this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2023
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Everyone calls everyone else dogs, it's literally the most common insult in the world.
With a very well documented history in anti-Semitic propaganda. We can criticize Israel without using phrases that attract white supremacists to our spaces
What? Dog in reference to “Jewish” people has always been towards the gentiles, it even shows up in the Bible.
Dog is a basic insult and not a slur or antisemitic. History and linguistics does not agree with you.
Here’s Cambridge even saying the same.
Hey thanks for this. You are correct that I was confused. I had falsely believed that calling Jews "dogs" was a long anti-Semitic tradition. I did more research and discovered that actually historically they were called rats and lice and very few examples exist of anti-semitics tropes comparing Jews and dogs.
The most salient example of that was an American trend to hang a sign on your shop that said "No Jews or dogs allowed", but that doesn't meet the standard of what I had believed.
All good mate. No worries.
Could you provide sources for it being specifically used as antisemitic dogwistle, especially that you claim it's very well documented? Calling any ethnoreligious group "dogs" is of course not very nice (good that nobody here did it), but i relly never heard of thar particlar insult being specifically antisemitic unlike let's say "k_kes" or "l_ce" or many others which do have specific context.
I dug for sources and discovered I was wrong. I had falsely believed that calling Jews "dogs" was a long anti-Semitic tradition. I did more research and discovered that actually historically they were called rats and lice and very few examples exist of anti-semitics tropes comparing Jews and dogs, as you said.
The most salient example of that was an American trend to hang a sign on your shop that said "No Jews or dogs allowed", but that doesn't meet the standard of what I had believed.
Yeah, the antisemitic comparisons I've seen have typically been in the "vermin" category. Implying that Jews need to exterminated. I guess dogs wouldn't fit the rhetoric well because people are generally sympathetic to dogs...
I know the dog comparison is used pejoratively in a couple of other languages, but the connection there seems to be to dogs barking - basically calling someone a nuisance.
Yeah, and respect for you for admitting it. For comparison, nazis also called Poles "pigs" with high consistence, but no one ever thought "pig" is antipolish slur since it's also one of those often used by everyone, including Poles for Germans.
Now when i think of it Polish slurs for Germans are pretty weak considering the circumstances, we have "szkop" (castrated ram, but also from the specific nazi helmet shape looking like pot or from Czech word for "highlander", literally "coming from up there"), "Helmut" (from the popular name), "Szwab" (from land of Swabia), even the worst case when we officially called the cockroach "Prusak" is also borrowed contextually from Czech language.