HOW FOOTBALL EXPLAINS THE
JEWISH QUESTION
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
• 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’)
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.
• 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]
• 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 AustroHungarian empire was alive) a great portion of
Hungarian national team consisted of Jews.
• 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 librettist
Fritz "Beda" Löhner and dentist Ignaz Herman Körner,
founded the Hakoah 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…..
• …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.
• 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.
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.
• 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.”
• 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
• 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.
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”.
CHIM-CHIMINEE, CHIM-CHIMINEE
CHIM-CHIM CHUROO
JURGEN WAS A GERMAN
BUT NOW HE IS A JEW
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”)