A few days ago, I got into an argument with a leftist friend about the word goyim, or gentile, which she said she was reclaiming against Ashkenazi Jews and their colonial ambitions since it was a "slur" against gentiles, and compared my irritation at using the word (which I don't have to explain the use of the word amongst antisemites to push ZOG/protocols-esque theories) to me getting angry at her, a white Latina, for making deportation jokes. This spiraled into a discussion about "Ashkenazi white supremacy" and she cited that Ashkenazi Jews have always, since the dawn of time, had a superiority complex and had a racial power dynamic over Sephardim and Mizrahim, and that threw me for a loop.
I want to quickly address a phenomenon which gets overlooked a lot in our very temporal contemporary political climate around Zionism and the incredibly dubious narrative of "Ashkenazi supremacism" and the delegitimization of Ashkenazi heritage that comes along with it: Ashkenazi Jews, especially Litvaks/Lita'iim were once perhaps the MOST ostracized and discriminated against minhag and subgroup both within and outside the B'nai Isra'il, or the Jewish community. Especially amongst Sephardim (originally from Spain, which is in fact, also in Europe) who then resided in the Ottoman Empire within the then cultural capital of Judaism, Salonica, their Polish and Ukrainian neighbors in the Pale of Settlement, and frankly across the Diaspora, the prevailing sentiment was that because of both the Haredi and Hasidic traditions practiced by such Jews and their historic opposition to the then-emerging Reform stream and the Haskalah, they were backwards and savage in comparison to the enlightened and sophisticated Sephardic communities. This can be seen in the rhetoric espoused in many Sephardic cultural organs that originated in the Ottoman Empire's Jewish cultural centers, and this sentiment persisted until very recently.
Even in places like New York, there is still an attitude of superiority taken towards many Litvaks and their descendants, separate from critique of Haredi practice as a whole.
The only reasons why this sentiment is largely forgotten is that firstly, me and said friend live in New York, and the dominant Jewish edot in New York are well, Ashkenazim. Secondly, nearly the entirety of the Sephardic community living in Salonica or what was once the Ottoman Empire was systematically deported and wiped out during the closing years of the Holocaust. This is why Salonica, or Thessaloniki, once a city that served as the center of Jewish culture the world over, now bears hardly any sign of its heritage. This is why the city that once went entirely silent on Shabbat now has not a trace of its Jewish population.
Full disclosure, I am firmly Ashkenazi, with my family roots in the historical region of Lithuania, in modern day Poland and Ukraine, so I don't want to speak too much on the experiences of Sephardim and Mizrahim, who do face legitimate discrimination within the Jewish community. There are legitimate problems here, but if you're not Jewish and especially if you're not Sephardic or Mizrahi, don't try to generalize how these communities feel and use them as a token in your antisemitic narrative. I'm merely pointing out the historical context and historic discrimination Jews who resided in Eastern Europe faced for centuries, which is conveniently ignored by those who feel compelled to construct a dubious faux-CRT narrative about Ashkenazim in the present day; I do not seek to discount the real problems these edot face within B'nai Isra'il and will alway oppose any inter-Jewish discrimination and prejudice espoused by Ashkenazim, or any other group for that matter.
However, I do not appreciate the generalization and tokenization of these communities to support a historically illiterate and deeply antisemitic narrative that gets so commonly pushed amongst the left, regardless of how masked it is in faux-intersectional and "progressive" language. Any mention of Jewish supremacy as a defining feature of Ashkenazi culture is truly ridiculous, regardless of what a few singled-out, fringe voices may say.
Also, gentile is not a slur any more than other out-group terms used by an in-group are. Do people think Black/BIPOC folks using non-Black is a slur? Never, and you'd be laughed out of the room for even suggesting such a thing. Gentile has origins going way back to Biblical times and emerged entirely divorced from any derogatory connotations; the use of the Hebrew-derived goyim in the 2010s was very much popularized by the Alt-Right as a reference to cabalistic conspiracies, as is goyslop and any other variation of the term, and although it can sometimes be derogatory, it's no more derogatory than any other out-group term has the potential to be. Thanks for listening!
For more reading and sourcing for this, here are some lovely books on the topic:
Mazower, Mark. Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430-1950. New York: Random House, 2003.
Nair, Devin E. Jewish Salonica: Between the Ottoman Empire and Modern Greece. Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016.
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