LUCKY THE VIRUS DIDN'T START IN TEL AVIV...:

What does the term actually mean, and why is there such a gap in the understanding of it?

It comes from an anti-Semitic trope.

The term to "Jew down" was born out of stereotypes formed during medieval times about Jews being cheap or prone to hoard money. Often they were forced into financial occupations and thus were best known as money lenders, leaving them vulnerable to anti-Semitic misrepresentations. Think of portrayals such as Shylock, the villainous lender in Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice."

The term itself means to haggle or bargain for a lower price than originally agreed upon. The Oxford English Dictionary notes the earliest usage of the term came in 1825 and that it was used in 1870 on the floor of the U.S. Congress to describe a bill setting salaries in the military. The legislation supposedly prompted someone to say that Congress is "ready to Jew down the pay of its generals."

The comparable term "gyp" also was born out of a negative stereotype, in this case about Roma -- often derogatorily referred to as "gypsies" and stereotyped as cheap. To gyp someone out of something is essentially to steal it away.

Same deal with the term "Welsh" -- a verb substituted for swindle or cheat -- derived from a stereotype about Welsh people.

But is it always anti-Semitic?

Trenton's Muschal is correct -- the expression probably has been used a million times. Are all the users anti-Semites if they don't know its history?

Historian Deborah Lipstadt's latest book, "Anti-Semitism: Here and Now," includes a chapter on what she calls the "clueless anti-Semite," which is, she told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, "the person who engages in anti-Semitism but doesn't even know it."

"Anti-Semitism has gone so deep into the roots of society that people don't recognize that they are engaging in it when they engage in it," said Lipstadt, the Dorot pro­fes­sor of Mod­ern Jew­ish His­to­ry and Holo­caust Stud­ies at Emory Uni­ver­si­ty. This, she hastens to add, does not excuse such behavior.

She calls clueless anti-Semites just as dangerous as extremist anti-Semites, who know exactly what they are saying when they say it. Expressions of anti-Semitism from both "feeds into the society's perception of Jews."

"It is not meant to be made light of," Lipstadt said.

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