March/April 2011

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Franklin Foer ’96 was the editor of The New Republic from 2006–10. Currently TNR’s editor-at-large, he is working on a book about the birth of American liberalism — partly inspired, he says, by a long-ago seminar with the Allan Nevins Professor of American History and Provost Emeritus Alan Brinkley.

 Foer’s previous effort, How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization (HarperCollins, reissued last year) became a national bestseller and was named one of the “Five Most Influential Books of the Decade” by Sports Illustrated. “I suck at soccer,” Foer announced cheerfully in that book’s first sentence. But despite his childhood failures on the field, he grew to love the world’s most popular sport. As he followed soccer, Foer began to think of it as a political phenomenon, perhaps even a bellwether of international change. “From the perspective of my couch,” he remarks in his prologue, “the game seemed much further along in the process of globalization than any other economy on the planet.”

Franklin Foer ’96 PHOTO: TAISIE BERKELYSeizing on this thesis, Foer took an eight-month leave from TNR to travel the globe. He interviewed Serbian soccer fans (the Ultra Bad Boys) in Belgrade. He marveled at the workers’-collective idealism of FC Barcelona, known in the sporting press as Barca, a Spanish club with its own museum (complete with paintings by Dalí and Miró). He looked at the ways in which a nation’s political corruption is mirrored on its soccer fields, and he studied — in countries from Iran to Brazil — the conflicts between tribalism (soccer’s usual form of loyalty) and larger forms of identity.

“The game has all sorts of political subtexts … ” Foer told TheAtlantic.com in an interview. And that seems to be what he likes about it. “Soccer matches usually signify a clash of religions, classes and castes. To me, that’s what makes the game so thrilling to watch. There’s always some elevated stake to the game.”

In the following excerpt from a chapter called “How Soccer Explains the Jewish Question,” Foer examines the way that one early soccer club’s destiny was shaped by the forces of European anti-Semitism.

Rose Kernochan ’82 Barnard

“Do you want something to read?”
“Yes, do you have something really light?”
“How about this short leaflet: Famous Jewish Sports Legends.”

—The movie Airplane!, 1980

I had grown up thinking that great Jewish athletes come around about once in a decade, if the gene pool gets lucky. There was the Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Sandy Koufax in the sixties; the swimmer Mark Spitz in the seventies; and then many fallow years. At home, my father and I would imagine that various athletes were quietly Jewish, like the Marrano survivors of the Spanish Inquisition. My father was especially adamant that Sid Bream, a lanky, energetic first baseman with the Atlanta Braves, was a person of the book. And, to be fair, the name, both first and last, made him a plausible member. But in retrospect, there were biographical details that probably should have negated our analysis. Sid Bream liked to talk about his love of hunting, and he drove a pickup truck. Yes, he wore a Mark Spitz moustache, but that was twenty years after its vogue within our community. The simple truth was that we were too apprehensive to go looking for Bream’s real ethnicity.

Before Bream captured the imagination of our household, I had stumbled across the soccer club Hakoah of Vienna, winners of the 1925 Austrian championship. Hakoah’s great triumph came at a time when Austrian soccer represented the world’s gold standard of style and strategy. Although they had only a few scarce encounters with the other great teams of the era, Hakoah usually triumphed in these matches. Based on all the evidence we have, the Jewish all-stars were, for a short spell, one of the best teams on the planet.

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 [’39] 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 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-effacing 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 coffee 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 scruffy, 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 throughout metropolitan Europe, in Budapest, Berlin, Prague, Innsbruck, and Linz.

Jewish teams cloaked themselves in Jewish, not Hungarian or Austrian or German, nationalism, literally 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 suffered from their own disease, a condition he called Judendot, or Jewish distress. Life in the dirty ghetto had afflicted the Jews with effeminacy 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 restore to the flabby Jewish body its lost tone, to make it vigorous and strong, nimble and powerful.” Jews, he urged in articles and lectures, should invest in creating gymnasia and athletic fields, because sport “will straighten us in body and character.”

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, effeminate 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 discombobulating 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.

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 different 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 necessary to go back and tell the story of Vienna’s Hakoah.

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 potential 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 Nordauesque 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.

Hakoah, which translates from Hebrew as “the strength,” was among the world’s best soccer clubs in the 1920s. There was a danger inherent in the Hakoah concept. 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 Drecksjude (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 impossible in a world before protein shakes and anabolic 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 bandwagon of Jews. The same Jewish elites who dismissed the game as the province of working-class ruffians began to bankroll Hakoah, believing that the respect of gentiles it acquired might rub off on them. 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. They told each other tales of how a gentile — who wanted Hakoah to beat a rival of his own club — shouted “Go Mr. Jew,” a massively respectful cheer relative to the rest. 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.”

Just as they built their squad using the methods of modern management, Hakoah exploited their successes with a marketing plan that could have been scripted by a Wharton MBA. In the off season, Hakoah toured the world, the same way that Manchester United now builds its brand with jaunts to the Far East and America. Instead 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. In New York, Hakoah pulled 46,000 fans into the Polo Grounds. Lithuanian Jews bicycled through the night to see the club. Such audiences lifted Hakoah’s game to levels far above its natural talent. Against the London outfit West Ham United, the Jews ran up a 5–1 victory. Naysayers rightly point to the West Ham lineup on that day. And it’s true, the Hammers didn’t take the traveling Jews very seriously, playing a mostly reserve squad. Nevertheless, the achievement stands: Before Hakoah, no continental team had beaten an English club on English soil, the same soil on which the game had been created.

There was, however, an unintended consequence of this success. 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.

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