The Scope of Jewish Humor

   When Mark came down to visit on my 90^th birthday, he brought along a couple of books, one of which is Michael Krasny’s Let There Be Laughter: A Treasury of Great Jewish Humor and What it All Means. Besides a running text, there are “More than 100 of the Funniest Jewish Jokes of All Time.”

Well, maybe. Many are indeed funny, though another large batch doesn’t quite make it for me.  Still, there is probably no list of that kind that does any better.
   But here I want to point out that the sources of these jokes are quite limited. Limited to the largest subclass of Jews, to be sure, but by no means to all of them. Home base seems to be New York, with by far the majority of its Jewish population coming from Eastern Europe.  Many of those 100+ jokes are translated—not by Krasny, but by the people he has tell them or their informants, from Yiddish, the language in which they were born. The “Jewish Humor” displayed is that of a large class of Ashkenazi Jews of which there are, give or take, five and a half million in the United States. There is another big batch of them in Israel, though I am doubtful—without actually knowing—that you’d get far in Tel Aviv or Haifa with Krasny’s Jewish humor.

   I am also an Ashkenazi Jew—really Ashkenazi, since it’s the Hebrew word for German. There were half a million of us in the Weimar Republic before Hitler started to solve the “Jewish Problem” by pushing their emigration. That made us refugees in America Holocaust Evaders in my language.

   Why bring up all of this? Because those jokes were not part of the culture of those five hundred thousand Yeckes.* While my father liked to tell a joke now and then, these “Jewish jokes” were not in his repertory, nor in that of my grandparents. So that is the first subdivision of Jews going back several centuries that does not partake of Jewish humor as here advertized.

   And there is another, much larger population of Jews whose humor has other roots. I cannot imagine a most properly attired congregant of the great 17^th century Portuguese synagogue in Amsterdam resonating to the humor in this book. The jokes recounted do not pertain to the more than two million Sephardic Jews symbolized by that Amsterdam synagogue. These Sephardim have their origin in Spain and Portugal and North Africa. Moreover, Yiddish is Greek to them; they have their own language, Ladino. And as Yiddish is rooted in old German, so Ladino is rooted in old Spanish. I have no idea what kind of jokes Sephardim tell, but they are surely not covered by that Treasury of Great Jewish Humor.

   There is a minor moral to that story. New Yorkers—and it is they who populate this book—believe themselves to be at the center of the universe, an island that comes to an end in Yonkers. But, heh! there are Jews who live beyond Brooklyn and the Bronx.

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   *The word, Yecke or Yekke is a mashed version of the German word Jacke, that is jacket. German Jews were notorious for being “properly dressed.”