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Abstract
The Ottoman Empire entered the war in October 1914. Once the military authorities had pronounced the war to be a Jihad, Christian and Jewish soldiers were removed from their military units and sent to the battalions called Amale Taburlari (road-building units) or tawabeer al-amale (labour battalions). One of these was Jerusalemite Hayim Nahmias who was conscripted in 1917. His experiences in a labour battalion were set down in a diary that lay unread for many years, until it was recently discovered in a storage unit. This article explains the nature and purpose of the labour battalions, and discusses Nahmias’s experiences as reflected in his war diary.
Notes
1. Yehuda Burla, “Hahayal Verhapirda” [The soldier and the she-ass], Bli Kokhav. Sippurei Milhamah [Without a star: war stories] (Tel Aviv: Devar-Massada, n.d), 189; ellipses in the original.
2. Hayim Nahmias, Yoman 1917–1918 [Diary 1917–1918], trans. into Hebrew from Ladino by Avner Perez (Ma‘ale Adumim, 2004); (emphasis added).
3. David Nicolle, The Ottoman Army 1914–18 (Wellingborough: Osprey, 1994), 9.
4. ‘One looks in vain for a mention of their fate in the memoirs of the Turkish and German commanders.’ See Erik Jan Zürcher , “Ottoman Labour Battalions in World War 1,” in Der Völkermord an den Armeniern und die Shoah, ed. H.-L. Kieser and D.J. Schaller (Basel: Chronos Verlag, 2002), 190. See also http://www.arts.yorku.ca/hist/tgallant/documents/zurcherottomanlaborbattalions.pdf. There is a brief mention of these battalions in Nicolle, The Ottoman Army. A more comprehensive coverage of these battalions is in Hebrew in Yaakov Markovyetzki, Bakaf hakela shela hane’emanut. Benei hayishuv batsava haturki 1908–1918 [Conflicts of loyalties: the enlistment of Palestinian Jews in the Turkish army 1908–1918] (Ramat Efal: Yad Tabenkin, 1995).
5. Leyla Neyzi, “Strong as Steel, Fragile as a Rose: A Turkish Jewish Witness to the Twentieth Century,” Jewish Social Studies 12, no. 1 (Fall 2005): 170.
6. See Salim Tamari, “The Short Life of Private Ihsan. Jerusalem 1915,” Jerusalem Quarterly 30, 29.
7. Ibid.
8. Zürcher, “Ottoman Labour Battalions in World War 1”; http://www.arts.yorku.ca/hist/tgallant/documents/zurcherottomanlaborbattalions.pdf.
9. Ephraim Deinard, Milehemet Tugarma be’eretz yisrael [The Turkish war in Palestine] (St Louis: Monastir, 1926), 41, 100.
10. Yehuda Amon, “Yoman shel hayal yehudai batsava haturki” [Diary of a Jewish soldier in the Ottoman army], unpublished, dated Shevat (January–February) 1915. The Turkish station of Wadi Sarar (Nahal Sorek) was on the old Hejaz Railroad that reached from Jaffa to Jerusalem, known in military history books and documents as ‘The Junction Station’. Amon goes on to describe a wheelbarrow in great technical detail, obviously never having previously seen one.
11. Moshe Ben-Hillel Hacohen, Milhemet He‘amim (Yoman) [The war of the nations. Diary] (Jerusalem: Yad Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, 1985), 191.
12. Alexander Aaronson, With the Turks in Palestine (Dodo Press, 2009), 16–17.
13. Hacohen, Milhemet He‘amim, 203.
14. Ibid., 203, entry April 19, 1916.
15. Yitzhak Olshan, Din udevarim: zikhronot [Memoirs] (Jerusalem: Schocken, 1978), 39–40.
16. Ibid., 41.
17. Hacohen, Milhemet He‘amim, 277.
18. Aharon Reuveni, Shamot [Devastation], in Ad Yerushalayim (Jerusalem: Hakibbutz Hameuhad, 1987), 380–82.
19. Markovyetzki, Bakaf hakela shela hane’emanut, 55; Hacohen, Milhemet He‘amim, December 12, 1915.
20. Hacohen, Milhemet He‘amim, April 13, 1916.
21. Ibid., April 14, 1916.
22. Ibid., 275.
23. Diary of Moshe Smilansky, a writer and activist; quoted in Markovitzki, Bakaf hakela shela hane’emanut, 55.
24. Shimon Rubinstein. The full text of his introduction and notes to volume 2 of the 2nd edition of Hacohen’s diary (Jerusalem: Yad Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, 1985 and 1997), 9.
25. Zürcher, “Ottoman Labour Battalions in World War 1.”
26. ‘As the author himself declares these are notes of the diary that he wrote during the events. Nahmias is proud of the fact that he continued to write, contrary to others who began but rapidly despaired of it, and he even emphasises his purpose in writing. He wrote on various papers and pages that he had come by. After the war he copied his notes into an orderly notebook.’ Personal correspondence from Dr Avner Peretz, translator of the diary from Ladino into Hebrew. I am grateful to Dr Peretz for this comment.
27. See Edward Erickson, “The Armenians and Ottoman Military Policy, 1915,” War in History 15, no. 2 (2008): 145.
28. A story by the Hebrew novelist Yehuda Burla, who was a military interpreter during the war, concerns the execution of a group of deserters after they had been caught. Among them is a sergeant, a noble character, loved by the men, whose honour is undermined through being accused of negligence in allowing the men to escape. Araf Shavish, the sergeant, is not executed but relieved of his decorations and ‘beaten formally’, that is, symbolically, in front of his unit, a great humiliation, which leads to his suicide. War stories like this one constitute a hybrid genre, neither fiction nor historiography, but clearly based on the author’s lived experience. Both as trustworthy and as untrustworthy as the diary accounts, such stories create good correspondence with them. Yehuda Burla, “Aref Shavish,” in Bli Kokhav (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1988), 165–75. All translations from Hebrew are mine. Page numbers in the text refer to the Hebrew translation of the diary. For a discussion of genres of war writing see Glenda Abramson, Hebrew Writing of the First World War (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2008).
29. Desertions occurred primarily during unit movements across the empire, during lulls in action and from hospitals and rear areas. See Eric Erikson, Ordered to Die: A History of the Ottoman Army in the First World War (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2000), 214.
30. The men were regularly shaved of all head, face and body hair
31. See Nicolle, The Ottoman Army, 21.
32. Only much later were they given clothes to replace the ones in which they had arrived: a grey shirt and black trousers, woollen socks, heavy shoes and a military hat.
33. On the southern shore of the Sea of Marmara (Marmora) in southern Turkey.
34. A town on the Aegean coast.
35. The continuous settlement of Jews in Palestine from biblical times, as opposed to the ‘New Yishuv’, the Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe that began in 1881.
36. In his diary Amon describes these frequent evenings of celebration, and Ariel-Orloff, in his novel Yeshimon, based on his own experiences in an Ottoman military band, describes one of them in detail. For a vivid account, also see Aaronson, With the Turks in Palestine, 10–11.
37. See Patterson et al., Encyclopedia of Holocaust Literature, 222.
38. A representative of the Sultan in peacetime. In wartime a military rank equivalent to Lieutenant-Colonel.
39. An ancient city in south-western Turkey.
40. Nahmias gives his name as Mulazam Fuad, a captain.
41. Steven Rendall, “On Diaries,” Diacritics 16, no. 3 (Autumn 1986): 8.
42. Ibid.