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There’s no doubt that Jews like some of the stereotypes ascribed to them. Many enjoy fantasizing about being super-intelligent yet physically weak beings, outsmarting enemies with brains, not brawn. This typing of the diasporic schlemiel as superhero is so prevalent as to have become mistaken for historical fact — not least because Jewish editors, scholars, and rabbis have written histories that put editors, scholars, and rabbis at the center of everything.

But there have been instances in the American Jewish experience when Jewish bodies have taken precedence over Jewish brains, when the Jew-as-physical-powerhouse has been ascendant. When Jewish immigrants populated the roiling ethnic ghettos of cities such as New York, Chicago, and Montreal during the first half of the twentieth century, most Jews lived lives that were less than bookish. They worked long hours in sweaty, dreary factories; they sold old junk on city streets and door-to-door; they lived ten to a room; they sucked the marrow out of bones; they were pimps and whores and petty criminals; they were filthy. They liked bad literature and worse theater. And, like the other ethnics who lived in these city ghettos, they boxed, and they wrestled, too.

A fair amount of ink has been spilled about Jewish boxers, but wrestling has endured less valiantly in the Jewish imagination. The sport has had a history tainted by the fixed nature of its “professional” side (although, as Yiddish writer H.D. Nomberg commented almost 100 years ago, wrestling is no less fixed than a staged drama and equally, if not more, entertaining). Prior to World War I, wrestling had its home in taverns, back rooms, and traveling circus sideshows. It was not terribly popular and began to gain large numbers of fans only in the 1920s, when promoters introduced high-flying, acrobatic moves into a sport that had previously consisted of two large men trying to hold each other immobile on a mat.

Most wrestlers at the time did not yet have sophisticated personas and often relied on ethnic affiliation to create a fan base. It was this aspect of the sport that brought Jews into both the ring and the seats. The concept of the “Jewish wrestler” was viable enough that there were even a few non-Jews who wrestled under Jewish names, with Stars of David on their trunks (one of these gentiles, Paul Boesch, wrestled as a Jew until a reporter from the Jewish Daily Forward saw him nude in a locker room).

One manager in particular was most responsible for creating a solid stable of Jewish wrestlers. Warsaw-born Jack Pfefer was known, among other appellations, as the “Plotter from Pinsk,” the “Smirker from Smolensk,” and the “Halitosis Kid.” Described as standing 5 feet tall with his hat on, wearing pants pulled up to his armpits, and wielding an ivory-knobbed cane, Pfefer, who confided to A.J. Liebling that he was the “son of a rabbi,” commanded one of the fiercest gangs of professional grapplers in the industry and was a major player in the wrestling world for nearly fifty years.

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Pfefer was most responsible for upping the spectacle quotient in the American wrestling ring. “I’ve never seen an honest wrestling bout in my twenty years in the game,” he said in a 1938 interview. “Maybe there was one, but I wasn’t there.” When Pfefer’s competitors tried to shut him out, he began to provide sportswriters with the results of wrestling matches before they took place. For this, the press loved him, but within his own industry he was regarded as the ultimate double-crosser.

Pfefer’s other major innovation was the introduction of the grotesque to the wrestling scene. “Freaks I love, and they’re my specialty,” he once said to sportswriter Jack Miley. “I am very proud of some of my monstrosities. You can’t get a dollar with a normal-looking guy, no matter how good he can wrestle. Those birds with shaved, egg-shaped heads, handlebar moustaches, tattooed bodies, big stomachs — they’re for me!”

One of Pfefer’s Jewish wrestlers, “Blimp” Levy, was a former Coney Island sideshow fat man who tipped the scales at over 625 pounds. Pfefer called Blimp “a freak with class” and his “glandular champ,” although he once also commented unsentimentally that the wrestler was so fat that he’d probably “drop dead” in the arena. He was advertised as “the most meat which ever stepped into a ring.”

Blimp was the exception, though. As a 1968 Ring Wrestling Magazine retrospective on Jewish wrestlers noted, “Jews brought speed and skill to the ring”; few of the Jewish wrestlers were known for their impressive size. Abe “Hebrew Hercules” Coleman topped out at 5 feet 3 inches. Some, like Paul Duveensky and Hymie “Ivan Rasputin” Fishman, were bristlingly hirsute. Herby “Jewish Sensation” Freeman and Harry Jacobs had puffy baby faces. Others, like Sam Stein, looked impossibly scrawny. Rafael “Rasslin’ Rabbi” Halperin didn’t look like a rabbi, but he didn’t wrestle on the Sabbath, either. Some of the Hebrew grapplers, like Sammy Cohen or Jack Singer, just looked insane. And that was half the battle. Working-class heroes all, their Jewish fans would have preferred a couple of teeth knocked out to a noggin full of Bashevis Singer any day.&