Jewish Invention Myths: The Pet Hamster

The Jewish Daily Forward – that bastion of demi-educated clickbait insanity – has published yet another moronic article – having previously claimed among other things that Meghan Markle was jewish based on her dancing the Hora at her first wedding – (1) whose author Sam Bromer claimed that pet hamsters have a ‘secret jewish history’. (2)

The article is a regurgitated and abridged version of Rob Dunn’s similarly lopsided 2011 article in the magazine of the Smithsonian Institute. (3)

Bromer’s logic is that because the first live specimens were captured in 1930 in Syria by a jewish zoologist named Israel Aharoni. This therefore makes the pet hamster ‘jewish’.

This is nonsensical as it would mean for example that the horse is Indo-European given that it was likely first domesticated on the Eurasian Steppes around 3500 B.C.

As an aside Bromer didn’t do his research either. Since while Aharoni is generally credited with capturing the first live specimen of the Syrian Hamster (alternatively called the Golden Hamster) in 1930. It was actually first captured and catalogued by British zoologist Robert Waterhouse in 1839. (4)

Notably Aharoni wasn’t even the first to use captive hamsters in his research as that honour goes to Saul Adler – also jewish – who was having trouble getting Chinese hamsters to breed in captivity. It was Adler not Aharoni who smuggled Syrian hamsters into Great Britain for research purposes, which ended up in the laboratory of Leonard Goodwin from which animals the ubiquitous pet hamsters of Europe today are descended. (5)

Goodwin’s hamsters were not the first breeding Syrian hamsters kept as pets either. That honour goes to James Henry Skene - former British Consul in Syria – who kept a breeding colony of Syrian hamsters in his home in Edinburgh, Scotland for over a decade and which survived until 1910. Skene himself had died in 1886 some twenty-four years before. (6)

The population of hamsters in the United States similarly owe their transmission there not to Aharoni – who is only credited with creating the Syrian hamster pest problem in Israel today – but either Adler or his similarly jewish friend Israel Jacob Kliger. (7)

So while it is somewhat arguable that jews were involved in the creation of the modern pet hamster populations. To assert this pointedly ignores the fact that it was the British who both discovered the Syrian hamster and kept it as a pet in a breeding population first as well as the fact that if the pet hamster is ‘jewish’. Then the domesticated horse is ‘European’.

Quite frankly I’d rather a horse than a hamster, but hey that’s just me.

References

(1) See my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/is-meghan-markle-jewish

(2) https://forward.com/culture/401601/the-secret-jewish-history-of-the-pet-hamster/

(3) http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-untold-story-of-the-hamster-aka-mr-saddlebags-1223774/

(4) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_hamster#Discovery

(5) https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/4241645/Leonard-Goodwin.html

(6) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestication_of_the_Syrian_hamster#United_Kingdom_2

(7) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestication_of_the_Syrian_hamster#United_States