In 1898, forty-eight men gathered in Berlin to found the National Jewish gymnastic (Turnverein) club “Bar Kochba,” in explicit recognition of the Jews as a people with a common heritage and a shared need for physical rejuvenation. In Der veränderbare Körper, Daniel Wildmann explores how these men appropriated Turnen, a program of gymnastics and group exercise that had fueled German nationalism since the Napoleonic Wars, to develop Jewish bodies and enact their collective identity. Using the minutes of meetings, political speeches, and a close reading of the monthly Jüdische Turnzeitung (JTZ), Wildmann presents a close analysis of a movement that, though small in size, played an influential role in Jewish self-definition in turn-of-the-century Germany.

Wildmann begins with a thorough examination of the heated debate over the meaning of “National Jewish,” both among Jewish Turners and within German society at large, a debate that occupied the movement's political attention throughout its duration. On the one hand, the Berlin Turners had intended the term as a refutation of the Zionist label, and they resisted calling for a Jewish state. On the other hand, those same Turners readily acknowledged the inspiration of prominent Zionists Max Nordau and Max Mandelstamm, and they founded their supranational umbrella organization, the Jüdische Turnerschaft (JT), at the 6th Zionist Congress in 1903. In one of the most engaging sections of the book, Wildmann examines the media reaction to that organization's founding, particularly a Kölnische Zeitung article that drew implicit parallels between National Jewish Turnen and the four other perennially suspect groups within Wilhelmine Germany: Catholics, Social Democrats, and the Danish and Polish minorities. Jewish Turners themselves worried that “National Jewish” necessarily implied skepticism about the possibility of German-Jewish coexistence, and the JT spent the first decade of its existence in the same balancing act that had occupied the “Bar Kochba” founders in 1898: expressing sympathy for the Zionist cause without raising doubt about one's own loyalty to the German state.

If the movement's political philosophy was complicated, its physical program was straightforward: strengthen Jewish bodies and prevent—even reverse—perceived physical degeneration. Turnen, its advocates promised, would restore strength, vigor, and self-confidence—a corporeal refutation of the era's prevailing stereotype of the neurasthenic Jew. Postcards from 1902 and 1912 show “Bar Kochba” members, neatly uniformed from neck to toe, demonstrating their strength and balance in forming elaborate human pyramids. Wildmann emphasizes that the Turners' bodies conformed to the lean “harmonious” bourgeois ideal, as opposed to the bulkier muscularity associated with the working classes and with publicly performing strongmen such as Stanislaus Czyganiewicz, a Jew from Galicia. In addition to Czyganiewicz's size, though, it was his bold self-presentation—Wildmann reproduces a widely circulated topless photo of the strongman—that contrasts so strikingly with that of the Turners, a contrast that Wildmann could have explored in greater depth. Why did the Turners appear in full uniform when the JT wanted to showcase the transformative effects of exercise on the body and when Max Nordau himself encouraged Jews to make their bodies visible? Was it middle-class propriety? An effort to focus greater attention on the bodies' gymnastic skill and upright bearing, which, as Wildmann notes later, marked them as respectably middle class? Or was it perhaps a lingering self-consciousness that the bodies still did not quite “measure up”? Nordau understood the shaming power of the non-Jew's perceived judgmental gaze, as Wildmann also notes later, and it would have been helpful to apply such contexts to the reading of these specific images and to the JTZ's photographic depictions of the body in general.

While the men in the National Jewish Turnen movement hewed closely to a traditional model of German middle-class manhood, measured primarily against the ideal of the reserve officer, the women proved more transgressive. They had already exchanged their skirts for pants at a 1909 Turnen exhibition, and the women's umbrella organization made the even more daring move the following year of competing in fencing, a pursuit otherwise reserved for men. The percentage of women in Germany's National Jewish Turnvereine also increased steadily, from twenty-six percent in 1906 to thirty-seven percent by 1912. For comparative purposes, Wildmann could have included the percentages for the German Turnen Association as well, especially since he presents women's active participation in National Jewish Turnen as an example of that movement's progressiveness.

Wildmann packs a lot into this book—politics, medicine, physical development, self-display, gender, Jewish identity, and even the nineteenth-century project to reclaim a Jewish past, an example of which was the Berliners' adoption of “Bar Kochba” as their club's namesake. Although National Jewish Turnen played only a limited role outside German-speaking central Europe, it actively promoted Turnen as a means of improving the situation of Ostjuden. At the same time, though, leaders acknowledged Turnen's limited usefulness for self-defense against pogroms and conceded that financial barriers prohibited all but a small percentage of Ostjuden from training in the first place.

Wildmann carries his narrative up to 1921, when Berlin Turners decided to reconstitute the umbrella organization for postwar circumstance. This decision might make sense from an institutional viewpoint, but the book deals primarily with the period before World War I, and these are its strongest parts. Largely inactive during the war, the Turners spent the three postwar years that Wildmann covers mostly in trying to regroup. With the exception of the 1919 “Munich Thesis,” in which a number of clubs advocated placing more emphasis on political education and less on physical development, thereby reversing the priorities of the 1898 Turners, Wildmann has little new to report and could well have taken 1914 as his endpoint. Nevertheless, Daniel Wildmann has incorporated a wealth of rich material into a book that will prove particularly rewarding for scholars of Jewish history, masculinity, and the body.