• freagle@lemmygrad.ml
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    11 months ago

    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.

    • boboblaw [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.net
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      11 months ago

      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.

    • PolandIsAStateOfMind@lemmygrad.ml
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      11 months ago

      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.