ABSTRACT
In the twentieth century, as today, there is a commonplace that Jews do not drink to excess. Susan Jacoby in her autobiography speaks of her mother’s Catholic family confronted with their daughter’s choice of a Jewish husband in the 1940s: “My Broderick grandmother, who bore scars of a childhood in a home dominated by the rages of her alcoholic father, regarded my dad’s Jewishness as something of a plus. She really had never known any Jews, but, like many gentiles, she was convinced that Jewish men didn’t drink and doted on their wives.” 1 Philip Roth, too, in his 1959 view of postwar, middle-class Jews in Goodbye, Columbus saw their abstinence as a sign of their difference. They had basement bar fully stocked with “bacchanalian paraphernalia.” Yet they did “not drink.” Indeed, the father of his protagonist’s love interest got “a fishy look from his wife when every several months he takes a shot of schnapps before dinner.” 2 This trope seems quite established. Mark Twain spent an extended period of time in Vienna during the rise of political anti-Semitism at the close of the nineteenth century. There he came to defend the Jews in Harper’s Magazine in an essay published in 1898: “In the police court’s daily long roll of ‘assaults’ and ‘drunk and disorderlies’ [the Jew’s] name seldom appears.” 3 And his contemporary Sigmund Freud, writing at the end of his life in London, echoes this: “They do not need so much alcohol as [non-Jews] do in order to make life tolerable.” 4 But why are they so?
