At the height of this moment, Amsterdam elected a string of Jewish mayors. There was a cultural context for these moves: The Dutch had begun to rediscover and celebrate their history of resisting the Nazi inva-sion. Starting in the sixties, annual commemorations trumpeted the heroism of a February 1941 mass strike that had been waged to protest the Nazi occupation.
And the Dutch did as much as anyone to cultivate the cult of Anne Frank and the righteous gentiles who guarded her family in an Amsterdam attic.
But more than rediscovering this history of resistance, the Dutch fabricated it. As historians have pointed out tirelessly in recent years, the Dutch did a better job collaborating with the Nazis than stopping them. Holland lost a higher percentage of its Jews to the Holocaust than any other country. In cosmopolitan, tolerant Amsterdam, identifying with the Jews in the Ajax style fit this project of reinvention and guilt assuagement. David Winner, an English journalist who wrote Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Soccer, argues that Ajax engages in an “unconscious act of post-Holocaust solidarity with the city’s murdered, missing Jews.”
This is a generous interpretation, and it may contain some significant sociological truth. But it’s a bit too sympathetic to the Dutch quest for redemption. The Dutch haven’t come as far as they like to believe. Empathy for the Jews in the soccer stadium has dark underpinnings. The essence of anti-Semitism has been the HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE JEWISH QUESTION
treatment of the Jews as something alien, as dangerous interlopers, a state within the state. For two hundred years, a significant swath of European Jews struggled to move past these canards. Even Zionists like Max Nordau, who touted the idea of the Jewish state, ultimately craved nothing more than acceptance as full-fledged Europeans. They dreamed of assimilation.
Unfortunately, after the Holocaust and the founding of Israel, this acceptance still hasn’t really arrived. Even when the Europeans identify with the Jews, as in the Ajax and Tottenham cases, they confirm that the Jews are foreigners, not like themselves. They still treat Jews as bizarre curiosities, reducing them to alien symbols—yarmulkes, sideburns, a Star of David.
There’s a parallel to the American use of Indians as their sporting mascots, as in the case of the Washington Redskins, Cleveland Indians, and Florida State Seminoles. It is possible to argue that these nicknames are compliments, a tribute to the bravery and fighting spirit of the Native Americans. And isn’t obeisance a better way to treat the aborigines than slaughtering them? But there’s a sizeable flaw in this reasoning.
Americans can only pay this kind of obeisance because they have slaughtered the Indians. Nobody is around to object to turning them into cartoon images. This perversely worsens the problem. The cartoon images of the mascots freeze the Indians in time, portraying them as they lived in the nineteenth century at the time of the west’s conquest, wearing leather suits and feather head-dresses. It becomes impossible to imagine the remaining Indians ever transcending their primitivism, ever leaving their reservations and assimilating into society. The same sort of cartoon image has aºicted the European Jews. No matter how hard they try, they’re stuck as outsiders and “others” in the continental mind. This treatment confirms an old aphorism, a bit strong but still truthful: a philo-Semite is an anti-Semite who loves Jews.
But to leave the argument there is a bit too simple.
Europe has come a long way since the war. In part, it has changed on its own. It recoiled against the horrific deeds that it had committed—and it has swung into a militant opposition to racialism, militarism, and nationalism. Ironically, this political correctness has made it irrationally uncomfortable with Israel’s unapologetic defense of Jewish nationhood and insistence on military response to terrorism. When Europe descends into anti-Semitism, it’s now motivated more by an uncompromising commitment to enlightenment ideals than inherited hatred toward Christ killers. Mark Lilla, the University of Chicago political theorist, has written, “Once upon a time, the Jews were mocked for not having a nation-state. Now they are criticized for having one.” He continues, “Many Western European intellectuals, including those whose toleration and even a¤ection for Jews cannot be questioned, find [Israel]
incomprehensible. The reason is not anti-Semitism nor even anti-Zionism in the usual sense. It is that Israel is, and is proud to be, a nation-state—the nation-state of the Jews. And that is profoundly embarrassing to post-national Europe.”
Europe has also changed because of globalization.
Most noticeably, the continent has been inundated with immigrants. Before the war, Jews and Gypsies were the HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE JEWISH QUESTION
outsiders who bore the brunt of European culture’s contempt for otherness. The arrival of Senegalese, Pak-istanis, and Chinese hasn’t endowed European nationalism with a significantly more multi-ethnic idea of the state. But it has di¤used hatred, so that it doesn’t fix on a single ethnic group worthy of elimination. You can see this in the soccer stadium very clearly. Raw anti-Semitism is anomalous. Most of the hatred in soccer now focuses on blacks in the form of ape noises and racist taunts emanating from the crowd and players.
And outside the stadium, it is often Muslims who now su¤er bigotry of the majority.
Just as important, the so-called Jewish soccer clubs like Tottenham and Ajax are a major leap forward from pogroms and Einsatzgruppen. Instead of denouncing the Jews as pollutants to the nation, chunks of the working class have identified themselves as Jewish, even if only in the spirit of irony.
Of course, there remain places in Europe with far less irony than others.
IV.
Outside the stadium in the old German quarter of southern Budapest, the police line up fans and frisk them. Although they weed out knives and projectiles, they’re much more interested in preventing the entry of painted banners that bring unwanted attention to their
