The development of sport in Zionism, Eretz Yisrael and the State of Israel is a fascinating subject. The word ‘sport’ often seems minor and mundane, a word to be relegated to the back pages - the sports pages of the newspaper - when compared to the big and really important subjects such as ideology, politics, economics or security, but as we shall soon see, the story is quite different. In the case of Zionism, it would be true to say that all the aforementioned subjects, the so called major subjects of Zionism and Israel enter in one way or other into the realm of sport and fashion it into what it is, a significant and central aspect of the Zionist story.

The key to understanding this is to appreciate the way that Zionism attempted to revolutionise and overturn so many of the central subjects of the Jewish story, and to understand that sport had been virtually absent from that history. This was not by chance. The values that had become dominant in the Jewish world over the past few thousand years had been based on the idea that the body must always be subservient to the spirit, and that the task of the body is to submit itself to the world of study. To take time out from study was traditionally seen as “Bitul Torah”- to waste time on subjects that were not Torah based. The Yetzer ha’Ra, the “Evil Inclination”, might try and tempt the individual student away from his studies, but the vigilant student of Torah would be aware of the danger and would guard himself against this.

Ideologically, despite the generally healthy attitude to the body in matters of physical love, physical culture was frowned upon. That was for the Hellenists, stated the classic interpretation of the Chanukah story. The Jews were victorious through the spirit, while the non-Jews worshipped the body and trusted in physical strength. The symbol of Chanukah was the miracle of the oil, not the Macabean victories in battles. Thus said Rabbinic Judaism. Leave the body to the gentiles, we will take the mind!

Zionism of course, as we have mentioned elsewhere (see the introduction to Struggle and Defence), attempted to overturn this entire way of looking at the world and supplied a counter ideology, which was, among other things, based on the idea of reclaiming the physical Jew as the legitimate property of the Jewish people. When the Zionists looked back at Jewish history, they reinterpreted it, placing at the centre of the heroic past, the physical attempts of the Jews to fight against their enemies through the means that the Rabbis had traditionally condemned as non-Jewish. The Zionist version of the Chanukah story, for example, went back to the Books of Macabees for inspiration rather than to the Talmud and rabbinic literature, recounting the story of the heroic struggle of the Macabees against their enemies, and the victory that came as a result of physical bravery and the employment of power.

The body, according to the Zionists, was no longer the physical side of the individual to be subdued by and subordinated to the sacred spirit. Rather the body and the spirit were two sides of the same coin and must be brought back to a more balanced position in which, together, they served the national cause. Not only secular Zionism praised the body and sought to restore it to what was termed to be its rightful place. Religious Zionism, as expressed in the words and ideas of its greatest leader, Rav Kook, also spoke of the need to reclaim the physical side of the Jew and to place it in tandem with the spirit, in order to create a better model for the future.