Jewish Soldiers of the 1st Moravian Line Infantry Regiment 'Kaiser' (1788-1820)

In 1715, the Prince Elector of Trier and member of the ducal house of Lorraine raised an infantry regiment for the Imperial service. The proprietorship of the regiment soon passed to the heir of the dukedom, Leopold, and after his death to his younger brother Francis Stephan. In 1737, Francis married the Habsburg heiress Maria Theresia. In 1740, Francis became co-ruler of the Habsburg Monarchy and in 1745 was elected Holy Roman Emperor. His regiment thus became the most senior infantry regiment of the Habsburg army. In 1769, when all line infantry regiments were given fixed numbers, the regiment was allocated number one. It was to remain the Emperor’s own until 1918. From the 1750s, the regiment became affiliated with the Czech lands and in 1781 was given a permanent recruitment district in Moravia with Prostějov as its headquarters. As with most regiments on the German establishment at that period, the 1^st Line infantry regiment was also allocated a secondary conscription district in Galicia. Between 1808 and 1817, the regiment was to draw its conscripts half from Moravia and half from Galicia. In 1818, with the final abolition of auxiliary recruitment districts, the regiment became a Moravian unit and from 1853 was moved to the adjacent province of Silesia, where it remained until the end of the Empire.

Based on its surviving manpower records - a total of 66 cartons preserved in the Viennese Kriegsarchiv - this database covers every identifiable Jewish soldier who served in the 1^st Line infantry regiment from the introduction of Jewish conscription in 1788 to 1820. It should be noted that the paperwork of the regiment in these years has almost no perceptible gaps. The survival of nearly all enlistment papers, together with the monthly reports noting changes to regimental strengths, allows us to not only identify 175 Jewish soldiers, but also to reconstruct their service itineraries in substantial detail. The two Jewish soldiers entered the regiment in 1789 as waggoneers of the regimental transport detachment. After a gap of several years, in 1795 two further Jewish Transport Corps soldiers were attached to the regiment, and two more in 1796 and 1812 respectively. The remaining 169 Jewish soldiers were infantrymen, the overwhelming majority of whom were conscripts with 159 identifiable cases to only four volunteers. The first Jewish infantry conscripts were drafted in August 1796 and arrived at the active army by the end of the year. The first Jewish soldier who became a casualty of war was Salomon Jellinek who was wounded in action at the battle of Ostrach at the very beginning of the Second Coalition War. Several months later in June 1799 the first Jewish soldier was killed in action at the First Battle of Zurich. Jewish soldiers of the 1^st Line Infantry regiment fought in 1805 in Ulm, Wischau and Austerlitz; and in 1809, at Abensberg, where 12 were taken prisoner, and Deutsch Wagram. In the wars of 1813-15 several Jewish soldiers were wounded at the battles of Dresden and Leipzig.

The regimental primary conscription district included some of Moravia’s most important Jewish communities such as Boskovice, Prostějov and Ivanovice. Each of these communities regularly provided conscripts for the regiment. Jewish conscripts from Galicia were more mixed, as the Habsburg recruitment was often conducted adhering to the formal boundaries of the various auxiliary districts. The two-tier nature of Habsburg army service also came clear in the treatment of conscripts who were raised in 1797 with the promise that they will serve only for the duration of the war: these from Moravia were discharged in 1802; those from Galicia were kept in service.  After 1808, a substantial proportion of the Jewish conscripts was raised through the army reserve. This was enacted again in 1813. In parallel, the popular levy (Landwehr), which operated in 1809 as an independent entity, was brought under the control of the regular army. Each of the Moravian regiments was allocated one Landwehr battalion. The initial intake of some 1,400 Landwehr recruits in July 1813 sees the only major gap in the regimental records. Several Jewish Landwehrmänner could be identified because of their subsequent medical records. Based on names and recruitment dates, I made tentative identifications of a few additional Jewish members of the Landwehr.

For more information on the Austrian Volunteer Formations during the 1809 War, see:

Alfons von Wrede, Geschichte der k. und k. Wehrmacht, 5 Vols., (Vienna: Seidel, 1898–1905), Vol. 1, pp. 117-24.