A large grouper native to the tropical Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico.
The earliest source we know of for the name of the species is from the Oxford
English Dictionary, which quotes from a book published in 1697, entitled 'A New Voyage
Round the World,' by the famed explorer, William Dampier.
In the book, Dampier logs his expedition to Jamaica, where he encounters Jews (who are an extreme minority, as they are in most other nations), who favor a certain type of fish - the jewfish - which they consider to be the grandest kosher fish.
Kosher, because it has both fins and scales, and the grandest, because it is by far the largest kosher fish around, as it is in the Florida's Keys (second to only the shark, when including all fishes). The quote from the OED is: "The Jew-fish is a very good Fish, and I judge so called by the English, because it hath Scales and Fins, therefore a clean Fish, according to the Levitical Law."
The once proudly named Jewfish is now called a
Goliath Grouper because South Florida ultra uptight and PC Jews have gotten so lost in being irrationally upset about
everything that they no longer care to remember their own heritage and thus demand that the name Jewfish, which is one of the world's grandest kosher fish and originally named by local Jews that ate it, is somehow
anti-semitic and culturally insensitive to them.
