Talk:Kike

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Judaism Start‑class Low‑importance

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Jewish history Start‑class Mid‑importance

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By definition, a jewish man can be considered an adult only after the bar-mitzvah ceremony (at age 13) which has the main activity of reading. Hence a grown man of jewish descent cannot be both illiterate and a jew. Jewish women, while not obligated, were still mostly literate, at least in Yiddish. The claim at the beginning of the article that illiteracy was widespread among jews should be rephrased or edited out. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2A00:A040:189:FBA:5C70:79C:BC8:DA19 (talk) 14:49, 14 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

A Jew is a Jew at birth and for life; even if they choose to follow a foreign religion or none at all; by virtue of being born to a Jewish mother. The only exception to the Jewish mother begets Jewish people rule is a correctly performed religious conversion to Judaism which is also a lifetime irrevocable status for a true convert as ratified by a qualified Jewish bet-din court. The status of being Jewish is for the entire lifetime of all Jews no matter what decisions or actions said person takes, a status exclusively/universally transferable from all Jewish mothers to all children they give birth to, so the existing children of a new convert would need to perform a religious conversion to become Jewish. While historically literacy, meaning Torah study for males, has always been high being educated or even being adherent to the Jewish religion has no connection to having the identity of being a Jew. When a Jewish girl turns 12 or a boy 13 they have the status bar/bat mitzvah no matter what they do, the celebration and perhaps a call up to do a Torah reading is simply an acknowledgement of their new status obligating a Jewish person under Torah law. I believe the passage re:illiteracy is referring to immigrants to the US who were often literate at a scholarly level in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Yiddish all of which use a Babylonian/Hebrew aleph-bet but who were illiterate to the English language and it's version of the Roman alphabet. This misunderstanding is common in the west especially North America without state religion where Christianity and similar faith based status religions which is now fragmented down to sometimes even a congregational level with many churches denying the validity of teachings or saved status of all but their own particular fragment are well understood with an assumption that the membership rules are universal. There is no True Scotsman-like variable POV identity or status issue found in the mainstream Jewish community as it is a tribal/national/ethnic affiliation group with a national religion rather than a faith based community where group members and the broader community can question any and all adherents as to their merit in self applying title of official adherent to a given faith or more often a particular splinter group of said faith. There is no adherent/saved=Jewish vs everyone else=wrong/punished(christian hell) isse. An interesting curiosity to western audiences accustomed to faith based identity vs tribal religions, it has always been possible to be adherent to the mainline universalist national religion of the Jews without conversion to the status of Jew, I have understood that around 10% of the pre-Christian Roman empire, especially among the slave caste, followed a simple non-scholarly Judaism for gentiles, who have nearly all moral vs ritual laws, an uncommon faith now sometimes called Noahide (after the non-Jewish person Noah of the ark/flood story) in modern times and Ger toshav in biblical times. I can cite as required.Solomon(for now)79.180.44.134 (talk) 12:42, 17 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Most of the above is just original research which we allow to a certain extent on talk pages but not articles. There are sources for illiteracy based on self-reporting by immigrants at Ellis Island, eg [1] and the Encyclopedia of Swearing" can be read here. Doug Weller talk 14:42, 17 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Doug, nice work helping find a source for the Encyclopedia of Swearing cite, sadly Google cuts it off though after a few pages into topic(I avoid anything Google) but it appears to be a work with basic in text citations and suitable for citation on WP satisfying my talk topic above. As you say we have always permitted OR and uncited assertions and disagreement in talk, though I stated I can(and do below at your request) cite any of what I typed. For now it is enough to say that the PBS cite below provides that your cite on illiteracy is not qualified and with that understanding only speaks to English literacy as it is re:imigration @ellis island along with Italians and others. [2] [3] these should satisfy curiosity on the assertions I made above, the judiasm for gentiles is not important to the article and simply a curiosity for people to do their own research if they like. As for the WP article connected to this talk page, this [4] is a far better write up than the current article and while the author uses every single cite(wp circular citing issue) it still provides further cites to do a much better job of a full rewrite from the sad state this article stands at currently. Solomon(for now)109.67.29.106 (talk) 19:24, 20 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

This article needs work. The Encyclopedia says "The earliest term to develop in America was kike, recorded in the 1880s. As Allen explains, the etymology is much disputed (1983, 121—23), but the picturesque explanation advanced by Leo Rosten in The joys of Yiddish (1968) seems to be the most plausible. According to Rosten, the root is kike/, the Yiddish word for a circle, the symbol used by Jewish immigrants, many of whom were illiterate, when signing their papers at Ellis Island, instead of the usual X, a Christian symbol. Consequently, immigration officers began to refer to such a person as a kike/, later abbreviated to kike. Rosten’s authority is Philip Cowcn, whom he styles “the dean of immigration inspectors” (180). Significantly, the term was first used by assimilated American German Jews to disparage “uncouth Jewish immigrants from Russia or Eastern Europe” (The Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang 1997). R. Glanz in his study The jew in Tolklore (1904-1905) noted that “No longer is it limited to the Russian Jew. Noble Bavarian hurled the epithet at equally noble Prussian and Swabian . .. and we have heard of ‘kike’ goyim too” (205). Now used disparagingly of Jews in general, the term has remained largely confined to American usage." Doug Weller talk 20:08, 20 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

"Philip Cowcn" (apparent OCR error) is Philip Cowen (1854-1943) (paywalled NYTimes obit, papers and short bio at Center for Jewish History). Cowen should be mentioned as Rosten's source, and definitely deserves a Wikipedia article. The Rosten attribution needs a better citation. In my The New Joys of Yiddish - Completely Updated (first paperback edition 2001) the article on kike is pp 176-178:

[] The word kike was born on Ellis Island [] (I obtained this information through the courtesy of Stephen Birmingham, who shared with me a letter sent to him by Mr. Sidney Berry. Mr. Berry's authority for his illuminating observation was the late Philip Cowen, "dean of immigration inspectors" at Ellis Island, later the founder and first editor of The American Hebrew. [then follows a story about East Side Jewish storekeepers, illiterate in English, who checked off payments with a kikeleh because the X is associated with Christian persecutors]

with a note by the revising editor Lawrence Bush:

Uriel Weinreich, in his authoritative Modern English-Yiddish Yiddish-English Dictionary (1968), does not include kikel (or kaykl) in his definitions for "circle" (krayz or rod). Kikelen, or kayklen, means "to roll". Rosten's conclusions about the derivation of kike seem doubtful.

Btw someone accidentally this sentence in the article: Referring to the e stated that: This is the downside of edit protection: articles get frozen in a broken state and never fixed.--2.204.227.159 (talk) 08:17, 2 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Doug, it has been a while since I last checked the article and it is now protected I made the heading below to continue if you like. As for universal literacy(though Hebrew not English) https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/jewish-literacy-as-the-road-to

I propose several edits to fix this page, the protects prevent me(15 year IP editor) from coming back now several months after the Meyers Leonard incident and my notes in talk above on repairing a complete focus in the only two sections exclusively on the earliest in-group etymology and now nothing except the word slur in the first sentence. The article never explains why it is a hate word or how it is now mainly used by anti-semites and only explains it's use between Jews in the early 20th century, there is a digest of a Jewish travel guide quote, a quote of the original German and a translation of that quote to english which again is only an example of it's early Jew vs Jew and not as a slur form out-group. For an encyclopedic article there is nothing mentioned about the current usage of the slur or it's use for the last 80 years as an antisemitic hate term almost exclusively used by non-Jews. I feel that there should also be at least passing mention of older slurs like the slang 'sheeny' and 'Christ-killer' https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sheeny https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Christ-killer It is very important to explain as is done in the N-word article the difference between in-group and out-group(antisemitic) modern usage and preference of quickly changing meme Dog whistle (politics) over easy to identify and censure slur words, and use of the word also as a way to slur a non-Jew with the perceived negative comparison to Jews. The article for the N-word does an excellent job as a guidance for how this article should appear in a finished form. Due to its current pejorative and vulgar nature perhaps also directing linking K-word to this article would be useful as it currently links to a disambiguation page along with words like Karen(misogynistic meme slur). Edited slurs with asterisks to get past WP offensive word filter

Cited examples of use and perception since WW-II where the article should spend at least 50% of its wordcount on:

1- Esquire article re:harris poll in the US that in 2008 'k**e' along with 'Fa**ot' was considered extremely-offensive at 53% vs N-word at 39% https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a4579/slurs-0608/

2- This article reports 'k*ke' among the worst slurs https://www.historynet.com/na-all-about-that-troublesome-n-word.htm

3- As does this law review in Reason. https://reason.com/volokh/2021/05/03/rutgers-law-students-calling-for-a-policy-on-students-and-faculty-quoting-slurs-from-court-cases/

4- Slate re:Richard Nixon 1960s antisemitic use of K**e in Whitehouse tapes https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2002/03/nixon-s-jewish-problem-again.html

5- Current use of k**e both 4th grade and recent, Israeli Newspaper English edition https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/i-hadn-t-been-called-a-kike-in-years-trump-changed-that-1.5446176

6- Meyers Leonard 2020 incident and word background https://www.scotsman.com/sport/other-sport/what-did-meyers-leonard-say-meaning-of-deeply-offensive-anti-semitic-slur-used-by-miami-heat-player-3160799

7- use of k**e to equate and use interchangeably for communist sympathizer in 1950s red scare https://www.thejc.com/culture/features/hunting-communists-they-were-really-after-jews-1.10702

8- 1980s White Aryan Resistance(WAR) leader John Metzger son of KKK leader Tom Metzger, later found to be culpable in the murder of an Ethiopian immigrant, utters k**e as a slur as he assaults the host and guests including a Jewish rabbi on TV talk show https://timesofsandiego.com/life/2020/11/10/tom-metzger-dies-at-82-notorious-kkk-boss-supremacist-who-ran-for-congress/

9- https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1988/11/04/geraldo-rivera-injured-in-melee-during-taping/14166cd2-bc3d-4871-9a97-2dc3a23bc2f3/ 109.64.54.23 (talk) 07:53, 27 July 2021 (UTC)Solomon(for now)[reply]

10- https://www.aclu.org/blog/capital-punishment/texas-plans-execute-jewish-man-denied-fair-trial-anti-semitic-judge Anti Semite Texas judge calls Jewish prisoner 'G*da*n K***' and F****** Jew" then sentences prison escapee to death October 4, 2019 Solomon(for now)109.65.33.199 (talk) 14:37, 12 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not educated enough on the topic to edit the article, but the "circle" etymology sounded more like a legend to me. I looked it up in the OED and the full etymology is below:

Origin: Of unknown origin. Etymology: Origin unknown. For an overview of several early etymological suggestions, see H. L. Mencken Amer. Lang. Supplement 1 (1945) 613–6. A suggested derivation from -ki , -ky , in the surname suffix -ski , -sky (of Slavonic origin), is highly unlikely on both onomastic and formal grounds.

L. Rosten ( Joys of Yiddish (1968) 180, at cited word) suggests that the term arose as a back-formation < Yiddish kaykl , keykl ‘circle’ (ultimately < ancient Greek κύκλος : see cycle n.1); Jewish immigrants to the U.S. would supposedly have been so called because, if illiterate, they drew a circle as a signature instead of an X (which was too close to the Christian sign of the cross for them to use in good conscience). However, the usual Yiddish word for ‘circle’ is not kaykl , keykl , but krays ( < German Kreis : see Wiener Kreis n.).

Perhaps compare also earlier ikey n. and its etymons Ike, Ikey, pet forms of Isaac, a common Jewish male forename.

The mention of krays as the more common word makes me wonder if the article is just repeating a legend.

2601:281:D47F:2918:C54A:BF7C:AFC8:C947 (talk) 19:57, 24 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

So DUMB they get offended by such a lame word, no hard R no nothing just psychological 2806:2F0:3340:2CD3:A3E3:5E39:53A1:56B9 (talk) 21:37, 18 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The immigration station there was begun in 1892. So it would've had to begun at Castle Garden for the "kikel" hypothesis to be true. That's at Battery Park in lower Manhattan. [[User:Rickyrab2|Rickyrab (2nd account)!]] | [[Talk:Rickyrab2| yada yada yada]] (old page: [[User:Rickyrab]]) (talk) 05:03, 5 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]