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From left, 1932-33 welterweight champ Jackie Fields (aka Jacob Finkelstein); 1934 heavyweight champ Max Baer, who was partly Jewish; 1933-35 lightweight champ Barney Ross (aka Barnet Rosofsky). |
Once Upon the 1930s
Jewish Boxers Reigned
of TheColumnists.com
The victory by Israeli boxer and rabbi-to-be Yuri Foreman on the Manny Pacquiao-Miguel Cotto undercard at Las Vegas recently got some of the boxing cognoscenti talking about Jewish fighters. Bert Sugar, the sometimes eminent boxing historian, noted to Larry Merchant, the eminent sportsman and HBO boxing analyst, that in the early 1930s six of the eight main boxing divisions had Jewish champions
This piqued my interest when Merchant passed this on to me. I went to The Source, The Ring Record Book, and determined that 1933 would have been the year dominated by Jewish fighters. It turned out that four, not six, of the champions were Jewish. They were:
Light-heavyweight: Slapsie Maxie Rosenbloom, 1930-34.
Middleweight: Ben Jeby 1932-33 (real name, Morris Benjamin Jebaltowsky).
Welterweight: Jackie Fields, 1932-33 (real name, Jacob Finkelstein).
Lightweight: Barney Ross, 1933-35 (real name, Barnet Rosofsky).
One could add another because Ross was also the Junior Welterweight champion, 1933-35, but that wouldn’t be kosher. Junior championship divisions muddy the boxing interests of ordinary fans, just as the many boxing organizations pollute the sport today. Ross went on to win the welterweight title in 1934.
(The other 1933 champions were: Heavyweight: Jack Sharkey/Primo Carnera; Featherweight: Kid Chocolate/ Freddie Miller; Batamweight: Panama Al Brown; Flyweight: Midge Wolgast).
As for Israeli boxer Yuri Foreman, he defeated
Daniel Santos on the Pacquiao-Cotto undercard, winning the World
Boxing Assn. super-welterweight championship.
It is the people
at the bottom of the economic ladder, immigrants, who turn to
boxing to escape poverty. The Irish did it first (John. L. Sullivan
is considered the first modern heavyweight champion), then came
the Jews, Italians and blacks. Now Latinos and Europeans dominate
boxing.
Most of the Jewish champions of the 1930s were the sons of immigrants. Benny Leonard, the lightweight champ, 1917-1925, (real name Benjamin Leiner) was the first great Jewish sports hero, probably more significant in his time than baseball’s Hank Greenberg and Sandy Koufax were later.
There is the story about Leonard fighting a guy named Finnegan in the Pennsylvania mining country. Incensed at the anti-semitic profanities hurled at him by the crowd, Leonard took it out on his opponent, Finnegan, pounding him mercilessly. Finally after a few rounds, Finnegan, in a clinch, gasped to Leonard, “Benny, Benny, cut it out, my real name is Goldberg.”
Some notes: Daniel Mendoza,
“The Light Of Israel”, was a significant Jewish boxer;
he was the 16th British heavyweight champion, reigning from 1792
to 1795, though he weighed around 160 pounds… Victor (Young) Perez.
a Jew from Tunisia, held the Bantamweight title in 1931-32; he
was killed in a German concentration camp... And it is an odd
fact that the Jewish Maxie
Rosenbloom lost his light-heavy championship
to another Jew, Bob Olin, in 1934.
In talking about
Jewish fighters, the controversy about 1934 heavyweight champion
Max Baer’s religion invariably comes up. Baer was or wasn’t
Jewish depending on acceptance of the Jewish law of matrilineal
descent, halakha, that bestows Jewishness only on the
progeny of Jewish mothers, not fathers. What seems to be incontrovertible
is that Baer’s paternal grandfather was a Jew from Alsace-Lorraine.
Max Baer’s father, Jacob, was not a practicing Jew. His
mother was of Scotch-Irish descent.
The controversy arose when Baer started to claim he was Jewish in 1933, just before he fought Max Schmeling, the reluctant standard-bearer for Hitler’s Third Reich. Baer wore the Star of David on his trunks for the first time in that fight. There were reports that Baer snarled “This one’s for Hitler” as he raked Schmeling with punches on the way to knocking him out in the 10th round.
Because Baer had shown no such religious leanings before the Schmeling fight, his alleged Jewishness was seen as a publicity stunt to create a Jewish fighter against the German, seen as a Nazi by many people. Baer’s manager Ancil Hoffman was Jewish and motivated the oft-lackadaisical Baer by building up Schmeling as a Nazi, telling Max he was “fighting for the Jews.”
Among those who dismissed Baer’s Jewishness was trainer Ray Arcel, who had seen Baer naked. He testified that Baer was no Jew.
Nevertheless, Baer said after the Schmeling fight that he wore the Star of David because he was “partly Jewish. My father is Jewish and my mother is Scotch-Irish. I wore it because I thought I should and I intend to wear it in every bout from now on.” (It is of note that his brother Buddy, also a heavyweight fighter, did not wear the Star of David on his trunks).
The Germans, who had gloried in Schmeling when he won the heavyweight title in 1930, played down Baer’s victory. I came to understand what Baer represented when I talked to a Jew who had grown up in Germany in the 1930s. When I asked nonagenarian Irving Klothen if he rooted for Joe Louis when Louis knocked out Schmeling in 1938. he said, “Yes, but more so when Baer fought Schmeling. We didn’t let anybody know that we were listening on the radio in Berlin, pulling hard for Max Baer because he was Jewish.”
At the time I told Klothen, since deceased, that Baer was not Jewish, that it was all a publicity stunt.
I have a column from the Sacramento Bee of Aug. 13, 1989 in which columnist Bill Conlin (not the Philadelphia Daily News’ Conlin) wrote that he had declared Baer was not Jewish because his mother was not Jewish. He then noted that in response to that column he had gotten a call from Baer’s widow, the former Mary Sullivan, a Sacramento resident. She said, “Bill, don’t write things like that. You of all people, who were his pall bearer. You know how proud Max was of his Jewish lineage and his Jewish background. I’m upset and so would Max be if he were still with us. (Baer died in 1959 at 50 of a heart attack).
In view of the joy Baer’s victory gave my friend Irving Klothen and Baer’s later desire to be considered Jewish, I am sorry I told Klothen that Max was not Jewish.
©2009 by Stan Isaacs. The Stan Isaacs caricature is ©2001 by Jim Hummel. This column first posted Nov. 23, 2009.
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