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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;GinoLR, post: 8367249, member: 128351&quot;]I did not know Jews were not allowed, or could not become officers, in the Prussian army in the 1810s. Probably your ancestor Gerson Abel served as a cavalryman but in the rank and file. I now understand better what a Lithuanian rabbi meant c. 1900 when he said about the Dreyfus Affair in France: &quot;A country that is torn over the fate of a little Jewish captain is a country where we should settle down right away.&quot;</p><p><br /></p><p>One day, when I retire, I will do some research about a group of Palestinian officers in Napoleon&#039;s army. This is not my speciality or my personal family history but I am interested in the Middle-East and these people lived and are buried in Fontainebleau and Melun, next to where I live. There were a number of them: Jean Renno (from Acre), Abdalla d&#039;Asbonne (Hazbun, a well-known family of Bethlehem) and Soliman Salamé (both from Bethlehem), Jacob and Daoud Habaybi (from Shefa &#039;Amr, an Arab-Israeli town near Haifa), many others, who enlisted in 1798 in the French army, followed its repatriation in 1801 and served in the Mamelukes squadron of the Guard from 1801 to 1814 or 1815. Some re-enlisted in 1830 as interpreters for the Algiers expedition. Like for your ancestor (well, the brother of your ancestor), there are still a lot of available documents about them that have been insufficiently exploited by Ian Coller, <i>Arab France. Islam and the Making of Modern Europe, 1798-1831</i> (2010) (for example, Islam had little to do with these people, at least those serving in the military, because nearly all of them were Christian).[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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