Probably no other ethnic group has been vilified with so much linguistic ingenuity as the Jews. For the moment I will leave out of account Kike and Smouch and say what little I can about Sheeny, a word first recorded in English in 1824 (so the OED). (An aside. There was a time when lexicographers did not dare to mention the F-word and the “low” names of the genitals and bodily functions, or some law prohibited them from doing so. The sexual revolution emancipated dictionary makers, and apart from public radio and public television, one can see and hear potty-mouthed commentators and hosts everywhere. The joy of it! But curiously, my prudish spellchecker suggests that Sheen(e)y and Smouch do not exist. Ethnic slurs have become more offensive than the rudest words in creation. Today’s dictionaries are more realistic and include everything, with warnings, to be sure.)
As a rule, ethnic slurs go back to some word or name in the language of the despised group (and throughout history every “alien” has been despised): compare Dago for Spaniards and Italians and Fritzes, used collectively about the Germans in wartime Russia. But some such words are tricky. The best example is perhaps French Boche “a German soldier,” coined during World War I. My database on Boche is large, but it contains no definitive answer, though the best French and German etymologists of that time (and later) dealt with the problem. It is irritating to observe how the slang that surfaced in the memory of the people still living, baffles seasoned investigators. Such episodes teach historical linguists, who try to reconstruct the forms and meanings of past epochs, great humility.
A few suggestions on the origin of Sheeny are, as usual, mere guesses. I am sorry to see a respectable dictionary taking Sheeny for a variant of the adjective sheeny “lustrous, shining.” Attempts to connect the two were abandoned long ago. Nor can Sheeny be an alteration of Zhid, a Russian-Polish offensive name for a Jew (I mentioned it in my recent post on squaw): their sounds are too dissimilar. It is true that Jew dog and other gentle phrases of the same type were used widely for centuries throughout Europe, but the derivation of Sheeny from French chien “dog” lacks foundation. Sheeny is not a French word and is not pronounced like chien. This etymology was debated in the once popular magazine The Open Court. A search for an appropriate etymon in the vocabulary of Hebrew and Yiddish holds out more promise, but here, too, lots of nonsense has been said on the subject. An old hypothesis (my reference goes back to 1889) traces Sheeny to the Hebrew curse misah (or mise) meshina “strange death.” Allegedly, gentiles, while persecuting and tormenting the Jews, heard this curse so many times that they abstracted the last two syllables of meshina and turned it into Sheeny. One needs a good deal of faith to accept such a derivation.
The meshina etymology, besides being quite incredible, has a drawback that deserves special mention. The first vowel of -shina is short, while Sheeny has always been pronounced with a long vowel. This discrepancy could have been ignored only if -shina were hurled at the offender with a Russian accent, for in Russian, stressed vowels increase their duration, and English-speakers do often hear ee where short Russian i is meant, but to the best of our knowledge, Sheeny did not pass through Russia en route to England. This is why I think Sheeny should not be traced to German shin, a cant word for “miser; base fellow; cheat” (an etymology proposed by a distinguished scholar).
For many years Gerald L. Cohen has been publishing a biweekly periodical Comments on Etymology. From time to time he reprints the most interesting contributions in collections titled Studies in Slang. One of his regular correspondents was Nathan Süsskind (an American, but he spelled his name with an umlaut). In 1985 he sent Cohen a series of letters on Sheeny that appeared in both Comments on Etymology and in Studies in Slang, Part II (1989). Neither the periodical nor the book series can be well known to the wide readership interested in word origins, so that below I will reproduce the relevant part of Süsskind’s summary.
“Sheeny, a jeering nickname for ‘Jew’ arose in 19th-century London. There a colony of so-called enlightened Jews from Germany, would-be ‘assimilationists’, felt embarrassed by later arriving Jews from the area of Frankfort who were still clinging to their traditions in piety, speech, dress, and trim: they wore long, untrimmed beards and earlocks, kaftans, and special hats; instead of High German they spoke a Jewish dialect (so-called Judeo-German—then considered broken German, today recognized as Western Yiddish)…The assimilating Jews… turned the admiring appellation sheener Yeed or sheene Yeedo (ee as in English eel) into jeering and probably imitated mockingly the fondling of the beard by moving their palms over their shaved faces as if stroking their own beards. Gentile Jew baiters then picked up the emphatic sheene of sheene Yeedo without necessarily understanding it quite, but realizing that it wasn’t exactly complimentary.”
Admittedly, this is not the most convincing etymology one can wish for. In his letters, Süsskind said many interesting things about beards in Jewish life but presented no evidence that the mocking gesture had been common or that the assimilators had jeered their conservative brethren in the presence of non-Jews. Yet the idea that Sheeny has something to do with Yiddish sheen “beautiful” looks plausible. It also occurred to Ernest Weekley, who wrote in his dictionary: “From Yiddish pronunc[iation] of Ger[man] schön, beautiful, used in praising wares. (A guess).” Weekley’s scenario does not inspire much confidence, but if Sheeny goes back to Yiddish sheen “schön” (which seems likely: a hateful, oddly dressed, and therefore ugly person was ironically called beautiful, with a most frequent word from his language being chosen for the occasion to increase the fun), the slur originated in the mouths of the detractors (a regular case), rather than the Jews; -y would then be a diminutive suffix. Perhaps this is a venue to pursue in the open court of execrable etymologies.
Headline image credit: Old pages. Public domain via Pixabay.
Anatoly Liberman is the author of
There is support for Professor Liberman’s connection of sheeny and schoen ‘beautiful, nice’. But the connection is not by way of irony, e.g. “Curly” for the bald one of The Three Stooges. As for phonetics, Yiddish, Austrian and Bavarian German “shane” were more heard on the streets of New York than standard German schoen. And millions of gentiles knew the Yiddish hit song “Bei mir bist du shane”, which made the cross-over from Yiddish musical theater to mainstream US and even made the German and Russian “hit parade”. See Sholom Secunda in Wikipedia for a good run-down. As for semantic development, metonymy would be a good place to look. Hawkers and talkers can be named for their characteristic noises. “Nicely-Nicely” is the name of a character in Damon Runyon. Shoe-shine boys call out their service: “shine!”, hence the white racist word for blacks. In Brendan Behan’s book “Borstal Boy” the nickname hung on a reform school (Borstal) mate was “Chew-Lips”, the cry of the London flower market hawker: “Tulips!”. “Shane” would be an excellent hawker’s cry, praising their product: “shane!”. (I use the real English pronoun “they” here, as opposed to the PC “his or her’.)
Almost certainly that was the Nathan Süsskind, Professor in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages at the City College of New York until his retirement in 1974. Though he was indeed an American, he was not so by birth; he was born in what is now Slovakia and was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1907, and died in New York City in 1994. He was also the director of the Institute for Yiddish Lexicology, and (though a native speaker of Eastern Yiddish) a world authority on Western Yiddish.
If Süsskind says that the WY for ‘beautiful’ was sheen, it probably was. The EY is shayn. In the phrase shayner yid, however, it refers not to personal appearance but to moral rectitude: “a shayner yid is a Jew of whom other Jews are proud” (Leo Rosten).
A very interesting article. However, “zhid” (Żyd) isn’t an offensive word in Polish. It’s a standard term, like “Jew” in English.
[…] and bodily functions, or some law prohibited them from doing so. The sexual revolution emancipa click for more var _wh = ((document.location.protocol==’https:’) ? “https://sec1.woopra.com” : […]
[…] Curse Around Ethnic Slurs. Part 2: SHEENYAn old hypothesis (my reference goes back to 1889) traces Sheeny to the Hebrew curse misah (or mise) […]
Let me take a stab at explaining the phonological evolution of ‘sheeny.’ To begin with the stressed vowel,the standard Yiddish form of the adjective for beautiful is ‘sheyn’. In all West Yiddish dialects and in two out of three East Yiddish the word has the dipthong /ei/. (The exception is Central Yiddish, where the diphthong is /ai/. In popular London English /ei/ is shifted to /ai/. Speakers of London English would have had trouble pronouncing Yiddish ‘sheyn’ with an /ei/ and so substituted an /i:/ sound yielding the stressed vowel in ‘sheeny’.
The unstressed vowel in ‘sheeny’ is easier to explain. It is an English version of the Yiddish adjectival suffixes /e/ or /er/.
Dear Anatoly,
Based on time frame and hard examples of contemporaneous transliteration mondegreens from French to English such as “Gardyloo” fron Gardez L’Eau, and “Hoppin’ John” from Pois Pigeon, I gotta go with Sheenie from Chien.
Cordially Yours,
Jonathan Kaufman
Just looking for meaning of my name. I read years ago; for the Jews themselves meant a shrewd biz man especially in diamonds.
I was told by an Irish plumber that the word sheeny means a little round hat that was worn by some men in Ireland and when the Ashkenazim from Poland and Russia immigrated to Ireland after the pogroms and they were all seen with their yarmulkas…….little round hats…….the name for this group of newcomers became “the sheenys”.
This sounds very logical to me.
[…] pronunciation of Sheeny. Two correspondents sent me their comments on the origin of Sheeny. Among other things, a question arose about the word’s pronunciation. The best-known form of the […]
[…] 12/22: A longish article, included below, describes the Chanukah celebrations led by the pupils of the Hebrew Sunday school and day school. Lasdusky was toast master, and “Charles Frankel, who is now a student at Harvard college, made an address upon the life of the Jewish students at that great institution of learning…they commingled socially and were received cordially by all of the Christian students.” Also my great-grandfather B. Hepps, president of the congregation, “explained the derivation and the use of the word ‘Sheeney,’ as applied by Christians to the Jews. He explained that it came from an old word meaning ‘second.’ That the Christians regarded the Jews as being second and that thus they corrupted the word into its present usage as a slang term. He expressed an opinion that the nickname of the Jew would soon be changed to a word meaning first or equal.” While’s wonderful to see how my love of languages traces to my great-grandfather, this clever faux-etymology from the Hebrew word “sheni” is unlikely! […]
[…] what you would get. A visit froh (sic) Cox’s ordinance officer and a fine after conviction as Sheenys. Not as my Hebrew brothers, as they terms (sic) you now and will continue to term you until after […]
That a word associated with Jews has roots in shiny and lustrous is not far fetched, in the sense words can take on connotations. Further.. why dismiss the Russian connection give the location of Jews in the Russian Polish pale of this time.
My wife passed this along to me as we were attending a baseball game at Fenway Park (Red Sox) last night and I was telling her and my daughter that when I was a teenager and working at Fenway, an Irish-American called me a “Little Sheeny” (he was also “ecumenical” in that he had racist descriptors for Jews and African-Americans). I was used to Kike, etc., but since then I had always associated this slur to the anti-semitic Irish (and I had lots of Irish friends who weren’t fyi) sector. I think that the derivation from England would make the most sense since we could attribute it more broadly to the British Isles. And yes this article although informative could been edited down a bit.
“Sheeny” is clearly of Gaelic derivation & probably has Irish origins. Any person of Anglo-Celtic heritage can see that immediately.
There is a comic short story, “The Amateur Jew”, published in “Everybody’s Magazine” in NY in June 1915 by ER Lipsett, a Litvak Jew who had lived in Ireland but was by now in New York. It is about a young Irish lad, Denny Nolan, who wants to become a Jew in NY’s Lower East Side, and it includes the following: “The morning of Rosh Hashonah, when all the Sheenies was coming into the Sheenigo, Denny’s heart swelled out with pride at his father…”
Now it might be contrived, but what do you think, Anatoly? Is there any other example of synagogue being pronounced something like “sheenagogue”, which might make “sheeny” a contraction for those who visited such places?
The short story is full of Yiddish-Irish tension, btw, but in a childlike, humorous way.
[…] got a mixed reputation, but for a sheeny, he’s got a lot of good qualities.” “Sheeny” is an anti-Jewish slur from the 19th […]
[…] got a mixed reputation, but for a sheeny, he’s got a lot of good qualities.” “Sheeny” is an anti-Jewish slur from the 19th […]