Is being Jewish a pretense, a masquerade? Caught up in the eccentric merry-go-round between two beggars, Ruben Honigmann enjoys being thrown off balance, to the point of making his identity falter.
There are often two beggars in front of Jewish shops. This is the case in front of the two places where I do my kosher shopping, Rue des Rosiers in the Marais and Rue Manin in the 19th arrondissement.
Every time I give to one of them, the other runs after me and warns me: the beggar I just helped is not Jewish, he’s an impostor, I’ve been duped, I mustn’t give him tzedakah!
The next time, I alternate: I give to the second one, and then the second one gives me a piece of his mind.
Sometimes, the one who says he is and the other isn’t addresses me in pseudo-Hebrew to better establish his claims and create a sense of complicity between us as authentic Jews.
I regularly argue with the whistleblower: even if the other one isn’t, what difference would it make? Do you think we shouldn’t help a goy? What kind of ethnic approach to charity is that!? You racist!
And I say this to him in counter-imitation Hebrew to let him know that he’s not going to fool me, a certified Jew, a full-time Jew. I’m even a professional Jew, I’m so Jewish that I know full well that being Jewish is a joke, who do you think you are to make me believe that there are real and fake Jews, you have to be completely goy to believe your fable of Jews as an objective human category!
I act smart while I’m scowling, but once the Jewish beggar who detected the goy beggar has been sent away, I play exactly the same tune between myself and myself: I find myself wondering whether the suspected goy-pretending-to-be-Jewish is really Jewish or not. In truth, I find that the fake Jew on Rue des Rosiers seems more genuine than the supposed goy on Rue Manin.
His way of wishing Shabbat Shalom seems more authentic, his schnorr is less affected, his “help me fulfill the mitzvah of Shabbat” routine less contrived.
That said, the circus of the self-proclaimed authentic Jew also alerts me: it all smacks of a diversionary tactic to better conceal his own imposture.
But then, if they are both goyim, where have the Jewish beggars gone? In that case, the religious authorities should be notified, and the schnorrer union alerted.
Sometimes I imagine them meeting in the evening, counting the day’s takings, debriefing on their respective performances, planning a possible role reversal for the next day: tomorrow you play the goy, and I’ll play the Jew.
I also wonder if there is an equivalent in front of goy shops, if there are also two beggars, one accusing the other of not being a real goy.
Deep down, I like the game the two beggars play. Stationed at our doors, they are the agents that reveal our own circus, holding up a mirror to our own identity crisis, to our destitute agitations.
For who among us can say which of the two he is: the real-fake Jew or the fake-real goy?
“The poor man is as good as dead,” we read in the Talmud[1], and we are all a little dead these days, playing at being Jews.
We have become cadaverous Jews, pseudo-living beings, mocking a totally borrowed Jewishness, a ridiculous counterfeit, appalling in its inconsistency and inauthenticity. I pity us with our mutual accusations of Jewish betrayal. I prefer the cinema of the two beggars: at least they implicitly admit the fragility of their Jewishness. Etymologically, a tramp is someone who walks on one foot. Jacob emerges from his nighttime battle with “the man-specter of Edom”[2] with an injured hip. The lame man becomes Israel and instills in his descendants the nobility of a tramp people.
It’s not good to be Jewish these days, but I don’t want to trade places: I tell myself that it must be just as complicated to be a goy.
Ruben Honigmann
