By Alex Gordon
HAIFA, Israel — In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Jews were powerless and hopeless. Their weapon of choice was to mock their oppressors and their own predicament. When Jews began to leave the ghettos and localities and to acquire other languages, anthropologists noticed that the number of Jewish jokes, among which were many mocking their own people, was much greater among Jews than among their neighboring peoples.
The massive composition of jokes was a response to the formation of a cultural vacuum created by the weakening of the Jews’ connection to the customs of their people. The Jewish joke became a distinctive genre. Separated from Judaism, national bonds between Jews were formed through the composition of jokes. By weakening ties to the holy books that united the people, Jews maintained national identification through humor.
In Jewish history, there has been far more weeping than laughter. Jews were surrounded by walls of weeping in ghettos and localities, but I guess humor thrives when the people are not laughing. Jews are good at crying and laughing, crying at the misery they have suffered and laughing at themselves so that it is not so dreary to live. Sholom Aleichem wrote, “The Jew laughs so that he does not cry.”
Mendele Moicher Sforim wrote about this, “Sad is my melody in the symphony of Jewish literature. My writings express the very essence of the Jew who, even while singing cheerful melodies, sounds from afar as if he weeps and wails. Why is it that even his festive hymns on Shabbos sound as if they were taken from the Book of Lamentations of Jeremiah? When he laughs, it is with tears in his eyes. When he tries to be cheerful, bitter groans burst out from the depths of his heart – it’s always oh-wey – woe is me, wey!”.
The Jews invented a special kind of humor, “laughing to keep from crying.” Here’s an example. “After a pogrom, the Cossacks have just left. The survivors run into the pogromized house, there are corpses on the floor, everything is torn and plundered, the owner is alive, standing against the wall as if crucified, his hands nailed. People remove the nails, supporting him under the arms, and sit him on a stool. – Haim, are you in pain? – Not at all. Only when I laugh.”
Soviet poet Mikhail Svetlov (Sheinkman) created a sad joke on the subject of pogroms: “What is the difference between a Jew and a fish? The fact that fish are not cut with a knife.” Nathan Ausubel, an American historian, folklorist, humorist, expert on Jewish culture, and native of Poland, asked himself: “Why do Jews laugh?” and answered with a saying of the ancient Jewish sages: “If you are hungry, sing; if you are wounded, laugh.”
According to Freud, Jewish humor is a “defense mechanism or a form of sublimated aggression that victims of persecution resort to in order to cope with their situation.” Freud noted that the teller of the joke never laughs himself. In his opinion, this is due to the fact that the main purpose of the storyteller is to control the emotional state of the listener. As a consequence, the narrator gains power over the listener.
Freud considered wit as a sublimation of sexual and aggressive instincts. Wit, according to the creator of psychoanalysis, is a means of attracting a female. It allows to shame and defeat the rival in the struggle for the possession of the female. During his period of struggle with traditional psychology, Freud was in opposition to most psychological scientists. He was despised by the scientific elite. He was alone. During those years, he began collecting Jewish jokes. Irving Stone in his book The Passions of the Mind or the Life of Freud wrote: “During his years of isolation, Sigmund became fascinated with collecting Jewish jokes, which for centuries have helped to maintain the popular spirit, ridiculing the shortcomings and at the same time subtly affirming its virtues of national character.”
Freud adds another aspect, however, which is perhaps related to Jewish concerns for survival. A caustic witticism against an enemy is a kind of symbolic killing of him, since it is impossible to destroy him literally because of moral obstacles or fear of retaliation. Therefore, jokes are military actions of the defending party.
Freud repeatedly felt the hostility of society toward him, both as a scientist with unpopular ideas and as a Jew. Jewish jokes in the life of a Jewish scientist, who had to overcome the resistance of the scientific community to his ideas, became a way of morally confronting difficulties. Freud, a stranger to the Jewish religion, embraced one kind of Jewish identity: jokes. In 1905 he published an original book, Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious. It was obvious from the concentration and selection of Jewish jokes that appeared in the book that the author was also reflecting on the role of jokes in Jewish history.
In this book, he described one of the main national traits that ensured the creation of Jewish jokes, self-criticism: “For a tendentious witticism it seems a particularly favorable case when the criticism of the protest is directed at one’s own personality; more cautiously, at the personality in which the personality of the person creating the witticism takes part, hence at a gathering personality, such as one’s own people. This condition of self-criticism may explain to us why it is on the soil of Jewish folk-life that a large number of successful witticisms have grown up, of which we have given here a sufficient number of examples. These are stories created by Jews and directed against the uniqueness of the Jewish character. […] I do not know whether it happens so often that a people laughs to such an extent at its own being. As an example, I can point to the story of how a Jew in a railroad car immediately ceases to observe all the rules of decent behavior after he recognizes in the person who entered the compartment his co-religionist. A Galician Jew is traveling in a train, he has made himself very comfortable, unbuttoned his coat and put his feet on the bench. A fashionably dressed gentleman enters the carriage. Immediately the Jew puts himself in order and sits down in the most modest posture. He flips through a book, calculates something, thinks something over, and suddenly turns to the Jew with a question: “Tell me, please, when is Yom Kippur (Judgment Day)?” – “So that’s it,” says the Jew and puts his feet back on the bench before answering the question.”
Self-criticism is inherent in a tolerant society that respects the human being as such and reflects on its mistakes and imperfections. Self-criticism is alien to an authoritarian society. Nations that are satisfied with themselves and look to other nations for faults and blame for their failures are stagnant. Jews are dissatisfied, hence they develop. The tense dynamic of the Jews’ relationship with God betrays their dissatisfaction with themselves and their desire to correct what they have done and to improve themselves. Jewish self-criticism is the leitmotif of Sholom Aleichem’s story Two Judeophobes.
After the famous Kishinev pogrom in 1903, a Jew wants to protect himself from anti-Semites on a train. The traveling salesman Max Berliant buys a leaflet called Bessarabets published by Krushevan, one of the main antisemites of the time. The hero of the story covers himself with the newspaper and falls asleep. In his sleep, his Jewish nose opens, and another Jew entering the compartment decides to laugh at Max. This other Jew, Albert Nemchik, buys the same newspaper and also covers his face with it, frightening the awakened hero. The story ends with both “Judeophobes” singing a Jewish song.
Freud also notes the deeply national features of Jewish humor: “Witticism allows us to use in our enemy all that is funny which we dare not mention aloud or consciously; thus, witticism bypasses limitations and opens up sources of pleasure which have become inaccessible. […] External circumstances are so often an obstacle to scolding or insulting response that tendentious witticisms are especially eagerly used to realize the possibility of aggression or criticism of persons superior or claiming authority. The witticism represents a protest against such authority, a liberation from its oppression. In this fact lies the beauty of caricature, about which we laugh even when it is not very successful, because we credit it with a protest against authority.”
The poet Heinrich Heine expresses Jewish self-criticism in the following joke. A Christian man addresses the poet: “You come from the nation to which Christ belonged. I would be proud of that.” Heine’s reply, “I would be proud too, if no one but Jesus belonged to it.”
Jokes for Jews were an outlet, a shield, and a social catharsis. In them, the Jew sought to defeat the offender by mocking him. He purified himself from hardship and humiliation by finding the right sharp word to strike the offender. Nothing so weakens the enemy as mocking him. It is easier to bear sad reality, turning it into funny. Making jokes lifted Jews from the social bottom above their misfortunes and for a brief moment elevated them above those who humiliated and persecuted them. Jokes brought enlightenment and hope. Witticisms were the seeming fulfillment of desires. Jewish jokes were a form of dreaming of life’s mending. They created a sense of the short-lived triumph of the weak over the strong. Jewish wit was the nation’s fantasy on themes of liberation from humiliation and persecution and an excellent method of escapism. In the preparation of Jewish jokes, bitterness has always been an important component. A keen desire for change was encoded in them.
The Polish writer of Jewish origin Stanislaw Jerzy Lecz composed bitter jokes in his book Unkempt Thoughts: “The richest in the world are Jews. Because they pay for everything.” “It’s all the Jews’ fault. It was their God who created us all.”
“There is nothing more significant in the character of men than what they think is ridiculous,” wrote Goethe. George Eliot, in an essay on Heine (1856), written after visiting Germany the year Heine died in Paris, corrects Goethe: “The justice of this remark would have been more apparent if he had said ‘culture’ instead of ‘character.'” Detailing “culture,” Eliot believes that Heine “to Teutonic imagination, sensibility, and humor adds a fair share of esprit which made him brilliant among the most brilliant of the French. This unique German wit is half Jewish.”
Heine, who experienced a baptism that did not give him the work he was looking for, lived the double life of a German and a Jew and laughed at himself: “What do you want? I found it impossible for me to belong to the same religion as Rothschild without being as rich as him.” In one letter, Heine claims that in his move to France, the main role in his move to France played “not so much a passion for wandering the world as torturous personal circumstances, for example, the indelible Jewishness.”
With a bitter sneer writes Heine about the most expensive invention of the Jews – Christianity: “Then I would go on to the other virtues and valor of the Jews, to the inventions that mankind owes them, such as: bills of exchange and Christianity. But no! The latter should not be attributed to them in great merit, because so far we have actually made little use of it – it seems to me that the Jews themselves have benefited less from it than from the invention of bills of exchange.” Heine was derisive of his tribesmen’s search for the Messiah. In his opinion, they are only able to choose a donkey for the Messiah. At the same time, he mocks Christians: “The most important candidate for this position baptized.”
For Freud, Heine is one example of how witticisms can bring out repressed feelings. Freud classified Heine’s witticisms as Jewish jokes. In his book on wit, Heine’s jokes appear, more than once serving as the German poet’s weapon against his many opponents. Heine’s witticisms, who participated in a dozen duels, were sometimes tantamount to sword blows. He wrote: “Since they stopped wearing a sword on their side, it is absolutely necessary to wit.” His joke about the French writer Alfred de Musset was murderous: “Vanity is one of his four Achilles’ heels.”
Heine saw Spinoza as a like-minded man: ‘Spinoza was solemnly expelled from the community of Israel and declared unworthy to bear henceforth the name of Jew. His Christian enemies were magnanimous enough to leave him that title.” The poet laughed at himself and other Jews, “The Jew Fuld has been elected to Parliament. I am very glad of this. It means that the equality of the Jews is quite realized. Before, only a brilliant Jew could get into Parliament, but if a mediocrity like Fuld gets in, it means that there are no more differences between Jews and non-Jews.”
With the formation of the State of Israel, the process of reducing the number of Jewish jokes apparently began. Albert Memmi, a French writer and sociologist of Jewish origin, writes: “Humor is another form of Jewish self-defense.” In Israel, Jews no longer have to defend themselves with the only weapon available to them – jokes; they have other weapons. Jews are no longer disenfranchised, humiliated, ridiculous, their witticisms no longer contain bitterness; “laughing through tears” is no longer typical of Jews in the presence of their own state.
Israelis should not criticize themselves as a way of “venting” the bitterness of life by indirectly blaming the dominant nation for their problems, for they are the dominant nation. Israelis do not need jokes for national identification. They have their own state for that.
The Jews left Eastern Europe. Along with them left this territory and Jewish humor. Isaac Babel’s Odessa Stories do not provoke laughter today. Heinrich Heine’s humor is little understood by Jews today. Sigmund Freud could not have assembled a collection of great Jewish jokes today. Jews are no longer funny and no longer laugh at themselves. The dissonance of Jewish humor is its disappearance.
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Alex Gordon is professor emeritus of physics at the University of Haifa and at Oranim, the academic college of education, and the author of 10 books.