To All My Shikse Friends

Michael Wex From Ben Schott's Blog

Q. So, what is the etymology of shiksa? Could it be the Hebrew sheketz [I'd transcribe that as sheigetz]? Translate that. — k’nocker

A. Since so many people have asked about this word, it’s worth going into a bit of detail. I’ve adapted the following from a longer treatment of shikse and sheygets in Born to Kvetch. Shikse is the feminine form of sheygets, a gentile youth. But sheygets originally had no connection with gentiles or young people. It began as the Hebrew shekets [שקץ], a reptile or amphibian, an abominable or detestable creature, the sort of cold-blooded treyf forbidden to Jews in the eleventh chapter of Leviticus. Indeed, Jews became impure if they so much as touched the carcass of a shekets. This touch-me-not aspect of the shekets is expanded from food to family in the Talmud, where the word is used in a well-known passage about the types of family to avoid in marriage:

Let [a scholar] not marry the daughter of an unlearned and unobservant man, for they are an abomination [shekets] and their wives a creeping thing, and of their daughters it is said: Cursed be he who lieth with any manner of beast. [Deut. 27:21] … Rabbi Meir used to say, “Anyone who marries his daughter to an unlearned and unobservant man can be said to have tied her up and set her down in front of a lion. For just as a lion treads upon its prey, then eats it and has no shame, so does an unlearned and unobservant man hit his wife, then lie with her and feel no shame” (Pesokhim, 49b).

If an ignorant Jew of suspect religious observance can be called a shekets, then how much the more so a gentile, whose ignorance and utter non-observance can be taken for granted. But that doesn’t mean that the gentile’s bestial daughters are lacking in animal magnetism. In 1 Thessalonians, St. Paul, who shares the Talmudic opinion of shikses, advises a group of Jewish Christians to

take a wife…in holiness and honor, not in the passion of lust like the heathen who do not know God (1 Thessalonians 4:4-5).

Find a nice Jewish girl, says the Apostle to the Gentiles, and don’t live it up with the shikses.

Sheygets and shikse were meant as barriers, fences between Jewish youth and the easy sexuality of “the heathen who do not know God,” vital bits of propaganda in the never-ending war against mixed dating: if it’s too loathsome to touch, it’s too loathsome to sleep with.

Sheygets lost most of its sexual charge a long time ago, and tends to call forth an image of testosterone-fueled loutishness – loud, boozy and violent, what the British refer to as “laddish.” It is seldom specifically sexual. Indeed, Jewish boys are often called shkotsim if they’re misbehaving, mouthing off, running around or playing sports. A command like “Enough with the baseball, sheygets. Be a mentsh and do your biochemistry homework,” can be directed to Mendel but never to Chris. When sheygets is used of a Jewish boy (compare “rascal” in English), it is often pronounced shkots – a form developed by working backwards from the plural – so that everyone will know that the sheygets in question is a Jew. To call a Jewish boy a sheygets or a shkots is a matter of Jewish behavior, not gentile ethnicity. Zayn a shkots, to be a shkots, means to enjoy whoopee cushions and attitude; G.I.’s named “Brooklyn” in movies about World War II are usually textbook shkotsim.

Shikse lacks the affective range of sheygets. “Domestic servant” and “backstreet mistress” are about as far from outright insult as shikse ever gets – “Talk louder, the shikse’s vacuuming”; “Soon as the business took off, he went and got himself a shikse” – and it’s no accident that shikse has entered other languages with the meaning of slut or floozy, retaining so little of its original sense that well-educated Germans and Poles are often surprised to discover that the word isn’t native to their own languages, let alone that it has anything to do with Judaism.

The shikse is freedom from the yoke of the commandments expressed in terms of nocturnal emission. Since a shikse has no mitsves, a shikse has no morals. She is the Other in a garter belt, Ellie-Mae Clampett after the censors go home. But Ellie-Mae soon turns into Granny; a woman passes from shikse to goye once she loses the ability to tempt a Jewish male. A yunge shikse – my mother recited it, my mother’s friends and my friends’ mothers, they all recited it, it was a secular hymn to endogamy – a yunge shikse vert an alte goye, a young shikse turns into an old goye. This is the Yiddish gloss on the Wife of Bath’s, “Age, allas, that al wole envenyme,” and the Wife of Bath is a perfect illustration of the shikse at sunset.