Ajax fans celebrate their team's 3-1 Champions League win Oct. 24 over Manchester City.  It's a scene that's repeated itself year after year at two of Europe's most popular clubs. Supporters of the Dutch club Ajax call themselves the "SuperJews" and wave flags with the Star of David. Their counterparts at Tottenham Hotspur in North London adopt the moniker "Yiddos" and chant "Yid Army!" during games.  Yet the vast majority of them aren't Jewish. And neither are the clubs in any formal way.  Just why this happens is a source of some debate. Both clubs have a Jewish connection, but it's a rather tenuous one. Tottenham's stadium, White Hart Lane, is located in a neighborhood that was once predominantly Jewish, but is now decidedly multiethnic. And the club itself was founded by Anglican Sunday-school students.  Some of its fans are Jewish, but a very small proportion. It doesn't take a demographer to figure this out. A 2010 survey by the German research firm "Sport+Markt" estimated the number of Tottenham fans at 3.5 million. According to census data, there are some 275,000 Jews in the United Kingdom and, obviously, not all of them are Tottenham fans or have any interest in soccer at all. The club's majority owner, Joe Lewis, is Jewish, but then so are the owners of other Premier League clubs like Manchester United, Chelsea, Aston Villa and West Ham. Plus, past Tottenham owners have been gentiles.  Ajax was set up as a secular club and named for Achilles's cousin in "The Iliad." The team crest features his likeness. Its ties come from the fact that its old stadium, De Meer, stood in one of Amsterdam's Jewish neighborhoods. Yet, as the author Simon Kuper points out in his book "Ajax, the Dutch, the War," roughly three quarters of Holland's Jews died in the Holocaust and, by the 1950s, De Meer ceased to have many Jewish connotations. And yet, particularly in the 1970s, this identity was rekindled by supporters, the overwhelming majority of them not Jewish.  Why this desire to adopt Jewish symbols as a means of cheering on your team?  Most likely, it's a desire for tribalism. You want your team to be different and special, and given Europe's history, such symbols are a convenient (and some would say lazy) shortcut. And given soccer's sense of history and tradition, once established, it isn't something that's easily going to be shed.  Not that there haven't been attempts to do so. In 2005, Ajax made a concerted effort to try to distance itself from the Jewish image. (Among other things, it stopped making a "Hava Nagila" ringtone available for download on its website.) Why? Because the quasi-cultural identification had been adopted by its hooligans, some of whom draped themselves in Jewish symbols when fighting with other fans or the police. What's more, whenever Ajax faced teams with supporters with far-right tendencies, it faced a barrage of anti-Semitic abuse, including chants of "Hamas! Hamas!" and hissing meant to emulate gas chambers. The club's campaign had limited success.  Now, Tottenham is in the spotlight thanks to the efforts of a campaigning lawyer named Peter Herbert, who last week called on Tottenham fans to stop using the word "Yid," which historically was used as an ethnic slur in Britain.  "What we are trying to do is change a culture," he told the BBC. "Even if it comes from Tottenham supporters, it remains casual racism."  Herbert has set a deadline of Nov. 20 and, if by that date the chants don't cease, he will report fans to the police. Under British law, all such race-related complaints must be investigated by law enforcement.  But the club is siding with its supporters.  "Our fans adopted the chant as a defense mechanism in order to own the term and thereby deflect anti-Semitic abuse," a statement released by Tottenham reads. "Our guiding principle in respect of the 'Y-word' is based on the point of law itself—the distinguishing factor is the intent with which it is used, i.e. if it is used with the deliberate intention to cause offense. [Our fans] do not use the term to others to cause any offense, they use it as a chant among themselves."  It's an echo of the classic debate over some people reclaiming insulting words by using them to refer to themselves. As with age-old derogatory terms used among African-Americans and "queer" in the gay community, opinion is polarized. The twist here is that many of those looking to defuse the impact of a slur against a minority community by using that term in public aren't themselves members of that community. Furthermore, to the more xenophobic and anti-Semitic opposition fans, all of this is the classic red rag to a bull. You can easily argue that if non-Jewish supporters didn't drape themselves in these symbols they would not generate the kind of anti-Semitic abuse that offends most everyone but probably Jews most of all.  What's left is the opening of a whole new can of ethical and legal worms of the kind that soccer would really rather not debate because, whatever the outcome, somebody is bound to be offended.  —Gabriele Marcotti is the world soccer columnist for the Times of London and a regular broadcaster for the BBC.
Have gentile fans of Ajax and Tottenham Hotspur crossed the line with their invocation of Jewish themes during games? Gabriele Marcotti ponders the question.