The Yid Army's chants turn anti-semitism into kitsch banter Prosecuting Spurs fans who call themselves Yids would penalise victims not perpetrators, says Simon Schama Good night Yids!" tweets the cheery Talking THFC Spurs blogger, managing to sound both endearing and sinister, like a Cossack tucking you in before the rough stuff starts. I should take offence; God knows I'm good at that. I am still trying to work up a lather of indignation to support a move by the Football Association - endorsed by the chairman of the Professional Footballers" Association as well as The Board of Deputies of British Jews - to prosecute Tottenham Hotspur fans who chant "we're the Yid Army!" from the stands at White Hart Lane, giving voice to the team's old association with north London's Jews. There is no doubt that, in some places and at some times, the Y-word is as vilely racist as the N-word - even when embraced by those who sing it. I remember seeing it in Mosleyite daubings on walls in London and Essex. But for this life-long Spurs supporter - a Yiddisher Yid who sees the popular Yiddish-Hasidic newspaper Der Yid on sale every week in Brooklyn - it is a bit of a struggle to get incensed. I sympathise with the rage of author and comedian David Baddiel, when as a Jewish Chelsea supporter he has to endure merry cries of "Death to the Jews, f*** the Jews" every time Spurs play his team. But perhaps that is a problem for Chelsea and other clubs that tolerate supporters sounding off like they are at a Nazi rally. Prosecuting Spurs fans for calling themselves Yids seems to criminalise the targets of hate speech rather than the perpetrators. And they, believe me, are out there in toxic force on the web, where neo-Nazi sites fall about laughing at the joke that Spurs must have 6m fans. Of course, not all London Jews are Spurs fans and still less are all Spurs fans Jews. But the connection is not entirely spurious either. The reason my dad passed on the allegiance to me was because the synagogue he helped establish was near White Hart Lane. On my seventh birthday in 1952 he gave me a postcard with the autographs of the team that had won the league the year before. I can still recite those names - Ditchburn and Ramsey, Nicholson and Duquemin, Medley, Bennett and Burgess - like a litany. Later, in Golders Green, a few miles to the west, it had to be love at a distance since Shabbat observance stopped us going to the games, then played only on Saturdays. But when the rabbi started his sermon we would bolt for the doors to chew over the prospects for the afternoon. Then came Bill Nicholson's magic team - Blanchflower, Mackay, Bobby Smith and the rest - not just winning the double in 1961 but doing so with an intelligent elegance that redefined the game just as the pre-Munich crash Manchester United had done under Matt Busby in the 1950s. It was the English game at its most thrilling: short, sharp passing; sudden bursts of acceleration; John "the Ghost" White intuitively moving into spaces he had no right to find, a will-o"-the-wisp in baggy shorts until his career and his life were struck down by a bolt of lightning. In the years that followed, Busby's United and the Ajax of Rinus Michels and Johan Cruyff also mastered that degree of lethal grace. And it was in Amsterdam in the 1970s that the ugliness started to throw a shadow over Ajax's brilliance. Into the city with a traumatic Holocaust history - where Anne Frank had been hidden but also betrayed, and which had lost 80 per cent of its Jews to the death camps - came Feyenoord supporters from Rotterdam, swastikas tattooed on their arms. Its a commonplace now to say it does not matter who started the aggravation but it seems to me that it does. For Ajax, long associated with a Jewish population in much the same way as Spurs, the waving of Israeli flags and the singing of "Hava Nagila" were a response to the Rotterdam swastikas, not the cause. The escalating spectacle of rival chants, recently refined by other sides into "Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas," along with the hissing that has piped its way to English grounds, grew distressing to the few Dutch Holocaust survivors and their families. The true horror was the emptying out of historical meaning, the trivialisation of genocide into Holokitsch. Is that not the real problem? Historical ignorance of the doltish kind that for many years allowed the Cleveland Indians baseball team to adopt the grotesque caricature of big-nosed "Chief Wahoo" as their mascot. Or, even more offensively, the tomahawk chop of Atlanta Braves fans: comic-book editions of histories of oppression and extermination. With the light tribal comedy of team solidarity comes a waiver from historical understanding. But words, chants, signs and gestures can never cut loose from the drag weight of the past. The right response to the Yid Army at Spurs and the Jew-baiters among the Chelsea fans at Stamford Bridge is not prosecution but (and I know this will be seen as another case of professorial optimism) to educate them into understanding what it is they are actually yelling; whose bones they stand on when they jeer and cheer. Perhaps, rather than have a platoon of chant cops patrolling the stands, we could flash up on the screens a photograph of a chimney, a train and Arbeit Macht Frei before the team announcements. That would shut them up. The writer is an FT contributing editor