsburg Army held its first peacetime muster after nearly a decade of continuous warfare. The total of the five Lower Austrian infantry regiments came to 16,681 soldiers. At least 223 of these were Jews, making nearly 1.33 per cent of the soldiers on the local establishment. To put this figure into perspective, the proportion of Jews in the population of Lower Austria at that time was about one tenth of a per cent – a fifteen-fold difference. The current database lists these soldiers as they appear in the rolls of their respective units: * 3rd Line Infantry Regiment Erzherzog Carl – Attached to Viertel unter dem Manhartsberg corresponding to the modern Weinviertel, with the Galician auxiliary recruitment district in in Przemyśl. *4th Line Infantry Regiment Deutschmeister – Not yet the Vienna house regiment of later fame, this regiment was based south of the capital in Viertel unter dem Wienerwald corresponding to the modern Industrieviertel. Its auxiliary recruitment district was in Żółkiew (Today Zhovka). *23rd Line Infantry Regiment Großherzog Toscana – Attached to Viertel ober dem Manhartsberg corresponding to the modern Waldviertel. Its Galician auxiliary recruitment district was also based at Żółkiew. *24th Line Infantry Regiment Auersperg – Vienna’s city regiment at that time. Its Galician auxiliary district was based in the eastern tip of the province in Zaleszczyki (today Zalishchyky). *49th Line Infantry Regiment Kerpen – Attached to the in Viertel ober dem Wienerwald corresponding to the modern Mostviertel with headquarters in St. Pölten. Its auxiliary district was also in Zaleszczyki. The Jewish soldiers from Galicia were not distributed equally across the establishment. In 1802, the 3rd Infantry regiment had only 12 Jewish soldiers, while the Viennese 24th had 78, making more than 2 per cent of the regimental strength. The latter unit was the only one to have Jews living in its primary conscription district – although none of its Jewish soldiers was actually born in the city. It seems that the Jews of Vienna had fulfilled their conscription quota by raising recruits among migrant Jews (see for instance soldiers Joseph PENDELS, Nathan STRAUSS and Abraham KAWKA; Rows 128, 167 and 172). Moreover, the experience of the Jewish soldiers demonstrates that Galician recruits were shuffled unceremoniously between regiments. None of the five Lower Austrian regiments confined itself to recruits from its designated auxiliary district. Jewish soldiers of these regiments arrived from every part of Galicia. From 1797, the regiments also received draftees from West Galicia, the name given to the lands annexed by Austria in the Third Partition of Poland. Recruits from West Galician district such as Radzyn, Biala and Sandomierz appear in all the five regiments. Moreover, the Jewish soldiers who were originally enlisted into Bohemian regiments were transferred into the Lower Austrian units to fill in gaps in manpower. This happened for instance to the 49th regiment after the losses it sustained in Swabia in May 1800 (See Rows 223 to 227). In other words, even though our sample covers Jewish soldiers only, unlike soldiers from the Austro-Bohemian lands, Galician recruits were treated similarly to mercenaries who could be sent to serve anywhere. Austrian policymakers were unaware at the time, but this approach was to hamstring the army in the next war. While reservists from the primary districts lived a short distance from the regimental headquarters and could be recalled quickly, the Galician reservists of the same unit were dispersed over the entire province. In parallel, each of Galicia’s districts had soldiers from numerous different regiments. This muddle was inherited by the next mobilisation drive, with dramatic consequences in 1805. Another sign of the second-class status of Galician soldiers was the treatment of the 1797 draft. Its men were promised they would serve only one war. As seen with the example of the 1st Line Infantry Regiment ‘Kaiser’, recruiters from the Austro-Bohemian Lands enlisted under these conditions were discharged in 1801; their Galician comrades were not released but sent on furloughed instead. This violation of an explicit promise was unlikely to add to the army’s popularity. In summer 1805, some of the older and sicklier soldiers were discharged, but as Austria prepared for war it was expected that furloughed Galicians would report to service irrespective of their status. Instead, numerous reservists voted with their feet, resulting in the collapse of the Galician establishment. Only a fraction of the furloughed Galician recruits returned to service – the bulk never appeared and were struck off as missing in 1806. The lessons appeared to have learned, because after the reform of 1808, the Habsburg army started honouring its pledges regarding service terms. The furloughed Jewish veterans from Galicia who did report back in summer 1805, had to march across the monarchy and were largely unable to join their regiments in the Austrian field armies in Germany and Italy. Instead, they were allocated to the newly formed 6th Battalions. These were supposed to serve as training depots for the new conscripts, but the annihilation of Mack’s army in Ulm, and Napoleon’s rapid advance to Vienna, meant that the 6th Battalions were pushed into active service. Much of the Austrian force in Austerlitz comprised these 6th Battalions. While the majority of Jewish soldiers who served in 1802 were subsequently furloughed to Galicia, where they bought their discharges, absconded or went missing in the mobilisation mayhem of 1805, a minority chose to remain in service. These men essentially opted for life as professional soldiers. This group lost heavily in the defeats of 1805, as they were with their units as they marched to Germany. Joined by the few returning furloughed soldiers from Galicia, the survivors were among the best Jewish soldiers Austria had (see for instance: Israel GRELL, Gefreyter Nowak Litzmann, Corporal Aron NIESENBERGER and Selig JOSEL; Rows 74, 142, 170 and 206). By the war of 1809, many of these veterans were past their discharge dates. Those who were not lost in that war were mostly discharged in 1810 and 1811. Surviving conscripts of the 1800 and 1801 intake were still liable for service, meaning that were sent to war in 1812 and again in 1813. In 1820 there were still four veterans of the 1802 group in the army, albeit two were already serving in different regiments. But service in the Lower Austrian units was not only about war. In the peace years of 1802 to 1805 and then again from 1806 to 1808, Jewish soldiers from these regiments were stationed in the main garrisons of the province. Their numbers and locations are shown in the database in the rightmost table headed ‘CONFIRMED PRESENCE IN LOWER AUSTRIA (1802 Onwards)’. The bulk were based in Vienna, where soldiers increased the actual number of Jews in the city at least by a quarter. In parallel, smaller numbers of Jewish soldiers were also stationed at some point in the regimental headquarters in Krems, Korneuburg, Wiener Neustadt and St. Pölten. In the latter case more than 20 were based in the city, most likely living in the regimental barracks in the former Carmelite nunnery (now the city museum and archive). This was the first time that such a large group of Jews lived in the city since the Middle Ages. Some Jewish soldiers were also sent on detached duty to towns and villages like Baden, Guntramsdorf and Wöllersdorf. Locals in these places, if they saw any Jews at all beforehand, were likely to encounter them as itinerant traders. Now Jews arrived in their localities as imperial soldiers. The Muster of 1802 offers a time capsule covering the first cohort of Jewish infantry recruits between 1796 and 1802. As part of the major reforms of 1808, the Galician auxiliary districts were essentially abolished. In parallel, two of the Lower Austrian regiments (the 23rd and 24th) were formally transferred to Galicia. However, Jewish presence in the remaining three regiments was not over. In 1820, the Krems-based 3rd Line Infantry Erzherzog Carl had three Jews in service, including a non-commissioned-officer as well as the regiment’s most senior assistant surgeon (cf. Jewish Soldiers, Ver. 5, Rows 2177, 2271 and 2381). The 4th Regiment Deutschmeister finally had some actual Viennese Jews in its ranks, while the 49th Line Infantry Regiment Kerpen had three, including a Corporal. While not large in absolute numbers, it appears that Jewish presence in rural Lower Austria was renewed to some extent even before the promises of 1848 and the final abolition of all restrictions on Jewish settlement in 1867.