When I was five years old I was dragged off the street by our Catholic neighbour, stood before a picture of the suffering Christ which hung on her living room wall, and accused of murdering the poor bastard. I assured her as best I could that the man I had apparently offed was a complete stranger to me. I was under the vague impression that he was a close relative, perhaps her uncle, who had undergone a horrible fate at the hands of some vicious neighbourhood bully she had obviously mistaken for me. Her fury increased with each subsequent denial and so did my terror until the Lord God personally intervened by causing the chicken roasting in her oven to catch fire. I made my escape through plumes of black smoke and I can still recall her face, etched in the window as I fled past, glowering over the charred bird, which I later came to see as an avatar of the Holy Ghost.

Growing up ghettoized in a small French-Canadian town was not like trying to survive in Gdansk or Vilna but it was still no joke. When I was six æTi-Paul Parent, a midget who lived directly across the street, stepped out on his balcony, loaded his slingshot, and, in a reverse parody of the David and Goliath story, put a stone right between my eyes. A direct hit which, to my great good fortune, was also a near miss. I awoke several hours later still in the dark. Illumination arrived when I was eight. I was stopped on the street one afternoon by a large muscular boy of fourteen or so whom I had never seen before. He merely asked me if I was a Jew, nothing more. When I said yes, he promptly delivered a roundhouse right that loosened my teeth and sent me into another mini-coma. The raw taste I carried around with me for days was my belated revelation of the bitterness of being a Jew.

These are the people whom I remember as my early teachers for, although I did not have a Jewish upbringing, the world can always be counted on to supply the deficit. The fact is that a Jew simply cannot help being educated. He is the perpetual scholarship student, the prodigy who receives his doctorate before puberty, whose fabled intelligence is not a consummation of angels in the blood but the tainted gift the world bestows on him and is then resentful of. He goes to the head of the class to answer the question and be punished for it.

My Portuguese barber is convinced that Jewish intelligence is the result of abstention from pork which he regards as a thickening or clotting agent. Pork clogs the mental pores, as it were, and obstructs sensitivity. The gentile world will never catch on because it continues to slaughter and devour pigs and so cannot repair the degradation of its intelligence. You have to stop eating pork to stop eating pork. A Hassid I once knew informed me that Jewish smarts were the product of a mystical substance the Jew harboured within him, like a kind of invisible pocket bible. An old farmer I met many years ago in northern Quebec fingered the intellectual complicity of the Jewish nose, the repository of cranial surplus.

It seems as if being a Jew is like being born with six fingers. It is the kind of fact there is just no way around. Even the most skilfull of surgical operations must leave a telltale stump or scarùlike the cicatrix I still bear between my eyesùas brail for blind antisemites. Being a Jew is forever. The peculiar sourness of the apostate is ample testimony here. Forgotten by his own, he is sure to be remembered by the others. At the very least, a Jew is a Jew by negative definition. And his putative intelligence is the stigma he brings with him, the brand that renders him both conspicuous and resilientùthe mark of Cain. Money is only the world's metaphor for brains.

Myself, I wonder what all the fuss is about. My own experience tells me that Jews are on the whole about as stupid as everybody elseùexcept, perhaps, in those cases in which intelligence is necessary for survival or distinction (the proverbial Chinese student) and in which a genuine historical percipience is produced by millennia of gratuitous suffering. This has nothing to do with the inverted pride of the Hassid who buttons his coat from left to right to assert his difference from the rest of benighted humanity (the reason Tacitus gives for circumcision) or with the ignorant conceit of the Jew who, as conveyor of the Shekinah through the desert of time, feels superior to the goyim because of his divine pedigree.

My relatives reeked of fish and mothballs. We lied, grovelled, swindled and scrambled for the buck as did the disinherited majority we affected to disdain. Our contempt for the inferior part of humanity was equalled only by our disregard for literature and philosophy and our lack of interest in anything that smacked of moral rectitude or magnanimity. This was true of all our Jewish landsmen in the town as well. As I grew up, I had more and more trouble differentiating my Jewish friends in their habitual outlook on life from the French-Indian halfbreeds we shared the street withùwith the important difference that we did not go around beating up people. The English minority were insufferably snooty but possessed a certain style and reticence which I at first envied and later recognized as simply a more tolerable form of insidiousness. But on the whole I saw nothing special about the Jew except a sense of esoteric pre-eminence caused by a history of oppression and segregation that eventually and to some extent became willed and deliberately assumed.

In the course of the years what I learned to admire in my people was something very different from that which earned them the grudging, double-edged credit of mankind. The Jews were the only "nation" chronically disposed to self-ridicule as a way of deflating its own pretensions to spiritual supremacy. Poles do not take kindly to Polish jokes. But the Jew makes himself his own butt and target, not to forestall the world's animosity but to keep himself approximately honest in the midst of chicanery and to practice up on that humility which saves him in the endùfrom himself.

The real and most unsettling question is one of definition. What is a Jew anyway? According to Koestler, whose researches are painstaking and rather convincing, we are the thirteenth tribe. A substantial majority of us were originally Kazhars who crossed the Volga and not the Jordan. We are a people of largely East European provenance whose affiliations to the Middle East are as much a political and psychological fact as a historical one. Further, although we sponsor trees in the holy land and root for the good guys in the wars that convulse the region, we are also not Israelis. In fact, mainstream Israelis have had considerable trouble pacifying not only the enemy but the Orthodox who wear medieval streimels under the hot sun, stone their own soldiers mobilizing on the Sabbath and assassinate their own Prime Minister. It is also disconcerting to note the absence of dark-complected, Sephardic faces in the Knesset, who would seem to have a stronger hereditary claim on ancestral citizenship. Who is a Jew? I would suggest that modern Hebrew-speaking Sabras are Jews as much by accident as by necessity. And they are not particularly hospitable to American Jews who wish to assimilate, interlopers who depending on their degree of commitment either hunker down in the settlements or return to Fort Lauderdale, baffled and resentful. And what does an Ethiopian convert have to do with a Russian muzhik?

So a Jew is not necessarily an Israeli and may have been a Kazhar. Here and there a rare and tenuous bloodline may connect a given individual to incorrigible Habiru ancestors even the Prophets despaired of ever civilizing. They cannot be more than a handful and must remain undetectable. And it is far from clear whether even these originals may be considered "Jews", a designation which came considerably later. But this, it should be realized, is not to imply that Israel is dispensable for it has become the last refuge and haven of a persecuted people whose foundational texts derive from the region in dispute, which means that the holy land will always remain the cadastral address of the diaspora. Moreover, it seems obvious to me that antisemitism is encoded in the DNA of Christianity, from the time of the gospel of St. John to the presentùwitness the Kristallnacht atmosphere pervading the world todayùwhich makes the survival of the Jewish nation absolutely necessary, even if we cannot settle on a proper definition of the Jew. What a French diplomat recently called "a shitty little country," conveniently ignoring the corrupt, authoritarian and fanatical Islamic regimes lined up against the object of his spite, must command our loyalty no matter how far it may fall from a condition of otherwordly perfection. Like so many other facts, this is also one there is no getting around.

Although I was never subject to the attentions of suicide bombers, when I think it over I see I am a Jew partly because I was routinely savaged and insulted for being one. Even pets were not spared. When our cocker spaniel was intentionally run over by the village taxi driver, who had to jump the sidewalk to do it, it was because the poor creature was suspected of being a Jewish dog. A mere bagatelle, of course, compared to some of the horror stories from the "old country": a grandfather bludgeoned to death over his bible and an aunt cut to pieces in the street, victims of that universal form of entertainment, the pogrom. The history of our century I pass over in silence.

A few thousand years of suffering and isolation make an excellent mixing bowl for selfhood. If I am a "Jew", it is because I would be ashamed of not being one, of reneging on a commitment I don't quite understand, of defrauding that part of the self which is still innocent. All that misery is a kind of historical investment. Just as being hated for no reason becomes in the long course of time a reason for being hated, so alienation becomes identity. It is an unalterable law of life that one becomes what one has suffered, and derives from unmerited brutality and scorn a sense of dignity and difference one can never betray without betraying oneselfùthe real sin of Judas. ò