Sitting on a train approaching Manchester, England, recently, my friend Arron and I leafed through a copy of MetroNews — Britain’s biggest free paper — and came across an article about recent violence in Jerusalem caused by the latest settlement controversy.
I began to read the article aloud, nonchalantly voicing the words “Israel” and “Palestinians” as they passed by in the sentence.
“Sshhh,” Arron whispered. “Try not to say that around here.”
Growing up, Arron explained, he and his Jewish friends learned from a young age to avoid saying words like “Jew” and “Israel” in public. It was a precaution against the anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism that continues to pervade Europe.
Instead, they created a secret, coded language. Jew became “wej” (its backwards cousin). “Eretz” (a Hebrew nom de plume for Israel meaning “land”) became the code word for the Jewish state or random Yiddish words. “We’re walking through a wej neighborhood,” Arron and his friends would say to each other.
One of many definitions of wej, according to UrbanDictionary.com, an online dictionary for slang and often-derogatory terms, is “the polite way of saying Jew in public without others knowing.” In France, a similar type of term, “feuj,” is also used colloquially to replace the word Jew — but this time, usually insultingly. From the French dialect similar to Pig Latin called the Verlan, feuj is simply the syllabic inversion of the French word for Jew, “juif.”
My language faux pas were by no means limited to the train ride into Manchester. Walking through the streets in London, in Liverpool, in Leeds — I breached the language barrier.
In London, I had just visited some of my British colleagues at The Jewish Chronicle office — which is, in fact, a veritable fortress against terrorism — and I was eager to discuss this with Arron. But I quickly learned from him that this too was off limits for conversation, at least on the street.
Local rabbis play down the “wej,” “Eretz” business, viewing the phrases more as forms of ethnic group dialect than paranoia.
“There’s a ‘Jewish British’ just as there’s a ‘Jewish American,’ in terms of speech. One of the things that has been fun in my 12 years here is learning all of the British expressions,” said Rabbi Mark Winer, the senior rabbi at West London Synagogue — Britain’s largest liberal shul
Sitting on a train approaching Manchester, England, recently, my friend Arron and I leafed through a copy of MetroNews — Britain’s biggest free paper — and came across an article about recent violence in Jerusalem caused by the latest settlement controversy.
Sitting on a train approaching Manchester, England, recently, my friend Arron and I leafed through a copy of MetroNews — Britain’s biggest free paper — and came across an article about recent violence in Jerusalem caused by the latest settlement controversy.
I began to read the article aloud, nonchalantly voicing the words “Israel” and “Palestinians” as they passed by in the sentence.
“Sshhh,” Arron whispered. “Try not to say that around here.”
Growing up, Arron explained, he and his Jewish friends learned from a young age to avoid saying words like “Jew” and “Israel” in public. It was a precaution against the anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism that continues to pervade Europe.
Instead, they created a secret, coded language. Jew became “wej” (its backwards cousin). “Eretz” (a Hebrew nom de plume for Israel meaning “land”) became the code word for the Jewish state or random Yiddish words. “We’re walking through a wej neighborhood,” Arron and his friends would say to each other.
One of many definitions of wej, according to UrbanDictionary.com, an online dictionary for slang and often-derogatory terms, is “the polite way of saying Jew in public without others knowing.” In France, a similar type of term, “feuj,” is also used colloquially to replace the word Jew — but this time, usually insultingly. From the French dialect similar to Pig Latin called the Verlan, feuj is simply the syllabic inversion of the French word for Jew, “juif.”
My language faux pas were by no means limited to the train ride into Manchester. Walking through the streets in London, in Liverpool, in Leeds — I breached the language barrier.
In London, I had just visited some of my British colleagues at The Jewish Chronicle office — which is, in fact, a veritable fortress against terrorism — and I was eager to discuss this with Arron. But I quickly learned from him that this too was off limits for conversation, at least on the street.
Local rabbis play down the “wej,” “Eretz” business, viewing the phrases more as forms of ethnic group dialect than paranoia.
“There’s a ‘Jewish British’ just as there’s a ‘Jewish American,’ in terms of speech. One of the things that has been fun in my 12 years here is learning all of the British expressions,” said Rabbi Mark Winer, the senior rabbi at West London Synagogue — Britain’s largest liberal shul. Continue reading…
