In his appeal to the Second Zionist Congress (Basle, 1898), Max Nordau introduced the concept of a “Muscular Jew:”
We must do away with the demeaning image of the stooping Jew in the ghetto, afraid for his life… Let us become strong men, with full chests and a deep, lucid expression in our eyes. More than any other, our people need programs of physical education. They will help strengthen our bodies and our character…We must ensure Jewish physical education clubs flourish and grow, setting an example in every Jewish community.
Breitbart portrait, signed in Yiddish (National Library of Israel).
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Siegmund “Zishe” Breitbart (1883-1925) became the epitome of the Muscular Jew. A Polish-born vaudeville shtarker (strongman) and Jewish folklore hero who became famous as the undisputed “Strongest Man in the World,” he was also known to Jews across the world as Shimshon HaGibor and, when he performed in Europe, Zionist papers would often note that “Samson has arrived.” Throughout his regrettably short life, he was especially proud of serving as an international paradigm of the strong Jew and for his role in beginning to shift European Christian perceptions of Jews as weaklings. His fame and popularity were such that he drew larger audiences than Harry Houdini.
Indeed, Breitbart, who was billed during his 1923 American tour as “the Superman of the Ages,” is credited by many with inspiring Jerry Shuster and Joe Siegel – who, as a nine-year-old, saw Zishe perform in Cleveland – to create their iconic superhero, Superman. See my Jewish Press article, Is Superman Jewish? (July 22, 2015).
Exceptionally rare postcard depicting Breitbart bending horseshoes with his bare hands.
Even while yet a teen, Breitbart stunned people with his exploits, including pulling himself out of a coffin buried underground. His most renowned feats included bending iron bars around his arm like tefillin; pounding nails into thick boards with his bare fist; ripping solid steel sheets 5/8″ thick and 3 feet long; biting through iron chains or tearing them apart with his bare hands; rolling half inch metal bars into scrolls; holding back two flogged horses who were whipped to run in opposite directions; supporting enormous weights, such as automobiles loaded with up to ten passengers, while lying on his back; and having huge stones broken with sledgehammers on his bare chest. In Bavaria, he once entered a bullring unarmed and wearing only red shorts and ended what was expected to be an epic battle in mere seconds when he stared the raging bull in the eyes, punched him smack in the head, and knocked him out.
Breitbart famously bit on a leather strap and hauled a wagonload of ten burly men for half a mile down Fifth Avenue in New York, and in perhaps his most famous feat, he climbed a ladder lifting a baby elephant while holding a locomotive wheel by rope in his teeth while three men were suspended from the wheel. During his “Tomb of Hercules” stunt, a bridge was built across his chest and heavy beasts such as a bull, or an elephant, were paraded over the boards. Even more incredibly, Breitbart would support a motordrome on his chest while two men chased each other on motorcycles inside.
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Born into an Orthodox family of blacksmiths in Łódź, Poland, Breitbart began casting iron in his father’s workshop at age four. His family discovered his remarkable strength when, at only three years old, he freed himself from under a heavy iron bar that had fallen on him in his father’s blacksmith shop, and the yarmulke-wearing young blacksmith was banished from several cheders for using his awesome strength against other yeshiva students.
Zishe’s parents wanted him to learn a trade, but wherever he was apprenticed, they took advantage of him by using his incredible strength for the business and teaching him nothing. A frustrated Zishe won his first job as a circus strongman when, as a teen, he snuck out to see the circus – something that nice Orthodox Jewish boys were not supposed to do – and, standing 6’1” and weighing 225 pounds, he was soon called “The Iron King” and was billed as “The Strongest Man in the World.” Responding to a public challenge issued by the circus’s then-strongman, he handily defeated him. When the losing shtarker’s brother, who was the circus bear-keeper, challenged Breitbart to return and fight the bear in a cage, he didn’t tell Zishe that the bear had been purposely starved for several days and was thus particularly ornery. Though Zishe nonetheless won the fight, he carried scars from the encounter for the rest of his life.
Breitbart fought in the Russian army against Germany during World War I, was taken prisoner by the Germans while serving on the Eastern front, and decided to remain in Germany after the war, where he married the daughter of Rabbi Dr. Vaytz of Koblenz. (One of his brothers, whom he characterized as his superior in strength – an almost unimaginable proposition – did not survive the war.) Commencing a career as a circus acrobat, shtarker, and Yiddish stage actor, he was the first strongman hired as a first ring act by the German Circus Busch (1919), the largest and most celebrated circus in Europe.
Breitbart arrived in the United States on August 26, 1923 and became an American citizen later that year – barely beating out the adoption by the U.S. of new immigration restrictions that all but closed off the immigration of Eastern European Jews. The first strongman to incorporate showmanship, theatrical flair, and “shtick” into his performances, Zishe went on to become a popular vaudeville performer across Europe and in the United States.
During the prime of the international Breitbart craze, his name was everywhere: product endorsements, poems and songs (including a song called The Breitbart March), holiday greeting cards, and films. He also successfully marketed a mail-order muscle-development-course based upon his book, Muscular Power, which promoted body-weight exercises and a special “Breitbart Apparatus,” a resistance exerciser made to simulate steel bending movements. (Ironically, many people still remember strongman Charles Atlas, but Breitbart was actually the first to offer a mail-order body-building program.)
Shown here is an original page from an advertising flyer for Breitbart’s Muscular Power. The caption underneath the remarkable photo reads:
Advertising flyer for Breitbart’s Muscular Power.
This feat of Super-strength has been and is still being performed by me before thousands of people daily. The huge steel motordrome and the combined weight of motorcycles and men is over 5,000 pounds. Aside from the tremendous weight, the balancing of this cumbersome mass while men and machines whirl around makes this the greatest test of strength, endurance, and skill ever performed in this or any other age.
Newspaper photograph of Breitbart bending a steel bar into a complex shape conforming with a pre-drawn diagram. (Note the Star of David at the bottom of the unit.)
During his act, Breitbart dressed in revealing and outrageous outfits designed to display his incredible physique, purposely adopting archetypal symbols such as the Roman centurion. He was particularly proud of the fact that his “look” and his strength undercut popular stereotypes about Jews as feeble weaklings, though he often attracted hostile attention and threats from antisemites. Zishe’s most devoted enthusiasts were arguably the Yiddish-speaking Jews of Eastern Europe, to whom he was a great Jewish hero, as many viewed him as an important response to the increasing antisemitic attacks in pre-Holocaust Europe.
Wherever he went, Zishe made a point to visit the Jewish community, and he would lift the children – whom he loved and who loved him – into the air, often seven at a time. During visits to hospitalized children, a regular agenda item on his schedule, he would often play his cello for them, which he took with him wherever he went, and he regularly attended Friday night Shabbat services. During services one Friday evening in Coblentz, a large group of Brown Shirt Hitler youths, knowing that Zishe was inside, stood outside the synagogue screaming for him, which he calmly ignored until a rock went sailing through a shul window. He put down his siddur, left shul to confront them and, in a matter of minutes, they had all disbursed.
Newspaper photograph of Breitbart with a bit in his mouth pulling a wagon full of muscular men through the streets of Washington, D.C.
The Jewish press venerated Breitbart, and even Orthodox and Charedi rabbis took interest in him. Wherever he went, he participated in Jewish activities, including visiting writers at the Warsaw Jewish Literary Union and attending the Yiddish Press Ball. In one case, Breitbart, who always showed great respect for rabbis, was summoned to perform for the Radzhiner Rebbe, who was so awed by the strongman that he blessed him that he should be the defender of the Jews, a blessing last bestowed upon Samson in the Book of Judges. Zishe was a regular and generous donor not only to Jewish causes, but to the general public welfare as well; in one famous incident, he fed lunch every day over a sustained period to the townspeople of a small village experiencing great economic difficulty. His generosity was such that when he suddenly died at a relatively young age, there was little left in his estate.
Breitbart was regularly attacked by antisemitic publications and portrayed by them as a fraud, including one famous incident where renowned “hypnotist-clairvoyant” Erik Jan Hanussen claimed that he could hypnotize a 20-year-old girl and, in her hypnotic state, have her replicate Breitbart’s feats. After audience members were invited to verify that the steel bars, chains, and other implements were real, Hanussen would bring the girl up on a darkened stage and delay his show by rapping to the audience about magic for some 15 minutes while, behind the curtain, his assistants were exchanging the steel paraphernalia for identical-looking fakes. When the “hypnotized girl” aped Breitbart’s acts of strength, audiences everywhere became convinced that Breitbart was indeed a con artist… until Zishe cleverly fought back.
Before a Hanussen show in Vienna, Breitbart hired an engineer to invite the stagehands to a free beer party, during which he locked the drunk lot of them in the theatre basement. When Hanussen’s hypnotized girl could not bend the real steel objects – in fact, she injured herself in the attempt – Hanussen’s duplicity was revealed and he was barred from performing, and Breitbart, fully vindicated, became even more famous. Hanussen had the unmitigated gall to later sue the strongman for damages, alleging that Zishe, furious at having been proven a fraud, physically harmed Hanussen in an unprovoked attack. When a leading chain manufacturer brought chains into court and Zishe expended little effort in breaking them, the case was summarily dismissed.
Breitbart as a “living quarry” (Berlin, 1921).
Breitbart was deeply committed to his faith and heritage and, although he was well-aware of the spreading antisemitic threat in Germany and Austria, he fearlessly wore the Star of David on his costumes. He was very generous in distributing personal funds to Jews in need; for example, on one particular occasion, he donated thirty pounds of Passover flour to the followers of the Radzhiner Rebbe.
Zishe was also an enthusiastic Zionist who spoke passionately in Yiddish to the Jews in his audiences about the Zionist settlements in Eretz Yisrael; often performed with the Zionist flag draping the stage; boycotted a Warsaw restaurant that refused to play Hatikvah to greet him; and founded an organization to provide strength-training to Jews for the purpose of joining an army he hoped to lead to liberate Eretz Yisrael.
Breitbart became a great source of hope to all sorts of Jews, ranging from the wholly unaffiliated to Orthodox and Charedi rabbis, who could dream of a future of national empowerment and, ultimately, a Jewish state defended by Jewish strength. A great admirer of not only Samson but also of Bar Kochba, who led the heroic Jewish revolt against Roman Rule in 135 A.D., Zishe met with Ze’ev Jabotinsky in New York to discuss a plan for Breitbart to travel to Eretz Yisrael, where he would generate international publicity by duplicating Samson’s feats, as described in the Bible, and commence training Jews to form an army – which Breitbart would lead as general – to overthrow the Turks and then the British. A broadly popular Yiddish saying held that “If a thousand Zishe Breitbarts were to arise among the Jews, the Jewish people would no longer be persecuted.”
As president of the Maccabi Berlin sports federation, Breitbart symbolized a Jewish renaissance, and he was always up-front about his Jewish identity and his Zionism. Some claim that he visited Eretz Yisrael, but there are no records confirming such a trip. The rumors probably testify more to the breadth of his popularity, extending even as far as the Middle East.
During a trip back to Poland, Zishe made a point of publicly stating that he had come there to perform the traditional Jewish pilgrimage of visiting the graves of his ancestors and to promote physical culture to Jews. Sadly, however, he died shortly after from an accidental stab wound to his knee by a railroad spike that he drove through five-inch-thick oak boards using only his bare hands. The leg became infected, he developed blood poisoning, his leg was amputated and, a few weeks later, he was buried in the Adas-Yisroel cemetery in Berlin. (Ironically, on that same date and that same cemetery, a member of the German Weimar Legislature who had written their post-World War I constitution was laid to rest which, as we now know, made no difference to the rights of Jews after the rise of Naziism.)
According to On the Death of the Second Samson, an article published by Doar Hayom, a paper published by Itamar Ben Yehuda (Eliezer Ben Yehuda’s son):
The massive funeral was attended by thousands of Jews and Christians. A good few kilometers around the graveyard were jammed with hundreds of cars filled with people coming to the funeral. There were so many people that the elderly cemetery officials declared they couldn’t remember ever seeing such an enormous Jewish funeral in Berlin. The police had to send numerous constables out to maintain order and supervise the procession….
[Orthodox] Chief Rabbi Dr. [Ezra] Munk delivered the eulogy, emphasizing that the deceased had won the hearts of millions… [He] particularly praised the deceased for disregarding all the glory and honor accorded him by the world at large, for Breitbart never forgot he was a Jew. He always returned to be with his fellow Jews, wherever they might be, telling them how happy he was that today Jews could claim the strongest man in the world as one of their own… A black flag belonging to the Berlin Maccabi sports federation, of which Zishe Breitbart was honorary president, fluttered throughout the funeral. Telegrams of condolence arrived, and wreaths were laid on the grave by sports associations from Paris, London, Rome, Vienna, and Warsaw…
Following his death, his two surviving brothers, who were also strongmen, tried to perpetuate Zishe’s legacy, but they were unable to duplicate his popularity or success. Though Jews treasured memories of Breitbart’s message of Jewish empowerment and continued to tell stories and sing songs about his feats, the Holocaust erased many Jewish legends and folklore and, sadly, he is little remembered today.
