The canonization and censorship of the modern Jewish joke: in Alter Druyanow’s Book of Jokes and Witticisms

ABSTRACT

The article discusses Alter Druyanow’s popular work: The Book of Jokes and Witticisms (Sefer habediha vehahiddud, Frankfurt, 1922) as a turning point in the development of modern Jewish humour. The acceptance of the book is ascribed mainly to its Zionist agenda expressed not only in the formation of its repertoire, but also in the censorship of a large collection of sexual jokes. Following a discussion of Druyanow’s main motives and anthologizing principals, the article includes a first exposure of these jokes, aiming to analyse their social roles. The comparative reading of the jokes in their historical and cultural contexts points at what the Jewish society of that time considered as its “other” – from competing religious groups to other threatening reference groups within this society, such as women and assimilated Jews. In this way, the censored jokes shed light not only on the marginality of the East European Jews and their feelings of inferiority but also on their creative response to them and their ideological horizons.

KEYWORDS:

• Early Zionism
• modern Hebrew literature
• Jewish joke
• humour
• sexual folklore
• ethnography
• canonization
• compilation and anthologizing

Acknowledgements

The present article is part of a book-in-progress about Druyanow’s unpublished jokes. I wish to thank Prof. Jeffrey Veidlinger, Prof. Dov-Ber Kerler, and the Borns Jewish Studies Program at Indiana University for enabling me to invest time and effort in this work as part of postdoctoral research. I am also grateful to Haya Bar-Itzhak, Eli Yassif, and Elliott Oring for their helpful suggestions, and to Dvora Stavi and Hila Zur from the Genazim Institute for their generous and valuable help.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Tsafi Sebba-Elran is a lecturer in the Department of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at The University of Haifa. She is the author of: In Search of New Memories: The Aggadic Anthologies and their Role in the Configuration of the Modern Hebrew Canon (Yad Ben-Zvi Research Institute, forthcoming).

Notes

1. The anthology’s principal two editions are the original one-volume edition published in Frankfurt in 1922, and the revised and expanded three-volume edition published in Tel Aviv in 1935–1938. All excerpts in this article are from the expanded 1930s edition, except references to Druyanow’s introduction and preface, the full text of which appeared in the first edition only. For an English translation of this introduction, see Bar-Itzhak (2010, 119–156).

2. Hovevei Zion or Hibbat Zion (The love of Zion) is the common name for various national organizations that informed the rise of Zionism in the 1880s, mainly in Eastern Europe. With its establishment as a political movement, Hibbat Zion declared its support of the new Jewish settlements in Palestine and deepened its involvement in national cultural and educational initiations. See Druyanow and Laskov ([1919–32] 1982–93).

3. I refer to the jokes censored by Druyanow as “sexual jokes,” not “dirty,” “obscene” or “erotic” jokes, as early scholars of sexual folklore have generally labelled them: see Dundes and Georges (1962), Legman (1964, 1968, 1975), and Hoffmann (1973). Labels such as “dirty” or “obscene” imply negative value judgements, whereas “cleaner” categories such as “erotic” or “romantic” fail to reflect the ways in which such jokes grapple with social taboos. Clearly, however, the label “sexual” does not quite cover the full range of topics touched upon by the jokes in question, for example, bodily waste and verbal profanity.

4. Alter Druyanow (Druya 1870–Tel Aviv 1938) was a Zionist activist and an adherent of Ahad Ha’am. As a member of the Hibbat Zion movement, he served as the secretary of the committee for settling in Eretz Yisrael, and as the secretary of the Jewish refugee committee during the First World War. His work as the Hibbat Zion’s historian was published in seven volumes (Druyanow and Laskov [1919–32] 1982–93) side by side with his monograph on Judah Leib Pinsker, and his “Tel Aviv Book” for the 25th anniversary of the Jewish city. Druyanow was also a literary editor, one of the founders of the first Hebrew periodical for Jewish ethnography and Folklore, Rashumot, an editor of the Eshkol Encyclopedia, and the head of the Dvir publishing house in Jerusalem. His ethnographic work on the Jewish joke was a continuous project that lasted until his last days. For more biographical details, see Litaei (1943), Kariv (1950), Fichman (1959), Kressel (1965a), and Bar-Itzhak (2010, 113–118).

5. Though not a Yiddishist, Druyanow compiled and published hundreds of Yiddish sayings in Warsaw newspaper Der Fraynd, defending Yiddish from attacks by such Hebraists as Y. H. Taviov (Kiel 1991, 68).

6. Druyanow adopts Freud’s view on this issue, see Druyanow (1922, 38–44).

7. Many studies explore the relation between social marginality and humour, in particular Jewish humour: see, e.g., Rosenberg and Shapiro (1958), Landmann (1962), Oring (1981), Howe (1990), and Chase (2000). For the emergence of the Jewish joke at the turn of the twentieth century, see Oring (1983), Bermant (1986), Ziv (1997), and Wisse (2013).

8. “Laughter,” Bergson writes, “has no greater foe than emotion” ([1900] 2008, 10).

9. One of the fundamental characteristics of the Jewish joke, according to Theodor Reik, is the familial intimacy it reflects: see Reik (1962, 188–203). Cf. Wisse (2013, 11) and Apte (1985, 29–66).

10. Dan Ben-Amos’s (1970) distinction between self-criticism and social criticism in Jewish jokes supports this constructive aspect Druyanow finds in the joke. Cf. Davies (1991).

11. See also Druyanow, CZA A10 Division, File 6c; Oring (1981, 67), where the collection of chizbatim (tall tales) functions as the best indicator for the internalization of the Hebrew language.

12. For further responses to Druyanow’s literary style, see the correspondence between Druyanow and Epstein (CZA A10 Division, File 27/1); the correspondence with Davidson (CZA A10 Division, File 27/1); and in M---L (1935), Heller (1936), Fichman (1959), 375, and Kiel (1991, 60–61).

13. The list was appended to the third volume of the expanded edition, Druyanow (1935–38, 3: 466–469).

14. The literal meaning of “sahsehan” in Hebrew is contested. However, Rashi explains the meaning of the Gemaric saying by writing that thick-bearded men are “lamebrains.”

15. The authoritative formula “tried and true” [baduk umenuseh] is typical of magical treatises (Harari 2010, 203).

16. The desecration of Scripture – a central feature of contemporaneous Jewish jokes which both foregrounded and ridiculed the sacred texts – is also noted in Druyanow’s overlooked essay on the figure of the Jewish jester, the badchan (Druyanow 1937).

17. The construction of modern sexual identities, and particularly the emergence of a new masculinist ideology among European Jews as a reaction to the rise of homophobic-anti-Semitism and of Zionism, is discussed at length in Boyarin (1997, 1–80, 189–312).

18. For a more comprehensive discussion considering the emergence of a bourgeois discourse at the nineteenth century with its new sexual categories, see Foucault (1978–88) and Mosse (1985). The influence of this discourse on modern Jewish literature and the restrictions it imposed on sexual behavior are discussed in Biale (1992), Boyarin (1997), Gluzman (2007), and Zaban (2014).

19. The most comprehensive and professionally compiled anthology of this type is based on the work of ethnographer Friedrich Krauss and was published only partially in two series: Kryptadia (1883–1911, 12 vols.) and Anthropophyteia (1904–1929, 23 vols.). For a more general discussion of the historical background and cultural significance of censorship policies in Europe at the time, see Dhavan and Davies (1978) and Engelstein (1992). A fascinating example from a distant and very different culture is Howard S. Levy’s (1972) anthology of traditional sexual jokes from Korea, which were similarly censored from written texts.

20. Legman (1968, 39–44) wished to lay the groundwork for this type of a detailed index, but it was Hoffmann who eventually completed the task in his book. According to both, sexual folklore remained unpublished and unrecognized by academics, as reflected, for example, in the decades-long rejection of the sexual jokes compiled by Vance Randolph in the Ozarks, until support by Legman, Hoffman, and other folklorists finally helped a selection of the jokes become a bestseller (Randolph [1976] 1986). According to Legman, the tide turned in the 1960s, when the American Folklore Association devoted a conference session to “obscene” folk traditions and published the lectures in print. Even then, he qualifies, the subject suffered from apologetic and biased attitudes; see Journal of American Folklore 297 (1962): 189–265.

21. An English translation appears in Zuckerman and Weltman ([1975] 2009).

22. Dr Shimon Einhorn (1882–1950) was a physician, folklorist, and occasional writer for Rashumot and Yeda-Am. His Folk Proverbs in Yiddish was published posthumously (Kressel 1965b). The joke appears in two full versions and six partial versions of Druyanow’s censored collection.

23. Fascinating testimony of the Zeppelin’s visit to Palestine on Purim 1929 and of the local responses, both comical and serious-minded, is given in Reuven Rubin’s painting The Zeppelin over Tel Aviv (1929), which reflects both the joke’s religious connotations and its sexual insinuations.

24. The classification by genre and the concluding comment are both Druyanow’s. In his terminology, “jests,” unlike “jokes,” can only “mock, deride, hold everything in contempt, fight and revolt against everything and everyone” (Druyanow 1922, 30).

25. The joke is similar in this respect to jokes about Zionist hero Yosef Trumpeldor’s trampled masculinity, which Zerubavel interprets as late criticism of Zionist mythology (Zerubavel 1995, 173), but which were also typical, as we have seen, of Jewish folklore at the turn of the twentieth century.

26. According to Davies (1990), women in Jewish jokes usually represent the fetters of social and familial mores and are therefore often the butt of the joke.

27. The archived collection includes four different versions of the joke, including one in Yiddish.

28. The affinity between castration (or lesser damage to the male sex drive) and the Jewish circumcision ritual has been discussed extensively, with reference to Freud and Bruno Bettelheim in Legman (1975, 528–567); Boyarin (1997, 231–244, 284–285); with reference to Philo, Maimonides, and later Jewish and Christian thinkers, in Cohen (2005, 143–173). Druyanow, who, as already noted, quoted from Freud, may have been acquainted with, and influenced by, Freudian ideas concerning this affinity.

29. “Reuven: Where may one find a hint [deleted: a remnant] of the ‘whale’ in the Torah? Shimon: It is written: We remembered the fish we shall eat [eat – disrupted]” (emphases in original). The wordplay on which the joke is based relies on the similarity in Hebrew between the words “remnant,” “remember,” and “male” – all inflections of the root זכר. Another joke based on the same wordplay goes as follows:

On Sabbath Eve, the yeshiva boys would go down to the river to have some fun; and when none of the overseers were looking, they would grab that which Abraham the Patriarch, may he rest in peace, used to forbid and permit. And they would say lovingly: “This is the whale You have created for us to play with.”

As these jokes show, Jewish sexual jokes often used “whale” as a phallic metaphor.

30. According to Zaban, the sexual discourse was replaced by a culinary discourse in maskilic literature due to restrictive social conventions (Zaban 2014, 15–29).

31. The vagina is likened to a crypt in Jewish and non-Jewish sexual jokes alike: see Levy (1972, 43, 50), Hoffmann (1973, 248: X712.1.1) (“Contraction of the Vagina”) and the motifs mentioned thereafter. Fear of being devoured by the female body is also represented in comparable non-Jewish compilations: see, e.g., Randolph ([1976] 1986, 15–17) and Levy (1972, 14–15).

32. On the same matter, see the following archived joke:

It is written (2 Samuel 3:14) that David said: “Give me my wife Michal, whom I betrothed to myself for the price of a hundred Philistine foreskins [orlot].” [But] from Tractate Kilayim we learn that orlah-fruit [lit. “uncircumcised” fruit, that is, fruit produced by a tree during the first three years after planting – T. S.] cannot be used for sacramental purposes. [The Gemara] resolves this difficulty: the orlah [foreskin, fruit] is attached in the one case, detached in the other.

33. In another archived joke which partly parallels this one, the “spare parts” are used to create a man who is “all p …” Cf. Legman (1975, 618–627) and the relevant motifs in Hoffmann (1973, 195: F547) (“Remarkable Sexual Organs”) and 250: X712.2.1.6 (“The Bastard King of England”).