The Periodic Table Read Free

to things pertaining to the Catholic faith. In this case, the originally Hebraic form is corrupted much more profoundly, and this for two reasons: in the first place, secrecy was rigorously necessary here because their comprehension by Gentiles could have entailed the danger of being charged with sacrilege; in the second place, the distortion in this case acquires the precise aim of denying, obliterating the sacral content of the word, and thus divesting it of all supernatural virtue. For the same reason, in all languages the Devil is named with many appellations of an allusive and euphemistic character, which make it possible to refer to him without proffering his name. The church (Catholic) was called tôneuà, a word whose origins I have not been able to reconstruct, and which probably takes from Hebrew only its sound; while the synagogue, with proud modesty, was simply called the scola (“school”), the place where one learns and is brought up. In a parallel instance, the rabbi is not described with the word rabbi or rabbenu (“our rabbi”) but as morénô (“our teacher”), or kbakhàm (“the wise man”). In fact in “school” one is not afflicted by the hateful khaltrúm of the Gentiles: khaltrúm, or khantrúm, is the ritual and bigotry of the Catholics, intolerable because polytheistic and above all because swarming with images (“Thou shalt have no other gods before me; Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image... and shalt not bow down thyself to them,” Exodus 20:3) and therefore idolatrous. For this term too, steeped in execration, the origin is obscure, almost certainly not Hebraic; but in other Jewish-Italian jargons there is the adjective khalto, in the sense precisely of “bigot” and used chiefly to describe the Christian worshiper of images.
    A-issà is the Madonna (simply, that is, “the woman”). Completely cryptic and indecipherable—and that was to be foreseen—is the term Odo, with which, when it was absolutely unavoidable, one alluded to Christ, lowering one’s voice and looking around with circumspection; it is best to speak of Christ as little as possible because the myth of the God-killing people dies hard.
    Many other terms were drawn exactly as is from the ritual and the holy books, which Jews born in the last century read more or less fluently in the original Hebrew, and more often than not understood, at least partially; but, in jargon usage, they tended to deform or arbitrarily enlarge the semantic area. From the root shafòkh, which is equivalent to “pour” and appears in Psalm 79 (“Pour out Thy wrath upon the heathen that have not recognized Thee, and upon the kingdoms that have not invoked Thy name”), our ancient mothers have taken the homely expression fé sefkh, that is, “to make sejokh,” with which one described with delicacy the vomit of infants. From rúakh, plural rukhòd, which means “breath,” illustrious term that can be read in the dark and admirable second verse of Genesis (“The wind of the Lord breathed upon the face of the waters”) was taken tire ’n rúakh, “make a wind,” in its diverse physiological significances, where one catches a glimpse of the Biblical intimacy of the Chosen People with its Creator. As an example of practical application, there has been handed down the saying of Aunt Regina, seated with Uncle David in the Cafe Florio on Via Po: “Davidin, bat la carta, c’as sento nen le rukhòd!” (“David, thump your cane, so they don’t hear your winds!”), which attests to a conjugal relationship of affectionate intimacy. As for the cane, it was at that time a symbol of social status, just as traveling first class on the railroad can be today. My father, for example, owned two canes, a bamboo cane for weekdays, and another of malacca with a silver-plated handle for Sunday. He did not use the cane to lean on (he had no need for that), but rather to twirl jovially in the air and to shoo insolent dogs from his path: in