The bruising tale of British Jews and boxing

Migrants, Minorities, and the History of British Boxing, published by Oxford University Press, has Dee mingling with the sport’s insiders, outsiders and ringsiders, venturing beyond the glare of the lights and the roar of the crowd into the darkness on the edge of town.

David Dee's book explores the history of Jews in boxing (Photo: Oxford University Press)[Missing Credit]

An eye-popping number of the figures encountered by the self-described “lapsed Anglican” – an outsider, though one with a long-standing involvement with the Jewish Historical Society of England – turn out to be Jews. They are still wrestling with the Angel, perhaps, but in their adopted British home they are also going more than a few rounds with the Devil.

Dee moves across the broad intersections between sport and migration, but it’s the Jewish strand that seems to grip him as tightly as the boxing itself.

For this scholar, the ring is never just a ring.

Possibly that’s just as well in his case. He cheerfully admits he has never been the kind of trainspotter who could, for example, rattle off all of Lennox Lewis’s fights and instantly tell you which one was his greatest.

Your writer, alas, is exactly that kind of tragic case: he would go with Lewis dispatching Mike Tyson with a ferocious right cross in the eighth round in 2002.

Harry Mizler’s boxing shorts from the 1930s (Photo: Jewish Museum London)[Missing Credit]

Dee is in it, rather, for the sweet social science.

He’s also wary of a simpler story. “Part of what the book is grappling with is the idea that boxing has been nothing but good for migrants,” he says. His view is that the relationship between the two is knottier than that: however successful an outsider might be in the sport, discrimination remained close at hand. Nor did the world around boxing ever quite look beyond ethnicity, especially not when Jews were involved.

There is a lot to chew on. A boxing match may be a story without words, but a good academic can find plenty to say about it. Surprisingly, few British scholars have tried until now.

Boxing is about brilliant pain – “a night out for the carnivore in us,” as the sportswriter Tom Boswell memorably put it in The Washington Post.

European Welterweight title holder Gary Jacobs and his manager Mickey Duff (Photo: Alamy)Alamy Stock Photo

But in the Jewish experience of the sport in Britain, the pain has been laced with its own historical sting.

Dee first started to circle around what this might mean in a substantial academic article he published in 2012, drawn from his PhD research. In The Hefty Hebrew, he argued that boxing was integral to the making (and remaking) of British-Jewish identity between 1890 and 1960. But he also challenged the assumption that the sport had been an unalloyed good for these cultural newcomers – a point he’s still fond of making.

That caution should not be surprising. As Joyce Carol Oates observed in her seminal 1987 essay On Boxing, the sport has always carried a beastly bargain: it elevates the lives of its practitioners even as it consumes them.

For Dee, that blade cuts close in the case of Jews.

The Manchester Jewish Lads Brigade boxing team pictured in 1926 (Photo: Manchester Jewish Museum)[Missing Credit]

Boxing was no marginal activity for these newcomers. For many young Jewish men looking to find their feet in the new country, Dee argues, it was a meal ticket. And if it could also put paid to long-held stereotypes of eastern European newcomers as spindly intellectual types and physical pushovers, all the better. The sheer physicality of the sport offered its own confidence, rather like an early version of Krav Maga.

Even before the First World War, Jewish youth clubs and the Jewish Lads’ Brigade promoted amateur boxing as one of the instruments of “Anglicisation”, the catch-all term of the era for re-tooling newcomers into “Englishmen of the Mosaic Persuasion”.

In Dee’s telling, the sport proved that the Jew could be a “first-class fighting man, both inside and outside of the ring”. It also offered a good way of making a few quid, not only for fighters, of course, but entrepreneurs and managers too.

But it left its bruises, too.

Dee’s earlier piece took its title from another little-known article on Jewish prizefighting, published almost a century before in the magazine Boxing, The Hefty Hebrew: The Shattering of a Silly Old Legend.

Long before Leon Uris popularised the image of bronzed kibbutzniks toiling under the Middle Eastern sun, Jewish fighters closer to home were making the point inside the squared circle.

Bare-knuckle fighter Sam Elias (Photo: jewsinsports)[Missing Credit]

In the 19th century, bare-knuckle fighters such as Sam Elias were held up by the community as proof of what might be possible in a time of anti-Jewish strain. “They were strong and physical,” says Dee, “doing all the things the stereotypes said Jews should not be doing. And that made them very useful.”

How so? “Because boxing is intensely physical and demands both physical and mental strength,” Dee responds evenly, “those fighters became useful symbols and ethnic exemplars for community leaders looking for ways to respond to wider problems.”

Probably the most famous of all those brawlers was Daniel Mendoza, the celebrated East End fighter of an even earlier era. He was diminutive and uneducated, and blessed with a formidable bunch of fives.

Celebrated East End fighter Daniel Mendoza (Photo: British Museum)[Missing Credit]

Wales-based Kate Ray, a descendant of Mendoza, recalls that her own father, a bookie born at the dawn of the 20th century, was “also short, squat and poor”. But alongside the Hebrew he was taught as a child, she says, he absorbed from the family legend of Mendoza a more bracing lesson: that Jews could do anything they chose if they studied the form and sought to lift and improve it.

That dovetails neatly with one of Dee’s main points: for many decades, boxing was not merely a mirror of social change. For many young Jews, it was social change; “more than a sport,” he writes, and “a defining factor in constructing their ethnicity”.

During the inter-war years, professional boxing’s influence radiated out further, offering many young second-and third-generation Jewish lads a route out of both their immigrant neighbourhoods and parental expectations.

Boxer Jack 'Kid' Berg pictured in 1933 after a day's training at Windsor for his upcoming fight with Italian lightweight champion Cleto Locatelli. (Photo: Harry Todd/Fox Photos/Getty Images)Getty Images

From this wave emerged pugilists such as Ted “Kid” Lewis and Jack “Kid” Berg. The first was a technician, defensively ducking and weaving when the situation called for it, but capable of unloading ferociously against elite opponents.

Berg, on the other hand, was a river of sweat, a swarmer, as aggressive fighters are called, whose remarkable punch rate earned him the sobriquet the Whitechapel Whirlwind.

Yet the success of these young fighters also alarmed some of their elders, who viewed professional boxing halls – no doubt correctly – as dens of iniquity.

They fretted, too, about the brutal energy of the sport itself. Sometimes the ring really is the ring, and the Jewish boys clambering into it were still every mother’s sons, sometimes getting the crap beaten out of them.

Dee points out that, however successful Jewish entrepreneurs were in the scene, they too could never quite escape antisemitism. He cites Jack Solomons, a ruthless businessman in the 1940s, though not necessarily more ruthless than his contemporaries.

Boxing promotor Jack Solomons in his office, 1958 (Photo: Getty Images)Getty Images

“Because he was Jewish, however, criticism of him often drew on antisemitic tropes about money, morality and scruples. His business practices could be problematic, but they were not atypical. The fact that he was Jewish gave the criticism an additional layer.”

In the end, though, socioeconomics appeared to settle the matter.

After 1945, boxing lost much of its glitter within the community, and the Jewish presence in the sport declined. Even that retreat from the ring was telling, for the period was a golden age of sorts for Jews moving into the middle class and warily threading the Establishment needle. The war was over. Sort of.

If elements of the British story sound oddly familiar, it’s because they are – in America, where the Jewish story of boxing has had no shortage of narrators.

In fact, across the ocean, the Jewish story is familiar almost to the point of folklore: Long Island Rail Road trips to Madison Square Garden for the latest fight, with the likes of Ali and Frazier tearing strips off one another under the lights.

There, too, was “Humble” Howard Cosell, born Cohen, calling the body shots in that unmistakable honk. Somewhere near the ring apron, at least in the Ali mythology, hovered Drew “Bundini” Brown, cornerman, the champ’s own Jewish spiritual adviser and giver of the “float like a butterfly, sting like a bee” line.

Writers such as Philip Roth and Oates have written about their country’s boxing as the ultimate metaphor for Jews – and the Irish, the Italians and all the other immigrant groups shipped over to work in the mills. These men were tough and the American skies were mean.

For Oates, the era of great Jewish champions – fighters such as Benny Leonard and Barney Ross – was no anomaly. She saw the Jewish prominence in American boxing during the 1920s and 1930s as a direct reflection of the American-Jewish experience, seared into the collective soul as deeply as her own childhood memories of being dragged along to the Garden by her self-educated father to see the latest fight. One of Roth’s final works, the underrated Exit Ghost, positively obsesses on the subject.

Dee accepts that the Jewish dimension of boxing is much harder to miss in the United States.

“In America, that involvement was obvious and high level throughout the century,” he says, nodding.

Jack Solomons pointing at a noticeboard showing the championship bouts he promoted (Photo: Getty Images)Getty Images

Still, Britain had its own notable figures, including the cigar-chomping promoter Solomons, who booked the Royal Albert Hall for title fights in the 1940s and 1950s, and the legendary Mickey Duff, the son of a Polish rabbi who fled to the UK and made a new life as a manager. Money and entrepreneurial opportunity mattered, but so did the idea that if Jews were not involved in sport inside the ring, they could still participate outside it.

That is where Dee draws one of his sharper transatlantic lines. In Britain, he suggests, the story has often been less about ethnicity than economics, which may be one reason Protestant family backgrounds stand out more clearly in British boxing than they do across the Atlantic.

When he wrote his first book in 2013, Dee wondered whether Britain might at last start producing more work on its migrant and minority sporting past. It hasn’t, really. Or not enough. Sports historians have become more interested in outsiders, migrants and minorities, but the field still feels thin to him.

“We are still a long way behind the Americans,” he says.

He takes heart in a small number of works, including Gavin Schaffer’s “brilliant” An Unorthodox History, a study of Jewish life in the UK since 1945. Schaffer “outlines a community often racked with self-doubt and concern about disappearance,” he notes. “Yet he argues that Jews remain deeply interested in heritage, identity and social and cultural cohesion.”

That still bothers him. America, he thinks, remains far ahead in the migrant sporting history that has consumed his academic life.

“The key idea I grapple with,” he says, “is the sense, common in both Britain and America, that boxing has been nothing but good for migrants and minorities. The dominant narrative is that for newcomers and outsiders, boxing offers a route to integration, success and acceptance. My book argues that this is deeply problematic.

“There were positive elements but the balance sheet comes down firmly against the idea of boxing as an open, inclusive, tolerant environment.”

So no, ultimately, the ring was never just a ring. It was a way in, a way out, and sometimes another trap.

Migrants, Minorities, and the History of British Boxing by David Dee is published by Oxford University Press