The Jewish Battalions and Their Photographers

The collection of photographs curated by Guy Raz, and the interpretive essay that introduces it, concerns the visual documentation of the Jewish Battlaions—collectively known as the Jewish Legion—operating in the framework of the British Army in World War I. This representation is a central chapter in the development of a sub-genre of photography that can be called “the portrait of the Jewish soldier in the Land of Israel.” Focusing on the work of three photographers—Yaacov Ben Dov, Tzadok Basan, and Avraham Suskin—Raz compares the different visual strategies developed by these photographers in order to present the new Jewish body, the national landscape and military culture. He argues that the question of “who is a Jewish soldier” is intertwined here with an equally important question: “who is a Jewish photographer.”