Original article (in Serbian) was published on 8/11/2024; Author: Teodora Koledin
A reader contacted the editorial team of FakeNews Tragac with a request to check if the quote “may you have it and then not have it” is of Jewish origin, as it has been repeatedly characterized by the media in Serbia and the region. Although we were unable to definitively confirm if this is a Jewish saying, experts on the history and culture of Jews explained to us that there is no clear evidence that this is a “Jewish curse”.
When is the curse first attributed to Jews?
After reviewing a significant number of media articles in which this curse appears, we concluded that journalists most often referred to it in stories about individuals who had everything, mostly in a material sense, and then lost it. On a number of these web portals, it is attributed to Jews (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) while on others it is described as a “folk” and/or “Serbian curse”, and on the web portal Luftika, it is even characterized as a “folk ominous saying” (1, 2, 3).
We first began searching for the oldest available media source in which this saying was attributed to the Jewish people. We first encounter its definition as an “old Jewish curse” in the newspaper Borba, in an issue published on December 15, 1988, and the specific article in which it appears discusses the economic reform at the time. In approximately the same period, somewhere between 1985 and 1989, the alternative Yugoslav rock band “Morbidi i mnoci” recorded an original song titled “Stara jevrejska kletva” (“Old Jewish Curse”), and the allegedly Jewish proverb appears in the first stanza of this song:
It should take at least nineteen years
For the old Jewish curse to start echoing
Because then you know you are in an elevated environment
First, you will have it, and then you won’t
The Old Testament as a potential source
However, we were unable to reliably determine which source – Borba article or the song “Morbidi i mnoci” – came first. We also tried translating the curse into Hebrew and Yiddish, but this search did not lead us to relevant results. Further research, this time in English, pointed us toward a potential connection with a part of the Old Testament – the Book of Job.
According to the Bible, Job was a devout man who had great flocks, wealth, and family. However, he loses all of that at one point, but despite this, he maintains his faith in God and says a sentence that is considered the message of the story: “The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away, blessed be the name of the Lord”. Given that the Holy Book of the Jews is actually the Old Testament, or Torah, this connection seemed relatively convincing to us, although its point is different from the message of the curse “may you have it and then not have it”.
Albahari: The message from the Old Testament takes on a materialistic tone
To learn more, we contacted two experts in Jewish culture and tradition, and here is what we found out.
Aron Albahari, the author of numerous works on the Jewish people, their culture, and history, confirmed our assumption about the Biblical source. He explains that the source of this proverb is a quote from the Book of Job 1:21, which says “The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away”, which many interpret figuratively as “may you have it, and then not have it”. He further states that “although this proverb is not formally identified as Jewish in Jewish sources, the practice of its use by those who advocate it as Jewish finds its foundation in this verse from the Old Testament”.
Albahari emphasizes that in “today’s time”, this proverb has “almost exclusively taken on a materialistic tone”, while its actual message was “the need for perseverance in faith in God, which we only understand when we have everything, and then lose it”. One example of the materialistic tone, as pointed out by our interlocutor, is a text published three years ago on the web portal Kurir, about former wealthy individuals who were struck by the ‘Jewish curse’ and lost everything.
Marinkovic: It is difficult to say whether the curse is Jewish or not
We received a somewhat different answer from art historian and Judaist Dr. Cedomila Marinkovic, who first pointed out that “it is very difficult to say whether the curse is Jewish or not”, given that “according to anthropological research, it has been established that curses easily pass from one ethnicity to another”. However, she further explains that curses exist in all Jewish languages and that the most well-known Ashkenazi curses were partially translated into English due to the migration of Ashkenazim to the United States. While Dr. Marinkovic did not find the curse “may you have it and then not have it” among the most frequently cited Ashkenazi curses, she does not exclude the possibility that it is an Ashkenazi curse.
On the other hand, Yiddish curses, or “klole”, as our interlocutor further explains, were created in the extremely harsh living conditions of Jews, and she describes them as follows:
Since slander is contrary to Jewish religious ethics, Eastern European Jews, in a desperate attempt to create catharsis in the extremely hostile environment in which they lived, created curses that were a kind of euphemism. These are often whole sentences, if not paragraphs. These curses are juicy, creative, very witty, and do not aim to insult but to deliver some negative prophecy.
What are the characteristics of “klole”?
Klole act like blessings that have an unexpected twist – verbally, at first glance, they wish good luck and wealth, which suddenly turns into kappore (catastrophe). They are also intricate and paradoxical, but also clever and sarcastic. Klole often contain many allusions to Jewish religious texts.
How do Jewish curses sound?
If you are still not quite sure what a Yiddish curse would sound like, we share two examples from the publication “If You Have Nothing Nice to Say, Say It in Yiddish: The Book of Yiddish Insults and Curses”:
May your enemies twist their ankles while dancing on your grave.
May you become so rich that your widow’s husband does not have to worry about his existence.
The aforementioned characteristics of “klole”, which can also be observed in the examples, are simultaneously one of the reasons why Dr. Cedomila Marinkovic believes that the saying “may you have it and then not have it” is “not Jewish, but universal”, because “for a Jewish curse, it seems too simple”. However, the interlocutor concluded that there are quite obvious reasons why the proverb could be Jewish, given that Jews were, of all nations, the ones who most often and most quickly, sometimes overnight, lost everything they had.
