The Bar Kochba club was not alone. In the last years of the nineteenth century and the opening years of the twentieth, a number of Jewish sporting clubs began to develop, especially in the towns of central Europe. Almost all of them had names that echoed great heroic moments and characters from the past of the Jewish people. Besides Bar Kochba there were significant clubs that took the name Shimshon (Samson) and of course Maccabi – while others called themselves names that included the words Koach (strength) or Gibbor (hero) or Gevurah (heroism).

At the fourth Zionist Congress at Basle, in 1903, an impressive display of gymnastics was performed for the entertainment and the edification of the delegates by a group of more than thirty Jewish athletes and it was at this congress that the foundations of the Juedische Turnerschaft, the Union of Jewish Gymnastic Clubs, the basis of the future Maccabi organization, were laid. It is important to emphasise that in their initial announcements they emphasized the national side of their activities. This was not merely physical activity for the enjoyment of the individual: it was physical development in the service of the nation. The national idea became a factor in many of the early sporting and gymnastic clubs that developed in these years.

With time, at the beginning of the next decade they crystallized into the Maccabi Federation with dozens of affiliated clubs and this formally became the World Maccabi Union in 1921, with headquarters over the next decades in a number of the great Central European cities. Maccabi presented itself as an apolitical organization unofficially connected with the Zionist movement. With the appearance of the Turnershaft and Maccabi, and the coordination of activities that up to then had been purely local, the movement for physical education and sport in the Jewish national cause became formalized.