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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.”