As one of Britain's major football clubs begs fans to cease using the word 'Yid' in loyal stadium chants, German lexicographers have been embroiled in a row with local Jewish leaders about an updated definition of the word 'Jew'.
'Yid', I must advise here, is simply the Yiddish version of the German 'Jude' and is wholly inoffensive. How it is then used or abused is a matter of tone and context.
But the arguments in the UK and Germany seem inconsequential in a period of ever-escalating universal antisemitism and convince me further that last week's homage to Anglo-Jewish medieval businesswoman, Licoricia of Winchester was just a jolly tourism pitch boosted by an uber grand coterie who somehow view her as one of their own.
The Plantagenet era figure made her celebrated fortune as a moneylender and this word, until relatively recently was listed routinely in English language dictionaries among pejorative meanings of the word 'Jew'.
As definitions of 'Jew' are conspicuously bland in current online English language dictionaries, the domestic scandal in Germany had me riffling through my late grandfather's copy of the New English Dictionary, published in March 1932, whose main editor was literary historian and scholar of librarianship Ernest A Baker.
I am fascinated by the unblinking lurid awfulness of the definitions employed, not only of the main sub-entries but the horrid associated words including - in lowercase - 'jew's-ear' and 'jewstone' - all intended, it would appear, to malign Jews and so make anything associated with us vilely repugnant.
What's more, this approach did not end after World War II.
As late as 1973, Marcus Shloimovitz, a Salford, Lancashire Jewish businessman, lost a long, expensive court case against the Oxford University (Clarendon) Press, publishers of the Oxford English Dictionary, in a vain attempt to enforce the removal of its own offensive definition of 'Jew'.
Robert Burchfield, then OED chief editor, insisted his job was to record the use of language accurately; not to be its censor and his one concession was to include an explanation of how any offensive definitions evolved in a supplement to the dictionary then being planned.
The high court's decision in favour of the OED was probably fair as social antisemitism, no matter how nasty, will not be eradicated by polite dictionary definitions as Jew hate exists everywhere - even and especially among Jews who loathe other Jews - and so also themselves.
NATALIE WOOD
19 FEBRUARY 2022