In 2015 I posted a note about the word “Jew” as differently understood by the Victorian Catholic poets Coventry Patmore and Gerard Manley Hopkins. At the time, I thought that the two poets’ correspondence about the word might help us understand the then topical issue of boycotting out of existence the country named Israel and the concept named Jew.

But as of 2017, those two-year-old thoughts of mine have gone anachronistic. Language, including the word Jew, no longer seems to work in all the ways it did two years ago. It has lost some functions and acquired others. So I’ve updated my note. WordPress has filed the revision in its original 2015 position and linked it to its original 2015 title, but the text you’ll reach is new when you click