Jewish history is rife with Jews whose Jewishness did not "sit well" with them, unlike those who were willing to do more than forgo eating in restaurants once or twice a year, like on Tisha B'Av.
I started thinking about this after reading a report about soccer, of all things. It was recently proven beyond any doubt that the ball in Geoff Hurst's famous controversial goal in the 1966 World Cup fully crossed the line. The game in question, between England and West Germany, ended in a 2:2 tie. In overtime, the English scored another two goals, but people claimed that the first hadn't crossed the line of the goal post. Well, it did.
England's right-back in that game was George Cohen. He wasn't Jewish, and neither was his father. Somewhere back in the 19th century, he had a Jewish great-grandfather who, as part of the exhilaration at the new world of gentile women that opened up to him following the emancipation of British Jews, married a Christian woman.
the great-grandfather enjoyed the newly available amusement park of shiksas [gentile women] and married a Christian. His descendants weren't Jewish – as proven by the fact they could play soccer.
In principle, everything having to do with people's personal choices is not supposed to be any of our business, but it pulls at the heartstrings to read that someone named Cohen is not a Jew. Only his last name remained as evidence of the process of historical choices, a test of survival that we are faced with whenever we are less hated than usual – allowing us the freedom to hate ourselves.
The Jews of England were expelled in 1290 and allowed back only in the mid-17th century. When Shakespeare wrote about Shylock, there were no Jews in England. It is unlikely Shakespeare ever even caught a glimpse of a Jew, but he thought he knew enough to write about them.
"The Merchant of Venice" is an anti-Semitic play; recent softened interpretations ("Shylock is portrayed in a humane light") ignore, as usual, the differences in the mentalities of that era and ours. Shakespeare gave his characters depth because he was a better playwright than others, that's all. It was accepted then to portray Jews as greedy and corrupt. There was nothing socially unacceptable about it.
Hatred of Jews is a kind of mental illness; people hate Jews without even seeing them. It is as if I hated hippopotamuses and couldn't sleep at night because I was so angry at the hippopotamus lobby's schemes to take over the world. Actually, it's nothing like that, because hippopotamuses would never start loathing themselves.
In Vienna, near the Hundertwasser House, there is a plaque commemorating one of the most horrific events in the city's history. In 1421, the Jews were falsely accused of cooperating with the Protestant Hussite rebels. They were tortured, imprisoned and starved, and forced to convert to Christianity. Whose idea was it? A Jewish convert to Christianity who served as an adviser to the young Archduke Albert of Austria. The 210 Jews who survived were led to an enormous bonfire in the city square and ordered to convert or be burned alive. Most of them chose death, and many jumped into the flames of their own volition.
But of course, we must not compare this to the sacrifice we are asked to make by not eating in restaurants on Tisha B'Av, a national fast day. There are limits, after all.
