Soccer, Anti-Semitism and the ‘Yid Army’: Toby Young
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324532004578358142463632614.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion
Tottenham Hotspur fans must be wary when they follow the London team across the Channel.
For Tottenham Hotspur’s corps of traveling fans, Thursday’s soccer game in Italy against Internazionale Milano holds many dangers—and not just to their team. When Tottenham played Lyon in a Europa League game last month, 150 visiting fans were set upon by a group of neo-Nazis, with three Spurs supporters ending up in the hospital. It was the second time in recent months that the team’s fans have been attacked by a fascist mob in Europe—in November, several Spurs fans were injured when they traveled to Rome to see Tottenham take on Lazio. Their assailants screamed “Jews” before attacking them with knives and clubs.
Tottenham’s supporters are no strangers to anti-Semitism. The North London team has been known as the “Jewish club” since the beginning of the early 1900s, when it regularly attracted over 11,000 Yiddisher supporters to home games. In 1986, it was the first big team (and the last) to hire a British Jew, David Pleat, as a coach, and a Happy Yom Kippur message has made an annual appearance in the club’s official program since 1973.
The story of how Tottenham came to be adopted by Britain’s Jews as “God’s chosen football club” is a curious one. The conventional wisdom is that it’s because the team’s White Hart Lane stadium is next to one of England’s largest communities of Orthodox Jews, but that’s not the reason. Indeed, it’s doubtful Tottenham draws more than a handful of supporters from this neighborhood, given the traditional indifference of Orthodox Jews to soccer.
The true explanation has more to do with London’s public transportation system and the fact that soccer games in England are normally played on a Saturday afternoon. Jewish immigrants from Europe at the beginning of the 20th century tended to settle in London’s East End, an area associated with West Ham, one of Tottenham’s London rivals. However, the reason Spurs became the “Jewish club” is because White Hart Lane was easier to get to using London’s now defunct network of electric trams. That meant East End Jews could go to synagogue on Saturday morning, wolf down a bowl of lokshen soup and travel to “the Lane” in the afternoon without breaking the Sabbath rule against using a vehicle powered by a combustion engine. Or that’s the team lore, anyway.
Today, gentiles outnumber Jews among Tottenham’s supporters by a margin of at least three to one and Arsenal—the Spurs’ biggest rivals—probably has a greater number of Yiddisher fans. Nevertheless, Tottenham’s Jewishness has become an indelible part of the team’s identity. It’s not uncommon to see Israeli flags flying in the stadium and Tottenham’s “top boys”—soccer slang for a club’s most aggressive supporters—refer to themselves as the “Spurs Yids.” The word “Yid” is worn as a badge of honor by the team’s fans, even the non-Jewish majority. Jews and gentiles alike are proud to call themselves the “Yid Army” and to chant the phrase at games.
Given the acute modern sensitivity to ethnic or racist slights, Spurs fans lately have come in for criticism: A racist epithet, they’re told, cannot be “re-appropriated” by people it has never been applied to in the first place, thereby ruling out Tottenham’s non-Jewish fans. In November, the Society of Black Lawyers threatened to report Tottenham to the police if its supporters continued to loudly use the word “Yid.” The club responded by pointing out that its fans had “adopted the chant as a defense mechanism in order to own the term and thereby deflect anti-Semitic abuse.” To date, the police haven’t taken any action.
Another facet of the club’s Jewish identity is that the supporters tend to be very critical of their team and pessimistic about its chances of winning. Alan Sugar, the Jewish businessman who owned Tottenham from 1991 to 2001, remarked on this in an interview he gave to Anthony Clavane for a book about Britain’s soccer-loving Jews called “Does Your Rabbi Know You’re Here?” Spurs fans, Lord Sugar said, “will be the first to say ‘waste of money’ if, God forbid, a player doesn’t perform. Jews, bless ’em, are the greatest critics on God’s earth.”
Spurs fans are unlikely to lament anything spent on Gareth Bale, the 23-year-old wunderkind who joined the team in 2007. Bale helped the club finish fourth in the English Premier League in 2009-10 and was named Player of the Year in 2010-11. But he has been particularly good this season, clocking 21 goals for the club across all competitions so far. He opened the scoring against Internazionale Milano at White Hart Lane last week, propelling Tottenham to a 3-0 victory. That means that unless Inter can beat Spurs by a four-goal margin on Thursday, the Italian team won’t progress to the last eight of the Europa League—another reason Tottenham’s fans may not receive a warm reception.
Mr. Young is the author of “How to Lose Friends & Alienate People” (Da Capo Press, 2002)
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