The Jewish Joke
Röyte Pomerantzen.
Edited by Immanuel Olsvanger.
New York, Schocken Books, 1947. 200 pp. $3.00.

 

Iz antkegen a vits muz men ophitn de töyre mer vi fun jeder anderer zach. (The Torah must be protected from a jokester more than from anything else.)

 

The Hasidic rabbi Pinhas of Koretz said: “All joys hail from paradise and jests too, provided they are uttered in true joy.” True joy may be a result of the Jewish joke or anecdote, but its original inspiration and the situation provoking it lay in quite another quarter than that whence all joys hail. What is specifically Jewish about the Jewish joke arose from the limitations and paradoxes of the specific Jewish condition in East Europe.

The Jews’ way of life there, as perhaps elsewhere in Europe and Asia until the 19th century, was anomalous in that it was lived self-absorbed in the midst of alien peoples: fundamentally uninterested in the social and cultural life that surrounded it on every geographical and political side, and regarding only the events and preoccupations of its own inner world as of real moment. The formal culture of the Jews took hardly any more cognizance of the non-Jewish human environment than it did of the natural one; it seems to have turned its back on both with a shrug conveying its despair of reading rational meaning into either. And yet the position of the Jews, far from being that of a ruling or conquering class which could afford to disdain the concerns of subject peoples, was that of a powerless and disliked minority protected only by its economic indispensability.

The peasants roundabout also lacked power but, unlike the Jews, they were not indifferent to those who did possess it. The nobility held the center of peasant attention; the heroes of their tales and legends were more often than not aristocratic or military, and their own culture constantly took over outmoded elements of the manorial one. That is, the peasants always showed that they were aware of the existing power structure. Power, political or physical, was something that the Jews, on the other hand, almost always censored from their consideration.

It is true that the peasant’s relation to the sources of power in a feudal society was usually more comprehensive than the Jew’s. Yet the Jew was made to feel sharply enough—and even more directly—his dependence on the feudal lord for his safety. The individual Jew knew how helpless he was; it was only his culture that refused to linger over this fact, giving it nothing more than academic recognition. And even when that culture became as informal as it did among the Hasidim, and as emotionally immediate, it still persisted in its indifference to the question of power and the nature of those who held it.

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Until the rise of Yiddish literature in the latter half of the 19th century, the formal culture of the Jews of East Europe was entirely religious. This is not to say that it shunned secular life altogether, but it dealt with that life only insofar as it could enclose it in a religious vessel and relate it to religious ends. This religious culture taught, as we all know, that the Jews were the chosen people, singled out by God to be the protagonist of humanity vis-à-vis himself in the cosmic drama. Thus their indifference to the Gentile seemed justified, even had his culture been superior to theirs—which it was not. The Jews were occupied with final ends; the Gentile and his temporal power belonged, like nature, to the field of contingency. Therefore the Gentile was not interesting, nor was his power.

In any case the whole question of Gentiles and power was something that could only hurt Jewish feelings were it ever to be dwelt upon at any length. Jewish culture, like every other, was concerned, among other things, to maintain self-esteem.

But reality always revenges itself on consciousness. In the Jews this revenge may have been long delayed, but when it did come it was a psychologically drastic one. The consolation the individual Jew got from his religious life and from the glorious promises it made to the people he belonged to could not conceal forever the fact that he as an individual had only his present life on earth, and that that life was becoming a more and more wretched and precarious one. A great disparity—which signified a lack of contact with reality such as could not be kept out of the sane consciousness—was felt between the ostensible conviction of superiority that made the Jew so indifferent in any but a practical way to the alien power surrounding him, and the secular and individual actuality of his life, which was lived at the mercy of that power—a power which erupted from time to time with the arbitrary destructiveness, it seemed, of a volcano.

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The Jewish joke was, among other things, reality’s revenge upon the Jewish consciousness. It blossomed with the disintegration of the old Jewish life in East Europe and it came to remind the Jew, as several critics have already pointed out, of the discrepancy between the divine promise and the secular reality. But even more fundamentally, the Jewish joke came to remind him that his self-absorption, as expressed in a millenial culture that, for all its modifications according to time and place, still attempted to perpetuate itself as if in a timeless and placeless vacuum, was foolhardy. .(My son has just lost his wife, who left him with three small children; his house has burnt down, and his business gone bankrupt—but he writes a Hebrew that’s a pleasure to read.) The Jewish joke criticized the Jew’s habit of explaining away or forgetting the literal facts in order to make life more endurable to himself. .(So what if the only thing wrong with the prospective bride is that she is a bit pregnant?) It also criticized the way in which the Jew violated his traditional decorum, while still trying to put a face on it, in his desperate struggle for individual survival. It criticized, finally, the self-absorption of individuals so devoid of power and status as most Jews had become by the 18th century. .(What God does is probably good.)

The peasants, too, had jokes in which they wreaked—on themselves—their resentment at their own lack of power or status. But the peasant joke is almost altogether without that final, cosmically subversive irony with which the Jews punished themselves. The peasant joke puts a premium on intelligence, or, at least, shrewdness; one of the most typical peasant heroes is the man who by superior slyness overcomes the social and economic handicaps imposed on him by established society. The Jewish joke, on the other hand, makes fun even of intelligence; it shows intelligence being put to the pettiest uses for the pettiest ends—simply because intelligence can only agitate itself in vain and split hairs when it is so completely unaccompanied by power. Religions have criticized intelligence in the name of the transcendental, but Jewish humor is almost alone in criticizing it in the name of immediate reality.

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The Jewish joke and funny story were for a long while, perhaps, the only secular culture the East-European Jew had; his only means, perhaps, of shaping secular experience that lay outside the confines of religion. And when religion began to lose its capacity, even among the devout, to impose dignity and trust on daily life, the Jew was driven back on his sense of humor. That sense of humor, in being called upon to restore confidence in life, underwent a development that has rendered it the most astounding and prodigious sense of humor in modern times. Invoked to correct a disequilibrium caused by religious preoccupations and by the need to preserve self-esteem, it learned to argue with God and dispute with him, ironically, those final questions around which generations of sages had spun their reverent dialectics. That sense of humor even began, after a fashion, to supply the Jew with all those things his formal culture had more or less omitted: a kind of political theory, a sort of economic doctrine, even a history in Galut, as in the jokes and stories in Röyte Pomerantzen that have to do with the First World War.

When Yiddish literature arose to give the secular life of the East-European Jew a more formal hearing, the Jewish joke and anecdote became, as we see in Mendele, Sholom Aleichem, and others, one of its major ingredients. In no other literature, as far as I know, has humor played such a central part. This was because the Jewish joke had already become, a long time ago, the underground culture of Jews.

The disasters that periodically overtook the Jews in East Europe played their part in this. These disasters were, to them, so inscrutable and captious that nothing they could do seemed to matter one way or the other, and grief and rage themselves seemed inadequate emotions in the final analysis. Humor became ultimately the only psychologically satisfactory way in which one could answer a situation permanently exposed to irrelevant catastrophes.

The Jewish joke may have been, paradoxical as that sounds, the one way aside from Zionism in which the Jew divined the future that awaited him at Auschwitz. Not only did it divine, I feel, the fact that he was living in a historical trap in East Europe, it was also, in a sense, the only appropriate answer to a fate that, as Hannah Arendt has pointed out, was incommensurable, entirely out of relation with, and radically disproportionate to anything that any group of human beings could possibly have deserved.

 

 

Röyte Pomerantzen is a collection, somewhat uneven but rarely disappointing, of Jewish jokes and stories published in their original Yiddish, which is transposed, however, from Hebrew into Roman characters. Anyone retaining some ear for the mame loshen should have no trouble acclimatizing himself after a few minutes of effort. Dr. Olsvanger has done a good job in the main in devising a system of Roman orthography that accurately conveys Yiddish sounds to the ears of English-speaking readers, and he has provided footnotes and a glossary for words derived from Hebrew, Russian, and other languages beside German. But, as he himself says in his introduction, an almost equally important factor in the understanding of this text is familiarity with the cadences of Yiddish speech. Without that, much of the humor is lost.

Schocken Books promises to put out a second collection of Jewish humor under Dr. Olsvanger’s hand. It is to be hoped that they will make Yiddish texts in Roman letters a staple item of their lists. I would suggest Sholom Aleichem and Mendele as the next candidates.

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