Wiktionary

Jewish

English

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Etymology

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From Jew +‎ -ish. Compare Middle English Judewissh (“Jewish”), Old English Iūdēisċ (“Jewish”), Dutch joodsch, joods (“Jewish”), German jüdisch (“Jewish”), Danish jødisk (“Jewish”), Swedish judisk (“Jewish”), Gothic 𐌾𐌿𐌳𐌰𐌹𐍅𐌹𐍃𐌺𐍃 (judaiwisks, “Jewish”). See also Yiddish.

Pronunciation

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  • enPR: jo͞oʹ-ĭsh, IPA(key): /ˈd͡ʒuː.ɪʃ/
  • Audio (US):(file)
  • Audio (US):(file)
  • Rhymes: -uːɪʃ

Adjective

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Jewish (comparative more Jewish, superlative most Jewish)

  1. Following the religion of Judaism.
    There are many Jewish people in France.
  2. Of or relating to Jews, their ethnicity, religion, or culture.
    I tried some traditional Jewish food yesterday.
    • 2009, Irene Silverblatt, “Foreword”, in Andrew B. Fisher, Matthew D. O'hara, editors, Imperial Subjects: Race and Identity in Colonial Latin America, page xi:
      The notion of blood purity was first elaborated in Europe, where it was used to separate Old Christians from Spain’s New Christians—women and men of Jewish and Muslim origin whose ancestors had converted to Christianity.
  3. (derogatory, offensive, dated) Greedy, miserly.
  4. Yiddish. (Can we verify(+) this sense?)
    • 1993, Philip Roth, Operation Shylock, page 47:
      The roots of American Jewry are not in the Middle East but in Europe—their Jewish style, their strong Jewish words, their strong nostalgia, their actual, weighable history, all this issues from their European origins. Grandpa did not hail from Haifa—he was a Jewish humanist, a spiritual, believing Jew, who complained not in an antique tongue called Hebrew but in colorful, rich, vernacular Yiddish.
    • 2007, Laura Levitt, American Jewish Loss After the Holocaust, page 69:
      Although I did know that my Jewish name was Yiddish, the rabbi who first taught me Hebrew in the 1960s insisted that we all have Hebrew and not Yiddish names
    • 2012, Aya Elyada, A Goy Who Speaks Yiddish: Christians and the Jewish Language in Early Modern Germany, Stanford University Press:

Alternative forms

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Synonyms

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Antonyms

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Derived terms

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Translations

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Noun

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Jewish (plural Jewishes)

  1. (non-native speakers' English, proscribed) A Jew.
    • 2022 November 26, ArgieSocDem, Twitter‎[1], archived from the original on 2022-12-09:
      The Statue of Liberty. A French gift with a poem made by a Jewish.
    • For more quotations using this term, see Citations:Jewish.

Proper noun

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Jewish

  1. (informal, proscribed) The Yiddish or Hebrew language.
    • quoted in 1947, William Lloyd Warner, Leo Srole, The Social Systems of American Ethnic Groups (page 232)
      I can't speak Jewish; I can't even understand it.
  2. The Yiddish language.
    • 2005 November 17, John Doyle Klier, Imperial Russia's Jewish Question, 1855-1881, Cambridge University Press, →ISBN, page 57:
      We believe that although he speaks Jewish, he speaks Russian quite badly and pretentiously.
    • 2009, Martin S. Jaffee, The End of Jewish Radar: Snapshots of a Postethnic American Judaism, iUniverse, →ISBN, page 115:
      After a day servicing commercial refrigeration through the five boroughs, Dad would bring home a story of a Chinese waiter on Second Avenue who “speaks Jewish like a Galitzianer,” or of a Mafioso in a Queens fruit market who “has such yiddisher taam, I call him Rabbi Zino.”
    • 2012 August 6, Ewa Kurek, Polish-Jewish Relations 1939-1945: Beyond the Limits of Solidarity, iUniverse, →ISBN, page 215:
      A Jew wearing a cap with a visor and a red scarf around his neck is answering a Jewish woman who has addressed him in Polish: “One speaks Jewish aboard the Jewish tram”. Another butts in: “What about in Hebrew?” “In Hebrew as well”.
      […] The Jews in Wereszczyn spoke Jewish amongst themselves, and Polish with us. They had their own Jewish accent, but they had a pretty good grasp of the Polish language.

Translations

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See also

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References

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