Ajax, the Dutch, the War by Simon Kuper

Why is Ajax of Amsterdam seen as a 'Jewish club'? David Goldblatt explores a football myth

In 1999, when Ajax of Amsterdam were drawn against Happoel Hafia in the Uefa cup, Israelis called it a Jewish Derby. The Dutch are their foreign team of choice at the World Cup, and many believe Johan Cruyff is a Jew. The tolerant Dutch, after all, protected Jews from German occupation. Yet, as Simon Kuper argues, only Poland lost a bigger percentage of its Jews to the Final Solution.

Ajax's own "F-side ultras" wave Stars of David while rivals chant anti-Semitic slogans. Yet when Kuper asks Ajax's archivists and old Jewish players why, they deny any meaningful connection between Dutch Jewry and the club, or mutter that the past is best not raked over. Myth and denials are the staples of most popular remembrance of the Second World War.

The Netherlands is no exception. In this book, Kuper punctures those myths, finding explanations of these paradoxes in the history of Dutch football, and of the war. His writing combines scholarly graft, a feel for political complexity, and quiet but powerful wit.

The Israelis can view the Dutch as honorary Jews because they still accept an account of Occupation that even the Dutch don't believe: that the Dutch resisted, and protected the Jews. Except for a very few in the real Resistance, they didn't. As Kuper puts it, for the most part they were "cowardly and grey". The Dutch played the game with greater fervour than ever. Kuper's heart-rending account of the wartime correspondence of Sparta Rotterdam and Ajax sees the Jews banned from club-houses and stadiums.

Ajax is seen as a Jewish club, for in the Sixties its great teams were built on the support of rich and driven survivors of Jewish Amsterdam. Yet the point of Ajax for its Jewish fans was not that it was a Jewish club, but an Amsterdam club – in the Dutch mainstream. In a beautiful recreation of a pre-war weekend, Kuper evokes the journeys of Jews to an Ajax game, where at this staunchly upper-middle-class club they could mingle in the crowd.

Kuper rightly condemns Ajax for its silence, its amnesia, and its pathetic failure to memorialise its war dead – Jewish and gentile. But tolerance is currently in short supply in the Netherlands. As he astutely argues, the populist bigotry and massive support of Pim Fortuyn were only surprising to those who had not registered the racism of Dutch football and society.