“The Idea of Sports is Pure and Noble”: Internationalism, Zionism and the Formation of a Global Universal Language

Abstract

Bridging the gap between international history, which often sees modern sport’s ideals as mere background noise masking economic or political motives, and philosophical and theoretical perspectives, which delve into the aesthetic appeal of sports, this article focuses on the interplay between the universal, ethical, and the spectacle of sports within Hebrew Culture in Palestine. Against the backdrop of the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games, the globalization of sports during the interwar period, and the emergence of FIFA and the IOC, it illustrates the growing influence of universal sports ideals within Zionist ultra-national revolutionary culture. By reassessing the mechanisms behind one of the most significant international phenomena of the twentieth century, and exploring the origins of inherent connection between physical activity, mega sporting events, and pseudo-religious discourse, this article offers a nuanced discussion on internationalism and globalization, particularly pertinent in our contemporary era, highlighted by the 2022 World Cup in Qatar and ongoing debates surrounding human rights violations in the name of sports.

Keywords:

• International Olympic Committee
• Nazi Olympic
• universalism
• World Cup
• ethics

Introduction

In June 1937, approximately a year following what is now remembered as ‘Hitler’s Olympiad,’ Yosef Yekutieli, the initiator of the Maccabiah Games, commonly known as the ‘Jewish Olympics,’ corresponded with a German colleague: ‘If it will cause you no difficulty,’ he wrote, ‘and you can obtain at small cost sundry literature about the Olympic Games in Berlin, particularly the propaganda booklet, I would be most grateful to you, because we are about to hold a large international sports event here and we are eager to have appropriate material in our possession.’¹ As one might anticipate, the Hebrew sports activist from Tel Aviv vehemently opposed the Nazi regime and even advocated for a boycott of the games. However, as his letter demonstrates, despite the International Olympic Committee (IOC) proudly collaborating with the antisemitic regime, Yekutieli continued to observe the Olympic Games and the ideological framework they provided as the paradigm for Jewish sports in Palestine.

Nearly ninety years have elapsed since Yekutieli penned his letter, yet in the aftermath of the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar, the tension between the allure of international sports and its ethical ramifications is arguably more pertinent than ever. Sports controversies are not new. Notably, since the 1936 Olympics, the intersection of sports and politics has consistently led to contentious situations, especially involving regimes disregarding liberal principles and human rights. Nonetheless, the Qatar World Cup represents an unprecedented case, with significant evidence of human rights violations emerging during the event’s preparation.² Above all, reports documenting the tragic loss of over six thousand migrant workers’ lives during stadium and infrastructure construction imply that approximately every minute of football played at the World Cup equated to the loss of one human life.³ Consequently, advocating for the integration of sports with a universal ethos rooted in human rights has ostensibly surpassed mere ‘rational’ discourse. Despite these serious circumstances, however, the international response remained largely subdued, with minimal sustained calls for boycotting the event.

This indifference to human life stands out in our current era of heightened sensitivity and cancel culture. It appears that while famous singers and movie stars face repercussions for making inappropriate remarks, and multimillion-dollar artistic endeavors are frequently scrutinized and boycotted by audiences for perceived political affiliations, the world of sports seems to escape similar levels of scrutiny. Yet, even sports fans are no strangers to this discourse, as evidenced by the swift cancellation of the proposed Super League in 2021, following widespread criticism from fans, players, managers, and politicians. However, despite the fervor directed at the Super League for being an ‘act of pure greed,’ and Hollywood’s insistence on informing viewers that ‘no animals were harmed during this production,’ the fans and media coverage of the 2022 FIFA World Cup, an event associated with the tragic loss of dozens of lives, were equally preoccupied with their ability to freely consume alcohol during the tournament in the Muslim country.⁴

Examining this prevalent conundrum as a historical outcome, this article delves into the interwar years, a period marked by what Barbara Keys described as the attainment of modern sports to ‘a level of popularity and worldwide significance that set them apart from what came before and that crystallized the attributes that would shape the enormous sports extravaganzas of the second half of the twentieth century.’⁵ Indeed, while Yekutieli’s embrace of the values of Olympism and liberal international sports may seem commonplace today, it was not obvious before World War Two, when the political and cultural prestige of sports was still nascent, and global sentiment often included vocal criticism. Therefore, in such an environment, it was far from self-evident that an East European Jew residing in Mandatory Palestine would view the modern Olympic Games, as a model for emulation, even after the Games’ organizers chose to collaborate with the Nazi regime.⁶

The ensuing study, thus, explores a global phenomenon from the margins. By following the Hebrew case, it exemplifies the formulation of a universal notion and augments the established literature on the interplay between nationalism and internationalism during the interwar period.⁷ Moreover, it serves as a conduit between two disparate strands of scholarship within the historiography of modern sports, seldom intertwined. On one front, substantial scholarly endeavors delve into international sports, accentuating the varied interests of bodies such as the IOC and the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA). Within this realm, the universal ethos of sports often becomes a peripheral consideration, masking underlying economic or political agendas. Conversely, on the other front, a substantial body of literature is dedicated to exploring the aesthetic allure of sports, portraying it as the nucleus of its appeal.⁸ Thus, highlighting the innate capacity of sports to exist autonomously, akin to art or literature, forging a profound ontological connection that engulfs individuals in the immediacy of the present moment, facilitating intense emotional and corporeal experiences.⁹ From this vantage point, the calls by IOC and FIFA leadership to disentangle sports from politics appear not only cynical but also potentially detrimental, yet, as this article argues, it also underscores that the interwar globalization of modern sports was not solely a bureaucratic dissemination of rules and regulations but also, and perhaps primarily, a philosophy that imbued somatic sports activity with a universal and ethical purpose.

History

The interwar years stand out as a crucial period in the evolution of modern sports. Historian Tony Collins captured this shift succinctly: ‘From a minority middle-class interest outside the anglophone and anglophile nations, sports in the postwar world transformed into a commercial, cultural, and political phenomenon that captivated the imaginations of tens of millions across Europe, Latin America, and Asia, while also commanding the attention of governments and politicians’.¹⁰ As part of this global rise, sports evolved into a mass cultural spectacle that transcended national borders, cultures, and empires, leading to the accumulation of immense wealth and substantial political and cultural influence by its international governing bodies.¹¹

The growing influence of international organizations established in the late nineteenth century, such as FIFA and the IOC, was part of a historical era that also saw the formation of the League of Nations and the Wilsonian moment.¹² However, in contrast to the abundance of international organizations that have long since disappeared, the shift of sports power from London to Lausanne and Zurich accompanied a specific process: the strengthening of an ostensibly universal language that viewed modern sports as separate from politics. Thus, from its foundation, FIFA, and primarily the IOC, emerges not only as organizers of physical competitions but also, and perhaps principally, as the agents and protectors of an ahistorical and universal philosophy, often known as Olympism.¹³

The IOC did not introduce the linkage between sports competitions and ‘noble’ values. Rather, it can be seen as a restoration of the ethos observed in the ancient Greek Olympic Games, which were imbued with religious significance and included a temporary cessation of warfare. Additionally, the advent of modern sports at British bourgeoisie’s public schools was intertwined with Muscular Christianity and the promotion of ‘fair-play’.¹⁴ A worldview on somatic activities which, in part, sought to preserve sports as a ‘pure’ pursuit by prohibiting professionalism, thereby restricting participation for those reliant on labor for their livelihoods.¹⁵ Consequently, from its inception, the application of a ‘moral’ ethos resulted in biases, while also conflicting with the commercial incentives of sports.¹⁶ Thus, the acceptance of professionalism by the pioneers of Association Football likely played a pivotal role in its subsequent global popularity from the late nineteenth century onward. Nonetheless, the IOC remained staunchly committed to amateurism until formally abandoning it in the 1990s.¹⁷

In short, from its outset in the late nineteenth century, the IOC has actively promulgated a discourse portraying sports as an autotelic entity. Over time, the preservation of sports’ purity has become mingled with various ‘ethical’ goals such as the promotion of amateurism, peace, and human rights.¹⁸ However, despite these shifts, the fundamental principle remains unchanged: engagement in sports entails more than just physical activity; it contributes to humanity as a whole. Thus, by ‘revitalizing’ an ancient tradition, the IOC has reshaped the narrative surrounding modern sports from specific social and cultural contexts to a global discourse, thereby elevating ‘pure’ sports from the realm of the imperial to that of the ostensible universal.

Nonetheless, elucidating the core tenets of this worldview poses a formidable challenge. Widely recognized as Olympism, its originator and architect of the modern Olympic Games, Pierre de Coubertin, was not an outstanding philosopher. Despite his ventures into intellectual discourse, his writings are firmly situated within the cultural milieu of fin de siècle Europe, characterized by nuanced contradictions and occasionally opaque articulations.¹⁹ For instance, in 1918, the French aristocrat described his vision as ‘the religion of energy, the cultivation of intense will developed through the practice of manly sport, based on proper hygiene and public-spiritedness, surrounded with art and thought’.²⁰ Paradoxically, perhaps, the enduring legacy of Olympism lies in its ambiguity, which allows individuals across different temporal and spatial contexts to interpret it as they see fit. Indeed, even today, the official definition of Olympism remains somewhat enigmatic: ‘Olympism is a philosophy of life, exalting and combining in a balanced whole the qualities of body, will and mind. Blending sports with culture and education, Olympism seeks to create a way of life based on the joy found in effort, the educational value of good example and respect for universal fundamental ethical principles’.²¹

Neither of these texts should be overly meticulous analyses, yet one intriguing difference lies in the absence of the word ‘religion’. This omission is not necessarily surprising, considering that the prevailing ethos in the contemporary Western world appears to be more secular than that of the fin de siècle yet, one could argue that the modern text is also implicitly religious. However, Coubertin’s linkage of sports with religion was notable not only in comparison to its successors but also to some of its predecessors, who aimed to ‘revive’ the ancient Olympic Games. As historian David Young shows, the earlier attempts lacked Coubertin’s zeal.²² Therefore, the Frenchman’s success cannot be divorced from his ability to cloak sports in pseudo-religious language, transforming the somatic athlete into a symbol that appears distinct from narrow human interests and down-to-earth politics.²³

And still, success was not immediate. The five Summer Olympiads that took place up to the First World War were sloppily managed and attracted little public interest.²⁴ Only after the ‘great war’ did the public’s attention, the number of participants, and the representation of non-Western athletes clearly head upward.²⁵ This development also included the invention of the amply stocked toolbox of Olympic rituals (the five-ring flag, the anthem, the Olympic race, etc.).²⁶ Perhaps the most conspicuous representation of the new cultural role of the Olympics, however, is the contract concluded between the IOC and the Coca-Cola Company.²⁷ This partnership, enduring uninterruptedly since 1928, is a prime symbol of the ability of the Olympic Games to smoothly integrate popular consumerism and an idealistic universal discourse.

Despite the success in the interwar years to match the sublime with kitsch, the modern sports and the Olympic Games were far from a monopoly. The sports scene still included international events of different vision and range, such as the Women’s World Games and the Workers’ Olympiad of the Socialist Workers’ Sport International (SASI), which enrolled more athletes and attracted more viewers than did the ‘bourgeois Olympics’.²⁸ Moreover, many, particularly from older generations, still struggle to grasp the appeal of these new competitions. “In the last century, the wave of sports had not yet reached our continent from England,” wrote the Jewish author Stefan Zweig about his childhood in late nineteenth-century Vienna.²⁹ Despite being a passionate supporter of internationalism and identifying himself as a world citizen, his attitude toward sports remained largely detached and distant. ‘There were yet no stadiums,’ he continued, where a hundred thousand people went wild with joy when one boxer hit another on the chin. The newspapers did not yet send reporters to fill columns with Homeric rapture about a hockey game.³⁰

Hebrew culture in Palestine shifts from sporting hectic to deep beliefs

A comparable sentiment characterized Hebrew culture in Palestine.³¹ Despite the Zionist worldview often diverging significantly from Zweig’s cosmopolitan ideals, their dominant perspective on sports competitions also remained highly skeptical. In other words, while they were subjects of the British Mandate, a construct of the League of Nations, their observation of the phenomenon inclined toward critical scrutiny.³² As the senior Zionist leader Moshe Sharett wrote, the national importance of sports delegations to destinations abroad was ‘widely considered dubious’.³³ The Hebrew writer Yitzhak Demiel expressed himself more acidly: ‘And as nonsensical and frenetic as it is, they also took the national, political, [and] class flags and emblems and dragged them here. No! May it never happen here that some group of young guys, idlers or non-idlers from another people and land, clash at football or boxing with a group of young guys, idlers, from another people and another land. No! Here envoys are dispatched. Agents. Consuls! […] Oh the folly, oh the tastelessness, oh the superficiality—a worldwide, inter-country, international superficiality!’³⁴

Similarly, the four Olympiads that followed the First World War also received severely limited and narrow coverage in the Hebrew press.³⁵ The Hebrew reader was privileged with historical background and essential information but these were often spiced with fierce socialist criticism of the structured discrimination that marred the ‘bourgeois’ Olympic event.³⁶ Even when the Hebrew press traced the source of the Olympic Games to ancient Greece, the event was perceived not from a universalistic position but from a pronouncedly Zionist-national one. ‘Only we Jews have no official delegation to the games,’ wrote a journalist for the liberal Zionist newspaper Ha’aretz in advance of the Summer Olympics in Paris in 1924, ‘and on the opening day, our flag will not be seen among the banners of all the nations. Yes, many Jews are taking part in the contests, but they are fighting for the peoples among whom they dwell’.³⁷

This ethnocentric national stance was largely an expression of the modern body culture that preceded the First World War.³⁸ From its outset in Max Nordau’s ‘muscular Judaism’ speech in the late nineteenth century, via the establishment of the first Maccabi club in Jaffa in 1906, and up to the mid-1930s, the development of the Zionist body mingled with the worldview of German gymnastics (Turnen).³⁹ This outlook, evidenced in many places around the world, emphasized the harmonious development of the individual’s body as part of the nation and therefore considered sports competition a dangerous and unhealthy phenomenon.⁴⁰ In the journal of the Maccabi Eretz Israel Movement (Maccabi Land of Israel, MEI), for example, the Danish educator and gymnast Johannes Lindhard argued in an opinion piece: ‘[…] If it is assumed that a champion should have special qualities from birth […] obviously, setting a record on this basis cannot be a source of honor for the individual and a fortiori for the nation to which of the record-holder belongs’.⁴¹ Accordingly, Lindhard ruled: ‘Sports champions are not for the nation but for extravagances such as racehorses and fighting cocks, just as holding a world record gives no cause of national pride any more than would a champion horse or a winning rooster. Maybe less than them’.⁴²

As the Hebrew publication of Lindhard’s remarks attests, gymnasts from various countries maintained relations and shared knowledge, but the inherent status of the group (as national, class, or religious) in gymnastics also ruled out the formation of an organized international body.⁴³ Thus, as the significance of gymnastics waned and that of international sports organizations grew, the Socialist-Zionist Hapoel association (The worker) swiftly joined SASI and the heads of MEI sought, for lack of choice, to join the liberal sports entities.⁴⁴ For the Zionist organization, however, joining the IOC and FIFA was more than a gateway to international recognition; it also occasioned a clash of worldviews.

This structured tension was directly reflected in the talks between Maccabi officials and international sports organizations on the matter of membership. At the early going of 1922, Yosef Yekutieli approached the IOC in an attempt to join it.⁴⁵ The realpolitik Zionist interest in this outcome was plain: the Olympic Games had become a major central cultural event, and without official recognition from Lausanne the devotees of the Zionist body culture could not even obtain certification to cover them as journalists.⁴⁶ Nevertheless, the MEI people had no understanding whatsoever of the IOC’s underlying values. Whereas the body-culture people in Tel Aviv applied to participate as a Land of Israel team (ostensibly representing world Jewry), the heads of the international sports community agreed to recognize only the geopolitical entity that the League of Nations recognized: Mandatory Palestine. As a result, the international organization demanded that the local body represent not only Jews but all inhabitants of the country.⁴⁷ This ‘civic’ stance dashed the Zionists’ expectations. As Yekutieli wrote to his colleague after first becoming aware of the rigid international rules: ‘There seems to be no hope for the Jews to appear at the Olympic Games as Jews’.⁴⁸ About a decade later, Yekutieli and his associates finally managed to join the international bodies officially—FIFA in 1929 and the IOC in 1934. Paradoxically, however, this merely underscored the ideological gulf between the sides. The heads of MEI added random and uninfluential Arab members to the local committee, creating the appearance of fairness but making full Jewish representation possible internally.⁴⁹ This end-around allowed the Hebrew culture to join the two large sports organizations. Officially, the Palestine Olympic Committee was established; in practice, however, it did not represent even all of the Jewish population in the region.⁵⁰

The Zionist ruse may be indicative of the international sports organizations’ weakness, yet it also allowed them to influence and shape sports in the Levant. Indeed, it seems unlikely that Yekutieli and his comrades could have duped the IOC and FIFA today, but from that moment onward they were also the official agents of international sports in Palestine. In May 1938, for example, the Secretary-General of FIFA reminded his Zionist electees in the Middle East: ‘It is supposed that you inform me of every such permission given by you because the F.I.F.A must know and authorize every encounter against non-affiliated organizations’.⁵¹ Thus, the members of MEI became de facto ‘foot soldiers’ for the international bodies’ prime mission—consolidating their authority over competitive sports worldwide.⁵²

In contrast to FIFA, however, the heads of the IOC apparently viewed their powers as more abstract. The Olympians from Lausanne were less bothered with ongoing management of games than were the footballers from Zurich because they were not called upon to subordinate their control of the world’s most popular and profitable sports.⁵³ Accordingly, they engaged less in micro-management and even remained more inured to the intrusion of sports professionalism.⁵⁴ In other words, the need to organize a large quadrennial sporting event (in the interwar era, the Winter Games and the Summer Games took place the same year) of limited commerciality gave the IOC a convenient platform for the maintenance of ideological piety.

the difference between FIFA and the IOC stemmed not only from material circumstances. Unlike the high-ups in Zurich, the IOC headship sought to transform the organization’s new members into representatives of an idea. Shortly after the Palestine Olympic Committee came into being, the heads of the IOC sent an envoy to the Middle East. The chosen agent, Theodor Schmidt, took little interest in creating organizational unity in the field of competition. On the contrary: he admitted cordially that ‘sports in Palestine do not walk down the old European paths; instead, they often take on original forms’.⁵⁵ His limited reference to the quality and organization of sports stands out against his avid interest in the philosophy of the matter. Consequently, the Austrian bureaucrat devoted most of the visit to a lecture about the ‘Olympic idea’.⁵⁶ The speech, delivered at a hall in Tel Aviv, was apparently well understood by the East European Jews who had immigrated to the Middle East. In the following days, Schmidt’s remarks were translated into Hebrew and published in the local press.⁵⁷ Furthermore, about two months later the Palestine Olympic Committee announced, in its first resolution, ‘the translation of the propaganda pamphlet published by the International Olympic Committee into Hebrew and Arabic for distribution in Eretz Israel in order to explain the Olympic idea and its value’.⁵⁸

The Zionist sports organization seems to have absorbed the transnational language with celerity. During the 1930s, the proponents of the Hebrew body culture gradually began to treat the language of international sports as a philosophy equipped with concrete political practice. MEI officials, for example, asked FIFA to punish Arab groups in Palestine for ostensibly mixing politics and sports⁵⁹ and, from the opposite side of the divide, requested funding to send missions of athletes abroad by quoting de Coubertin’s adage, ‘The most important thing is not winning but taking part’.⁶⁰

The Nazi Olympics as a modern-day binding of Isaac

The place of the Olympic ideal in sports politics found even more salient expression with the approach of the “Nazi Olympics.” In retrospect it may be hard to disassociate the ongoing interest in the event from Nazism itself, namely, what the Holocaust scholar Saul Friedländer called ‘kitsch and death’.⁶¹ Nevertheless, the Berlin Olympiad also has significance in the history of modern sport and Olympism. The games had been awarded to the Weimar Republic in 1931 in order to signify Germany’s return to the Olympic movement after its suspension in the aftermath of the First World War. After the Nazis rose to power in 1933, however, a transnational wave of protest erupted, calling for a boycott of the event.⁶² The games ultimately took place as planned but were preceded by the first significant public debate over the limits and essence of the universal language of sports.⁶³ Namely, did holding the games under the banner of the Third Reich reinforce the ‘purity’ of sports and its separation from ‘impure’ politics, or did it degrade sports and therefore strike a blow at their lofty values?⁶⁴

The debate reverberated in the Hebrew culture of Palestine. At the ‘political level’, the Zionist objection to the event was firm and even before the official invitation arrived, senior Zionist leaders applied visible pressure on MEI to keep it from participating.⁶⁵ Against this background, the heads of the Palestine Olympic Committee announced their intention of boycotting the games and already refused to participate in November 1934, before the transnational boycott reached its tipping point.⁶⁶ Nonetheless, even in their official letter of rejection the heads of MEI made no reference to antisemitism and racial discrimination; instead, they expressed their hope that ‘in future years our small country will be able to send its representative sportsmen to participate in these contests in a true spirit of international sport’.⁶⁷

One may read these lines as a diplomatic evasion, but similar reasoning against participation was often voiced until the contests began. About seven months before the opening ceremony, Yekutieli wrote: ‘Honest athletes from all Diaspora communities worldwide, who learn to “play fair” every day on the playing field, will not lend their hand to the Berlin games and will not take part in them. […] All will be true to the Olympic idea and will remember the adage of Baron de Coubertin, creator of the modern Olympic Games—“all sports for all peoples!”’⁶⁸ Yekutieli did not explicitly mention Jews in his remarks: instead, like many sportspeople around the world, he touted the Olympic idea as the ethical gold standard of “sports politics.”⁶⁹ The wish to safeguard the purity of the “Olympic idea” appeared not only in the publicistic writings of supporters of the Zionist body culture but also in official documents. ‘The Palestine Maccabi conference vehemently protests the decision to hold the next Olympiad in Germany,’ it was stated in the minutes of the organization’s national conference, ‘a country where all the principles of freedom and human fraternity that underlie the Olympic idea are crudely trampled’.⁷⁰

This stance diverged markedly from the common position in the Hebrew culture in Palestine. In foreign news columns, for example, writers maintained an ‘official’ Zionist line that treated the event as part of the Jewish people’s broad political struggle against antisemitism.⁷¹ Accordingly, the chieftains of world sports and other proponents of the Berlin Olympiad were perceived as fellow travelers of the heads of the Third Reich.⁷² Ha’aretz, for example, described American sportsmen who favored holding the Olympics as ‘starting to talk literally in Goebbels’ language’.⁷³ In contrast to this Zionist political stance, by which ‘the Olympics affair is not just a sports affair for us’,⁷⁴ the members and heads of MEI construed the question of holding the games as a debate over the purity of modern sports. In February 1936, for instance, they claimed that the opponents of holding the Berlin games had ‘true sports awareness’ whereas those favoring the event ‘did not act for the purpose of sports. […] The purpose of their war ceased to be the Olympiad for its own sake; it was more their intent to cleanse the Nazi regime at large’.⁷⁵ In contrast to the prevailing perspective of Hebrew culture, the leaders of the MEI have already embraced and become spokespeople for the philosophy of Olympism.

The MEI’s members belief in the Olympic idea was not lip service. Thus, the eventual occurrence of the event under an anti-Semitic regime genuinely traumatized them. As, MEI stalwart and chair of the Palestine Olympic Committee, Selig Rosecki, wrote, on the eve of the inauguration of the games in Berlin: ‘I accuse them all. All those who destroyed my soul-held belief in the lofty ideals of modern sports!’ He railed against ‘the representative athletes who will convene together in the Berlin stadium. […] You have forsaken the exalted ideals of the sportsman […] I accuse you all of treachery—in the name […] of those vigilantly defending the idealistic principles of international sports’.⁷⁶ Rosecki’s piece, headlined ‘J’Accuse,’ evoking Émile Zola’s famous utterance, did not spare the heads of the IOC: ‘You dignified lords who sit on the International Olympic Committee […] with a sweet smile on your lips, proclaim fraternity, equality, and liberty […] specifically for Nazi Germany, the land that has inscribed on its blood-red banner the slogans that blatantly contradict the principles of international sports: enmity toward those who belong to another race, hatred of those of other nationality; contempt for those whose views diverge from their own’.⁷⁷ Thus, from Rosecki’s standpoint, too, the main victim of Nazism was the purity of the Olympic idea.

Rosecki’s remarks, however, were aimed at the Jewish population in Palestine and not at the international sports community. Accordingly, his reasoning, focusing on the Olympic idea and not on Nazi antisemitism, suggests that he was not necessarily trying to convince the target readership but was rather describing his worldview.

Although Rosecki’s words appear to originate in pain, in cold ‘rational’ terms, one may suggest the ‘Nazi Olympics’ should have drawn an uncrossable line between the Zionist athletes and the IOC. Indeed, the MEI not only boycotted the event but also shunned the Diaspora Jewish athletes who agreed to participate in it. About seven months before the games began, the MEI leadership still ‘[refused] to believe that Jews will prefer the Nazi Olympic wreath over Israel’s humble wreath as it fights for its existence against mortal enemies’.⁷⁸ Even after their hopes were dashed, they vowed to remember ‘the names of the Jewish athletes who are bringing disgrace upon the entire Jewish people, which is fighting for its rights’. ‘The sportsmen here in Palestine’, they continued, ‘will remember those names well, lest they think, in their lack of a sense of self-respect, that they will still manage to appear once [again] at the Maccabi stadium’.⁷⁹ This was no idle threat. The Maccabiah Games, in 1932 and 1935, in which only Jews took part, did not necessarily need the patronage of the IOC and attracted almost as many athletes, from almost as many countries, as did the Summer Olympics.⁸⁰

By that juncture, however, the ethnocentric-nationalistic lens of gymnastics was already intertwined with the lofty ideology of Olympism. Yekutieli, in elucidating the significance and essence of the Maccabiah Games to the Hebrew public, wrote in 1935: ‘It will be to fulfill the forthcoming Maccabiah Games akin to the international Olympiad until they evolve into the Hebrew Olympics!’⁸¹ Hence, the adherence to the ‘lofty ideals of modern sports’ ultimately resulted in deference to the ‘church’ – the international bodies that embodied (and engendered) these ideals. On the inaugural day of the games in Berlin, Rosecki and Yekutieli wrote the following to the IOC Congress, held in Germany: ‘All our sportsmen are following with great interest what is being done at your honorable congress, because we all expect good hope from you work. We pray that your honorable and important mission for the development of physical culture for the befit of mankind irrespective of religion and race will be crowned with great success’.⁸²

Following the Olympiad, the MEI officials concluded the affair by writing that a ‘momentary political contingency’ had overshadowed the ‘pure timeless ideal that undergirds the Olympic Games’.⁸³ Thus, in greater part they merely reinforced the IOC’s point of view, which invalidated the mingling of sports and politics. As an editorialist in one of the Hebrew-language sports inserts affirmed, ‘Obviously, lots of ‘foreign bodies’ harass the mighty movement […] but the idea of sports is pure and noble’.⁸⁴

True believers

The impact of the universalistic sports discourse transcended the Olympic domain. Two years after the Berlin games, the Mandatory Palestine football team took part in the preliminary rounds of the World Cup. It was the second time that the Zionist team participated in this event. The initial occasion took place four years earlier in a dual match against the Egyptian national squad. The two peoples, the Jewish and the Egyptian, have a lengthy mythology that traces back to Moses, Pharaoh, and the Exodus, yet the relatively extensive coverage of the match, focused largely on technical and informative matters including essential information, a concise account of the composition of the teams, and brief attention to the game itself.⁸⁵ In 1938, in contrast, when the Zionist team competed against Greece in the preliminary rounds, the coverage included on an additional exalted and ahistorical level of attention that freighted the contest with universal values. ‘Through the mist of hatred and villainy, a beam of light breaks through’, one Hebrew sports journalist wrote. ‘The two historical peoples meet again after millennia, on the battlefield of—peace’.⁸⁶ The game on the field was now imagined as a moment that connected the past to the present, the ancient to the modern. Rosecki’s faith in the ideal of international sports was also restored. ‘We will now meet in a delightful sports competition on the football pitch, in a battle held under the international rules of sport, in an atmosphere of nobility and mutual respect’, he wrote. ‘It’s a war of peace, in which, even if it’s fought with sublime ferocity, the rivals remember that they are brethren, members of the great global sports family’.⁸⁷

The Olympic paradox of ‘a war of peace’ only became more acute when it reverts to history and to the Jewish-Arab conflict in Mandatory Palestine. The belief in the Olympic ideal did kindle hope among adherents of the Zionist body culture that sports would bring the sides closer. The following, for example, was written in Ha’aretz just before the violent eruption of the Arab Revolt in 1936: ‘Perhaps at first at least one group of Arab sportsmen will be found who will heed our voice and our demands not to mix sports with politics and, perhaps, good interrelations between these sportsmen from the two peoples will lead to an improvement in cordial relations at large’.⁸⁸ Concurrently, however, the international language that aspires to separate sports from politics was used to drive the Arab athletes off the playing field and exclude them from international representation.⁸⁹ From this standpoint, Olympism only led to discrimination within the “great global sports family.”

Neither did the universalistic philosophy induce a conceptual shift among the heads of MEI, who still viewed the world through Jewish-national lenses. In 1935, for instance, Yekutieli once again approached the senior IOC official (and eventual president), Sigfrid Edström, requesting permission for every Jewish athlete worldwide to represent Palestine.⁹⁰ The IOC rejected the proposal, indicating that Zionists had limited interest in grasping the civic principle of Olympic representation. As Yekutieli wrote, for example, the Maccabiah Games were ‘a national test,’ in which ‘hundreds and thousands of young people […] who will immigrate to Eretz Israel […] [and] breathe the air of the homeland’.⁹¹ In that sense, the metaphor of the playing field as an ahistorical encounter between their ‘forebears’—the Maccabi rebels and the Hellenistic warriors of antiquity—was more comfortable for the heads of MEI than contesting with palpable and more proximate reality.

Thus, akin to advocates worldwide, global sports empowered MEI members to weave a narrative that seemingly transcended immediate reality and fleeting moments. The fusion of national and international elements was not exclusive to sports but underscored the IOC’s view that, like the Catholic Church, sports could symbolize anything—be it war, peace, or human rights—as long as it culminated in the stadium. Just hours before the Berlin Olympics commenced, Yosef Yekutieli penned his thoughts ‘We also know that we are weak; therefore, our protests and demand are not heeded. […] Our answer to the Olympic Games in Berlin will be […] strong participation in the Twelfth Olympiad. […] We will bring together athletes who remained loyal to their country. […] Then we will no longer be weak. We will be strong and the whole world will know our answer’.⁹²

Conclusion

As it turned out, the Twelfth Olympiad did not take place, and the Olympic Games resumed only twelve years in 1950. By then, however, it was another world. The decline of the Workers’ Sport and gymnastics organizations after the Second World War paved the way for modern sports and the Olympic movement to progress without the weight of the past. With the memory of the Nazi Olympics as widespread success and the vague sense of universal permanence, the helmspersons of international sports of international sports found it easier than ever to overcome various scandals and bans.⁹³ On the contrary, the perception of international sports as a global arena that ostensibly transcends national earthly politics allowed it to become a monopoly serving various symbolic roles in current affairs. Thus, the pre-war rivalry among the liberal, socialist, and communist camps, waged in separate international sports organizations, unfolded since the Cold War under one Olympic banner.⁹⁴

After nearly a century of modern sports dominance, its historical essence often remains elusive. As Barbara Keys wrote: ‘Sport occupies center stage in today’s conceptions of ‘physical culture’ to such an extent that we now find it difficult to grasp just how historically conditioned and narrowly framed it is’.⁹⁵ Yet, without memory, however, the universalistic ethical value of modern sport often perceived as self-evident. Even intellectuals who criticize today’s neoliberal consumption culture invoke aesthetic and ahistorical terminology when they contemplate sports.⁹⁶ In 2006, for example, the American writer David Foster Wallace wrote: ‘High-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty. […] Its power and appeal are universal. It has nothing to do with sex or cultural norms’.⁹⁷ Perhaps, as Foster Wallace noted, we truly need sports to reconcile ourselves with the fact of having a body, yet, from that perspective, contemporary significance given to dilemmas such as integrating transgender athletes merely attest to the continued meaning of the playing field.

While looming advancements in biotechnology and robotics may potentially reshape human perspectives on the body, for now, modern sport, particularly in its international context, remains deeply intertwined with its ideological and autotelic essence.⁹⁸ Despite its professed commitment to universal ideals like combating racism and promoting peace, it often perpetuate discrimination and lend support to non-liberal regimes.⁹⁹ In light of these realities, recent criticisms have brought attention to a range of issues, from environmental damage to human rights violations, corruption and excessive costs.¹⁰⁰ However, such efforts, that view Olympism as a façade, have largely fallen short, and the principle of separating sport and politics remains largely unchallenged.¹⁰¹

The conspicuous absence of public and political outcry regarding injustices presents a stark contrast to the swift and successful protests against the Super League in 2021. Historically, modern sports have been closely intertwined with the rise of capitalism rather than universalism and human rights. As extensively demonstrated by Tony Collins and numerous social historians, the penetration of competitive sports into society is inseparable from the middle-class capitalist worldview.¹⁰² However, the fervent accusations that the authenticity of the sporting experience would be undermined by greed ignited a plethora of visceral emotions against a perceived violation of sporting values. Thus, if, to be intentionally blunt, the juxtaposition between the failed protests against international sports events and the success of the Super League boycott illuminates that, much like many religions, Olympism allows for sacrifices but does not tolerate sinners.

Viewed from this perspective, the philosophy of the Olympics and sports, aiming to encapsulate the universal within the human body, is essentially a language that articulates verbally what is fundamentally an aesthetic experience. Set against this background, the heads of the IOC are both responding to and forming the modern human desire for the athletic spectacles. Like the global spread of physical aesthetics of bodybuilding at the turn of the nineteenth century, the issue may concern not the diffusion of Western norms but mainly a similar response to the challenges of modernity and globalization.¹⁰³ Thus, as Arjun Appadurai remarked in regard to cricket in India, international sports also represent changing symbolizations of diverse human needs.¹⁰⁴ ‘If cricket did not exist in India’, Appadurai noted, ‘something like it would certainly have been invented for the conduct of public experiments with the means of modernity’.¹⁰⁵

However, unlike cricket, which India  inherit from the Empire, Olympism is indeed the invention of Coubertin and the International Olympic Committee. Yet, despite being a modern historical event, with a very clear and relatively recent chronological origin, the question persists: why do so many people around the world believe in the connection between physical sports activity and a universalistic, pseudo-religious language, imbued with a teleological ethical significance? Thus, ultimately, whether the sports ideal attains its universalistic purpose matters less than the fact that so many people still believe in its existence.

Shortly before the commencement of the games in Qatar, FIFA President Gianni Infantino and Secretary General Fatma Samoura penned a letter. ‘Please, let’s now focus on the football!,’ they wrote, ‘We know football does not live in a vacuum and we are equally aware that there are many challenges and difficulties of a political nature all around the world. But please do not allow football to be dragged into every ideological or political battle that exists’.¹⁰⁶ ‘We try to respect all opinions and beliefs, without handing out moral lessons to the rest of the world’, they continued,¹⁰⁷

‘One of the great strengths of the world is indeed its very diversity, and if inclusion means anything, it means having respect for that diversity. No one people or culture or nation is “better” than any other. This principle is the very foundation stone of mutual respect and non-discrimination. And this is also one of the core values of football. So, please let’s all remember that and let football take center stage’.¹⁰⁸ This abstract wording bears resemblance, in many ways, to both Coubertin’s definition and that of the contemporary IOC definition of Olympism. As astute sports journalist, Adam Crafton, commented the letter ‘is lamentable, irrational and dumbfoundingly stupid’.¹⁰⁹ Ending his article with a report on a gay man ‘That was lured to a hotel room via a dating app and found Qatari officials waiting to attack him upon arrival. They raped him, the report said, before arresting him. Anyway, as Gianni says, back to the football everyone’.¹¹⁰ Yet, this is exactly what the world did. The event garnered high ratings, and a BBC poll even voted it the best World Cup of the century.¹¹¹

This shift from controversy to empowerment is not unprecedented. African American runner Jesse Owens, for instance, served in 1936 as a convenient shield, enabling the IOC to proceed with the games under a racist regime. Yet, today, he is predominantly remembered as an icon of the fight against discrimination, underscoring the significance of separating sports and politics.¹¹² Similarity, in the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City, black athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos were viewed as controversial figures who openly criticized the IOC leadership.¹¹³ However, their iconic gesture of raising clenched fists on the podium is now seen, even by the Olympic establishment, as a powerful symbol of how sports competition can advance universal justice.

On January 10, 1939, eight months before Germany invaded Poland, Sigfrid Edström, turned down Yekutieli’s repeated requests to allow Jews from all over the world to represent Palestine: ‘I hardly think the International Olympic Committee will change his fundamental rules to assist you.’ The Swede, however, also added a threat and an invitation:

I much regret that your country did not participate in the Olympic Games in Berlin because in not doing that, so you mixed politics in the Olympic Games which is a sin hard to forgive. We will certainly be happy to have Palestine take part in the Olympic Games in Helsingfors [Helsinki] and hope you will send a small but good team.¹¹⁴

The first Zionist delegation to the Olympic Games was indeed to Helsinki, but, thirteen years later, in 1952. The Zionist sports headship wanted to take part in the London games in 1948 but were disappointed to find that the new political entity that had come into being—the State of Israel—would have to reconstitute its Olympic Committee.¹¹⁵

Even after transforming into sovereign Israelis, the leaders of Zionist sports still struggled to fully grasp the tension between citizenship and participation. However, despite the local interpretation, they were no longer under the threat of sin. Already by the 1940s, MEI warmly adopted the torch race, an Olympic ritual that the Nazi regime had invented in 1936 for propaganda purposes in Eastern Europe. The Zionist athletes merely converted the Greek flame on Mount Olympus into a torch erupting from the ancient Maccabis’ stronghold in Modi’in.¹¹⁶ Similarly, instead of being marched across Eastern Europe—the Nazis’ intended Lebensraum—it continued on a journey among Jewish communities around the world until it returned to the stadium for the opening ceremony.

Acknowledgment

I am grateful to the Humboldt and Minerva Foundations for their generous support, which has afforded me the time to reflect and craft this text. And to Newcastle United Football Club, for enriching my life with over thirty years of pure joy and noble sorrow, shaping my sports perspective with experiences free from cynicism.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ofer Idels

Ofer Idels holds the position of Minerva Postdoctoral Fellow at the Historisches Seminar, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. He is the author of the upcoming book “Embodying the Revolution: The Hebrew Experience and the Globalization of Modern Sports in Interwar Palestine” and of “Zionism: Emotions, Language, and Experience,” forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.

Notes

1 Yosef Yekutieli to Hans Friedenthal, June 8, 1937, Maccabi Sports Union Archive, 5.1/24, Ramat-Gan, IL (hereafter, cites as MCA).

2 Amnesty International, June 15, 2023 (https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2023/06/qatar-hundreds-of-migrant- workers-employed-as-security-guards-at-fifa-world-cup-denied-justice-for-abuses/)

3 The Guardian, February 23, 2021 (https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/feb/23/revealed-migrant-

worker-deaths-qatar-fifa-world-cup-2022); The Guardian 27 November, 2022 (https://www.theguardian.com/football/2022/nov/27/qatar-deaths-how-many-migrant-workers-died-world-cup-number- toll); Humans Rights Watch, November 30, 2022 (https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/11/30/qatar-world-cup-chief- publicly-admits-high-migrant-death-tolls).

4 CNN, November 30, 2022 (https://edition.cnn.com/2022/11/30/football/alcohol-world-cup-fans-qatar-2022-spt-

intl/index.html); NPR, November 19, 2022 (https://www.npr.org/2022/11/19/1137783957/world-cup-qatar-fan- restrictions-alcohol).

5 Keys, Barbara J. Keys, Globalizing Sport: National Rivalry and International Community in the 1930s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 2.

6 Ofer Idels, ‘How to lose gracefully in an internationally selfish world: gender, the “New Jew” and the underestimation of athletic performance in interwar Palestine,’ Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 21, no.2 (2022): 215–233.

7 Glenda Sluga, Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism (Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013).

8 For example: John Zilcosky and Marlo A. Burks (eds), The Allure of Sports in Western Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019).

9 Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, In Praise of Athletic Beauty (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Press, 2006).

10 Tony Collins, Sport in Capitalist Society: A Short History, (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), 85.

11 Wilson Chacko Jacob, Working Out Egypt: Effendi Masculinity and Subject Formation in Colonial Modernity, 1870–1940 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 125–156; Andrew D. Morris, Marrow of the Nation: A History of Sport and Physical Culture in Republican China, (Berkeley, CA: Berkeley University Press, 2004), 141–180; Stefan Huebner, Pan-Asian Sports and the Emergence of Modern Asia, 1913–1974 (Singapore: NUS Press, 2016) 55–102; Mark Dyreson, ‘The Emergence of Consumer Culture and the Transformation of Physical Culture: American Sport in the 1920s’, Journal of Sport History, 16 (1989): 261–281; Erik Jensen, Body by Weimar: Athletes, Gender, and German Modernity (New York: Oxford Press, 2010), Joan Tumblety, Remaking the Male Body: Masculinity and the Uses of Physical Culture in Interwar and Vichy France, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Dennis J. Frost, Seeing Stars: Sports Celebrity, Identity, and Body Culture in Modern Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).

12 Sluga, Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism, 45–96; Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Susan Pedersen, The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 2015.

13 Dikaia Chatziefstathiou and Ian P. Henry, Discourses of Olympism: From the Sorbonne 1894 to London 2012 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

14 J.A. Mangan, Athleticism in the Victorian and Edwardian Public School (London and New York: Routledge, 2000).

15 Collins, Sport in Capitalist Society, 27-37; James Walvin, The People’s Game: A Social History of British Football

(London: Random House 2014).

16 Tony Collins, A Social History of Rugby Union (London and New York, Routledge, 2015), 1–21; Mike Huggins, The Victorians and Sport (New York: Palgrave, 2004); John Hargreaves, Sport, Power, Culture (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1986); David Kirk, Schooling Bodies: School Practice and Public Discourse 1880–1950 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1998

17 Matthew P Llewellyn, John Gleaves, The Rise and Fall of Olympic Amateurism (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2016).

18 Seth Brown, ‘De Coubertin’s Olympism and the Laugh of Michel Foucault: Crisis Discourse and the Olympic Games’, Quest, 65 (2012): 150–164; Barbara J. Keys, ‘Introduction’in The Ideals of Global Sport: From Peace to Human Rights, ed. Barbara J. Keys Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania University Press 2019).

19 Eugen Weber, “Pierre de Coubertin and the Introduction of Organized Sport in France,” Journal of Contemporary History 15 (1970): 3–26.

20 Cited in Norbert Müller, Olympism: Selected Writings/Pierre de Coubertin. ed. (Lausanne: International Olympic Committee, 2000), 44.

21 Olympic Charter International Olympic Committee, 8 August 2021, https://stillmed.olympics.com/media/Document%20Library/OlympicOrg/General/EN-Olympic-Charter.pdf

22 David Young. The Modern Olympics: A Struggle for Revival (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 1–67.

23 Ibid, 86-95; John J. MacAloon, This Great Symbol: Pierre de Coubertin and the Origins of the Modern Olympic (London: Routledge, 2013). On the legacy of the sublime in a wider context see: Robert Doran, The Theory of the Sublime from Longinus to Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

24 Allen Guttmann, The Olympics: A History of the Modern Games (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 21- 36.

25 Ibid, 37-52.

26 David Clay Large, Nazi Games: The Olympics of 1936 (New York: W.W. Norton, 2007), 21–56.

27 Keys, Globalizing Sport, 104–106.

28 David Steinberg, “The Worker’s Sport International 1920–1928”, Journal of Contemporary History 13 (1978): 233–251; Mary H Leigh and Thérèse M. Bonin ‘The Pioneering Role of Madame Alice Milliat and the FSFI in Establishing International Track and Field Competition for Women,’ Journal of Sport History 4, no1 (1977): 72–83.

29 Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964), 58.

30 Ibid.

31 Idels, ‘How to lose gracefully,’ 5–9.

32 Ibid.

33 Moshe Shertok to MEI, April 23, 1934, S25/6711, Central Zionist Archives, Jerusalem, Israel (hereafter, cites as: CZA) For early criticism from the Maccabi organization, see Do’ar HaYom, 29 July 1925, 5.

34 Hapoel Hatzair, 14 December 1934, 16–17.

35 For examples, see Ha’aretz, 16 July 1924; Do’ar HaYom, 23 June 1927, 2; Davar, 23 February 1928, 3.

36 Davar, 14 June 1928, 3; Do’ar HaYom, 10 August 1932, 1; Do’ar HaYom, 19 August 1932, BaMaslul, August 1932.

37 Ha’aretz, 16 July 1924, 4.

38 Sebastian Conrad, ‘Globalizing the Beautiful Body: Eugen Sandow, Bodybuilding, and the Ideal of Muscular Manliness at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,’ Journal of World History, 32 (2021): 123.

39 Todd S. Presner, Muscular Judaism: The Jewish Body and The Politics of Regeneration (New York: Routledge, 2007), 106–154. On Gymnastics see: George L. Mosse, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (Oxford: Oxford University Press,1996), 40–47; Christiane Eisenberg, ‘Charismatic Nationalist Leader: Turnvater Jahn,’ The International Journal of the History of Sport 13 (1996): 14–27; Svenja Goltermann,” Exercise and Perfection: Embodying the Nation in Nineteenth: Century Germany”, European Review of History 11 (2004): 333–346.

40 Michael Hau, The Cult of Health and Beauty in Germany a Social History, 1890–1930 (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2003), 177.

41 HaMaccabi, 22 September 1936, 11.

42 Ibid.

43 Gertrud Pfister, ed. Gymnastics, a Transatlantic Movement: From Europe to America (London: Routledge, 2011); Annette Hofmann, ed. Turnen and Sport: Transatlantic Transfers (New York and Berlin: Waxmann, 2004). 6–7; HaMaccabi, April 1933; Do’ar HaYom, 3 May 1936, 1.

44 Uriel Simri, ‘Hapoel: Israel’s worker sport Organization’ in The Story of Worker Sport, eds Arnd Kruger and James Riordan (Champaign: Human Kinetics, 1996), 142–153.

45 Yekutieli to Deedes, April 23, 1922, 8/1120, MCA.

46 G. van Rossem, to Maccabi Sports Association, 19 April 1928, 1.19/61, Wingate Institute Archive, Netanya, IL (hereafter, cites as: WIA).

47 Baillet-Latour to Yekutiely, 26 September 1933, Israel-Correspondance 1930–1934, International Olympic Committee Archives, Lausanne, SZ (hereafter, cites as: IOC)

48 Yekutieli to Gur Arye, 8 July, 1924, 1.19/61, WIA.

49 Yekutiely to Kisch, 29 March 1934, 5-1-23, MCA; Mustakim to Yekutieli, 27 March 1934, Israel-Correspondance 1930-1934, IOC.

This “solution,” which also allowed the MEI to join FIFA in 1929, solidified the Jewish attitude toward the new body not under its official name, the Palestine Olympic Committee, but under a different and parochial name: the Olympic Committee of the Land of Israel.

50 See for example Hapoel criticism on MEI and the local Olympic Committee: "Hamishakim HaOlympim," (the Olympic Games, 1935, WIA, uncited.

51 Dr. Ivo Schricker to Mr. I. Chalutz, 4 May 1938, Palestine/Israel 1932–1950, Fédération Internationale de Football Association Archives Zurich SZ (hereafter, cites as: FIFA)

52 Schricker to Chalutz, 3 September 1935, ibid; Schricker to Chalutz, 16 August 1938, Ibid.

53 Keys, Globalizing Sport, 50–51.

54 Ibid, 48–49.

55 “Conversation between Mr. S. Rosecki and Dr. Schmidt,” 1934, WIA, 1-19/61.

56 Hed HaMaccabi, April 1934, 11.

57 Ibid, 12.

58 Do’ar HaYom, 28 June 1934, 1.

59 I. Chalutz and S. Torok to Schricker, September 1932; Palestine/Israel 1932–1950, FIFA.

60 Yosef Yekutieli to unknown correspondent, 29 March 1933, 1–39, MCA.

61 Saul Friedländer, Reflections of Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1993).

62 Arnd Krüger and William Murray, eds. The Nazi Olympics: Sport, Politics and Appeasement in the 1930s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003).

63 Large, Nazi Games, 69–110.

64 Preserve the Olympic Ideal: A Statement of the Case Against American Participation in the Olympic Games at Berlin, 1935, A09.6L Wiener Library, Tel-Aviv University.

65 Locker to Ben-Gurion, 21 February 1934, S25/6711, CZA; Chertok to Aluf, 3 April 1934, S25/6711, CZA.

66 Davar, 24 April 1934, 3.

67 Kisch to the Organizing Committee of the XI Olympiad, 4 November 1934, 1.19/61, WIA.

68 HaMaccabi, 31 January 1936, 6.

69 Do’ar HaYom, 17 January 1936, 4.

70 Do’ar HaYom, 19 December 1935, 6.

71 Ha’aretz, 11 January 1935; Davar, 6 November 1935, 1

72 Ha’aretz, 8 December 1935, 1.

73 Ha’aretz, 10 December 1935, 2.

74 Ibid.

75 HaMaccabi, 14 February 1936, 21.

76 HaBoker Sport, 1 August 1936, 2.

77 Ibid.

78 Do’ar HaYom, 17 January 1936, 4

79 Ibid.

80 Nina S Spiegel, Embodying Hebrew Culture: Aesthetics, Athletics, and Dance in the Jewish Community of Mandate Palestine (Detroit: Wayne University Press, 2013), 57–96.

81 Do’ar HaYom, 2 April 1935, 10.

82 Yekutieli and Rosecki to Edström, 24 July 1936, 1.19/61. WIA. See also: HaBoker Sport, August 1, 1936, 1.

83 HaMaccabi, 22 September 1936, 2.

84 HaBoker Sport, 4 February 1939, 1.

85 See, for example: Ha’aretz, 23 March 1934, 7; Ha’aretz, 13 April 1934, 7; Davar, 9 April 1934, 7; Hed HaMaccabi, April 1934, 4–5.

86 Eretz-Israel-Yavan, 19 January 1938, 2.

87 Ibid, 3.

88 Ha’aretz, 17 April 1934, 12.

89 See Chalutz to Schricker, 6 September 1932, Palestine/Israel 1932–1950, FIFA; Chalutz to Dr. Schricker, 17 January 1933, ibid; Schricker to Mr. I.J. Chalutz, 6 April 1935, Ibid; Schricker to Chalutz, 30 March 1936, Ibid; Chalutz to Schriecker, March 14, 1937.

90 Yekutieli to Edström, 7 March 1935, 5-1-23, MCA.

91 Do’ar HaYom, 2 April 1935, 10.

92 HaBoker Sport, 1 August 1936, 2.

93 Collins, Sport in Capitalist Society, 100–125.

94 Robert Edelman and Christopher Young, The Whole World was Watching: Sport in the Cold War (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019).

95 Keys, Globalizing Sport, 182.

96 There are numerous examples. For instance: J. M. Coetzee and Paul Auster, Here and Now: Letters, 2008–2011 (London, Vintage Books, 2014).

97 The New York Times, 20 August 2006, https://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/20/sports/playmagazine/20federer.html

98 Tara Magdalinski, Sport, Technology and the Body: The Nature of Performance (London: Routledge, 2009).

99 David Clay Large, Munich 1972 Tragedy, Terror, and Triumph at the Olympic Games (New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2012).

100 Andrew Zimbalist, Circus Maximus: The Economic Gamble Behind Hosting the Olympics and the World Cup (Washington D.C: Brookings Institution Press, 2016); Chris Dempsey and Andrew Zimbalist, No Boston Olympics: How and Why Smart Cities Are Passing on the Torch (New England: New England University Press, 2017); Jules Boykoff, NOlympians: Inside the Fight Against Capitalist Mega-Sports in Los Angeles, Tokyo and Beyond (Nova Scotia: Fernwood Publishing, 2020).

101 Andrew Zimbalist, ed. Rio 2016 Olympic Myths, Hard Realities (Washington D.C: Brookings Institution Press, 2017).

102 Collins, 1–14; Dyreson, ‘The Emergence of Consumer,’ 261–281.

103 Conrad, ‘Globalizing the Beautiful Body,’95–125.

104 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis Mn: Minnesota University Press, 1996), 89–113

105 Ibid, 113.

106 Sky Sports, 4 November 2022. (https://www.skysports.com/football/news/11095/12737790/qatar-world-cup-fifa- writes-to-teams-and-says-focus-on-the-football-not-ideological-or-political-battle-that-exists)

107 Ibid.

108 Ibid.

109 The Athletic, 4 November 2022. (https://theathletic.com/3762724/2022/11/04/infantino-gianni-world-cup/).

110 Ibid.

111 BBC, 24 December 2022 (https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/64075135).

112 Large, Nazi Games, 353.

113 Amy Bass, Not the Triumph but the Struggle The 1968 Olympics and the Making of the Black Athlete (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2002).

114 Edström to Yekutieli, 10 January 1939, 1.19/61, WIA. (my emphasis)

115 Amichai Alperovich, "Israel’s Integration within the Olympic Movement, 1948–1951," Israel Affairs 13, no.3 (2007): 642–652.

116 Merotz Halapid [torch race], Maccabi World Union. https://www.maccabi.org/he/education/torch-relay/