HOW DO YOU TELL THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A GOOD DEAL AND A BAD DEAL?

In the domain of the Jewish joke, you can find beneficiaries of this ‘double vision’ everywhere:

Mr and Mrs Horowitz are in a restaurant, having soup. Across the room an elegant young woman grins and waves at Mr Horowitz. He tries to shrug it off.

Mrs Horowitz: ‘Manny! Who is dat voman?’

Mr Horowitz: ‘Dat’s ... I’m afraid dat’s mine paramour.’

Mrs Horowitz is shocked. After a moment, she asks,

‘And who is da other voman vith her?’

Mr Horowitz: ‘Dat? Dat’s Klein’s paramour.’

Mrs Horowitz thinks for a moment: ‘Ours is better.’

While the same historical forces that have taught Mrs Horowitz how to make the best out of a raw deal have also taught Moshe how to query the deal’s terms:

Moshe walks into a post office to send a package, but the package is too heavy.

‘You’ll need another stamp.’

‘And that should make it lighter?’

Since some things are non-negotiable, however (‘money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons’ – Woody Allen), it’s fortunate that Jews should happen to be so awfully good at business:

A young Jewish boy starts attending public school in a small town. On day one the teacher asks the class, ‘Who was the greatest man that ever lived?’

A girl raises her hand and says, ‘Was it Winston Churchill?’

‘A good answer,’ says the teacher, ‘but not the answer I’m looking for.’

Another young student raises her hand and says, ‘Was it Shakespeare?’

‘Still not the answer I had in mind,’ says the teacher.

Then the new Jewish boy raises his hand and says, ‘I think Jesus Christ was the greatest man that ever lived.’

The teacher is astonished. ‘Yes!’ she says. ‘That’s the answer I was looking for.’ She invites him to the front of the class and gives him a lollipop.

Later another Jewish pupil asks him, ‘Why did you say “Jesus Christ"?’

The boy replies, ‘Look, I know it’s Moses, and YOU know it’s Moses, but business is business.’

Meanwhile, in the Jewish school, the Hebrew teacher used to boast:

‘If I were Rothschild I would be richer than Rothschild.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I would teach Hebrew on the side.’

Not everyone, however, is so easily impressed:

‘Mummy I saved money today!’

‘How?’

‘Instead of buying a ticket to take the bus home, I ran after it all the way!’

‘You couldn’t have run after a taxi?’

A good deal is just a case of being in the right place at the right time with the right equipment:

Two members of a congregation are talking.

‘Our cantor is magnificent,’ says the first.

‘What’s the big deal?’ says the second. ‘If I had his voice, I’d sing just as well.’

And sometimes without the right equipment:

‘How much is this pickle?’

‘A nickel.’

‘But the stall down the street sells them for just three cents!’

‘So why don’t you buy there?’

‘Cos he’s run out of pickles.’

‘When I run out of pickles, I also sell them for three cents.’

Still, everyone feels there’s one deal that escaped them:

Maurice, a young Jew, comes to north London and applies for a job as caretaker at the Edgware Synagogue. The synagogue committee are just about to offer him the job when they discover that he is illiterate. They decide for many reasons that it would be inappropriate to have an illiterate caretaker. So Maurice leaves and decides to forge a career in another business. He chooses to sell plastic goods door to door. He does well and soon is able to buy a car and, later, to open a store, and then a second and a third. Finally he is ready to open a vast chain of stores and so applies to the underwriter for insurance. But when the underwriter asks him to sign the contract it becomes obvious he cannot write. Shocked to discover that such a successful man has no education, the bank manager says, ‘Just think what you could have been if you had learned to read and write.’

‘Yes,’ says Maurice regretfully, ‘caretaker at Edgware synagogue.’

But if Mrs Horowitz and the chain-store owner have learned how to succeed by adopting bourgeois values under capitalist conditions, Jews have also had to manage the art of the deal under communist ones:

One winter in Soviet Moscow, the rumour went around that a meat delivery had arrived from the collective farm. Real sausage! Within minutes, a vast queue wound around Peshkov the butcher’s, like an anaconda around a cow. But after an hour, the manager came out and announced, ‘Comrades, there is less meat than we thought. Can all the Jews leave.’

Out go the Jews. Two hours later, the manager faces the crowd again: ‘I’m afraid there’s even less than we thought – only enough for Party members.’

Half the crowd shuffles off. An hour later: ‘There really is very little meat. Anyone who didn’t fight in the October Revolution must go.’

Now just two old men are left. Three hours later, as darkness falls, the manager emerges: ‘Comrades, there will be no sausage after all today.’

‘You see,’ says one old man to the other, ‘The Jews get the best deal.’

(No wonder Jews have a reputation for double-dealing.)