Jew/Jewish

[Alice Faber]

Laurence Horn wrote:

>   But I did experience an interesting misunderstanding once in Paris,
>when my (very much non-Jewish, and no doubt bigoted) French landlady
>asked me apropos of nothing whether I was "israëlite".  Never having
>heard the word, I processed it as 'Israeli', and said that no, I was
>américain.  Only later did I realize she was asking (euphemistically)
>if I were Jewish.  Not that I'm sure I'd have answered honestly even
>if I'd realized what she was asking me...  Since then I believe I've
>encountered "Israelite" as a fellow-euphemism of "Hebrew" (as in
>"a(n) ... gentleman") to avoid referring to Jewishness directly.
>Possibly somewhere in "Gentleman's Agreement" or some such cultural
>relic.

I don't remember if I've recounted this here previously, but, here goes.
When I was in grad school in Texas, teaching the intro for non-majors, one
of my students asked (in an appropriate context) about the status of Jew as
an ethnic descriptor. She was from Houston, and non-Jewish. But her best
friend was Jewish, and had been instructed by her parents that she should
tell them if anyone referred to her as "a Jew". Both kids had been very
puzzled by this, since after all, it would have been accurate. This
provided context for me for an earlier puzzling encounter. On my first trip
to Austin (apartment hunting), one one of the flights I sat next to a Texas
"woman of a certain age". It really appealed to her civic pride that a New
Yorker had chosen the University of Texas. When I told her that I wanted to
study the history of Hebrew and related languages, she asked, among other
questions, if I was an Israelite. This totally took me aback. Now there was
no hint of anti-Semitism in our discussion, though it's possible she hadn't
had many conversations with Jews. It seems though that she, too, had been
raised to think that there was a pejorative connotation to using Jew or
Jewish, and was trying to use the most polite and neutral term she could
think of, where it was clearly a reasonable category to refer to.

Alice