This Hebrew Saying Might Have the Same Origin as an American Southern One

I was reading the first chapter of J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, which seems to be a required book these days, when I was struck by a sentence that few readers would probably have paid much attention to. Writing about his grandparents, natives of Kentucky known to him in the distinctive speech of the Appalachians as Mamaw and Papaw, Vance wrote: “As Mamaw used to say, you can take the boy out of Kentucky, but you can’t take Kentucky out of the boy.” What took me aback wasn’t Mamaw’s observation that removing someone from his native environment can’t keep its effects from continuing to influence him. That’s commonsensical. It was the similarity of her wording to the well-known Hebrew saying Kal yoter l’hotsi et ha-y’hudi miha-galut mi-l’hotsi et ha-galut miha-y’hudi, “It’s easier to take the Jew out of exile than to take exile out of the Jew.” Could there possibly be a connection?

Well, of course not. What connection could there be between the Appalachia of Vance’s grandparents and the Zionist circles in Europe and Israel in which the Hebrew saying was common from the early 20th century on? Clearly, the resemblance was simply the product of a shared perception regarding human nature. No doubt other languages had like sayings.

Some cursory research, however, failed to bear this out. German, Russian, French, Spanish, Italian—none appeared to have anything like the “You can take X out of Y but you can’t take Y out of X” formula. The one language I found it in was Polish, in which one says, Chłop ze wsi wyjdzie, ale wieś z chłopa nigdy, “The yokel leaves the village but the village never leaves the yokel.”