Throw the Jew Down the Well
I was watching a clip of Borat getting a group of rednecks in a bar to sing “Throw the Jew down the well” and it just seemed bogus. The scene was supposed to illustrate southern or redneck racism. I thought it only illustrated the power of a camera crew and the ability of an entertainer to get people to sing along. I figured the bar patrons were paid and directed, directed to sing along. They didn’t seem that enthusiastic but I am a southerner and redneck is my heritage. And that wasn’t redneck enthusiasm.
Also we don’t throw anything down a well. You throw a person down your well, he dies, your well is contaminated, ruined. Enough rednecks grow up using well water that we don’t find the idea of throwing a dead or living person down a well attractive. Talk about “don’t shit where you eat.” It’s just alien. Southerners lynch. Not throw people down wells.
And we don’t call them wells. A well is a pipe that is sunk down into the water table and a pump is used to bring the water up. Even if you took the pump apart you couldn’t put anything down a well bigger than a mouse. What Borat calls a well we call a cistern.
Also anti-Semitism is not common in the south. At least not among rednecks. First of all Jews are mighty thin on the ground in the rural south. Second, redneck prejudice is aimed at blacks. There isn’t much room for any special prejudice against Jews. It is true that the average Southerner believes all Jews will go to hell but he believes that all members of every Christian sect but his own will go to hell too. As well as some member of his sect. There is plenty of hell to go around.
When I was growing up the few Jews in town seemed just another sect. And there are so many sects in the south. The Church of Christ, Church of God in Christ, Baptist, Southern Baptist, Assembly of God, Methodists, Seventh-Day Adventist, and so on and so on. Many little churches have no wider affiliation, just a group of maybe a hundred people with their own tiny sect. I’m still amazed the Republicans were able to weld these sects into a political force. Maybe the Democrats need to emphasize their differences to break that coalition apart.
The Jews were no different. They were going to hell but so was everyone else except your own little sect. The weirdest thing about the Jews was they weren’t actively recruiting new members. That is what southern religion is about: Proselytizing. Evangelizing. Trying to convert people, mostly other Christians, to your sect.
I never heard a redneck say that the Jews were guilty of killing Jesus. That idea would have been thought pretty weird since Jesus and the apostles were Jewish and since the Bible pretty much pinned that on the Romans. I know sometimes Jewish people see themselves at the center of the world, at least as victims. Not so in the South. The central victim in the south is always black.
Jews were always a tiny minority in the south and were pretty assimilated.
During the Civil War, just to name a few prominent Jews in the South, the Speaker of the Louisiana House (Edwin Moise) and Louisiana’s Lieutenant Governer (H.M. Hyams) were Jews, and during the Civil War, the Mayor of Richmond, capital of the Confederacy, was a Jew (later connected by family ties to Confederate president Jefferson Davis), and of course Judah Benjamin was variously the Secretary of State and Secretary of War of the Confederate government.
http://cgi.stanford.edu/group/wais/cgi-bin/index.php?p=387
There were even Jews in the original KKK.
But Jews will point out the lynching of Leo Frank as southern anti-Semitism. But Frank was lynched not because he was Jewish but because he was a rich Yankee factory manager forcing some of his female employees into sex as the price of keeping their jobs and who was convicted of raping and killing a 12 year old girl who worked for him. It’s best to remember that the Klan was founded as a vigilante group to punish criminals when there was little or no law after the civil war. Not just black suspected criminals. I was reading about lynchings in the town where I was born. Most of the victims were black but the local paper also exhorted the citizenry to lynch various white alleged criminals as well.
So when Borat gets the rednecks to sing “Throw the Jew Down the Well” he is working out his own cultural stereotype of victimization (Cohen/Borat is Jewish). Not a southern one.
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© Alllie 2006
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