Ghetto Warriors exhibition packs a punch

OneWorld UK

By Daniel Nelson

Boxing is chess with pain and 100 times the speed, says promoter Robert Waterman.

The speed of thought and mental calculations required are the same as when you are playing chess, he emphasises in a short film that is part of Ghetto Warriors Minority Boxers in Britain at the Jewish Museum in London.

The title says it all. Wheres theres poverty and immigration, theres boxing. Thats why it will never die, sportswriter Colin Hart said at the opening earlier this month.

Not surprisingly, given its venue, the exhibition focuses on Jewish boxers from a small area of Londons East End. For a time, from the 1920s, they were the dominant force in British boxing, pushing aside even the Irish.

It was an extraordinary development. In the words of Elliott Tucker, the maker of the film featured in the exhibition, Similar to the new muscle Jew of modern Zionist ideology, the Jewish boxer was a bolt of lightening to the masculine Jewish psyche*

The Jewish boxers, he says, stand alone in the annals of Jewish cultural history.

They certainly ironed out the ghetto bend, the stereotype of the cringing, submissive Jew. How it came about is complex, says Tucker, but as many old fighters said, they were hungry and hunger makes you need to fight.

The same is true of the black boxers who took over the tradition as boxing gave way to law and medicine for the next generation of Jews. (Roman Greenberg - born in Russia, raised in Israel, made in England - is the only professional Jewish fighter active in Britain today. He wears a Star of David on his shorts.) The fighters from Caribbean families had to wait for the British Board of Boxing to scrap the colour bar that prevented them competing for British titles. Wait is the wrong word: the Board was finally forced to put its prejudices aside in 1948 by the popularity of the Turpin brothers, Randolph and Dick.

Now it is the turn of fighters of Asian origin and Travellers to make their mark. (Next into the ring, Hart suggested with a smile at the opening, might be the sons of our Polish plumbers.)

Though small, the exhibition raises several fascinating issues, including discrimination and Britishness. Pugilism was seen as quintessentially British. In the words of a song popular in the 19th century:

Since boxing is a manly game,
And Britons recreation;
By boxing we will raise our fame,
Bove any other nation.

That meant migrants and their children who took up the sport often faced prejudice (Daniel Mendoza, the first Jewish boxer to win national acclaim, in the late 1800s, and who developed scientific boxing, was accused of hitting low), and an individuals character flaws could be blown up into generalisations about a whole ethnic group: but they could also prove their or their communitys Britishness - at Amir Khans first professional fight (against another Briton) in 2005 he waved a Union Jack in the ring as the Land of Hope and Glory blared out and later wrote, I wanted to show people that Asian lads like me were proud to be British.

From the 18th to the early 20th century, boxing showed that Britain was international top dog, and when reality intervened to the extent that even jingoistic Brits could no longer claim to be No.1, minority boxers such as Ted Kid Lewis and Lennox Lewis won hearts by boosting dented national pride through their defeat of American opponents.

The book that accompanies the exhibition, Fighting Back? Jewish and Black Boxers in Britain, explores some of these issues.

* Women barely get a mention in this exhibition, though it notes that From the Georgian period until today there have always been female boxers, including at least one Jewish example. In April 1975 Daniel Mendoza and John Jackson acted as seconds in a fight between Mrs Mary Ann Fielding and a Jewess of Wentworth Street. As so often in the literature of migration, the person from the ethnic minority doesnt get a name.

+ The exhibition runs until 2 September at the Jewish Museum, 129-131 Albert Street, London, NW1.