Until three days ago, I assumed that the greatest inconvenience of being visibly Jewish outside of Israel is personal safety. As I found out after spending three days at an academic seminar posing as an observant Jew, safety is a relatively minor hassle.
The real yoke is the complete loss of individuality. Everywhere and all the time, one is forced to speak and act thinking about the implications of every word and behavior on the good name of the Jewish people.
In the underground, I had a stuffed nose. Usually, it would be no issue for me to blow my nose. But with a kippah on your head, it’s no longer the unknown Rafael who blows his nose loudly, but the whole Jewish people and Judaism that do so. Thus, I breathed through one nostril the whole way until I got home.
This is a minor physical inconvenience comparable to the minor inconvenience of not being able to join the seminar lunches, the seminar dinner and the seminar snacks.
Yet the real inconveniences are emotional, psychological and intellectual.
The seminar was full of people verifiably devoid of anti-Jewish animus. Thus, I finally understood why philosemites and philosemitism can be so damn annoying. Since I know exactly how people otherwise treat me, it quickly became obvious how much a kippah changes the way people interact with you. While there would be nothing more pleasant than being treated like an ordinary mortal, there are people whose niceness and obsequiousness is reminiscent of the way many whites suddenly started smiling all the time at blacks after the George Floyd episode.
People who would normally ignore my glance or smiles, suddenly smiled back, at times quite nervously, to reassure me that they knew their German history.
And the greatest hardship is being suddenly deprived of most spontaneity in interpersonal communication. I could simply not be myself anymore. Being my real self would involve speaking too much, occasionally interrupting other people speaking, openly disagreeing and arguing, making witty jokes and remarks. Suddenly, this was all treif since it might involve aggravating or offending Gentiles, and thus breeding antagonism and hostility toward the Jewish people.
Even success can be problematic. Let us take for instance a situation where you want to say something that is liable to please eight people and annoy two people. You hesitate to speak. Why? Because +8 and -2 doesn’t mean a net gain of 6 points. On the contrary, while the 8 people could remember that Rafael said something nice, 2 people might resent the noxious Jew.
The only genuinely pleasant experience wearing a kippah was when a swarthy man in the subway, perhaps a Syrian or Iraqi Kurd, cried out “Shalom!” And the only reason this was pleasant is the fact his words rekindled my dying hopes for peace in the Middle East.
Rafael Castrois a Yale and Hebrew University graduate.An Italian Noahide by choice, Rafael can be reached at [email protected]