| Happy Merchant | |
|---|---|
 Edited caricature illustration of a stereotypical Jewish man by "A. Wyatt Mann". | |
| First appearance | Artwork by A. Wyatt Mann |
The Happy Merchant is a common name for an image depicting an antisemitic caricature of a Jewish man. The image appears commonly on websites such as 4chan, Reddit, and X (formerly Twitter) where it is frequently used in hateful or disparaging contexts.
The image was first created by cartoonist A. Wyatt Mann (a wordplay on "A white man"), a pseudonym of Nick Bougas. [1] [2] [3] The image was part of a cartoon that also included a racist caricature of a black man and used these images to say: "Let's face it! A world without Jews and Blacks would be like a world without rats and cockroaches." The cartoon was first released in print, but appeared online in February 2001. [1]
The stereotypical image of a Jew from the cartoon began to spread on various internet communities, where users began to make variations of it. [1]
The Happy Merchant meme endorses the idea that Jews secretly conspire to conquer the world . [4]
The image is intended as a derogatory depiction, and employs many stereotypes of Jews. These include:
This image is a form of antisemitic propaganda, common on alt-right internet communities such as 4chan, other "chan" websites, and on other message boards. [6]
In 2017, Al Jazeera tweeted an image that included the Happy Merchant on its official English-language Twitter account. The tweet was promoting a story about climate change, and insinuated that Jewish people were behind climate change. Al Jazeera later deleted the tweet, explaining that it had been used in a segment covering alt-right antisemitic climate change conspiracy theories. [7]
A 2018 study published by Savvas Zannettou et al. focused on online antisemitism recorded that the Happy Merchant and its variations were "among the most popular memes on both 4chan's /pol/ board and Gab, two major outlets for alt-right expression. [8] The study found that usage of the Happy Merchant on /pol/ remained largely consistent (with a peak during the U.S. airstrike on Syria in April 2017), while usage of the meme on Gab increased after the Charlottesville rally in August 2017. [9] It was also determined that /pol/ influences the spread of Happy Merchant to other web platforms such as Twitter and Reddit. [10]
The same study also found that the Happy Merchant has been incorporated into other common memes on the site, including Pepe the Frog. [11]
Under the pen name of 'A. Wyatt Mann,' artist Nick Bougas has drawn many explicitly racist, homophobic, and anti-Semitic cartoons where there isn't even a pretense of humor.
But internet anti-Semites (or at least people fishing for a reaction) started splicing Garrison's work together with the work of Nick Bougas, aka A. Wyatt Man, a director and illustrator responsible for one of the web's most enduring anti-Semitic images.