Kommt der Jude heim und wird von seiner Frau gefragt, welchen Namen er von der Polizeibehörde bekommen hätte. Er: “Schweißloch”. Sie empört sich: “Was? Wofür haben wir so viel Geld ausgegeben?” Er: “Was meinst du, wieviel Überredungskunst mich das W gekostet hat?”
In 1787 in Austria, in 1808 under Napoleon and in 1845 in Prussia, Jews were required to take last names and register them. Yet they had to pay the officials for the privilege. If you had the dough, you got nice names like Rosen (roses) and Gold, or Silber (silver). If you didn’t have the money, poor you! You might get a name like Katzenellenbogen. Anyway, Karl Emil Franzos wrote extensively about this absurd bureaucratic naming practice in his Namenstudien in 1880 and others have picked up on his trail recently. That joke was told to me by a member of the Jewish community in Bonn.
Incredibly, the joke works in yiddishy English, too. My translation:
A Jew comes home and is asked by is wife what name he got from the police office. He: “Shvitzloch.” She is outraged: “What? Why did we spend so much money on that?” He: “You have no idea how much it cost me just to get the ‘v’!”
People tell me it’s easier to tell the joke in English, and I suppose I know why. But nobody in English knows it. Just googling “Schweißloch” and seeing all the hits on the variations of this joke is my idea of a good time.