500 Years of Antisemitic Propaganda

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Dehumanization of Jews (Czechoslovakia, late 19th century) From the Middle Ages to the modern era, antisemites frequently portrayed Jews as vermin and various other animals—especially pigs because Judaism considers pigs unclean and forbids the consumption of pork. This statue depicts three pigs in traditional Jewish garb sitting on a bench in Karlsbad, Czechoslovakia, a popular spa town frequented by prewar European Jewry. A prohibition on Jewish settlement existed in Karlsbad from 1499 to 1793, and until 1848 Jewish residence there was contested in protracted litigation initiated by non-Jewish merchants. In time, Karlsbad gained a Jewish clientele and a rich Jewish life unfolded there, but coexistence with members of other religions was never widespread.
Martyrdom of Simon of Trent (Nuremberg, Germany, 1493) The oldest item in the collection, this woodcut depicts a scene from the Nuremberg Chronicle, an illustrated world history as related in the Bible and one of the earliest published books (Germany, 1493). The woodcut depicts an event that supposedly took place in Trent, Italy, 18 years earlier. It portrays a blood libel, one of the oldest antisemitic canards in which a Jewish community is falsely blamed for killing Christian children in a religious ritual. Over the centuries blood-libel accusations have resulted in expulsions, executions, and mob attacks against Jews. In 1475, a two-year-old Christian boy named Simon was found dead. Shortly before Simon went missing, an itinerant Franciscan preacher had delivered a series of sermons in Trent in which he vilified the local Jewish community. The Catholic Church later designated the child Simon as a martyr.
Jew with dentures hoping to extract gold tooth (England, 18th century) This hideous portrait was painted in England in the 18th century by an unknown artist. After medieval expulsions, Jews were only gradually readmitted to England starting in 1656. In 1753, Jews gained naturalization only to lose it the following year due to public protest. This painting made approximately at that time shows a stereotypical religious Jewish man holding a pair of dentures and about to extract a gold tooth. Although this artist accused a Jew of eyeing a gold tooth for its monetary value, it was the Nazis who 200 years later extracted gold teeth from Jewish victims.
Board Game: The Dreyfus Affair (France, 1898) In 1894, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, the highest ranking Jewish artillery officer in the French army, was falsely convicted of high treason. Although the accusation was baseless, the Affair unleashed widespread violent antisemitism throughout France until Dreyfus was finally exonerated in 1906. This board game, produced by Dreyfus’ defenders and illustrated with broken tablets of the Rights of Man, promotes the idea that hatred and discrimination against one minority—the Jews—has a detrimental impact on the rule of law and the human rights of all.
Walking sticks (Europe, 19th century) European artisans commonly adorned everyday items such as ceramics, toys, and even walking sticks with caricatures of Jewish faces. These walking sticks are examples of racial antisemitism becoming part of everyday life.

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Anti-Jewish hatred has pervaded Western art, politics, and popular culture for centuries. Perceptions and understandings of Jews throughout history were manifested in objects—from fine arts and crafts for the elite to everyday toys and knickknacks and household items. Many of these objects promoted negative attitudes and stereotypes about Jews.

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The Katz Ehrenthal Collection—acquired through the generosity of the Katz family—consists of over 900 individual objects depicting Jews and antisemitic and anti-Jewish propaganda from the Medieval to the modern era, created and distributed throughout Europe, Russia, and the United States. The same hateful stereotypes reappear throughout the collection, spanning centuries and continents. Not all of the objects are antisemitic, however, a small portion of the collection documents or combats specific antisemitic episodes.

In the 1930s and 1940s, Nazi propagandists used these same stereotypes with deadly consequences. For example, feature films, newsreels, toys, and games helped intensify negative stereotypes of Jews. Already portrayed as second-class citizens, they were increasingly characterized as “degenerates, criminals, and racially inferior corrupters of German society.” Some of the same beliefs are still prevalent in Western countries today.

Peter Ehrenthal, a Romanian Holocaust survivor, amassed the collection to document the pervasive history of anti-Jewish hatred in Western art, politics, and popular culture. Ehrenthal wrote that, through this collection, he tried to illuminate the root causes of why the public saw the Jew as “the incarnation of all evil, and why ... [the public] accepted the Hitlerian and even earlier persecutions and destruction of Jewish life.”

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