ENGLISH football grounds in the 1980s were not pleasant places. Fans were squeezed into caged terraces which were often left open to the elements. Hooliganism was rife and the country was in a state of moral panic as lurid images of fighting youths became a fixture on news bulletins. Margaret Thatcher, the prime minister, convened a “war cabinet”. Ken Bates, the chairman of Chelsea football club, suggested electrifying the fences in the stadiums to keep the warring factions apart. By the end of the decade English football reached its nadir. In 1985, 39 Italian football fans had been killed in Heysel, Belgium after a riot by Liverpool supporters. In 1989, Liverpool supporters themselves were the victims as 96 lost their lives at Hillsborough as a result of incompetent policing. Some time toward the beginning of that decade, aged around ten, your correspondent was taken to his first away game by his father, a fanatical supporter of Tottenham Hotspur. The game was a derby with Chelsea, a bitter London rival. Chelsea's fans were among the game’s most notorious. Many were skinheads; foot soldiers of extreme right-wing parties such as the National Front and the British Movement. Tottenham, because of the area in North London in which it is situated, had a large and visible Jewish following. It did not make for a pleasant combination. At one point during the first half the hostile Chelsea crowd fell suddenly silent. Quietly at first came a hissing sound, like someone letting out gas from a canister. Before long the hissing reached crescendo. It was a terrifying sound for a small boy. But I was too young to grasp the significance. Only later was I filled in: the Chelsea fans were mimicking the sound of cyanide being released at a Nazi concentration camp. As the years wore on, the abuse towards Spurs fans became less subtle. When clubs with a large right-wing following came to Tottenham’s White Hart Lane stadium, such as Chelsea, West Ham, Leeds and Manchester United, the anti-semitism was relentless. One common song ran:

Spurs are on their way to Belsen

Hitler's going to gas ‘em again

The Yids from Tottenham

The Yids from White Hart Lane

The Y-word. It was the most relentless chant of all. Thousands of opposition fans, faces snarled, would come together in spiteful mantra: “Yiddo! Yiddo!” It was directed towards Tottenham fans and players alike. It would go on for minutes at a time, many times in a game. After a while it was so commonplace that one became immune to it.

At some point during that time, something odd began to happen. Tottenham fans began to appropriate the Y-word. Gradually they began to refer to themselves as Yids. The club’s supporters started to describe themselves as the “Yid Army”. Soon the word was being chanted solely by Tottenham fans referring to themselves in a spirit of celebration and of togetherness. It had been reclaimed in much the same way that the word “nigger” was taken back by black hip-hop artists and “queer” was by gays.

As a result, the word died as an insult, at least within football grounds. Opposing fans could no longer bait Spurs fans with a word with which they were now referring to themselves with pride. Nowadays, when a star signing is introduced to the White Hart Lane crowd, the fans initiate him with a rapturous chant of “Yiddo! Yiddo!”. Last night when Jermain Defoe, a Spurs striker who wears his Christianity proudly, scored a sublime hat-trick, he was lauded with his usual song, “Jermain Defoe, he’s a Yiddo”. Smiling broadly with his hands in the air, he revelled in the plaudit.

So is this a heart-warming story of a triumph over racism? Not quite. Two days ago, out of the blue it seemed, the Society of Black Lawyers (SBL) announced it would report Tottenham to the police if its fans continued to refer to themselves as Yids. Peter Herbert, the head of the society, said that it was “exposing the rather nasty underbelly of racism in British sport”.

Jews in name only

Clearly the word has the capacity to offend. But many in the media have accused the SBL of not fully understanding the history of the word in relation to Spurs before it opened its mouth. In a statement, the club said that its fans “adopted the chant as a defence mechanism in order to own the term and thereby deflect anti-Semitic abuse.” In any case, the legal position of this is unclear. The club says that the point of law is distinguished by the intent to cause offence, which would not apply in Spurs’ case. The Daily Mailreports that the police also accept this distinction.

However the argument is nuanced. According to John Efron, in his book “Emancipation Through Muscles: Jews and Sports in Europe”, although Tottenham does have a large Jewish support, and is widely regarded “the Jewish club”, Jews by no means make up the majority of its fans. Indeed it probably does not even have the largest Jewish support in the country. That title probably belongs to Arsenal, its north London neighbour. Hence, when the Yid chant goes up, even though it is intended in a wholly positive sense, most of those using the word will be Gentiles.

Does this exempt them from the right to bandy the word about? David Baddiel, a Jewish comedian and a Chelsea fan, thinks that it does. He is behind a campaign to drive the term out of English football altogether. He equates it to a white person from a black area describing himself as “a nigger”.

But an alternative view might be that it is a laudible example of solidarity with an opressed minority in their number. Mr Efron writes:

What we have here are insiders, in this case Englishmen of that most English and working class of cultures, the soccer stadium, declaring their outsider status, namely that of the Jew or, more accurately, the hated Yid.

Daniel Wynne, a prominent member of the Tottenham Hotspur Supporters’ Trust and a Jew, says he is conflicted. His father escaped to Britain from Nazi Europe. He says he does not feel comfortable singing the Y-word himself. But he does defend others’ right to do so because it is not used in a derogatory way. Mr Wynne says that his Jewish friends, even those who do not support Tottenham, understand the positive motive behind the word: “It is different from someone saying it to your face in the street.” He does find it upsetting, though, that a new generation are growing up who only associate the Y-word with a north London football team.

On Thursday night, the White Hart Lane crowd answered the Society of Black Lawyers with a chorus of “We’ll sing what we want”. Clearly, they have no intention of relenting. The debate about whether they are legally or morally right to do so continues.