Free How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization by Franklin Foer Page B

these remaining few include immigrants from the old Soviet bloc and a smattering of Israelis who have moved to town for business. The bulk consists of aging natives. Many of them have children in the U.S.
    and even spent years abroad themselves. But they’ve come back to the city of their youth for their last days so they can live a familiar lifestyle. Because so many Austrians enthusiastically welcomed the Nazis, they often apologize for continuing to reside in Vienna. A retired professor of economics told me in a perfect American accent, “What can I do? I know the Austrians are the worst. Maybe they would do it all over again. But I have interests here and friends. It’s comfortable.”
    These elderly Jews wanted badly to talk about the past, about politics and their love of the United States, to buy me a meal at a Chinese restaurant and a pastry

at a co¤ee house. Unfortunately, for my purposes, these conversations didn’t have anything remotely to do with soccer. None of them had played the game. Their parents considered it too scru¤y, violent, and proletarian for their children. Viennese Jews were among the most bourgeois of the bourgeoisie. And even these old Jews were too young to remember Hakoah’s glory years during the twenties. “Maybe there’s someone in New York you could talk to,” they told me. I had gone all the way around the world only to be told that the answers to my queries might be found in the smoked-fish line at Zabar’s on Broadway. Sadly, in New York and Florida, where I had more names to contact, I didn’t make much more headway. I couldn’t. Anyone who might remember Hakoah at its best is too superannuated to remember, or no longer around. As far as I can tell, the historical memory of the club now resides with a gentile Swedish sportswriter from the town of Hässelby called Gunnar Persson who has obsessively tracked every shred of evidence vaguely related to the club.
    With his help, I began to cobble together the story of the wonder Jews.
    Although it seems so strange now, the idea of a professional Jewish soccer club, it is only strange because so few of the Jewish soccer clubs survived Hitler. But, in the 1920s, Jewish soccer clubs had sprouted through-out metropolitan Europe, in Budapest, Berlin, Prague, Innsbruck, and Linz.
    Jewish teams cloaked themselves in Jewish, not Hungarian or Austrian or German, nationalism, literally

HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE JEWISH QUESTION
    wearing their Zionism on their sleeves and shirts.
    Decades before Adolf Eichmann forced them to don the yellow star, some of these clubs played with King David’s logo stitched onto the breasts of their jerseys. They swathed themselves in blue-and-white uniforms, the colors of Israel. Their unabashedly Hebrew names, Hagibor (“The Hero”), Bar Kochba (after the leader of a second-century revolt against the Romans), and Hakoah (“The Strength”), had unmistakably nationalist overtones.
    If all this seemed exceptionally political, it was because these clubs were the products of a political doctrine. An entire movement of Jews believed that soccer, and sport more generally, would liberate them from the violence and tyranny of anti-Semitism. The polemicist Max Nordau, one of the founding fathers of turn-of-the-century Zionism, created a doctrine called Muskeljudentum, or muscular Judaism. Nordau argued that the victims of anti-Semitism su¤ered from their own disease, a condition he called Judendot, or Jewish distress.
    Life in the dirty ghetto had aºicted the Jews with e¤emi-nacy and nervousness. “In the narrow Jewish streets,” he wrote, “our poor limbs forgot how to move joyfully; in the gloom of sunless houses our eyes became accustomed to nervous blinking; out of fear of constant persecution the timbre of our voices was extinguished to an anxious whisper.” To beat back anti-Semitism and eradicate Judendot, Jews didn’t merely need to reinvent their body politic. They needed to reinvent their