The Jewish story behind the Dutch soccer attacks

Among the bizarre phenomena in the world of sports is Ajax, the most talented club in the history of Dutch football. Its fans—blonde-haired men with beer guts, blue-eyed boys—sing “Hava Nagila” as they cram into the trams that take them to the stadium on the outskirts of Amsterdam. Ajax fans tattoo the Star of David on their forearms. In the moments before the opening kick of a game, they proudly shout at the top of their lungs: “Jews, Jews, Jews” because – although most of them are not Jews – philosophical spirit is part of their identity.

Last night the club that describes itself as Jewish played against a club of actual Jews, Maccabi Tel Aviv. As Israeli fans left the stadium after their club suffered a resounding defeat, they were set upon by well-organized groups of thugs in what Amsterdam’s mayor described as “anti-Semitic hit-and-run squads.” What followed was a textbook example of a pogrom: mobs chasing Jews down the city streets, men punching and kicking Jews huddled helplessly in corners, an orgy of hateful violence.

That this attack took place in the streets of Amsterdam is more than 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, the Netherlands absorbed Iberian Judaism, which flourished there. Amsterdam was the city that hid Anne Frank, the most famous example of righteous Gentiles taking risks on behalf of Jewish neighbors. And then there was Ajax.

In the 1950s and 60s, 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 brink of glory. Ajax reinvented the global game by introducing a strategic paradigm called total footballa free-flowing playing style that exuded the loose spirit of the 60s. Led by the genius Johan Cruyff, perhaps the most creative player in the history of the game, Ajax became an unexpected European powerhouse.

In the glorious post-war years, Ajax had two Jewish players; three of the club’s presidents were Jewish. Before games, the team would order a kosher salami for good luck. Yiddish phrases were part of locker room banter. IN Brilliant orangeIn David Winner’s extraordinary book on Dutch football, Ajax’s (Jewish) physiotherapist is quoted as saying that the players “like to be Jewish, even if they weren’t.” It’s not hard to see the psychology at work. By embracing Yiddishkeit, Ajax players and fans told themselves a reassuring story: their parents could have been Nazi collaborators and bystanders to evil, but they weren’t.

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The Israelis welcomed pleasure in Ajax’s affiliation, and they especially revered Cruyff. His family had Jewish relatives—a connection he honored on a trip to Jerusalem’s Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem. It was said that he once walked down the streets of Tel Aviv wearing a kippah and was a devoted fan of the writer Isaac Bashevis Singer. The Israelis embraced Cruyff as one of their own.

But Ajax’s rival clubs took advantage of this history, this strange identity, to taunt its players and fans with anti-Semitic bile. Among the common chants used at Ajax matches: “Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas.” To mock Ajax, these fans would make hissing noises and mimic the release of Zyklon B. The Dutch authorities never effectively cracked down on this ubiquitous anti-Semitism.

Philo-Semitism and anti-Semitism went hand in hand in the post-war years. It was not so different from the way American sports franchises turned native tribes into mascots. Only after Jews or Native Americans have been wiped out by genocide can they become vehicles for the majority population to have fun at the murdered group’s expense. And behind even Ajax’s nominal expression of love was something deeply disturbing: Jews barely existed in the Netherlands, yet they remained a major obsession.

After videos of the violence emerged from Amsterdam in various media, there was no denying the global wave of anti-Semitism. But a section of the press – and an even larger section of social media – has minimized the assault, sometimes unintentionally. Some headlines described the anti-Semitic nature of the assaults in quotation marks, despite all the conclusive evidence about the mob’s motive. Because some of the Israeli fans tore Palestinian flags from buildings and shouted bigoted slogans, it was implied that the mob was justified in stabbing and beating Jews. Such widespread ambivalence about the attack reflects a culture that shrugs off anti-Jewish violence, treating it as an inevitable facet of life after October 7.

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