Jew-Jitsu: The Hebrew Hands of Fury

An excerpt from the book of the same name by Paul Kupperberg and Rabbi Daniel Eliezer, coming from Citadel Books in October of this year. Paul is a veteran editor and writer of comic books and author of young adult books whose blog is right here.


Chapter 1
Turning the Other Cheek Was a New Testament Concept

The Chosen People of Israel have, across the millennia, been chosen for their fair share of aggravation. From the Egyptians and the rest of the Middle East, the Romans and the Catholics to the Roman Catholics, the Spanish, the Germans, the Russians, the Germans, the Americans, and the Germans again, the British and, at long last, bringing history full circle, the entire Middle East.

Jews are accustomed to misery, to tsurus, which is misery so deep, it transcends the heartbreak of everyday life. Misery is your brother-in-law moving in with you. Tsurus, he brings his whole family and your mother-in-law.

And knowing they were at the top of everyone’s hit lists, Jews learned to take care in the perilous world in which they lived those heartbreaking everyday lives. They formed tight-knit communities, little ghettos in which eyes and ears were ever alert for trouble and lines of communication went off in every direction, from housewife to peddler to shop owner to colleagues and to the rest of the population. Survival was dependent on the Jews knowing what was happening before it happened, leading to a tradition of bareden yenem, or gossip, as practiced by the unsung heroes of this underground struggle, the yenta.

So adept did they become at conveying information from one end of the Jewish community to the next that Rabbi Goodunov of Moscow wrote in his history of the Jewish self-protection movement, Ich vel dir geben a khamalye (Striking Back) that even Tsar Alexander II came to hear of their intelligence gathering prowess:

“How is it the Jews know everything before even we do?” the tsar demanded of his intelligence minister.

“The Jews have an expression in Yiddish,” the minister responded. “One Jew meets another and asks, ‘Vus titzuch?’ which roughly means, ‘What’s happening?’ By this method do they easily identify one another and speed the progress of information.”

In disbelief, the tsar decided to investigate this story personally, so he dressed as an Orthodox Jew and, without telling another living soul, he slipped from the Kremlin and went down among the Jewish people.

Within half an hour, having encountered no one along the way who gave him a second glance, he arrived in the Jewish ghetto where he almost immediately met an old man, shuffling down the street.

The disguised tsar nodded in greeting and whispered, “Vus titzuch?”

The old man glanced conspiratorially about before he whispered back, “The tsar is in the ghetto!”


The Rabbi and the Samurai

But while knowledge is power, it’s no good against a klop on the head by a Cossack’s club. It took an act of kidnapping and one man’s literal and spiritual voyage to bring him to a place where he could discover a way for the victims of choice to fight back.

Chiam Mangawicz was a Polish Jew from the port city of Gdansk. In 1841, the young rabbinical student was waylayed by a press gang and put to sea as a cabin boy. Trapped aboard the Orient-bound trading ship, the devoutly observant lad incurred the wrath of the ship’s captain by refusing to slop the deck, serve swill and grog, and be abused down in the bilge on the Shabbos even though his defiance was rewarded with cruel punishments.

Mangawicz’s courage under the lash won him the admiration of the scurvy crew and, by the time Pesach rolled around on the high seas, he was allowed to put together a makeshift sedar at which all hands celebrated the Hebrew exodus with the shank bone of a coxswain and a milchidik menu.

When the trader dropped anchor at the Ryukyu Islands of southeastern Japan, Chiam jumped ship and swam to safety in the tiny village of Kumentsugast. There, a compassionate farmer named Meshpokha and his family hid the young rabbi in their soy field until the ship sailed on. Stranded, the youth was invited to stay with the family. In exchange for their kindness, he taught them Judaism and Talmud, performing the first bris in Japan on the converted Meshpokha. From them, he learned Japanese and how to roll sushi.

One day, Mangawicz saw what appeared to be the old farmer and his sons fighting in the garden. He ran out, seeking to make peace between the warring family members only to be told that they were merely practicing a fighting technique they called "jujitsu," the "gentle art." Using nothing more than their hands and feet and whatever might be handy to double as a weapon, the practitioners of this Asian art turned a foe’s own strength against him, utilizing no more force than necessary to deter an attacker.

Chiam likened this method to a familiar Jewish tradition: “As the mama will deftly sidestep objection with the gentle application of guilt, so does the student of jujitsu move his opponent with subtle leverage.”

Fascinated by this very Jewish way of thinking, what Rebbe Mangawicz would later call “Japanese yiddishe kop,” he joined their daily exercise routine and found in it not only physical confidence, but spiritual satisfaction as well.