"Jewish Soldiers of the Freikorps Grün Loudon" Topic

Jewish Mercenaries in Habsburg Service:
Soldiers of the Freikorps Grün Loudon 1796-98

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This article aims to demonstrate the exceptional potential of Habsburg military records for the study of Jewish history during Europe's Age of Revolution. We begin with the random discovery of six Jewish veterans of Freikorps Grün Loudon a unit of mercenary freebooters – which fought for the Habsburgs during the first war against the French Republic (1792–97). A careful re-reading of the available archival evidence reveals that these men were the survivors of a much larger group numbering at least two dozen Jewish soldiers. While Jewish conscripts had been drafted into the Habsburg army since 1788, the fact that Jews could also serve even volunteer as professional soldiers in that period is completely new to us. When considered together, the personal circumstances and service experiences of the Jewish soldiers of Freikorps Grün Loudon enable us to make several observations about their motivation as well as their position vis -ŕ-vis their non-Jewish comrades.

In 1788, the Habsburg Monarchy became the first state in modern history to draft Jews into military service. Jewish soldiers continued to serve in the Habsburg army until the final collapse of Austro-Hungary at the end of the First World War. Thus, Habsburg history and Jewish military history was intertwined for exactly 130 years. The current article deals with the early part of that period, in the immediate aftermath of Joseph II's conscription edict. The parity established by the Habsburg Emperor between his Jewish and Christian subjects – at least as far as compulsory military service was concerned was soon to produce another novelty: the long- established ban on voluntary enlistment of Jews into the army was lifted. Closely following the footsteps of the first Jewish conscripts in the last Habsburg-Ottoman War (1788–91), the Jewish professional soldier was to re-appear on history's stage. In the autumn of 1802, the 13th Line Infantry Regiment Reisky had a total of 76 Jewish soldiers. Unlike almost every other Habsburg regular infantry formation under the Upper and Inner Austrian Military Command, the 13th Regiment did have a small Jewish population living directly within its primary conscription district in Friuli. Although the local Jewish community of Gorizia (Görz) was formally allocated a quota of three conscripts per year, none of the Jewish soldiers of the 13th Regiment came from there. Instead, 70 of these men were conscripts raised through the Regiment's auxiliary recruitment district in Galicia, as well as transferees from other line infantry regiments. The remaining six soldiers – Mayer Fuchskehl, Mayer Geldmann, Wolf Kritz, Isack Lanzek, and Berko Reiner as well as the convert Franz Eisen (formerly Israel Eusen) – were veterans of a German mercenary unit called Freikorps Grün Loudon (hereafter FKGL)
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About half of the peacetime musters of 1802 to 1804 for the entire Habsburg army survive.
For 1811 and 1817, there are no gaps in the records. The total number of Jewish soldiers from the period of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars is estimated at 35,000 men at least. This means that the musters alone preserve the data of tens of thousands of Jewish soldiers. Apart from a few unit musters, this material has not been used until now.
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