In
1908, the American Hebrew published its
first series of articles on Jewish athleticism.
The first article, “Activity of
the Jews in Athletics,” celebrated the fact that teams from either the
Clark House or University Settlement, “solely made up of Jewish boys, has held
the basketball championship of the settlement league…ever since the league came
into existence.” The newspaper focused
on basketball played on the lower East Side in
an environment predominated by Jews, which led to the conclusion that, “it is a
well established fact that in basketball, the Jew has no superior.” More significantly, the newspaper attempted
to examine the root of Jewish success.
This urban, frenetic and hurried sport, according to the Hebrew, “requires a good deal of quick
thinking, lightning like rapidity of movement and endurance; it does not call
for brutality and brute strength and that is why the Jews excel in it.”[1]
The Hebrew’s
assertion of Jewish basketball superiority fit into the dominant writing about
the sport’s required characteristics. Early
accounts of the sport noted that “basket-ball requires the most rapid kind of
play,” which necessitated a certain kind of player. The focus on passing placed a premium on
quickness and speed. A 1912 treatise
explained that “agility and alertness are two of the fundamental and principle
characteristics.” In 1903, Spalding’s
editor pronounced: “Basket ball is a game of skill and not of brute force. I have seen a team weighing on an average
fifteen pounds less than the other win a game by skill in passing the ball.”[2] Even inventor James Naismith commented: “The
first principle on which the game was based was that it should demand of, and
develop in, the player of the highest type of physical and athletic
development. This type in the mind of
the writer was the tall, agile, graceful, and expert athlete, rather than the
massive muscular man on the one hand, or the cadaverous greyhound type on the other.”[3] The stereotyped Jewish immigrant body did not
fit Naismith’s ideal, but it was not negated as either the ‘cadaverous
greyhound’ or the ‘massive muscular’ type.
The Hebrew
took the dominant writing about basketball and applied it to the imagined category
of the ‘Jew.’ The Hebrew proposed,
possibly for the first time, that the Jewish body could serve as an advantage in athletic competition. The
Hebrew inverted the lack of physical size from a determinant of Jewish
non-athleticism and weakness into an advantage in basketball. Jewish vitality could be transformed into
endurance and intellectual ability translated into mental acuteness in a rapid
game that required instinctual quickness.
Yet, ascriptions of Jewish intelligence perpetuated the underpinnings of
the stereotype. The implication that
Jews did not have “brute strength” meant Jewish masculine identity had not
escaped perceptions of Jewish physical inferiority. Jews succeeded because of quickness and
thinking, not because of physical strength.
The
Hebrew’s ‘basketball Jew’ possessed the immigrant body and an essential
Jewishness. Speed and the ability for fast
play served as important characteristics, but the Jew also had the necessary
mental makeup needed to succeed. Thus,
the Jew succeeded as, and because of being, a Jew. The racial pride involved in celebrating this
distinctiveness indicated that although Bushnell and others presented Jewish
athleticism as a way to overcome ‘clannish’ tendencies, Jews did not have to
change their racial or cultural identity to become American. In fact, the underlying assumption of the Hebrew’s
argument was that if Jews lost either their small body or their Jewish
intellect, they would also lose their status as superior basketball
players. American Jews had found an
activity that proved their willingness to participate in mainstream society
without losing their positive racial identity.
[2] Paret,
“Basket Ball,” 227; “Basket Ball and Its Success,” New York Times, November 12, 1893. The press
explained that playing positions were virtually interchangeable with the
exception of center, which required an additional characteristic: height. Guerdon N. Messer, How to Play Basket
Ball: A Thesis on the Technique of the Game (New York: American Sports
Publishing Co., 1912); “Order v. Chaos,” Spalding’s Official Basket Ball
Guide 1902-03 (New York: American Sports Publishing Company, 1903).
[3]
Naismith, “Basket Ball,” 340.
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