and shiksa (a Gentile [i.e., “impure”] woman) generally pejorative terms that could be used metaphorically to refer to stupid or loutish Jews; much of the colloquial Yiddish vocabulary dealing with goyim was cryptic and circumlocutory. According to Hirsz Abramowicz, Lithuanian Jews used a special code when talking about their non-Jewish neighbors: “They might be called sherets and shrotse (reptiles); the word shvester (sister) became shvesterlo ; foter (father) foterlo ; muter (mother), muterlo , and so on. Khasene (wedding) became khaserlo ; geshtorbn (died) became gefaln (fell), geboyrn (born) became geflamt (flamed).” Similarly, according to M. S. Altman, when Jews of his shtetl referred to Gentiles’ eating, drinking, or sleeping, they used words normally reserved for animals. The Yiddish for the town of Bila Tserkva (“White Church”) was Shvartse tume (“Black filth,” the word tume generally denoting a non-Jewish place of worship). 6 The reason for this was ritual avoidance (as well as, possibly, secrecy): words relating to the goyim and their religion were as unclean and potentially dangerous as the goyim themselves. (The same devices, including cryptic calques for place-names, are commonly used in “Para-Romani” languages.) 7 M. S. Altman’s grandmother “never called Christ anything other than mamser , or ‘the illegitimate one.’ Once, when there was a Christian procession in the streets of Ulla [Belorussia], with people carrying crosses and icons, Grandma hurriedly covered me with her shawl, saying: ‘May your clear eyes never see this filth.’ ” 8 There were, of course, other reasons to avoid Christian processions. In Joachim Schoenfeld’s native shtetl of Sniatyn, in eastern Galicia, When a priest was on his way to administer extreme unction to a dying Christian soul, the Jews, as soon as they heard the ringing of the bell by the deacon accompanying the priest, left the streets quickly and locked the doors of their homes and stores lest the Christians, who knelt in the streets in front of the passing priest, would accuse them of not having behaved with dignity at such a moment by remaining standing when everybody else was kneeling. This would have been enough to set anti-Jewish disturbances in motion. The same thing happened when a procession was marching through the streets bearing holy images and banners, for example, on the Corpus Christi holiday. No Jew would dare remain on the streets because he might be accused of host desecration. 9 Traditional Jews warded off the impurity of strangers by using supernatural protection (as well as their much praised “Jewish heads”); their Apollonian