The Origins and Reality of Jewish Lightning
Before I saw a piece on ‘Jewish Lightning’ by Aviya Kushner in the Jewish Daily Forward; I hadn’t heard of the linguistic curiosity before. (1) I quickly checked a few reference works on the subjects of jews and Judaism which yielded little information.
What I did find though was the frumpy Irene Rabinowitz screeching about the term being a form of ‘jew hate’ at the Times of Israel. (2) That yielded relatively little information other than a useful little definition of what ‘Jewish Lightning’ is.
To wit:
‘One of them, describing a fire in her New Jersey town, said “It was Jewish lightening, we all knew it.” Stunned I said to her, “So you believe that Jews are so greedy that we will burn down our own buildings for insurance fraud?” She said, “I never thought of it that way, but it does happen.”’ (3)
So in essence it is a euphemism for the use of arson as a method to commit insurance fraud.
Kushner cites two principles pieces of evidence for the origins of this term. (4)
Firstly, she cites the jewish reputation for arson in medieval Europe. This is certainly plausible (if her example is poor as it is an obscure incident in Bavaria in 1337 which she manages to deliberately misrepresent to make her case as I have documented by making a case study of the incident and showing how it was actually caused by jewish behaviour), (5) but since the concept is rarely seen in jewish or anti-jewish literature before the late nineteenth century and the mass migration of jews from Eastern to Western Europe and the United States. (6)
It would thus only make sense if the concept of ‘Jewish Lightning’ began in response to experience with jews in the English-speaking world rather than some hangover from the medieval world.
The reason that Kushner wants to link this to the world of medieval Europe is because she wishes to suggest that the concept behind the term is irrational and if it only occurred around the time of mass jewish immigration into the Anglophone world. Then it would be difficult to see this as anything other than a term that arose in response to a jewish behavioural trend not as an ‘irrational anti-Semitic slur that resulted from anti-jewish prejudice’.
This then plays into the second piece of evidence that Kushner cites in the form of John le Carre – the pen name of David Cornwell – who testifies that in his youth in the East End of London:
‘Still, I didn’t feel queasy about addressing the tradition of Jewish tailors in the East End. It’s so deeply embedded, and so historically extended, that most of the good jokes are true. There was a community of rascally Jewish tailors. The insurance companies, many of which were Jewish, referred to “Jewish lightning” when unfortunate fires burned down warehouses in the East End.’ (6)
That is plausible – if anecdotal – evidence for the origin of the term ‘Jewish Lightning’ being in the experience of those dealing with jews in London and elsewhere during the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Yet it doesn’t discount from the reality that it was actually a stereotype based on a fundamental historical truth that jews really did routinely set fire to their own premises for the insurance money. (7)
References
(1) http://forward.com/culture/372158/why-do-people-call-arson-jewish-lightning-and-is-it-anti-semitic/
(2) http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/jewish-lightening-and-other-fine-phrases/
(3) Ibid.
(4) http://forward.com/culture/372158/why-do-people-call-arson-jewish-lightning-and-is-it-anti-semitic/
(5) See my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/deggendorf-1338-the-anatomy-of-anti
(6) http://forward.com/culture/372158/why-do-people-call-arson-jewish-lightning-and-is-it-anti-semitic/
(7) See my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/daniel-radcliffes-anti-semitic-family