But trickster jokes of this sort abound in cultures where there's a system to be tricked. So is this one uniquely or even distinctly Jewish? Wisse knows that's a question from which there is probably no return, not even for an escape artist as wily as Roubitschek, but she does find it fruitful to wonder why a non-Jew would "ascribe a Jewish provenance to anecdotes that could as easily have circulated about Catholic Czechs, or . . . Catholic Poles". Her answer to herself is that "where liberalism is under siege, the Jewish joke stands for independence, for the right to joke and freedom to mock".

This Jewish assumption of the "right to joke," where the right to think independently is denied, would explain why the Jewish narrator/hero has found such favour in the contemporary novel, even when the novelist isn't himself or herself Jewish. It also liberates the idea of what a Jewish joke is from the usual limiting descriptions. Hyperbole, self-criticism, oy-veying and kvetching might be recurrent features of Jewish joking, but Wisse compendiously demonstrates, in the course of this excellent book, that Jewish "humor" — I fear we have to indulge Americans their penchant for the word "humor": they just don't hear its inertness and that's that — has, as often as not, a covertly political not to say seditious intention. Where there is an insistence on the "right" to joke, it makes perfect sense to see joking as a subversive act, no matter how subtly it conceals itself. And enough jokers have been done away with by paranoid political systems to prove it.

Still and all, once this grander function has been granted — making a Jew of all of us when the chips are down — the unanswerable question of what determines a Jewish joke's Jewishness goes on nagging at the corners of our minds. Wisse makes a nice sidestep from the exercise of a right to the expression of a necessity when pausing to speculate that what such variously articulate Jews as Heine and George S. Kaufman have in common "is not the content of their wit but rather their reliance on wit". She is very good on what this "reliance" consists of, tracing with tactful erudition its evolution from the earliest Jewish consciousness of difference. But it has to be asked, nonetheless, whether the content of Jewish wit and Jewish reliance on it, now as a defence, now as a weapon, are in the end separable.

To return to the Roubitschek anecdote — isn't the victory it commemorates a little too easily achieved and a little too bracing in its effect to be as mordantly Jewish as a Jew would want it and even need it to be? Only compare it with an Israeli joke Wisse picked up during the Second Intifada.

Sara in Jerusalem hears on the news about a bombing in a popular café near the home of relatives in Tel Aviv. She calls in a panic and reaches her cousin, who assures her that, thankfully, the family is all safe.

"And Anat?" Sara asks after the teenager whose hangout it had been.

"Oh, Anat," says her mother reassuringly, "Anat's fine. She's at Auschwitz.''

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