Research Query: Source of a Yiddish Joke

Ronald Schechter Discussion

Can anyone help me with the origin of this Yiddish joke?  “If you see a Jew with a dog, either the Jew isn’t a Jew or the dog isn’t a dog.”  I read this joke in a newsletter from the MEDEM Yiddish library in Paris.

 

Many thanks in advance,

Ron Schechter

William and Mary

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Dear Ron,

I'm not sure what you mean by locating the "origin" of this joke. In any case, please notice that it opens Leonard Prager's chapter, "Bilom in Bashevis’s Der knekht (The Slave): A khaye hot oykh a neshome (An Animal Also has a Soul)," in The Hidden Isaac Bashevis Singer, ed. Seth L. Wolitz (Austin, TX, 2001), 79-92; and see also Robert A. Rothstein, "'If a Jew has a Dog...': Dogs in Yiddish Proverbs," in A Jew's Best Friend? The Image of the Dog Throughout Jewish History, eds. Phillip Ackerman-Lieberman and Rakefet Zalashik (Brighton; Portland, OR, 2013), 135-146.

Regards,

Liran Yadgar

UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies

I don't know the origin (or if such a thing can be determined), but it appeared in one of the later episodes of the Israeli tv series "Shtisel," in Yiddish a couple of years ago.

Here's a response from a local Yiddish teacher:

I don't know what your friend means by the "origin" of the joke -- do jokes have "origins?" But the point is that traditionally, Jews did not own dogs -- they're not kosher animals so even if you're not eating them, some consider them undesirable to have around, and the Talmud tells us that they can frighten women and cause miscarriages so one should not "raise" them. You find very few dogs owned by religious Jews -- my Rabbi told me his grandfather kept a goat as a housepet but wouldn't consider a dog. Also, Jews had mostly bad relations with dogs in the old country -- they were kept by peasants and by the aristocracy for hunting and protection. and nervous Jewish strangers were often the objects of dog attacks. Often just for fun. The literature is full of fearful Jews running from dogs.

A minor, personal contribution to the question of dogs and Jews. When I was a child, living in the suburbs of Buenos Aires City, my parents, both Jews born in Argentina, brought a dog home as a pet for their three children. My grandfather, a Jew who immigrated from Poland to Argentina in 1923 and that was living with us, saw the dog with coldness and said “In Poland, only goyim had dogs; Jews didn’t”.

I never understood that sort of indifference from my zeide to this particular dog and to the dogs in general until I saw recently an episode of the series Peaky Blinders. There appears a character called Solomon, an Orthodox Jew who is also a gangster. Solomon is an Englishman but, strangely, also does speak Russian fluently. When some Russian gangsters (that are also aristocrats) get surprised to realize he speaks Russian so well, he makes them two comments. Firstly, that his mother was Russian, and from there his fluency in that language. Secondly, that they (i.e. the Russian aristocrats) used to hunt his mother down with dogs across the snow in Russia. I cannot remember what season and episode was that, but I remember that at the time of watching the episode I fully understood the meaning of dogs to Eastern European Jews: an instrument of domination, humiliation and violence.

Jaime E. Bortz, MD, MA, PhD
Professor of History of Medicine
Buenos Aires, Argentina
jaimebortz@yahoo.com.ar

This may have already been mentioned, but Israel Joshua Singer, Bashevis's older brother, has a lovely short story/memoir entitled simply "A hunt." In it he describes that although dogs were generally detested by his milieu, he was always jealous of the Gentiles because he loved dogs. I'm sure there are translations of the story.

I think it is important to point out that this fear seems to be an Eastern-European one. I have not studied the issue but anecdotally, one secular, Israeli recently asked me why Haredim (mostly Ashkenazic) are afraid of dogs and an Oriental Jew told me that his culture has no particular antipathy towards dogs. He owns two! So I tend to think that the provenance of such an antipathy is Eastern-European Judaism and not classical Judaism.

Meshulam
Jerusalem, Israel

Beside all the valuable notes that have been already made by previous scholars, I would like to mention the remarkable discussion of Sara Offenberg in her PhD. Dissertation: Bituyyim LeHitmodedut im haSevivah haNotzrit baAmanut uVaSifrut HaYehudit beYemei haBeynayim, part 1, p. 105-112. From her discussion one can conclude that the image of the dog functioned as a symbol of the Christian in the medieval Jewish art. The link between the dog and the Christians can be found in the descriptions of the return of hunters from their hunt.

In addition, Offenberg points to Targum Yonatan (Gen. 27:31) who tells us that Esau prepared the meal for Jacob from a dog he hunted, and refers to Robert Hayward ["Targum Pseudo-Jonathan to Genesis 27:31", The Jewish Quartery Review 84: 2-3 (1993-1994), pp. 177-187], who connected it to the sacrifice of dogs that have been performed by the Romans in connection to death. Therefore, says Hayward, one can found in other Targumim as well that when Esau entered Jacob's tent Jacob immediately felt the smell of Gehinom (hell).

The truth is, however, that it goes to both sides. Even more common is to observe how the Christians depicted Jews as dogs. See Kenneth Stow, Jewish Dogs: An Image and Its Interpreters Continuity in the Catholic-Jewish Encounter, Stanford university press, Stanford 2006. Although the main research of Stow is the image of the Jew as a dog – he also dedicated pp. 137-144 to the opposite view: how the Jews in return depicted the Christians as dogs. Offenberg also refers to his research in her dissertation in pp. 106 and p. 110.

Another connection that have been made is between Mitzrayim-Notzrim (Egypt-Christians) and the symbol of the dog (Offenberg, p. 109).

Lastly, Offenberg, on p. 111, brings the view of Kurt Schubert, who argues that the dog in Jewish art symbolizes the Church that persecutes Israel, especially among the members of the Dominican order, who called themselves "dogs of God" (domini canes).

Admiel Kosman
Potsdam University
"

Augusto Segre, an Italian Jew, in his memoir, cites as a midrash the following: "Why is a dog called Kelev? Because it is 'all heart' (kol lev)" He is reminded of this by his own beloved dog who was with him when he was a partisan in WWII. So here's an example of an attitude toward dogs in Jewish tradition that is not negative. And it seems that it's not East European, to confirm everything said in this thread so far.

Also, a question: what about the name "Kalb"? It appears to mean dog. If so, how does that square with what's been posted so far?

The participants in this thread might be interested in an Israeli novel translated into English called THE JEWISH DOG, by Asher Kravitz. The dog's name is Caleb, of course. The novel is told in first dog.

Steve Siporin

I thought, though, that Islam and at least much of Arab culture are quite hostile to dogs, and Oriental (Mizrahi) Jews - not Ashkenazi/Eastern European Jews - come from Arab/Muslim lands.

A more complex description of the relationship between Jews and dogs is found in Agnon's Only Yesterday, where a dog and the Jews who abhor him are equal subjects of the book's terrifying black humor. Similarly, Avot de-Rabbi Natan 6 states that Rabbi Akiva's wealthy father-in-law, Kalba Savua, was known by that name because anyone who entered his house as hungry as a dog (kelev) would leave satisfied (savea). Here the dog is referred to contemptuously but with a positive association.

Elayne Grossbard

Sholem Aleichem wrote an ironic allegorical story about an abject stray, "Rabtshik: a yidisher hunt" (1901). It can be found in "Mayses far yidishe kinder," Book 1, which is v.8 of the standard Folksfond edition of the complete works. An English translation by Leonard Woolf, "Rabchik, A Jewish Dog," appeared in eds. Howe and Greenberg, "Yiddish Stories Old and New" (1974), and subsequently in "Roger Caras' Treasury of Great Dog Stories" (1987).

Ronald Robboy

The following footnote to an article of mine might be relevant to the issue of dogs:

I am reminded here of a story my late father, z"l, told me. In the 1930's he served as a rabbi in Miami, Florida, then a Jewish backwater. Unusual for an Orthodox rabbi, and under the influence of my American-born and raised mother, z"l, my parents kept a pet dog. Their home in Miami was a small bungalow and my father told me that once he was sitting in the front room when a hungry meshulach, looking for a kosher meal, walked up to the door. My father told me that he overheard the following soliloquy: "I know this to be the home of Reb Avraham Kellner, whom I know to be an ehrliche Yid. But I see sitting here on the front stoop, looking very much at home, what appears to be a dog, something which is inconceivable in the home of an ehrliche Yid. So, either Rabbi Kellner is not an ehliche Yid, or this is not a dog. But Rabbi Kellner is well known to be an ehrliche Yid, so this must not be a dog!" At which point our hungry meshulach knocked on the door. Many people have said: "No ehrliche Yid could possibly hold the positions academics like Menachem Kellner attribute to Rambam; ergo, Rambam does not hold those positions."
Menachem Kellner