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Maccabiah’s Muscle Jews:

The Games Make Zionism Fun, Reminding US That We Are Not Just a Religion but a People

by Gil Troy

July 17, 2009, Jerusalem Post Magazine: Upfront, p. 4



POP quiz: when is the last time anyone you know used the words “Zionism” and “fun” in the same sentence? Unfortunately, too many people today approach Zionism, which was supposed to solve “the Jewish problem” in Europe as the big Jewish problem today. This week Israel is hosting the18th Maccabiah, the world’s third largest sporting event – after the Olympics and the World University Games. As 5300 Jewish athletes from 65 countries join 2000 Israeli athletes, competing in dozens of sports, from cycling to swimming, from soccer to squash, they are making Zionism fun, as it should be.



The Maccabiah, which now meets every four years, traces its origins to 1912. That year’s Stockholm Olympics inspired fifteen-year-old Yosef Yekutieli to dream of a Jewish Olympics in Israel. Twenty years later in 1932, 390 Jewish athletes from 18 countries, including Syria and Egypt, inaugurated the First Maccabiah at a new stadium in northern Tel Aviv, completed just before the opening ceremonies. Under British rule, Palestine was a primitive backwater, lacking even a competitive swimming pool. The Maccabiah occurred again in 1935. The third was delayed fifteen years until 1950, after the Holocaust’s horrors, but, happily, in a new state of Israel.



To understand the Maccabiah’s meaning, we must remember the origins of the Zionist movement in the late 1890s and early 1900s. One of Theodor Herzl’s colleagues, the essayist and physician, Dr. Max Nordau, called for a renewed “Muskeljudentum,” a “Jewry of muscles.” Millennia of exile and oppression had made Jews the world’s weaklings. Jews as a people were persecuted. Individual Jews, Nordau mourned, were “haggard and unable to defend ourselves in the narrow alleyways of the ghetto.”



Nordau proclaimed: “We will develop wide chests, strong arms and legs, a brave look. We will be warriors. But our recovery to health is not only through the body, but also in the spirit, for as Hebrews will attain more achievements in sport, so will our self-confidence improve. Hebrew sports clubs go forward and bloom.” These sports clubs sprouted into the Maccabiah movement.



IN REBUILDING the Jewish body and spirit, Nordau and other early Zionists reclaimed Jewish history. For too long, rabbis had emphasized the scholars of the past and ignored the warriors. Nordau helped revive Hanukkah, making this minor festival of lights a highlight of the Jewish year. The heroes, of course, were the Maccabees, the rebelling warriors from the second century B.C.E. who hit the Greeks hard like hammers.



Another inspiration was Bar Kochba, the Jewish warrior who fought valiantly against the Romans, from 132 to 136 C.E., three hundred years after the Maccabees redeemed the Temple. Bar Kochba’s partnership with the failed revolt’s other great hero, Rabbi Akiva, illustrated the Zionist message that Jews should not have to choose between the body and the mind, between physical and spiritual power. Yosef Yekutieli scheduled the first Maccabiah for 1932, the Bar Kochba revolt’s 1800th anniversary.



The games’ slogan and setting broadcast an even deeper Zionist message. The games’ website proclaims “the Maccabiah of Jewish Nationhood!” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the athletes at the majestic opening ceremonies Monday night: “You represent 65 different countries, but above all, you represent one united nation, Am Yisrael, the nation of Israel,” meaning the Jewish people.



The Maccabiah games, assembling thousands of Jews from all over the world, remind us that we are a people, a nation, not just a religion. Zionism is the movement of Jewish national liberation, of Jewish nationalism. As believing and non-believing Jews compete, a common theology does not unite them necessarily. Their solidarity stems from a sense of peoplehood, a sense of belonging to the Jewish nation, shaped by a common past, enjoying common ties in the present, and sharing a common future, no matter where they live.



This experience the athletes share in Israel will provide an essential glue that will bond them. The Maccabiah Games could have followed the Olympic analogy, wandering from city to city. But the logic of the Maccabiah, the logic of Zionism, makes Israel, the center of the Jewish people, the only appropriate site. The games are to repudiate the phenomenon of the “wandering Jew” as much as the stereotype of the browbeaten Jew. And that is why the most appropriate message in greeting the participants to the 18th Maccabiah – as with all Jewish visitors to Israel – is “welcome home.”



The opening ceremonies’ pageantry illustrated that idea vividly. Amid a rainbow of flags from six continents, in a sea of colorfully-glad and excited Jewish athletes, the blue-and-white of Israel, the one sovereign Jewish state, dominated. This brought alive the cultural Zionist Ahad Ha’am’s classic metaphor, that the Jewish people are a wheel, with Israel at the center connecting to all Diaspora communities via various spokes.



TRAGICALLY, THE physicality most associated with Israel today is the blood of the warrior not the sweat of the athlete. The first national Jewish army established since Bar Kochba worked hard to establish the state and defend it. But reducing the Zionist revolution to a process of producing soldiers instead of students is a distortion. The return to the land entailed working with our hands and our minds, changing our body images along with our self-images and national image.



Essential to that transformation was stopping to view Jewish history and Jewish life as a continuous tragedy. Zionism sought to return Jews to history, to make Jews normal. That return included bringing fun back into Jewish life. Fun is not always frivolous, just like sports – especially at the Maccabiah’s competitive level -- is not always fun. But as the joyous opening ceremonies on July 13 indicated, the smiles on the faces of thousands of athletes and spectators will be genuine, historic, and Zionist.



And perhaps, next time Zionism arises in conversation, the topic will not just elicit the usual furrowed brows and hunched shoulders of the pro-Israel crowd’s worrying warriors – or the disproportionate disdain of the politically correct. For the Zionist revolution to be complete, for us to fulfill the spirit of the Maccabiah Games, our muscular Jews should be happy Jews. We all should be delighted that we live in this period of history, when we can gather from all over the world in peace and friendship to celebrate Israel, to celebrate sport, to celebrate Jewish nationhood, and to celebrate Zionism.



Gil Troy is Professor of History at McGill University. He is the author of Why I Am a Zionist: Israel, Jewish Identity and the Challenges of Today. His latest book Leading from the Center: Why Moderates Make the Best Presidents, was recently published by Basic Books. He splits his time between Jerusalem and Montreal.
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