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The first Jewish gymnastics club was founded in Constantinople, the capital of the Ottoman Empire, in 1895. It was set up to cater, in particular, for the city’s Ashkenazi German-speaking Jews rather than the Sephardic Jews, as the former had been forced out of the German gymnastics club due to increasing anti-Semitism. The Jews in Constantinople thus followed the example of Vienna, where the "German-Austrian Gymnastics Club" was founded by Jews in 1887 after the First Viennese Gymnastics Club began excluding Jewish participants. Even before the famous Bar Kochba club was founded in Berlin in October 1898, however, the Sephardic Jews in what is now Plovdiv followed the example of the Bulgarian Sokol movement and founded the Maccabi Philippopel club. National movements, both German and Bulgarian, as well as the Zionist movement itself, are therefore of particular importance for the foundation of these first clubs. In sports clubs, national affiliation often played less of a decisive role during this phase and, especially in Germany, the vast majority of Jewish athletes played sport in non-Jewish clubs. Soccer clubs in particular serve as an example of this. The illustration shows the German soccer champions of 1910, the Karlsruhe Football Club. The team included the two famous national team players Gottfried Fuchs and Julius Hirsch, who were both Jewish Germans. Gottfried Hirsch was the record goal scorer for the German national team. In 1937, he emigrated via Switzerland to Canada, where he died in 1972. Julius Hirsch was deported to Auschwitz in 1943 and was murdered there. Their life stories span the various phases of Jewish sports history, whereby the expulsion of Jewish Germans from the general clubs is primarily part of the later eras. However, particularly in Germany, until 1933, it was the rule rather than the exception for Jewish athletes to play sport in general clubs.
It was primarily adherents of the Jewish national movement, especially Zionists, who founded their own clubs. Women were already active in the German-Jewish gymnastics and sports movement before the First World War. The "Jewish Women's Association for Gymnastics and Sport" (IFFTUS) was founded in Berlin in 1910. This gave women a more active role in the Jewish gymnastics movement than in the German one. This emancipatory movement also gave rise to the participation of women in sport in East Central Europe, which increased on a massive scale after the First World War.
The culturally German Zionist gymnastics movement spread rapidly among the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe. Its circles extended beyond the German Reich, encompassing East-Central and South-East Europe and it primarily catered for Jews of "German tongue", by which was meant the Yiddish language as well as German. English sport and Swedish gymnastics took its place alongside German gymnastics, or “Turnen”. In the German national context, this competition was perceived as a massive threat, but beyond this, the "culture war" between gymnastics and sport hardly had any impact. Jewish gymnasts perceived these competing forms much more as an enrichment. In the memorandum of the founders of the Jewish student fraternity Viadrina in Breslau, the members also expressed the aspiration to pursue sports such as "fencing, rowing and swimming" in addition to gymnastics. At the same time, among Eastern European Jewish gymnasts, sport was often seen as an alternative to gymnastics, which was easier both to offer and take part in because only a small amount of equipment was required. Therefore, the rapid adaptation of sporting practices, especially in Eastern Europe among the supposedly "backward" Yiddish-speaking Jews, counteracts the idea of English sport as a "modern practice" that spread along the imagined lines of "modernization".
Jewish gymnastics clubs, which bore and spread the cultural markers of Zionism, were by no means consistently bourgeois and Zionist in Eastern Europe. Often, they merely offered spaces and opportunities to do gymnastics or sport. When clubs were founded, however, there was often a struggle around the question of what kind of affiliation should be cultivated there. In Eastern Europe, the conditions for gymnastics, sport and Swedish gymnastics were often precarious and characterized by a lack of venues and materials. Accordingly, the material history of Jewish sport can also shed light on the diverse Jewish experience in Eastern Europe in the modern era.
In this environment characterized by a lack of opportunities, Jewish sport was by no means limited to clubs. On the contrary, it was mostly in schools that young people were exposed to sport and the school sports facilities also offered other athletes the opportunity to engage in physical activity.
