"Baptized shmuls" (крещеные шмули) -- ethnic slur

Chekhov's dismissal of the journalist Gorodetsky as talentless "like all baptized shmuls" (как все крещеные шмули). "Shmul" (from the Yiddish given name Shmuel/Samuel., the neutral-to-mildly-disparaging stock-name usage in "tina") is here weaponized as a blanket ethnic slur for Jewish converts to Orthodoxy, structurally identical to the corpus's other genuine-prejudice cases: Chekhov generalizes from one disliked individual to an entire ethnic-religious category ("like all baptized shmuls"), asserting that conversion does not remove an essential, inherited lack of talent. This is a harsher and more pointed usage than the merely blunt zhid/zhidovka of: there the slur functioned as an almost reflexive ethnonym sitting beside real personal warmth toward specific Jewish people; here it is deployed explicitly as a generalizing racial theory, with "baptized" doing the work of foreclosing the obvious rebuttal that conversion should have erased the difference. Compare also two sections earlier in this same letter: Chekhov routes a telegram through a named, unremarked-upon Karaite merchant with no hint of the contempt he directs at Gorodetsky -- the letter contains both a neutral, functional mention of a Jewish-adjacent community member and, twenty lines later, an unambiguous slur, without any sign Chekhov saw a contradiction. Translated at full force as "shmuls" per this corpus's no-softening policy for genuine slurs; not to be softened, euphemized, or silently corrected. This is Chekhov's own casual antisemitism in a private family letter.