A new book titled Digging Deep: Unearthing the Stories of Eleven Murdered Jewish Footballing Greats by British Jewish author David Bolchover shines a light on a chapter of European sport that has long been overlooked.
Before the outbreak of World War II, Jewish athletes, coaches and administrators were among the most influential figures in the continent’s football landscape, shaping tactics and inspiring crowds from Vienna to Budapest.
Pioneers on the Pitch
Among them, József Braun of Hungary is remembered as the greatest Jewish footballer, his career cut short when he was beaten and starved to death in a forced‑labor battalion; Julius Hirsch, a German international who earned the Iron Cross in the First World War, was deported to Auschwitz and murdered; and Polish internationals Leon Sperling and Zygmunt Steuermann, who turned down chances to flee to pre‑state Israel, perished in the same tragedy.
The legacy of clubs such as Hakoah Vienna, which in 1923 became the first foreign side to defeat an English team on home soil, also illustrates the depth of Jewish contribution to the game, a legacy now being pieced together through archival research and survivor testimonies.
Renowned coach Béla Guttmann, who once led Hakoah Vienna, exemplifies the administrative talent that Jewish figures brought to European football, while historian Daniel Finkelstein and rabbi Jonathan Sacks have examined the cultural ramifications of this lost heritage.
Bolchover’s work does not stop at historical reconstruction; it also draws a line from the old antisemitic hatred that erased these careers to the modern wave of antisemitism that now targets Israel as a nation‑state, fueling campaigns to exclude Israeli clubs and the national team from international competition.
The book notes that the only player with Jewish roots currently at a World Cup is United States reserve goalkeeper Matt Turner, and it calls for a renewed memory of the eleven stars whose lives were extinguished, aiming to break the silence that has persisted for decades.