I was trying to understand the etymology and history for the word 'kike'. With discovering some stuff on the Internet.
After searching on many sources, I found out that Jewish people on Ellis Island signed 'O' instead of 'X' because of relevance towards Christianity. Apparently, the religious slur originated from 'kikel' which means circle.
According to Oxford University Press's blog. /
The second hypothesis turns round the Yiddish word for "circle" and has two variants. According to the main of them, on Ellis Island those immigrating Jews who knew neither English nor the Roman script were asked to put an X near their names, but looked upon it as a picture of the cross, a symbol of their former persecution, and instead put a circle. One of the variants of the Yiddish word for "circle" can be transcribed as kaykl, and this is said to be the etymon of Kike. Could the English speaking officials on Ellis Island isolate one Yiddish word in the speech of the Jewish people they dealt with, use it mockingly, and make it famous? I am afraid that we have here an example of the rich Ellis Island folklore that produced a Jew Shaun Ferguson and a Chinese man Sam Ting.
Another thing was this
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it may be an alteration of the endings –ki or –ky common in the personal names of Jews in eastern Europe who immigrated to the United States in the early 20th century.[2]
From
So, what is true? Did the Jewish people really sign O instead of X? Is there more information about the whole of the subject?