This week, one of Charles Dickens’ most memorable characters returned to the small screen in the latest adaptation of Oliver Twist. Fagin, as envisaged by the author, pandered to all the worst stereotypes of the race from which he hailed.
Far removed from the all-singing, all-dancing loveable rogue portrayed by Ron Moody, the wretched Jew was, in the words of his creator, “a miser, my dear—only a miser”.
While successive dramatisations of Oliver Twist have sought to break free from the bigotry of the original text, in the same way that contemporary Shylocks have sought a sympathetic side to Shakespeare’s grasping financier, sadly in the real world the association of the Jew as miser has remained.
And for many, who know no better, the two words are virtually synonymous. Not everyone, it seems, has read the dictionary definitions which note that the verb ‘to jew’, meaning to bargain sharply or to beat down in price, is offensive.
One can only hope that
Sean Smith’s turn of phrase was born out of ignorance; that growing up in Portsmouth he lacked exposure to Jews or Judaism beyond the Shylocks and Fagins of fiction and simply picked up the term in an environment where ‘jewboy’ was a byword for ‘stingy’. The finger of blame can then be pointed at a society and an education system which fail to rectify such abusive cultural references. That said, the
Same Difference singer, was apparently clued up enough to know at the time that what he’d said was wrong and didn’t suit the smiley child-friendly persona that propelled his act into the
X Factor finals on Saturday night.
Totally Jewish
