Where "Kike" Comes From

We know that the slur has something to do with Jews traveling in rural America in the first years of the 20th century. Do we know more than that?


Observation
March 3 2021
About Philologos

Philologos, the renowned Jewish-language columnist, appears twice a month in Mosaic. Questions for him may be sent to his email address by clicking here.

Got a question for Philologos? Ask him directly at [email protected].

No sooner had I written my previous column on the old children’s chant of “sticks and stones may break my bones but names can never hurt me” than the Lowell, Massachusetts school-board member Robert Hoey decided to put me to the test. In a video of a school-board meeting that quickly made the national news, Hoey can be seen and heard saying, in reference to the school district’s former chief financial officer who had moved to another position, “We lost a ****—oh, I mean the Jewish guy—I hate to say it, but that’s what people used to say behind his back.” The word blacked out on the video, the news reports related, was “kike.”

Hoey, I’m happy to say, resigned from the Lowell school board, although had all this happened in the old days that I lamented previously I might have said to him, “Listen, you dumb Mick, that’s no way to talk about Jews. Let’s go have a beer and I’ll tell you why.” Micks, for the benefit of the younger set, was once a pejorative term for Irish Americans—and the Hoeys are as Irish as they come, being descendants of the 1st-century Irish king Fiatach Finn mac Dáire.

Those days, for better or for worse, are gone forever. Gone too, I would have thought, was the word kike, at least when used by school-board members. But we all make the mistake of thinking that what we don’t hear isn’t said—and unless someone is indiscrete enough to release a video, Jews never know what is said about them when they’re not in the room. Kike, it seems, is alive and well, even if it has gone deep underground.

But where does the word itself, whose earliest written attestations, according to the Random House Dictionary of American Slang, date to the first years of the 20th century, come from? That’s something the etymologists aren’t sure about. What seems fairly certain is that an older form of kike is kiky, and that this word at first referred not to Jews in general but to recent Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. Our best clue to its origins is found in a memoir published in 1926 by J.H.A. Lacher, the author of a history of German immigration to the state of Wisconsin. Writing in the scholarly journal American Speech. Lacher stated, as quoted by H.L. Mencken in the supplementary volume to his The American Language:

In Russia there began some 40 years ago a fierce persecution of the Jews. . . . Many found their way to the United States. . . . Here they offered keen competition to their brethren [i.e., Jews] of German origin, who soon insisted that the business ethics and standards of living and culture of these Russians were far lower than theirs. Since the name of so many of these Russian Jews ends in –ki or –ky, German-American Jewish traveling men designated them contemptuously as kikis, a term which, naturally, was soon contracted to kikes. When I heard the term kikis for the first time at Winona, Minn. about 40 years ago, it was a Jewish salesman of German descent who used it and explained it to me; but in the course of a few years it disappeared, kike being used instead.

There is no reason to doubt Lacher’s account of tensions between German-Jewish and Russian-Jewish peddlers and commercial travelers (a trade dominated in those days by Jews) in rural America. In general, there was no little prejudice toward East European Jewish immigrants among German Jews, both in Germany and in the United States, whose small Jewish population was largely German-Jewish in composition until Jews from the Russian Empire began arriving in large numbers in the 1880s. What is far less certain, however, is Lacher’s tracing of kiki to Russian and Polish last names, whose common ending was not -ki or -ky but -ski or -sky. This ending, which is a Slavic relational suffix denoting a connection or belonging to something or somewhere, was originally a sign of Russian or Polish nobility, much like French de and German von. And like de and von, it was appropriated in the course of the 19th century by many non-aristocratic families too, Jews among them.

The problem is that if a pejorative term for East European Jews that started with Jews of German descent and eventually spread to non-Jews (who later used it for all Jews) was coined from -sky or -ski, it should have resulted in skikies rather than kikies and skikes rather than kikes. There is no tendency among speakers of English to drop the s before a k sound and no reason why it might have been dropped in this case. Phonetically, it doesn’t make sense.

This is probably why a second theory about kike developed, one deriving it from the Yiddish word kaykl, a circle. According to this proposed etymology, illiterate East European Jews who could not sign their names, and who refused to make the traditional “X” in lieu of a signature because they thought it resembled a Christian cross, made a circle instead. Two alternate versions of such a scenario are presented by Leo Rosten in his The Joys of Yiddish. The first goes:

Jewish storekeepers on the Lower East Side [of New York City], and peddlers who went far out into the hinterlands with their wares, conducted much of their trade on credit; and these early merchants, many of whom could not read or write English, would check off a payment from a customer, in their own or the customer’s account book, with a little circle (“I’ll make you a kikeleh”)—never an “X” or a cross.

And here is the second:

The word kike was born on Ellis Island, when Jewish immigrants who were illiterate (or could not use Roman-English letters), when asked to sign the entry-forms with their customary “X,” refused and instead made a circle. . . . Before long the immigration inspectors were calling anyone who signed with an “O” instead of an “X” a kikel, . . . or, finally and succinctly, a kike.

Rosten cites a chain of documentation for this second version leading back to the Jewish publisher Philip Cowen, who served as an immigration official at Ellis Island from 1905 to 1927. Version 1 also has documentary support, cited not by Rosten but by the American linguist David Gold: a letter to a 1914 issue of the weekly American Israelite that spoke of circles being used in this way by Jewish peddlers. This account is closer to the -sky theory of kike in that it traces the word back to the same milieu, thus confirming the testimony of J.H.A. Lacher.

Yet ultimately, the kaykl derivation seems implausible, too. If one considers its Ellis Island version, most male heads of East European Jewish families arriving in America were literate enough to sign their names in Hebrew/Yiddish letters, which would certainly have been more acceptable to the immigration authorities than a circle; while as for its peddler version, it is even more unlikely that a Jew who had been in America long enough to become a house-to-house salesman in rural areas would not have known how to write his name in Latin characters. It is one thing, after all, to be truly literate in a language and another and far simpler one to be able to sign one’s name in it—especially since many signatures that are considered perfectly valid for all commercial purposes have no discernible letters in them at all.

In a word, while we can state with some confidence that kike originated with Jewish commercial travelers in rural America, we will probably never know for a certainty why it did. All we can say for a fact is that it has been around for at least 140 years and doesn’t seem about to go away any time soon.

Got a question for Philologos? Ask him directly at [email protected].

More about: Anti-Semitism, History & Ideas