Jew Hear That?

Jerusalem Post.

I had Dr. Google looking for "Trump shekel -Eric" to filter out references to the current scandal. Most of the results were about a commemorative coin, a half-shekel, being issued in a grift operation of the "nascent Sanhedrin and the Mikdash (Temple) Educational Center", with Emperor Trump's profile laid over that of Cyrus the Great, getting rendered into Caesar as it were, but then there was that really useful bit on the 2016 rallies. I'll get back to it at the end.

The current scandal being, you know, this one:

"Don't you think people look through the fact that you can write a sensational, nonsense book, CNN will definitely have you on there because they love to trash the president," Eric Trump said on Wednesday's "Fox and Friends," the network's morning show, when asked about Woodward's book. 

"It will mean you sell three extra books, you make three extra shekels," Eric Trump added. "Is that really where we are? I think people see through this." (CBS)

I didn't want to rush out and recklessly start calling Eric a Nazi:

I don't ever want to defend Eric Trump, but he could be thinking of some translation of Matthew 26:15 and the payment from the Romans to Judas where the "pieces of silver" are shekels. https://t.co/2f7uVwkL4B That would be deplorably over-the-top too, but not literally Nazi.

— Yasphalt Jungle (@Yastreblyansky) September 12, 2018

Now you're making me work. I was thinking he might have stopped in a church or something. The best possibility would be Jesus on Netflix. Research indicates the Mel Gibson shitshow didn't use "shekels" but this thing from 2013 did https://t.co/CiCUclOjD2

— Yasphalt Jungle (@Yastreblyansky) September 12, 2018

Which would be pretty weird, evidently—making Trump an analogue of Jesus, savior and martyr, is a pretty normal thing among the serious Trumpies, but making Bob Woodward into Judas Iscariot is a bit melodramatic. When was he Trump's favorite disciple? Lolwut?

Only then again, on thinking about it, that doesn't absolve Eric from the charge of using Nazi rhetoric at all.

Because in the first place, what kind of word is "shekel"? Friends were suggesting in comments at NMMNB yesterday that it could be some kind of comic slang from New York City, like "schlep" or "oy vey", but it can't have the same source, which we know very well: those are yiddishisms, spread by Jewish comedians, from Shecky Greene and Henny Youngman through Jon Stewart, on television, but "shekel" isn't Yiddish, it's Hebrew, and it's just not Borscht Belt vocabulary.

So where is it coming from? As an American slang term for "money", it's not just unusual, it's unique: we've got a thousand synonyms of the kind listed in David Corn's list in the tweet above, but exotic or ancient currencies aren't among them—sesterces or drachmae, denari or dinars or doubloons, sequins or shillings, quattrini or pieces of eight. It's also not coming from the Republic of Israel where the currency has been called "shekels" since 1980 ("New Shekel" since a 1985 revaluation); it's much older than that.

And it certainly is used with an anti-Semitic intention at least sometimes, as the Wiktionary notes:

That notion of bribery, and the "Jewish elite", is key: Daily Stormer–type nouveau Nazis use the word "shekel" to refer to the hordes of cash held by the hook-nosed Elders who rule the world from their counting-houses, out of the usage of old-style Nazi-type Nazis, and the centuries-old European tradition of Jew hatred in which Nazism was born, with reference to the traditional Christian libel against the Jews, that Judas took a bribe in Tyrian shekels from the high priest Joseph Caiaphas to deliver the Lord to his executioners—Judas, whose very name (Yehuda in Hebrew, "Judas" is of course Greek) is the etymological doublet of "Judaea" and "Jew": the eternal Jew as the embodiment of betrayal for cash.

That's the usage Eric Trump was employing, and it's not hard to imagine it might have come from his own upbringing in the home of a man who was comfortable, talking to a the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino president John O'Donnell about a black finance employee,

“Yeah, I never liked the guy. I don’t think he knows what the f––– he’s doing. My accountants up in New York are always complaining about him. He’s not responsive. And isn’t it funny, I’ve got black accountants at the Trump Castle and at Trump Plaza. Black guys counting my money! I hate it. The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day. Those are the kind of people I want counting my money. No one else.”

I couldn’t believe I was hearing this. But Donald went on, “Besides that, I’ve got to tell you something else. I think that the guy is lazy. And it’s probably not his fault because laziness is a trait in blacks. It really is, I believe that. It’s not something they can control. … Don’t you agree?”

Trump would no doubt say he was being "nice" to Jews in that exchange, but it's soaked in stereotypes as much about Jews as about African Americans.

However innocently other people might use the word, the way we used to use terms like "gyp" to mean cheat, in an unconscious slur against the persecuted Roma (h/t Jordan for coming up with the example), Eric Trump is using it exactly the way he was brought up to use it. Like the guy at the rally reported in the Jerusalem Post less than a week before the election, associating the press with his international Jewish conspiracy:

Anti-Semitic epithets have become a common occurrence at Trump rallies. Last week, one supporter in Arizona turned to the media and chanted "Jew-S-A." Swastika signs have repeatedly been left in media pens along the GOP nominee's campaign trail, and last month, a Nazi slur, "Lügenpresse," meaning "lying press," was shouted at another Trump event in Ohio.

"You're a shame to your profession," the Trump supporter repeated. "You sell out for a few shekels. For a few shekels, you sell out."

Now Trump refers to the press as the "enemy of the people", and Bob Woodward is, though as WASPy as they come, a journalist. Don't tell me Eric doesn't know what "shekels" are. When I said it was "not literally Nazi" I was wrong.

Proposed design.