Jew/Jewish

[Duane Campbell]

On Wed, 3 Jul 2002 18:25:38 EDT "James A. Landau"

>At one time during
> the
> emancipation era there was a tendency among Jews to avoid the
> application of
> the term to themselves; and from 1860 onward the words "Hebrew" and
> "Israelite" were employed to represent persons of Jewish faith and
> race

Here's an aspect which hasn't been mentioned.

I went to that well known college in New Haven, and after more than three
decades of maundering around the world ended back in my old home town,
where you must be a graduate of Dickenson to practice law and a teacher
with a degree from Juniata is considered elite.

When someone occasionally asks where I went to college, I usually say New
Haven, I don't say Yale. I don't think I would have this reticence had I
gone to Princeton or Dartmouth or Cornell.

The combination of the short, almost ejaculatory word combined with the
special social circumstances of the small town where I live makes it more
comfortable to say New Haven rather than Yale. I suspect the same
phenomenon may be operating in the Jew/Jewish/Hebrew question. Jew is
harsh; the polysyllabic synonyms are softer.

D