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The first time I hear it, it sounds small, like a secret escaping from the corner of someone’s mouth.
“Yiddo.”
Then comes the response, a little louder, echoing back like a bird call.
“Yiddo!”
The Courtfield pub in southwest London.
Flickr: terry_love_uk / Creative Commons (CC BY 2.0)
It’s a warm, sunny Saturday afternoon in early March and I’m in a pub, the Courtfield, across from Earl’s Court Tube stop in southwest London. All around me are fans of Tottenham Hotspur, the North London-based soccer team, who will play their bitter cross-city rivals and current Premier League leaders, Chelsea, this evening at Chelsea’s stadium, Stamford Bridge, a little over a mile from here. Going for a drink — many drinks — on the way to a game is British football’s equivalent of tailgating, though it’s probably even more deeply ingrained into the match-day ritual here than standing around a parking lot, gorging on bratwurst and Budweiser. By a fairly mysterious — to me, anyway — alchemy, the Courtfield was chosen by Spurs supporters as a place to meet en masse this afternoon. The police are obviously hip to this alchemy and have stationed several officers on the corner in front of the pub.As fans arrive at the door, they’re often met with this singsong call of “Yiddo” from those already inside; it’s part-greeting, part-password to acknowledge that, yes, you’ve found the right place and are now safely among your own kind. As drinks are consumed and kickoff time approaches, the little murmurs of “Yiddo” grow into full-throated, pub-wide chants. There’s one that involves stomping or banging out a beat (boom-boom-boom-boom-boom-buh-buh-buh-boom-“Yids!”), another that repurposes the Baha Men’s dreadful 2002 hit (“Who, who, who, who let the Yids out!”), one that opts for simplicity (“Yids! Yids! Yids! Yids!”), and the favorite, a tribal war cry (“Yid Army! Yid Army! Yid Army!”). As an American Jew, it’s both thrilling and a little unnerving. As one Jewish fan told me, "At first I thought it was like a Nuremberg rally."
How Tottenham — a club formed by Christians, with a fan base that even by the most generous estimates probably isn’t more than 5–10% Jewish (almost certainly no more than local rivals Arsenal) — became, unofficially, at least, the Yids, is a complicated tale filled with as much conjecture as actual fact. But there’s no doubt that their identification as such has caused considerable consternation in Britain, where free speech laws are making routine fandom a potentially prosecutable offense. This fall, near the start of the current Premier League season, the Football Association and the Metropolitan Police each announced that the chanting of “Yid” was offensive to some and those who continued doing it could get ejected from a game or even arrested for violating the country’s Public Order Act, which prohibits the use of “threatening, abusive or insulting” language. (In January, the law was amended to remove the word “insulting.”) Naturally, fans dug in their heels, and over the next few matches, the chanting continued.
Though most everyone agrees that Spurs fans use the term “Yid” affectionately, many observers believe it fuels vile, anti-Semitic chanting by opposing fans. Along with fairly mild cracks about big noses and foreskin, rival supporters have been known to sing, “Spurs are on their way to Auschwitz / Sieg Heil! / Hitler’s gonna gas ‘em again,” “Adolf Hitler, he’s coming for you!”, or simply hiss to simulate gas chambers.
In the Courtfield, I meet a guy in his twenties named Harry, who, like several Spurs fans I interviewed, doesn’t want his last name printed because of fears that his opinion could cause him trouble at work or even with the police. Harry, who is not Jewish, is sitting at a table in the back corner of the pub with his brother and a friend. He was raised in North London and goes to nearly every Spurs match, home and away. He says that growing up, he never really associated the word “Yid” with Jews.
“I later came to understand the history behind the word, but to us, a Yid always just meant a Spurs fan,” he says. “Once at school, my brother actually got called a ‘dirty Yid’ by a Jewish Arsenal fan.”
In the pub, the chants and songs are not all “Yid”-related — some simply hail Spurs, others denounce Chelsea, one maligns the parentage of Chelsea star John Terry. The best of them are funny and profane. The worst cause even Spurs supporters to wince a little. As one fan put it to me, “Football is about 10 to 20 years behind the rest of society.”
But it’s changing. Money has softened some of the sport’s jagged edges, for better and worse. Campaigns against racism have been paramount — and largely successful — during the past two decades, but this effort to combat anti-Semitism has run aground amid a quagmire of complex issues and competing motivations. If nothing else, the anti-“Yid” contingent seems to have picked a fight with a group of fans just disheartened enough by the state of their national pastime to be spoiling for one.
The fans of Lazio hold up a sign showing support for Palestinians during a match between S.S. Lazio and Tottenham Hotspur on November 22, 2012 in Rome.
Giuseppe Bellini / Getty Images
Last season, Peter Herbert, chairman of the Society of Black Lawyers and a frequent campaigner against bigotry inside and outside of football, publicly called the “Yid” chants “casual racism,” and threatened to lodge a complaint with the Metropolitan Police if they continued. Soon after his comments, a group of Tottenham fans, in Rome to watch Spurs play against Italian powerhouse Lazio, were attacked in a pub by masked, knife-wielding assailants who reportedly hurled anti-Semitic slurs throughout the assault. At the game the following day, Lazio fans chanted, “Juden Tottenham,” waved Palestinian flags, and unfurled a “Free Palestine” banner.During a late September game versus Chelsea, police gave one Spurs fan an official written “warning.” At the next league game, against fellow London club West Ham — whose fans, along with those of Chelsea, have been frequently singled out as the most egregious purveyors of anti-Semitic abuse — police arrested three Spurs fans for “Yid” chanting and gave out warnings to several others. The issue had quickly grown from a quirky football problem into a full-blown national debate about religion, race, identity, political correctness, the gentrification of football, and the limits of free speech. Lawyers were hired, tightly worded public statements were parsed, prominent Jewish figures in Britain were consulted, former Spurs players picked sides, and even Prime Minister David Cameron weighed in, saying he saw nothing wrong with the way Spurs fans employed the word.
The club, for its part, said very little on the subject initially, and in doing so, managed to upset nearly everyone. Early this season, it sent out a questionnaire to its season ticket holders, polling their opinions on the subject, and received more than 11,000 responses. But as the issue grew to a boil, the results of the research remained under lock and key.
Simon Felstein, Spurs press officer, declined to make anyone from the club available to be interviewed for this story and referred me to the statement that had been crafted following the arrest of the three Tottenham fans. It read, in part: “At this point in time, whilst we believe that our fans do not use the word with any deliberate intent to offend, we would once again remind our fans that the Metropolitan Police has stated that the use of the word can be considered a criminal offence...” In a move that upset many of the Tottenham faithful, the three arrested fans were banned from the stadium while their cases went to trial.
One of those fans was due to have his day in court the Monday after I arrived in London, but around the time my plane landed, the Crown Prosecution Service dropped all three cases, having determined that based on the context of the chanting, there was little likelihood of scoring convictions. The CPS made clear, however, that it was not closing the door to the possibility of further arrests or prosecutions. The club rescinded the fans’ bans, but didn’t issue any new policy on the chants.
Harry believes that the entire campaign surrounding the “the y-word” is aimed in the wrong direction. “They shouldn’t be going after Spurs supporters,” he says. “They should be focused on Chelsea and West Ham, who are the worst when it comes to the hissing gas chambers and all that.”
Paul Greenwood/BPI / Rex/REX USA
Tottenham Hotspur with the Southern League Championship Shield in 1900.Popperfoto / Getty Images
Popperfoto / Getty Images
The Jewish population in Britain is estimated to be between 250,000 and 300,000, or roughly 0.5% of an overall populace of about 56,000,000. (By comparison, there are more than 5.4 million Jews in the U.S., about 2% of the population.) Jews had been an even smaller sliver of Britain until the late 1800s, when pogroms and oppression in Eastern Europe sent them scattering for safer ground.
Tottenham Hotspur Football Club was founded around this time, in 1882, but with no connections to the then-burgeoning Jewish community in Britain. The club’s first secretary was an Anglican church officer and its first president, a YMCA leader. The area around the club’s stadium, White Hart Lane, built in 1899, wasn’t populated with Jews back then; from the late 1800s through the early to mid-1900s, most Jewish immigrants to London settled in the East End. But according to Anthony Clavane’s history of Jews in British football, Does Your Rabbi Know You’re Here?, a sizable number of those East End Jews made the trip north to Tottenham on Saturdays to see Spurs play.
“Driving or using combustion-engine-powered vehicles on the Sabbath was strictly forbidden, but catching the tram or the train was not,” Clavane writes. “The public transport network … made access to the stadium from the east and centre of London relatively easy.” For football-minded secular Jews, the tramline made going to watch Spurs after synagogue part of their Shabbat ritual.
In the post-war years, Jews began leaving the overcrowded East End and resettling, mostly in North London, some not far from White Hart Lane. Opposing fans walking up Tottenham High Road toward the stadium 50 years ago would likely see their fair share of Jewish-owned businesses, kosher butchers, and the like, further cementing the club’s image as a bastion of Jewishness.
In 1982, Irving Scholar, a Jewish businessman and longtime Spurs fan, bought the club, becoming the first in a string of Jewish owners and club chairmen, a string that continues through the present day with Tottenham’s current owner, Joe Lewis, and chairman, Daniel Levy, both Jews. In the '90s, Spurs briefly had a Jewish manager, David Pleat, and at least a couple of Jews have suited up for the first team, most notably the Israeli Ronny Rosenthal, who spent four seasons with Spurs in the mid-'90s.
But none of these things necessarily set Tottenham apart from several other English clubs. Many of the London teams have a strong Jewish following. When Jews began leaving the East End for North London, just as many settled near Arsenal’s home ground at the time, Highbury, as did near White Hart Lane. Jews own or have been majority shareholders in many prominent English clubs including Arsenal, Chelsea, West Ham, Manchester United, and Aston Villa. Jews had run clubs including Leyton Orient and Leeds United, long before Scholar took over at Tottenham. Other teams have employed more Jewish managers and players.
The German Football Team doing a Nazi salute before the international match against England at White Hart Lane in 1935.
Daily Mail / Rex/ REX USA
The fact is Jews have never been more than a small minority of Spurs’ fan base, and the club itself has done little to woo them. In 1935, when the English national team hosted their German counterparts at White Hart Lane, the Nazi flag was flown at the stadium. In 2002, Israel hoped to play several international matches at Tottenham’s home ground, but Levy declined their request.Today, nearly all the Jewish businesses close to White Hart Lane are gone. The area has fallen on hard times — the High Road itself was a prominent focus of the rioting that shook London in 2011 — and the demographics have changed considerably. When I spend an afternoon walking through the neighborhoods of Bruce Grove, Northumberland Park, Tottenham-Hale, and Edmonton Green near the stadium, the area seems a magnet for immigrants of many stripes — Turks, Cypriots, Ghanaians, Poles, Brazilians, Nigerians, Jamaicans — but there’s no evidence of any Jews around here anymore. The only real signs of Jewish life in Tottenham are in Stamford Hill, a neighborhood home to a visible community of Hasidic Jews, but which is nearly three miles south and a solid 45-minute walk from White Hart Lane.
Nonetheless, Tottenham’s Jewish image remains undiminished. Danny Fenton, a Jewish TV executive and Spurs supporter, says when he started attending games in the late '70s and early '80s, that connection was immediately evident.
“My dad took me to the 1981 FA Cup Final against Manchester City,” he says. “I remember seeing people wearing kippah and tallit at the match, not because they were religious but because they were identifying with being Tottenham fans, being Yiddos. I remember Leeds fans doing the ‘Sieg Heil’ and throwing coins at the Tottenham fans. In the late '80s, a lot of fans used to take Israeli flags to the games. We played Arsenal in the League Cup semifinal in 1987 and they unfurled this massive swastika with ‘Arsenal Nazis’ written on it. [After that], they made a plea for Tottenham fans to stop taking Israel flags to matches.”
Most Spurs fans trace the roots of the “Yid” chants to the late '70s. After being on the receiving end of anti-Semitic abuse for years, fans decided that instead of being victimized by shouts of “Yid” or “Yiddo,” they would own them, claim them, and shout them back with pride.
During the late '70s and '80s, hooliganism was at its peak. Each weekend hardcore fans of rival clubs would battle it out in stadiums, pubs, train stations — wherever they could get at each other. Racism was endemic. Black players were taunted with monkey noises, bananas were tossed on the field at them, and much, much worse. The country’s economy was in tatters. The far-right, neo-fascist political party, the National Front, was in its ascendancy and saw the disaffected youth that frequented football grounds as a prime target for its racist, virulently nationalistic, anti-immigrant message. Hardcore fans at Chelsea and West Ham, in particular, had ties to the National Front.
Daniel Wynne
Courtesy of Daniel Wynne / Via Twitter: @danielwynnethfc