Several years ago, I wrote a newspaper article (not for the Tribune) about a Near North Side intersection that had a steakhouse on one corner and different ethnic restaurants on the other corners. I called it “The Four Corners of the World.”
To my dismay, the article was illustrated with outmoded, stereotypical caricatures of an Italian, Asian and Mexican cavorting with Uncle Sam. The Asian had big buckteeth, crossed, slanted eyes and wore a straw “coolie” hat. The Italian had a huge handlebar mustache and was dressed like an organ grinder with one of those conical felt hats Chico Marx wore in the movies. The Mexican resembled the “Frito Bandito.”
I wasn’t shown the artwork beforehand, but, to my further chagrin, some thought I had OKd this travesty–I, who was celebrating diversity in dining. I shuddered to think what it might have looked like had one of the restaurants been a black-owned rib joint or a kosher deli.
A few years later, The Reader published a cartoon of Ald. Dorothy Tillman–always a rich subject for caricature–that crossed all the lines and suggested the nastiest kind of African-American stereotyping, replete with big bare feet and talon-like toenails. Thus, late in the 20th Century–and early this 21st–we’re still stumbling across demeaning, ethnic stereotyping in our “enlightened” press, as a recent Tribune editorial cartoon of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon demonstrates.
Granted, the Tribune and Reader cartoons were intended to take satirical swipes at their subjects, but they crossed the boundaries and emerged as swipes at Jews and blacks in general; the “innocent” illustration used for my dining article was not intended as criticism at all, which made it even more insidious.
Like the “harmless” ethnic joke, those caricatures perpetuate false, odious traits and legends associated with different ethnic or religious groups. But beyond bad taste–beyond violations of political correctness–reiterating ugly myths throughout history has led to serious, often catastrophic consequences. As the conservative British historian Paul Johnson notes, “The Jews have been more frequently the target of such [satirical] attacks than any other group and they know from long and bitter experience that violence of print is often the prelude to the violence of blood.”
Would slavery have been tolerated as long as it was–or fundamental civil rights been denied for so many generations–had not racial stereotypes portrayed blacks as ignorant, lazy and generally subhuman? To this day, certain conservative social scientists, such as the authors of “The Bell Curve,” are trying to prove that blacks are genetically mentally inferior–much as French and German linguists in the early 19th Century developed a pseudoscientific rationale to prove Jews an inferior race because of their Semitic language.
Would Adolf Hitler have been so successful in his efforts to eradicate Jews had the German population, among others, not misunderstood Jews to be money-grubbing, power-lusting creatures who killed Jesus Christ and drank the blood of Christian babies?
Beyond Hitler, anti-Semitism infected some of the finest minds of our times. The great poet T.S. Eliot did his own stereotyping. In “Burbank with a Baedeker, Bleistein with a Cigar,” he caricatured the crass, money-grubbing Jew. Composer Igor Stravinsky blamed the Jews for fomenting the Russian Revolution–and even Winston Churchill often pointed out that most of the revolution’s leaders happened to be Jewish.
The blood-libel of Jews killing the Christian savior was a rationale for the First Crusade, in the 11th Century, but some ideas die hard. It took nearly two millenniums after the crucifixion for most Christian churches to recant the lie–which was recently resurrected by both right-wing Christian organizer Paul Weyrich and New York Knicks basketball star Charlie Ward.
Shakespeare’s Shylock
The primordial, stereotypical Jew, of course, has a long, hooked nose, is dressed in black and often sports a wild beard. We’ve seen his likeness as long as there has been a printed page. It’s there in the earliest renderings of Shylock, the avaricious moneylender in Shakespeare’s “Merchant of Venice.” (Speaking of stereotypes, the Jew as usurer has some factual basis: The early church forbade its faithful to practice lending and money-changing, forcing the role on Jews.)
Fast-forward to Charles Dickens’ day, and you see virtually the same hooked nose on Fagin, master thief and corrupter of children in “Oliver Twist.” As if Jews needed another evil stereotype. The image appears again and again, some in late-19th Century editorial cartoons attacking Alfred Dreyfus, the French army captain falsely accused of betraying military secrets. He was imprisoned for years on Devil’s Island before being exonerated in 1906. The fact that Dreyfus was Jewish made him an easy scapegoat. But then, Jews had been scapegoated for centuries, even getting blamed for the plague in medieval times.
During the Hitler era, a periodical called “Der Stuermer,” edited by Julius Streicher, was rife with anti-Semitic cartoons, most showing the same stereotypical figures, all aimed at supporting Hitler’s genocidal policies. Jews were accused of “betraying” Germany–never mind that 100,000 of them fought on the Kaiser’s side in World War I and 12,000 died in battle. As Johnson observed, “The climate of actual violence that nourished Nazism was itself sustained by growing verbal and pictorial violence in the media.”
These days there’s a torrent of similar, toxic editorial cartoons, mostly in the Arab world but some also in the West, showing that selfsame stereotypical Jew. They’re generated by the Middle East conflict, which has given rise to a whole new wave of anti-Semitism. Arabs, however, like to point out that they, too, are Semites, so the term is inappropriate–though Arabs, too, suffer from stereotyping as fat oil sheiks or terrorists and are often caricatured as unclean. Look at cartoons showing flies buzzing around Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.
Jewish troubles with the Arab world did not just begin with the state of Israel. Nearly a millennium ago Jews were massacred by Islamists and expelled from the Arabian Peninsula, much as they were exiled from Jerusalem some 600 years before the birth of Christ. In the following centuries they were legislated against, attacked in pogroms and ultimately expelled from country after country across Europe.
Remember the Inquisition? The year 1492 is best-known for the voyage of Christopher Columbus–but that’s also the year his mentors, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, expelled the Jews from Spain. Five years later they were expelled from Portugal.
Jews were deprived of civil rights in most countries and restricted in where they could live. The original ghetto, remember, is an Italian word designating the quarter in which Jews were confined. In late-19th Century Czarist Russia, they were limited to a 25-province area known as the Pale–beyond which they could not go and within which they could not practice most trades.
Lies about Jewish plot
The most successful forgery in all literature is “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a document concocted for the czar by his secret police, purporting to be the inside story of how international Jewry is plotting behind the scenes to dominate the world. It’s also the source of the legend that they drink the blood of Christian babies at Passover. Picture its illustrations! It was used to support czarist pogroms and later by Joseph Stalin for his anti-Semitic purges. Despite being discredited as a total fraud, it keeps resurfacing–it’s still selling well in some Arab and Asian countries.
Its companion pieces are legends blaming Jews for the Sept. 11 attacks and a French best seller claiming that Jews were forewarned to stay away from the World Trade Center that horrible day–despite the hundreds of Jews who perished. Truth, it seems, is no inoculation against the virus of anti-Semitism, which manifests itself in Europe today with increasing physical attacks on Jews and the defacement of synagogues and Jewish institutions.
Once the province of the far right, a new anti-Semitism of the left has emerged out of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Legitimate criticism of Israeli policies has crossed into outright condemnation of Jews. Campuses in California and elsewhere have seen sloganeering more befitting Hitlerian brown-shirts than American social protesters–profoundly abetted by the fact that most of the neoconservative architects of America’s new bellicose, neoimperialist foreign policy happen to be Jewish. Just like the creators of the Russian Revolution.
There is something remarkably chilling about the virus called anti-Semitism. It lives on and on, millennium after millennium, changing course from place to place, creating and recreating new rationales built on old lies, finding its host in a multiplicity of political environments–but its roots remain deep in the same old stereotypes. Little wonder we Jews go nuts when we see it manifest in what others may consider a harmless editorial cartoon.
