It is not only in the official philo-Semitism of post-Hitler Germany, that the noun Jew has been replaced by the adjective Jewish. In the Jewish communities of Britain and the US, the softer adjective is preferred to the noun, which is associated with shouts and insults.
In Germany, there are occasional lapses, such as "the Jew Rifkind," with the resultant shock and alarm. Optimists think of them as edi- torial inadvertancies of no import; pessimists see ideological turning points and a sinister sign of recrudescent racism.
The most dramatic incident pre-Rifkind, which got much less coverage, involved the controversy over a "Hollywood manifesto" in which some 30 leading US entertainers and film stars defended the Church of Scientology from the attacks on its "dangerous totalitarianism" by the Bonn government. The protest compared the legal and bureaucratic difficulties which the scientologists have been experiencing to the Holocaust of the Jews in Hitler's Third Reich. Among the American signatories of the "Open letter to Helmut Kohl" (published in the International Herald Tribune in January 1997) were Tom Cruise, Dustin Hoffman, Larry King, Oliver Stone, Gore Vidal and Goldie Hawn. The petition was poorly written and inadequately argued. Its political charge was patently absurd; it aroused the ire of Chancellor Kohl, who led a loud chorus of public outrage against the invidious comparison. The measures against the scientologists (they have been refused recognition as a religion or a church for tax purposes) are of the utmost legalistic mildness-the Germany of today cannot be compared to the Germany of yesterday.
Newspaper reporting of the affair in Germany was generally straightforward, except for one Munich publication, Focus, which felt it significant that "Jewish Hollywood stars were recruited for a dirty campaign against Germany..." The otherwise unexceptionally liberal current affairs weekly went on to single out the stars in question. Focus published little coloured photographs of them, as if they were wanted men, and identified them-Dustin Hoffman, Jude; Larry King, Jude... The dismay, distress even, among many Focus readers was palpable. There had surely been no discreditable "Nazi" intention, perhaps only a thoughtless relapse to styles which remain virulent in the German language. How could they excuse themselves? I was told by an embarrassed editor that headlines are sometimes erratic, photo captions often wrong, and that the senior staff just did not get around to proof reading pages 186-187 of the 13th January 1997 edition of Focus before it went to press.
Still, as with Rifkind, a taboo had been broken, a code had been violated. For the J-word remains at the centre of a national neurosis. The linguistic correctness of anti-anti-Semitism has required avoidance of the word whenever possible (indeed, in Germany, it can still have a fearsome effect when uttered at mass meetings or on television). Anglo-American lexicographers have also been pressured to omit from their dictionaries traditional usages which denote the old denigrating myths and slurs about greed- for example, the almost obsolete verb for bargaining, "to Jew down," and the not unrelated anti-Romany G-verb for cheating, "to gyp." Most editors refuse to play the censor and prefer the evasive strategy of "playing down, and if possible, omitting..."
Other journalists I know contend that it is best to use and overuse the words until they are incapable of any demeaning impact. One dedicated feuilletonist of my acquaintance delicately avoids even the turn to circumlocution in such references as "Albert Einstein, the scientist of Jewish ancestry" or "Franz Kafka, born into a Jewish family in Prague." Others go even further with this tactic by attempting to neutralise and render harmless, at long last, what was for millennia an offensive appellation: they insist on writing bluntly, "Heinrich Heine was a Jew" or "As a Jew, Disraeli naturally took a long perspective..."
These are valiant and well-meaning efforts, but I suspect that these high-minded stratagems of linguistic subversion will prove to be of questionable value to the cause of enlightenment. The word has thousands of years of historical encrustation; it is not easily dusted off.
Indeed it even attracts new exotic growths. One Bonn journalist attributed the popularity in Germany of the Beatles' hit song "Hey Jude" to a resurgent neo-Nazism among the hippie young. In fact, "Hey Jude" was, as a historian of the Beatles has written, "sung as if to Lennon's five-year-old son Julian ("Hey Jules") before McCartney changed it to something a bit more country and western."
And yet, and yet... When I called my Bonn friend's attention to the awkward facts, he came up with some new details which only thickened the plot. The Beatles had lived and played for quite a time in Germany, and had learned enough of the language to know what the word for Jew was. They also had a penchant for double entendres. The pop cognoscenti of the day always suspected that the song was "aimed at Dylan," for Bob Dylan had been a great influence, now a close rival and his real "Semitic" name was Zimmerman... QED.
