On Jewishness

In an episode of Family Guy that I saw recently, Peter erects a 'scare-jew', a scarecrow with a Hitler moustache, outside his house to frighten away his importunate Jewish neighbour Mort. When Mort sees it, he flees across the street yelling, "Hitler's back! Quick, everyone protect Jon Stewart – he's our most important Jew!" In today's post I want to say something about Jewishness, the quiddity associate with being Jewish. A necessary caveat: I myself am not Jewish. If someone were to ask me my ethnicity I would describe myself as a Pakeha New Zealander (although I believed briefly that I was Jewish over the summer of 2009 and 2010) and so I am taking a risk. Nor do I know many Jews. New Zealand does not have a large Jewish community but we do have a few – comedian and filmmaker Taiku Waititi is half Jewish, half Maori, and our Prime Minister from 2008 until early this year, John Key, was Jewish although almost always quite quiet about this aspect of his identity. Nevertheless, I feel I can still say something interesting about this issue, for reasons that will become apparent in a bit. I have had readers who have said that my most interesting posts are the one in which I talk about my own experiences and I intend to do so a little later in this post.

The questions is, "Is there a 'Jewish essence"? Is there some quality that all Jews have that all Gentiles lack? One way of framing the issue of Jewishness is to say that this religion or ethnicity is inherited mother to child, an argument that this essence is in effect genetic, an idea held to be true especially in Orthodox Judaism. When I was at high school, I had read (for fun and profit) in my Encyclopedia Britanica that the rule that Jewishness is handed down matrilineally had arisen as a consequence of the Rape of the Sabine Women; it was a way of ensuring a continuation of the Jewish community despite miscegenation. When I told my friends at school this fact the next day, one of my friends took offence, saying angrily "Don't you know I'm Jewish?" I hadn't known. Apparently Gentiles aren't permitted to be interested in things Jewish or even use the word. Leaving this problem aside, the problem of who can say what, the idea that Jewishness is a quality passed down mother to child is controversial: Karaite Judaism, for instance, argues instead that Jewishness is patrilineal. There seems no clear consensus. What then is it that makes a person Jewish?

The issue of a 'Jewish essence' is complicated by two undecidable categories – the closet Jew and the latent Jew. A closet Jew is a person who knows he or she is Jewish but chooses to keep it secret, to tell no one. I can't think of any examples offhand but reportedly Hollywood history is littered with examples of Jews who changed their names to seem more palatable to the White Anglo-Saxon Protestants who make up the bulk of the US population. Consider Jon Stewart himself. In early 2013, I think, Donald Trump tweeted something like, "Not many people know this but Jon Stewart's real name is Jonathan Leibowitz" and went on to ask rhetorically if Jon was ashamed of his Jewish heritage. Jon bridled at this and responded in a tweet, "Not many people know this but Donald Trump's real name is Clownstick von Fuckface." Jon can scarcely be considered a closet Jew – he talks it up all the time. But he lives knowing that other have the false impression, an impression that upsets him I think, that he changed his name to deny his 'Jewish heritage'. Personally I think it more likely that he changed his name to distance himself from a father he disliked. But still he rails agains it. On at least two occasions, on Stephen's Colbert's show and in a standup routine, I have seen Jon ask rhetorically, "How can anyone see this nose and not know that I'm Jewish?" By drawing attention to his physiognomy, Jon is asserting that a Jewish essence exists, an essence instantly perceptible to others, a physical giveaway – that Jews all have big noses. The problem with this gambit is that lots of Jews don't have big noses. Ashkenazi Jews are often indistinguishable from Gentiles of European descent. And lots of people with big noses aren't Jewish. (The French for instance were often caricatured by the English as having big noses.) Jon's Jewishness is disclosed by what he says, not what he looks like. It is only because he says he has a big nose that we think he does.

If a closet Jew is a Jew who keeps his or her Jewishness secret (something we could never accuse Jon Stewart of being), a latent Jew is someone somehow born Jewish who doesn't know he or she is Jewish until later in life. Madeleine Albright, the former Secretary of State, found out at the age of 59 that she was of Jewish descent. After Albright's parents had emigrated from Czechoslovakia, she had been raised Catholic, later converting to Episcopalianism. She had no idea that her parents were ethnically Jewish; they had kept this secret from her. Then when she finally looked into her family history she found that three of her grandparents had died in the Holocaust. Apparently her father considered himself a Czech first and a Jew second. It seems bizarre for a person to discover that he or she is ethnically Jewish at the age of 59 but this seems to be what happened with Albright. I saw Albright in a panel discussion with Fareed Zakaria on CNN and she told him that she and he epitomised the diversity of modern America – a claim that at the time seemed incredible to me.

I'll turn now to why this issue of a 'Jewish essence' interests me, why it features in my own life. In 2007, during my first psychotic episode, I formed the delusion that the world was ruled by a conspiracy of closet homosexuals as I have described in the post "My First Psychotic Episode". At this time I couldn't say the words 'gay' or 'straight' and the only way I could communicate my terrible insight was by analogy, by telling a flatmate "You know how they say Hollywood is run by the Jews?" I didn't intend this comparison to be construed as bigoted but for a long time afterwards I worried acutely that what I said that one time could have been misinterpreted as something anti-semitic and shared with others, that people might think me Mel Gibson. A couple of months later I would decide as a counterbalance that I was in some way in the same camp as the Jews, that we were all victims of the same kind of modern-day holocaust. In 2009, when I was hearing voices a lot, I adopted Jon Stewart as an imaginary friend; mainly this was because he was funny, leftwing and quite obviously heterosexual, a good man, but the issue of his Jewishness came into it as well. During that year, I vacillated – occasionally I thought the Jews might actually all be evil but more often I thought them a persecuted minority and believed myself to be Jewish. I even tried to go kosher for a time in early 2010.

Over the summer of 2009 and 2010, I experienced a profoundly intense psychotic episode during which I believed I could communicate telepathically with others. (I have talked about this in earlier posts.) My main imaginary friends were Jon and Jess but I also spoke with others – former friends, family, celebrities and during its later part even Barack Obama. I decided that the common denominator among all these people was that they were all Jewish – even if they hadn't realised it until the moment when Jon and I contacted them. All the people we spoke to were latent Jews; the world was full of them. Furthermore, the essence of Jewishness was simply this, the ability to communicate telepathically with other Jews. (It is worth mentioning that in this story I concocted my ex-girlfriend Maya was not Jewish and could only speak with me via intermediaries.) Jon and I would play a kind of game sometimes, seeking out and outing latent Jews. We would metaphorically knock on people's doors, say "You're Jewish!" and run away. We did this with Steve Martin. He woke up briefly, muttered "That's stupid", rolled over in bed and went back to sleep. There were far more Jews in the world than anyone realised.

Although I would later decide Jess was Jewish, I did not decide this immediately. When I first met the real girl, in October or November of 2009, I noted that she had a prominent nose and wondered if she was Jewish. I heard a voice in my head say, "A Roman nose" – I include this detail because, of course, as I said earlier, it is not just Jews who supposedly have big noses. Later, after I had decided that she was also Jewish, I went even further, deciding that she was John Key's illegitimate daughter. (Her foster-father or step father was TV1's former presenter Mark Sainsbury.) In early 2010 I heard John Key's voice in my head, telling me to "take good care of my daughter." Unfortunately this prophecy, if it was a prophecy, never fructified.

Jon even once said to me, "I always wanted a Jewish friend", a statement that still makes no sense to me. I have only recently understood why the issue of Jewishness featured so strongly in my 'illness'; as the reader may have gathered from this post, it seemed to function as a kind of parallelism to my ruminations about sexuality. Years later, I would find that my surname Judd derives from an Old Dutch word 'Judo' that means 'Israelite'. But then years later again I would find this was wrong and that Judd is etymologically connected to the River Jordan. On my father's side, unfortunately, I am in reality descended from Open Brethren.

During this episode, as I said, I formed the belief that the essence of Jewishness was the ability to speak telepathically with other Jews – and this is of course absurd. I strongly believe now that there is no such thing as a Jewish quiddity or essence at all. If there is no Jewish essence, how then can we define this quality 'being Jewish'? What makes a person a Jew? One approach is to say that Jewishness is performative in the same way that in Judith Butler's theory of gender, gender is performative. (I have mentioned Butler's theory in my posts about Neil Gaiman's comics. Gaiman incidentally is also Jewish.) Jewishness is what a person does, not who a person is. A Jew performs his or her Jewishness – by attending brit milahs and bar mitzvahs, by adhering to the dietary regimes of Judaism and keeping kosher, by associating and socialising with other Jews in the Jewish community, by studying the Torah and Kabbalah, learning Yiddish and by marrying another Jew. Jewishness is a series of actions or practices. If Jewishness is performative, a closet Jew would be someone who performs his Jewishness in secret – by perhaps clandestinely removing the ham from the ham toasted sandwiches distributed to Daily Show staff, as I sometimes imagined Jon doing. A latent Jew would be someone who performs his Jewishness unconsciously, say by instinctively avoiding pork products. Jewishness manifests itself through behaviour and is not a kind of destiny.

There is a second way we can define the quality 'being Jewish' while avoiding essentialism. To be Jewish is to have the world know one is Jewish. You tell one person you're a Jew, that person tells his or her friends and soon everyone on the planet knows. Identity is constituted by how others perceive you. By this definition, closet Jews and latent Jews are people suspected of being Jewish who have never 'come out'. Albright was a Gentile who turned into a Jew when she started telling people she was ethnically Jewish. We can go further. Conceivably, anti-semitism and Jewishness are mutually constitutive, inseparable; a world without Jewishness would be a world without anti-semitism and a world without anti-semitism would be a world without Jewishness. Without the spur of bigotry, pogroms current and historical, Jews would be less motivated, less compelled, to assert their Jewishness, to retreat into their community, to perform the roles the world has dictated they perform. How much of Jewish identity today is founded upon the Holocaust?

This second way of talking about Jewishness is more indebted to Foucault than to Butler.

There is a third way to define this quality Jewishness and once again I will turn to Family Guy for help. In one episode, Brian's scatter-brained blond girlfriend phones him up and asks, "Brian – how do you know if you're Jewish?" Brian replies, "Are you Jewish?" She says, "No" and he says, "That's how you know."