Clear Heads, Solid Stomachs, and Hard Muscles - Max Nordau and The Aesthetics of Jewish Regeneration

PRESNER / max nordau and the aesthetics of jewish regeneration
269
MODERNISM / modernity
VOLUME TEN, NUMBER
TWO, PP 269296.
2003 THE JOHNS
HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS
Clear Heads, Solid Stomachs, and Hard
Muscles: Max Nordau and the Aesthetics
of Jewish Regeneration
Todd Samuel Presner
I. Introduction
In his opening speech at the second Zionist Congress in Basel
on August 28, 1898, Max Nordau invented one of German
Zionisms most famous, most fraught, and most challenging con-
cepts: the muscle Jew.
1
Although Nordau did not start explor-
ing the political implications of his initial call for a muscle Jewry
until a couple of years later, he clearly alluded, in this early
speech, to the necessity of creating a new type of Jewcorpore-
ally strong, sexually potent, and morally fitas the precondition
for realizing the national goals of Zionism. After providing an
overview of the steadily deteriorating situation of Jews in Rus-
sia, Romania, and Galiciawhat he terms the classic countries
of Jewish suffering (SP, 2:15)Nordau turns to France and
suggests that the widespread anti-Semitism that sparked the
Dreyfus Affair was also a fatal affront to the Enlightenment ideal
of universally recognized human rights. He argues that the Jews
themselves must change their desperate historical situation, and
that it is Zionism [that will] awaken Judaism to new life. He
continues, It achieves this morally [sittlich] through the reju-
venation of the ideals of the Volk and corporeally [krperlich]
through the physical rearing of ones offspring, in order to cre-
ate a lost muscle Jewry [Muskeljudenthum] once again (SP, 2:24).
Nordaus idea of a muscle Jewry was not only consistent with
the national goals of the Zionist movement: simultaneously the
spiritual and the corporeal rebirth of the Jewish people, as ar-
ticulated by Theodor Herzl and other early Zionist proponents;
2
Todd Samuel
Presner is assistant
professor of Germanic
Languages and Jewish
Studies at the
University of California
Los Angeles. This essay
derives from a book in
progress tentatively
entitled Muscle Jews and
the Aesthetics of
Regeneracy.
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M O D E R N I S M / mode r ni t y
270
it was also the crystallization of these goals on the individual body of the Jew. National
regeneration would come through moral and physical rebirth and, recursively, moral
and physical regeneration would be achieved though nationality. Indeed, the concept
of the muscle Jew resonated immediately because it brought mythic elements of the
Jewish tradition to bear upon the turbulent historical reality of fin de sicle Europe,
marked by both a raging political uncertainty and a condensation of conflicting intel-
lectual currents ranging from decadence to social Darwinism.
3
Nordau called upon
both a great Jewish past and a redeemed future, a convergence that would give the
fledgling Zionist movement its present direction and historical rationale. Contrary to
contemporary anti-Semitic representations of Jews as scrawny, weak, and inferior (an
image also internalized by many Jews through the violent mechanisms of self-hatred),
Jews were at one time, Nordau reminded his readership, muscular and heroic, as the
mythic story of Bar Kochba attested.
4
Not by chance, Bar Kochba and the Maccabees
also became two of the names adopted by the newly formed Zionist gymnastic associa-
tions. In fact, Nordau would publish the first complete expression of his call for Muscle
Jewry in an article in the second issue of Die Jdische Turnzeitung (The Jewish gym-
nastics journal), the central organ of the Bar Kochba Gymnastics Association and a
key venue for the dissemination of German Zionism up through the end of World War
I.
5
In this decisive article, he describes Bar Kochba as the last world-historical em-
bodiment of a war-hardened, weapon-happy Judaism as well as a hero who refused
to know defeat (JTZ, 1900, no. 2:10).
Over the formative and tumultuous two decades between 1898 and the end of World
War I, Nordaus reinvented muscle Jew would become one of the most emblematic
figures of German Zionisms body culture. Iterations of the muscle Jew would ap-
pear in a fascinatingly wide range of discourses on corporeal regeneration, which si-
multaneously addressed the reformation of the individual body and the reconstruction
of the body politic of the desired nation. Beyond Nordau and the pages of Die Jdische
Turnzeitung, these intersecting Zionist discourses extended from the aesthetic and
the therapeutic to the eugenic and the colonial. In the visual arts, for example, the
iconography of E. M. Lilien, the most important and prolific Zionist artist of the early
twentieth century, is inseparable from the Hellenic athletes that inspired Nordaus
competitive muscle Jew; in medicine and eugenics, the muscle Jew represents a radi-
cally hygienic and racially charged counterimage to the degeneracy of the Ostjude;
and in Zionist colonial discourses, the strength of the muscle Jew is the prerequisite
for successfully building a nation in Palestine. What these seemingly diffuse discourses
share is a national investment in the images and rhetoric of regeneracy.
To illustrate this convergence of discourses, let me begin by drawing attention to
two overdetermined images produced during the first decade of Zionism. The first
image (fig. 1), produced and printed in Berlin in 1904, is an illustration by E. M. Lilien
for the first edition of the journal Altneuland (Old-new land). The second (fig. 2),
Auswanderung nach Palstina (Emigration to Palestine), was published around the
same time in the anti-Semitic slapstick journal, Kikeriki, based in Vienna.
6
Both im-
ages, which can be read productively in dialogue with one another, depict Jews migrat-
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271
L
Fig. 1. E. M. Lilien, Frontispiece for the journal
Altneuland (1904).
Fig. 2. Caricature in Kikeriki (Vienna,
c. 1905). Reproduced in Eduard
Fuchs, Die Juden in der Karikatur: Ein
Beitrag zur Kulturgeschichte (Munich:
A. Langen, 1921), 199. L
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272
ing to Palestine. In Liliens illustration, we see two muscle Jews, rendered as gigantic
Hellenic athletes, carrying an even larger bounty of grapes to the Promised Land. The two
Jews walk barefoot across the top of the earth, which is itself shaped by the rounded word
Altneuland and gently accented by blades of protruding grass. Their muscular figures are
silhouetted in front of two spheres, outlining the earth and probably the rising sun. In the
caricature from Kikeriki, we see a band of seven Jews crammed together front-to-back
holding a crudely carved, pointed spear labeled Zionismus. The grotesquely distorted
Jews have bodies marked by exaggerated Jewish features including small statures, large
noses, and bulky feet.
7
Their ugly countenances emerge directly from the anti-Semitic
imagination: The first and third Jews display profiles of vapid eagerness; the second
Jew appears conniving and mischievous; the fourth and fifth seem learned but petty; the
sixth looks wide-eyed and greedy; the last bespectacled Jew has a countenance of un-
speakable haughtiness. This motley crew wends its way through a dense forestpopu-
lated by preying vultures, giant insects, and exotic foliageon its way to Palestine.
Liliens illustration was published at the height of his popularity as the foremost
artist of Zionism, and the drawing shares a stylistic resemblance to other pictures that
he created for the Zionist cause during this period.
8
Although he had produced many
prior images of Jews with bulging muscles (see fig. 3), this illustration was unique in
bringing the masculinity of Hellenism together with the Zionist national project. Ex-
cept for a wreath of leaves in his hair, the first bearded man stands naked, his clenched
fists and taut muscles exhibiting a sculpted male beauty; the second, wrapped in a
partly diaphanous cloth, is slightly taller, younger, and more muscular. In contrast to
the seven dwarflike Jews in the Kikeriki illustration,
9
the two men do not touch each
other and are, instead, separated by a magnificent abundance of grapes. The bundle of
grapes signifies the fertility of the land, perhaps standing in for a woman. The phallic
rod that runs the length of the illustration not only gives an element of depth to the
image through its diagonal placement on the two Jews opposing shoulders; it also
highlights and penetrates the feminine fertility of the lush bunch of grapes. Whereas
Lilien deflects homosexual contact through a symbolic feminine presence necessary
for nation building, the Kikeriki caricature depicts the seven male Jews in compromis-
ing postures holding a phallic spear that penetrates them all. Here, Zionism is to be
interpreted as the foolish product of malformed, homosexual Jews.
10
But perhaps even more relevant to the Zionist project of national regeneration is
the fact that both of these images link the individual body of the Jew to the larger
project of state formation. Liliens muscle Jews are in the process of relocating their
reproductive fertility to the old-new land of Palestine, and the Jews of the Kikeriki
caricature are viciously mocked as silly degenerates whimsically attempting to found a
state. Even if the latter survive the hostile terrain populated by wild mushrooms, flocking
vultures, and insects as big as their noses, surely, we are made to believe, they could
never establish a state like the great European powers.
Giving a visual illustration of Houston Stewart Chamberlains race-based anti-Semitic
argument in his magnum opus, Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, the Kikeriki
caricature shows Jews as anything but world-historical people. Not only are present-
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273
L
Fig. 3. E. M. Lilien, What is the World? Lieder des Ghetto (Berlin: Benjamin Harz Verlag, 1902/03), 54.
day Jews racially unfit for nation building, but Jews have, according to Chamberlains
version of history, always been so. In this vein, after describing the physical, religious,
and cultural deficiencies of the Jews in his chapter On the Entrance of the Jews into
Western History, Chamberlain turns back to the history of the Judeans to show how
Jews, unlike Germans, have never been able to found a great nation:
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274
They were so unwarlike, such unreliable soldiers that their king had to trust his protec-
tion and the protection of their land to foreign troops; they were so unwilling to under-
take any endeavors that just looking at the ocean . . . horrified them; they were so slothful
that for every task at hand one had to hire designers, production managers, and even
handworkers from neighboring countries for all the delicate work; they were so unfit for
agriculture that (as it says in many places in the Bible and the Talmud) the Canaanites
were not just their teachers but were the only ones up until the end who worked the land;
yes, even in a purely political respect, they were such opponents of all stable, well-or-
dered conditions that no rational form of government could come about by them and
they felt best from early on under the pressure of foreign rule, something that did not
prevent them, however, from burrowing underneath it. [GNJ, 1:454]
Through their scheming, their materialistic worldview, and their demonic genius
(GNJ, 1:455), the Jews have, despite (or perhaps because of) their laziness and other
deficiencies, nevertheless managed to survive as a race under the rule of other nations;
however, they remain nothing more than a foreign element, Chamberlain argues,
quoting Herder with approbation (GNJ, 1:463). Because of these transhistorical racial
qualities, Jews can never know the greatness of having their own nation. Even Zion-
ism, because it, too, is always already Jewish, is condemned to fail, as the Kikeriki
caricature portrays in no uncertain terms.
11
By contrast, the Germans, Chamberlain
maintains, building on Hegels quadripartite structuring of history, represent the pin-
nacle of world history because their cultural and national strength is the outgrowth
of the great colonial empires of Greece and Rome. That the little Jews are depicted
sauntering along on footrather than traveling by shipis thus highly significant.
After all, reckoning with the ocean, traveling by ship, and cultivating the new land are
world-historical achievements that, according to both Chamberlain and Hegel, assure
a colonial claim to national greatness.
12
Liliens Hellenic depiction of two muscle Jews walking on top of the earth with the
bounty of fertility thus represents a very different history of Judaism. The Jews here
are great, as indicated by their sheer scale, and quite capable of domesticating nature
and cultivating the land. But even more striking are the colonial tasks that the journal,
with Liliens frontispiece, envisioned for itself. The title Altneuland was a direct ref-
erence to Herzls 1902 utopian travel novel of the same name, in which Jews settle
Palestine and transform it from a desert wasteland into a vibrant, technologically
modern nation-state.
13
Jews not only cultivate the soil, they arrive by shipjust as
Herzl did in 1898 for his famous visit to Palestine with the German Kaiserto civilize
this supposedly backward land. Jewish settlers who streamed into this country brought
with them the experiences of the whole civilized world [i.e., Europe], Herzl declares
in his novel.
14
While Herzl imagined the novel as taking place in 1923, some two decades after it
was written, the journal Altneuland was founded in 1904 (the year of Herzls death)
with the express purpose of investigating the scientific and economic conditions for
the Jewish colonization of Palestine. As the frontispiece indicates, the journal was to
serve the economic tapping of Palestine. The first edition laid out the tasks to be
accomplished:
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275
We have to know the land precisely on which the house of Ahasver will stand. . . . The
journal shall collect and examine what those who know the land best know about its
climate, its soil, its fruits and products, its laws and their operation, the customs of its
inhabitants, its health conditions . . . it will collect reports about agriculture, business, and
trade with all neighboring areas and countries with similar natural resources and compo-
sition. . . . It shall collect and examine what is well-known by all colonial enterprises
[kolonisatorische Unternehmungen] across the world. . . . Like a focal point, the journal
will bring together all of the thousands of scattered rays into a single bundle of light in
order to enlighten the half-darkened land of two thousand years of desire, which is today
only illuminated by shadows.
15
As the mission statement of the journal makes clear, one of the critical prerequisites of
the successful colonization of Palestine was extensive scientific knowledge about the
land, its inhabitants, and their customs. Moreover, utilizing the rhetoric and meta-
phors of the Enlightenment, the Jewish colonial effort would be consistent with the
European idea of colonization as the spread of civilization, the domestication of
nature, and the dispensing of knowledge to those in the shadowy darkness of the land.
At the same time, as Liliens frontispiece shows, Palestine was not just to be scientifi-
cally studied and objectively analyzed but also actively populated and civilized by muscle
Jews who were arriving from Europeon foot and by shipin the old-new land.
As I hope is already evident, then, Nordaus invention of the muscle Jew cannot be
adequately understood apart from the paradoxical condensation of multiple discourses
concerning the politics of regeneracy and the deployment of sexuality for the purpose
of nation formation. Strangely, however, no study of the body culture of German Zion-
ism has tried to analyze comprehensively the discourses of the muscle Jew in this way.
In fact, when the muscle Jew is discussed, the concept is either largely confined to Nordaus
idiosyncratic intellectual biography or considered an exemplary instance of anxieties
over Jewish masculinity and nationality.
16
In the latter camp, George Mosse undoubt-
edly produced the most substantial corpus of work dedicated to the exploration of the
topos of masculinity within nineteenth- and twentieth-century European nationalisms.
17
But what Mosse does not doand this applies to all the studies I have encountered in
which the concept is mentionedis consider the muscle Jew as a discursive forma-
tion, one that both emerged from Nordaus aesthetic reflections on regeneration and
lived on in a range of discourses that extended and justified the corporeal politics of
German Zionism.
18
In this article, I propose to do just that and pursue the more mod-
est goal of examining the genesis of the muscle Jew discourse within Nordaus theories
of regeneracy as well as the visual culture of Die Jdische Turnzeitung.
Critics are still somewhat split between those who view Nordaus Zionism as a sud-
den eruption and those who see no real division in his thought between his Zionism
and the world-view he outlined in his non-Zionist and earlier writings.
19
I want to
argue here that Nordaus articulation of the muscle Jew is informed by the same logic
of education, discipline, and regeneration found in the 1892 project of Degen-
eration and, therefore, that his Zionismespecially his conceptualization of the muscle
Jewis anything but a sudden eruption. In what follows, then, I first give a reading
of Nordaus Degeneration, taking seriously the terms of his analysis, in order to distill
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276
the corporeal and aesthetic concepts that will later inform his understanding of the
tasks of Zionism. From there, I turn to a detailed analysis of the first years of the
muscle Jew discourse vis--vis the project of Degeneration. What I want to show is that
all the traits that Nordau attributed to the true modern in 1892health and origi-
nality of race, clarity of vision and purpose, strength of body, depth of discipline, and
ability to adapthave been transposed to the muscle Jew and, more broadly, the dis-
course of the new Jew featured in the pages of Die Jdische Turnzeitung.
II. Nordaus Degeneration
In 1888, in his last completed work before his collapse in Turin, Nietzsche em-
blematically summed up the anxieties of the late nineteenth century with the follow-
ing words: Nothing is better known today, at least nothing has been better studied,
than the protean character of degenerescence.
20
Through the figure of Wagner,
Nietzsche mounted a choleric critique of modernity and its voguish nihilism, arguing
that decadence and degeneracyranging from cultural decline to physical sickness
and moral turpitudeare the truest signs of this nervous age. As Nietzsche suggests,
signs of degeneracy were detected and studied everywhere, not just in cultural or
artistic forms. The fast pace of modern life rendered the nerves of city dwellers weak;
21
the natural borders of races and classes had become porous, causing these groups to
break down and merge together; the spread of venereal diseases and prostitution evi-
denced the loosening of codes for policing sexuality, while the eager embrace of the
rhetoric of sickness and decadence displaced traditional moral authorities.
22
But most
of all, the birth of the discipline of eugenics in the mid-1850s
23
turned the regulation
of degeneracy into an urgent racial-sexual imperative.
24
It is precisely this confluence of discoursesmedicinal, socio-economic, political,
and culturalaround the concept of degeneracy that fed the apocalyptic tone of
Nordaus fin de sicle cultural criticism. When Degeneration appeared in 1892, it was
an instant success, becoming one of the best selling and most hotly contested books of
the decade. Not one for understatement, Nordau couched his shrill diagnosis in the
following terms: The feeling of the time is curiously confused. . . . The prevailing
sense is that of destruction and extinction. . . . In our days there has awakened in the
minds of the more highly developed a dark fear of a dusk of nations [Vlkerdmmerung]
in which all the suns and stars are gradually burning out and humankind with all its
institutions and creations is perishing in the midst of a dying world.
25
Nordaus solu-
tion, while definitely motivated by a desire for the preservation of traditional, classical
values and forms, does not look backward to reclaim a lost character but rather prog-
nosticates an evolutionary break, imbued with the ideology of social Darwinism, in
which the degenerates will perish and those who are strong, disciplined, and well-
adapted will come forward to preside over a new world.
Condemning virtually every contemporary artistic or literary movement as proof of
degeneracy (his unforgiving criticism jumps effortlessly from particular figures such
as Manet and Tolstoy to entire movements like the pre-Raphaelites, Symbolism, and
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277
Ibsenism), Nordau argues that only the calm rationality and disciplined logic of sci-
entific progress can save humanity from the woes of degeneration and its attendant
horror, formlessness. In his portrait of the most famous leader of the Symbolists,
Verlaine, he writes, We see a repulsive degenerate with an asymmetric skull and a
Mongolian face, an impulsive vagabond and dipsomaniac, who, because of crimes
against morality, was placed in a penitentiary; . . . a dotard, who displays the absence of
any definite thought in his mind by incoherent speech, meaningless expressions, and
frizzy images (E, 1:228). In other words, degenerates can be recognized not only by
the confused content and chaotic structure of their thoughts or artistic expressions but
also by race-based, physical deformities (such as an asymmetric skull and Mongo-
lian face) that prevent them from adapting to the demands of civil society. Instead of
engaging in productive labor, rational activities, and deliberate moral decisionsthe
cornerstones of an enlightened societythe degenerate is lost, desperate, overly emo-
tional, drunk, and sex-craved. Not given to restraint (although, ironically, he considers
restraint to be a critical characteristic of the healthy and sane), Nordau spends the
next three hundred pages of his book mercilessly castigating an astonishingly wide
range of artists, literati, critics, and philosophers, as well as anyone else who dares to
question the truths of science and the rational foundations of civil society.
His chief concern is with the contempt for traditional views of respectability and
morality (E, 1:10).
26
Established customs, old moral authorities, and traditional prac-
tices have, he argues, been glibly displaced by a practical release from conventional
discipline [Zucht] (E, 1:10). Discipline, arguably the central term in Nordaus lexi-
con, had, at one time, insured the reliability of moral authorities, the stability of values,
the containment of lewdness, the steadfastness of ideals in art, and the sublimation of
base desires and greed, among other things. Historically, through the discipline of
their form, artists, poets, and musicians taught us what is good, valuable, beautiful,
enviable, and inspirational. But this is no longer the case at the fin de sicle, which
announces the end of an order to the world that for thousands of years satisfied logic,
fettered depravity, and in every art matured something of beauty (E, 1:11). Forms
have become blurred, boundaries upset, order forsaken, logic and values abandoned
all in favor of undisciplined chaos. The catchall term for this breakdown is degeneracy.
Nordau proclaims at the outset of the first chapter that, when we speak of the fin de
sicle, we ought correctly to say fin de race (E, 1:5; italics in original) since the cur-
rent cultural situation manifests not simply the end of a century, but also the degen-
erative end of race. To understand his point, we might dwell briefly on the etymology
of degeneration (Entartung). The German verb entarten (to degenerate) means aus
der Art schlagen, approximately, to be untrue to form or kind [Art]. It implies a
process of withdrawal (ent-arten) or movement away from an ideal or, at least, norma-
tive type. In English and French, the word degenerate (from the Latin degeneratus)
also contains the idea of a debased movement away from a norm while implying the
idea of a natural form, namely a race or genus. Thus, to be degenerate means to
deviate from ones race or kind.
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278
To articulate his idea that degeneration is a fin de race, Nordau cites the seminal
text of the French psychiatrist Bndict Auguste Morel, Trait des dgnrescences
physiques, intellectuelles et morales de lespce humaine et des Causes qui produisent
ces Varits maladives (1857 [Treaty on the physical, intellectual, and moral degenera-
tions of the human species and on the causes which produce these unhealthy varia-
tions]), the first theory of degeneration as a hereditary, race-based problem: Degen-
eration has to be spoken of as a pathological deviation from an original type [Typus].
This deviation, even if, at the outset, it was ever so slight, contains transmissible ele-
ments of such a nature that anyone bearing them becomes more and more incapable
of fulfilling his tasks to humanity; moreover, intellectual progress, which is already
inhibited in his own person, finds itself endangered in his descendents as well (E,
1:32). Building on Morels work, Nordau argues that degenerate organismsas patho-
logical deviations from the normproduce offspring that, to an even greater degree,
suffer from debilitation and malformations. As examples of physical degeneracy, he
names various deformities such as stunted growth, asymmetry of the face and cra-
nium, protruding ears, squinted eyes, pointed or flat palates, syn- and polydactylia, all
of which are meant to establish the power and value of the norm over the deviation.
27
These offspring, living among us today at the fin de sicle, represent the end of
race: Although Nordau is optimistic that they will fortunately soon become sterile
(E, 1:32) and die out, the societal risk is that degenerates will be imitated, rather
than shunned, as if their deviations somehow represented new social norms. Here, we
can detect the first expression of Nordaus social Darwinism, something that runs
throughout the entire book and will, later, become an essential part of his
conceptualization of the tasks of Zionism.
Besides inspiring imitation, the other danger posed by degenerates, Nordau as-
serts, is that they throw the binary organization of the world into mystical disarray:
good and evil, virtue and vice, right and wrong, beautiful and ugly become nothing
more than empty, arbitrary distinctions (E, 1:35). This anxiety becomes particularly
evident in his discussion of the literary decadence of the novels of Josphin Pladan
and J.-K. Huysmans. In Huysmanss novel, A rebours, we not only find a radical re-
valuation of traditional binary categories for ordering experiencemale/female, right/
wrong, progress/decline, health/sickness, moral/immoral, true/false, and so forthbut
we encounter the representation of a world in which binary categories themselves are
no longer reliable structuring matrices for organizing experience.
28
The novel portrays
the perceptions and experience of a physically anemic and nervous man by the name
of Duke Jean des Esseintes, who, in Nordaus description, can no longer distinguish
between dreams and reality, right and wrong, near and far, present and past; he is, instead,
nothing more than the embodiment of an endless array of monstrous sensory experi-
ences. Nordau sums up his discussion of Des Esseintes with these overblown words:
We now have him, the super-man of whom Baudelaire and his disciples dream, and
whom they wish to resemble: physically, sick and feeble; morally, an arrant scoundrel;
intellectually, an unspeakable idiot who passes his days choosing the colors of things to
drape his room artistically, observing the movements of mechanical fish, sniffing per-
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279
fumes, and sipping liqueurs. . . . His complete inability to adapt reveals itself in the fact
that every contact with the world and other human beings brings pain. . . . A parasite of
the lowest level of education, a sort of human sacculus [a parasite, Nordau notes, that is
virtually indistinguishable from the diseased excrescence of its hosts intestines]. [E,
2:11920]
The degenerate hero of Huysmanss novel thus stands radically opposed to Nordaus
ideal of the sane and healthy man who sees clear forms, articulates sensible ideas,
acts with purpose, restrains his emotions, adapts easily to new situations, and is mor-
ally disciplined and physically strong. As we will see shortly, Nordau conceives of the
body and the behavior of both the true moderns and the muscle Jew in stark contrast
to Huysmanss figure of degeneracy.
As a good social Darwinist, Nordau ends the book on a note of therapeutic opti-
mism, directed at the highest educated classes (E, 2:545), who are not yet entirely
seduced by the ravings of the degenerate artists:
The weak, the degenerate will perish; the strong will adapt themselves to the achieve-
ments of civilization or will subordinate them to their own organic capacity. . . . The art of
the twentieth century will connect itself at every point to that of the past, but it will have
a new task to fulfill: to bring a stimulating variety to the uniformity of cultured life, an
influence that probably only science, many centuries later, will be in a position to exert
over the great majority of humankind. [E, 2:544]
Thus Nordau predicts that the twentieth century will bring an end to both degeneracy
and degenerate art; art will return to its traditional, canonical forms, and science will
combat superstition and mysticism through the force of its truth. In the end, only the
true moderns (E, 2:562)those who are best adapted to the demands of modern
society through discipline, rationality, and clarity of visionwill survive. On the last
pages of his book, Nordau concludes his apocalyptic fantasy with an image of the de-
generate vermin being crushed and beaten to death:
Whoever believes with me that society is the natural organic form of humanity, . . . who-
ever considers civilization to be a good that has value and deserves to be defended, must
mercilessly crush the anti-social vermin [Ungeziefer] under his thumbs. . . . We cry: Get
out of our civilized society [Gesittung]! Rove far from us! . . . if you dare return to us, we
will pitilessly beat you to death with clubs. [E, 2:5567]
The degenerates are no better than vermin and must be expelled or clubbed to
death in order for Nordau and the ranks of the true moderns to secure the values of
civil society according to the violent mechanisms of social evolution.
Indeed, as other critics have pointed out, it is here that Nordaus own ideas for
social exclusion evidence a decidedly uncomfortable resemblance to national-vlkisch
ideologies and their own obsession with ridding society of its so-called anti-social
vermin. Although one can definitely argue that certain elements of National Socialist
ideology were first conceptualized around the fin de sicleone might cite Julius
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280
Langbehn as an originator of vlkisch nationalism, or Nordaus diatribe against de-
generate art as complicit with the eugenics of social Darwinism
29
I am not inter-
ested in attempting to trace the reception history of Nordaus ideas past his turn to
Zionism in 1895 and his own formulation of the muscle Jew a few years later. In what
follows, then, I want to show how Nordau invented an aesthetic discourse of regeneracy
through the muscle Jew, who, like the normal man, rises to the challenges of modernity
and does not degenerate but rather re-embodies his race by becoming a true modern.
III. Muscle Jews as True Moderns
In the speech he delivered at the first Zionist Congress in 1897, Nordau described
two kinds of Jewish suffering. The first, material suffering, afflicted the great majority
of orthodox, Eastern Jews who lived in poverty and were legally disenfranchised, sec-
ond-rate citizens of their host countries; the second, moral suffering, referred to the
minority of assimilated, Western Jews, who had, by and large, abandoned Judaism but
were still not fully welcome in their countries of birth or residence. They suffer even
more bitterly, Nordau argues, because they are forced to hide their Jewish heritage
and are nevertheless still subject to anti-Semitic aspersions. He concludes the speech
with a strangely veiled threatdirected foremost at the Jews attending the Zionist
Congress who might act as ambassadors to other Jews and to Christians in general
that Jews could destructively degenerate, like lethal microbes, if the Zionist cause
were not supported:
Neither Christians nor Jews can indifferently ignore Jewish suffering. It is a great sin to
let a people degenerate [verkommen zu lassen] in mental and physical need . . . it is a sin
to the work of civilized society [Gesittung], and the Jewish people could and would gladly
be energetic partners. And it can turn into a great danger for everyone if strong-willed
people, whose size extends beyond the average in good and bad, become embittered
through undignified treatment and, through embitterment, become enemies to the exist-
ing order [Ordnung]. Microbiology teaches us that microorganisms that are harmless as
long as they are living in open-air turn into terrible, disease-causing pathogens if one
deprives them of oxygen and, to use the technical language, transforms them into anaer-
obes. Governments and peoples had better beware of making the Jews into anaerobic
beings. They could have a high price to pay, regardless of what they do, to get rid of these
Jews who they turned into pests [Schdling] by their own guilt. [SP, 1:20]
What makes this warning so striking (besides the fact that it was uttered as part of
an opening speech at the first Zionist Congress) is that Nordau has clumsily imported
the conceptual terminology of Degeneration into the Zionist cause but with a defiant,
Jewish twist: Civilized society, with its rules of discipline and order, is still the goal;
but now, if Jews are not allowed to participate in its construction as partners, at the
very least, through their own efforts at nation building, Nordau admonishes both as-
similated Jews and Christians alike that the embittered Jews, through their strong
wills, might be transformed into disease-causing pathogens who will undermine its
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281
very foundations. Whereas a few years earlier parasites, microbes, and vermin were
exclusively identified with the degenerates who were to be shunned and crushed by
the true modernsthe only rational defenders of civil societynow degeneracy
could be re-embodied, as it were, by Jews working to subvert the anti-Semitic hege-
mony. Far from the weak and ineffectually degenerate Jews of the anti-Semitic imagi-
nation and equally far from the degenerate artists crushed to death by the true moderns,
these microbe-like pests would vigorously exact revenge on civil society.
Needless to say, this formulation of the embittered Zionist Jew as destructive anaer-
obe would not be Nordaus greatest claim to fame within the Zionist movement. In
fact, at the second and third Zionist Congresses in 1898 and 1899, he would entirely
forgo this revaluation of parasitic degeneracy in favor of a mythically heroic figure of
regeneration, namely the muscle Jew. To be fair to Nordau, hevery much unlike
contemporary anti-Semitic ideologues such as Houston Stewart Chamberlain or the
self-hating Otto Weiningernever considered Jews inherently degenerate nor did
he endorse the racial determinism and popular conspiracy theories of the anti-Semitic
imagination. Whereas Weininger, for example, gladly co-opted Chamberlains argu-
ments for Jewish inferiority in his Sex and Character (1903), considering the Jew to be
a spreading parasite, straggling all over the earth and finding true root nowhere, . . .
[able] to adapt himself to every circumstance and every race, becoming, like the para-
site, a new creature in every different host, although remaining essentially the same,
30
Nordau only invokes the concepts and arguments of Degeneration in order to describe
the range of Jewish suffering and to advocate for a national solution. As Anita Shapira
has pointed out with respect to Nordau and his contemporaneous German Zionist
colleagues, Nordaus acceptance of the anti-Semitic diagnosis did not entail concomi-
tant acceptance of the racist deterministic prognosis preached by anti-Semitic ideo-
logues.
31
Jews would only behave like parasites if they were working to undermine
the oppressive social and political structures that treated them as such.
Nevertheless, in the early years of Zionism, Nordau and other Zionist cofounders
sometimes legitimized the anti-Semitic diagnosis of Jewish degeneracy through their
increasingly nationalistic rhetoric of moral, physical, social, and even linguistic regen-
eration.
32
In 1898, for example, shortly after the first Zionist Congress in Basel, Nordau
published an essay entitled The Tasks of Zionism in which he argues that Zionism
has two fundamental goals: The first is to conquer Palestine for the Jewish people
and the second is to prepare the Jewish people for Palestine.
33
He considers the
second to be the absolute prerequisite of the first and urges Jews to begin to think of
themselves simultaneously as a single people [Volk] and as autonomous citizens who,
with the discipline of soldiers, could contribute to the reformation of the fragmented
whole. By depriving Jews of organic coherence and unity, Nordau argues, the
Galut made a chaos out of us, creating a people completely without the knowledge,
ability, and experience to establish the necessary infrastructure (from police head-
quarters and juridical organizations to administrations for taxation, postage, engineer-
ing, and education) for building a civil society (AZ, 323). The first thing that every
single Jew had to learn was to feel the affairs of the entire Jewish people as his own
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282
personal concern and to listen with iron obedience to the leaders that they chose; in
other words, the most engaged possible participation in the affairs of the people, and
manly discipline [Mannszucht] (AZ, 324).
Through discipline, always a masculine quality for Nordau, Jews could relearn
lost ideals, moral principles, social behaviors, worthy customs, and a serious work ethic
before emigrating to Palestine. In order to become, once again, a fully entitled citizen
[Brger] of his own people (AZ, 325), the Jew had to reform his body and behavior
patterns in accordance with the standards of bourgeois civil society. Although he con-
cedes that it took Moses forty years to educate his people (AZ, 327), Nordau is
confident that the Zionist program of disciplined regeneration will take place much
faster. Through a rigorous work ethic entailing the creation of order, unity, and har-
mony of purpose, Jews could act like good soldiers (AZ, 326), charged with vigor-
ously reconstituting their race and methodically establishing a new society in Pales-
tine.
Elaborating on the transformation of the Jew into a soldier of regeneration, Nordau
gave an inspiring speech to Jewish college students the following year in which he
allied his own Jewish heritage with a triumphal strain of Greek history. Far from being
condemned to historical oblivion like the routed Helots, Zionist Jewsas masculine
fighterswould now re-embody the heroic, martial tradition of the Spartans.
34
In this
deeply personal account of his own path to Zionism, Nordau recounts how, in his
childhood, he learned about the defeated Helots and even planned, at one time, to
write his own Helot tragedy (HS, 376). This never happened, he tells his listeners,
and he forgot about the Helots until the war howls of anti-Semitism (HS, 376) at
the fin de sicle thrust them back before his eyes: Jews, he feared, might become
nothing more than modern-day Helots. Zionism, he adamantly retorts, is precisely
why Jews will never become like the poor Helots; Zionist Jews, he concludes, are
Spartans. . . . For to be a Zionist means to be doubly and triply a fighter (HS, 378).
Through manly discipline and military dominance, Nordau imagined Zionism as an
ideology of the Jew-Greek warrior.
35
Whereas earlier Jews and non-Jews of the Enlightenment called for cultural Bildung
(education) and social Verbesserung (improvement) in order to achieve Jewish assimi-
lation within German society,
36
Nordau shifts attention to what he perceives to be a
missing corporeal upbringing (eine fehlende, krperliche Erziehung) (JTZ, 1902, no.
7:110). He urges Jewsin his case, male Jewsto become strong and muscular by
participating in athletic associations, and argues that exercise, specifically gymnastics
(das Turnen), is of the utmost importance for the health of the Jewish race. Due to a
range of historical reasons largely connected to anti-Semitism and the challenges of
life in the Diaspora, the Jewish body had been destroyed (abgetdtet). In the cramped
quarters of the Jewish ghetto streets, Jews forgot how to move their limbs freely; in
dark houses, their eyes blinked nervously; out of fear of persecution, their formerly
strident voices turned to mere whispers (JTZ, 1900, no. 2:10). As a redemptive figure,
then, the muscle Jew represents both a future ideal and the return to a heroic Jewish
tradition characterized by the likes of Bar Kochba and the Maccabees. In his rally cry
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283
for a muscle Jewry, Nordau proudly asserts that Zionists are rejoining our oldest
traditions by becoming strong-chested, tautly jointed, boldly gazing men [tiefbrstige,
strammgliedrige, khnblickende Mnner] (JTZ, 1900, no. 2:10).
The Zionist muscle Jew, at least in Nordaus articulation of the figure, is a resolutely
masculine fighter, characterized by the drive for Jews to become once again heroic
warriors. It is here that Nordau underscores the masculinity of the battle-ready Jew:
Our new muscle Jews have not yet regained the heroism of their forefathers . . . to
take part in battles and compete with the trained Hellenic athletes and strong north-
ern barbarians. But morally speaking, we are better off today than yesterday, for the
old Jewish circus performers of yore were ashamed of their Judaism and sought, by
way of a surgical pinch, to hide the sign of their religious affiliation . . . while today, the
members of Bar Kochba proudly and freely proclaim their Jewishness. (JTZ, 1900,
no. 2:11). In other words, the male members of the Bar Kochba gymnastics associa-
tion are no longer ashamed of their circumcised penis; instead, they show off their
surgical pinch with pride.
37
The organ of Jewish virility evokes national pride.
38
Al-
though the phallocentrism of Nordaus Zionist ideal cannot be overlooked in his char-
acterization of the muscle Jew, a well-developed, semibalancing discourse surround-
ing the need for female gymnastics and female muscle Jews (JTZ, 1902, no. 5:7680)
also emerged, as we will see, in the pages of Die Jdische Turnzeitung around the
overlapping themes of fertility, family, and sexual reproduction.
When Die Jdische Turnzeitung was founded in Berlin in May 1900 as the official
organ of the Jewish gymnastics association, its purpose was to realize Jewish national
goals through corporeal means. Over its twenty years, the journal published an array
of materials, ranging from historical discussions of ancient Jewish greatness to battle
songs, fitness programs, schedules and results of various gymnastics competitions,
photographs of exemplary muscle Jews (figs. 4 and 5), and medical discussions of the
benefits of sun, light, and movement for a potent sexuality. A leitmotiv that ran through-
out the journal was the physical improvement of the Eastern European Jew, so often
pejoratively characterized as the Jammergeschlecht (wretched race), with a hunched-
over body, crooked posture, awkward gait, underdeveloped musculature, and nervous
disposition. Pictures of strong Jewish gymnasts with upright postures, elegant move-
ments, developed muscles, and assured confidence were not only meant to provide
inspiration and reclaim an ancient, heroic ideal; the bodies they depicted were also
hailed as the preconditions of a successful project of nation building (figs. 6 and 7). In
its first edition, the journal proclaimed five goals: the creation of a strong Jewish body,
the creation of a strong Jewish community, the reinvigoration of old Jewish ideals of
heroism, the fighting of anti-Semitism, and the cultivation of a national feeling. It is no
coincidence that, as the primary means of staving off what Herzl once called the
family affliction of Jewish degeneracy,
39
Jewish athletic and gymnastic associations
sprang up simultaneously with Zionism throughout many German-speaking cities. In
1903, five years after Nordau invented the concept of the muscle Jew, Die Jdische
Turnzeitung began carrying the subtitle monthly for the corporeal improvement of
the Jews. It boasted that there were already thirteen national-Jewish gymnastics as-
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284
L
Fig. 4. Outstanding Jewish Gym-
nasts, Die Jdische Turnzeitung, 1902,
no. 6:99.
L
Fig. 5. Well-trained Back
and Arm Muscles, Die
Jdische Turnzeitung, 1904,
no. 5:106.
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285
L
Fig. 6. Gymnastics Exercises, Die Jdische Turnzeitung, 1903, no. 1:12.
L
Fig. 7. From the World of Jewish Gymnastics, Die Jdische Turnzeitung, 1902, no. 1:12.
sociations and that we should strive to have every Zionist association develop a gym-
nastics division (JTZ, 1902, no. 1:3).
Indeed, this emphasis on corporeal regeneracy should come as no surprise since
Zionism emerged from the same fin de sicle culture that had spawned numerous
other body reform movements, ranging from the womens and the homosexual eman-
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286
cipation movements to the youth, sports, fitness, and nudist movements, all of which
were striving to gain social recognition and political momentum.
40
It was precisely
during this period that Jewish gymnastics associations and Jewish Wanderklubs came
into existence across Europe, many taking the German youth and body reform move-
mentsespecially the Wandervogelas their shared starting point.
41
Die Jdische
Turnzeitung, for example, published travelogues of hiking trips and other outdoor jour-
neys that the Jewish gymnasts undertook, as well as military songs, such as the so-
called Mannerlied, which celebrated their heroic masculinity.
42
And over the course of
the next decade, in part because the anti-Semitism of the Wandervogel kept many
Jews from participating in the German youth movement, Jewish gymnastics associa-
tions began to establish their own Wanderklubs.
In a lead article entitled Grndet Wanderklubs! published in Die Jdische
Turnzeitung in 1908, Georg Arndt officially called for the establishment of Jewish
hiking clubs, arguing that such clubs would solidify the kernel of a disciplined, goal-
conscious team, something that was important for every national gymnastics (JTZ,
1908, no. 7). The same year, Theobald Scholem argued that Jewish body culture
(Krperkultur) must not restrict itself to indoor activities since the gymnastics hall is
only a substitute for nature: Above all, we need light and air and forest and fields.
Responding to a reservation on the part of Jewish gymnastics associations to support-
ing patriotic hiking trips analogous to those of their German counterparts, Scholem
critically asked, We Jews are scattered throughout the world and forced, because of
our fate, eternally to wander. Why do we not go outside into nature? Is it that we have
lost the desire to wander because of our incessant search for a home, because wander-
ing has become a symbol of our misfortune? . . . There must not be any Jewish gym-
nastics association which refuses to undertake hiking trips. . . . In the forests and fields,
in rain or in sun, the Jew will get to know what he has lost for millennia, namely love of
mother earth (JTZ, 1908, no. 6:112). He emphasizes light, air, and free movement in
nature, all constitutive components of the rhetoric of contemporaneous German body
reform movements. In essence, he is calling for a Jewish version of the Wandervogel,
something that would actually come into existence by 1912 under the name Blau-
Weiss (Blue-White), a Jewish youth association dedicated to scouting, fitness, and
Jewish patriotism.
43
As early as November 1900, in an article on The Tasks of the Jewish Gymnast,
Emanuel Edelstein, echoing Nordaus ideas, postulates that physical strength is the
prerequisite of a favorable solution to the Jewish question. He situates the Jewish
questionat once a social, racial, and national questionwithin a neo-Hegelian
framework, which holds that world history, as it plays out in its particular national
inflections, is nothing but a history of opposition, a battle for nationality and a race
war (ein Nationalittskampf und ein Racenkrieg) (JTZ, 1900, no. 7:734). He sees
these battles for recognition occurring all over the world: in Asia, China, the Philip-
pines, as well as in the Spanish-American War, the impending war between England
and Russia, and, of course, the Zionist cause. Citing Nordaus concept of muscle Jewry
directly, he places the solution to the Jewish question within these historical lineages
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287
of bellicosity. In order to overcome the nervousness, degeneracy and weakness of the
Jewish race and form a robust nation, Jews need to become men! (werdet Mnner!)
(JTZ, 1900, no. 7:74). Edelstein calls upon the heroic male tradition in ancient Juda-
ism, but in contrast to the singular phallocentrism of Nordaus muscle Jew, he is also
the first author in Die Jdische Turnzeitung to draw attention to the heroic female
tradition, which he links to a historical argument for creating a stronger Jewish race:
Daughters of Israel, whose beauty has radiated across all time since Sara and is still
uncontested, recognized, and sung today; there is a Miriam, a Deborah, a Judith, a
Ruth and an Esther for you to emulate, names that can never be erased. Take part in
everything that endows your body with power, agility, and grace. Become a strong and
healthy sex [ein starkes und gesundes Geschlecht] and you, too, will play an important
part in helping to solve the Jewish question (JTZ, 1900, no. 7:75).
44
Although the discourses of Jewish regeneration and nationality were almost com-
pletely dominated by male thinkers, the necessity of female gymnastics was recog-
nized in Die Jdische Turnzeitung from the very start. In answering the charge that
gymnastics is unfeminine, . . . [that] we dont need strong females [weibliche
Kraftmenschen], the editors retorted: Is it unfeminine to improve the functioning of
the heart and lungs, the circulation of the blood and the metabolism through purpo-
sive strengthening movements (if possible in the open air), to toughen the muscles,
and awaken an enthusiasm for movement, a sense of well-being, and a gaiety in play
and hiking? (JTZ, 1901, no. 9:118). Although the editors demurred somewhat with
respect to the question of creating female muscle Jews, they did argue unequivocally
that it pays off for everyone when we recognize that one of the first tasks of today is to
strengthen and preserve the health of the female sex by giving the most serious atten-
tion to gymnastics (JTZ, 1901, no. 9:11920). Indeed, for the majority of the first
decade of the journals existence, the theory of female gymnastics was primarily articu-
lated by men. In fact, it was not until 1911 that the journal published a speech by Betti
Eger of the womans division of the Jewish gymnastics association in which she argues, on
behalf of the female members, We want to contribute to the health of our peoples body
[Volkskrper]. We want to become strong muscle Jews [krftige Muskeljuden] (JTZ, 1911,
no. 4:75). Confirming the significant health benefits of gymnastics that her male colleagues
consistently emphasized, Eger argues that gymnastics would not only produce healthier
mothers but also beget stronger children. For this reason, she maintains, female muscle
Jews are just as important as male muscle Jews for the creation of the new state.
Support for female gymnastics among the male representatives was never, how-
ever, entirely liberating since the discussions in Die Jdische Turnzeitung quite clearly
limited the social role of women to healthy reproduction and motherhood. Richard
Blum, for example, in comparing antique and modern gymnastics, explains that fe-
male gymnastics was important to the Spartans because, like today, the strength and
health of the nation is vitally dependent upon the strength and health of the mother
(JTZ, 1902, no. 2:32). In a follow-up article entitled Girls and Womens Gymnastics
(1902), he argues that gymnastics is crucial for the health and strength of the female
body and, by extension, the Jewish nation. Blums concern is not with womens libera-
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288
tion per se but with the role of women for the fertility of the nation. Women need to
liberate themselves, he argues, from the crutch of the corset by strengthening their
own back muscles and assuming a healthy posture; this will enable, in his medical
opinion, healthy Jewish women, with strong back muscles, powerful lungs, and freely
circulating blood, to produce stronger children, in turn, serving your sisters, your
families, your communities, and your nation! (JTZ, 1902, no. 5:80).
From the very beginning of the muscle Jew discourse, then, corporeal training was
explicitly linked to the production of nationality, an association that derived both its
theoretical program and historical legitimacy from the German father of gymnastics,
Friedrich Ludwig Jahn. Transferring Jahns ideas of German fraternity, brotherhood,
and nationality to the Jewish cause, Felix Meyer, in an article on the Hygienic Value
of Gymnastics, connects the history of German nationality to the development of
Jewish nationality: After Prussia was defeated by the hand of the great Napoleon, . . .
men like Jahn came forward . . . [and] recognized that the foundation for a moral
rebirth of the people was to be found in personal self-defense, that a strengthening of
the courage of the individual [would do the same] for the nation (JTZ, 1901, no. 4:46).
He then draws a parallel between the situation of the German people after 1806 and
that of contemporary Jews who have a right and a duty to be a nation (JTZ, 1901, no.
4:46). Like the German national body, the Jewish national body would similarly be
reassembled once the individual bodies of the Jews were strengthened and regener-
ated.
45
Applying the ideas of Jahn directly to the Jews, Blum points out that modern
Jews cannot afford to close their eyes to the successes which the German people
recorded with its gymnastics associations. To support his point, he quotes Jahn: Only
the beneficial training [Ausbildung] of the entire human being [through gymnastics]
protects against any sort of corporeal and mental crippling and deformation (JTZ,
1900, no. 6:62). In the same way that Jahn believed gymnastics to be necessary for the
inner elevation of the German fatherland and people, . . . in order to build up a new
Germany,
46
the Zionists considered gymnastics to be necessary for the rebirth of a
long-lost heroic ideal and the prerequisite for the conquering of Palestine (fig. 8).
But the muscle Jew discourse, as conceived by Nordau and made visual in Die
Jdische Turnzeitung, not only built upon the masculine heroism of the Germanic
tradition, it was also suffused by a social ethos of survival of the fittest, in which Jews,
overcoming the extenuating circumstances which had rendered them weak, could now
adapt to the new challenges of nation building and become true moderns in order to
thrive. As Nordau writes in his call for all Jews to practice gymnastics in order to re-
create a muscle Jewry, Our muscles are outstandingly capable of development. . . .
No one need be satisfied with the muscles he is given. Everyone can have the muscles
that he wishes for. Methodical, persistent exercise is all that is necessary. Every Jew
who is or believes himself to be weak can attain the musculature of an athlete (JTZ,
1902, no. 7:112). Although a cursory reading may render these ideas more like a kind
of self-help guide for achieving the body youve always wanted, the adaptability of the
Jew through the cultivation of discipline and physical musculature explains precisely
why the Jew is not degenerate. After all, adaptability, as Nordau argued in Degenera-
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289
tion, is both the prerequisite of social evolution and the critical characteristic for be-
coming a true modern.
In this respect, then, Nordaus 1892 argument is quite consistent and continuous
with his Zionist call for the re-creation of a muscle Jewry. Through their heroic tradi-
tions, Jews embody precisely what degenerates are not. In Degeneration, he distin-
guishes between organisms and races that are degenerate and those that are capable
of adapting themselves to historical circumstances:
As long as the vital powers of an individual as well as of a race are not entirely consumed,
the organism makes efforts, actively or passively, to adapt itself by seeking to change injuri-
ous conditions or by adjusting itself in such a way that conditions that cannot be changed
cause as little damage as possible. Degenerates, hysterics, and neurasthenics are not ca-
pable of adaptation. Therefore, they are fated to disappear. They will become irretriev-
ably destroyed because they do not know how to come to terms with reality. [E, 2:528]
Jews, on the other hand, just like their muscles, are entirely capable of development
and adaptation. Despite the historical challenges presented by anti-Semitism, Jews
L
Fig. 8. On the Fiftieth Anniversary
of the Death of Friedrich Ludwig
Jahn, Die Jdische Turnzeitung, 1902,
no. 10:166.
10.2presner 4/22/03, 11:29 AM 289
290
as a raceare not innately degenerate and cannot be classed along with hysterics and
neurasthenics. In fact, precisely because of their discipline and commitment to the
ethical and social principles underlying civil society, they are capable of embodying
the social Darwinist spirit of the true moderns.
Nordau concedes that he was at first willing to accept the anti-Semitic stereotype of
the weak Jew as a national-racial characteristic given some historical evidence proving
that Jews were small in stature and that present-day Jews are on average somewhat
smaller than Germans, Russians, Anglo-Saxons, and Scandinavians. But he is con-
vinced that Jews are not racially degenerate and that Jewish self-improvement is
both possible and desirable (JTZ, 1902, no. 7:111). Their small size and ostensible
physical weaknesswhich may, at first sight, appear to be evidence of degeneration
(Entartungserscheinung)can easily be explained by the fact that Jews have neces-
sarily lost their ability for physical fitness, having lived for a thousand years deprived of
exercise in the ghetto (JTZ, 1902, no. 7:110). To regain it, all that is necessary is disci-
plined training.
47
At no point does Nordau ever situate Jewswhether assimilated,
Western Jewry or so-called Ostjudenunder the rubric of degeneracy that he devel-
oped in his 1892 book. If Jews have deviated from their race or kind, to invoke the
conceptual history of the term degeneration, then it is because the original type
namely, the heroic muscle Jew of Bar Kochba and the Maccabeeshas been de-
stroyed through the violent historical mechanisms of anti-Semitism. Far from repli-
cating the racial grounds for explaining the pervasiveness and expected death of both
degenerate art and the degenerate artists themselves, Jews, Nordau maintains, repre-
sent a latent race of Spartan fighters who will not perish by the challenges modernity
presents. Instead, through their discipline and adaptability, the weak Jews will be able
to evolve back into muscle Jews, uniting, in turn, their scattered people and founding
a new nation with all the scientific solidity and racial strength of the greatest European
civil societies.
Articulated around a paternal picture of himself (fig. 9), Nordaus 1902 article, What
Does Gymnastics Mean for Us Jews? specifies precisely why gymnastics is central to
the Zionist project. Gymnastics not only makes one healthier by facilitating the physi-
cal development of strength as well as beauty, but it also teaches manly discipline
[Manneszucht], reciprocal adaptation to different personalities, and carefully con-
structed combinations of many efforts leading to a single, common goal (JTZ, 1902,
no. 7:109). Besides its corporeal benefits, gymnastics also embodies certain ideals
such as intellectual clarity, moral rectitude, and social competencethat correspond
with races that are well-adapted, disciplined, and healthy. It is the perfect way of train-
ing individual Jews to strengthen their own bodies and work together for the attain-
ment of a shared national goal. Jews thus gain in both physical strength and moral
character. Muscle Jews are known for their ruthless boldness, complete mastery of
the muscle groups, energetic exclusion of inhibitions of an anxious or doubting na-
ture, and, finally, mental nimbleness, clarity, and sharpness (JTZ, 1902, no. 7:112).
In the muscle Jew, intellectual acuity is matched by physical prowessand it is this
ideal which is to be cultivated through the propagation of the race.
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291
In conclusion, then, it is no coincidence that Nordaus description of the muscle
Jew is diametrically opposed to his descriptions of the degenerate characters in the
novels of Pladan or Huysmans. Conceptually, the muscle Jew is essentially the out-
growth of Nordaus normal man, who, rising to the challenges of modernity, trans-
forms himself into a true modern and crushes the degenerates to death. This is how
Nordau describes the prototype of the muscle Jew in 1892:
The normal man, with his clear mind, logical thought, sound judgment, and strong will,
sees, where the degenerate only gropes; he plans and acts where the latter only dozes and
dreams. . . . Let us imagine the driveling Zoroaster of Nietzsche, with his cardboard lions,
eagles, and serpents from a toyshop, or the noctambulist Des Esseintes of the Decadents,
sniffing and licking his lips . . . let us imagine these beings in competition with men who
rise early, and are not weary before sunset, who have clear heads, solid stomachs, and
hard muscles: the comparison will provoke laughter. [E, 2:529]
L
Fig. 9. What Does
Gymnastics Mean for Us
Jews? with photograph
of Max Nordau, Die
Jdische Turnzeitung,
1902, no. 7:109.
10.2presner 4/22/03, 11:29 AM 291
292
Just like the normal Jew, the normal manable to adapt to the exigencies of moder-
nity and become both potent and muscularis characterized by clarity of perception,
discipline, adaptability, and, most of all, physical strength. He rises early and works
diligently all day long; he maintains focus and acts decisively; he works out and has
washboard abs to show for it. He is the re-embodiment of the strength of his race.
In this respect, then, the goal of the muscle Jew discourse was not simply the reju-
venation of the individual body but rather the creation of a modern body politic through
the aesthetics of corporeal regeneracy. On the one hand, the muscle Jew harkens back
to a bygone, mythological time as the embodiment of true Jewishness, a concept not
entirely divorced from other contemporaneous calls for Volkstmlichkeit or true
Germanness. On the other hand, the muscle Jewthrough his discipline, adaptabil-
ity, and strengthrepresents a modern, evolutionary break, one in which the achieve-
ments of civilization are elevated to a higher, more refined level. Nordau concludes
Degeneration with these fateful words, which might just as well describe the tasks of
Zionism and the duties of the muscle Jew: The criteria by which the true moderns
can be recognized and distinguished from impostors calling themselves modern are
the following: Whoever preaches absence of discipline is an enemy of progress; who-
ever worships his I is an enemy to society. Societys first premise is love of ones neigh-
bor and the capacity for sacrifice; progress is the effect of an ever more rigorous sub-
jugation of the beast in man, of an ever tenser self-restraint, of an ever keener sense of
duty and responsibility (E, 2:562). It might well be that the concept of the muscle
Jewthrough its paradoxical aesthetics of regeneracyis modernitys most emblem-
atic form of discipline and social progress.
Notes
1. Max Nordau, speech delivered at the second Zionist Congress. Stenographisches Protokoll der
Verhandlungen des II. Zionisten-Congresses (Basel, August 2831, 1898) (Vienna: Verlag des Vereines
Erez Israel, 1898), 1427; hereafter abbreviated as SP, followed by conference number and page
number. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are mine.
2. See, for example, Herzls classic solution to the so-called Jewish question: Der Judenstaat
(1895), in Theodor Herzl, Gesammelte Zionistische Werke, vol. 1 (Tel Aviv, 1934), 19105. See also
the speeches by Herzl, Nordau, Nathan Birnbaum, David Farbstein, and Max Bodenheimer at the
first Zionist Congress, in Stenographisches Protokoll der Verhandlungen des I. Zionisten-Congresses
(Basel, August 2831, 1897) (Vienna, 1897).
3. For a good study of the intellectual context of Zionism, see the recent work of Michael
Stanislawski, Zionism and the Fin de Sicle: Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism from Nordau to
Jabotinsky (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). For a critical assessment of European
decadence, see Perennial Decay: On the Aesthetics and Politics of Decadence, ed. Liz Constable,
Dennis Denisoff, and Matthew Potolsky (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999).
4. Bar Kochba led the Judeans in the revolt against the Roman Empire in A.D. 132, which was
ultimately suppressed in 135. As Yael Zerubavel argues, [in] Zionist collective memory the Bar Kochba
revolt symbolizes the nations last expression of patriotic ardor and the last struggle for freedom dur-
ing Antiquity. Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of the Israeli National Tradition
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 48. The representation of the physically inferior and
creatively stunted Jew can, of course, be found in countless late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-
century anti-Semitic discourses, including scientific and pseudo-scientific literature, historical ac-
10.2presner 4/22/03, 11:29 AM 292
293 counts, and popular imagery in the press and politics. Houston Stewart Chamberlains Die Grundlagen
des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, 5th ed., 2 vols. (1899; Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1904) represents the
racist historical-scientific imagination at its core (hereafter abbreviated as GNJ). For the discourse of
Jewish self-hatred, see Sander Gilmans classic, Jewish Self-hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden
Language of the Jews (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986).
5. Nordau, Muskeljudentum, Die Jdische Turnzeitung, 1900, no. 2 (June): 101. A follow-up
article emphasizing the relationship between gymnastics and health appeared in July of 1902, Was
bedeutet das Turnen fr uns Juden? (What does gymnastics mean for us Jews?). References to the
journal are hereafter abbreviated as JTZ, followed by the year, issue number, and page number. Both
articles are also reprinted in Max Nordaus Zionistische Schriften, ed. Zionistische Aktionskomitee
(Cologne: Jdischer Verlag, 1909), 37981 and 3828, respectively. Die Jdische Turnzeitung was
published monthly or bimonthly in Berlin from May 1900 through the outbreak of World War I.
Between 1914 and 1918, the journal appeared sporadically, and it finally ceased publication in 1921.
6. The exact date of the caricature is unknown but is probably between 1905 and 1910. According
to Eduard Fuchs in 1921, Kikeriki was likely the oldest anti-Semitic journal in Austria still in circula-
tion. It was founded in 1862 as a general and political comic magazine with a specifically anticlerical
critique. . . . With the rise of the Christian-Social Party in Austria during the 1890s, the journal gave
up its original character and placed itself more and more in the service of anti-Semitism. Die Juden
in der Karikatur: Ein Beitrag zur Kulturgeschichte (Munich: A. Langen, 1921), 2389.
7. For more on Jewish corporeal stereotypes, see the collection of essays, Der Schejne Jid: Das
Bild des j dischen Krpers in Mythos und Ritual, ed. Sander L. Gilman, Robert Jtte, and Gabriele
Kohlbauer-Fritz (Vienna: Picus, 1998). For a careful explication of the stereotype of the Jewish foot,
among others, see Sander Gilman, The Jews Body (New York: Routledge, 1991).
8. Besides co-curating the first Jewish national art exhibition at the fifth Zionist Congress in 1901,
Lilien published two book illustrations prior to completing the Altneuland picture: Juda (1900) and
Lieder des Ghetto (1902/03). Schooled in the aesthetics of Jugendstil while studying in Munich and
Berlin, Lilien uses and revalues the visual language of decadence in order to give form to the Zionist
concept of progressive regeneration. The best contemporary overview of Liliens work through 1903
is E. M. Lilien: Sein Werk, mit einer Einleitung von Stefan Zweig (Berlin, 1903). For more recent
criticism, see Milly Heyd, Lilien: Between Herzl and Ahasver, in Theodor Herzl: Visionary of the
Jewish State, ed. Gideon Shimoni and Robert S. Wistrich (Jerusalem: The Hebrew University Magnes
Press, 1999), 26593. See also Michael Stanislawskis chapter, From Jugendstil to Judenstil: Cos-
mopolitanism and Nationalism in the Work of Ephraim Moses Lilien, in Zionism and the Fin de
Sicle. Neither Heyd nor Stanislawski discusses the Altneuland illustration.
9. The caricature is also reformulating the legend of the seven Swabians, a legend that was made
popular by the Brothers Grimm fairy tale of the same name. In transforming the bungling Swabians
into Jews and turning the famous slogan, Hannemann, geh du voran (Hannemann, go forward),
into a Jewish imperative, Jakele, geh du voran, the caricature equates the famous cowardice of the
leader Hannemann and his dastardly soldiers with the Zionist project. I thank Hinrich C. Seeba for
alerting me to this reference.
10. Of course, the association of Jews and homosexuals was also a part of the stock of anti-Semitic
and homophobic rhetoric of fin de sicle Europe. The most famous diatribe to link Jews and homo-
sexuals by way of a deeply self-hating and misogynistic argument is Otto Weiningers Geschlecht und
Charakter (Sex and Character) of 1903. For a critical assessment of Weininger within his intellectual
context, see Jews and Gender: Responses to Otto Weininger, ed. Nancy A. Harrowitz and Barbara
Hyams (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995).
11. Weininger put an even finer point on what he believed to be the ultimate flaw of Zionism:
Zionism is the negation of Judaism, for the conception of Judaism involves the world-wide distribu-
tion of the Jews. Citizenship is an un-Jewish thing, and there has never been and never will be a true
Jewish State. The State involves the aggregation of individual aims, the formation of and obedience to
self-imposed laws; and the symbol of the State, if nothing more, is its head chosen by free election. . . .
The true conception of the State is foreign to the Jew because he, like the woman, is wanting in
personality; his failure to grasp the idea of true society is due to his lack of a free intelligible ego. Sex
and Character (London: William Heinemann, 1907), 3078.
10.2presner 4/22/03, 11:29 AM 293
294 12. For more on Hegels views on Jews in his philosophy of history, see my article, Jews on Ships;
or How Heines Reisebilder Deconstruct Hegels Philosophy of World History, Publications of the
Modern Language Association of America, May 2003 (forthcoming).
13. Theodor Herzl, Altneuland, in Gesammelte Zionistische Werke, vol. 5 (Tel Aviv, 1935), 125
420.
14. Herzl, Altneuland, 251.
15. Altneuland: Monatsschrift fr die wirtschaftliche Erschliessung Palstinas, ed. F. Oppenheimer,
S. Soskin, and O. Warburg 1, no. 1 (January 1904): 12.
16. Nordaus conception of the muscle Jew is well-known and mentioned in passing in countless
studies of German Zionism or histories of Jewish masculinity. Steven Ashheim, for example, briefly
mentions the muscle Jew in his important discussion of Western Zionist conceptions of health and
vitality, Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German Jewish Conscious-
ness, 18001923 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), 878; Sander Gilman mentions the
muscle Jew on one page dedicated to the birth of Zionist gymnastics societies in The Jews Body, 53;
Michael Berkowitz gives a somewhat more detailed discussion of the same phenomenon in his chap-
ter Zionist Heroes and New Men, in Zionist Culture and West European Jewry Before the First
World War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993); John Efron ends his highly informative
chapter, The Jewish Body Degenerate? with a brief discussion of Nordau. Medicine and the Ger-
man Jews: A History (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001), 149. Although not centered
on the muscle Jew discourse per se, Daniel Boyarins highly suggestive and controversial book, Unhe-
roic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1997), offers an incisive critique of Zionist discourses of masculinity while trying
to reclaim the sissy tradition, to use his term, for Judaism.
17. Mosses most important works on this topic are The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern
Masculinity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); and Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectabil-
ity and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe (New York: Howard Fertig, 1985).
18. In an article on the hundredth anniversary of the publication of Nordaus Degeneration, Mosse
makes the important connection between Nordaus earlier cultural criticism of degenerate art and
his Zionist project of cultivating respectability and middle-class standards of masculinity for Juda-
ism. I think that Mosses argument is exactly on target. I draw on his work here and extend it with
additional archival and visual evidence. Max Nordau, Liberalism and the New Jew, Journal of Con-
temporary History 27, no. 4 (October 1992): 56581.
19. Mosse, Max Nordau, Liberalism and the New Jew, 567. Without coming down one way or
the other, Michael Stanislawski, for example, writes that it is only a slight oversimplification to claim
that [critical] opinion has essentially been divided between those who see Nordaus Zionism as com-
pletely contradictory to his previous views and those who see his pre-Zionist views as seamlessly
connected to his Zionism. Zionism and the Fin de Sicle, 20.
20. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1967),
5, quoted in Gregory Moore, Nietzsche, Biology, and Metaphor (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2002), 115.
21. This has been thoroughly analyzed by Joachim Radkau in Das Zeitalter der Nervositt:
Deutschland zwischen Bismarck und Hitler (Munich: Hanser Verlag, 1998).
22. Barbara Spackman explores this connection in detail in Decadent Genealogies: The Rhetoric of
Sickness from Baudelaire to DAnnunzio (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989).
23. Arthur de Gobineau wrote On the Inequality of the Human Races, the founding text of mod-
ern eugenics, between 1853 and 1855, arguing that the concept degenerate characterized the adul-
terated blood of the unhealthy, which in turn affects the well-being of the entire race.
24. The connection between degeneracy and sexual politics is explored in the collection Degen-
eration: The Dark Side of Progress. ed. J. Edward Chamberlin and Sander L. Gilman (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1985). For more on the relationship between degeneration and sexuality,
see Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, vol. 1 (New York: Vintage, 1978),
esp. 1189.
10.2presner 4/22/03, 11:29 AM 294
295 25. Max Nordau, Entartung (Berlin: Carl Duncker, 1893), 1:5; hereafter abbreviated as E, fol-
lowed by volume and page number. For translations, I consulted the following English edition, but
found it necessary to use my own translations: Degeneration, 7th ed. (New York: D. Appleton, 1895).
26. The most important work to discuss the ideology of respectability vis--vis the formation of
bourgeois society is George Mosses Nationalism and Sexuality.
27. The best study of the history of the terms norm and pathology within the context of medi-
cal-scientific discourses of the nineteenth century is George Canguilhems The Normal and the Patho-
logical (New York: Zone Books, 1991).
28. For a compelling analysis of how degeneracy upsets binaries and disrupts the logic of absolute
difference, see Barbara Spackman, Interversions, in Perennial Decay, ed. Constable, Denisoff, and
Potolsky, 3549.
29. The seminal texts to explore this are: Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study of
the Rise of Germanic Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963); and George Mosse,
The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (New York: Universal Library,
Grosset and Dunlap, 1964). Let me be unequivocally clear about my own position: I am in no way
suggesting that the ideas expressed in Nordaus Degeneration led to the purifying ideology of Na-
tional Socialism; however, it is worth pointing out that the violence of Nordaus social Darwinism and
his cultural decisionism did have an afterlife in the fervid adoption of race-science and eugenics in the
service of state formation (such as in the writings of Ludwig Woltmann) or, later, the right-wing
political theories of Carl Schmitt. Moreover, in the twentieth century, Ungeziefer has consistently
referred to the abject of society, the absolutely vile deviation from the norm. Franz Kafka famously
thematized this in his short story Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis), in which Gregor Samsa
wakes up to find himself transformed into an Ungeziefer and is ultimately killed by his family for
the sake of preserving bourgeois society. More ominously, the association of Jews with parasites and
vermin was a persistent topos of Nazi propaganda, given a direct visual association in the virulently
anti-Semitic Nazi film The Eternal Jew (1938).
30. Weininger, Sex and Character, 312, 320.
31. Anita Shapira, Land and Power: The Zionist Resort to Force, 18811948, trans. William Templer
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 13.
32. Perhaps most disturbingly, we might mention Theodor Herzls infamous article, Mauschel
(1898), in which he castigates the hapless, Yiddish-speaking Eastern Jew as something unspeakably
low and repugnant (etwas unsagbar Niedriges und Widerwrtiges) and even advocates the symbolic
shooting of an arrow through the chest of the Eastern Jew as a Zionist gesture of national rejuvena-
tion. The article is reprinted in Gesammelte Zionistische Werke, vol. 1 (Tel Aviv, 1934), 20915; here, 210.
33. Max Nordau, Die Aufgaben des Zionismus (1898); reprinted in Zionistische Schriften, 321
2; hereafter abbreviated as AZ.
34. Max Nordau, Heloten und Spartaner (1899); reprinted in Zionistische Schriften, 3748; hereafter
abbreviated as HS.
35. Daniel Boyarin provides an incisive analysis of the Zionist valuation of the image of the warrior
in his Unheroic Conduct. In addition, Anita Shapira demonstrates with remarkable cogency how the
warrior ideal was a consistent, continuous, and central part of both the Zionist project and the foun-
dation of the state of Israel. See Land and Power.
36. During the German Enlightenment, the primary exponents were Gotthold Ephraim Lessing,
Moses Mendelssohn, and Christian Wilhelm Dohm. Dohms ber die brgerliche Verbesserung der
Juden (1783) is perhaps the best-known argument for the civic improvement of the Jews. For more
on the idea of educating and improving the Jews before the race-based arguments of the nine-
teenth century, see Michael A Meyer, ed., German-Jewish History in Modern Times, vol. 2 (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1996).
37. Not only did the Greeks consider circumcision to be a mutilation of the flesh, Greek athletes
tended to tie and clasp the foreskin of the penis during athletic competitions. Jewish athletes, who,
like the Greeks, performed in the nude, could not, of course, do this and were often subject to public
ridicule. However, with the development of an operation known as epispasms (stretching), every
Jew who performed nude in the Olympic games at Tyre had a remnant of his foreskin pulled over the
10.2presner 4/22/03, 11:29 AM 295
296 crown of his penis. See Allen Edwardes, Erotica Judaica: A Sexual History of the Jews (New York:
Julian Press, 1967), esp. chap. 9. Interestingly, Liliens Altneuland illustration shows the rear of the
muscle Jew, but does not proudly display the Jewish penis.
38. Michael Stanislawski has also offered a similar reading of this passage, highlighting the
phallocentrism of Nordaus muscle Jew. He writes, the blatant and evocative image of the publicly
displayed circumcised Jewish phallus [is offered by Nordau] as the ultimate symbol of Jewish national
pride as well as newfound Jewish masculinity. Zionism and the Fin de Sicle, 934.
39. Herzl, The Family Affliction, (originally published in The American Hebrew), in Zionist
Writings: Essays and Addresses, trans. Harry Zohn, vol. 2 (New York: Herzl Press, 1975), 437.
40. For this context, see James Steakley, The Homosexual Emancipation Movement in Germany
(Salem, N.H.: Ayer Company Publishers, 1975), 246.
41. Hans Blher, the founder and primary exponent of the German Wandervogel movement, later
argued in his book, Die Rolle der Erotik in der mnnlichen Gesellschaft (The role of the erotic in
masculine society), that erotic, male-bonding experiences such as those of sports competitions and
the German youth movement were a necessary prerequisite for both patriotism and state formation.
Despite Blhers well-known anti-Semitism, Jewish gymnastics associations nevertheless applied cer-
tain aspects of his theories about hiking clubs, physical fitness, and the erotic development of patrio-
tism to the Zionist cause. See Die Rolle der Erotik in der mnnlichen Gesellschaft: Eine Theorie der
menschlichen Staatsbildung nach Wesen und Wert, 2 vols. (Jena: Eugen Diederichs, 1917/19).
42. Its last stanzas, supposedly sung while on hiking trips, went like this: Men, even then, / we will
not despair like cowards, / but take the punches of destiny / we will be patient, without complaining. /
Strong is the man. / Step forward men! / Dont tremble before the future! (JTZ, 1901, no. 7/8:101).
43. For a history of the Jewish youth movement in Germany, see Jutta Hetkamp, Die jdische
Jugendbewegung in Deutschland von 19131933 (Mnster: Lit, 1994); Hamischmar, Vom Leben der
Jngern im Blau-Weiss (Berlin: Bundesleitung des Blau-Weiss, 1925). For an overview of the history
of Jewish sports in Germany, see Paul Yogi Mayer, EqualityEgality: Jews and Sport in Germany,
Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, vol. 25 (London: Secker and Warburg, 1980), 22141.
44. Here, the term Geschlecht oscillates in meaning between race or lineage and sex.
45. In addition to Jahns, the ideas of J. G. Fichte represent the most significant German ante-
cedents to the Zionist interest in strengthening the individual body in order to regenerate the body of
the nation. Jahns Deutsches Volksthum (1810) and Die deutsche Turnkunst (1816) as well as Fichtes
Reden an die deutsche Nation (1808) consistently thematize the reassembly and even the resurrec-
tion of the German nation through the physical regeneracy of the individuals body. The best discus-
sion of this idea in Fichte can be found in Hinrich C. Seeba, Auferstehung des Geistes: Zur religisen
Rhetorik nationaler Einheit, in Nicht allein mit den Worten. Festschrift fr Joachim Dyck zum 60.
Geburtstag, ed. Thomas Mller, Johannes G. Pankau, Gert Ueding (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt:
Frommann-Holzboog, 1995), 26682.
46. Jahn, Dokument Nr. 4: Mainzer Zentral-Untersuchungskommission, quoted in H. Ueberhorst,
Zurck zu Jahn? (Bochum: Universittsverlag, 1969), 91.
47. Nordau, of course, was not alone in both explaining what appeared to be Jewish degenera-
tion and calling for a rebirth of Jewish heroism. See, for example, Hermann Jalowiczs programmatic
article, Die krperliche Entartung der Juden, ihre Ursachen und ihre Bekmpfung (JTZ, 1901, no.
5:5765).
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