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- 12/08: Seth Greenland
Is there a word in Yiddish for "non-Jewish Black woman"? |
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 by Kristine Maitland, August 23, 2007 |
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My own heritage is British Guyanese: my mother left Guyana just after it gained independence. If there is one thing I know about Guyana is that the people there have a word for everything. I had to call my mother and get the linguistics lesson. If your background is Black and Portuguese there’s a word for it: "santantone" (which actually refers to San Antonio – a slave ship stopover point). If you’re Black and East Indian, it’s "dugla", which is probably something offensive in Hindistani.
Of course there a simpler word for me – mutt, which can just as easily be translated to "Canadian".
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Anonymous
schvartza?
Anonymous
shiksa schvartza?
Joey Kurtzman
Oy. That probably IS the closest thing that Yiddish has to a term for a non-Jewish black woman. In most shtetls they wouldn't have encountered a lot of women of African descent. You can use the combinatorial power of language to pile a couple distasteful epithets on top of one another as the above anon has done, but I suggest you don't. We'd need to create a new term suitable for an American Yiddish, rather than the shtetl variety.
You know what, let's see if we can get Yiddishist and Jewcy user portnoy on the job! See if he can coin a non-pejorative Yiddishism for a non-Jewish black woman. Will update you.
Anonymous
nisht honkeleh
portnoy
Yiddish terms for black vary. Shvartse, in Yiddish, does not necessarily have the derogatory feel that it does in English. For example, there were occasional articles in the Yiddish press of the 1920s-30s about Di shvartse yidn fun harlem (The Black Jews of Harlem). The other term found in the press was neger, a Yiddish variant of negro, the commonly used term of the pre-1950s period. The female form of that would be negerke. I'm not sure what today's Yiddish press does. They probably use "Afrikanishe-amerikanerin," or, African-American. That doesn't do the job for non-American blacks, but other variants are easily created.
There is also a tangentially related phrase that relates only to Jews: shvarts-kheynevdik, which literally means, "charmingly black." This is a kind of Jewish "black is beautiful" expression and can be found throughout Yiddish literature describing Jews who are dark haired and dark skinned.