Jew-ish

[liv]

This weekend I went to another Jewish-Muslim interfaith event. I was not exactly the main target audience, which was mainly people whose actual job is religious education. I did get to meet some Somali Bravanese Muslims, an ethnic minority from Somalia via Kenya whom I hadn't encountered before.

Anyway we had some very interesting discussions, including around the use of language. Some of the Muslim participants said they didn't like what I had thought of as an otherwise neutral older spelling, Moslem. They said they associate that spelling and pronunciation with people like Donald Trump, and I can see that people who haven't bothered to update their language might well be assumed to be hostile. I don't particularly need to change my own language choices since I have been using the modern spelling anyway, but it's useful to note.

Then of course the conversation turned to the Jewish side, and the somewhat fraught issue of what we should be called. There is undoubtedly a lot of discomfort with the word Jew. I think the answer is probably something unhelpful like, it depends on context and different people are going to have different views. But I've read some interesting stuff on this question recently, and I am treating this post as a kind of draft for something I might circulate to the group to see if we can shed any light on the question.

My personal view is that jew as a verb is by now purely offensive and everybody would be happier if it just weren't used. (That doesn't mean I want to ban the word; you certainly have a right to use the term and I'm not going to stop you personally nor attempt to use legal means to stop you. This isn't about "censorship" or restricting anybody's freeze peach, I'm writing for people who have made the choice to be polite but don't necessarily know what terms are acceptable.)

I'm not that happy with Jew as an adjective either. I realize this has not always been true, but in contemporary English, Jew is primarily a noun and using it in an adjectival way is almost always derogatory. People who simply want to describe something as being connected to Jewishness will use the form Jewish. Jewish music, Jewish food, Jewish customs, Jewish humour, not Jew music, Jew food etc. And certainly not as an adjective for a person: Jew politician, Jew writer, those are always insulting and as far as I can tell usually deliberately so. When I was a teenager an elderly Welsh lady asked me if I was "one of those Jew-girls", and I'm pretty sure she wasn't intending to be hostile, she just hadn't interacted very much with anyone Jewish recently (if at all).

But what about Jew as a noun? Or "the Jews" as a name for people like me? There is certainly a trend towards prefering to say "Jewish person" or "Jewish people", but I'm not sure that should be an absolute rule for all possible contexts. Sometimes insisting on that adjective, that person-centred language as it were, sounds stilted and over-corrected. I know a lot of people who refer to themselves as Jews as often as Jewish or even strongly prefer the noun form. I don't really want the word Jew to drift into being exclusively a slur, even though it certainly sometimes can be. And it's not as simple as just, it's ok for Jews to use the term but not for non-Jews. (It's a slight simplification but I think that probably is true for the Yiddish equivalent, Yid; for people speaking English that's at best a reclaimed slur, and for many really quite a strong insult.)

I am really not a fan of "person of Jewish [noun]"; I can totally see how it's calqued on terms like person of color and person with a disability, but even those are not always the right choice in all circumstances and "person of Jewish something" feels at best clunky. Not that I consider it anti-semitic, but it's usually a sign that the speaker is well-meaning but doesn't actually know any Jewish people personally. It makes me feel like I've time-travelled into a nineteenth century novel where people use elaborate circumlocations like gentleman of the Mosaic persuasison because Jew is basically synonymous with loan-shark.

I most certainly do not appreciate non-Jewish people insisting we can't call ourselves Jews. (Thanks to siderea for the link.) That really interesting and well-sourced post from realsocialskills brings up another problem: if you're going to insist that Jewish can only be an adjective, and you feel a bit awkward about referring to someone as simply Jewish or a Jewish person, which is that they're a person of Jewish... what? Jewish extraction? Jewish persuasion? Jewish extraction suggests it's only their background whereas it might in fact be their actively claimed identity. Jewish persuasion, on the other hand, suggests that Jewishness is a set of beliefs that a person subscribes to, but being Jewish isn't just an opinion, or even really an opinion at all since there are plenty of people who are perceived as and may well identify as Jewish who don't actually agree with any of the central teachings of Judaism-the-religion at all. realsocialskills goes into a great deal of detail about why person of the Jewish faith is a problem, because even religious Jews often don't primarily think of Judaism as a faith, and there are many many more completely secular and atheist Jews than there are religious ones.

Of course, this whole discussion started in a context of an interfaith event. And I don't mind using that term because that's what it's commonly called when people from different religious backgrounds enter into dialogue with eachother. But actually I think the whole emphasis on faith in these kinds of contexts is very largely because of Christian dominance of the interfaith scene, combined with nervousness around using religion-based adjectives or noun labels for people. Christians I think are a lot more likely than Jews to use the terms religion and faith interchangeably, or in the case of some of the more Evangelical sorts of Christians, explicitly say that Christianity isn't a religion but rather a faith. Also, Christians often see their Christian identity as being mainly about faith; they don't have a clear language for people who are undeniably Jewish (or indeed Muslim) but don't particularly believe in or practise their religions. And yet, perhaps ironically, nobody sees the need to talk about "people of Christian faith" we just say "Christians", but still end up stumbling over "people of Jewish faith" or "members of the Muslim faith community".

karaspita pointed me to a really cool article by Boyarin Yeah Jew!. Boyarin is, as ever, writing very dense and academic dissection of some really complex ideas, but I think he expands really interestingly on realsocialskills' point. Sometimes the distinction between Jew and Jewish is more than a simple division between rude and polite, it's about the way that Jewish identity is a complex interplay of cultural and ethnic factors with religious ones. Boyarin challenges that dichotomy, which he again argues comes primarily from a Christian worldview. Jewish speakers often say things like, you can't translate the question "is Judaism a religion or a culture?" into Hebrew, and I find that kind of argument from lexical gaps basically fatuous, but it does often feel like outsiders are trying to get us to pick between two facets of identity which aren't actually distinct.

I'm involved in discussions at work about adopting a formal definition of anti-semitism. It's quite clear that any useful definition has to include attacks on people because of their religious Jewish beliefs or practices, which often affect Jews by choice with no Jewish ancestry, and attacks on people because of their (perceived or actual) Jewish ethnicity, where religious beliefs or lack thereof are no defence at all. And of course I don't want to define my Jewishness in terms of why people hate me, but in a world where that hatred exists, I'm uncomfortable with being pushed into saying I'm a member of the Jewish faith, or that I'm from a Jewish background, because neither of those covers the whole story, though in my particular case both of them happen to be true. In current UK diversity monitoring questionnaires, I'm expected to write "Jewish" for the religion-and-belief category of the Equality Act (and I might well query why those two are conflated together in law), but I'm not really supposed to write "Jewish" as my ethnicity; I know I'm far from unique in uncomfortably defaulting to "white other".

People often say kind of wrily, I'm not really a Jew, I'm just Jew-ish. And I have no problem with someone to whom it applies choosing to make that semi-joke, but I don't want outsiders, in the name of trying to be polite, to push me into watering down what I say about myself.

Comments

[ewt]

There's an open italic tag in the 9th paragraph of this.

[jae]

Interesting. 'Moslim' is the way the Dutch spell the word (both when used as a slur and when not), so that's my immediate association with 'Moslem'. I suppose everything is fraught with Trump these days, though.

-J

[lethargic_man]

Some good points here. A little linguistic nitpicking:

I did get to meet some Somali Bravanese Muslims, an ethnic minority from Somalia via Kenya whom I hadn't encountered before.

Interesting. I encountered them once via the NNLS, I think.

Anyway we had some very interesting discussions, including around the use of language. Some of the Muslim participants said they didn't like what I had thought of as an otherwise neutral older spelling, Moslem. They said they associate that spelling and pronunciation with people like Donald Trump

Whilst it might be an older spelling, I think it reflects a difference in how you pronounce Arabic. If you say "Mohammed", you'll say "Moslem"; if you say "Muhammad", you'll say "Muslim". The latter is standard Arabic; I think the former might be Egyptian. OTOH, that doesn't necessarily say anything about its use in English.

I'm not that happy with Jew as an adjective either.

Technically, this usage is as a modifier (i.e. a noun being used like an adjective).

It's a slight simplification but I think that probably is true for the Yiddish equivalent, Yid

ISTR recall reading somewhere that in Yiddish it's always pronounced with a long I, yīd which distinguishes genuine Yinglish use from derogatory English use. But I've barely ever heard the Yiddish word in the singular (though the phrase "a frummer yid" springs to mind); it's almost always yid(e)n in the plural, and used in Yeshivish.

It makes me feel like I've time-travelled into a nineteenth century novel where people use elaborate circumlocations like gentleman of the Mosaic persuasison because Jew is basically synonymous with loan-shark.

As I understand it, in the nineteenth century, "Jew" referred to ethnicity, "Mosaic" to religion. Hence I remember reading, many years ago, about someone being described as being Polish by nationality, Jewish by people and Mosaic by religion.

[davidgillon]

I can totally see how it's calqued on terms like person of color and person with a disability, but even those are not always the right choice in all circumstances

My teeth grind every time I see PWD. I recognise that some people feel that they need to emphasise that we are not our disabilities, but for some of us our disabilities are very much inseparable parts of us, and some prominent disability groups explicitly reject PWD as a label. It's a label that I see as largely based in well-meaning ignorance.

There is certainly a trend towards prefering to say "Jewish person" or "Jewish people", but I'm not sure that should be an absolute rule for all possible contexts. Sometimes insisting on that adjective, that person-centred language as it were, sounds stilted and over-corrected.

I've repeatedly seen non-disabled people insist that disabled people use PWD, even tell them they are "wrong" to call themselves disabled, even when they are members of groups, such as the neurodiverse and Deaf, who explicitly reject PWD. I normally call it 'Clueless Ally Syndrome'.

[ghoti_mhic_uait]

I admit I'd kind of assumed that Moslem was offensive, because I've mostly seen that spelling used by the kind of people who are anti-Islamic. Similarly yid - when it's in English, it's people yelling at Judith, and it's clearly not meant to be polite. Although that does get mixed up with football stuff.

It never occurred to me that you would write anything other than 'Jewish' in the ethnicity section of forms. You've told me what you feel you should write, but, well, ethnicity is about sharing a common culture, not about skin colour. I used to write 'goth' because that felt the most accurate, but it doesn't any more, and that's OK. Ethnicity doesn't have to stay the same any more than any other personal characteristic, life happens and people change.

[liv]

Many thanks, I always appreciate it when people point out that kind of error. I thought I'd fixed it, but maybe my edit to the post crossed with you making this comment? Does it still look undreadable to you?

[liv]

I don't have any information about languages other than English on this topic. But if lethargic_man below is right, the Mo- pronunciation may reflect a different dialect of Arabic.

(I'm not automatically assuming that Moslem is always offensive even in English, just that these particular people I was talking to were bothered by it.)

[liv]

Thank you, linguistic nitpicking always appreciated! I'm pretty sure you're right that the usage I'm calling Jew as adjective is more properly called a modifier.

It would make sense that the anglicization Mo- rather than Mu- is from a different dialect of Arabic. I'm pretty sure it wasn't originally an offensive term in English, just that it's acquired negative connotations.

And yes, when I hear the term Yid from Jews, it's nearly always either in the plural or part of a stock phrase; I think that makes it clear that they are using the Yiddish term, not the English slur. But I still think it's probably better for non-Jews to avoid it unless they're confident they know what they're talking about.

I hadn't quite gathered that Mosaic always meant specifically Jews-by-religion. Which again goes along with what Boyarin is arguing, that it's generally coming from the Christian context to separate ethnic and religious aspects.

I got the impression that the Somali Bravanese community are quite tight with the Jewish community in the Barnet area; a lot of the people who came to this event had made connections via borrowing a synagogue building when their community centre was destroyed in an arson attack. Linguistically interesting is that their traditional language has Persian roots as well as Swahili-related ones :-)

[liv]

I have switched over to using "disabled people" as the default, but I am still reluctant to say "the disabled" as a generic term. (Whereas, speaking as an insider, I would in some sentences say "the Jews" or just "Jews" and not always insist on "Jewish people".)

I haven't given up saying PWD altogether, because as far as I can tell that is still some people's preference, particularly some American activists, and also because it's still somewhat current in academic and medical contexts. But it's possible that the people I've seen describe themselves as PWD are only using the term because it's accepted by the establishment, or that I've picked it up from older usage and not realized that language has shifted. I'm certainly not going to insist that anybody else uses PWD, though; it's worse than clueless to tell people they're not allowed to use their own preferred names for how they identify!

[liv]

Ah, interesting. I hadn't consciously seen a lot of anti-Muslim people using the word Moslem, I'd only noticed people either using much more obviously offensive terms, or else trying to sneak their islamophobia under the radar by using euphemisms like "Islamists" or "fundamentalists".

Yid absolutely unarguably can be a slur, but anything that awful people yell at little children for supporting the wrong football team is going to be in that category. But I've heard it used in mostly-English contexts not as a slur, particularly by Jewish people referring to themselves and fellow Jews. I am not quite clear how much that's them just purely using the Yiddish word, which is a pretty neutral demonym, as you can probably tell by the fact that it's in the name of the language. And how much it's intentionally reclaiming a slur. If it's the first case, it's probably somewhat acceptable for non-Jews to also use? But my instinct is that it's probably better to steer away from it.

The thing about the ethnicity section on diversity forms is that very often they just baldly call it "race", and the Equality Act refers to "race" as a protected characteristic. And of course intellectually that's a nonsense, race isn't this defined thing that you can select a tickbox for on a form. But various people who live in the UK and are visibly not white have convinced me that trolling the racial diversity question in diversity monitoring is not a helpful form of protest. I used to refuse to answer or write in Other:human, until I learned that only white people do that and that people who experience skin-colour based racism find it annoying. Imperfect though the forms are, it's better to have accurate statistics on whether people are being discriminated against on the grounds of (perceived) race than to have the data polluted with silly answers. I can totally see that 'goth' matches most aspects of the definition of an ethnic group, and I don't suppose you were deliberately trolling when you wrote that option, but it's not in the spirit of the information that people are trying to collect.

So after much thought, I've come to the conclusion that those forms are trying to find out whether I'm read as white, to which the answer is yes or possibly yes, but. It's not "white is not a meaningful category", and it's not "other" because that means visibly non-white but not in one of the currently monitored categories. So I think "white other" is the best representation of what I am.

[smhwpf]

This is really interesting. I had not realized that these nomenclature issues (in terms of self-description) were also a problem for those like you who are Jewish by religion, ethnic background and culture!

I certainly find the expression "The Jews" uncomfortable. It seems always like it is part of a sentence involving a generalization, probably not flattering. There is also the problematic use in the Gospel of John - e.g. "...for fear of the Jews", when it is Jewish people he is talking about who have the fear (of the religious authorities). One can understand the context, in the wake of the final split between Christianity an Judaism, but it is still extremely problematic.

Jew as a noun, yeah, context is everything. I remember when I was a kid at school, other kids frequently used "Jew" as a synonym for "mean person", as in "Lend me 50p" "No" "Oh, don't be such a Jew", which I did not appreciate.

I have wrestled with the question of whether I am entitled to describe myself as Jewish - three Jewish grandparents and one Jewish step-grandparent, but not the bio-maternal-gran, brought up Atheist, converted to Christianity. When I was a kid I described myself as "Three quarters Jewish", but subsequently realized how absurd that is, and in particular became wary of playing the "I'm Jewish and I support the Palestinians" card, as being appropriative.

But I've always been willing, when someone says something anti-Semitic, to say "Hey, I'm Jewish and I find that offensive", and so now Trump is in power and with all the vileness around that, including much more prominent anti-Semitism, I have lost some of these qualms and am much more willing to describe myself as Jewish. (Or Jew-ish).

[davidgillon]

Yeah, I'm not a fan of 'the disabled', the criticism of that was valid, but swapping to PWD went too far in the opposite direction. Much as "person of Jewishness" is going too far! My friend Lisa had a great article on this in XO-Jane http://www.xojane.com/issues/i-am-not-a-person-with-a-disability-i-am-a-disabled-person As she notes there, no one is insisting she describe herself as a "person with gayness" or "person with womanliness". It's rather revealing we don't see the same pressure for people to refer to themselves as "a person of Protestant faith" or "a person of Catholic faith". It's almost as if there was a double standard at work!

I won't object if disabled people choose to use PWD, it's essentially a matter of how you view disability politics, and significant parts of the US disability movement are locked onto PWD. But some of the US professional bodies (psychs etc) apparently insist their practitioners use it, even when dealing with members of groups who explicitly reject that usage because who they are is indistinguishable from their disabilty. And when they start telling us how we should describe ourselves, that's edging into infantilization.

(Really didn't mean to hijack this away from Jewishness, but parallels)

[davidgillon]

I wouldn't dream of using yid, I don't think I've ever seen it used in a non-negative form by a non-Jew, so there's too much chance of being interpreted wrongly.

[lethargic_man]

Hmm. I've been filling in "Jewish (Ashkenazi)" for years.

Incidentally, aviva_m was horrified when she first saw even just British documentation referring to "not discriminating on the grounds of [...] race", because to write such is to acknowledge that race exists, and such thinking is, for obvious historical reasons, deeply taboo in Germany.

[lethargic_man]

It would make sense that the anglicization Mo- rather than Mu- is from a different dialect of Arabic. I'm pretty sure it wasn't originally an offensive term in English, just that it's acquired negative connotations.

It's a bit like "Negro". For years I was puzzled by claims that this word was offensive before I discovered that... I forget, was it Malcolm X who decided that it was, and campaigned against its use; because I'm pretty certain it wasn't in the UK, and I certainly never perceived it as such; but now I'm shocked by hearing the word used in a recording of an event I was present at in 1990.

I got the impression that the Somali Bravanese community are quite tight with the Jewish community in the Barnet area; a lot of the people who came to this event had made connections via borrowing a synagogue building when their community centre was destroyed in an arson attack.

Ah, that was how I came across them, yes.

[liv]

Thanks for adding this perspective to the discussion!

Certainly the Jews can be problematic, but I am not sure if the root problem is the definite article, or if it's the fact of making negative generalizations. But one might say, eg: "In the recent US election, the Jews overwhelmingly voted for Clinton"; the usual politically correct pattern is to say something like "Jewish-Americans" but that hyphenated form sounds rather unnatural to me. If I rephrased the sentence to say "Jewish people in America voted for Clinton" it still sounds quite stilted. And I'm currently seeing a lot of social media discussion about "is Corbyn good for the Jews?" often phrased in those terms by Jewish posters, and they're possibly being slightly ironic but they're not making a negative generalization.

I think the NT example is telling because it chimes with what Boyarin is saying, that so much writing about "the Jews", whether in Greek, Latin or later English is really coming from a Christian perspective. The Jews are defined and named by Christians. One of the issues that came up in our discussion at the weekend was the phenomenon of some people, particularly Sephardi activists, who want to be called Hebrews or Israelites, because they see "Jews" as an unwillingly imposed identity.

I don't think I've ever been called Jew as a synonym for mean. I've had a beggar say: you Jews are so mean! because I didn't give him enough money, but he didn't think just using the word was enough to convey his disapproval. Much sympathy on dealing with that kind of name-calling as a schoolkid, though.

I really appreciate that you've put thought into when it's right for you to describe yourself as Jewish! In some circumstances you could probably say "I'm ethnically Jewish" or "I have a lot of Jewish family", but yeah, speaking up about offensive remarks is an admirable stance to take. (I personally hate talking about fractions of Jewishness, because to me it it is reminiscent the horrible Nazi classifications of blood taint. Religiously one is either Jewish or not, there are no fractions, and ethnically, I don't believe people can be divided up into parts like that.)

[ghoti_mhic_uait]

Yes, if they clearly mean race or even say race then I say white European or white other f my choice is Brit or gtfo. The ones where I came up with a culture answer were ones where they wrote ethnicity an I either thought they really meant ethnicity or wasn't sure which answer they were looking for.

[liv]

Oh, that's interesting about Negro. I'm enough younger than you that I learned it as a rude word before I learned that it had been ok historically. I was also a bit shocked to find out that when Dorothy Sayers referred to a character as black, which looks unexpectional to a modern British reader, she was actually being deliberately derogatory as the polite term when she was writing was in fact Negro. I assume whatever American activist had good reasons for objecting to it.

[liv]

Oh, that XOJane article is really helpful, thank you. I don't think you're hijacking the discussion, the parallels here are illuminating. Partly because the similarities of the unmarked case getting nice straightforward adjectives, and the minority having to put up with clumsy person-first phrases.

But also partly cos of the differences: PWD was a term that originated with at least some of the people to whom it applied, and then it got taken over by the medical establishment and also disability activism broadened out to include more people than just wheelchair users, so usage is shifting. In contrast we never really called ourselves Jews; I think Boyarin is making quite a strong case that the term was originally an externally imposed one and Jews subsequently adopted it, so it's sort to some extent the other way round.

[liv]

That makes sense! One of the things that really annoys me about the currently accepted categories is that they weirdly conflate geographic or national origin with skin colour. I wish we didn't keep muddying the categories by putting "British" in there, just as I don't like the asymmetry between "black" and "Asian". Also I think right now we really ought to be tracking racism / xenophobia against white but non-British Europeans, and there is just no sensible way to record that on most forms. In short, sympathy to you not having any applicable category.

[ghoti_mhic_uait]

Yeah, that's why I traditionally never wrote White British, because I did spend my childhood and teenagers being bullied and feeling unsafe for the German part of my nationality. It's a lot less relevant now, though.

[liv]

I can totally see aviva_m's point there. There's a big problem with dealing with the fact that racism clearly exists and needs to be addressed, even though race doesn't correspond to anything of much use in the real world. I suppose the issue is that racists believe there are distinct races, so people who are trying to prevent racism are sort of cornered into acting as if the construct were real.

I think this disconnect is quite related to the problems around recording Jewish as an ethnicity / anti-semitism as a form of racism. I mean, Ashkenazi is mostly an ethnic identity, but I'm not sure that most anti-semites are aware of that, so I question whether it's useful to track on a monitoring form. But at the same time many Jews who are not ethnically Ashkenazi do experience ethnic prejudice because in the racist world-view Jewishness is a despised ethnic trait.

[ewt]

No, it's fixed now -- I guess the wires got crossed.

[ewt]

But actually I think the whole emphasis on faith in these kinds of contexts is very largely because of Christian dominance of the interfaith scene, combined with nervousness around using religion-based adjectives or noun labels for people.

Yup. I tend to think of it as partly a protestantism thing, but I have less experience of inter-"faith" discussion from a non-Christian perspective than you do.

It's a slight simplification but I think that probably is true for the Yiddish equivalent, Yid; for people speaking English that's at best a reclaimed slur, and for many really quite a strong insult.

I wouldn't have dreamt of using Yid for anything even when I was at my most close association with a Jewish community; my (Jewish) then-partner did, but only in casual conversation with people around the same age.

And of course I don't want to define my Jewishness in terms of why people hate me, but in a world where that hatred exists, I'm uncomfortable with being pushed into saying I'm a member of the Jewish faith, or that I'm from a Jewish background, because neither of those covers the whole story, though in my particular case both of them happen to be true.

I tend to think of it as a sort of Venn diagram, where "Jewish" can refer to being part of the religious community or to the cultural community or to nebulous ideas around 'background' or a few other things, and there is considerable overlap, but not everyone is necessarily a member of all of the rings. So discrimination on the grounds of any of these aspects of Jewishness is wrong, but of course one doesn't have to conform to all of the aspects of Jewishness to be Jewish.

I also tend to think that unless the person describing themselves as Jewish voluntarily discloses what they mean by that, or it's directly relevant to the conversation or some practical matter (e.g. kashrut, Shabbat), which aspects of Jewishness apply to that particular person is really none of my business.

I know I'm far from unique in uncomfortably defaulting to "white other".

I also do this. I'm white, but I'm not British, even if one of my grandparents and a few of my great-great-grandparents were. I'm never sure how helpful it is, but there really isn't another option that fits. I'm definitely foreign, but also definitely "not that kind of foreigner" according to most xenophobes and racists.

[ewt]

So discrimination on the grounds of any of these aspects of Jewishness is wrong, but of course one doesn't have to conform to all of the aspects of Jewishness to be Jewish.

NB I'm aware that it's actually more complicated than that; but in a context of formulating anti-discrimination policies, this is one way of looking at it.