Volume 27, Issue 1

This article gives an overview of the research project »Jewish Sports Officials in Interwar Vienna«. The project uses the example of Jewish sports officials to reconstruct the social field of sport as a site of identity politics in Vienna during the interwar period. It tries to show the significance of sports officials for questions of Jewish difference and provides an insight in the research methods and relevant sources. It examines how a sample of about 600 Jewish sports officials in Vienna was defined and can serve as a base for further research and interpretation, especially discourse analysis.

Research on Jewish life in Vienna prior to the Holocaust understandably focuses on places, where it predominantly took place: the Leopoldstadt and the city centre. This view fails to consider the suburb, an area that reflects spatial aspects of Jewish life and does not evoke the connotations typically associated with being Jewish but is instructive as it regards questions of »Jewish difference«. Based on the biographies of two Jewish sports officials, the article shows that (Jewish) difference was defined primarily by parameters of space which manifest as »Bodenständigkeit« (being native): In actual fact, at least in the field of popular culture, ascriptions to a non-Jewish suburb were more powerful than the Jewishness of the officials: In self-perceptions as well as in external ascriptions the meanings of Jewishness were informed by suburban affiliations.

Apart from SC Hakoah and the Amateure (later Austria ) no other Viennese football club of the first division had more Jewish members (sportsmen/sportswomen and officials) than the »First Vienna Football Club 1894«. In the period between the foundation of the club in 1894 and the National Socialist assumption of power in Austria in 1938, one third of the officials and many of the football players of the First Vienna Football Club – who were the pioneers of Austrian football – were Jews or Jewish converts. Jews especially dominated in the Club’s leading positions and important functions. The First Vienna Football Club has not yet been researched in detail, which means that most academics remain unaware of the high level of Jewish participation in it. My paper aims at closing this knowledge gap and looks at the reasons for the substantial participation of Jews in the football club.

The Jewish community in Salzburg before 1938 never exceeded 300 and there were consequently hardly any Jewish sportsmen/women. Anti-Semitism was quite common, especially in the city of Salzburg, where nearly the whole Jewish community lived and where sport had been established by that time. There were, nevertheless, a few personalities who had a major impact on the development of sport (i. e. football) in Salzburg such as Johann (Isak) Dachinger, who played a part in the foundation of Austria Salzburg in 1933, Erwin Bonyhadi, who was an official in various clubs and the SFV (Salzburg Football Association), and Ferdinand Morawetz, the »founding father of football in Salzburg«, who was co-founder and official of the two oldest football clubs, helped to establish an independent football association in Salzburg in 1921, and was kicked out of Salzburger AK 1914 when the club introduced an Aryan Paragraph, just a few months after he had organised a football ground for the club.

The main Jewish sport movement was and is Zionist (and as such nationalist), nevertheless I would claim that Jewish sport is a transnational practice par excellence. Sport, and especially Jewish sport, transcends the concept of nation and state, but sport historiography still follows national paradigms. The sport history of big cities might help to find an empirical basis for a transnational history of modern sports. The search for community and belonging is vital for the experience of the modern individual. From the nineteenth century onwards the »nation« was the preferred »imagined community« to fill the void left by religion and tradition after the age of Enlightenment. But there were other communities as well, such as the workers’ movement or other political communities and social classes or sporting communities. By looking at an East European Jewish metropolis such as Vilne (today’s Vilnius), I want to explore the ambiguous character of the Jewish sport movement and the agency of Jewish athletes in their search for identity and belonging.

Der vorliegende Beitrag versucht das Phänomen des jüdischen Fußballs in Krakau in der Zwischenkriegszeit zu beleuchten. Basierend auf Erinnerungen von Zeitzeugen, Literatur und Zeitungsartikeln beschreibt die Autorin die signifikante Rolle von Juden bei der Entwicklung des polnischen Fußballs. Der Fokus liegt dabei auf der Bedeutung sportlichen Wettbewerbs für Vertreter von Minderheiten, insbesondere im Zusammenhang mit der katholischen Mehrheitsbevölkerung. Dabei ist es das primäre Ziel des Artikels, das Verhältnis zwischen Polen und Juden aus der Perspektive von vier Fußballvereinen – Jutrzenka, Makkabi, Wisla und Cracovia – darzustellen. Die vier Vereine lagen nicht nur auf dem Sportplatz im Wettstreit, sondern vertraten auch in ideologischer Hinsicht und bezüglich ihrer Einstellungen sehr unterschiedliche Standpunkte. Differenzen zwischen dem linksgerichteten Jutrzenka, dem Zionistischen Makkabi, dem demokratischen Cracovia und dem nationalistisch orientierten Wisla reflektieren wichtige Antagonismen zwischen Polen und Juden wie auch die Gegensätze innerhalb der ethnischen Gruppierungen.

Dieser Beitrag diskutiert jüdische Sportkulturen in den Niederlanden vor dem Zweiten Weltkrieg. Dabei soll das bisherige Konzept einer vorwiegend segregierten und zionistisch geprägten jüdischen Sportkultur als Ergebnis einer aus der Nachkriegszeit stammenden Sichtweise revidiert werden. Anhand des Beispiels von drei jüdischen Gemeinden, Amsterdam, Groningen und Den Haag, zwischen dem Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts und 1940 wird aufgezeigt, dass die jüdische Sportszene zugleich »assimiliert« und heterogen war, und dass sie Vereine verschiedener sozialer, politischer und religiöser Orientierung umfasste. Wegen des hohen Grads an Integration in die niederländische Gesellschaft, spielte die Frage der niederländischen Identität keine Rolle. Vielmehr beeinflusste die soziale Klasse Fragen von Inklusion und Exklusion. In den 1920er und 1930er Jahren stieg die Anzahl separater jüdischer Vereine ebenso wie die Verbreitung des Zionismus, wenngleich letzterer im Sport ebenso wie das Ideal des Muskeljudentums umstritten blieb. Jüdischer Sport in den Niederlanden war daher weder so profiliert wie anderswo noch ein Instrument der Integration.

This article provides an overview on both Jewish sport in Swiss metropolises and anti-Semitism in the Swiss sports system in the early 20 th century. A number of Jewish sport pioneers considerably contributed to the formation and development of the Swiss sports system during the Belle Époque and again in the interwar period, be it as athletes, coaches, officials or journalists. At the same time, a small movement of Maccabi clubs emerged which would participate in the first international Maccabiah Games during the 1930s. However, anti-Semitism was not unknown in the early Swiss sport system. Whilst the article identifies a number of persistent anti-Semites amongst sports officials of the period considered and uncovers anti-Semitic mechanisms in individual sports associations, the full extent of discrimination against Jews in Swiss sports is yet to be explored.

The article focuses on a certain aspect of Central European soccer history – the turning of traditional urban images into enemy stereotypes by the inter-war fan culture. Generally, pejorative images were based on the origin of a club. Village clubs and their fans were considered »Saubauern«. If they had their home in a suburb, they were denigrated as a »Mob«, and if they were city-clubs, they had to cope with anti-Semitism. The images were in fact misleading. Even those clubs which were denounced as »Judenklubs« only had a very small minority of Jews among their fans, members and officials.

From the eleventh century onwards the Jewish community in Frankfurt had developed into one of the centres of Jewish life in Europe. In the early 1930s it was the second largest Jewish community in Germany, counting about 31,000 members. With Bar Kochba, Schild, Jüdischer Arbeiter-Sportclub, Jüdischer Turnerbund and Sportverein des Philanthropin five Jewish sport clubs had already been founded before Hitler’s rise to power. But with only 1,000 members they played a minor role in Frankfurt’s sport society. The majority of the Jewish athletes were members of the middle-class sports clubs in Frankfurt. After the exclusion of Jewish members from the middle-class sports clubs the Jewish athletes’ only choice was to join one of the Jewish sports clubs. After fighting to survive until 1933, the Jewish sports club Schild Frankfurt developed into a major sports club within months.

After the National Socialists came to power in 1933 the Jews in Germany were excluded from most sports clubs. As a reaction to this, and in order to still be able to participate in all kinds of sports, many Jews assembled in Jewish sports associations. In Germany, there were two competing sports organizations: the Maccabi sports movement which was part of the National Jewish/Zionist movement, and the »Sportbund Schild« (shield) which attracted the »assimilated« and patriotic German-Jewish followers. Using the example of the Jewish »Sportgruppe Schild« in Hamburg, which existed between 1933 and 1938, this contribution shows that the Jewish Sports organization meant much more than only physical training and social networking: for the young generation in particular, the »Sportgruppe Schild« played an important part in enhancing their self-confidence and strengthening their Jewish identity.

Oluf Gerhard Tychsen (1734–1815) was a dazzling figure in the European history of ideas. As a young student of theology at the pietistic Institutum Judaicum et Muhammedicum in Halle he showed great interest in Jewish studies and took part in missionary activities throughout Germany. As a teacher of oriental studies at the universities of Bützow and later of Rostock, both in Mecklenburg, he was in charge of an academic network with about 200 correspondents from all parts of Europe. Besides his numismatic and linguistic expertise he was deeply occupied with the »Jewish question«. Our investigation explores three topics in this field: Tychsen’s participation in the debate on the early burial in Jewish communities in Mecklenburg, his part in the enrolment of the first medical students at Bützow and in granting them their medical degree from 1766 onwards, and his commitment to one of the most liberal Jewish emancipation edicts which was composed in Mecklenburg-Strelitz in 1813. Our main question is how Tychsen’s activities in these fields were interwoven with the Jewish striving for emancipation against the background of Haskala and Pietism.

In der Literatur werden zwei Populationen als Vorfahren der osteuropäischen Aschkenazim erwähnt: Deutsche Juden und Chasaren. Ein deutscher Ursprung ist demografisch nicht möglich, eine Chasarische Herkunft kann ebenfalls nicht nachgewiesen werden und ist auch nicht plausibel. Der Verfasser schlägt das Denkmodell vor, dass die Vorfahren der osteuropäischen Aschkenazim zunächst um den Kimmerischen Bosporus angekommen sind, vorwiegend aus Anatolien und Südeuropa. Er führt Beweise an, dass es schon vor der Zeitwende eine jüdische Anwesenheit auf der Krim gab, die bis zum 7. Jahrhundert dauerte. Hinzu kamen während des 7. und 8. Jahrhunderts noch Juden aus Byzanz. Diese These wird unterstützt durch genetische Beweise, die einen Unterschied zwischen west- und osteuropäischen Aschkenazim zeigen. Der Verfasser erklärt die Umwandlung von einer Slawisch zu einer Yiddisch sprechenden jüdischen Population mit dem »language-cum-ethnic shift« Modell nach Ehret.