WHEN JEWS RULED THE FENCING WORLD
Jewish athletes have won more Olympic medals for fencing than for any other sport
By Robert Rockaway
January 29, 2019 • 12:00 AM
At the 1936 Berlin Olympics, the women’s fencing medal ceremony witnessed three medal winners with Jewish backgrounds. Ilona Elek, a Hungarian, won the gold medal. Helene Mayer, a German, won the silver. And Ellen Muller-Preis, an Austrian, won bronze. All of them stood together atop the medal platform. It should be noted that all three women were half-Jewish and none of them considered themselves Jewish. This denial made no difference to the Nazis, however, who deemed them to be Jewish. A photograph of the ceremony shows Mayer, the silver medal winner, standing on the podium and giving the Nazi salute.
Mayer’s bizarre gesture created consternation and a great deal of comment. She was born in 1910 to a Jewish father and a Lutheran mother. Although her physician father was active in Jewish organizations, Helene and her two brothers were raised in a secular home and she attended a Christian school. Before Hitler’s coming to power, Mayer had been one of Germany’s most beloved athletes. She won her first German foil championship in 1924 when she was 13. By 1930, she had won six German championships. She won a gold medal in fencing at the age of 17 at the 1928 Olympics in Amsterdam. Representing Germany, she won 18 bouts and lost only two. Attractive and vivacious, she was a fencing star and Germany’s most dazzling athlete.
Mayer’s father died in 1931 and her mother and brothers remained in Germany. After she competed for Germany in the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics—finishing in fifth place—she decided to stay in California as an exchange student at Scripps College. When Hitler came to power, her exchange was terminated, as was her membership in her hometown fencing club. Returning home to Germany seemed impossible, so she finished her studies at Scripps and took a job teaching German at Mills College in Oakland, California, where she could also continue fencing. Nonetheless, she accepted an invitation to compete for Germany in the 1936 Berlin Summer Olympics. This was arranged by Avery Brundage, head of the U.S. Olympic Committee. He convinced Germany to let one German-Jewish athlete onto the German team to quiet American calls for a U.S. boycott of the games. (According to German law, Mayer was a mischling, a German of mixed Jewish and Aryan blood.) Mayer was the only German athlete from a Jewish background to win a medal that year.
Despite winning a medal, she was not celebrated on her return to Germany. The Nazi government barely tolerated her. Joseph Goebbels, the government’s minister of propaganda, instructed the German press not to make any comments regarding Mayer’s non-Aryan ancestry. After the 1936 games, she never competed in the Olympics again. She returned to the United States and became a citizen in 1940. She won the U.S. women’s foil championship six times from 1937 to 1946. She was also world foil champion in 1937.
Mayer moved back to Germany in 1952 and married an old friend. She died of breast cancer in 1953. She was inducted into the United States Fencing Association Hall of Fame posthumously in 1963. In 2000, Sports Illustrated named her the greatest fencer of the 20th century.
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American Jews generally have heard about Jewish-American athletes such as Sandy Koufax and Hank Greenberg in baseball, Sid Luckman and Benny Friedman in football, and Benny Leonard and Barney Ross in boxing. But they know practically nothing about the history of outstanding European Jewish athletes before WWII. Jewish Olympic fencers brought their home countries fame and international recognition, and brought honor to themselves and the Jewish people.
Young Jews have always viewed participating in sports as a means of integrating and gaining acceptance among their non-Jewish peers and within the larger society. This held true for Jewish university students in Germany, Austria, and Hungary during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Only there, fencing and dueling with swords became the Jewish students’ sports of choice. They did so because fencing was considered a path to climb the social ladder. In addition, dueling against non-Jews was a way for Jews to show their mettle and offered a means to defend Jewish honor, especially in a time of rising anti-Semitism.
Even Theodor Herzl, the founder of political Zionism, enthused about fencing. As a journalist, Herzl wrote articles about fencing duels between Jews and French anti-Semites in the late 19th century. Herzl himself once offered to duel a Viennese anti-Semite. He was not bluffing. As a child, he had been trained to use a sword and fought a duel as part of his initiation into Albia, a German student dueling fraternity. Herzl believed that “a half dozen duels would very much raise the social position of Jews.”
Because of widespread anti-Semitism in Europe, Jewish students were excluded from many university fraternities and athletic associations. Consequently, they created fraternities and sporting clubs of their own. Their dueling frequently took place within the confines of the Jewish environment. But once they engaged in competition with non-Jews, they achieved a reputation as fierce duelists. As a consequence of their ability and competitiveness, numbers of Jewish fencers became champions in their countries and in the Olympics. Olympic fencing competition was a means by which young Jews could express their patriotism and love of country and a way to show the world that Jews could compete with non-Jews at the highest level and win. In fact, Jewish athletes have won more Olympic medals for fencing than for any other sport.
The first Jewish fencing Olympic medal winner was Siegfried “Fritz” Flesch (1872-1939), who fenced for Austria. He won a bronze medal in the saber competition at the 1900 Summer Olympics in Paris. His was the first of 35 Olympic fencing medals, 17 of them gold, won by Jewish fencers from 1900 to 1936.
The next Jewish Olympic medal for fencing was won by an Englishman, Edgar Seligman (1867-1958). Seligman was born in San Francisco to German parents. After his parents moved to London, he became a naturalized British citizen. A talented artist by profession, he competed in five Olympic Games as a member of the British fencing team. He was the only man to win the British fencing championship in three fencing divisions: the epee in 1904 and 1906; the foil in 1906 and 1907; and the saber in 1923 and 1924. He first competed in the 1906 Intercalated Games, held in Athens to renew interest in the Olympic Games. The British team won the silver medal. Seligman competed again in the 1908 Olympic Games in London, where he and his teammates won the silver medal in the team epee competition. Four years later, Seligman captained the British fencing team at the Stockholm Olympics. He competed in three events and won another silver medal in the team epee competition. Although Seligman competed in four more Olympics—1920, 1924, 1928, and 1932—he never won another medal.
Hungarians had always taken pride in being descended from saber-wielding mounted warriors. For a Jew to become a saber champion was to fulfill a fantasy of acceptance. The first Hungarian Olympic champions were Jews who excelled in saber fencing, the most Hungarian of martial arts. In the 1908 London Olympic Games, four Hungarian-Jewish fencers—Dezso Foldes, Jeno Fuchs, Oskar Gerde, and Lajos Werkner—won a gold medal in the team saber competition. Fuchs also won a gold medal in the individual saber competition. He became the first Hungarian Olympic champion in fencing. In addition to his gold medals, Fuchs (1882-1955) won 22 individual matches in the 1908 and 1912 Olympic Games.
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