The Fighting Jew: The Life and Times of Daniel Mendoza, Champion Boxer by Wynn Wheldon (review)

It is an understatement to say that the history of boxing does not command attention in the field of eighteenth-century studies. Sad to say, Wynn Wheldon's biography of the bare-knuckle fighter Daniel Mendoza, a London-born Jew of Spanish and Portuguese descent who was active in the ring in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, will do little to correct this. It is long on anecdotes and short on analysis. Wheldon, who came to the subject because his wife is a descendant of Mendoza, writes in a lively and engaging way but does not probe the implications of Mendoza's career. This is regrettable. Prizefighting flourished in Britain at this time but not elsewhere in Europe. Why, one wants to know, did the British have a fondness for fisticuffs and what does this say about British taste and social habits? In addition, prizefighting's popularity, which often bridged the social gap between the highborn and the lowborn, its links with gambling and crime, and the imaginative work it did in crystallizing notions of nationality and masculinity are left unexplored.

The one dimension of Mendoza's life that Wheldon pursues is his Jewishness, especially its place in his career and in the formation of images of the Jew. In this period, at least thirty Jews made a name for themselves in the ring, Mendoza the best known and the most successful among them. He was credited with introducing a more "scientific" form of boxing, one that emphasized finesse, agility, and intelligence, rather than brute strength and bulk. (He himself was not a big man. He stood five feet seven inches tall and weighed 160 pounds in his heyday.) Long after his career in the ring came to an end, he continued to tour the provinces, attracting large audiences to exhibitions of his prowess, in which he sparred and imitated the boxing styles of other well-known fighters. He was, as Wheldon makes clear, as much a showman as an athlete. His Jewish birth was not an obstacle to acceptance into "the fancy" (the boxing fraternity), success in the ring, and popular acclaim. A "Mendoza" became a slang word for a physical set-to. Throughout his career, he fought as a Jew—that is, he was labelled as such by friends and foes ("Mendoza, the noted fighting Jew"), a label he embraced. He was a great hero to the Jews of London, who vicariously participated in his victories in the ring. His triumphs occurred, however, at the same time that popular culture continued to stigmatize Jews as untrustworthy, scheming, rapacious, and greedy. The coexistence of anti-Jewish sentiment and pro-Mendoza admiration may represent one of the first manifestations of a phenomenon that became commonplace in twentieth-century America, where athletes and entertainers from minority groups enjoyed public acclaim while racial stereotyping continued to thrive. The concurrence of such seemingly opposed sentiments calls for further comment.

One possible reason that Wheldon does not engage with this problem is that he believes that Mendoza, whom he calls, with good reason, "the most famous Jew of his day" (in Britain), made potential assailants think twice before harassing Jews in the street. He did so, according to Wheldon, by erasing "a particular stereotype of the Jew as craven and submissive and un-English" (213). His only evidence for this is a passage from the radical reformer Francis Place's autobiography, in which Place claimed that Mendoza's celebrity and the spread of boxing skills among young Jewish men put an end to Jew-baiting. While there might have been a diminution in random assaults on Jews in London in the first half of the nineteenth century, there is no reason to attribute this to Mendoza. More likely, it was due to the more general decline in casual violence and the Evangelical-inspired growth of civility and respectability. Moreover, even in the wake of Mendoza's triumphs, there...