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Sara Lipton

Sara Lipton teaches medieval history at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and is currently a Visiting Fellow at Oxford. Her most recent book is Dark Mirror: The Medieval Origins of Anti-Jewish Iconography.
 (June 2019)

IN THE REVIEW

A Terribly Durable Myth

Detail of an Exchequer receipt roll showing the oldest known anti-Jewish caricature, 1233

Jews, Money, Myth

an exhibition at the Jewish Museum, London, March 19–July 7, 2019
The exhibition “Jews, Money, Myth” at the Jewish Museum in London seeks both to document and to refute the stereotype of the moneyed Jew. The subject is distressingly timely. Propelled by rising nationalism on the right and antiglobalism on the left, in the past two years anti-Semitism has come back into the headlines. Politicians and activists on all sides now implicitly endorse or even repeat accusations of Jewish greed and financial power.

NYR DAILY

The First Anti-Jewish Caricature?

The earliest known anti-Jewish caricature is a sketch—actually, an elaborate doodle—in the upper margin of an English royal tax record from 1233. It shows three bizarre-looking Jews standing inside a schematic castle, which is being attacked by a host of cartoonish horned, beak-nosed demons. But there is reason to reconsider the traditional reading of the cartoon, which has been overly influenced by the long afterlife of the anti-Jewish imagery pioneered here.

Books of Jewish Beauty

An image from volume 2 of The Tripartite Mahzor showing the revelation at Sinai; male protagonists have human heads, but women are given the heads of various animals, Germany, Lake Constance region, circa 1320

Since the late eighteenth century, Jews have often been viewed as contributing little to the visual arts. The idea began with Enlightenment thinkers, such as Kant, whose disdain for sensory experience led him to praise what he considered to be the admirably abstract, image-less, and therefore philosophical nature of ancient Hebrew religious thought. Since then, Jews’ alleged disregard for aesthetics has been variously attributed to the Second Commandment’s prohibition against graven images, or to a logocentric culture’s lack of interest in the visual realm. A new, gorgeously illustrated volume of Jewish manuscripts challenges all such assumptions.

The Invention of the Jewish Nose

A miniature depicting the expulsion of Jews from France. The Jews are not shown with hooked noses, however. The hook-nosed man is a royal sergeant, whose gross features indicate his low social status. From the Grandes Chroniques de France, 1182

The “eternal Jew” and “the longest hatred” are equally misleading labels. Neither Jews themselves nor attitudes toward Jews were static or unchanging. Even apparently identical images can bear radically different meanings. But the history of anti-Jewish iconography does reveal one constant in western culture, well-known to Nazi propagandists—the visceral force of the visual image.