forty-five = Jew?

[Stephen Goranson]

>From the N Y Times:

In his book “Anglomania,” Ian Buruma writes about his grandparents, German Jewish immigrants who became British, felt British, loved Britain — and yet. He writes: “Instead of using the word ‘Jew’ in public we would say ‘forty-five.’ The origin of this odd phrase is unknown. When Bernard was refused a senior position in a famous hospital in 1938, he wrote to Win: ‘It is the old, old story — (45).”’

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/08/opinion/cohen-a-jew-not-quite-english-enough.html

I hadn't heard this before. In the book, the sentence before the quote above: "Like all families ours had its private expressions and code words." So maybe it was quite limited.

Stephen Goranson
http://people.duke.edu/~goranson/

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