Hakoah first came to my attention in a book that I found rummaging through my uncle’s old bedroom, in my grandparents’ house: Great Jewish Sports Legends. It had a frayed blue spine that could be lifted to reveal the naked binding. Sepia photos filled its pages. When this volume came into my possession at age eight, it quickly became a personal favorite. Because it had been written in the early 1950s, it wasn’t so far removed from the mid-century American renaissance of Jewish athletes, which consisted of giant figures such as the Chicago Bears’ quarterback Sid Luckman and the Detroit Tigers’
first baseman Hank Greenberg. Like so much of Jewish life at that moment, the book was schizophrenic about its ethnic identity. As I remember the book, it was both HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE JEWISH QUESTION
a paean to Jewish achievement and to assimilation, but mostly to assimilation. There was no Star of David on the title page and no anecdotes about Greenberg skipping a crucial season-end game to attend Yom Kippur services. That’s why Hakoah sprung at me from the pages. There was nothing self-e¤acing about the Jewishness of the Hakoah players. The team had a Hebrew name and advertised its Judaism on its jersey.
From the start, in other words, Hakoah had seemed chimerical to me. My search for the team made it even more so. I traveled to Vienna with promises of help from academics and community leaders. From them, I began to compile the names of Viennese Jews in their eighties and nineties who might have some memory of the championship season. Since 1940, Viennese Jewry has dwindled from approximately 200,000 to 7,000.
Some of these remaining few include immigrants from the old Soviet bloc and a smattering of Israelis who have moved to town for business. The bulk consists of aging natives. Many of them have children in the U.S.
and even spent years abroad themselves. But they’ve come back to the city of their youth for their last days so they can live a familiar lifestyle. Because so many Austrians enthusiastically welcomed the Nazis, they often apologize for continuing to reside in Vienna. A retired professor of economics told me in a perfect American accent, “What can I do? I know the Austrians are the worst. Maybe they would do it all over again. But I have interests here and friends. It’s comfortable.”
These elderly Jews wanted badly to talk about the past, about politics and their love of the United States, to buy me a meal at a Chinese restaurant and a pastry at a co¤ee house. Unfortunately, for my purposes, these conversations didn’t have anything remotely to do with soccer. None of them had played the game. Their parents considered it too scru¤y, violent, and proletarian for their children. Viennese Jews were among the most bourgeois of the bourgeoisie. And even these old Jews were too young to remember Hakoah’s glory years during the twenties. “Maybe there’s someone in New York you could talk to,” they told me. I had gone all the way around the world only to be told that the answers to my queries might be found in the smoked-fish line at Zabar’s on Broadway. Sadly, in New York and Florida, where I had more names to contact, I didn’t make much more headway. I couldn’t. Anyone who might remember Hakoah at its best is too superannuated to remember, or no longer around. As far as I can tell, the historical memory of the club now resides with a gentile Swedish sportswriter from the town of Hässelby called Gunnar Persson who has obsessively tracked every shred of evidence vaguely related to the club.
With his help, I began to cobble together the story of the wonder Jews.
Although it seems so strange now, the idea of a professional Jewish soccer club, it is only strange because so few of the Jewish soccer clubs survived Hitler. But, in the 1920s, Jewish soccer clubs had sprouted through-out metropolitan Europe, in Budapest, Berlin, Prague, Innsbruck, and Linz.
Jewish teams cloaked themselves in Jewish, not Hungarian or Austrian or German, nationalism, literally HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE JEWISH QUESTION
wearing their Zionism on their sleeves and shirts.
Decades before Adolf Eichmann forced them to don the yellow star, some of these clubs played with King David’s logo stitched onto the breasts of their jerseys. They swathed themselves in blue-and-white uniforms, the colors of Israel. Their unabashedly Hebrew names, Hagibor (“The Hero”), Bar Kochba (after the leader of a second-century revolt against the Romans), and Hakoah (“The Strength”), had unmistakably nationalist overtones.
If all this seemed exceptionally political, it was because these clubs were the products of a political doctrine. An entire movement of Jews believed that soccer, and sport more generally, would liberate them from the violence and tyranny of anti-Semitism. The polemicist Max Nordau, one of the founding fathers of turn-of-the-century Zionism, created a doctrine called Muskeljudentum, or muscular Judaism. Nordau argued that the victims of anti-Semitism su¤ered from their own disease, a condition he called Judendot, or Jewish distress.
Life in the dirty ghetto had aºicted the Jews with e¤emi-nacy and nervousness. “In the narrow Jewish streets,” he wrote, “our poor limbs forgot how to move joyfully; in the gloom of sunless houses our eyes became accustomed to nervous blinking; out of fear of constant persecution the timbre of our voices was extinguished to an anxious whisper.” To beat back anti-Semitism and eradicate Judendot, Jews didn’t merely need to reinvent their body politic. They needed to reinvent their bodies. He prescribed Muskeljudentum as a cure for this malady. He wrote, “We want to
