Christhardt Henschel’s monograph “Jeder Bürger Soldat. Juden und das polnische Militär (1918–1939)” tells the fascinating story of Jewish men in Poland’s armed forces in the interwar years. As Poland struggled for independence, hundreds of thousands of Jews fought in the German, Austro-Hungarian, and Russian imperial armies as well as in the Polish independence legions, with many hoping that their service would be the ticket to full citizenship. Henschel’s nuanced study suggests that in the 1920s and 1930s, the Polish military was an ambivalent space where antisemitic exclusion overlapped with inclusionary ideas and hesitant recognition of Jewish men’s military performance. Henschel places his book at the intersection of social and military history, giving what happens in the barracks, in officers’ clubs, and on the pages of newspapers no less importance than the developments on the battlefield. “Jeder Bürger Soldat” is a thought-provoking study that invites readers to rethink Polish and Jewish history through the experiences of Jewish soldiers.

Henschel’s study consists of four chapters. The first explores the entanglements of citizenship, Jewishness, and military service during the nineteenth century and the Polish independence uprisings. Chapter 2 analyzes the army in the context of unstable years surrounding the establishment of independent Poland in November 1918, while chapter 3 examines how the Polish military approached its Jewish members in the 1920s and 1930s. The final chapter shifts our attention to Jewish veterans and how they constructed narratives about Jewish military excellence as a pathway to full citizenship. While chapter 2 offers a glimpse into the violence-filled first years of the new Polish republic, chapters 3 and 4 provide readers with insights into a complex network of actors (Jewish and non-Jewish politicians, army leadership, Jewish soldiers, Jewish veterans, etc.) who shaped the debate about Jews and the military.

“Jeder Bürger Soldat” is a well-researched study based on painstaking archival work. Henschel explored the records of the Central Military Archive in Warsaw, the Archive of the Modern Records in Warsaw, the State Archive in Lublin, and several smaller collections in Poland, Israel, and Ukraine. He researched diverse periodicals and dozens of memoirs, pamphlets, reports, position papers, and an immense body of secondary literature. The author demonstrates a great ability to scrutinize an overwhelming number of archival collections and is exceptionally well-versed in the nuances of modern Polish history. While Henschel gathered a marvelous collection of first-person narratives, he included almost no Yiddish sources. At a time when the majority of Polish Jews used Yiddish as their language of private and public communication, the omission of Yiddish sources poses a risk of studying only a fraction of the Jewish experience.

One of the major achievements of Henschel's monograph is its presentation of the situation of Jews in the context of other ethnic groups in Poland. What emerges from Henschel's study is a highly complex panorama in which the army at times sought to include ethnic minorities and at other times rejected them for a variety of reasons. While earlier studies underscored the complexities of religious and ethnic differences in German, French, or Russian armies, Henschel’s study presents the Polish case in its specificity, which was full of contradictions. By demonstrating how not only Jews, but also Germans, Silesians, and Ukrainians fell victim to suspicion and discriminatory policies, Henschel does not question the omnipresence of antisemitism but rather reveals how the military apparatus responded to nationalism that defined social and political life in the newly independent Poland.

Henschel centers his narrative around the Jabłonna events – the 1920 internment of several thousand Jewish soldiers – which became a symbol of antisemitic prejudice in the Polish army during the immediate post-independence era. The internment of Jewish soldiers was the culmination of stereotypes about the supposed lack of fighting capability and loyalty of Jewish soldiers, which influenced internal military and political debates. Henschel explores these events in the introduction, in chapter 2, as well as in the conclusion, granting them particular relevance. The Jabłonna case serves him as a framework for exploring the twenty-year-long history of Jewish service in the Polish military. As Henschel notes, there are hardly any first-person accounts from the interned soldiers, and after 1920, the Jabłonna events were rarely discussed by Polish Jews. While during the two-month internment, Jewish parliamentarians and the local and foreign press depicted the events as proof of how undemocratic newborn Poland was, Polish Jews quickly sought to forget this moment of humiliation. As Henschel demonstrates in Chapter 4, Jewish veterans wanted to see themselves as brave soldiers and full-fledged citizens, not victims of antisemitic prejudice. In the context of these Jewish-produced counternarratives, the author's continuous focus on Jabłonna might appear somewhat surprising.

One of the challenges that Henschel only occasionally manages to overcome is seeing the individual Jewish men behind the files in the military archive. While Henschel includes Jewish voices, for example, from trial records, they often disappear in the immense number of military-produced texts. The author traces some Jewish approaches to the military, such as draft dodging, but we miss accounts of men who found meaning in their military service. One of them was Hassid Yankev Kahan, who in 1930 published his memoirs from the years 1919–1922, in which he underscored his embrace of military logic. Henschel’s study maintains the military's authoritative voice rather than challenges it. While he examines army reports with proper scrutiny and scholarly distance, the dominance of army-produced materials ultimately overshadows any individual or collective Jewish accounts. Additionally, Henschel follows the binary vocabulary typical of Poland’s interwar political debate (“Jews” and “Poles”) and missed the opportunity to present Jewish experiences as part of Polish history by referring instead to “Jews” and “non-Jews.”

Taken as a whole, “Jeder Bürger Soldat” is a major contribution to Polish and Jewish social history. The book is valuable for scholars and students interested in the history of ethnicity in East-Central Europe, the history of antisemitism, and military history. Henschel’s monograph excellently demonstrates how the Polish state and its Jewish citizens entered into the era of army-related entanglements unknown in the pre-1918 period, and it brilliantly recreates the mosaic of voices that contributed to the debate on Jewish men’s place within the Polish military.