Žid

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Žid ( Russian Жид ) is a religionym (a name for a people based on religion ) that goes back to Old Slavonic and is the regular expression for " Jews " in most Slavic languages to this day . Only in the East Slavic region has the word with the reign of Catherine the Great lost its regular and neutral status, because in January 1780 this expression in Russian ceased to denote the Jews regularly. From then on there was no longer talk of the Židy , but only of the Evrei ("Hebrews"). The New Testament religion lost its previous function in Russian legislation because it was up to the ruler to give the Jews who had been unwanted in Russia since Peter the Great with the annexation of eastern parts of Ukraine and thus of the core area of ​​the then Eastern Jewry with a new legal title Mistake. In addition to Jews, newly distinguishable groups of merchants were renamed in the same weeks. In the 1930s, under Stalin, this former legal title, which had been discarded by Catherine (before January 1780), had lost any right to designate Jews as neutral.

To this day, the expression in Russian is different from that in Belarusian or Ukrainian . Although it seems to be phonically identical, its role as a religionym in Ukrainian and Belarusian is a regular one, in modern Russian a purely pejorative one.

The term has been considered pejorative in Russian since the 19th century, while in Belarusian or Ukrainian it remained neutral until around 1920 (and longer in western Ukraine until the postwar period). The expression remains neutral in West Slavic languages ​​(Polish, Czech, etc.) as well as in Hungarian and Ruthenian .

literature

  • Markus Wolf: Žid - criticism of a ban on words. Imagology of Israel between state-political calculation and artistic alienation. (= Peter Rehder (Hrsg.): Sagners Slavistische Sammlung 30 ) Kubon and Sagner, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-87690-905-8 (Contains a new theory on the genesis of ethnonyms and distinguishes them from other socionymes, which either come from political names , Ethnonyms and religious symbols exist.)