As a historian, he is interested in the structural similarities in warfare between the early modern period and the present day. He comments on modern international affairs for magazines such as Foreign Policy.
Staiano-Daniels applied the “Page 99 Test” to The War People and reported the following:
From page 99:Learn more about The War People at the Cambridge University Press website....Articles of War and stuck to general phrases that could have been spoken by members of any denomination: “God have mercy on Victoria Guarde’s soul,” said Michael Steiner, after she was dead. The “on-the-job” neutrality about religion in this regiment looks less striking to us than to contemporary observers.The War People is a history from below of ordinary soldiers from Saxony during the Thirty Years War (1618-1648), the most destructive war per capita that Europe experienced. The Page 99 Test doesn’t work for The War People, but it works in one way for the war. The page would lead a browser to assume this book is about religious differences in Central European armies, whereas that’s only one part of the social interactions within ordinary companies and regiments. But this test introduces something I’ve been wondering: the relationship of Jews to armies in seventeenth-century Central Europe, and through this, the position of minorities in armies more generally.
Armies were multi-denominational, but Saxon soldiers’ religion is difficult to track, since Saxon muster rolls do not list denomination. Sometimes it is clearer than others, like the men in Dietrich von Taube’s life company in 1634 who gave their origin by their Catholic parishes rather than their native cities. They were listed in a solid block, their names almost uninterrupted. These soldiers came from “Hofkirchenpfarr” in the bishopric of Passau; “Wolfsegger pfarr” (Wolfsegg, Bavaria); “Buerbacherpfarr,” the little town of Puerbach in northern Austria; and “Waizenkirchen pfarr,” right next to Puerbach, thirteen Catholics, all southerners, standing close together in the middle of a Saxon company.
Some men in Saxon service may have been Jewish. Jonathan Israel claimed that armies were less antisemitic than the rest of central Europe during the Thirty Years War, but this subject needs more research. Barbara Tlusty found evidence of numerous Jewish soldiers during the war. Entire companies of Jews fought in the army of Poland–Lithuania. In this context, the recorded surname of Martin Jude, a common soldier in Dam Vitzthum von Eckstedt‘s company in 1635, is interesting. He appears in the roll right next to a man named Barthel Bernhold, which means they may have stood together during the mustering: Bernhold came from the small community of Gleicherwiesen in Thuringia, which was about one-third Jewish.
In 1983, Jonathan Israel, cited in the excerpt, pointed out that harassing Jews was illegal in areas under military jurisdiction, and this was enforced. On the other hand, Hans Medick (2018) and Christoph Gampert (2024) argued that the attitude of military authorities toward Jewish civilians was consistent with the anti-Semitism of the time: officers assumed Jews were rich and demanded Jewish families pay contributions that in one case were twice as heavy as non-Jews. (“Contributions” means military requisitioning of money, which is one way armies were financed in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.)
Israel’s older argument may have to be revised. Armies seem less anti-Semitic than other Central Europeans when officers make it illegal to mistreat Jews in occupied towns, but they seem just as anti-Semitic when they single out Jews for contributions. It’s possible that the question is orthogonal to the observed actions: armies view Jews as a potential resource. This produces protection in one case, and harsher treatment in the other. But as a resource is also how they consider their own men. This is why I've been wondering about the place of minorities in these armies more generally: if you're caught between multiple bad options of life in seventeenth-century Europe, being a resource might be better than being a target.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
