Is This Why the Jews Are Disliked by Other Religions?

It was when my wife and I started looking at buying a condominium in Chicago that an Indian friend gave us this advice, “Buy one in a Jewish neighbourhood. You won’t have to worry about law and order there.”

We already knew this, our apartment in a predominantly Hassidic neighbourhood was a place where you could sit on the patch of grass outside on a Saturday afternoon in the summer to watch whole families go to the synagogues together. I would occasionally walk my little dog outside and some of the children would come up asking if they could pet him, something that I happily agreed to let them do. They would look at my dark skin, long hair and Asian features and wonder who I was, as would their parents from their cautious looks from some distance away, but I guess I soon became known as a harmless local eccentric until I ended up sick and in need of treatment.

My wife had booked me with a Polish doctor who was my primary physician and it was a chore to even meet the woman until I sent her Physicians Group an e-mail telling them that I was considering a legal option against them - a trick that I learned from an article in The New York Times. After this, I received, on average, three calls a day until I found my treatment underway. And then, I needed to get my eyesight checked because of my condition and the doctor I chose was Jewish.

It was a completely different experience. After a quick glance at my insurance card, the doctor’s secretary ushered me into his clinic room which was in a small nondescript building on Devon Avenue. I explained my problem and during the course of the examination, I got talking to him. His family had friends in Israel who were Cochin Jews from India. And We talked about them, the Bene Israel and the new converts from the Indian North East, the Bnei Menashe. The hour long examination was punctuated with very interesting conversation about India, Indian history, and, when he learned about my secular activities, about religious fundamentalism. It was a vastly different experience from my primary physician to say the least.

Devon Avenue is an unusual street in Chicago - with mostly Jewish families in the streets in the South of it and Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi families living in the streets to its North. There are a smattering of Arab families in the area including Palestinians and Moroccans whom I would occasionally speak to in French. The street itself is lined with Russian pharmacies and medical and surgical equipment stores, kosher bakeries, halal meat shops and Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi restaurants alongside the phone card shops and travel agencies that are typical of South Asian localities anywhere in the west. The difference between where we lived and the north side off Devon was something that we saw on more than one occasion - sub continental children would throw egg shells and other projectiles at buses and get rounded up by the police on practically every occasion we went shopping for Indian spices or groceries.

On more than one occasion, I saw trouble in a city parking lot on Devon - the only parking lot there which stands very near a mosque - with fist fights between West and South Asian youth. And, restaurants where my wife and I would eat always had someone or the other ask us whether we were Indian or Pakistanis - we could speak both North and South Indian languages and they were always curious about where we came from. We would leave them guessing by asking them where they thought we hailed from. Contrast this, again, to a kosher bakery that I buy my bread from - the first time we were there, the girls seemed surprised to see us shop in the store until I told them about my years in Russia and how I liked their Rye Bread with meat. They didn’t seem to believe me until I once read a Russian language newspaper that they offered free to customers in my halting Russian and my memories of the Cyrillic script from more than ten years before. There haven’t been any questions since.

It was obvious that there were no gangs among the Jewish children unlike among the West and South Asians, or, indeed, among the other communities in other parts of Chicago. I have been told that the more affluent Jewish localities further north of us like Lincolnwood and Skokie have problems with drugs, though there are no gangs, again, among Jewish youth. And there was something that intrigued me further - the free Chicago Reader that we would pick up every Friday always carried advertisements on “converting to Judaism” or “learning about Judaism” for Gentiles who were dating Jews. This was amid nearly daily reports from across the Atlantic about “honour” killings among virtually every South Asian community in Europe and, who knows how many more in South Asia itself.

To the Jews, killing their own children for dating someone from another community was not something to think about. And, for the different West and South Asian communities in Europe and South Asia, “honour” seemed to lie in killing mostly girls who dated outside their clan. It is a difference that stands out quite starkly and something that seems to me, to indicate the very different approaches that the Jews seem to take to life, at least as far as their own children are concerned compared to “the rest of us.” And this community feeling among them seems to extend to other Jews as well - I remember the late Yasser Arafat’s statement on Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination where he expressed astonishment that a Jew had killed another Jew.

Is this, perhaps, the reason why non Jews dislike Jews? The stability of Jewish families and their strong community feeling, their success in business and in different professions in whatever country they live in, their skepticism as far as religion and dogma is concerned, including their own religion? This is not to belittle the Palestinian problem which is something completely beyond the scope of this personal experience piece - the reference is to the dislike for Jews that seems to be endemic among non Jews, in a country where there is no conflict between the Jewish people and them, and where Israel is a distant land. It does seem like a “sour grapes” kind of feeling. The non Jews need to introspect, to work as hard as the Jews and to grow up.