A Horseradish
Friday 30th August 2013 5:46pm [Edited]
8,475 posts
Quote: Tursiops @ August 30 2013, 6:14 PM BST
I have been doing some research on my granddad's, war record; I think I have identified him in the British Jewry Roll of Honour, a list of Jewish servicemen who fought in the Great War. At least it is the right name and the right regiment; no personnel number and the rank is wrong for the end of the war, but reading the intro they seem to have pulled the information together from all sorts of sources, so that is not perhaps surprising.
The thing is that if this is my granddad, then they got it wrong. Admittedly his name sounds a bit Jewish, but not only was he not of the chosen, he would fly into an absolutely rage if anyone suggested he was. He was fiercely anti-Semitic. (In fairness he had some personal grievances: his dealings with those of a Jewish persuasion had not been happy ones.)
I wonder how he would have felt about it if he knew he was commemorated in this way.
It could depend on how competent he felt the authorities were. I've just had a look to see how the roll of honour was produced. It is in a book edited by Michael Adler in 1922. Apparently he was the first Jewish chaplain in HM forces and presumably he was reliant on national records. It is probably to be expected that people then were less questioning of state accuracy but there were all kinds of anomalies. I have seen my grandmother's year of birth described on databases as 1890 and 1891. We had always felt that it was the first and my Mum was so aggravated by the doubts I was raising, she dug out her birth certificate as proof.
In other respects, I feel that there are two ways of considering predecessors' perspectives. One is that they are people who are sort of frozen in time and the other is as if they are fully aware of what is now happening. Certainly anti-semitism was once rife but many individuals would have a different opinion if they were alive today. That applies to a wide range of matters. To date, I have never abstained from voting and for most of my life I bought poppies. A key reason was the familiar argument that relatives had fought for our rights. But I did stop buying poppies when things were done which I knew my uncles who fought in the wars would oppose. I know too that many weren't at all happy with the way they were treated when alive.