[Ads-l] Possible relation between Hebrew, US South saying

[James Landau]

https://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/history-ideas/2024/08/this-hebrew-saying-might-have-the-same-root-as-an-american-southern-one/?utm_source=Klaviyo&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=daily-newsletter-unpaid&utm_content=08-01-24&_kx=i0ZPgd4vOQstxHP7Jwn-RyePVpMGlDIpV8MX3nsRqiw.L87CGh

I was reading the first chapter of J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, which seems to be a required book these days, when I was struck by a sentence that few readers would probably have paid much attention to. Writing about his grandparents, natives of Kentucky known to him in the distinctive speech of the Appalachians as Mamaw and Papaw, Vance wrote: “As Mamaw used to say, you can take the boy out of Kentucky, but you can’t take Kentucky out of the boy.” What took me aback wasn’t Mamaw’s observation that removing someone from his native environment can’t keep its effects from continuing to influence him. That’s commonsensical. It was the similarity of her wording to the well-known Hebrew saying Kal yoter l’hotsi et ha-y’hudi miha-galut mi-l’hotsi et ha-galut miha-y’hudi, “It’s easier to take the Jew out of exile than to take exile out of the Jew.” Could there possibly be a connection?


Well, of course not. What connection could there be between the Appalachia of Vance’s grandparents and the Zionist circles in Europe and Israel in which the Hebrew saying was common from the early 20th century on? Clearly, the resemblance was simply the product of a shared perception regarding human nature. No doubt other languages had like sayings.

Some cursory research, however, failed to bear this out. German, Russian, French, Spanish, Italian—none appeared to have anything like the “You can take X out of Y but you can’t take Y out of X” formula. The one language I found it in was Polish, in which one says, Chłop ze wsi wyjdzie, ale wieś z chłopa nigdy, “The yokel leaves the village but the village never leaves the yokel.”

This saying probably goes back to the 19th century, when widespread migration from the countryside to large towns and cities took place in Poland, as it did in all Europe and America. Yet while its formal structure is the same as that of Vance’s grandmother’s remark, its vantage point is not. “The yokel leaves the village, . . .” is said from the perspective of the urbanite’s disdain for the country hick who can never shed the crude manners and mentality of his origins. “You can take the boy out of Kentucky, . . .” is the declaration of someone proud of rural origins that no amount of city dwelling can uproot. There’s a world of difference between the two.

Mamaw did not invent the “You can take X out of Y, . . .” formula, which has proliferated in America in recent years. “You can take the man out of the mountain, but you can’t take the mountain out of the man”; “You can take the girl out of the South, but you can’t take the South out of the girl”; “You can take the boy out of the hood, but you can’t take the hood out of the boy”; “You can take Björk out of Iceland, but you can’t take Iceland out of Björk’s music”; “You can take the president [i.e., Donald Trump] out of real estate but you can’t take real estate out of the president”—these are just a few recent examples from the Internet. There is even a song sung by the country singer Morgan Wallen with the words: “I ain’t ashamed of how I was raised/ And I don’t see no need to change./ You can take the boy out of the country,/ But the country is still in your boy.”

“You can take the boy out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the boy” would indeed seem to be the original American version of the saying, which was termed a “hoary, bromidic saw” by the The Rotarian Magazine as far back as 1935. Until not long ago, its earliest documented use was thought to be a 1914 issue of The Country Gentleman, in which an article stated: “Remember the phrase how it’s easy to get the boy out of the country but much more difficult to get the country out of the boy.” Now, though, this record turns out to have been beaten by a year by—of all things!—the Detroit College of Medicine’s class of 1914 yearbook, which was published in 1913 by the following year’s graduating class. Amid thumbnail profiles of the college’s students, we find it said of a certain John Jennings Watts that he was the first in his class to wear the latest-fashion striped shirt collars, and that although “Dr. Snyder says you can take the boy out of the country but you cannot take the country out of the boy, Watts has disproved this.”

Dr. Edward J. Snyder, the yearbook informs us elsewhere, was an associate professor of histology and pathology, born in 1885, who came from “the sunny South”—specifically, from Texas. Presumptively, the saying attributed to him (which the medical students were apparently unfamiliar with, though he can hardly be supposed to have invented it himself) originated in the American South, too, though exactly when and where is impossible to say.

Polish could have had nothing to do with this. It may well, however, have influenced our Hebrew saying, which clearly originated in Eastern Europe and has been ascribed without proof to at least six different Jewish figures from the region: the disciple of the Baal Shem Tov and early hasidic rabbi Menachem Nahum of Chernobyl (1730–1797); the hasidic master Levi Yitzhak of Berdichev (1740–1809); the Zionist thinker and essayist Ahad Ha’am (1856–1927); the Russian Zionist politician Shmaryahu Levin (1867–1935); Israel’s first president Chaim Weizmann (1874–1952); and David Ben-Gurion (1886-1973). All these men were born and raised in the tsarist empire, of which Poland was part.

Like its Polish counterpart, “It is easier to take the Jew out of exile than to take exile out of the Jew” has a negative connotation. Removing a Jew from the Diaspora, it says, is merely a matter of putting him or her on the boat or plane to the Land of Israel; ridding him of the attitudes of the Diaspora once he has arrived there, on the other hand, is another story entirely. Still widely encountered in Israel today, the saying is resorted to by all shades of political opinion. On the right, for example, we find Rabbi Menachem Yisra’eli writing recently:


More than removing the Jew from exile, it is hard to remove exile from the Jew. . . . When [in the late 1970s] Prime Minister Menachem Begin visited the Lubavitcher rebbe, the rebbe spoke to him privately about the need to stand firm against America and not return an inch of Sinai [to Egypt]. The rebbe wanted Jews to rule in their own country, not Americans. In conversations in those days, he compared Israel’s governments to the servants of a parits [wealthy Gentile landowner] in Russia or Poland.


And in a newspaper column criticizing Israelis who individualistically disregard the public welfare, the left-of-center economic commentator Merav Arlozoroff also mentions the figure of the parits. Referring to the well-known story of the Jewish estate steward who, offered a handsome sum to teach his parits’s dog to talk, readily agreed, so he said, because he could always claim to be still working on the dog’s education until either it or the landowner died, Arlozoroff wrote:


It’s easier, it turns out, to remove the Jew from exile than exile from the Jew. In the Diaspora, Jews—generally speaking, for good reasons—were dismissive of those who governed them, as in the tale of the landowner and the dog. . . . Yet though both dog and landowner have long departed from Jewish history, they have not done so from Jewish consciousness. A basic disdain for authority continues to guide Israeli behavior even when the authority is a Jewish government in the Land of Israel.


Mamaw and Papaw, one imagines, would have laughed at the parits together with the estate steward. Outsmarting government was a way of life in Appalachia, too. You can take the boy out of Kentucky and the Jew out of exile, but that’s a trait you can’t take out of either.


James Landau
jjjrlandau at netscape.com



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