Following one of the leitmotifs in this volume, namely how and why the Shoah was turned against ‘the Jew’, one inevitably lands in the football domain too. ‘The Jew’ has always been an issue in Dutch football, also before the outbreak of the Second World War. But it did not end with the war. Since the 1980s, the antisemitic identification of Jews with gas and gas chambers, which started in Dutch society directly after 1945, has become common in the ‘football world’ – not only in the Netherlands. It should be mentioned that there is an ongoing debate about whether one should use the term ‘antisemitism’ in this context, or rather rely on terms such as ‘rivalry’, ‘vandalism’ and ‘provocation’. This chapter will analyse both the phenomenon itself and the debate. It will also address the role of the (alleged) Jewish image of the world famous Amsterdam football club Ajax and its supporters. What is their part in the game? And how did Jews themselves, in and outside of the stadium, react to on the one hand the supposed Jewish image of Ajax, and on the other anti-Jewish chants, slogans and banners? In this chapter we start with a football scandal in 1982 and will then kick the ball backwards through history right up to the present again.

Jewish football players are ‘Jewed’

On 2 May 1982, FC Utrecht supporters, on their way to a match against Ajax, took at least two remarkable banners with them. One showed a capital J, a Star of David and a swastika and the word ‘Death’. The other one was written in rhyme:

Initially, the police denied having spotted the banners. Het Parool then published a photo showing a police officer looking at the first banner. The commander, standing directly below the second banner in the Ajax stadium in Amsterdam, said that police non-intervention had been a ‘matter of weighing up the benefits and risks’. It was clear that the police considered order maintenance more important than tackling antisemitism.