Nobody much is weeping over the death of Yevgeny Prigozhin, the ugly, ruthless leader of the Wagner group of Russian mercenaries. Once closely tied to Putin, he surprised everyone in July by turning on his former associate and marching on Moscow.
He was a thug. But Jews may be given pause — not sympathetic pause, mind you, just interested pause — to learn that Prighozin had Jewish heritage, allegedly on his father’s and stepfather’s side. These are somewhat tenuous, since it’s hard to confirm anything in Putin’s Russia, but they did make me think. Because more interesting than whether Putin’s former chief mercenary is Jewish or not is the reaction I noticed — at least in myself — at the idea that he might be.
However much I admire the IDF, or all those millions of Israeli Jews who don’t conform to the weedy and neurotic Woody Allen stereotype, there remains an assumption — a caricature — among many Jews that we are somehow different. That on the psychological front, we are less prone to violence, thuggery and gangsterism; and on the physical side, somehow less imposing. Less well cut out, in short, for the brutal landscapes of oligarchic Russia and Belarus, and wartorn Ukraine, than our non-Jewish peers.
But we have tough heritage. The way in which this is so often ignored by Jews, and so often clashes with our own received ideas of what it is to be a Jew, smacks a little bit of mild internalised antisemitism.
In pre-Prohibition America, Jewish gangsters were among the deadliest in New York, right up there with the Italian and Irish mafias. The Lenox Avenue Gang (mostly Jewish but with some Italians), was one of the most dangerous, led by one Harry “Gyp the Blood” Horowitz. It was famous for the murder of gambler and gangster Herman Rosenthal.
During the prohibition era, Arnold Rothstein was one of the biggest organised crime bosses around, running mobs dealing in bootlegging, gambling, loan sharking and so on. None of these had any qualms about murder.
Thanks to gangsters such as Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano, the partnership between Italian and Jewish crime intensified in 20th-century New York, while in LA and Las Vegas, the powerful Cohen crime family lorded over some of the region’s biggest prostitution and gambling rackets.
In the UK, numerous Jewish gangs ran areas of north and east London.
Among them were the Yiddishers, the Aldgate Mob, the Bessarabian Tigers (known as the Stop at Nothing Gang) and the Odessians. The Bessarabian Tigers (immigrants from Moldova) were known to one East London police inspector as “the greatest menace ever known to London”.
There is no question, then, that Jews can be just as violent, dangerous, and criminal as the next mobster. But it was the other image that hobbled European Jewry: the one of physical and psychological weakness and vulnerability, embodied most in the idea of the Talmudic Jew who was weakened by a life of study and books.
It was with this in mind that Max Nordau launched the “muscular Judaism” movement, a term coined in his speech in Basel for the Second Zionist Congress in 1898.
Nordau was thinking of a whole “new Jew”, an antidote to Judennot, or Jewish distress. In 1932, the first Maccabiah games were staged. Here was the ultimate celebration of the “muscular Jew”.
Nordau was particularly prescient in seeing that the muscular Jew, who lived a vigorous life of physical challenge, rather than textual absorption and rumination, would be essential to the formation of a Jewish nation. After all, nobody mistakes the IDF for an army of weeds; Israelphobes and admirers alike are stunned by the armies of muscular, gun-toting Jews — not only whizz-kids at military technology and espionage, but in the blunt business of fighting.
Without Zionism’s vision of “muscular Judaism”, there would be no Israel today.
Nor would there be the most powerful and efficient martial art of Krav Maga. Taught to the paramilitary units that would become the IDF in the 1940s, Krav Maga discourages students from confrontation but, if physical attack is unavoidable, it prepares them to finish it off with great speed and decisiveness.
It was developed by the Hungarian-born Imi Lichtenfeld, after his years in the 1930s spent defending the Jews of Bratislava from fascists. He emigrated to Palestine in the 1940s.
It’s a useful exercise for diaspora Jews to stop thinking of ourselves through the lens of the “weak” and neurotically virtuous and remember that, just like all other groups, there are plenty of tough, rough and dangerous folk among us.
In other words: we may be special, but we are not that special.
