Goy
The word 'goy' carries a surprising depth of history, evolving from a simple biblical term for 'nation' into a complex, often controversial descriptor in modern usage. What began as a neutral identifier for any people—including the Israelites—transformed over centuries, becoming synonymous with 'non-Jew.' This journey reveals shifts in religious thought, cultural identity, and sadly, even expressions of prejudice. So, how did this single word acquire such diverse and sometimes loaded meanings? The original Biblical Hebrew meaning of 'goy' was simply 'nation' or 'people,' used for both Israelites and other groups. Over time, particularly during the Hellenistic and Roman periods, the term's meaning narrowed to specifically denote 'non-Jew' due to evolving religious distinctions. In modern English, influenced by Yiddish, 'goy' often carries pejorative connotations and has been appropriated by antisemitic groups as part of their hateful rhetoric.
AI Summary
The word 'goy' carries a surprising depth of history, evolving from a simple biblical term for 'nation' into a complex, often controversial descriptor in modern usage. What began as a neutral identifier for any people—including the Israelites—transformed over centuries, becoming synonymous with 'non-Jew.' This journey reveals shifts in religious thought, cultural identity, and sadly, even expressions of prejudice. So, how did this single word acquire such diverse and sometimes loaded meanings?
- The original Biblical Hebrew meaning of 'goy' was simply 'nation' or 'people,' used for both Israelites and other groups.
- Over time, particularly during the Hellenistic and Roman periods, the term's meaning narrowed to specifically denote 'non-Jew' due to evolving religious distinctions.
- In modern English, influenced by Yiddish, 'goy' often carries pejorative connotations and has been appropriated by antisemitic groups as part of their hateful rhetoric.
What's in a Word? The Journey of 'Goy'
In modern Hebrew and Yiddish, the word 'goy' refers to a gentile—meaning, simply, a non-Jew. You might hear it in English, too, often carrying a certain nuance, sometimes even a pejorative edge. But to truly understand 'goy,' we need to travel back in time, far beyond its current usage.
The term itself comes from the Hebrew 'goy' (גוי), with its plural form 'goyim' (גוים or גויים). When it transitioned into Yiddish, and subsequently into English, it retained this core meaning of a 'gentile' or 'non-Jew.' Yet, its adoption into everyday language has been anything but straightforward.
What started as a general, almost unremarkable word in ancient texts has accumulated layers of meaning, cultural context, and emotional weight. It's a prime example of how language, particularly terms related to identity, can evolve dramatically over millennia.
From Nation to Non-Jew: 'Goy' in the Hebrew Bible
Deep within the pages of the Biblical Hebrew texts, 'goy' held a much broader significance than it does today. Here, it simply meant 'nation' or 'people'—a group defined by common ancestry, language, or shared identity, not necessarily by a political border as we understand it now.
Remarkably, the word 'goy' and its variations appear over 560 times in the Torah and other biblical books. And here's the fascinating part: it wasn't exclusively used for other peoples. It often referred to the Israelites themselves.
For instance, in Genesis 12:2, God promises Abraham that his descendants will form a 'goy gadol' — a 'great nation.' This is one of the earliest instances, clearly indicating that the term was a neutral descriptor for any distinct group of people.
The Israelites are also famously called a 'goy kadosh' — a 'holy nation' — in Exodus 19:6. Another poetic description, popular among Jewish scholars, is 'goy ehad b'aretz,' meaning 'a unique nation upon the earth.' This truly underscores its original, all-encompassing nature.
Translating 'Goy'
When it came to translating the Hebrew Bible into English, 'nation' became the primary rendering for 'goy.' Early translations, such as the 1530 Tyndale Bible and the iconic 1611 King James Version, largely upheld this. However, other interpretations soon emerged.
The King James Version, for example, translates 'goy' as 'nation' 374 times, but also as 'heathen' 143 times, 'Gentile' 30 times, and 'people' 11 times. This diversity in translation hints at the evolving understanding and subtle biases beginning to attach to the word even centuries ago.
The Great Divide: A Term Evolves
The conceptual shift of 'goy' truly began during the Hellenistic Period, from roughly 300 BCE to 30 BCE. While the Hebrew Bible used 'goy' broadly, later Jewish writings of this era increasingly applied the term specifically to non-Israelite nations.
By the first and second centuries CE, 'goy' had firmly acquired the meaning of 'someone who is not Jewish.' Scholars like Adi Ophir and Ishay Rosen-Zvi argue that prior to this, a clear, crystallized dichotomy between Jew and non-Jew didn't fully exist in the same way within Judaism.
They suggest that early Christian figures, notably Paul, played a significant role in solidifying this distinction. Paul, as an 'apostle to the gentiles,' needed to define this category for his mission, thereby contributing to the conceptual division that later influenced both Church and Jewish thought.
This evolving usage also paralleled the development of the Latin terms 'gentes' and 'gentilis,' which also referred to peoples or nations. Eventually, the English word 'gentile' came to mean 'non-Jew'—a direct linguistic cousin of 'goy' in its later meaning.
Centuries later, the renowned 12th-century Jewish scholar Maimonides defined 'goy' in his Mishneh Torah as a worshipper of idolatry. He clarified, 'Whenever we refer to a gentile [goy] without any further description, we mean one who worships false deities,' explicitly seeing Christians as idolators but not Muslims.
The Weight of Words: 'Goy' as a Pejorative
In modern usage, particularly within Yiddish, 'goy' can indeed be used in a derogatory manner. Lexicographer Leo Rosten, in 'The New Joys of Yiddish,' defines it not just as a non-Jew, but also as someone who is 'dull, insensitive, or heartless.' This hints at a more critical, even insulting, undertone.
These phrases reveal how 'goy' can become shorthand for a perceived lack of foresight, uncouth behavior, or even underlying hostility toward Jews.
This pejorative sense appears in many Yiddish expressions: Dos ken nor a goy: 'Something only a goy would do or is capable of doing.' A goy blabt a goy: 'A goy stays a goy,' implying 'once an anti-Semite, always an anti-Semite.' Goyisher kop: 'Gentile head,' meaning someone who doesn't think ahead, an idiot. Goyishe naches: 'Gentile pleasures,' or pursuits only a gentile would enjoy. A goy!: An exclamation of utter exasperation, when patience has run out.
Within the Jewish community, there's an ongoing discussion about how offensive the word truly is. Some, like Dan Friedman of 'The Forward,' argue it's 'not an insult' but can be used dismissively, comparing it to how 'foreigners' might be used. Others disagree, strongly.
Rebecca Einstein Schorr argues that the word undeniably carries an 'established pejorative overtone.' While acknowledging neutral uses—like a 'goyishe restaurant' meaning one that isn't kosher—she contends it's 'neutral, at best, and extremely offensive, at worst,' advocating for its discontinuance.
Andrew Silow Carroll adds that 'goy' has 'too much historical and linguistic baggage' for casual use, citing derogatory expressions like 'goyishe kopf' (gentile brains, suggesting dullness) and 'shikker iz a goy' (a gentile is a drunkard) as examples of its entrenched negative connotations.
Perhaps the most telling 'litmus test' comes from Nahma Nadich, who observes, 'I definitely see goy as a slur — seldom used as a compliment, and never used in the presence of a non-Jew.' If you wouldn't say a word directly to someone, it’s a good indication it might be offensive.
Distorted Meanings: 'Goy' in Antisemitism
In a disturbing twist, the term 'goy' has been ironically and maliciously co-opted by white supremacists. They use it to refer to themselves, signaling their belief in antisemitic conspiracy theories, often portraying themselves as the 'enlightened' non-Jews who 'know the truth' about supposed Jewish manipulation.
Examples abound: a Hungarian antisemitic motorcycle association calls itself the 'Goyim riders,' and the far-right activist Kyle Chapman tried to rebrand the 'Proud Boys' as the 'Proud Goys.' These are deliberate, provocative acts to align with hateful ideologies.
Similarly, the far-right American Traditionalist Worker Party launched a crowdfunding platform named 'GoyFundMe,' a cynical wordplay on the popular 'GoFundMe.' These appropriations are designed to be inflammatory and to propagate their hateful messages.
One of the most prominent examples is the 'Goyim Defense League' (GDL) and its accompanying website, GoyimTV. This group openly promotes antisemitic content, using the term 'goyim' as part of its brand to rally those who subscribe to anti-Jewish prejudices.
Perhaps the most widespread and insidious example is the far-right catchphrase or meme, 'The Goyim Know, Shut It Down.' This meme, originating on forums like 4chan, assumes the persona of a 'panicking Jew' reacting to an event that might 'expose' alleged Jewish manipulations or deceitfulness.
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) explains that this meme is a clear instance of 'linguistic appropriation' by Neo-Nazis. They cynically integrate pseudo-Yiddish phrases to ridicule Jews and propagate the 'anti-Semitic myth that we are a cabal with our own secret language and agenda.' It’s a chilling use of a word with such a complex past.
The ADL further deciphers the meme, stating that its language 'is typically used in references to antisemitic conspiracy theories depicting Jews as malevolent puppet-masters, manipulating the media, banks, and even entire governments to the benefit of themselves but to the detriment of other peoples.' This warped context is a far cry from its ancient, neutral origins.
Article
Goy
Goy (pl. goyim or goys) is a term for a gentile, a non-Jew, sometimes in a pejorative sense. The word, of Hebrew origin, was adopted into English from Yiddish. It carries a similar meaning in Modern Hebrew.
The Biblical Hebrew word goy has been commonly translated into English as 'nation', meaning a group of persons of the same ethnic family who speak the same language (rather than the more common modern meaning of a political unit). In the Bible, goy is used to describe both the Nation of Israel and other nations.
The meaning of the word goy in Hebrew evolved to mean "non-Jew" in the Hellenistic (300 BCE to 30 BCE) and Roman periods, as both Rabbinical texts and then Christian theology placed increasing emphasis on a binary division between Jews and non-Jews.
As a word principally used by Jews to describe non-Jews, it is a term for the ethnic out-group. In modern usage in English, the extent to which goy is derogatory is a point of discussion in the Jewish community.
The word goy is sometimes used by white supremacists and antisemites to refer to themselves when signaling a belief in antisemitic tropes.
Hebrew Bible
Goy
A page from Elia Levita's Yiddish–Hebrew–Latin–German dictionary (16th century) including the word goy (גוי), translated to Latin as ethnicus, meaning heathen or pagan.
The word goy means 'nation' in Biblical Hebrew. In the Torah, goy and its variants appear 560 times in reference to both the Israelites and the non-Israelite nations.
The first recorded usage of goyim occurs in Genesis 10:5 and applies to non-Israelite nations. The first mention of goy in relation to the Israelites comes in Genesis 12:2, when God promises Abraham that his descendants will form a goy gadol ("great nation").
There are two exceptions where a "Kingdom of Goyim" is mentioned. One is in Genesis 14:1, where it states that the "King of Goyim" was Tidal. Bible commentaries suggest that the term may refer to Gutium. The other is in Joshua 12:23, where a "King of Goyim in Gilgal" is included in the list of kings slain by Joshua. In all other cases the meaning of goyim is 'nations.'
In Exodus 19:6, the Israelites are referred to as a goy kadosh, a 'holy nation'. One of the more poetic descriptions of the chosen people in the Hebrew Bible, and popular among Jewish scholars is goy ehad b'aretz, or 'a unique nation upon the earth' (2 Samuel 7:23 and 1 Chronicles 17:21)
Translations of goy in English-language Christian Bibles
In English language Christian bibles, nation has been used as the principal translation for goy in the Hebrew Bible, from the earliest English language bibles such as the 1530 Tyndale Bible and the 1611 King James Version.
The King James Version of the Bible translates the word goy/goyim as nation 374 times, heathen 143 times, Gentile 30 times (see Evolution of the Term below) and people 11 times. The New American Standard Bible translation uses the following words: "every nation" (2 times) Gentiles (1) Goiim (1), Harosheth-hagoyim (3), herds (1), nation (120), nations (425), people (4).
Evolution of the term
Goy
While the books of the Hebrew Bible often use goy to describe the Israelites, the later Jewish writings of the Hellenistic Period (from approximately 300 BCE to 30 BCE) tended to apply the term to other nations.
Goy acquired the meaning of someone who is not Jewish in the first and second century CE. Before that time, academics Adi Ophir and Ishay Rosen-Zvi have argued, no crystallized dichotomy between Jew and non-Jew existed in Judaism. Ophir and Rosen-Zvi state that the early Jewish convert to Christianity, Paul, was key in developing the concept of goy to mean non-Jew:
This brilliant Hellenist Jew [Paul] considered himself the apostle of the Christian gospel "to the gentiles," and precisely because of this he needed to define that category more thoroughly and carefully than his predecessors. Paul made the conception that "goyim" are not "peoples," but rather a general category of human beings, into a central element of his thought [...] In the centuries that followed, both the Church and the Jewish sages evoked Paul's binary dichotomy.
The Latin words gentes/gentilis – which also referred to peoples or nations – began to be used to describe non-Jews in parallel with the evolution of the word goy in Hebrew. Based on the Latin model, the English word "gentile" came to mean non-Jew from the time of the first English-language Bible translations in the 1500s (see Gentile).
The twelfth century Jewish scholar Maimonides defines goy in his Mishneh Torah as a worshipper of idolatry, as he explains, "Whenever we refer to a gentile [goy] without any further description, we mean one who worships false deities". Maimonides saw Christians as idolators (because of concepts like the Trinity) but not Muslims who he saw as more strictly monotheistic.
As a derogatory term
Goy
Goy can be used in a derogatory manner. The Yiddish lexicographer Leo Rosten in The New Joys of Yiddish defines goy as someone who is non-Jewish or someone who is dull, insensitive, or heartless. Goy also occurs in many pejorative Yiddish expressions, including:
• Dos ken nor a goy (דאָס קען נאָר אַ גױ) – Something only a goy would do or is capable of doing. • A goy blabt a goy (אַ גױ בלאַבט אַ גױ) – "A goy stays a goy" • Goyisher kop (גױישער קאָפּ) – "Gentile head," someone who doesn't think ahead, an idiot. • Goyishe naches (גױישע נחת) – Pleasures or pursuits only a gentile would enjoy. • A goy! (!אַ גױ) – Exclamation of exasperation used "when endurance is exhausted, kindliness depleted, the effort to understand useless".
Several authors have opined on whether the word is derogatory. Dan Friedman, executive director of The Forward in "What 'Goy' Means, And Why I Keep Using It" writes that it can be used as an insult but that the word is not offensive. He compares it to the word "foreigners" which Americans can use dismissively but which isn't a derogatory word. Similarly, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ) has stated that goy is "Not an insult, just kinda sounds like it." The term Shabbos goy, which refers to a non-Jew who performs certain tasks forbidden to Jews on Shabbat, is an example of common usage that, while drawing attention to the binary division of all people into Jews and non-Jews, is not pejorative, and in fact highlights historical cooperation between observant Jews and their friends, neighbors, and colleagues.
Rebecca Einstein Schorr argues that the word has an established pejorative overtone. She refers to the observation "the goyishe groomsmen were all drunk and bawdy; of course, you'd never see that at a Jewish wedding" and "goyishe kop" where the word is used in a pejorative sense. She admits that the word can have non-pejorative uses, such as "goyishe restaurant" – one that doesn't serve kosher foods – but contends that the word is "neutral, at best, and extremely offensive, at worst". She advocates that the Jewish community stop using the word goy. Andrew Silow Carroll writes:
But the word "goy" has too much historical and linguistic baggage to be used as casually as "non-Jew" or "gentile." It starts with the obvious slurs – like "goyishe kopf," or gentile brains, which suggests (generously) a dullard, or "shikker iz a goy," a gentile is a drunkard. "Goyishe naches" describes the kinds of things that a Jew mockingly presumes only a gentile would enjoy, like hunting, sailing and eating white bread.
Nahma Nadich, deputy director of the Jewish Community Relations of Greater Boston, writes:
I definitely see goy as a slur — seldom used as a compliment, and never used in the presence of a non-Jew.
That's a good litmus test: if you wouldn't use a word in the presence of someone you're describing, [there is a] good chance it's offensive.
Writer Mike Rothschild linked Jeffrey Epstein's derogatory usage of the word in quotations like "This is the way the jew make money.. and made a fortune in the past ten years„ selling short the shippping[sic] futures„ let the goyim deal in the real world" with a rise in antisemitic conspiracy theories online in the wake of the release of the Epstein files.
In antisemitism
Goy
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, white supremacists have ironically used the term goy in reference to themselves as a signal of their belief in conspiracy theories about Jews. For example, a Hungarian antisemitic motorcycle association refers to themselves as the Goyim riders, and in 2020, Kyle Chapman tried to rename the far-right group the Proud Boys to the Proud Goys.
In a similar vein, the far-right American Traditionalist Worker Party, in 2017, created the crowdfunding platform called GoyFundMe, a wordplay on the popular crowdfunding platform GoFundMe.
The Goyim Defense League (GDL) and its website, GoyimTV, are another example.
Europol's 2021 report on Terrorism Situations and Trends discusses the German Goyim Partei Deutschland ('Goyim Party Germany'), "a right-wing extremist organisation" founded in 2016 which "used its website to publish antisemitic and racist texts, pictures and videos."
The term is also featured in the far-right catchphrase or meme "The Goyim Know, Shut It Down" associated with Neo-Nazis on online forums like the 4chan and 8chan. In this context, the "speaker" assumes the role of a "panicking Jew" who reacts to an event that would reveal Jewish "manipulations" or Jewish "deceitfulness".
According to the Anti-Defamation League, the antisemitic meme first appeared on 4chan in 2013. Einstein Schorr called the meme an instance of "linguistic appropriation" whereby Neo-Nazis cynically incorporated "pseudo-Yiddish phrases" into their vocabulary to ridicule Jews. Schorr describes that as a way to propagate the "anti-Semitic myth that we are a cabal with our own secret language and agenda".
The Anti-Defamation League further deciphers the catchphrase,
The language is typically used in references to antisemitic conspiracy theories depicting Jews as malevolent puppet-masters, manipulating the media, banks, and even entire governments to the benefit of themselves but to the detriment of other peoples.