Muscular Judaism: The Jewish Body and the Politics of Regeneration (review)

German studies in the United States are reaching a certain maturity as the field implodes. The relative decline in numbers of students studying German, being taught German, and using German (according to the 2006 MLA evaluation of enrollment) as opposed to the growth of non-European languages seems to be matched by a growing sophistication in the scholarly work of the best of the younger scholars in the field. Their work spans not only the traditional literary sphere but also is suddenly of interest to scholars (and general readers) across the humanities and social sciences. Todd Presner’s second book (as well as his first: Mobile Modernity: Germans, Jews, and Trains, Columbia UP, 2007 [ed. note: see review in Monatshefte 99.4, 590–91]) is an indication of this extraordinary leap of scholarship.

Muscular Judaism is a study of the development of a culture of masculinity among European Jewry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. An answer to the work of Daniel Boyarin, it examines the development of a culture of the body as part of the rise of Zionism in the context of theories of regeneration. Solidly located at the intersection of cultural and intellectual history, this major work by a Germanist shows how very necessary it is to locate cultural artifacts (such as the writings of Martin Buber or the art of E.M. Lilien) in the debates of their times. The “healthy” body, as Mitchell Hart has shown in his recent book The Healthy Jew: The Symbiosis of Judaism and Modern Medicine, is the subject of much debate in the medical sphere and yet there is serious thought and action beyond the limits of the world of biomedicine.

It is in the world of cultural politics that Presner dominates the discussion. From the debates about gymnastics, of great interest to the historians of sport and politics, to the realm of myth-making and the reinvigoration of the Maccabees (the Taliban of Jewish history) into the model for healthy, military, or quasi-military idealization, Presner is able to outline a compelling case for the creation of an idealized body in a health- obsessed world. A healthy body in a healthy land, as Sandra Sufian shows in her brilliant Healing the Land and the Nation, was the central mantra of political Zionism in the Middle East. Make the land of Palestine healthy (drain the swamps, as Mussolini did in Rome) and its people (both Jews and Arabs, often the same people) healthy, and you have the basis for a new state. Presner shows how this debate has its origins in the world of European Jewish thought that demanded the ability of degenerate or decadent peoples (as at one point or another every people or “race” were labeled) to regain their fabled state of health and power. But more importantly he shows how it impacts on the self-image, the “real” bodies, of Jews. As George Mosse argued more than a decade ago in The Creation of Modern Masculinity, all of the political moments of the nineteenth century, from Fascism or Zionism to Communism, demanded such malleability. Presner outlines how this worked in real, historical time in a real cultural space.

Presner’s book is full of the sort of details that have been missing in this discussion. His complex but completely comprehensible account of the construction of the very notion of regeneration, which opens his book, is a monument to serious and accurate cultural history. Any writer who takes both Max Nordau and Julius Langbehn seriously in the twenty-first century is to be commended. But indeed this is what Leonid Pasternak did a hundred years before without any question. Presner asks hard questions: how does a notion of “regeneration” link philo-Semite and anti-Semite in their search for redeemable and healthy bodies?

This is a seminal book. It is a book that any one interested in European thought from the 1860s to the Holocaust and...