Mick Hartley

Jews nowadays are hardly renowned for their sporting prowess. But in fact, as David Bolchover’s Digging Deep: Unearthing the Stories of Eleven Murdered Jewish Footballing Greats shows, Jews were central to European football prior to the Holocaust.

Who was the greatest Jewish footballer ever? A question to leave even the most historically literate football experts scratching their heads.

And yet, before the Holocaust, Jewish superstar players were at the heart of European football. So too were the visionary Jewish coaches reinventing tactics; the Jewish footballing pioneers who shaped the modern game; and even the elite Jewish referees trusted with the biggest matches.

Digging Deep excavates a destroyed civilisation. It reveals the untold stories of eleven Jewish football greats – icons one minute and marked for extermination the next. Setting exhilarating sporting triumphs against the gathering darkness of twentieth-century Europe, it restores these forgotten men to their rightful place in the football pantheon.

Dave Rich reviews Bolchover’s book, and offers some thoughts before the World Cup:

Digging Deep is a book about football history, but really, at its core, is about the Holocaust and the lost civilisation of Jewish Europe. The Nazis and their accomplices did not just kill six million Jewish individuals; they destroyed an entire culture. The legacy of this erasure still distorts Jewish identity, and perceptions of Jewish life, up to the present. For example, the contribution to European intellectual and literary culture of Jewish writers and thinkers who escaped Nazi persecution, like Freud and Einstein, Arendt and Zweig, is widely known and celebrated. In some circles, it shapes what people like to think of as the most admirable aspect of Jewish culture and sensibilities today. But this Jewish role in European intellectual life during the interwar years was matched by the Jewish contribution to its sporting life, and especially to football, at a time when Austria and Hungary in particular were the strongest footballing nations in Europe. Except, while many leading Jewish intellectuals escaped, most Jewish footballers didn’t, and almost all their fans were slaughtered along with them.

It leaves us with an absence of absence: not only is the Jewish football world gone, but we don’t even notice that it is missing. The writers of the joke in Airplane! about Jewish sports legends being all but non-existent didn’t know it, but their quip was an unintended tribute to the efficiency of the Holocaust in wiping out not just Jewish life, but any future knowledge of that life. Joni Mitchell famously sang “you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone”: the obliteration of Jewish life was so complete that we don’t even remember what we had.

This makes the failure of UEFA and FIFA to mark Holocaust Memorial Day each year even more indefensible and disgraceful. The one place in the world where a Jewish football culture survives is in Israel, and their teams are, as Bolchover points out, the inheritors of the traditions of Hakoah Vienna and the other lost European clubs. At a time when there are political campaigns to boycott Israeli football teams, and even to ostracise any non-Jews who have played or managed in Israel, the lack of recognition by these two bodies of the central role that Jews played in building the world’s favourite sport is an act of complicity in antisemitism….

Worth a read.