The Jewish world has ebbed and flowed over the past eight centuries. A notable Jewish experience was expulsion from England in the thirteenth century and return in the seventeenth. Another was the transition from patriotic citizenship in what was to become Germany in 1871 to the beginnings of elimination in that country 62 years later. Yet another journey was the struggle to establish a Jewish state, starting in the late nineteenth century and becoming a reality in the middle of the twentieth. Jews have indeed suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, as Prince Hamlet may have noted, and sport could hardly have been a regular part of Jewish life in most of those eras.
Population movements explain many things, and possibly also the growth of Jewish engagement in sport, especially when one looks at the circumstances of East and Central European mass migration to the United States, the United Kingdom and South Africa. Life was bad enough in the shtetls and cities of Russia, Poland, Lithuania and Latvia. It was also ghastly enough in New York’s Lower East Side, a space seething with disease-ridden tenements for those often denigrated as ‘human riff-raff’. Yet some Jews managed to escape the grind and the cholera, moving into theatre, the movie industry, music (jazz especially), comedy, literature, and sport — usually of the tough boxing kind. Emptying Europe of Jews, from ten million in pre-war 1939 to fewer than two million today, is yet another tale — much of it a disaster and only a little of it a success. The movement to Israel of East and Central European Jews, of those from Islamic North Africa, and of those from South Africa, Britain and France, has impacted on both the vacated nations and the new host.
Read the full article by Colin Tatz at Plus61J.