Jewish body image is wrapped up in delusion and awareness - The Jewish Chronicle

We all have a body image, or indeed body images — our conscious and unconscious view of how we look to ourselves and others. Body image has become a hot topic in psychology. Few of us say “Mirror Mirror on the wall who’s the fairest of them all?” because so many of us worry about how we look. One recent study found that 77 per cent of teenage girls are distressed by their appearance and become anxious and depressed. The beauty industry and therapists thrive as a result.

For Jews, body image has had a complicated and often tragic history. Nazi cartoons showed Jews as weak and greedy cowards with long noses that were usually in the shekel trough.

In fact, the strong Jew has a long history. King David was anything but weak. The Goliath-slayer was a shepherd. But forget the rural idyll view of the sheep herder — David killed bears and lions to defend his father’s sheep. He convinced Saul he could defeat Goliath by giving some history of his dealings with bears.

“When a lion or a bear came and carried off a sheep from the flock, I went after it, struck it and rescued the sheep from its mouth. When it turned on me, I seized it by its hair, struck it and killed it. Your servant has killed both the lion and the bear.”

Excellent training for his battle with the Philistine. Another positive body image fact: Jews have also had considerable success as boxers for more than 200 years. Daniel Mendoza started using his fists to settle a dispute with a porter over payment for some tea. The porter had demanded twice the agreed price for the tea. It ended in an Aldgate altercation. Mendoza said the porter behaved in a manner unfit for a gentleman. The porter challenged the owner to settle the dispute by boxing.

Believing the porter was cheating his frail employer, Mendoza accepted the challenge on his behalf. The fight lasted for 45 minutes, ending when the porter admitted he could not fight on. Mendoza became famous as the talented whippersnapper who had thrashed his larger opponent.

Turning professional at 18, Mendoza fought at Mile End in 1784 against the wonderfully named Harry the Coalheaver. After an incredible 118 rounds, Mendoza made the hefty Coalheaver give up. Mendoza then fought Tom Tyne, a tailor, and won.

Jewish boxers have a long history. The American Mike Rossman was the World Boxing Association light heavyweight champion. He was nicknamed “The Kosher Butcher” and “The Jewish Bomber”. Benjamin “Benny” Baruch J. Bass, known as “Little Fish”, was a Jew with fists. He was born in Kyiv, Ukraine, and came to the States in 1906. Bass was world featherweight champion and world junior lightweight champion.

I became interested in Jewish boxers when my son Reuben worked on The Boxer’s Story, the autobiography of Nathan Shapow. Shapow fought for his life in Nazi camps. He was resilient. In one fight he was knocked down twice but that didn’t floor him. He wrote: “I saw the only way that I could fight back was to attack. I drew Samuel into the sort of mauling street corner fight he neither wanted nor expected.” Shapow survived and went to live in Palestine where he fought for the creation of Israel.

Time to move from punches to psychology. The scientific literature on body image dates to the 1930s. The pioneer was Paul F. Schilder, the son of a Jewish silk merchant. He got his doctorate in medicine in 1909 from the University of Vienna. He became a member of the Viennese Psychoanalytical Association.

Freud clashed fiercely with Schilder. Freud wrote to his devoted follower, Karl Abraham: “Delusion and knowledge by Paul Schilder which, in its results, is already thoroughly analytical, and which only leaves aside, as is appropriate, the Oedipus complex. Of course, Schilder acts as if these gentlemen had discovered everything themselves, or almost everything. In short, this is how German clinicians are going to ‘appropriate’ our discoveries. All things considered, I vow, it is of no importance.”

The early analysts were always squabbling and needed therapy themselves, it seems to me.

In 1929 Schilder travelled to Baltimore where he became a guest lecturer at Johns Hopkins University. He later became clinical director of the psychiatric division of Bellevue Hospital in New York. He wrote The Image and Appearance of the Human Body, published in 1935, which he thought was his most important book. He and Freud clashed again this time about training analyses. Freud wrote to him that those of the first analytic generation who weren’t analysed did not boast of the fact, and that “whenever it was possible it was done: Jones and Ferenczi, for instance, had long analyses”. Both those men were crucial in the development of psychoanalysis.

Schilder liked to look dapper. He argued that everyone had a (potentially infinite) number of separate body-images which he called, “the picture of our own body which we form in our mind”. He wrote on narcissism, erotic zones, neurasthenia, depersonalisation, hypochondria, hysteria, as well as our ideas of beauty. He also explored the role of changes in body image in schizophrenia – a common symptom is feeling disconnected from one’s body.

There is now a learned journal devoted to the subject, The Journal of Body Image, and there are many tests of every aspect of how we feel about our bodies. Many tests involve looking at yourself. So, stand naked in front of the mirror. The wisest thing is to accentuate the positive.

When I do that I see my paunch (always had one) is larger than when I was a teen but my hair flows still and my mouth and nose are, if not distinguished, normal looking. My grandmother had a huge hooter but I’m lucky I haven’t inherited that.

David Cohen’s book on body image will be published by Routledge in 2024