HOW FOOTBALL EXPLAINS THE JEWISH QUESTION

1. HOW FOOTBALL EXPLAINS THE JEWISH QUESTION

2. HAKOAH OF WIEN • Winners of the 1925 Austrian championship (at a time when Austrian football was the gold standard of style and strategy). • A team of Jewish superstar footballers • The team had an Hebrew name (meaning "the strength”) and advertised Judaism on its jersey

3. The idea of a professional Jewish team may seem strange only because few teams survived Hitler. But in the 1920s, Jewish Football Clubs had been founded all over Europe in Budapest, Berlin, Prague, Linz and Innsbruck. • Jewish teams were soaked in Jewish, not Hungarian or Austrian or German nationalism, literally wearing Zionism on their sleeves and shirts. • They dressed with blue and white uniforms, they boasted Hebrew names with nationalistic overtones like Hagibor (‘The Hero’), Bar Kochba (after the leader of the second revolt against the Romans) and Hakoah (‘The Strenght’)

4. ZIONISM • is a form of nationalism of Jews and Jewish culture that supports a Jewish nation state in territory defined as the Land of Israel. • Zionism supports Jews upholding their Jewish identity and opposes the assimilation of Jews into other societies and has advocated the return of Jews to Israel as a means for Jews to be liberated from anti-Semitic discrimination, exclusion, and persecution that has occurred in other societies.

5. These clubs were the products of a political doctrine: an entire movement of Jews believed that football and sport in general, could liberate them from the violence and tyranny of anti-Semitism. • MAX NORDAU: was one of the founder of the Zionism and in particular, devised a doctrine called "Muscular Judaism" (German: Muskeljudentum). Nordau argued that the victims of anti-Semitism suffered from a condition called Judendot (Jewish distress). Life in the ghettos had affected them with effemminacy. • “In the narrow Jewish streets our poor limns forgot how to move joyfully; out of fear of constant persecution our voices have become whispers” [M. Nordau]

6. TO BEAT BACK ANTI-SEMITISM AND ERADICATE JUDENDOT, JEWS NEEDED TO REINVENT THEIR POLITICS AND THEIR BODIES: THE CURE WAS MUSKELJUDENTUM. • Jews should invest in creating gymnasia and athletic fields as the sport “will straighten us in body and character”. • Nordau’s words trickled down to the leaders of Central Europe’s Jewish community. Of the fifty two Olympic medals captured by Austria between 1896 and 1936, eighteen had been won by Jews (eleven time more the proportion of Jewish population) • During the 1910s and 1920s (where still the Austro-Hungarian empire was alive) a great portion of Hungarian national team consisted of Jews.

7. Indeed , Zionism and football was not an odd marriage. Other revolutionary movements, of the left or the right, understood the political leverage to be gained from football (ESCAPE TO VICTORY). Socialist youth clubs sponsored teams, and aspiring fascists tried to take control of popular clubs. In Vienna a small circle of Zionist intellectual understood the potential of the game. Among them , cabaret librettistFritz "Beda" Löhner and dentist Ignaz Herman Körner, founded theHakoah athletic in the spirit of Nordau. The name of the club was meant to project strength. The team was meant to burst stereotypes but in one aspect it confirmed them…..

8. …before any other team in the world Hakoah embraced the market and paid its own players (and paid them very well, about three times the salary of an average worker). • The high pay and the ideological mission helped Hakoah to assemble an all star team of Jewish players recruited from Austria and Hungary; and he flew over the best “gentiles” to coach them. • But there was a danger inherent in the Hakoah concept. Viennese anti-Semites generally did not need a pretext to shout insults or pick fights, but Hakoah gave them a perfect one. Common shouts included Drecskjude (dirty Jew) and Jewish Pig.

9. However, Hakoah was also a wresting and boxing club and they plucked a group of bodyguards to protect players and fans. Among them Mickey Herschel, one of the most famous wrestler of the 1920s. Herschel and his corps evolved into a community security force that sometimes stood outside synagogues and neighborhoods. • The newspaper accounts of the period mention of the enthusiastic Jewish supporters and the grit of the players.

10. ALEXANDER FABIAN • 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.

11. In a way, Hakoah achieved just what its founders had hoped for: a victorious team trailed by a bandwagon of Jews. • Assimilated Jews who didn’t like to acknowledge or flaunt their identity in front of gentiles began filling Hakoah’s 18,000-seat stadium in Vienna’s second district. • As Edmund Schechter, an American diplomat, recounted in a memoir of his Viennese youth, “Each Hakoah victory become another proof that the period of Jewish inferiority in physical activities had come to an end.”

12. Hakoah was the first team to exploit their successes with a marketing plan. In the off season, Hakoah toured the world, the same way that Manchester United now do. • nstead of selling jerseys, however, Hakoah sold Zionism. Preparing for visits, Hakoah would send ahead promoters to generate buzz for Muskeljudentum and distribute tickets to companies stocked with Jewish employees. They lured overwhelming crowds to watch this curiosity. • Against the London outfit West Ham United, the Jews ran up a 5–1 victory. Before Hakoah, no continental team had beaten an English club on English soil, the same soil on which the game had been created

13. On the team’s 1925 trip, Hakoah players caught a glimpse of New York City, a metropolis seemingly uninfected by European anti-Semitism. It replaced Jerusalem as their Zion, and, over the next year, they immigrated there en masse. • Deprived of nine of its best players, Hakoah attempted resurrection but only achieved mediocrity. • For the rest of its brief life, it struggled to hold down a place in the top division of Austrian football, occasionally plummeting out of it. • And then, its players struggled against death. With the 1938 Anschluss and German rule of the nation, the Austrian league shut down Hakoah, nullified the results of any games played against Hakoah, and it handed over the club’s stadium to the Nazis.

14. TOTTENHAM HOTSPURS • Anti-Semitism is nowadays something not socially acceptable and strange. But sometimes it is revived as pointed out by the attitude towards a team in North London: Tottenham. • Tottenham fans refer to themselves as Yids or Yiddoes. But although the names have no positive connotations, Tottenham fans actually apply the moniker to themselves in a complimentary and prideful way. When a Tottenham player is to be celebrated the fans chant him as “Yiddo, Yiddo”. • To rally their club at moments of difficulty they sing”Who let the Yiddos out”.

15. CHIM-CHIMINEE, CHIM-CHIMINEE CHIM-CHIM CHUROO JURGEN WAS A GERMAN BUT NOW HE IS A JEW

16. HISTORY • While lots of London neighborhoods had Jews , the Stamford Hill, near the Tottenham grounds had lots of Hasidic Jews, black-clad, pre modern and unassimilated, the kind that stick out. • The fans that persecuted Tottenham for its neighborhood Jews included almost every club in the league, but mostly Chelsea (their fans sing along these lines “Gas a Jew, Jew, Jew, put him in the oven and cook him through”)