Heard on TV

[Ben Zimmer]

On Mon, Sep 5, 2011 at 8:15 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
>
> On Sep 5, 2011, at 7:29 PM, Wilson Gray wrote:
>
>> Once, a Japanese-American colleague said to me that the Chinese were
>> "the Jews of the Orient" - this was back in '57, when _Orient(al)_ was
>> still cool.  But it was unclear to me as to how he intended that
>> remark, whether as compliment - good at business, etc. - or as insult
>> - tight with money, etc.
>
> And the Indians are (or at least were) supposed to be the Jews of East
> Africa, but that's a bit different, since that may imply both 'good at business'
> but also 'don't really belong here, suitable for kicking out when nationalists
> need a useful target', which happened in some (all?) East African countries
> to Indians as it certainly has to Jews.  But whatever you think of the
> Chinese, nobody can say they don't belong in the Orient. Maybe if the
> Chinese were called the Jews of Malay(si)a, that might be a closer fit.

On Mon, Sep 5, 2011 at 8:15 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:

> But whatever you think of the Chinese, nobody can say they don't belong in the
> Orient. Maybe if the Chinese were called the Jews of Malay(si)a, that might be
> a closer fit.

Yes, "the Jews of the East/Orient" was an epithet of the colonial era
to refer to the commercially minded overseas Chinese communities of
Southeast Asia. See _Essential Outsiders: Chinese and Jews in the
Modern Transformation of Southeast Asia and Central Europe_ (Daniel
Chirot and Anthony Reid et al., University of Washington Press, 1997).

--bgz

--
Ben Zimmer
http://benzimmer.com/

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