sheeny

   An offensive name for a Jew, in slang use since the nineteenth century. It has other slang meanings, such as ‘pawnbroker’, ‘tramp’, and ‘a mean person’. The origin of the word is obscure, but it is highly unlikely, as Eric Partridge suggests in his Dictionary of Historical Slang, that it has anything to do with the sheen of a Jew’s hair.

   The word is used in the USA rather than Britain in modern times. Portnoy’s Complaint, by Philip Roth, has a young girl calling a Jewish boy ‘sheeny’, ‘kike’, ‘hebe’, and ‘cheap bastard fairy Jew’ in the space of a moment or two, all of these being expressions of contempt.

   In Garson Kanin’s Moviola it is supposedly Mack Sennett who addresses a colleague as ‘you dumb sheeny’, but this is interpreted by the man concerned as a friendly term. Soon afterwards ‘you fatheaded kike’ is used in a similar way.