The Beauty, the Beasts, and Birobidjan

Daphne Anson
16 December '10

(Daphne Anson with another amazing piece. Y.)

General Sir John Monash (1865-1931), the son of German-born parents and a civil engineer by profession, commanded Australia’s Expeditionary Forces during the First World War. The grandson of a well-known printer/publisher in Krotoszyn, Baer Loebel Monasch, and nephew by marriage to the great historian Heinrich Graetz, he was not a religious Jew – he famously joked that on Yom Kippur he fasted from breakfast until lunch – but he was a proud one, accepting the honorary presidency of the Australian Zionist Federation when the latter was formed in 1927.

So esteemed was he by his fellow-countrymen and women that during the Great Depression, when there was widespread anxiety over the leftist direction of New South Wales Premier Jack Lang and other politicians, Monash was approached to, in effect lead, a rightwing coup, and his state funeral cortège in 1931 (some months after this photo was taken, showing him at the annual Anzac Day parade) attracted the densest crowds – about 250,000 people – seen in Australia up to that time. He’s still commemorated in a variety of ways, with his name that of a university in his native Melbourne and his face on the $A100 banknote. There’s little doubt that his very presence on the national scene – in fact, his consensual status among his contemporaries as the greatest living Australian – helped to keep antisemitism disreputable and marginal.

(Read full "The Beauty, the Beasts, and Birobidjan")

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