Jews in the Gym

Judaism, Sports, and Athletics

Leonard J. Greenspoon

• Publisher: Purdue University Press
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781612492407
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Jewish History
• Index: Social Sciences

For some, the connection between Jews and athletics might seem far-fetched. But in fact, as is highlighted by the fourteen chapters in this collection, Jews have been participating in-and thinking about-sports for more than two thousand years.

The articles in this volume scan a wide chronological range: from the Hellenistic period (first century BCE) to the most recent basketball season. The range of athletes covered is equally broad: from participants in Roman-style games to wrestlers, boxers, fencers, baseball players, and basketball stars.

The authors of these essays, many of whom actively participate in athletics themselves, raise a number of intriguing questions, such as: What differing attitudes toward sports have Jews exhibited across periods and cultures? Is it possible to be a "good Jew" and a "great athlete"? In what sports have Jews excelled, and why? How have Jews overcome prejudices on the part of the general populace against a Jewish presence on the field or in the ring? In what ways has Jewish participation in sports aided, or failed to aid, the perception of Jews as "good Germans," "good Hungarians," "good Americans," and so forth?

This volume, which features a number of illustrations (many of them quite rare), is not only accessible to the general reader, but also contains much information of interest to the scholar in Jewish studies, American studies, and sports history.

Cutting the Way into the Nation: Hungarian Jewish Olympians in the Interwar Era

Mihály Kálmán

WAR AND REVOLUTIONS

Hungary lost roughly two-thirds of its territory and population, including nearly half of her Jews, with the Trianon Treaty of 1920.¹ In the ranks of the vanquished Austro-Hungarian Army, the rate of Jews was lower than their share in the population of the monarchy; 300,000 Jews, including 25,000 officers, served in the course of the war. Since many of the Jews of Galicia and northeastern Hungary became refugees, and because Jews were underrepresented in the infantry corps, the rate of Jewish deaths on the battlefield was lower relative to non-Jewish deaths. At the same time, soldiers of Jewish origin featured prominently among decorated veterans.²

Jews also played a prominent role in early postwar Hungary, filling eight of the twenty ministerial positions in Count Mihály Károlyi’s pacifist-democratic government, which was toppled by the Revolutionary Soviet in March 1919. Thirty of the forty-eight People’s Commissars in the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic were Jewish, including Béla Kun, the de facto leader, and Tibor Szamuely, the militant ideologue and orchestrator of the Red Terror.³ If not as markedly as among its leaders and perpetrators, with 7.4% Jews were also overrepresented among the victims of class-based persecution at the hand of Szamuely’s “Lenin Boys.” Beginning with August 1919, officers of Rear Admiral Miklós Horthy’s National Army unleashed a wave of “White Terror.” Often assisted by local residents, the death squads murdered hundreds of people identified as Communists, targeting Jews in particular.⁴

In addition to Jewish involvement in the democratic and Communist regimes, Jews were also present at the cradle of the interwar Hungarian Kingdom. While representatives of Hungarian aristocracy established the Antibolsevista Comité [Anti-Bolshevik Committee] in Vienna, the main power base of anti-Communist officers was Szeged, a large city near the new Romanian-Yugoslavian border.⁵ The Szeged Jewish community warmly supported the government-in-the-making from raising substantial funds to filling high-level bureaucratic positions. On May 7, 1919, Jewish officers in a seventy-twostrong unit of the National Army’s officer corps helped disarm the Communist garrison in Szeged, allowing the counterrevolutionary government of Count Gyula Károlyi to relocate from Arad.⁶

The exact number of Jewish officers involved in the disarming became the subject of an early attempt at questioning the role of Jews in the nascent foundation myths and hagiographies of war and counterrevolution, the yardsticks of battle-worthiness and patriotism. A monograph on the history of the Szeged government published by a Jewish news reporter in 1919 claimed that twenty-two Jews partook in the operation in a unit led by a Jewish officer.⁷ In response, a commander who had organized the disarming reprimanded the author for inflating the number of Jews from fifteen, falsely claiming that they had been led by a Jewish officer, and exaggerating the importance of the victory.⁸ The lower number is confirmed by the Hungarian Jewish Lexicon,⁹ and according to Kálmán Shvoy, himself a participant of the attack and the foremost organizer of the National Army, no Jewish commander was appointed. As Shvoy pointed out, however, the attack indeed “marked a turning point in the military fortune” of the Szeged government.¹⁰

Shvoy made no mention of the Jewish officers’ role in the disarming in his diary, but he no doubt recalled it in 1933, when addressing leading rabbis and hundreds of attendees in the Szeged Jewish cemetery, at the inauguration of the first Jewish war heroes’ memorial, the building of which he had initiated years earlier. Accompanied by a lavish military parade and a variety of Christian leaders, Shvoy spared no compliment to the Jewish community of Szeged, reminding his audience “how many Christians and Jews [had] faced hand in hand the greatest suffering, the greatest bitterness in life: the fear of death.”¹¹ The leaders of the Szeged and Budapest Jewish communities assured Shvoy after the event: “‘the future will justify you’… ‘this statement is bound to receive the warmest welcome from Jews abroad … and benefit the cause of Magyarhood abroad.’”¹² Two weeks later, Shvoy was reprimanded by a superior officer for meddling in politics and discharged after an undue and humiliating process.¹³ Not only did Shvoy not relent in championing peaceful coexistence or in his fight for the rights of Jewish war heroes, but a few years later he helped codify into law the recognition of the patriotic services of another category of Jews who had advanced the Hungarian cause with their weapons: Jewish Olympians.

The violent succession of the war and three regime changes prepared the scene for the interwar debates on Jewish courage, chivalry, and patriotism— discourses that underlay discussions on Jewish Olympians’ achievements. After the exchange on Jewish officers’ role in the Szeged disarming, a momentous press trial emerged around the question of Jewish loyalty as expressed by military service and self-sacrifice. In January 1921, Representative Elek Avarffy claimed in an article that the number of Jewish veterans does not exceed 50,000, of whom only 500 died on the battlefield. Lajos Szabolcsi, editor in chief of the preeminent Jewish newspaper, Egyenlőség [Equality], immediately refuted the claim and announced that he had compiled an archive of 10,000 Jews killed in action. The parties took the case to court, and the trial dragged on until June 1923. While the government initially refused Szabolcsi’s request to publish confessional statistics on war heroes, it did resolve to disclose such data on fraudulent military contractors, commonly believed to have been overwhelmingly Jewish. Finally, war hero statistics were made available and confirmed Szabolcsi’s claim.¹⁴ Egyenlőség won a major battle against excising the memory of Jewish heroes from the ranks of Hungarian brothers-in-arms.

DUELS

Szabolcsi’s Egyenlőség became the leading public forum of Hungarian Jewry under his father, Miksa Szabolcsi, who had revived the journal after its single-issue campaign against the Tiszaeszlár blood libel of 1882-1883; he remained editor in chief until his death in 1915. Egyenlőség was committed to molding Jews into Hungarian patriots of Jewish persuasion; achieving legal reception, it became the main organ fighting antisemitism.¹⁵ Even in peacetime, this fight in many cases went beyond press insults or legal disputes and took a violent form. The Szabolcsis, both father and son, became staunch supporters of defending Jewish honor in duels—real or reenacted.

In 1892, Szabolcsi attempted to prevent a duel between 1917 Minister of Justice Vilmos Vázsonyi, a gifted Jewish lawyer, and Ferenc Mezey, leader of the Neolog National Office, which had issued a statement questioning Vázsonyi’s honor. The editor of Egyenlőség published an open letter to the parties, begging the National Office to revoke the communiqué, lest “the Jewish congregation will become a battlefield, the synagogues dueling halls, the rabbinical schools courts of honor, the cantor will fight a pistol duel with the rabbi.”¹⁶ Although Szabolcsi despised intra-confessional scandals, he came to be an ardent advocate of dueling. After Theodore Herzl declared in 1893 that “a half dozen duels would very much raise the social position of the Jews,”¹⁷ and when Jewish students came under attack at Hungarian universities in 1895, Szabolcsi echoed his words: “The epidemic of Jew-hatred has to be combated by duels[he wrote in Egyenlőség]. Today our Jewish youth will convince the Jew-haters of our right only with the sword…. The extremists among the anti-Semites come from the rural areas. They do not yet know that the Jews have learned well the wielding of the sword.”¹⁸ Szabol...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Editor’s Introduction
• Contributors
• Playing Roman in Jerusalem: Jewish Attitudes toward Sport and Spectacle during the Second Temple Period
• Sports and the Graphic Novel from Diaspora to Diaspora: James Strum’s The Golem’s Mighty Swing and JT Waldman’s Megillat Esther in the Tree of Contexts
• The Jew in the Gym: Judaism, Sports, and Athletics on Film
• Is Life a Game? Athletic Competition as a Metaphor for the Meaning of Life
• The Jewish Athlete of Faith: On the Limits of Sport
• Antisemitism and Sport in Central Europe and the United States c. 1870-1932
• Cutting the Way into the Nation: Hungarian Jewish Olympians in the Interwar Era
• Grappling with Ghosts: Jewish Wrestlers and Antisemitism
• Sporting a Nation: The Origins of Athleticism in Modern Israel
• Gyms and the Academy: Professional and Personal Reflections on Stepping Up to the Scholarly Plate
• Jewish Women in the American Gym: Basketball, Ethnicity, and Gender in the Early Twentieth Century
• From Benny Leonard to Abi Olajuwon: Jews, Muslims, Evangelicals, and the Evolving Religious Challenges of being an American Athlete
• Buster Haywood and the Jews of Black Baseball
• A Global Game: Omri Casspi and the Future of Jewish Ballers