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I. Introduction
In his opening speech at the second Zionist Congress in Basel on August 28, 1898, Max Nordau invented one of German Zionism's most famous, most fraught, and most challenging concepts: the "muscle Jew."1 Although Nordau did not start exploring 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 Jew-corporeally strong, sexually potent, and morally fit-as the precondition for realizing the national goals of Zionism. After providing an overview of the steadily deteriorating situation of Jews in Russia, Romania, and Galicia-what 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 rejuvenation of the ideals of the Volk and corporeally [korperlich] through the physical rearing of one's offspring, in order to create a lost muscle Jewry [Muskeljudenthum] once again" (SP, 2:24).
Nordau's 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 articulated by Theodor Herzl and other early Zionist proponents;2 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 siecle Europe, marked by both a raging political uncertainty and a condensation of conflicting intellectual 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...