How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization

by Franklin Foer

  This liberalization of thinking hasn’t purged anti-Semitism from the European system. By most counts, continental anti-Semitism is as pervasive as it has ever been in the postwar era, or even more so. It certainly exists within European soccer. But that doesn’t mean that European anti-Semitism is the same now as before the war. It’s an entirely di¤erent beast, one not nearly as likely to kill, that has been made less pernicious by globalization’s transformation of Europe. Thanks to the immigration of Africans and Asians, Jews have been replaced as the primary objects of European hate. These changes can be seen in microcosm in the history of Jewish soccer. But before explaining the present, it is nec-essary to go back and tell the story of Vienna’s Hakoah.

  II.

  At the beginning of the last century, revolutionary movements, of the left and the right, understood the political mileage to be gained from soccer. Socialist youth clubs sponsored teams, and aspiring fascists tried to hitch themselves to popular clubs. In Vienna, a small circle of Zionist intellectuals saw the same poten- tial in the game. This group included a dentist, a lawyer, and Fritz Beda-Löhrner, the cabaret librettist who wrote “Yes, We Have No Bananas.” They, too, wanted the game to propagandize on behalf of their movement.

  In 1909, this group created the Hakoah athletic club in the spirit of Max Nordau. Its name translates from Hebrew as strength, and that was the Nor-dauesque point of the club: to project strength. The team was meant to burst stereotypes, but in one important respect it confirmed them. Before any other club in the world, Hakoah thoroughly embraced the marketplace. It paid its players and paid them well—about three times the salary of the average worker. These higher wages, along with the ideological mission, helped Hakoah assemble an all-star team of Jewish players recruited from across Austria and Hungary.

  While the club only fielded Jewish players, it brought in the best gentiles to coach them, including Englishmen who instilled the latest in strategy.

  There was a danger inherent in the Hakoah con-

  cept. Viennese anti-Semites generally didn’t need a pretext to shout bile or pick fights, but Hakoah gave them a perfect one. Common shouts from opposing fans included Drecskjude (dirty Jew) and the oxymoronic Judensau (Jewish pig). To give their fans some confidence that they could escape this environment alive, Hakoah plucked a corps of bodyguards from the wrestling and boxing clubs that it also ran. The most iconic Jewish self-defender was the wrestler Mickey Herschel. In photos, he looks like a Charles Atlas character, in a bikini brief with a musculature that seems HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE JEWISH QUESTION

  impossible in a world before protein shakes and ana-bolic steroids. Herschel and his corps evolved into a community security force that sometimes stood outside synagogues and neighborhoods, casting appropriately goonish glances at prospective pogrom participants.

  From the newspaper accounts of the period, it’s not at all clear that the Jewish team possessed superior talent. But the clippings do make mention of the enthusiastic Jewish supporters and the grit of the players. The grittiest performance of them all came at the greatest moment in Hakoah history. In the third to last game of the 1924–25 season, an opposing player barreled into Hakoah’s Hungarian-born goalkeeper Alexander Fabian as he handled the ball. Fabian toppled onto his arm, injuring it so badly that he could no longer plausibly continue in goal. This was not an easily remediable problem. The rules of the day precluded substitutions in any circumstance. So Fabian returned to the game with his arm in a sling and swapped positions with a teammate, moving up into attack on the outside right.

  Seven minutes after the calamitous injury, Hakoah blitzed forward on a counterattack. A player called Erno Schwarz landed the ball at Fabian’s feet. With nine minutes remaining in the game, Fabian scored the goal that won the game and clinched Hakoah’s championship.

  In a way, Hakoah achieved just what its founders had hoped for: A victorious team trailed by a band-wagon of Jews. The same Jewish elites who dismissed the game as the province of working-class ruªans began to bankroll Hakoah, believing that the respect of gentiles it acquired might rub o¤ on them. Assimilated Jews who didn’t like to acknowledge or flaunt their identity in front of gentiles began filling Hakoah’s 18,000-seat stadium in Vienna’s second district. They told each other tales of how a gentile—who wanted Hakoah to beat a rival of his own club—shouted “Go Mr.

  Jew,” a massively respectful cheer relative to the rest. As Edmund Schechter, an American diplomat, recounted in a memoir of his Viennese youth, “Each Hakoah victory become another proof that the period of Jewish inferiority in physical activities had come to an end.”

  Just as they built their squad using the methods of modern management, Hakoah exploited their successes with a marketing plan that could have been scripted by a Wharton MBA. In the o¤ season, Hakoah toured the world, the same way that Manchester United now builds its brand with jaunts to the Far East and America. Instead of selling jerseys, however, Hakoah sold Zionism. Preparing for visits, Hakoah would send ahead promoters to generate buzz for Muskeljudentum and distribute tickets to companies stocked with Jewish employees. They lured overwhelming crowds to watch this curiosity. In New York, Hakoah pulled 46,000 fans into the Polo Grounds.

  Lithuanian Jews bicycled through the night to see the club. Such audiences lifted Hakoah’s game to levels far above its natural talent. Against the London outfit West Ham United, the Jews ran up a 5–1 victory. Naysayers rightly point to the West Ham lineup on that day. And it’s true, the Hammers didn’t take the traveling Jews very seriously, playing a mostly reserve squad. Nevertheless, the achievement stands: Before Hakoah, no continental team had beaten an English club on English soil, the same soil on which the game had been created. HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE JEWISH QUESTION

  There was, however, an unintended consequence of this success. On the team’s 1925 trip, Hakoah players caught a glimpse of New York City, a metropolis seemingly uninfected by European anti-Semitism. It replaced Jerusalem as their Zion, and, over the next year, they immigrated there en masse. Deprived of nine of its best players, Hakoah attempted resurrection but only achieved mediocrity. For the rest of its brief life, it struggled to hold down a place in the top division of Austrian football, occasionally plummeting out of it.

  And then, its players struggled against death. With the 1938 Anschluss and German rule of the nation, the Austrian league shut down Hakoah, nullified the results of any games played against Hakoah, and it handed over the club’s stadium to the Nazis.

  When I returned to Washington from Vienna, I went to the library of the national Holocaust Museum. A scholar had pointed me in the direction of a documentary that contained footage of Hakoah players. Der Führer Schenkt den Juden Eine Stadt, The Fuhrer Gives a City to the Jews, depicts life in the Czech concentration camp of Theresienstadt. The Nazis had created Theresienstadt as a Potemkin village that they would show to the Red Cross, Danes, and other humanitarians. Here, the Jews attended lectures and performed symphonies. How could there be genocide?

  So pleased with their ability to pull the wool over the humanitarian eyes, the Nazis intended to stage Theresienstadt for a far wider audience. They would transpose the images to celluloid and distribute them widely. In the summer of 1944, the Nazis commis-

  sioned the burly Jewish comic actor and director Kurt Gerron to make the picture. Gerron had become a big name in the Weimar film renaissance, a colleague of Marlene Dietrich. But now, he wasn’t just shooting for his reputation; he believed that he could make a film that could please the SS enough to save his life.

  The Nazis had given Gerron an impossible task.

  They had asked him to make a film without giving him any control over the script or editing. In fact, he died in Auschwitz without having viewed any of the 17,000

  feet of film that he shot. More than that, the residents of Theresienstadt didn’t lend themselves to propaganda. Not even modern special e¤ects could have compensated for the sad faces playing chess or the grim urgency with which
children grab pieces of but-tered bread o¤ a plate.

  To please the Nazis, Gerron embraced the Nazi

  style—especially their cult of the body. Women perform aerobics in short shorts. A shirtless worker brings down his hammer on an anvil holding piping steel. A group of men play soccer. It is the perverse Nazi inversion of Muskeljudentum.

  narrator: Use of free time is left to individuals.

  Often workers flock to soccer games, Theresienstadt’s major sports event.

  The courtyard of the camp’s old military barracks is used as a field. Men and little boys cram the porticos overlooking the dirt pitch. The camera pans to teams dashing into barracks. Like Hakoah, one team wears Jewish stars on its white jerseys. The other wears dark shirts. HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE JEWISH QUESTION

  narrator: The teams each have only seven men,

  due to limited space.

  Players shake hands with the referee.

  narrator: Nevertheless, enthusiastic fans watch a spirited game from beginning to end.

  Play begins. Some of the players in dark jerseys must have played professionally. Despite the cramped quarters, they execute sly give-and-gos and skillfully deflect a corner kick into the goal. With each goal, the crowd jumps ecstatically from their seats.

  For two minutes, the action unfolds without narra-tion. The scene then abruptly switches to the bathing facilities, a tribute to the compound’s impeccable hygiene. A line of naked men marches into the showers.

  III.

  It’s not exactly breaking news that, sixty years after Hakoah, anti-Semitism persists in Europe. There are even signs—the flourishing of ultra-right politicians in France and Austria; a rise in physical violence directed at French Jewry; political cartoons redolent of classic hook-nose stereotypes—that it may be increasing. As scary as all that is, intellectual honesty demands a distinction between anti-Semitism then and now.

  Anti-Semitism now is something strange and

  new—not quite socially acceptable and not quite unac-ceptable, either. There’s perhaps no stranger case of this attitude toward the Jews than Tottenham, a soccer team based in North London. Tottenham’s fans refer to themselves as the Yids or the Yiddoes. When the name comes o¤ their lips in a Cockney accent, it sounds like a crude slur. And, it’s true, the name doesn’t have the nicest connotations. When the English fascist Oswald Mosley’s gangs marched through the Jewish East End of London in 1936, they shouted, “Down with the Yids.”

  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 for the Jewish state in the United Nations. During the 1973 oil boycott, the Dutch prime minister rode a bike in front of TV cameras to show his solidarity with the Israelis.

  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