Harvard President Charles Eliot on Jewish physicality, by Ari Sclar

In December 1907, Harvard University president Charles Eliot addressed Harvard’s Menorah Society, which had been formed the previous year as a way for Harvard’s Jewish students to study “Jewish culture.”  Eliot spoke before approximately 200 people, including Jewish students from Brown, Dartmouth, Tufts, Boston University, MIT, and Radcliff.  According to the New York Times, Eliot stated: “If you take any representative gathering of, say a thousand Jews, you will find that they are distinctly inferior in stature and physical development to a similar gathering of representatives of any other race.”  President Eliot did not claim that Jews could not physically regenerate, but he placed the responsibility on Jews to conform to the American physical ideal.  He believed that the freedom offered by America provided an opportunity for modern Jews to recapture the “glorious times in the history of the Jews when there was a martial spirit among you.”  Eliot indicated that Jewish physical inferiority occurred because of centuries of suffering, but also claimed: “Here at Harvard, you young men, members of the Jewish race, neglect the out-of-door life, and do not get out into the fresh air and develop physically as you should, although you are taking every advantage of the intellectual opportunities offered you.”[1]

Eliot’s comments, which imposed a unified Jewish cultural and racial identity that included both physical deficiency and lack of physical activity, received an immediate, and public, response from American Jews.  Jewish newspapers in Denver, St. Louis, Detroit, Pittsburgh, and elsewhere published editorials, letters, and rabbinical sermons on the subject of Jewish normality.  Most commentary focused on Eliot’s condemnation of Jewish physicality.  Some Jews posited ‘vitality’ as an alternative definition of physicality in order to illustrate that traditional Judaism promoted health.  Rabbi Joseph Silverman of New York’s prestigious Temple Emanu-El denied that Jews, including eastern European Jews, had ever degenerated, and claimed “stature and development are matters of leisure.”  Rabbi Samuel Margolies of Cleveland’s Anshe Emeth agreed and stated that, “the best authorities on this subject…call attention to the pronounced vitality of the Jews and to their physical strength.”[2] 

During the controversy, the American Hebrew acquiesced to the intellectual-physical dichotomy that rendered Jews a non-athletic ‘other’ in American society.  The Hebrew endorsed sport as the primary means to overcome the negative characteristics associated with the Jewish body.  Ghettoization had partially caused the degeneration of the Jewish body, but “there is a certain amount of truth in Prof. Eliot’s statements” since Jews’ intellectual activity caused inadequate physical training.  This did not change the fact that Jewish boxers, runners, and weight-lifter E.L. Levy proved that, “Jews are capable of developing their muscular system equally as well as other folk and that there is no inherent difficulty in acquiring athletic qualifications if these be desired.”  The Hebrew implied that too few Jews had this desire and appealed to “Jewish students at Harvard and elsewhere” to take Eliot’s advice and “devote even a greater amount of time to their outdoor sports than the ordinary student whose frame has been built up by generations of life in the country.”[3]

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[1] Eliot’s statements quoted in “Urges Jews to be Strong,” New York Times, December 21, 1907, 1. Also see “Dr. Eliot on Jewish Physique,” American Hebrew, December 27, 1907.  Jewish papers were printed on Fridays, so the response in the Jewish press occurred the following week. For quote on the Menorah Society’s goal, see Seth Korelitz, “The Menorah Idea: From Religion to Culture, from Race to Ethnicity,” American Jewish History 85, no. 1 (1997): 79; Jenna Weissman Joselit, “Against Ghettoism: A History of the Intercollegiate Menorah Association, 1906-1930,” American Jewish Archives 30 (1978): 133-154.  Eliot’s speech was the second lecture in a series given by Menorah. Eliot was no proponent of Jewish assimilation and argued that Jews should not intermarry.  See “Dr. Eliot Urges Jews to Uphold Traditions,” New York Times, December 13, 1924.

[2] “Rabbi Excerpts to Eliot Speech,” New York Times, December 22, 1907, 14.  Editorial, Jewish Outlook (Denver), January 3, 1908.  Also see “Rabbi Chas. Fleischer’s Reply to President Eliot,” Jewish Voice (St. Louis), January 10, 1908; “President Eliot at the Menorah Society,” Jewish Advocate (Boston), December 27, 1907; Editorial, Jewish Criterion (Pittsburgh), December 27, 1907.  During the decade, and in response to a hostile environment, American Jews formed various defense organizations.  Among the most important was the American Jewish Committee (AJC), founded in 1906 following the Kishinev pogroms. On the early development of the AJC, see Gerald Sorin, A Time for Building: The Third Migration, 1880-1920 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1992), 204-207.  In 1908, the New York police commissioner claimed that Jews constituted half the city’s criminals, which broadened rhetorical denouncements of the cunning Jewish mind.  T.A. Bingham, “Foreign Criminals in New York” North American Review 188 (September 1908). Arthur Goren explained that New York Jews established the Kehillah in 1908 in response to Bingham’s charges regarding Jewish criminality.  See Goren, New York Jews and the Quest for Community: The Kehillah Experiment, 1908-1922 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970).  The perception of Jewish economic and intellectual strength led to broad conspiracy theories and Jewish bankers were a central figure in anti-Semitic texts.  According to E.A. Ross, Jewish criminals were those of “cunning” not violence.  See Ross, The Old World in the New, 155-157; Hendrick, “The Jewish Invasion of America,” 125-128.

[3] Editorial: Jewish Physique, American Hebrew, December 27, 1907.