Alan,
No, I have no idea of how observant he may have been; such information just hasn't come down. On the one hand, for a Jewish lad from the East End to enlist in the Navy and then the Army was very unusual and suggests a distinct level of detachment from a religious life - or perhaps, one may speculate, a rebellion from an over-orthodox one? - but he clearly retained his Jewish identity. He was buried in a Jewish cemetery and the family here certainly retains its Jewish identity, though I think most of its members, myself included, are very assimilated and not at all observant.
I retain a pride in my Jewish ancestry, though, and have recently identified a nephew of a 6xgreat grandfather on my father's side who was burned by the Inquisition in Spain. Another on that side - a 3xgreat uncle- was the renowned pugilist and folk hero for the London poor, Daniel Mendoza, three of whose children were transported to Australia in the 1830s; I discovered quite recently that I have more 1st cousins four times removed on that side of the family out there than I ever dreamed of.
As a possible parallel, and qualifier, to your question, I have a big project to find the graves of veterans of the American Civil War in the mainland UK (there is a similar one in Australia and NZ). Of three Jewish veterans I have found here, one was a Henry Magnus, who defied his orthodox parents who had forbidden him to go and fight as he would not be able to observe full religious ritual in the army. He disobeyed, went to fight, and they never spoke to him again. When he returned to England, he changed his name to McGuinness, and died in Nottingham. Another had a battlefield conversion and became a fanatical Christian. The third was an East London butcher and kept up Jewish tradition; he is buried in a Jewish cemetery and, curiously, my father "courted" one of his granddaughters before meeting my mother and marrying her. So, even among that sample of three military Jews, there is no consistency in how they approached their religion.
Michael
