My grandpa Zivien loved to tell this joke: An elderly Jewish man is hit by a car and lies bleeding on the street. A paramedic attends to him, keeping him as relaxed as possible, and asks “Are you comfortable?” The man groans and replies: “Meh, I make a living.”
We Jews especially appreciate this joke, which plays on the definition of the word “comfortable.” In Jewish culture, it’s considered really bad form to brag about how wealthy you are, so “I’m comfortable” has become a euphemism to let others know that you’re doing just fine financially.
Through the ages, the general population has held a negative view of the relationship between the Jewish people and their money. The “Miser Jew” stereotype has been around for many centuries, as demonstrated in literature by Shakespeare’s Shylock, the money lender, in The Merchant of Venice, and by Dickens’ Fagin The Jew in Oliver Twist. I’ve always been grateful that Dickens didn’t name his most famous tightwad “Ebenezer Scroogestein.”
What many people don’t realize is that it was during the Middle Ages that Jews were practically forced into the fraught profession of moneylending. For nearly one thousand years, from 500 to 1500, Jews in Europe were forbidden to own land, so they could not farm. Additionally, all craft guilds locked them out, so they could not become weavers or blacksmiths or practice any other occupations in which organized groups of people shared the same job.
It was the medieval Catholic Church that opened the door wide to Jews for the hated mercenary profession. The church considered it a grave sin — usury — for Christians to lend money with interest. But because towns and trades and monarchies were expanding rapidly throughout this period, they all needed a steady flow of liquid cash and credit to function. Not only were Jews always living close by in towns (because they could not be farmers), but the supreme importance of education in all Jewish households made them masters of both literacy and numeracy.
Royalty, nobility, and wealthy townspeople were more than happy to let the Jews do all the dirty work of money exchange; Jews were relieved to be able to provide for their families. But as a result, even today, the Jewish people have been branded avaricious and money-obsessed, simply because they were once forced into such a disreputable occupation.
Isn’t it interesting that even as recently as the last two centuries, most Jews are still not in farming nor in occupations with guilds? It is not a coincidence that throughout the 1900’s, most Jews interacted with the Christian community on a daily basis as merchants, successfully running their own small shops and retail stores, as my father and grandfather did. Jews learned early on how to be their own bosses because prejudice against them so often prevented them from being hired by others.
Many sociologists have posited the idea that it is these past centuries of exclusion and racial prejudice that helped create the brash and assertive (many would say “highly aggressive”) stereotype of the modern Jew. So many times growing up, I was told by my family members that “God helps those who help themselves.” My personal favorite, along that same line, was “The squeaky wheel gets the grease.” Especially following the Holocaust, we Jews have been taught that we must never back down in the face of prejudice, but should always assert ourselves and our right to determine our destiny through hard work and what we saw as native Jewish intelligence.
It’s true that such self-confidence, brashness or, to use that divine Yiddish noun — “chutzpah” — can rub non-Jews the wrong way. The niceties of polite society are sometimes set aside by the Jewish compulsion to never be victims again.
And that brings me to my grandfather‘s other favorite joke. Because governmental antisemitism forced him to leave Russia to start life anew, he had nothing but contempt for all Russian leaders, with special loathing for the tyrannical Stalin so he especially relished this one:
After WWII, Stalin gathered an American and Chinese representative to serve on a panel to bolster international post-war economic cooperation. At a press conference a reporter stood and said “Excuse me, but what does this panel think about the current German meat shortage?”
“What’s a shortage?”asked the American.
“What’s meat?” asked the Chinese.
“What’s ’excuse me’?” asked Stalin.
Email Elliot at huffam@me.com or click here