Liberty, Equality, Ferocious D

Written by Jake Steinberg

Zionism, anti-Semitism, and Soccer in Jewish France
I arrive late for the game, and it’s raining. Unsure if I’ve come to the right place, I ask two kids kicking a soccer ball on sidelines whether the team in blue is Maccabi. They look at me like I’m an alien. Who would come out here to watch if they didn’t already know the team?

When I finally find them, the first half is underway. The players are huddled under a shelter, and the coach is pacing the sideline. Former team members stand along the sidelines, trying to stay out of the rain. The game is back-and-forth, the players struggling in the weather. I watch a play break apart, and the ball roll harmlessly to the visitors’ goalie. He passes to the defender, who can’t handle it, and suddenly the play is going back the other way. The opposing wing player hits his center midfielder, a recent substitute, with a low pass, and he’s off. He plays in toward the defender, fakes a look, and beats his man. A forward is calling for the ball, but the midfielder wants to shoot. The goalie is late to move; he dives and misses, but it doesn’t matter. The shot is high and wide. The bench groans and the shooter looks down, hands on his hips, and kicks the dirt.

This is typical amateur soccer–football to the French–rough, emotional, a bit sloppy. But I’m here for something else: it’s hard not to notice that the players in blue wear Mogen David right over their hearts. It’s there again in their yearbook. Sixteen players and two coaches, posed in front of the goal, some smiling, some trying to look hard. Apart from that, this could be any soccer team, anywhere. But this team is the Sporting Club Maccabi de Paris. Their home field is in the Bois de Vincennes, in the east of Paris, and their logo is the ship of Paris superimposed on a Star of David in blue and gold.

Every year they raise cash by selling a day planner featuring photographs of the Maccabi teams, a letter from the club president, and a calendar of Jewish holidays. It also includes ads for local businesses, Israel trips, sporting goods, and BMW and Mercedes-Benz dealers (reparations, it occurs to me). The photographs go back through the 1970’s, but the team was founded in 1947. And its history stretches back a half-century before that, to modern Zionism’s birth in late nineteenth-century Europe, against the backdrop of pogroms and the Dreyfus Affair. This team is heir to that early Zionist tradition–but if the Mogen David was the first thing I noticed about them, the second was how little regard they gave it. I began searching for the Maccabi team with an idea I’d gotten from the Sandy Koufax stories and tales of Jewish athletes that loom large in the secular Jewish imagination: If pre-Holocaust Jews saw sports as an arena in which to combat anti-Semitic stereotypes and assert Jewish pride, then I assumed the contemporary team would be engaged with these issues, equally complex and pressing in the Europe of today. Instead, I found a group of athletes for whom Jewishness was both their defining characteristic and entirely irrelevant. They bore little relation to the Maccabi team I sought–but they perfectly embody the France they live in now.

In 1898, writer and early Zionist Max Nordau delivered a speech at the Second Zionist Congress in Switzerland, calling for the creation of Muskel Judentum: Muscular Jewry. Jews should no longer, he argued, be trapped in ghettos, stereotyped as weak and studious, but should participate in the physical activities that defined late nineteenth-century ideals of manliness. At the time of Nordau’s speech, Central and Eastern Europe were already home to a nascent trend of Jewish sports clubs, but in the following years there was a small explosion of them, with the formation of twenty new organizations in Germany, Bulgaria, and the Austrio-Hungarian Empire. By 1915, Maccabi organizations or individual clubs existed across Europe and North Africa, as well as in what would become Israel. These clubs were instrumental in forming Jewish army brigades, such as the Zionist Mule Corps, which participated in World War I battles and would provide some of the impetus for the Jewish militias that fought the 1948 Israeli War of Independence.

The prewar Maccabi clubs were about a lot more than games. They encouraged young Jewish men to strive for the same ideals as their gentile counterparts, and were part of a broader movement within Zionism to develop social structures similar to those available to non-Jews. These included Blau-Weiss (blue-white) college fraternities and summer camp-style groups, all in the German Wandervogel (hiking club) tradition. Songs and physical activities with political overtones became part of the standard Zionist program. These modes of organization foregrounded what was, at the time, the seemingly intractable dilemma of social Zionism: how does one remain a Jew and take on the same values as gentiles? If the Jews get a nation, do they stop being Jews? Unfortunately, the same traditions underlying these Zionist programs also contributed to the formation of the Hitler Youth, and Michael Stanislawski, among other historians, has pointed out the problem with Nordau’s thinking–it implicitly accepts anti-Semitic stereotypes, even as it seeks to make them no longer true. This is one of the reasons Nordau has been excluded from the Zionist canon; during his time, though, his theories fit well with the modern Zionist agenda.

Trying to find the pre-war Maccabi team in Paris is like chasing a ghost, reminding me of Franklin Foer’s attempts, described in How Soccer Explains the World, to track down Hakoah, a well-known Viennese team from the same period. My effort simply to locate the contemporary club itself involves Gallic bureaucrats at the league offices, a trip to a café to find the director of football operations, and finally, an excursion to Les Lilas, one of the moribund suburbs to the northeast of Paris, to meet the club president at his small real estate firm. Les Lilas is typical of the immediate outskirts of the capital: half of it has the rustic feel of a rural French town, while the rest is dominated by cités: housing projects and low-income developments that have been the source of significant social unrest.

Maurice Benayoun, the current president of Sporting Club Maccabi de Paris, greets me in his small office, which sits at the end of a row of three, with one secretary outside. It’s untidy, but I notice certificates of appreciation from several French Jewish organizations on his walls. Benayoun seems pleasantly surprised that a journalist would take an interest in the team; in France, to my amusement, “I am a writer from New York” carries all the credibility I need. He lights a pipe and explains the club’s history as best he can: he knows there was a team before the war, and shows me some old photographs of men playing soccer, but admits that even in his capacity as team historian, he has found little more to go on. He assumes that whoever founded the contemporary team had some connection to the prewar one, but he can’t say with any certainty. Later, I visit the director of the Maccabi’s children’s teams, who is responsible for the administrative work for the younger players, and he adds the tidbit of information that, like the current one, the old Maccabi team was always only an amateur club. The best Jewish players, he explains, played on the professional French teams. The way he says it leaves me unsure whether this is a legacy he is proud of.

Despite the fact that France had one of the highest percentages of survivors of any country under Nazi rule, the Parisian Jewish community was effectively dismantled during the Holocaust. Before the war, the Marais, Paris’ traditionally Jewish neighborhood, was the vibrant center of a largely Ashkenazi, politically active, secular Jewish community. Today’s Marais is a hodgepodge of Sephardic Jews, the descendants of postwar Eastern European refugees, and Hasidim. No matter how many memorials are tacked up, the old world is dead here.

France today is widely perceived as the most anti-Semitic country in Western Europe. From what I’ve seen, it’s not an unfair assertion. With the largest population of Muslims in Europe, and a far-right party that has proven to be a viable movement, Jews have few political options here. The last two years have seen a rash of attacks on Jewish cemeteries and synagogues across France, mostly originating from North African youth, often motivated by antagonism toward Israel. Many commentators have noted the recent increase in French Jews’ immigration to Israel, and the Marais is lined with Zionist posters and bookshops. The Zionism of today, though, is not the fierce debate of the fin-de-siecle, or the desperate struggle of the prewar years, but instead a reflexive support for the state of Israel as a bulwark against threats. Translations of the allegedly fabricated Martin Luther King Jr. “Letter to an Anti-Zionist Friend” appear in shop windows, as do posters for a variety of pro-Israel charities.

All of this seems to be the furthest thing from the players’ minds during the first game I watch one Sunday afternoon in late January. Standing along the sidelines, their few supporters–mostly old players and friends–scream encouragement, groan at missed chances, and laugh at a couple of particularly egregious fouls. The players seem to be mainly confused by my presence, to think it’s a bit weird that someone would care enough to write about them.

The team’s starting lineup is Jewish, Arab, and West African. The people conspicuously absent are white Frenchmen; in the game-day squad of 16 players, there is only one. Benayoun explains that the team has reached a level of competition that makes it impossible to have a segregated team, even if they wanted to: “In lower divisions,” he tells me, “there are Arab teams, Yugoslav teams, Portuguese teams, everything. But when you get above those divisions, you can’t be competitive and exclusive.” Even if it were possible, Benayoun says, he would avoid an all-Jewish lineup: SCMP’s goal is not only to promote athleticism among Jews but to show members of other communities excluded from the French mainstream that Jews are part of those communities too. The treasurer of the club, Mr. Choukroun, agrees: “we exist to guard our [Jewish] identity but not to discriminate,” he tells me. I ask him if he sees the club as part of the tradition started by the early Zionists; he says he does, in the strongest possible terms. But if the goal of his team is to encourage cooperation between Jews and non-Jews, then this tradition has changed significantly.

“It’s important to have a Jewish team,” says Anthony, one of SCMP’s Jewish players, echoing the administrators. I ask why, and he becomes evasive. I ask if he’s seen anti-Semitism in football. “Never,” he says. Then, “Well, not never, but rarely.” What then, I want to know, is the point of having a Jewish team? The coach, Charley Aïdan, gives me his standard line: he is just trying to teach people a sport. His aim, he says, is to teach young men, Jewish or not, what they can learn from football about character, discipline, and teamwork. Beyond these clichés, he does not have much to say about the social position of a French club with Jewish links. Aïdan–himself a Jew, as are most of the administrators–sees the club’s Jewish associations as largely symbolic. “Look,” he said, “Those are the reserve players. Maybe three are Jewish. But it’s a symbol to the Jewish community here.” This demographic breakdown is true of all of their age groups; Jews are disproportionately, but not overwhelmingly, represented.

Before one game, when I’ve finally worked my way far enough into the team’s good graces to hang around the coach, the president, and the director of football, I get a taste of their real concerns. Aïdan is worried about the referee, whom he remembers from an earlier match and dislikes. The director jokingly tells him not to yell at the refereeing crew so much. Benayoun turns to me and proudly announces that a Maccabi youngster led the French national team onto the field for their friendly match against Sweden the week before. Apparently, it’s an honor to have been included in this odd tradition, in which professional soccer teams are led onto the field by a small child dressed in full team uniform.
The ten-and-under team plays in the same park; they also wear stars over their hearts. There are fewer parents than I remember from American youth soccer, but otherwise it’s much the same. Marcel Mimoum, an elderly Jewish man, is the director of the club’s youth program. He explains that he cares strongly about the club’s Jewish identity, but not about the background of his players. “Automatically,” he says, “we teach kids to recognize each other as individuals alone.” Pointing to an older player on the sidelines, he says, “You see number 9 over there? He’s black, but he’s played with us since he was ten years old.” Mimoum says the club recruits in the Jewish lower schools, one of the few strong religious education traditions that still exists in France, although not one that educates the majority of French Jews. He allows word of mouth to reach non-Jewish parents.
The players on the senior team seem to know little of the Maccabi movement’s back story, and mostly, they seem unconcerned. Salim, the team captain, is a French Arab who came over to SCMP with the current coach. “I don’t know much about the history of the club,” he tells me. He’s smiling widely, smoking a cigarette after a two-goal win. “But I think it’s important that a club like this exists, to show that there’s no difference between types of people.”

Even in the early days of the Maccabi Clubs, football was the dominant spectator sport in Europe. It required both teamwork and individual inspiration, which also happened to be key Zionist values. And as Jewish participation in the sport grew, it neatly defied Jewish stereotypes. Jewish teams gained great regard, even in leading footballing cities like Vienna.
All of this had another side. From the outset of mass spectator sports, political groups have exploited their crowd dynamics and simulated conflict to political ends, and what is romanticized as a working-class game has often been an incubator for radical racist and nationalist agendas. Real Madrid, the Franco’s pet team, still has a group of fans–the Ultra Sur–who bring fascist paraphernalia to games, sing chants about gassing Jews, and are even reputed to have keys to the stadium so they can store their oversized banners. This political element was present, and for obvious reasons troubling, in the inter-war period, but it hasn’t disappeared. A recent issue of the French magazine So Foot had a cover story asking, “is football of the right or the left?” Tellingly, the article didn’t attempt to answer the question.
The team’s officers don’t see any significance in facing occasional anti-Semitism–to them, it’s simply a consequence of life in modern France. They say that the non-Jews on the team always leap to the defense of the Jewish players, but are careful to note that any teammate would do that. I ask Aïdan if he would deny that there are politics in football. His brief response: “Unhappily, yes [politics are part of football].”
Like their coaches, the players on SCMP do not trouble themselves with all of this. One, from Cote d’Ivoire, says that playing on a Jewish team is not a problem for him. “It’s only football,” he tells me. The Jewish players see it the same way. Rudy, a right midfielder on the senior team, has been playing with the team since he was a kid; his brother played for SCMP before him. He says he’s seen some anti-Semitism, but nothing serious. When I ask him about the history of the club, he jokes that the real Maccabi club is Ajax Amsterdam, a team whose supporters bring Israeli flags to games. The club has been subjected to Nazi-infused taunting, and the pro-Israel imagery has become a symbol of their defiance as much as anything else, but the club administrators recently announced they’d be discouraging Israeli flag-waving in the future. Rudy says it’s very important to have a Jewish team, but can’t tell me why. When I press him, he says, “to show that we’re still in the world, and to show that we’re the best!” Then he runs off, laughing hysterically. Watching the team walk onto the field, I can’t help but feel a bit stupid for having spent so much time looking into the history of the Maccabi movement. The players go over tactics, and Aïdan tells them to move the ball and avoid fouls.
Perhaps the only thing out of the ordinary is my reaction: I’m irrationally proud of them. Even after the first game I saw, when the president, who I had arranged to speak with, hadn’t shown up, and the players had stared at me like I was a lunatic, I was proud that a team called Maccabi had won 4-1. Salim told me the point of the team was to “be a good example. We [Jews and non-Jews] wear the same jersey. We win together. We lose together too.”
The players circle up before the kick-off, arms around each other, and chant: “Maccabi, Oui! Maccabi, Oui! Maccabi, Oui!” It’s the same chant I hear in the locker room after a win. The only moment of controversy is before the game, when the referee tells them to get their spectators back further–that’s me–and the coach convinces him to let me stay by the bench. At halftime, the players go back to the locker room, where Aïdan reminds them that “football is a team game, not an individual one.” When they get back out on the field, they turn a 0-0 stalemate into a 2-0 win.

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Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved.