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"Like all our brethren of the second Aliya, the bearers of our Salvation, Isaac Kumer left his country and his homeland and his city and ascended to the Land of Israel to build it from its destruction and to be rebuilt by it." Todd Presner quotes this famous first sentence of S. Y. Agnon's novel Tmol Shilshom (1945) in a chapter titled "The Land of Regeneration." Here, and throughout this fascinating book, Presner examines how early Zionist discourse focused not only on the regeneration of land, but also on rebuilding the body in order to build a Jewish state. Presner's study presents a cultural and intellectual history of the concept and figure of the "regenerated" Jewish body as it appeared within German Jewish media, art, and Zionist imagery from the 1890s to the Weimar Republic. Central to this history is the figure of the Muskeljude, the "muscle Jew," a term coined by Max Nordau at the Second Zionist Congress in 1898. As Presner points out, this complex discourse on the regenerated body needs to be understood within its cultural and historical contexts.
Taking Michel Foucault's notion of "bio-power" as a point of departure, Presner considers the focus on masculinity and discipline in relation to the Jewish body as a response to three concurrent processes: increasing orientations toward racialization and eugenics within European cultures near the end of the nineteenth century, the entanglement of nationalism and the gymnastics movement in nineteenth-century Germany, and, in the larger picture, the dialectic of modernity. The underlying idea that shaped this discussion was the possibility of change: Education and reform, discipline and the vitalization of the body, offered new possibilities for imagining the collective's regeneration and rehabilitation as a nation among others. From Christian Wilhelm Dohm's political treatise On the Civic Improvement of the Jews (1781), which called for Jewish emancipation in Prussia, to the writings of Zionists such as Moses Hess and Theodor Herzl, the Jewish condition had been depicted as a state of social, moral, and physical degeneration caused by oppression, persecution, ghettoization, and...