The Jewish story behind the Dutch football attacks

One of the most bizarre phenomena in the world of sport is Ajax, the most successful club in the history of Dutch football. His fans – blonde men who don’t like beer, boys with blue eyes – sing “Hava Nagila” as they pile into the trams that take them to the stadium on the edge of Amsterdam. Ajax fans tattoo the Star of David on their forearms. In the moments before kickoff of a game, they proudly shout “Jews, Jews, Jews,” because even though most of them are not Jewish, philo-Semitism is part of their identity.

Last night the club that describes itself as Jewish played against a club made up of real Jews, Maccabi Tel Aviv. As Israeli fans left the stadium after their club suffered a crushing defeat, they were ambushed by well-organized thugs that the mayor of Amsterdam described as “anti-Semitic hit-and-run squads.” What followed was a prime example of a pogrom: mobs chasing Jews through the city streets, thugs punching and kicking Jews as they cowered helplessly in corners, an orgy of hateful violence.

The fact that this attack took place on the streets of Amsterdam is beyond ironic. At least 75 percent of Dutch Jews died in the Holocaust. But there was an affectionate Yiddish nickname for the city: mokum“safe place”. After the Spanish Inquisition, Holland absorbed Iberian Jewry, which flourished there. Amsterdam was the city where Anne Frank was hidden, the most famous example of righteous non-Jews taking risks on behalf of Jewish neighbors. And then there was Ajax.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the few remaining Holocaust survivors in the city supported the team, as they had before the war. No Dutch club had a larger Jewish fan base, because no Dutch city was as Jewish as Amsterdam. They supported a club on the verge of glory. Ajax reinvented the global game by introducing a strategic paradigm called Total Football, a free-flowing style of play that exuded the let-go spirit of the ’60s. Under the leadership of the brilliant Johan Cruyff, perhaps the most creative player in the history of the game, Ajax emerged as an unexpected European powerhouse.

In those post-war glory years, Ajax had two Jewish players; Three of the club’s presidents were Jewish. Before the games, the team ordered kosher salami for good luck. Yiddish phrases were part of the locker room banter. In Bright orangeIn David Winner’s extraordinary book about Dutch football, Ajax Amsterdam’s (Jewish) physiotherapist is quoted as saying that the players “liked to be Jewish, even though they weren’t.” It’s not hard to see that psychology is at work is. By adopting Yiddish, Ajax players and fans told themselves a reassuring story: their parents could have been Nazi collaborators and spectators of evil, but they were not.

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The Israelis were very happy to be part of Ajax and particularly admired Cruyff. His family had Jewish relatives – a connection he honored on a trip to the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem. It is said that he once walked the streets of Tel Aviv wearing a yarmulke and was an avid fan of the writer Isaac Bashevis Singer. The Israelis welcomed Cruyff as one of their own.

But Ajax’s rivals exploited this history and this strange identity to taunt their players and fans with anti-Semitic bile. Common chants at Ajax games include: “Hamas, Hamas, gas Jews.” To taunt Ajax, these fans made hissing noises imitating the release of Zyklon B. The Dutch authorities never took effective action against this pervasive hatred of Jews.

Philo-Semitism and anti-Semitism went hand in hand in the post-war years. It wasn’t all that different from the way American sports franchises turned indigenous tribes into mascots. Only after Jews or Native Americans have been wiped out through genocide can they become vehicles for the majority population to enjoy themselves at the expense of the murdered group. And even behind Ajax’s nominal expressions of love lay something deeply disturbing: Jews barely existed in Holland, and yet they remained an outsized obsession.

After videos of the violence from Amsterdam appeared in various media, the global wave of anti-Semitism could no longer be denied. But a portion of the press — and an even larger portion of social media — downplayed the attack, sometimes unintentionally. Some headlines quoted the anti-Semitic nature of the attacks, despite all conclusive evidence of the mob’s motive. As some of the Israeli fans tore Palestinian flags from buildings and chanted bigoted slogans, it was suggested that the mob was justified in stabbing and beating Jews. This widespread ambivalence about the attack reflects a culture that shrugs off anti-Jewish violence and sees it as an inevitable aspect of life after October 7th.

But the most bitter fact of all is that these attacks took place on the same evening that the Dutch celebrated the 86th anniversary of Kristallnacht. In the presence of real Jews, the Dutch abandoned them again.