Semite Like Me: When Gentiles Pose as Jews

• In Event: Passing and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History

Abstract

Conventional accounts of Jewish “passing” entail low-status Jews passing as gentiles in order to assimilate up into Christian cultures. My larger project entails the study of “down-passing” which includes gentiles “downpassing” as Jews; Jews as blacks; Israelis as Arabs. However, in this paper I restrict myself to the cases—in undercover journalism, memoir, and in fiction—of gentiles down-passing as Jewish. I will assess the various philosophical and political implications of gentile solidarity through temporary identification as Jewish.
Cases of gentiles purposely passing as—or being taken as—Jews are rare; so much so that the fictional cases of Arthur Miller’s Focus, Sholom Aleicheim’s A Bloody Hoax, Sidney Lumet’s A Stranger Among Us, and Laura Z. Hobson’s Gentleman’s Agreement are the most well-known. Less attended to are the actual incidents of the French priest Charles de Foucauld, who disguised himself as a rabbi in North Africa, and a recent spat of “undercover Jews” in Europe calling attention street-level anti-Semitism.
The gesture of “downpassing” out of solidarity was made most famous by the legend of the people of Denmark who, it has been told, during WWII all wore the yellow star as signs of solidarity with the endangered Jews. Similar gestures of sacrifice are immortalized in Rolf Hochhuth’s The Deputy.
These forms of identification teach us much—in their various contexts—about the plasticity of Jewish identity, the imagination of Jews that projects a fictitious course of events for gentile passers, and, finally, the ethical importance of cross-community solidarity.

author

• Elliot Ashley Ratzman, Temple University