Muscular Judaism wasn’t an egghead’s pipe dream.
Nordau’s high-toned words trickled down to the leaders of Central Europe’s Jewish communities. Of the fifty-two Olympic medals captured by Austria between 1896
and 1936, eighteen had been won by Jews—eleven times more than they would have won if they had performed proportional to their population. And while much of the achievement came in individual events, especially fencing and swimming, Jews thrived in soccer, too. During the 1910s and 1920s, a healthy portion of the Hungarian national soccer team consisted of Jews. For a brief moment, Jewish sporting success mimicked Jewish intellectual achievement.
There is something creepy about Max Nordau’s description of the sickly, e¤eminate Jewish body. And the creepiness lies in its similarities to the anti-Semitic caricature. Perhaps it’s not a coincidence. Zionism and modern European anti-Semitism dripped out of the same fin-de-siècle intellectual spout. Both movements were born at the turn of the last century, in the midst of another wave of massive globalization and discombob-ulating social change, when the European intelligentsia reacted strongly against the values of the enlightenment. They embraced a scientific concept of race, an almost homoerotic obsession with perfecting the body, and a romantic idea of the motherland. Neither placed any emphasis on the universal brotherhood of man, the ideal of the French Revolution. HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE JEWISH QUESTION
But that counter-enlightenment phase passed long ago, defeated in war and intellectually discredited. The last fifty years of European politics has run hard in the opposite direction, a return to the celebration of reason and universalism. Certainly, that’s the theory behind the European Union, which assumes that conflicts can be avoided with dialogue and that commonality of interest can transcend even the deepest enmity.
This liberalization of thinking hasn’t purged anti-Semitism from the European system. By most counts, continental anti-Semitism is as pervasive as it has ever been in the postwar era, or even more so. It certainly exists within European soccer. But that doesn’t mean that European anti-Semitism is the same now as before the war. It’s an entirely di¤erent beast, one not nearly as likely to kill, that has been made less pernicious by globalization’s transformation of Europe. Thanks to the immigration of Africans and Asians, Jews have been replaced as the primary objects of European hate. These changes can be seen in microcosm in the history of Jewish soccer. But before explaining the present, it is nec-essary to go back and tell the story of Vienna’s Hakoah.
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At the beginning of the last century, revolutionary movements, of the left and the right, understood the political mileage to be gained from soccer. Socialist youth clubs sponsored teams, and aspiring fascists tried to hitch themselves to popular clubs. In Vienna, a small circle of Zionist intellectuals saw the same poten-tial in the game. This group included a dentist, a lawyer, and Fritz Beda-Löhrner, the cabaret librettist who wrote “Yes, We Have No Bananas.” They, too, wanted the game to propagandize on behalf of their movement.
In 1909, this group created the Hakoah athletic club in the spirit of Max Nordau. Its name translates from Hebrew as strength, and that was the Nor-dauesque point of the club: to project strength. The team was meant to burst stereotypes, but in one important respect it confirmed them. Before any other club in the world, Hakoah thoroughly embraced the marketplace. It paid its players and paid them well—about three times the salary of the average worker. These higher wages, along with the ideological mission, helped Hakoah assemble an all-star team of Jewish players recruited from across Austria and Hungary.
While the club only fielded Jewish players, it brought in the best gentiles to coach them, including Englishmen who instilled the latest in strategy.
There was a danger inherent in the Hakoah con-
cept. Viennese anti-Semites generally didn’t need a pretext to shout bile or pick fights, but Hakoah gave them a perfect one. Common shouts from opposing fans included Drecskjude (dirty Jew) and the oxymoronic Judensau (Jewish pig). To give their fans some confidence that they could escape this environment alive, Hakoah plucked a corps of bodyguards from the wrestling and boxing clubs that it also ran. The most iconic Jewish self-defender was the wrestler Mickey Herschel. In photos, he looks like a Charles Atlas character, in a bikini brief with a musculature that seems HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE JEWISH QUESTION
impossible in a world before protein shakes and ana-bolic steroids. Herschel and his corps evolved into a community security force that sometimes stood outside synagogues and neighborhoods, casting appropriately goonish glances at prospective pogrom participants.
From the newspaper accounts of the period, it’s not at all clear that the Jewish team possessed superior talent. But the clippings do make mention of the enthusiastic Jewish supporters and the grit of the players. The grittiest performance of them all came at the greatest moment in Hakoah history. In the third to last game of the 1924–25 season, an opposing player barreled into Hakoah’s Hungarian-born goalkeeper Alexander Fabian as he handled the ball. Fabian toppled onto his arm, injuring it so badly that he could no longer plausibly continue in goal. This was not an easily remediable problem. The rules of the day precluded substitutions in any circumstance. So Fabian returned to the game with his arm in a sling and swapped positions with a teammate, moving up into attack on the outside right.
Seven minutes after the calamitous injury, Hakoah blitzed forward on a counterattack. A player called Erno Schwarz landed the ball at Fabian’s feet. With nine minutes remaining in the game, Fabian scored the goal that won the game and clinched Hakoah’s championship.
In a way, Hakoah achieved just what its founders had hoped for: A victorious team trailed by a band-wagon of Jews. The same Jewish elites who dismissed the
