“Like all our brethren of the second Aliya, the bearers of our Salvation, Isaac Kumer left his country and his homeland and his city and ascended to the Land of Israel to build it from its destruction and to be rebuilt by it.” Todd Presner quotes this famous first sentence of S. Y. Agnon's novel Tmol Shilshom (1945) in a chapter titled “The Land of Regeneration.” Here, and throughout this fascinating book, Presner examines how early Zionist discourse focused not only on the regeneration of land, but also on rebuilding the body in order to build a Jewish state. Presner's study presents a cultural and intellectual history of the concept and figure of the “regenerated” Jewish body as it appeared within German Jewish media, art, and Zionist imagery from the 1890s to the Weimar Republic. Central to this history is the figure of the Muskeljude, the “muscle Jew,” a term coined by Max Nordau at the Second Zionist Congress in 1898. As Presner points out, this complex discourse on the regenerated body needs to be understood within its cultural and historical contexts.

Taking Michel Foucault's notion of “bio-power” as a point of departure, Presner considers the focus on masculinity and discipline in relation to the Jewish body as a response to three concurrent processes: increasing orientations toward racialization and eugenics within European cultures near the end of the nineteenth century, the entanglement of nationalism and the gymnastics movement in nineteenth-century Germany, and, in the larger picture, the dialectic of modernity. The underlying idea that shaped this discussion was the possibility of change: Education and reform, discipline and the vitalization of the body, offered new possibilities for imagining the collective's regeneration and rehabilitation as a nation among others. From Christian Wilhelm Dohm's political treatise On the Civic Improvement of the Jews (1781), which called for Jewish emancipation in Prussia, to the writings of Zionists such as Moses Hess and Theodor Herzl, the Jewish condition had been depicted as a state of social, moral, and physical degeneration caused by oppression, persecution, ghettoization, and professional restrictions. If Jews were only treated as citizens with equal rights, Dohm and his French contemporaries Grégoire and Villeneuve declared, they would also be reformed and regenerated individually, and hence their social status and their usefulness as civil subjects would “improve.” In a careful analysis, Presner discusses the ideological and political purpose of their arguments while showing simultaneously how the idea of integration and regeneration is built upon an antisemitic image of the degenerate Jew.

Presner sees a related rhetoric of degeneration and regeneration reflected in fin-de-siècle writing and early Zionist discourse. Julius Langbehn's Rembrandt as Educator (1890) and Max Nordau's Degeneration (1892) serve Presner as examples of the kind of cultural critique that takes the crisis and ostensible demise of Western culture as a decisive moment from which a renewal of the nation—a völkisch Germany in Langbehn's case and a Jewish state in Nordau's—could emerge. Rather than claiming ideological equivalence, Presner is interested in the discursive parallels in the project of a renewal or regeneration brought about through reform and education, in this case through physical education and discipline. In this scenario, regenerated and steeled individuals were meant to serve as the motor for a national renaissance that was to arise from Europe's civilizational exhaustion. While Zionism emerged as a reaction to antisemitism, much of early Zionist rhetoric also used antisemitic images to decry its Jewish opponents. One need only think, for example, of Herzl's notorious defamation of Zionism's antagonists as morally and physically degenerate in his 1897 article titled “Mauschel.” The insistence on the muscle Jew entails both a reference to a heroic past in Jewish antiquity, mainly the Maccabees, and a “founding violence” directed against what is considered at odds with the goal of an equally heroic future; it “enacts regeneration by cutting off or stamping out its degenerate other” (64).

With compelling arguments, Presner shows the degree to which this rhetoric of education and regeneration rests on aesthetic underpinnings. Langbehn's and Nordau's cultural critiques were both written as scathing responses to the artistic movements of their time, and their calls for regeneration were profoundly shaped by an aesthetic, albeit revisionist, agenda. Presner is also to be commended for pointing to an often overlooked aspect of Martin Buber's work: his call for a Jewish national art. A trained art historian and one of the founders of cultural Zionism, Buber issued his call at the Fifth Zionist Congress in 1901. Together with Jugendstil artist Ephraim Moshe Lilien, Buber curated an exhibit of Jewish artists at the congress and edited a volume titled Jewish Art and Jewish Artists. As Presner shows, not only did Buber challenge the antisemitic claim—propagated most infamously by Wagner—of the innate artlessness of Jews, but also he also accepted the idea of Jewish traditional aniconism, which he explained as a result of historical conditions and religious restrictions and proclaimed a need to overcome. Drawing on Kalman Bland's important study on this topic, Presner mentions that the notion of Jewish aniconism is a modern invention, yet he takes Buber and his agenda seriously in their own right. Discussing this agenda in the context of muscular Judaism, Presner's approach is illuminating: He links Buber's programmatic plea for the arts' importance in the rejuvenation of the Jewish people and its state-building prospect to Friedrich Schiller's tractate On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters. In this work, Schiller maps out the educational impact of the arts on the political sphere, their correlation, and the aesthetic dimension of governance. Here again, we find reform and education as the basis of an aesthetic state in which all parts operate in unison, but we also see the dangers of a radically aesthetic regime that aims to eradicate what it considers degenerate. Presner's insightful conclusion is that for Schiller and Buber, “art restores a lost harmony by helping the fragmented people become complete and vital beings once again. This is the essence of the ‘aestheticized politics’ of regeneration” (86).

Responding to the work of Sander Gilman and Daniel Boyarin, among others, Presner examines how the male Jewish body became the arena and battlefield of population politics, eugenics, and militarist fantasies, both in the context of Zionism and within European societies writ large. Presner offers an insightful discussion of the Jewish section at the 1911 International Hygiene Exhibition at Dresden and the correspondence between the curator of the Jewish section, the Viennese rabbi and historian Max Grunwald, and the exhibition's chief curator, Karl Lingner. In contrast to this exhibition, which focused on traditional Jewish practices and lifeworlds in antiquity and the Middle Ages, journals of Jewish sports clubs and publications documenting Jews fighting in World War I provide representations of the renewed Muskeljuden, the reformed and regenerated modern Jewish body. In this context, Presner also looks at the figure that reflects perhaps most vividly the modern technological extension of the human body: the aviator.

Presner's claim that the European fin de siècle, with the birth of the muscle Jew, marked the “invention” of the modern Jewish male is well supported by his substantive study. Presner demonstrates the connection between the discourse of the muscle Jew and colonial discourse by pointing to a photo documentary, Pictures from Palestine, and analyzing materials from the journals Altneuland and Palästina. It is here that he explores the colonial aspects of early Zionism and its complex linkage to European imperialism. This is the historical trajectory to Presner's assessment of contemporary Israeli society with which the book begins. Looking at photographs by the Israeli artist Adi Nes, Presner describes Nes's deconstruction of precisely the ideological figurations whose foundations were laid in the German Jewish discourse on muscular Judaism at the turn of the twentieth century. Overall, Muscular Judaism provides a fascinating study of the discursive formation of the muscle Jew and its complex relationship to other European discourses on the body, race, sexuality, aesthetics, nationalism, and militarism, as well as its importance in the project of the creation of a Jewish state. Not only is the book essential reading for anyone who is interested in the cultural history of Zionism, representations of the Jewish body in modernity, and German Jewish history, but also it is fundamental to understanding the ideological history of contemporary Israeli ideals of masculinity and muscularity.