How Spurs became ‘the Jewish team’
This exclusive extract from a new history of the club explains how Spurs became ‘the Jewish team’
‘We f***ing hate Tottenham and we hate Tottenham.” The spirit of hospitality extended to both home and away supporters hadn’t spread to a gaggle of Sheffield United supporters as they spilled out of a popular prematch venue before the League Cup semi-final in 2013.
One of them shouts “The Jews…” and laughs. We were leaving the Irish Centre but the irony passed her by. Yet this inconsequential incident captures two major elements of being a Spurs supporter. To fans of other clubs, Tottenham Hotspur is a Jewish club: we are the Yids. Second, when fans of other clubs use the word, it’s always a term of abuse.
The rest of the group left it there and decided instead to express in song their apparent distain for Cockneys. Yorkshire rivals Leeds were known for many years as a Jewish club – another city with a large Jewish population, football mad and owned in their golden years by a Jewish family. But not Yids.
A proportion of Spurs’ support has long been drawn from the London Jewish community and the three chairmen since 1982 have all been Jewish businessmen with pre-existing degrees of allegiance to the club. Yet the proportion of fans who are Jewish, impossible to know precisely, is likely to be small. The best estimate is a maximum of 5% of the crowd. Arsenal have at least as many Jewish fans. But they are not Yids.
Spurs supporters did not grow up as ‘Yids’; they became Yids in adversity through a complex and contested process of identity formation. Forced to respond to pejorative, abusive taunts from rival supporters, many in the crowd embraced the term in order to render the abuse impotent. But the word yid remains highly controversial. Many Jewish Spurs fans support their club despite the word not because of it.
The Jewish community in Tot tenham began to grow in the early 20th century. Eastern European Jews fleeing pogroms in Russia came to Britain from 1880 onwards, with a surge in 1905/06 as their persecution intensified. Many settled in the East End amidst its long-established Jewish community. Others then moved further north, taking advantage of the good transport links and employment prospects in the Tottenham area. The Jewish Dispersion Committee encouraged the move from overcrowded Whitechapel and Brick Lane.
Unskilled work was plentiful in the fast-growing industrial sites around Tottenham Hale. Several large busi- nesses were Jewish-owned. Lebus furniture, at one time the largest furniture manufacturer in the country, moved to the area in 1899. Most famous for its cheap and cheerful post-war utility furniture, it also made parts for the Mosquito bombers and Horsa gliders used on D-Day. Gestetner became a world leader in duplicating machines, the forerunner of modern copiers. The Eagle Pencil works, later known as Berol, and Flateau Shoes employed thousands.
Over the next 30 to 40 years, Tottenham Hotspur became part of the lives of these predominantly workingclass Jewish men living in the crowded streets between the Hale and Landsdowne Road. For many Jews, the drive for assimilation has been an over-riding imperative and football has been instrumental in that process. Writing about this powerful anglicisation, Anthony Clavane says football is: “A space where ethnic identity has connected, even become intertwined, with national identity; an arena where Jews have fought the notion that they were invaders who needed to be fended off, newcomers who did not belong.”
Many Jews, especially the second generation who were born here and called Tottenham home, sought belonging and identity on the terraces at White Hart Lane. They weren’t the only ones: the history of Tottenham Hotspur is linked inextricably with the lives of the newcomers, the displaced, the ambitious, the hungry who came to Tottenham in search of work and a better life. Generations have found comfort and comradeship in the swaying masses who follow the navy blue and white. Through their club are expressed hopes and aspirations, of being part of something, of being somebody. The Hotspur was Tottenham.
This assimilation was particularly important in the Tottenham community that faced hostility, often violent, after the so-called ‘Tottenham Outrage’ in 1909, when a botched armed robbery by two Russian immigrants led to a police chase involving hundreds of officers from Tottenham to Chingford that ended with a policeman and a child caught in the crossfire dead and 24 injured. This case attracted unprecedented national interest and provoked a period of anti-alien feeling, which in Tottenham meant ‘anti-Jewish’.
Jewish attendance at football matches rose after the First World War, especially among second generation young men. Partly this reflected changes in social patterns as, in the East End, Saturday became a day for leisure rather than strict religious observance. The British-born generation forged their own identity in this fast-changing urban world. Proud of their heritage and faith, people adopted football as another element of this new anglicised Jewish culture alongside the old customs. So in the words of a correspondent to the JC, for a Saturday kick-off at 2.30, “it was possible to be in synagogue until the end of musaf, to nip home for a plate of lokshen soup and then board a tram from Aldgate to White Hart Lane.”
One creative interpretation of religious law claimed that the Shabbos tradition could be maintained by purchasing a ticket on the Friday morning and going by an electric tram, not a combustion-engined bus, although we suspect not every rabbi agreed. However they travelled, the good transport links made the journey straightforward.
Tottenham Hotspur appealed to all sections in society with a history of welcome and independence. Arsenal’s Jewish support grew later, in the 1930s, from the more affluent north London community. They were the