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What are the origins of this offensive slur? There are many theories.
With news that former Miami Heat center Meyers Leonard - who was suspended back in 2021 for calling called a fellow video game player a kike - is returning to the NBA, the odious anti-Jewish slur “kike” is back in the news. What does it mean, and why is it such an offensive monicker? Turns out, the answer is complicated.
Kike is the worst anti-Jewish slur one can say. Some news outlets even replace write it like this: k**e, treating it like a swear word.
The word kike is likely a relatively modern invention. The Merriam-Webster dictionary records that its first recorded use was only in 1901. It appears in a 1904 American novel, The Showgirl and Her Friends, where it was already used as a term of deepest contempt. By the early 1900s, “kike” was already a widely-known insult that gained currency as thousands of Jews poured into the United States at the turn of the 20th century, transforming American society.
Some researchers claim that American Jews coined the term kike as a put-down of the poorer, more religious Jews from Eastern Europe who began to move to the US in great numbers in the late 1800s and early 1900s. One early proponent of this theory was J.H.A. Lacher, who published a book about German immigrants in Wisconsin in 1925.
Lachler described Wisconsin’s Jews, who’d largely arrived in earlier waves immigration from Germany, as being troubled by the Russian Jews who were moving to the state in the 1910s and 1920s, and calling them by the derogatory name “kikis”.
Since the name of so many of these Russian Jews ends in -ki or -ky, German-American Jews designated them contemptuously as kikis.
“Since the name of so many of these Russian Jews ends in -ki or -ky, German-American Jews designated them contemptuously as kikis, a term which, naturally, was soon contracted to kikes,” Lachler wrote.
“When I heard the term kikis for the first time at Winona, Minn., about 40 years ago, it was a Jewish salesman of German descent who used it and explained it to me; but in the course of a few years it disappeared, kike being used instead.”
This theory is largely rejected by the linguist Dr. Anatoly Liberman of the University of Minnesota. Writing for the Oxford University Press, Dr. Liberman observes that it seems unlikely, given how languages develop, for the ee sound of “kikis” to morph into the “i” sound in “kike”. That’s just not how languages evolve, he observes.
Aviya Kushner, an associate professor of creative writing at Columbia College in Chicago, posits that Irish immigrants may have coined the term, referring to Jews they encountered in the US. Kushner points out that the Gaelic word ciabhog can mean sidelock, and is pronounced k’i’og. Perhaps Irish immigrants began calling Orthodox Jewish men they encountered – who wore long sidelocks (peyot in Hebrew) – ciabhog?
She quotes Dr. Sarah Bunin Benor, a linguistics expert at Hebrew Union College in Los Angeles, who notes that “...this etymology seems plausible. Some early recorded uses of ‘kike’ are in writings of Irish Americans and in dialogue of Irish Americans interacting with Jews.” Reasonable as it sounds, the conjecture that Irish immigrants coined the slur has some competition from other linguists who champion different theories.
In his book, An Encyclopedia of Swearing: The Social History of Oaths, Profanity, Foul Language, and Ethnic Slurs in the English-Speaking World (Routledge: 2006), Geoffrey Hughes, a professor emeritus of English Language at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, notes that an anti-Jewish slur in 1860s England was Ikey, derived from the common Jewish name Isaac.
Given the similarity between “Ikey” and “kike,” it’s possible that this derogatory slur evolved to become the word kike, particularly as it crossed the Atlantic with immigrants to the United States and underwent subtle changes in pronunciation.
Cassell’s Dictionary of Slang by Jonathan Green (Cassell: 2006) records yet another feasible explanation for the word’s origin: it derives from the German word kieken, meaning “to peep.” According to this view, German speakers dismissed Jewish clothing manufacturers as “peepers” who stole glances at high-fashion designs, then made their own cheap knock-offs.
In his 1968 classic book The Joys of Yiddish, writer Leo Rosten provides two more theories about the origin of the word kike. Jews who were illiterate in English might have been asked to sign their names with an X as they arrived in the United States. Some Jews might have recoiled at the thought of marking what looked like a cross on a piece of paper and insisted on drawing a circle instead. A variation of the word circle can be translated into Yiddish as kikel. (A little circle could be translated as a kikleh.)
Rosten posits: “The word kike was born on Ellis Island, when Jewish immigrants who were illiterate (or could not use Roman-English letters), when asked to sign the entry-forms with their customary ‘X,’ refused and instead made a circle… Before long the immigration inspectors were calling anyone who signed with an ‘O’ instead of an ‘X’ a kikel…or, finally, and succinctly, a kike.” Rosten claimed that the publisher Philip Cowen, who served as an official at Ellis Island from 1905 to 1927 corroborated this account, though contemporary linguists remain highly skeptical.
Leo Rosten also offers the theory that it was another group of Jews signing their names using a circle that led to the word kike: “Jewish storekeepers on the Lower East Side, and peddlers who went far out into the hinterlands with their wares, conducted much of their trade on credit; and these early merchants, many of whom could not read or write English, would check off a payment from a customer, in their own or the customer’s account book, with a little circle (‘I’ll make you a kikeleh’) - never an ‘X’ or a cross.”
Jewish merchants, many of whom couldn’t read or write English, would check off a payment from a customer with a little circle, kikeleh in Yiddish, never an ‘X’ or a cross.
Linguist David L. Gold supports this theory. He points to a 1914 letter written to the Jewish newspaper The American Israelite about “drummers,” as traveling salesmen were then known, coining the term kike. “It seems probable that drummers called the Russian Jew, who, unable to sign his name in English, made his handmark in the form of the traditional kykala, a Kyke. The term undoubtedly originated as drummer slang,” the letter-writer asserted.
Linguists can’t be certain, but this theory is one of the strongest contenders for the origin of this odious slur.
We may never know for certain where the term kike originated, but one thing is for sure – the slur is still in use today. From graffiti to online harassment, to public discourse, kike continues to poison the atmosphere for Jews around the world.
If you come across the insulting word, be sure to stand a little taller and embrace the word with pride. Strengthening your Jewish identity is the best response to those who seek to offend you for being Jewish.
When Christians call me like, my response is always ' and so is Jesus".
I believe it had German origins as Hitler wrote in his disgusting book Mein Kampf about the Jews he encountered “If you cast even cautiously into such an abscess you found,like a maggot in a rotting body, often dazzled by light- a kike!”
And so is Jesus a kike and dirty Jew.
I let the bigots know that about Jesus when they spew their Christian antisemitism against me.