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between Ajax (which used to be a Jewish soccer club) versus FC Utrecht

This I didn't know. Anyone know how long ago was it that Ajax was 'a Jewish soccer club'? Does that mean it was owned by Jews, or that its players were Jews, or something else? Isn't it one of the 'major' clubs in Holland?

Anyone know how long ago was it that Ajax was 'a Jewish soccer club'? Does that mean it was owned by Jews, or that its players were Jews, or something else? Isn't it one of the 'major' clubs in Holland?

I can't help you with the club's Jewish history, but they are the major club in the Dutch League. Kind of like what Manchester United is to the English Premiership.

Wait...here's a good article. It appears that the anti-Jewish chant is nothing new.

Soccer Tribalism
David Winner
The Jersualem Report - 1998

The fans of a top Dutch soccer club have chosen an unlikely way to support their team

The fans beat their drums and yell their battle cry: "Joden! Joden! Wij zijn super-Joden" - "Jews! Jews! We are super-Jews!" The totem of their faith is the Star of David. They tattoo it on their arms, their chests, sometimes even their shaved skulls. They wear the star on earrings and necklaces, emblazon it on shirts and baseball caps, daub it as graffiti on walls, tram stops and toilet doors.

Welcome to the weirdest, least kosher Hebrew tribe ever - the hardcore supporters of Ajax (pronounced Eye-Yacks), the perennial Dutch soccer champions, none of whom is in fact Jewish.

The Amsterdam club's 3,500 "F-Side" fans, notorious for their occasionally violent behavior, wave Israeli flags as a sign of support for a team which has had no Jewish players for years. As Ajax's chairman Michael van Praag is fond of saying: "Ajax is not a Jewish club and these fans are about as Jewish as I am Chinese." Van Praag's father was Jewish, but there is no connection between this fact and his position in the club.

Yet because of pre-war associations Ajax had many Jewish fans and its stadium was near Amsterdam's Jewish district - the club has for years been widely assumed to be Jewish. Even after the Holocaust, in which 106,000 Dutch Jews were killed, Amsterdam has a somewhat Jewish soul. The city's slang, for instance, is laced with Yiddish, like shlemiel and mazel. The city's nickname, Mokum, is Yiddish for "place." Most of Holland's 30,000 Jews (there are also some 10,000 Israelis) live in suburbs south of the city.

Ajax's Jewish connection isn't all fun. Rival fans, envious of the club's swaggering, cerebral style, success and popularity, have adopted a string of vile counter-chants. "Hamas, Hamas - Jews to the gas" is a regular cry among the fans of Feyenoord, the club's bitter rivals from Rotterdam. So is hissing in unison of a "joke" about gas chambers - and shouting "Trains for Auschwitz leave in five minutes." Other chants feature stereotypes like mean Jews with big noses.

Hadassa Hirschfeld of the Center for Information and Documentation about Israel, a pro-Israel lobby in The Hague that also keeps track of communal affairs in Holland, considers the trend "dangerous," because it weakens the taboo against anti-Semitism. But the authorities view the name-calling as a symptom of childish soccer tribalism rather than anti-Jewish racism and police no longer bother to prosecute.

"Ronald," an editor of The Ajax Star, the F-Side fan magazine that uses the Magen David as its logo, explains how the F-Siders (named after the area where they used to stand in Ajax's old stadium) began calling themselves Jews: "Out-of-towners used to call us 'Jews' as an insult. In the early 80s, we decided to take over the insult word as our own and started carrying Israeli flags. Every year, more fans take the star for their own symbol. But it doesn't mean anything to us. We have no relation to real Jews or feeling about Israel or anything like that.

"We like to provoke a little bit with this symbol. Dutch fans are not very friendly to one another and Ajax is one of the most hated clubs," Ronald continues. "When you wear the star, everybody gets mad."

Some F-Side members have been involved in organized battles with rival fans involving baseball bats and knives. "Ronald" refuses to identify himself because he fears he'd lose his job as a computer systems developer with a large Amsterdam bank if his employers knew he was an F-Sider.

Many Dutch Jews, especially older ones, are appalled by the fans' antics.

Bennie Muller, 60, one of Ajax's handful of former Jewish players, who played alongside the great Johan Cruyff in the 60s and now runs a cigar shop near the Amsterdam Central Station, says: "Sometimes when I'm sitting in the stadium and I hear those crazy people shouting 'We are super-Jews' and 'Jews are champions,' it's so bad that I just walk off and go home," he says.

About 200 members of Muller's extended family died in the Holocaust and he vividly remembers the day his mother was taken away. "I had two brothers and two sisters. All of us children were crying. The German said, 'Oh, let's leave them,' but the Dutch Nazis said no. My mother had 11 brothers and sisters." His mother survived, but her relatives were killed.

"Older people know what happened in the war. But these fans, they don't know. I wish they would stop, but they won't. I talk a lot with Israelis here. They all seem to like it. They laugh about it. But for the Jewish people in Amsterdam it's so disgusting it's unbelievable," says Muller.

Younger Jews take a more relaxed view. Says Yves Gijrath, 31-year-old publisher of the hip new magazine Jewish Journal, and a non-F-Side Ajax fan: "It's strange when they sing 'Jews, Jews.' It starts with a small group, but at some stage the whole stadium is singing with them. When other fans insult us, it's not because they hate Jews, but because they hate Ajax."

"I don't dislike the F-Side," says 21-year-old Danny Jacobs, an ardent Ajax supporter and Orthodox Jew who wears a yarmulke in the stadium. "But if you ask the average Dutchman about the blue-and-white flag with a star on it, he thinks it's an Ajax flag, not an Israeli one."

Ajax History

In 1941 the Germans prohibited Jews to be members of mixed sports clubs, which included Ajax. Although the club had the reputation of being a Jewish club even before the war, in reality this applied mainly to the spectators who often came from the predominantly Jewish class of theself-employed. The number of Jewish players at Ajax has never in fact been any higher than that of other Amsterdam clubs.