Linguistic and cultural survey of the Jewish traditions in the light of their proverbs

Abstract

This paper describes the direct relationship between Spanish proverbs about Jews and the imaginary that has been created upon these proverbs. The relationship between language and ideology is so strong that even an imaginary, more or less based on prejudices, is capable of resisting the passing of ages even when the object of prejudice has disappeared from society and have no effect whatsoever on it, as in the case of the Jews in Spain or the latest case of anti-Semitic expressions in the Polish language today. In order to build up the imaginary about Jews we have analized and divided the proverbs that refer to Jews in several sections: physical appearance, character, religion, economy, relations with Christians, and so on. It was concluded that the imaginary obtained from the analysis of the proverbs about Jews offers a picture very similar to that in other European languages. Finally, as shown in the example of Poland, an imaginary survives in a language as long as the paremiological and idiomatic expressions that sustain it exist in the language.