Athletes in transition: German immigrants to Mandatory Palestine – between integration and segregation

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe Brit Maccabim Atid sport club was founded by immigrants from Germany who came to Palestine during the 1930s. The circumstances surrounding this organisation’s establishment differed from those of the sports organisations operating in Palestine until then. We consider sports culture as a tool for analysing immigrant absorption processes. Our discussion is based on the claim that sports served as a means of social integration for German Jews. In Palestine, sports served as an arena of conflict between the political camps in the Jewish settlement. In response to this political reality, immigrants from Central Europe began organising to establish separate sports clubs along political and ethnic lines, thus responding to the needs of immigrants identifying with German cultural circles. Brit Maccabim Atid constitutes a test case for the social and cultural changes in the meaning of sports in the move from one country to another. The paper describes two sociological models, each of which examines the impact of involvement in sports on the extent to which immigrants become integrated into society. Our findings indicate that sports participation in an immigrant society can be a unifying and assimilative factor and at the same time a segregating factor.