Jewry Of Muscle Summary

The Jewish people in Europe faced harsh persecution in the late 19th and early 20th century. This hatred towards the Jewish people was often exhibited through violence and false accusations that led to unreasonable and unfair punishment. This prompted Jewish leaders from all around the world to start a Zionist movement calling for a revolution and the creation of a Jewish state. The movement created various types of Zionism and different beliefs on how to achieve establishing a Jewish nation that would free the Jewish people from discrimination. Political Zionism, in particular, focused on the Jewish people regaining the confidence and restoring the power they once had through political means. Max Nordau’s ‘Jewry of Muscle” and Theodor Herzl’s “A solution of the …show more content…
“Jewry of Muscle” written by Max Nordau was meant to be inspiring and a call to action. It was a juxtaposition between the suffering the Jewish people tolerated and the solution that was needed to end the oppression. A call for the Jewish people to regain more self-power and self-confidence to prevent the anti-Semitists from taking advantage and exploiting the Jewish people. In the first half of the essay, I noticed the use of imagery as a political weapon. Nordau talks about how the success of the anti-Semitists are measure by the thousands of Jews that are killed and the corpses that are in the ghettos. This is meant to infuriate and cause a reaction among the Jewish people. It exemplifies the problem at hand, that the Jews are being targeted and acts of animosity are taken out against them. Their success is measured through the quantity of Jews that are slaughtered and the pain that can be inflicted on the Jewish people’s lives. Another use of imagery was when he wrote “the fear of constant persecution turned our powerful voices into frightened whispers, which rose in a crescendo only when our martyrs on the stake cried out their dying prayers in the face of their