Jinx is native to English, so the idea that talking about something good might prevent it from happening is not exclusive to Ashkenazim. Anything else is an invitation for catastrophe. You don’t talk about your baby until your baby is born. The easiest example of Jewish attitudes about luck is that Ashkenazi Jews don’t hold baby showers. Maybe this is a Jewish attitude either way. I’d say instead that if you talk too much or too openly about good things in your future, you might accidentally convince yourself they’ll happen, and then when something goes wrong, you’ll be even more crushed. If you demanded that I explain this, I wouldn’t say anything about the evil eye. But it just feels right to me to keep in mind, at all times, that it’s a bad idea to talk too much about future good things. I had never thought of this personality quirk as Jewish-certainly we never talked about the evil eye in my very secular family. While not a superstitious person in general, I am wary of talking about possible good things in the future without layers and layers of hypothetical statements. I started thinking about the word “jinx” today when a friend on twitter was surveying people about (1) whether they held with the superstition that it’s bad luck to talk about good things that might happen (in general, or specifically attracting the evil eye) and (2) whether they were Jewish.
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