Throughout history, plenty of other Jew haters have used the term in exactly this fashion. But Tottenham fans actually apply the moniker to themselves in a com-plimentary, prideful way.
When a Tottenham player threads a pass or slams a shot from outside the penalty area, the fans celebrate him by chanting, “Yiddo, Yiddo.” To rally their club at moments of unsure play, Tottenham fans stir their beloved club with the song “Who, who, who let the Yiddos out?” They serenade their favorite players as
“Jews,” even though none of them qualify under the loosest standards of halakhah. When the great blond German striker Jürgen Klinsmann arrived at the club in 1994, fans honored him by singing:
Chim-chiminee, chim-chiminee
Chim-chim churoo
Jürgen was a German
But now he’s a Jew.
To the uninitiated, the logic undergirding the connection between Tottenham and the Jews isn’t obvious.
For that matter, the logic probably doesn’t seem any clearer to Tottenham’s fans—it’s just an inherited custom practiced without thought. But as far as I can discern, the historical link is this: While lots of London HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE JEWISH QUESTION
neighborhoods had Jews, the Stamford Hill neighborhood near the Tottenham grounds had lots of Hasidic Jews, black-clad, pre-modern, and unassimilated, the kind that stick out. They provided a large rack on which Tottenham’s enemies could hang their hatreds. The fans that persecuted Tottenham for its neighborhood Jews included almost every club in the league, but the worst were their cross-town rivals from Chelsea. Even though they had nearly as many Jewish supporters as Tottenham, Chelsea composed some exceptionally hateful tunes. One went, “Hitler’s gonna gas ’em again/We can’t stop them/The Yids from Tottenham.” Another urged, “Gas a Jew, Jew, Jew, put him in the oven, cook him through.”
How do you respond to such bile? Tottenham’s
strategy alternated between ignoring the chants and changing the subject with insults of their own. Neither approach made much headway. When they finally
devised a response, they borrowed a classical argumen-tative act of legerdemain, claiming the insult as a badge of honor. The key moment in this transformation came in an away game against Manchester City in the early 1980s. Tottenham’s opponents subjected them to a song that went,
We’ll be running around Tottenham with our pricks hanging out tonight,
We’ll be running around Tottenham with our pricks hanging out tonight,
Singing I’ve got a foreskin, I’ve got a foreskin, I’ve got a foreskin, and you ain’t
We’ve got foreskins, we’ve got foreskins, you ain’t. Instead of passively absorbing the blow, Tottenham rounded up its Jewish supporters, encouraged them to drop their pants, and defiantly wave their circumcised members. It was a retort so funny, so impossible to rebut that Tottenham e¤ectively closed down the argument.
Strangely, it was the hooligan element, the same one with members tied to the far right, which adopted the Jewish identity first. They named their band of thugs
“The Yid Army,” and they made the Israeli flag their standard. After victorious battles against rival gangs, they would rub their triumph in their enemies’ faces by dancing around them and chanting, “Yiddo.” Hooligans may sound like marginal fans, but they weren’t.
Up until the nineties, they were regarded by many average fans as a vanguard, fashion-setters who deserved respect for their maniacal devotion to the club. So Tottenham’s Jewish identity quickly spread from the hardcore to the average fan, becoming part of the fabric of the culture of the club. Before games, the streets leading to the stadium become a storefront for vendors with T-shirts covered with proclamations like
“Yid4ever.”
Some of the greatest clubs in European soccer—Bayern Munich, Austria Wien, AS Roma—have been pegged by detractors as “Jewish” clubs. In most cases, it’s because their early supporters came from the ranks of the pre–World War I Jewish bourgeoisie. Only one club in the world, however, can out-Jew Tottenham. Ajax of Amsterdam decorate their stadium with Israeli flags, HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE JEWISH QUESTION
which can be purchased on game day just outside the stadium. The unforgettable site of blond-haired Dutchmen with beer guts and red Stars of David painted on their foreheads accompanies Ajax matches. And unlike Tottenham’s oªcial organization, which does nothing to encourage its Jewish identification, Ajax has made Judaism part of its ethos.
During the 1960s, Ajax cut the European game
loose from its stodgy strategies, rubbishing traditional rigid defensive formations and embracing a more creative approach that eschewed assigning stringent positions. The press called their style Total Football. The auteur behind this new aesthetic was the great player and philo-Semite Johann Cruy¤. His club’s strange pre-game rituals included the delivery of a kosher salami, and locker-room banter self-consciously peppered with Yiddish phrases. Before every game, a player called Jaap Van Praag would crack a Jewish joke. The club’s Jewish physiotherapist has recounted, “The players liked to be Jewish even though they weren’t.” Israelis were more charmed by these customs than anyone. As Simon Kuper explains in his book Ajax: The Dutch, the War, many Israelis believe that Cruy¤ is himself a Jew. This, of course, is urban legend, but a legend he feeds. When he visits Israel, where his wife’s family has relatives, he has been spotted wearing a yarmulke with his number 14 stitched into it.
The daring Cruy¤ teams were reflective of the hippie youth culture overtaking Amsterdam in the sixties.
They also represented a philo-Semitic wave overtaking the city. In those years, more than any country in Europe, the Dutch aided Israel and stood up
