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  • Der Veränderbare Körper: Jüdische Turner, Männlichkeit und das Wiedergewinnen von Geschichte in Deutschland um 1900
  • Benjamin M. Baader
Der Veränderbare Körper: Jüdische Turner, Männlichkeit und das Wiedergewinnen von Geschichte in Deutschland um 1900, by Daniel Wildmann. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009. 329 pp. €64.00.

With this superb study, Daniel Wildmann has made two significant contributions. He provides us with a comprehensive history of the national-Jewish gymnastics movement that operated in Germany and in parts of Eastern Europe and the Ottoman Empire, in the last years of the nineteenth and the first decades of the twentieth century. And Wildmann breaks new ground in Jewish gender history, as he successfully explores Jewish masculinity in its doubly relational setting, at the intersection of gender difference and Jewish difference. [End Page 173]

As he lays out in the first of three sections of his book, the German national-Jewish gymnasts comprised a relatively small segment of middle-class Jewry in Germany, never much more than 4500 often young, active and some 3000 passive members in some thirty clubs, at the movement's height. Much greater numbers of Jewish men and women practiced gymnastics in non-Jewish German clubs, and others founded Jewish gymnastics associations that did not define themselves as national-Jewish. Yet through its newspaper (on which Wildmann relies heavily), other publications, gymnastics displays, and its association with the Zionist movement, the national-Jewish gymnastic movement appears to have gained a certain visibility and may have had some impact beyond the limited scope of its membership. Cooperating—though for partially tactical reasons not formally associated—with Zionist organizations, the national-Jewish gymnasts eschewed Jewish territorial claims and abstained from explicit political engagement. For them, a "national-Jewish" program meant primarily cultivating Jewish collectiveness and fostering a Jewish national consciousness, which could be expressed and promoted by gymnastics and was in harmony with German citizenship.

In the second section of his study, Wildmann reports in detail on the bodily renaissance that the national-Jewish gymnastic movement envisioned for European Jewry. In the publications of the movement, the Zionist Max Nordau as well as various medical experts expounded on the alleged physical and psychological degeneration of Jews, caused by centuries of persecution. The physicians asserted that an exercise regime such as gymnastics could help restore the Jews' health along with their original and inherent Semitic beauty.

Yet the leaders of the national-Jewish movement by no means promoted a crude muscle Judaism. They rather took their cues from the German culture of bourgeois aesthetics that extolled the ancient Greek ideal of the harmonious formation of the body and the mind. Thus, postcards of the national-Jewish gymnastic movement showed images of symmetrically arranged groups of gymnasts whose beautiful bodies harmoniously supported each other and together formed a self-sustaining, well-balanced collective (of Jews).

Wildmann qualifies this finding in regard to the German leadership's conceptions of the role of gymnastics for their East European contemporaries. German gymnasts recommended a somewhat more muscular and martial ideal of Jewish masculinity for the Jewish men of Eastern Europe, who were believed to need courage in the face of physical attacks and who had to learn to defend themselves and their communities. In fact, the membership of national-Jewish gymnastic clubs that established themselves in Poland and Galicia was socially more diverse than its German, mostly middle-class counterpart and also included larger numbers of Orthodox Jews. Likewise, German clubs [End Page 174] were able to attract immigrants from Eastern Europe, and in their publications led debates about how appropriate notions of German-Jewish cultural superiority toward their supposedly more authentically Jewish Eastern contemporaries were.

In the third section of the study, Wildmann widens the scope of his investigation by introducing us to the women's squads of the national-Jewish gymnastics movement, who pioneered in defying nineteenth-century standards of modesty. While male leaders certainly subscribed to contemporary ideas of biologically grounded sexual difference and perceived of women primarily in their maternal and domestic functions, the leaders' concern for the health of the Jewish family opened the door to controversial practices, such as women performing...

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