Hi everyone! For my appetizer presentation this week, we’ll be thinking together about the overlaps between grotesque depictions of the body and anti-Semitic tropes and visuals.
A brief content warning — the conversation here focuses on images that have been used to promote violence and hate for centuries, so both the topic of discussion and visual materials may be harmful. Please be mindful of your needs and take the space you need in order to engage with this space in a way you feel is best for you. I’ll provide textual descriptions of the images I link to in case you would prefer to read those rather than view the images themselves.
(A quick aside – in talking about anti-Semitic caricature, I am drawing from stereotypes most associated with Ashkenazi Jews, or Jews with Eastern European lineage. In conversations about Jewish identity, a sort of “Ashkenormativity” tends to dominate the space, neglecting to highlight the experiences of Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews, and other Jews of color. This post is focused on tropes we may be more familiar with concerning the Ashkenazi Jewish body – like a prominent nose, associations with greed, and small stature – but should not be read as speaking to the breadth of Jewish identities in the world!)
Okay, on to ~content of presentation time:~
While a lot of our class conversation is focused on the grotesque as a comedic or mocking phenomenon, it’s important to remember that grotesque imagery can also be used in a more directly malicious or hateful way. Specifically, anti-Semitic characterizations of the body tend to focus on elements protruding from the face: eyes, noses, and lips. Some stereotypes even allege that Jews have horns that they hide underneath their hair. As Bakhtin describes on page 316:
“Of all the features of the human face, the nose and mouth play the most important part in the grotesque image of the body; the head, ears, and nose also acquire a grotesque character when they adopt the animal form or that of inanimate objects. The eyes have no part in these comic images; they express an individual, so to speak, self-sufficient human life, which is not essential to the grotesque. The grotesque is interested only in protruding eyes…It is looking for that which protrudes from the body, all that seeks to go out beyond the body’s confines.”
With this in mind, here are links to two cartoon depictions of Jewish bodies [descriptions in brackets]. Again, while the content warning at the top of the post applies to the prior textual elements of the conversation above, I urge you to check in with yourself here and decide what form of engaging with this material feels most comfortable and productive for you!
Image 1. [Known as “The Happy Merchant,” this widely recognized image features a balding Jewish man wearing a yarmulke (or kipah) with an exaggerated nose, large ears, beady eyes underneath a thick brow, and a scraggly curly beard. His hands are clasped together in such a way that indicates a sort of greedy rubbing].
Image 2. [This image is a cartoon of Mark Zuckerberg in profile, with an exaggerated nose and two “like” buttons coming out of his head, resembling horns. A caption at the bottom reads “uncrontrolled growth.”
What are your reactions to these images? How do they contradict or play into the discussions we have been having this semester about the comedic side of the grotesque? How do they relate to the passage from Bakhtin above? What other thoughts do you have about the visual culture of hate more broadly?
Allison, I think this topic of how bodies and our perceptions of bodies can feed into prejudice is really important and not something I’ve thought about in the context of this class before. So thank you for bringing it to light!
I am from a very white, very Protestant town, and I had never known a practicing Jew until I came to Haverford. I was also ignorant and didn’t know about Jewish caricatures, or what a Jew “looked like”–I hadn’t heard of a “Jewish nose” for example. During my first year on campus, when I was still a little naive baby, I realized that these caricatures of greedy men that I had seen growing up were not just a cartoon of a generic greedy person but were anti-Semitic dog whistles.
Anti-Semitic caricatures are of course very visual and I think that lack of language that surrounds them can be very dangerous. Because no anti-Semitic caricature includes a little caption that literally says “I’m prejudiced against Jews,” it’s easier to hide the true meaning of them. I also think caricatures in general are very grotesque, and racist/hateful caricatures are grotesque and lacking in carnivalesque features.
This is a really thoughtful and well-chosen topic to bring up, thank you! I think to the first reaction I have this conflicting sense of fortunate and unfortunate familiary with the image. I am glad that I’ve been educated enough to recognize that archetypal image for what it is and to be able to identify its echoes in today’s versions. Still I’m displeased that I need to be so familiar with it due to the continuing deployment of antisemitism by insidious projects and organizations.
The picture of Zuckerberg gives me a lot more pause though. The use of Facebook’s CEO makes you consider that there are significant differences in how we critique and portray someone who objectively has a disproportionate amount of power andi nfluence in the country. People have good reason to not like him–but recirculating those antisemitic tropes creates a maybe unintended but still consequential affinity with white supremacists and fascists. The image you selected is clearly originating from an antisemitic origin but what about all those memes calling Zuckerberg lizard king and a reptilian alien from space? I wouldn’t be surprised if some of those images were posted on 4chan and got a life of their own.
I think it’s useful to discuss the antisemitic depictions of “the Jewish nose” in this class because it forces us to confront places where the culture of comedy has changed, whether we like it or not, from the moment of Rabelais. I don’t know how well-informed Bakhtin was about antisemitic imagery when writing Rabelais and his World, but we can’t claim naivete today.
I find these images really unsettling and I think they point to the wide variety of ways in which grotesque imagery is used. I definitely think these caricatures fit the criteria of being grotesque, with the overexaggerated features. I also think that grotesque forms of expression are kind of common when it comes to portraying antisemitic stereotypes. An example is Fagin, from Charles Dickens’ novel Oliver Twist. Fagin is an old man who sells stolen goods and runs a gang of pickpockets. In the novel, he is described as incredibly ugly and as an embodiment of evil. Dickens relies on many antisemitic stereotypes when describing Fagin’s appearance and mannerisms. Different adaptations of the novel treat Fagin differently, and perhaps the one that came closest to Dickens’ description of Fagin was David Lean’s 1948 adaptation. Alec Guiness played Fagin in this version, and he puts on a voice and wears a prosthetic nose. The makeup was inspired by the original illustrations accompanying the novel, done by George Cruikshank.
I feel like Dickens’ use of grotesque imagery works in a different way from Rabalais’. Bakhtin represents the grotesque as something empowering, but I feel like in portrayals of Fagin it others people as opposed to unifying. The grotesque is about making people laugh and connecting to a universal experience, and it made me wonder who the intended audience of the grotesque is. Is it really for everyone, or does it differ depending on the creator or the time and place in which the work was created.
Hi y’all! Thank you for your thoughtful responses to my post — I appreciate the directions we’re heading in!
Collin’s critique of the Zuckerberg image adds a really important dimension to the conversation. I definitely agree that there is absolutely a need and a validity to using visual media to criticize the heinous amounts of fiscal and social capital he possesses, and think it is interesting to consider the trope of the male Jewish billionaire in a broader context here too. I’m thinking of depictions of say, Michael Bloomberg as a small, conniving, greedy figure. This is a tough dichotomy: I think Zuckerberg and Bloomberg *are* both immoral hoarders of wealth that use their platforms to uphold inequality under American and global capitalism, but I wonder one can reconcile such a position without buying into the alt-right notion of “Jews control the money, beep boop, don’t trust them.” I don’t necessarily have a direct answer (or even a direct question) on the matter, but the idea of Jews as distrustful sources of wealth and undue influence seems like a useful site for examining the relationship between the visually grotesque (like an image of a “Jewish nose,” as seen in the drawing of the “happy merchant”) and the fundamentally hierarchial, unequal, and anti-carnivalesque manner of capitalist society.
I’d love to hear more of what you make of the above, but in case that isn’t of interest, I want to talk about Shylock, a character from Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice.” This is largely inspired by Charlotte’s examining of Fagin — so thank you! The wikipedia page on the character (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shylock) sums up his role in the play well, and I am curious about how this example of a Jewish, money-lending character from an author that we are looking at later this semester resonates with you! In terms of the grotesque, I’m drawn to this image: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/96/The_Kingdom_of_Shylock.jpg/440px-The_Kingdom_of_Shylock.jpg
What can we see here about the relationship between the idea of Shylock as a stand-in for grotesque visualizations of anti-semitic principles? Is it even responsible at all to try to connect anti-semitism through the present day with renaissance ideas of the grotesque?
xoxo,
Allison
I am also drawn to this comparison of how grotesque imagery appears in anti-capitalist vs anti-Semitic works. Like you, I agree that billionaires are morally wrong because their wealth has to have been grown via exploitation regardless of their ethnicity or religion. However, the alt-right is all about capitalism and a big part of their rhetoric against Zuckerberg or Bloomberg is that Jews are evil lizard illuminati figures. Obviously, most alt-righters are more upset that Zuckerberg and Bloomberg’s wealth is not in the hands of the “correct” white people.
I think alt-righters and racists generally are borrowing from the grotesque, but completely removing it from the carnivalesque. Or they are using carnival-like features, but as Collin points out, real-life carnival festivities will always be tainted by racism and prejudice. Like Alice’s appetizer about the horror genre last week was discussing, the grotesque without carnivalesque features or people’s rights behind it can be extremely unnerving/horrifying/sickening.
You’re reminding me that I still need to get around to reading Merchant of Venice! My first thought is I’m curious about the costuming of Shylock over the centuries. We talked about the standards of Greek Comedy costumes with outrageously large and expressive masks, fat suits and exaggerated parts. Did Elizabethian productions of the play have actors in costumes with exaggerated “Jewish” physicalities like large noses? This production of grotesque imagery, however, wouldn’t work to unite, but to create an other.
Also Shylock’s demand for a pound a flesh from Antonio is striking. Shylock values the bodily but in a way that’s not celebratory. He puts a price on it. I think this brings into question whether Jews in the Renaissance era produced/circulated the themes of the grotesque and carnivalesque that Bakhtin identifies in Rabelais. Being excluded from much of European social life and prevented from owning land for antisemitic reasons, a lot of Jews were left to deal in usury like Shylock. So if Jews were not welcome in gatherings like The Peasant Dance how can we expect to find sympathetic depictions of Jews or their subjectivities in grotesque works of art?
I’d never thought about Shylock demanding a pound of Antonio’s flesh in a grotesque light before. It really does go against the perception of the body that Bakhtin identifies in Rabelais’ writing. I also think the question of staging is interesting and how the character would have been portrayed in a stage production. I found an article about stage productions of the Merchant of Venice over the years (https://www.rsc.org.uk/the-merchant-of-venice/about-the-play/stage-history) and the article says that when the play was first performed in the 1600s/1700s, the actor portraying Shylock would have worn a fake nose and a red wig which fit into antisemitic stereotypes. I also think it’s interesting how the perception of the character of Shylock has changed over time. Lots of adaptations nowadays discard a lot of the stereotypical aspects of his character and Shylock is seen as very sympathetic, why the characters who were originally intended to be the heroes are painted as villains.
After our class discussion on Thursday, I was especially struck by Professor Farmer’s comment that in Shakespeare’s day, there weren’t many Jews in England and they were almost mythical creatures. Despite this absence of a Jewish population, caricatures of Jews still retained the link to evilness or greediness. (Also I have only ever read like 3 Shakespeare plays so I am kind of flying in the dark here and am not even sure I’m spelling his name correctly).
This anti-Semitism in the lack of English Jews brings to mind the concept of linking physical features to personality types/characteristics. The “Jewish nose” is associated with greed as much as it is with a religious ethnicity. Although the caricature can’t really be removed from its anti-Semitic roots, it also is a visual shortcut to mean these negative attributes? (CW: fatphobia in the next bit) As another example of body characteristics being associated with character traits in addition to oppressive rhetoric, earlier in this class we discussed how fat bodies are associated with laziness and thinner bodies with dedication and work ethic. Or tall men being more noble than short men, or how Americans typically vote for the candidate with the most defined jaw. Previously in this post, I have been musing about how removing the grotesque from the carnivalesque can weaponize or warp the grotesque. Now I am wondering how focusing on/fetishizing/demonizing one body part apart from the larger body and spirit that lives in that body can do the same.
I think part of racist caricatures is that they boil complex, living people into one or two body parts. For Jews that can be a nose or a hair type. While Rabelais’s use of the grotesque encourages us to accept and celebrate *all* of our bodies’ functions, racist/anti-Semitic caricatures shame some bodies. I don’t know if this is making any sense and I don’t have a big conclusion, but I really appreciated this appetizer. Thanks everyone!
Hi everyone! Thanks so much for your engagement with this appetizer discussion — I know it’s not the most uplifting topic so I appreciate you powering through with me. I think the conversation went to some really interesting places — from anti-capitalist critiques to Dickens and red wigs. I don’t think I had any particular expectations for the discussion in terms of outcome, as I pretty much just wanted to start conversation about the “Happy Merchant” photo and things expanded from there. So, I guess it was a success! I’m definitely going to carry with me these insights about the historical role of Jews in
European theater and how stereotypes translate over to an American context. I’m gonna end here because ya girl’s got a fever and is paranoid, so apologies for the brevity and see y’all next week!