Obscuring the Name of Yoshke

Discussion about the Hebrew Bible, Septuagint, pseudepigrapha, Philo, Josephus, Talmud, Dead Sea Scrolls, archaeology, etc.
Post Reply
semiopen
Posts: 471
Joined: Sat Mar 08, 2014 6:27 pm

Obscuring the Name of Yoshke

Post by semiopen »

semiopen wrote:
ficino wrote:
semiopen wrote:It's easiest for me to go by a few general rules.

Jewish translations are always better than Christian ones. This is probably the result of the Christians having Yoshkieitis clouding their judgment.
semiopen, I've been curious, and I finally can't contain my curiosity: why do you generally use the name Yoshke? I don't see anyone else on here use it, and the standard English is, of course, Jesus. What does its use accomplish?

Just wondering,

cheers, f
I do it to honor my late father who introduced me to the term.

If you use Jesus, you are perilously close to using the C word.
Ficino's question in the Baa Baa thread got me thinking, and I'd like to expand on this.

My father actually introduced me to this term by calling the music on the radio at Xmas one year "Yoshke Music."

This sort of reminds me of an exchange I had with a guy on a Chabad Forum several years ago. The guy's name was Christian and there was an old lady who suggested the earth wasn't 6000 years old. They got to discussing this and she misspelled his name in one of her messages. Christian then tried to use that misspelling as a point in his favor. I responded that the woman didn't want to write his name correctly because it was blasphemous and, with my usual tact, explained that his criticism of her spelling just showed his general ignorance.

In his reply, he claimed I was just making that up. It was quite amusing, my lady friend even responded that she simply made a mistake.

It is clear that Jews shouldn't use the C word. It physically bothers me to write it.

In reflecting on this after responding to Ficino, I recalled Maimonides Epistle_to_Yemen

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Epistle_to_Yemen/III
The first one to have adopted this plan was Jesus the Nazarene, may his bones be ground to dust.
http://www.wikihistory.org/index.php?n=Main.135CE discusses the use of this epitaph when referring to Hadrian after the Bar Kochba War
When Jewish sources mention Hadrian it is always with the epitaph "may his bones be crushed" (שחיק עצמות or שחיק טמיא, the Aramaic equivalent), an expression never used even with respect to Vespasian or Titus who destroyed the Second Temple.
The use of this epitaph by a guy currently as well respected as Maimonides has been used by anti-semites but that is a different subject.

Anyway, by obscuring Yoshke's name, we relieve ourselves of the obligation to say something nasty after mentioning it.

The Daily Forward has also dealt with this - Yoshke of Nazareth - Jesus Has Many Names, Not All Nice - http://forward.com/articles/160737/yosh ... eth/?p=all
Still on the subject of “Yoshke,” James Goldman writes that mention of the name in these pages made him think of “Yoshke Pandre,” a dismissive Yiddish epithet for Jesus. Having read up on this a bit, he thinks the “Yoshke” of the epithet should be translated as “little Joe,” an allusion to Joseph, Jesus’ father, while pandre is a reference to “allegations dating to [the early Church Father] Origen that the father of Jesus was a Roman soldier called Pantera (Latin for ‘panther’).”
The “little Joe” part is improbable. True, Yoshke is a diminutive of Yiddish Yoysif (Hebrew Yosef — that is, Joseph), and Jesus was also sometimes known by Yiddish speakers as Yoyzl, another diminutive of the same name. Yet the name Jesus in Hebrew is Yeshu (a shortened form of Yeshu’a, itself a shortened form of Yehoshua or Joshua), and the Yoshke of “Yoshke Pandre” is more likely to have originated as a jesting diminutive of that.
ficino
Posts: 745
Joined: Fri Oct 25, 2013 6:15 pm

Re: Obscuring the Name of Yoshke

Post by ficino »

Thank you for the explanation, semiopen.
Post Reply