‘To Their Credit as Jews and Englishmen’: Services for Youth and the Shaping of Jewish Masculinity in Britain, 1890s–1930s

Abstract

Studies on the construction of masculinity have been something of a growth industry of late, and Jewish historians have also found this approach a fruitful one. Until recently, much historical writing has treated men as ‘entirely ungendered persons’ which, as John Tosh suggests, is ‘myopic’.² As the field developed, much of the early scholarship emphasised muscular Christianity, identifying ‘a shift in the meaning of manliness from spiritual morality to muscular morality’ that occurred midway through the nineteenth century.³ Likewise, a version of muscular Judaism has also received significant attention. Jews and Gentiles alike came to emphasise ‘character’ — morality, athleticism, pluck and a commitment to fair play — as essential to masculinity. This ideal was especially prevalent among middle- and upper-class British Jews during the late Victorian period. Muscular Judaism, ‘a call for corporeal and spiritual regeneration’, shared much with the Christian form.⁴ At the turn of the century, many Jews had internalised the value of physicality and athletic manliness, concepts much less integral to traditional Judaism than to the nineteenth-century European world in which adherents of muscular Judaism lived.⁵ With few exceptions, such as the response to the British Union of Fascists (BUF) in the 1930s and 1940s, only the ‘rougher’ working classes continued to see violence and physical defence as honourable.⁶

Quotation in chapter title from The Jewish World, 12 October 1900.