Jews - Literary Depictions, The Word-Field

Jews have for centuries attracted animus, negative stereotypes, ethnic insults, and persecution from the host populations among whom they have lived. The grounds, so far as they can be rationally explained, have ostensibly derived from their religious difference and their commercial practices. However, the growth of other vicious stereotypes, based on legend, fabrication, and propaganda rather than fact, has led to pogroms (a Russian word meaning “destruction”) and even genocide. Prejudicial notions have persisted long after rational exposure.

Religious hatred derives from the rejection of Christ as the Messiah and the self-imposed blame for his Crucifixion, according to St. Matthew 27:25: “Then answered all the people and said His blood be on us and on our children.” Many medieval Passion plays dramatized this motif powerfully, as did numerous literary authors, so that Jewish blame had doctrinal status until the ruling by Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) exculpating the Jews for the death of Christ. The Hebraic foundation of the Scriptures contained a number of allusions linking Jews to Satan, notably St. John 8:44 and the Book of Revelation 2:9 and 3:9. Furthermore, a number of major medieval ecclesiastical authorities wrote influential works depicting Jews as the enemies of Christians, if not Antichrist himself. Among them were those of Rabanus Maurus in the ninth century and Peter of Blois’s Contra perfidium Judaeorum (“Against the Treachery of the Jews,” ca. 1200). Furthermore, Jews were exempt from the regulations of Canon Law forbidding Christians to charge interest on loans. An explanatory note added to the Supplement of the Oxford English Dictionary in 1972 runs: “Thus the name of Jew came to be associated in the popular mind with usury and extortionate practices that might be supposed to accompany it, and gained an opprobrious sense.”

In the early Middle Ages there were occasional instances of anti-Jewish riots and persecution in England, the most notable being the massacre of Jews at the coronation of Richard the Lion-Heart on September 3, 1189. An English manuscript shows Jews being attacked in thirteenth-century London: they are identifiable since Jews were legally required to wear two strips of yellow cloth on their garments (British Library, MS Cotton Nero D ii fol. 183v). The motivation for such attacks derived from deeper roots than their religious difference and advantageous commercial situation. “It was in England that the first accusation of ritual murder was formulated against the Jews. In 1144, they were said to have crucified a boy named William in Norwich. Many miracles were reported to have taken place at his grave” (Sinsheimer 1947, 39). A similar legend surrounded the murder of St. Hugh of Lincoln in 1255: the account of Matthew Paris claims that the Jews “disemboweled the corpse, for what end is unknown, but it was said to practice magical arts.” There was also the sensational case of the alleged ritual murder of the boy Simon at Trent in 1474.

However, there is an anomaly or disjunction between the growth of this stereotype and historical actuality. There were virtually no Jews in England from 1290, when they were expelled by Edward III, to 1655, when they were readmitted by Oliver Cromwell. (By special permission a few were allowed to remain resident during the interim.) Yet precisely during this period there developed the vicious stereotypes of Jews being child murderers and social saboteurs, one of the most common myths being that they poisoned wells. The typical qualifying adjective in medieval times was corsed , “cursed or damned.” In numerous texts their role in the Crucifixion is reiterated. From the inhuman or insulting behavior of a single variously named Jew toward Christ at this historic moment, the whole legend of the Wandering Jew takes root. In view of the widespread mocking of Christ at the Crucifixion, this exclusive punishment in itself seems like discrimination. As the entry for God’s wounds shows, those spiritual authorities who denounced Christians for swearing by God’s body and wounds routinely made invidious comparisons with the Jews.

Literary Depictions

References to Jews in Anglo-Saxon literature are limited to Biblical events. Indeed the word Jew is first recorded only ca. 1275. However, Chaucer’s Prioress, Madame Eglentyne, presented as a demure and dignified nun in the General Prologue of the Canterbury Tales , tells a melodramatic and savage tale based on the legend of the murder of St. Hugh of Lincoln and driven by virtually all the stereotypes of xenophobia and anti-Semitism. The “cursed Jews,” sustained by "foul usure and lucre of vileynye, / Hateful to Crist and to his compaignye (ll. 491-92), are presented as diabolically evil:

Our firste foo [enemy] the serpent Sathanas
That hath in Jues herte his waspes nest.
(ll. 558-59) The Jews murder a boy chorister, but the corpse miraculously continues to sing, so that the perpetrators are found, pulled apart by wild horses, and hanged. The Prioress also denounces the Jews as “O cursed folk of Herodes al newe” (l. 574), making an explicit comparison with the massacre of the innocents (Matthew 2:16). She ends with a prayer to St. Hugh of Lincoln, “slayn also with cursed Jewes.”

This hideous tale, which would now be condemned as hate speech, provokes no response in the pilgrim company beyond sober reflection on the miracle, thus giving a sense of how deeply engrained were anti-Semitic sentiments in medieval times. In his standard edition, F.N. Robinson noted: “The general tradition of the murder of Christian children by Jews is much more ancient than this particular story, beginning at the time of the Church historian Socrates (5th century), and is still alive” (1957, 734). The subsequent edition by Larry D. Benson (1987) deals more directly with the problem of the anti-Semitism of the tale for readers and critics.

Two major character studies of Jews dominated the Elizabethan stage. The most famous is Shylock in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (1596–1597), but equally significant is Barabbas in Christopher Marlowe’s earlier play, The Jew of Malta (1589). Shylock is an original and sympathetic study of the Jew as alien and victim, called impersonally “Jew” or “the Jew” throughout, using language full of Old Testament references to Jewish custom. When Shylock agrees to make the loan, Antonio expresses mock surprise, saying “gentle Jew” (punning on gentile ), adding (after Shylock has exited) the ironic comment: “This Hebrew will turn Christian: he grows kind” (I iii 178-79). The play juxtaposes the strict punitive code of the Old Testament, symbolized in Shylock’s “bond,” and the merciful code of the New, which Portia seeks to evoke in her famous speech on “the quality of mercy” (IV i 184). Despite Shylock’s intensely moving speech “Hath not a Jew eyes?” (III i 60-75), he remains an alien rejected by Venetian society and in the end is totally ruined.

While Shylock provokes mixed feelings, Barabbas is a melodramatic version of the ruthless Machiavellian intriguer and a continuation of the figure of Herod, presented on the Elizabethan stage as arrogant and bizarre. Marlowe defiantly names his protagonist after one of the thieves crucified with Christ, while the title, The Jew of Malta , clearly demarcates him as an outsider in an alien multicultural context. The Prologue is spoken by Machievel, a figure obviously derived from the Italian political philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527), stereotyped in England as an atheistic opportunist. Machiavel announces casually: “I hold religion but a childish toy” (l. 14). Barabbas is openly contemptuous of “these swine-eating Christians, / Unchosen nation, never circumcised” (II iii 7-8), pointedly referring to “our Messias that is yet to come” (II iii 302). In the same scene, the speech beginning “Sometimes I go about and poison wells” is a catalogue of all the anti-Semitic stereotypes. He steadfastly refuses to convert, acknowledging the ruinous financial consequences and asks mockingly of the Christians: “Is theft the ground of your religion?” (II iii 155). He poisons a whole convent of nuns billeted at his house, including his daughter Abigail, and yet is preposterously joyful: “How sweet the bells ring now the nuns are dead” (IV i 2). As his stratagems catch up with him he retains a haughty defiance: “Devils, do your worst! I’ll live in spite of you” (V i 38). Seeking to be the ultimate Machievel, ruthless and amoral, he is finally destroyed by treachery and by his own ingenuity. Whereas Shylock leaves the play destroyed, with a bitterly ironic “I am content,” Barabbas dies with a final curse: “Damned Christian dogs! and Turkish infidels!” (V vi 88).

Equally significant to the popular conception of the Jew was the controversial figure of Dr. Lopez (1517–1594), a Spanish Jew who in 1581 became Queen Elizabeth’s physician and a political adviser. He was accused by the Earl of Essex of conspiracy to murder the queen by poisoning and was denounced by the attorney general Sir Edward Coke: “That … murdering traitor and Jewish doctor is worse than Judas himself” (Sinsheimer 1947, 66). At his public hanging at Tyburn on June 7, 1594, the crowd had a simple denunciation: “He is Jew! He is Jew!” The similarities between Barabbas and Lopez, both Jews, Spaniards, poisoners, and traitors, seem not to be coincidental.

The later literary depiction of Jews is more balanced. The evil outsider stereotype is continued most famously in Fagin, the sinister “godfather” of a gang of juvenile thieves in Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1837–1839). Generally called simply “the Jew,” Fagin is introduced in chapter viii as a crude caricature, “a very old shrivelled Jew, whose villainous looking and repulsive face was obscured by a quantity of matted red hair.” He is made decidedly alien: “As he glided steadthily along, the hideous old man seemed like some loathsome reptile, engendered in the slime and darkness through which he moved.” Similar is Ferdinand Lopez, the villain of Anthony Trollope’s The Prime Minister (1876), simply and strongly sketched as “without a father, a foreigner, a black Portuguese nameless Jew [with] a bright eye, a hook nose, and a glib tongue” (1983, 146). A new development, that of the positive sympathetic stereotype, is found in Riah in Our Mutual Friend (1864–1865), Dickens’s last complete novel, and in Daniel Deronda, the eponymous hero of George Eliot’s novel (1876). The most famous Jew in Victorian public life, Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) was also a notable novelist, creating in his political novel Coningsby (1844) an impressive Jewish character, Sidonia.

On the wider political front there emerged a seminal anti-Semitic document, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion , privately printed in 1897 and published in various European languages from 1905 with savage propagandist caricatures. It was ostensibly a record of a secret Zionist Congress at Basel to plan world domination. However, after an exposé by the London Times in 1921, a judicial inquiry in 1934 revealed that “the supposed minutes were highly sophisticated forgeries made in the Paris office of the Russian Political Police (the Okhrana) probably for use by the Czarist regime against the Russian liberals” (Maser 1970, 165). Bizarrely, sections had been copied from two novels, Biarritz (1868), by Hermann Goedsche, and Dialogues in Hell (1864), by Maurice Joly. But since the content perfectly fitted the stereotype of a Jewish conspiracy, it was highly effective as propaganda and was widely disseminated, notably by Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, and by Henry Ford in the United States. Its influence is not entirely extinguished.

The Word-Field

The word-field of hostile terms starts relatively late in the Elizabethan period with the senses of the noun Jew (ca. 1600), defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “a name of opprobrium or reprobation, spec. applied to a grasping or extortionate money-lender or usurer who drives hard bargains or deals craftily.” The equally controversial verbal sense, “to bargain sharply with; cheat; beat down the price; haggle” is recorded in American English from about 1818: “A Yankee can Jew a Jew directly,” a few decades earlier than in British English. A note by the Reverend R. Manning Chipman in the Dictionary of American English in 1870 observes that to jew “is used all over the U.S. In [New England] Jews themselves use it in the same way.” The literal origin of jew-boy is explained in a British Police document of 1796: “Jew Boys … go out every morning loaded with counterfeit copper, which they exchange for bad silver, to be afterwards coloured anew, and again put into a circulation.” Within a few decades the term was being used offensively of grown-ups. The sense that the Jews were “different” or “alien” is shown in the considerable number of compounds such as Jew-butcher, Jew-physician, Jew-pedlar , and Jew-fencer (buyer or seller, generally of stolen goods).

More significant witness words were the arrival over a century ago of Jew-baiting (ca. 1883) and Jew-hatred (ca. 1898). However, it would be naive to see anti-Semitism as being a feature of right-wing organizations alone. The correspondence of Karl Marx, one of the founders of communism and himself a Jew, has some virulently racist comments. In a letter to Friedrich Engels, the coauthor of the Communist Manifesto (1848), Marx referred to the German politician and sociologist Ferdinand Lassalle, as “the Jewish Nigger,” adding that “It is now quite plain to me—as the shape of his head and the way his hair grows also testify—that he is descended from the negroes who accompanied Moses’ flight from Egypt (unless his mother or paternal grandmother interbred with a NIGGER)” (letter dated July 30, 1862). (Marx himself was dark and nicknamed der Mohr [“The Moor”] even by his friend Engels.) Anti-Semitic attitudes surface frequently in everyday speech: in Henry Mayhew’s London Underworld (1862), a “bunter,” or low-class prostitute, says that “she never paid any rent, hadn’t done it for years, and never meant to. They [the landlords] was mostly Christ-killers, and chousing [cheating] a Jew was no sin” (1983, 53). Even Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881), perhaps the greatest Victorian intellectual, referred to Benjamin Disraeli, anglicized, baptized, and twice Prime Minister, politely as “a superlative Hebrew conjuror” and savagely as a “cursed old Jew not worth his weight in cold bacon” (Sutherland, ed.), 1975, 224).

It is notable that in comparison with the growth of demeaning nicknames for other nationalities, those for Jews are late, the earliest recorded use of sheeny , ca. 1810, about a century after bogtrotter, macaroni , and dago . The most obvious reason is that Jew itself was already being used in various opprobrious senses. The broad chronology of the principal nicknames is as follows: sheeny (ca. 1810), ikey (1864), yid (1874), kike (1880s), heeb or hebe (1926), and hymie (1973). While all of these have been current in the United States, the first three terms were previously current in the United Kingdom but are now obsolescent. In The Language of Ethnic Conflict (1983), Irving Lewis Allen shows that in the United States there are sixty-four nicknames for Jews, more than for any other immigrant group.

Of the most common terms, sheeny dates from about 1816 in British usage, possibly deriving, according to Eric Partridge, “from the Yiddish pronunciation of German schön , ‘beautiful,’ used in praising wares” (1972, 825). William Makepeace Thackeray uses it as a nickname in Snobs (1847): “Sheeny and Moses are … smoking their pipes before their lazy shutters in Seven Dials” (xiv). The definition in the Dictionary of American Slang (1986) is tactlessly specific: “a pawnbroker, tailor, junkman or other traditionally Jewish occupation.” Ikey , derived from Isaac , is first recorded in John Camden Hotten’s Slang Dictionary (1864) and defined as “a Jew fence,” that is, receiver of stolen property. Yid seems to be the first term coined by the Jews themselves, according to the 1874 edition of Hotten’s dictionary: “The Jews use these terms [ yid, yit, yidden ] very frequently.” It derives from German Jude , a Jew, an abbreviation of Yehuda , the name of the Jewish Commonwealth. American usage dates from about 1915. As with many terms of ethnic insult, the degree of offensiveness depends on who uses it: Hugh Rawson retails the anecdotal point that “Chaim Weizmann, the first president of Israel, would describe himself appealingly as just ‘A Yid from Pinsk’” ( New York Times Book Review , June 30, 1985). A less expected cross-cultural manifestation was Richard “Kinky” Friedman’s country and western band, founded in the early 1970s and styled “The Texas Jewboys.”

The earliest term to develop in America was kike , recorded in the 1880s. As Allen explains, the etymology is much disputed (1983, 121-23), but the picturesque explanation advanced by Leo Rosten in The Joys of Yiddish (1968) seems to be the most plausible. According to Rosten, the root is kikel , the Yiddish word for a circle, the symbol used by Jewish immigrants, many of whom were illiterate, when signing their papers at Ellis Island, instead of the usual X, a Christian symbol. Consequently, immigration officers began to refer to such a person as a kikel , later abbreviated to kike . Rosten’s authority is Philip Cowen, whom he styles “the dean of immigration inspectors” (180). Significantly, the term was first used by assimilated American German Jews to disparage “uncouth Jewish immigrants from Russia or Eastern Europe” ( The Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang 1997). R. Glanz in his study The Jew in Folklore (1904–1905) noted that “No longer is it limited to the Russian Jew. Noble Bavarian hurled the epithet at equally noble Prussian and Swabian … and we have heard of ‘kike’ goyim too” (205). Now used disparagingly of Jews in general, the term has remained largely confined to American usage.

During the first half of the twentieth century, prior to the growth of political correctness and the general sensitivity to opprobrious ethnic labels, there developed in the United States a campaign against the insulting uses of the word Jew , especially as a verb. H.L. Mencken, who was not very sympathetic to this development, observed: “Certain American Jews carry on a continuous campaign against the use of Jew , and American newspapers, in order to get rid of their clamor, often use Hebrew instead. Thus one encounters such forms as Hebrew comedian, Hebrew holidays and even Hebrew rabbi” (1936, 297). (See also Hugh Rawson 1983, 133, and 1991, 189). However, the offensive abbreviation heeb (or hebe ) started to emerge about 1926 (first recorded in Ring Lardner) and has maintained a slang or underground currency ever since. More recent forms have been hymie (from Hyman) and Hymietown (for New York). Recorded ca. 1973, the terms gained notoriety in 1984 when the Reverend Jesse Jackson, an African-American spokesman, admitted using them in private conversations ( New York Times , February 27, 1984). Though he apologized, he insisted that he had been using “noninsulting colloquial language” ( Newsweek , April 1, 1984).

Despite these stigmatic terms, Jewish humor contains a rich store of jokes based on anti-Semitic stereotypes. Leo Rosten’s exuberant collection, The Joys of Yiddish (1968), illustrates this point on virtually every page, often in the witty definitions of the disparaging terms for social types like schmuck, schlemiel, schmegegge, yenta , and so on. In British English some references for Jews are disguised by the mode of rhyming slang, in which the last term in the phrase rhymes with the unstated word. Among the codes for Jew are four by two, five by two, half-past two , and kangaroo . Similar forms for yid are front-wheel skid and saucepan lid . Not all rhyming slang is exclusively British: box of glue originated on the Pacific coast of America.

Other coded terms in the United States are goldberg , limited to Black English, and JAP, an abbreviation pronounced “jap” for Jewish American Princess , dating from the late 1960s. According to Hugh Rawson, “Always portrayed as rich, spoiled and straitlaced” (1991, 217), the type became the subject of many jokes, such as “What does a good JAP make for dinner? Reservations” (B. Raskin 1987, 287). The issue led to a Conference on Current Stereotypes of Jewish Women, sponsored by the American Jewish Committee in 1987. However, in his study The Death of Meaning , George Zito noted: “Most Jewish students I have interviewed do not … understand why some ultra-sensitive Jews find the JAP term so objectionable” (1993, 67).

South African English provides an almost identical stereotype in the term kugel , current from the 1970s, defined in the Dictionary of South African English (1991) as: " Jewish . A young woman of the wealthier class, whose interests are men, money and fashion, speaking in a recognizable drawling dialect developed within the group." Although kugel describes a social type rather than strictly denoting a Jewish woman, this identity is implied in the derivation, from the Yiddish name of a pudding. Smous , amazingly recorded in Grose (1785) for a German Jew, migrated to South Africa, where it formerly denoted “an itinerant pedlar, often Jewish, who made a living hawking goods from farm to farm.” In 1797, Le Vaillant noted that these hawkers had “obtained the name Capse-Smouse, or Cape Jews” (I, 55). It is also an American slang term for a Jew.

The strangest South African term is peruvian , which has followed the same sociolinguistic pattern as kike . Almost certainly originating in an acronym derived from P.R.U., standing for “Polish and Russian Union,” yielding a pronounceable form “peru,” it first denoted an Eastern European Jewish immigrant to South Africa. In 1899 there is a reference to “Peruvian Jews … compelled to contribute to the Pretorian war-chest” (Froes 1899, 14). As with kike , the term was first used by South African Jews to stigmatize those new arrivals who still retained their characteristic foreign accents, customs, and eating habits, before becoming a derogatory term for an unacceptable, crude, or dishonest person in the community. Finally it developed a general anti-Semitic sense. The term is now virtually obsolete.

The long history of anti-Semitism, the growth of political correctness, and increased sensitivity to opprobrious categorizing labels have all combined to diminish the currency of ethnic insults. In some cases traditional names have been altered. Thus in 2001 the committee of names of fishes of the American Fisheries Society ruled that the name jewfish was offensive, and the fish was renamed as the Goliath grouper . While official alteration of names obviously has impact, prejudice and underground slang cannot be so easily controlled. Thus a jew canoe has been a satirical term for an expensive automobile in both American slang and the upper-class British argot of the Sloane Rangers for at least three decades. The surfacing of such terms expressive of envy and contempt shows that the impulse toward denigration continues. As has been noted, a number of originally stigmatic or critical terms, like kike and yid , have been through the same socio-semantic cycle of being used first to mark Jews as outsiders, then by insider Jews to discriminate against other Jews, finally returning to the original dynamic. The same pattern can be seen in nigger .