Tradescantia name survey, take 2

This survey ran from 17th May until 27th July 2024. It was the second of its type. The first can be found here. My goal with the second survey was to again find out how Jewish and non-Jewish people (both with and without relevant plant knowledge) felt about the common name “Wandering Jew” for the genus Tradescantia, and to fairly investigate preferences for alternative names. Ultimately, I wanted to provide some statistical reference info on whether or not the common name “Wandering Jew” is acceptable to use.

There were 726 responses, a slight increase on survey #1. 28.4% of respondents said they were Jewish or that their relationship to Jewishness is complicated, which was 206 people.

You can see the full spreadsheet of all responses and my tinkering with the numbers here.

All respondents

68% of all respondents said they wouldn’t use the name “Wandering Jew”. 7% said they would use it exclusively. (This is about the same as in survey #1.)

Most respondents (52%) disliked the name, and 5% liked it:

I’ll keep this section fairly simple and stop there, as the nuance is extremely similar to the results of the first survey.

Jewish respondents

146 participants said they were Jewish, and 60 said “My relationship to Jewishness is more complicated than that”. That’s 206 people, and here’s how they feel about the name “Wandering Jew”:

Those of you using screen readers will probably prefer to view the original graph on Google Sheets here.

So, similar to survey #1, Jewish people are more likely than non-Jewish people to say they like the name, but regardless of Jewishness around half (or more) of participants dislike the name.

If we combine all the people who are at least a bit Jewish into one group, and then group the people who feel bad or conflicted about the name together, and then group the people who feel good or neutral about the name together, that means we can look at all the people affected by this issue and find out whether they accept (good/neutral) or don’t [completely] accept (conflicted/bad) the name.

Again, this is very close to the results from survey #1. It’s pretty clear that the name is not favoured among Jewish people.

However, there was a wide variety of sentiments towards the name. Here’s some Jewish people who liked it or referred to reclaiming:

• “It makes me uncomfortable, but I also think that Jewish people have the right to “reclaim” it if they want to”
• “I liked the plant more when I learned [this name] as I felt connected to it”
• “I sympathize with other Jews who may be uncomfortable with the term for the plant. However, I instead interpret it as referring to wandering Jews in a much more Jewish context. Not just the stories of Jews in the wilderness from the Torah, but as a diasporic people we do indeed have a long history of “wandering” as it were. I chose to interpret the name of the plant in a Jewish context, and therefore do have a degree of fondness for the plant that I otherwise might not.”
• “It reflects our history and even the negative views people have about us. I love how we spread so wide across the world and flourish everywhere.”
• “I use it ironically, mainly to joke around with other jews.”
• “I think getting rid of the name sanitizes Jewish history. The name of this plant is a good entry point for people, if theyre intersted, to learn about the Wandering Jew stereotype and then anti-Judaism in general.”

And here’s a representative selection of some Jewish people who didn’t like the name:

• “It’s unnecessary to have names that reinforce harmful stereotypes or emphasise difficult past like Jewish people having to leave their homes because of antisemitism.”
• “After looking up a bit of info on the plant, the name is at least a bit antisemitic given that tradescantia plants seem to be invasive in most places.”
• “My family is Jewish and we’ve been forced to “wander” away from a lot of countries, you know?”
• “It’s a name that has centuries of negative connotations. It’s really antisemitic and absolutely insensitive.”
• “I read the Wiktionary article. Before that I suspected it of being anti-Semitic because it was statistically likely, but had no info to back it up. Now, I’m very unhappy with the name.”
• “The name comes from a hateful antisemitic trope made by Christians. Allegedly Jesus cursed a Jew to wander till the second coming (not in any of the Gospels). This should offend Christians as well as Jesus is supposed to forgive people not curse them”
• “I’m wary about using unfamiliar terms that contain the name of a race/culture/nationality unless I have context, and on reading the context I want to punch Christianity in the nuts.”

… Plus several comments that it was insensitive, offensive, stereotyping, outdated, etc. and that it is simply not necessary to retain the name.

There were also comparisons to the mushroom formerly known as Jew’s ear, which is now called jelly ear.

There is a cultural phenomenon where people within a marginalised group can use a particular word freely, while people outside of the group will cause discomfort by doing so. Some words are slurs in some contexts and not in others. This phenomenon was referenced in some textbox entries. One Jewish participant summed it up: “Sometimes if another jew says it, I don’t have a reaction but if a goyische person says it (especially comfortably) it rubs me the wrong way.”

In addition to the phrase “wandering Jew” perhaps fitting this pattern, the word “Jew” alone as a noun within the name (as opposed to the adjective “Jewish [person]”) can also cause discomfort when used by people who aren’t Jewish. One Jewish participant said:

“As a Jewish man, I feel as if the shortening of the Longer proper phrase, Jewish person, is not offensive on its own, but has been used so derogatorily that it’s very easy to associate with a negative connotation.”

This reminds me of my own experiences in the LGBTQ+ community, where some feel that using “gay” or “queer” as nouns (e.g. a gay, the gays, a queer, the queers) is okay coming from queer people — but not from cisgender straight people, who should lean towards adjectives like “gay person” and “queer person” instead. I’m sure there are comparable linguistic situations in other marginalised groups too, as using a group label as a noun gives the impression of ignoring someone’s personhood/humanity and instead defining them by a single shared social characteristic.

On the topic of culture, this time I included a question asking about people’s country of residence, and I’m glad that I did, because…

Country and perception of antisemitism

So I made this table of the top countries in the Jewish people sample:

There were only these 5 countries that had more than two Jewish respondents. The purple-shaded percentages above are the proportion of the participants from that country (not all participants from any country) who are Jewish or have a complicated relationship to Jewishness.

According to Wikipedia, Israel was 73% Jewish in 2016, so it’s not surprising that all respondents from Israel were Jewish. Here’s the percentages of populations who were Jewish according to Wikipedia:

• Israel: 73% (2016)
• USA: 2% (2023)
• Canada: 0.9% (2021)
• Australia: 0.5% (2021)
• UK: 0.4% (2021/22)

[The percentages in the survey are higher than the percentages in the populations of those countries because the survey was very helpfully shared in Jewish communities online.]

And here’s how Jewish people from those countries feel about the name “Wandering Jew”:

Those of you using screen readers may prefer to view this table on Google Sheets here.

(You can see this table more clearly here on Google Sheets directly.)

It’s not really possible to draw firm conclusions from such a small sample. For the USA it may be somewhat representative with 125 responses, but the next biggest group is the UK with only 36.

Even though there were only 10 responses from Israel, I think it is interesting that residents of the country with the highest proportion of Jewish people in the population are the most likely to say they like the name and use it exclusively, and almost the least likely to say they would never use the name.

On the face of it, this seems to suggest that Jewish people are fine with the name and it’s not offensive. However, I think the reality is likely to be more complicated. First of all, this table contains only responses from Jewish people, so based on these numbers, a fair proportion of Jewish people (and people whose relationship to Jewishness is complicated) who participated do seem to find it offensive, especially in countries with more participants. But more importantly, Jewish people’s experiences of anti-semitism are likely to be very different in countries that are mostly Jewish (like Israel), compared to countries where only a small proportion are Jewish (like the USA), and this may affect participants’ feelings about the name “Wandering Jew”. I think, and I am no expert, that it may be possible that people in Jewish majority countries face less anti-semitism from their peers in their day-to-day lives, and might feel less offended by subtle anti-semitism as a result.

A comparable example to help frame this might be the widely observed but anecdotal phenomenon of cisgender people being less upset when someone uses the wrong pronouns or title for them compared to transgender people. Cisgender people don’t experience transphobia and associated misgendering, and so are less likely to feel hurt by a mistake, less likely to assume bad faith, more able to brush it off easily, and more likely to find it funny. By comparison, transgender people face transphobia often, have to deal with misgendering much more often, it’s more likely to be done in bad faith, and the accumulated pain can make it harder to deal with each time it happens. I wonder whether a Jewish person in a “default Jewish” country might react to these subtle examples of antisemitism in a way that is more similar to a cisgender person’s reaction to being misgendered in a “default cisgender” culture.

Having said that, living in a Jewish country obviously doesn’t make you immune to the harm of antisemitism. One Jewish respondent from Israel said, “Why is it named this? Antisemitism seems likely.” Another Jewish respondent from Israel said, “Jews are terrified for the future, grieving, and feeling under constant attack. This plant’s name doesn’t matter.”

This is all speculative though, and basically we don’t have enough data to have a full picture of the cultural influences at play here. I just haven’t done enough reading around this.

These results split by country suggest that at the very least you could consider being extremely cautious when using the name. Even in the tiny sample of majority-Jewish Israel (10 people), four either had mixed feelings about it or outright disliked it, and three would not use the name at all. And in the UK and USA, based on these numbers it’s inadvisable — about three quarters of Jewish people from each country had partially or wholly negative feelings about it, which is huge.

~

The natural next question is:

What could we call it instead?

In the first survey I did ask about names, and I provided a lot of checkboxes, plus an “other” textbox. As new names were suggested, I added them to the checkbox list, which got very long!

However, when something is a checkbox option it is chosen much more often than would be written into a textbox. That means that any name that was added as a checkbox partway through can’t provide accurate information about its popularity.

So in the second survey, I was able to include a very long list of checkboxes based on the names chosen and entered in the first survey, and keep that list unchanged throughout. This was fairer and more representative.

I will note that the name “zebra plant” was included on the checkbox list, and then partway through the survey I learned that “zebra plant” is the common name for a totally unrelated plant! So, I will exclude this name from the results here, even though it was understandably quite popular.

The most well-known names were:

1. tradescantia (55.3%, exactly 400 people)
2. spiderwort (39.9%)
3. wandering dude (30.9%)
4. inchplant (28.4%)
5. wandering plant (11.3%)
6. wandering jewel (8.7%)
7. trad (8.5%)
8. dayflower (6.6%)
9. wandering trad (3.7%)
10. purple heart (0.3%, 2 people)

I wanted to find out which of the listed names people liked more, and answers to that question gave us this list:

1. tradescantia (52.9%, 384 people)
2. spiderwort (26.3%)
3. inchplant (16.5%)
4. dayflower (11.6%)
5. wandering dude (10.3%)
6. wandering plant (10.1%)
7. wandering jewel (6.1%)
8. trad (4.5%)
9. wandering trad (2.8%)
10. zebrina (0.6%, 4 people)

And then I asked people what their favourites were:

1. tradescantia (29.1%, 211 people)
2. I don’t have [a/just one] favourite (14.3%)
3. spiderwort (12.8%)
4. wandering dude (5.5%)
5. inchplant (4.7%)
6. wandering jewel (4.7%)
7. dayflower (3.7%)
8. wandering plant (2.2%)
9. wandering trad (1.0%)
10. wandering jew (0.7%, 5 people)

As you can see, over half of all participants liked the scientific name Tradescantia, and there is far from a clear majority for a common name.

Also, a lot of the names in these lists are inadvisable/unsuitable as the common name for the whole genus, for various reasons. I consulted with Avery Rowe, the ICRA for tradescantia and the UK Plant Heritage collection holder, to learn that:

• “Spiderwort” usually refers to the several American prairie grassland species of tradescantia, and their hybrids, but that’s only part of the genus.
• “Inchplant” usually refers to T. zebrina, or sometimes all tropical creeping species of tradescantia — which often end up as houseplants in non-tropical countries. Again, that’s only part of the genus.
• “Dayflower” usually refers to the whole Commelinaceae family, in which the tradescantia genus resides. So named because flowers from plants in this family, including tradescantia, last for only one day. This name would not be specific enough.
• “Purple Heart” is used for several cultivars of a specific species of tradescantia, so it doesn’t refer to the whole genus.
• “Zebrina” is the name of a species within the tradescantia genus, so it doesn’t refer to the whole genus.

So if we use the list of names that people liked (a fair compromise, I hope??), and remove names that can’t be used, we get this:

1. tradescantia (52.9%, 384 people)
2. wandering dude (10.3%)
3. wandering plant (10.1%)
4. wandering jewel (6.1%)
5. trad (4.5%)
6. wandering trad (2.8%)

The first choice, tradescantia, is the scientific name. The scientific name is allowed to be a common name, so that’s fine and not that unusual really. But we got to this point because people needed or wanted a common name, perhaps because the scientific name is harder to spell or pronounce or remember, so let’s keep looking.

The second most popular, “Wandering Dude”, is a valid common name, but it is only liked by 1 in 10 participants, and less than a third had even heard the name. Plus, some participants dislike it because it’s a callback to its previous antisemitic name:

• “The plant does like to wander, but let’s lose the medieval antisemitism. ‘wandering dude’ isn’t much better because it’s still riffing on the original name”
• “It’s like if Pringles rebranded to Prongles because they got caught putting cyanide into them”

Oof.

Conclusion

There doesn’t seem to be anything approaching consensus on the common name for tradescantia at the moment, aside from simply using its scientific name. For now, I recommend using that instead of “Wandering Jew”, as a significant proportion of Jewish and non-Jewish participants internationally disliked the name and found it uncomfortable.