Please note that the posts on The Blogs are contributed by third parties. The opinions, facts and any media content in them are presented solely by the authors, and neither The Times of Israel nor its partners assume any responsibility for them. Please contact us in case of abuse. In case of abuse, The modern conception of Muscular Judaism was born into existence through the words of Max Nordau in a 1898 speech to the Second Zionist Congress. In his speech, Nordau urged the creation of the “new Jew,” a Renaissance man with a refined mind, body, and spirit capable of leading the Jewish people out of diaspora and distress. He would be balanced, the antithesis of the overly spiritually-minded, esoteric Rabbinical scholars and the overly physically-minded, equally detached Haskalah intellectuals of the day, which Nordau dubbed “old Jews.”