To mark the release of Cruella, Nathan Abrams reflects on the relationship between Jews and dogs.
Even though I own two of them (or they own me), Jews and dogs are widely believed to be an oxymoron. Consider the Yiddish proverb, ‘A Jew with a dog? It’s either not a Jew or it’s not a dog.’
An 18th-century German rabbi, who allowed the ownership of dogs for economic or security reasons, ruled that owning one merely for pleasure is ‘precisely the behaviour of the uncircumcised.’
Certainly, growing up, dogs were not a common sight among our Jewish friends and acquaintances (although cats were, including our own).
Anyway, where does this bias come from? Dogs have been considered unclean animals, and in the modern era, there is an association between dogs and Nazis.
But the evidence is that the relationship between Jews and dogs is more multifaceted. In A Jew’s Best Friend? The Image of the Dog throughout Jewish History, academics address the relationship between Jews and canines throughout the ages.
In the Bible, dogs are generally depicted in a poor light. Deuteronomy 23:19 states,
You shall not bring the fee of a whore or the pay of a dog into the house of the LORD your God in fulfilment of any vow, for both are abhorrent to the LORD your God.
Elsewhere, dogs are linked to corpses. They are referred to as scavengers feeding on dead bodies, like beasts that maul at human beings. Look at the fate of Jezebel.
The Egyptians, who enslaved the Hebrews, worshipped the jackal-headed dog, Anubis. On the other hand, during the tenth plague — the death of the firstborn — dogs remained silent, which is considered a good thing. Dogs are also mentioned as working animals, in the context of shepherding and hunting, rather than as pets.
Confirming this, archaeological digs in Israel revealed the largest known dog cemetery in the ancient world. 700 skeletons of the Canaan dog were excavated in Ashkelon and it is believed they were revered but also served as guard and herd dogs for the ancient Israelites. But when those inhabitants were expelled from their lands, the dogs became wild.
Thousands of years later, these dogs formed the core of a military corps of service dogs for the precursor to the IDF, the Haganah.
In fact, dogs received their first mention, albeit not directly, in Genesis 2 where it recounts that all animals were created by God as a source of human companionship. But then, not being fully up to the task, God created Eve for Adam…
Later Jewish writings and superstitions continued the negative rather than the positive portrayals. Kabbalistic works connected dogs with demons. In the medieval period, according to Joshua Tractenberg,
The disconsolate howling of a dog is a certain indication that the angel of death is strolling through town. If a dog drags his rump along the door in the direction of the door, this too is a token of approaching death.
Jews didn’t really get a chance to learn otherwise in the Diaspora because, being forbidden from hunting and owning land, the need for dogs was negated.
In contemporary popular culture, as I said above, dogs are associated with Nazis and thus appear in many Holocaust films.
In Adam Resurrected, Jeff Goldblum plays a Jew who survived the Holocaust by acting like a dog for an SS officer. After the war, he has delusions that he is a dog.
A more unusual take on that is the bestselling Israeli novel, ‘The Jewish Dog,’ by Asher Kravit, which has also been made into a film, Shepherd: the Story of a Jewish Dog.
Likewise, in Art Spiegelman’s Maus, where the Jews are mice and the Germans are cats, dogs represent non-Jewish Americans are dogs.
Conversely, in Franz Kafka’s story ‘Jackals and Arabs,’ the dogs have been read as an allegory for Jews.
As the Kubrick family had owned a large dog setting up his attachment to them for life, they even had a dog: a Doberman Pinscher.
Freud asserted that the relationship between a dog and his owner replicates that of parent and child, with one difference; ‘there is no ambivalence, no element of hostility.’
In 1972, the Israelis even created Azit, the Paratrooper Dog, for a movie. In a later Israeli TV show, the cracking Shitsel, a young Jewish student is expelled from his yeshiva (seminary) for hiding a stray dog. When he shows his grandfather, we learn the above Yiddish proverb.
On the other hand, a Jewish director who loved and owned dogs alll his life was Stanley Kubrick and he featured dogs in a couple of his movies.
Comedian Louis C.K., who has Jewish ancestry, voices Max, a Jack Russell Terrier in The Secret Life of Pets. Other famous movie dogs, owned by Jews, include Walter Sobchak’s ex-wife’s dog in The Big Lebowski and Bernie Focker’s Moses in Meet the Fockers.
Schnorbitz, was the sidekick of British-Jewish comedian Bernie Winters (born Bernie Weinstein). Appropriately, Schnorbitz was a St Bernard. Her name sounds like a Yiddish expression.
Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg is a rare example of a rabbi who owns a dog. He wrote the book Things My Dog Has Taught Me.
For the record, now that I have moved to semi-rural northwest Wales, pretty much as far from Jewish North London as one can get in the UK, it is de rigeur to own a dog. I possess two — Pepper who is a Cockapoo and Moose who is Golden Doodle and I even have the wellies.
Theosophy teaches that we, of course, have individualized souls, and animals have a “group soul” But animals in close contact with man, like the dog and cat and even the horse and bovine (birds like parrots are known to be very intelligent) group souls become and develop a more individual consciousnesses that would allow them move up to become or allowed to incarnate as humans, this takes many tens of thousands of years.
Thank you for this post.
The only suggestion- we don’t “own”dogs, they are living beings with each member of the canine tribe an individual with his/her own wishes, memories, desires, emotions, love.