Research has found that the nose design outlined by this Jewish stereotype is most prevalent among humans originating from the Mediterranean Basin and the Middle East, where it is equally prevalent among the Jewish population as it is among the other local populations.[6][7][8] Still, among the Jewish communities situated outside of the Mediterranean Basin and the Middle East, such as that in the United States, the so-called "Jewish nose" has come to be effectively reclaimed by many Jews as a defining characteristic of their Jewish identity,[9][10] with general Jewish attitudes toward the trait having changed from mostly negative to mostly positive since the 1950s.[11]
Perceptions
Robert Knox, an 18th-century anatomist, described the supposed Jewish nose as "a large, massive, club-shaped, hooked nose."[4] Another anatomist, Jerome Webster, described it in 1914 as having "a very slight hump, somewhat broad near the tip and the tip bends down."[4]
A 1886 sketch by Joseph Jacobs that illustrates the degrees of "Jewishness" of a nose
In the 19th century, Jewish folklorist Joseph Jacobs wrote: "A curious experiment illustrates this importance of the nostril toward making the Jewish expression. Artists tell us that the best way to make a caricature of the Jewish nose is to write a figure 6 with a long tail (Fig. 1); now remove the turn of the twist as in Figure 2, and much of the Jewishness disappears; it vanishes entirely when we draw the continuation horizontally as in Figure 3. We may conclude, then, as regards the Jewish nose, that it is more the Jewish nostril than the nose itself which goes to form the characteristic Jewish expression."[12]
The statistics cited in the chapter "Nose" of the Jewish Encyclopedia (1901–1905) by Joseph Jacobs and Maurice Fishberg demonstrate that, contrary to the stereotype, the "Jewish", or hooked, nose is found with the same frequency among people of Jewish descent as it is among non-Jewish people from the Mediterranean region generally. The data collected by Jacobs and Fishberg showed that this type of nose is found in the minority of Jews (20–30%) and that the vast majority have a straight nose.[5] In 1914, Fishberg examined the noses of 4,000 Jews in New York and found that only 14% could be described as either aquiline or hooked.[13] In 1906, Felix von Luschan suggested that the arched nose in Jews is not a "Semitic" trait, but is a consequence of the intermixture with the "Hittites" in Asia Minor, noting that other races with Hittite blood, such as the Armenians, have similar noses.[5] The same theory was held in 1910 by Houston Stewart Chamberlain, a racialist writer whose ideas on the racial inferiority of Jews influenced the development of Fascism.[14]
A Roman bust falsely identified in the early 20th century as representing the Roman-Jewish historian and military leader Josephus, based solely on stereotypes about the Jewish nose. Current scholarship definitively rejects this identification.
A Roman statue depicting a hawk-nosed figure in the collection of the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen, and acquired in 1891 from Princess Piombino, lacked an inscription in Latin identifying the subject but was presented by the museum in 1925 as Josephus, an identification defended by Robert Eisler. The grounds for Eisler's inference were simply that a notice in Eusebius stated that Josephus, the most famous Jew of his time, had a statue erected in his honour, and this bust, he thought, corresponded to a "crooked", "broken" "Jewish nose" as distinct from the classic aquiline Roman nose. The identification is still widely used online despite the fact that modern scholarship definitively rejects the claim.[15][16][17][18]Hebrews in ancient Near Eastern art, like other peoples, Canaanites for example, who lived to the west of the Assyrian empire, have straight protruding noses.[15][16]
History
Art historian Sarah Lipton traces the association of a hooked nose with Jews to the 13th century.[19] Prior to that time, representations of Jews in art and iconography showed no specific facial features. "By the later thirteenth century, however, a move toward realism in art and an increased interest in physiognomy spurred artists to devise visual signs of ethnicity. The range of features assigned to Jews consolidated into one fairly narrowly construed, simultaneously grotesque and naturalistic face, and the hook-nosed, pointy-bearded Jewish caricature was born."[19]
While the hooked nose became associated with Jews in the 13th century, the Jewish nose stereotype only became firmly established in the European imagination some centuries later. One early literary use of it is Francisco de Quevedo's A un hombre de gran nariz (To a man with a big nose) written against his rival in poetry, Luis de Góngora. The point of his sonnet was to mock his rival by suggesting his large nose was proof he was, not a 'pure blooded Spaniard', but the descendant of conversos, Jews who had converted to Catholicism to avoid expulsion. In particular, the reference to una nariz sayón y escriba (Spanish for 'a nose of a hangman and scribe') associates such a nose maliciously with the Pharisees and the Scribes responsible for Christ's death according to the New Testament.[20][21] In his History of the Indies, (1653), Francisco López de Gómara argued for the thesis that the native population of the Americas must have descended from the Israelites, whom, a decade earlier, Antonio de Montezinos/Aharon Levi had claimed were the lost tribes of Israel, by citing the size of their noses.[22]
George Mosse, describing negative stereotypes about various parts of a Jewish body, wrote: "The so-called Jewish nose, bent at the top, jutting hawk-like from the face, existed already as a caricature in the sixteenth century […] It became firmly established as a so-called Jewish trademark only by the mid-eighteenth century, however, and soon became a foil for the straight nose of Greek beauty."[23]
The hooked nose became a key feature in antisemitic Nazi propaganda. "One can most easily tell a Jew by his nose," wrote Nazi propagandist Julius Streicher in a children's story. "The Jewish nose is bent at its point. It looks like the number six. We call it the 'Jewish six.' Many Gentiles also have bent noses. But their noses bend upwards, not downwards. Such a nose is a hook nose or an eagle nose. It is not at all like a Jewish nose."[24]
According to writer Naomi Zeveloff, "in prewar Berlin, where the modern nose job was first developed, Jews sought the procedure to hide their ethnic identity."[25] The inventor of rhinoplasty, Jacques Joseph, had "a large Jewish clientele seeking nose jobs that would allow them to pass as gentiles in Berlin", wrote Zeveloff.
But this negative view of the Jewish nose was not shared by all Jews; Jewish Kabbalistic texts consider a large nose as a sign of character. In his book The Secrets of the Face (Hebrew: חכמת הפרצוף), Kabbalistic Rabbi Aharon Leib Biska wrote in 1888 that Jews have "the eagle's nose". "A nose that is curved down […] with a small hump in the middle attests to a character that seeks to discover the secrets of wisdom, who shall govern fairly, be merciful by nature, joyful, wise and insightful."[26]
Among those seeking surgery to make their noses smaller were many American Jewish film actresses of the 1920s to 1950s. "Changing one's name is to Jewish males what fixing one's nose is to Jewish females, a way of passing,"[27] writes film historian Patricia Erens. One of the actresses to undergo surgery was Fanny Brice, inspiring commentator Dorothy Parker to comment that she "cut off her nose to spite her race."[28] According to Erens, this fashion ended with Barbra Streisand, whose nose is a signature feature.[29] Streisand told Playboy magazine in 1977, "When I was young, everyone would say, 'You gonna have your nose done?' It was like a fad, all the Jewish girls having their noses done every week at Erasmus Hall High School, taking perfectly good noses and whittling them down to nothing. The first thing someone would have done would be to cut my bump off. But I love my bump, I wouldn't cut my bump off."[30]
"As Jews assimilated into the American mainstream in the 1950s and '60s, nose jobs became a rite of passage for Jewish teens who wanted a more Aryan look," wrote Zeveloff. By 2014, the number of rhinoplasty operations had declined by 44 percent, and "in many cases the procedure has little bearing on […] religious identity."[25][clarification needed]
In Western non-Jewish literature and cinema
In The American Scene (1905), Henry James alluded to the stereotype in a description of the Jewish slums in New York City's Lower East Side by comparing Jews to a "sallow aquarium [with] innumerable fish, of over-developed proboscis".[31] The Jewish nose stereotype was a common motif in the work of Thomas Mann, who described it as "too flat, fleshy, down-pressed". In his 1909 novel Royal Highness, for example, Mann invents a Jewish doctor, Sammet, whose nose is described as giving away his origins, being "too broad at the bottom".[32] In The Great Gatsby (1925), F. Scott Fitzgerald's portrayal of the gangster Meyer Wolfsheim (also Wolfshiem) focused on his "expressive nose", a reference Fitzgerald later denied was antisemitic, despite privately expressing "bias toward Jews and ethnic others … into the 1930s".[33] In The Sun Also Rises (1926), Ernest Hemingway's character Robert Cohn breaks his nose while boxing at Princeton University, an incident which "certainly improve[s] his nose." The alteration is symbolic of the perceived sacrifices required to fit in with a predominantly Anglo-Saxon peer group at a university with a strongly antisemitic atmosphere.[34]
In Paul Thomas Anderson's 2021 film Licorice Pizza, the nose of leading role Alana Kane, played by Alana Haim, is mentioned by a casting director (Harriet Sansom Harris), who also emphasizes her sexiness and asks if she would play topless roles. In another scene, producer Jon Peters (Bradley Cooper) brags about Barbra Streisand being his girlfriend and subsequently demonstrates an interest in Alana—as do most other males in that film, most prominently leading role Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman). This has been commented as the film capturing "the moment when pop culture finally started to see Jewish women as beautiful".[35]
Heinrich Heine in his The Baths of Lucca creates a satiric portrait of the Jewish upstart figure Gumpel trying, under false aristocratic pretenses, to ingratiate his way into high society, while waiting for God to restore the Jews to their ancestral homeland. The problem is his nose, which is so long it almost pokes out the narrator's eyes when they meet. God must eventually make good on his promise of a return to Israel, the narrator reflects:
a promise which has been leading them by the nose for two thousand years. Is this being led by the nose the reason, perhaps, why their noses have grown so long? Or are these long noses a kind of uniform, by which the divine old king Jehovah recognizes his palace guards even when they have deserted?[37][38]
In American Jewish literature and cinema, the Jewish nose has been a defining characteristic – for better or for worse – of the American Jewish identity. "The nose is […] a physical symbol of otherness, definitely for Jews," as Philip Roth and other artists note, writes literary critic Roy Goldblatt.[9] Big noses for Jews, small noses for non-Jews, and the frequent appearance of rhinoplasty "as an instrument of (attempted) Americanization" all appear in Jewish literature as showing "the special significance attached to the nose as a factor marking the otherness of Jews – historically, in print, on stage, and on the screen," writes Goldblatt.
Goldblatt cites numerous examples of Jewish writers discussing the Jewish nose. As Philip Roth writes in Portnoy's Complaint, "Goyim are the people for whom Nat 'King' Cole sings every Christmastime, 'Chestnuts roasting on an open fire, Jack Frost nipping at your nose' […] 'No, no, theirs are the noses whereof he speaks. Not his flat black one or my long bumpy one, but those tiny bridgeless wonders whose nostrils point northward automatically at birth."[9]
Joshua Louis Moss cites Woody Allen's movie Sleeper as another example of the Jewish nose as an element of the American Jewish identity.[10] "The historical and ethnoreligious connections are made palpable in the film's main structuring comedy motif, one of the central tropes of twentieth-century anti-Semitism: the contested landscape of the Jewish nose […] Nose jokes recur throughout the film in both dialogue and sight gags." For example, in one scene two robots with outlandishly large noses speak with heavy Yiddish accents. In another scene, Allen assassinates the dictator in the movie by throwing the tyrant's distinctly non-Jewish-looking nose under a steamroller.
While large noses are taken as a sign of Jewishness, Jewish authors take small noses as a sign of the Gentile. "Neither Sarah's way of speaking nor her manner was that of a daughter of Israel. Suddenly they remembered she didn't look Jewish, that she had a snub nose, high cheekbones, teeth that were strangely white […] unlike those found among the Jews," writes Isaac Bashevis Singer in his novel The Slave.[39] "'Don't you know what that girl is who is asleep beside you? Just look at that nose.' 'What nose?' 'That's the point – it's hardly even there […] Schmuck, this is the real McCoy. A Shikse! (non-Jewish woman)'" writes Philip Roth in Portnoy's Complaint.[40] "We started out with short beards and straight noses – you can look at the wall paintings – and who knows? With a slightly different genetic break in our wanderings and couplings, we might all be as blond and gorgeous today as Danish Schoolchildren," writes Joseph Heller in God Knows.[41]
Bernice Schrank notes that Jewish attitudes toward the Jewish nose have changed from negative in the 1950s to positive today. "The change from unacceptability to acceptability is based on an increasingly successful challenge to the American myth of melting pot sameness by the politics of ethnic difference."[11]
Antisemitism is hostility to, prejudice towards, or discrimination against Jews. This sentiment is a form of racism, and a person who harbours it is called an antisemite. Primarily, antisemitic tendencies may be motivated by negative sentiment towards Jews as a people or by negative sentiment towards Jews with regard to Judaism. In the former case, usually presented as racial antisemitism, a person's hostility is driven by the belief that Jews constitute a distinct race with inherent traits or characteristics that are repulsive or inferior to the preferred traits or characteristics within that person's society. In the latter case, known as religious antisemitism, a person's hostility is driven by their religion's perception of Jews and Judaism, typically encompassing doctrines of supersession that expect or demand Jews to turn away from Judaism and submit to the religion presenting itself as Judaism's successor faith—this is a common theme within the other Abrahamic religions. The development of racial and religious antisemitism has historically been encouraged by the concept of anti-Judaism, which is distinct from antisemitism itself.
Scholars have studied and debated Muslim attitudes towards Jews, as well as the treatment of Jews in Islamic thought and societies throughout the history of Islam. Parts of the Islamic literary sources give mention to certain Jewish groups present in the past or present, which has led to debates. Some of this overlaps with Islamic remarks on non-Muslim religious groups in general.
A number of organizations and academics consider the Nation of Islam (NOI) to be antisemitic. The NOI has engaged in Holocaust denial, and exaggerates the role of Jews in the African slave trade; mainstream historians, such as Saul S. Friedman, have said Jews had a negligible role. The NOI has repeatedly rejected charges made against it as false and politically motivated.
Watto is a fictional character in the Star Wars franchise, featured in the films The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones. He is computer-generated and is voiced by voice actor Andy Secombe. He is a mean-tempered, greedy Toydarian, and owner of a second-hand goods store in Mos Espa on the planet Tatooine. Among Watto's belongings are the slaves Shmi Skywalker and her son, Anakin. He acquires them after winning a podracing bet with Gardulla the Hutt, and he puts them both to work in his store. Anakin demonstrates an incredible aptitude for equipment repair, and Watto decides to profit from it by having the boy fix various broken equipment in the store. He eventually loses Anakin in a podracing bet with Qui-Gon Jinn when he bets on a competitor, Sebulba, who is defeated by Anakin.
Religious antisemitism is aversion to or discrimination against Jews as a whole based on religious doctrines of supersession, which expect or demand the disappearance of Judaism and the conversion of Jews to other faiths. This form of antisemitism has frequently served as the basis for false claims and religious antisemitic tropes against Judaism. Sometimes, it is called theological antisemitism.
Żydokomuna is an anti-communist and antisemitic canard, or a pejorative stereotype, suggesting that most Jews collaborated with the Soviet Union in importing communism into Poland, or that there was an exclusively Jewish conspiracy to do so. A Polish language term for "Jewish Bolshevism", or more literally "Jewish communism", Żydokomuna is related to the "Jewish world conspiracy" myth.
An aquiline nose is a human nose with a prominent bridge, giving it the appearance of being curved or slightly bent. The word aquiline comes from the Latin word aquilinus ("eagle-like"), an allusion to the curved beak of an eagle. While some have ascribed the aquiline nose to specific ethnic, racial, or geographic groups, and in some cases associated it with other supposed non-physical characteristics, no scientific studies or evidence support any such linkage. As with many phenotypical expressions it is found in many geographically diverse populations.
The Jewish lobby are individuals and groups predominantly in the Jewish diaspora that advocate for the interests of Jews and Jewish values. The lobby references the involvement and influence of Jews in politics and the political process, and includes organized groups such as the American Jewish Committee, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, B'nai B'rith, and the Anti-Defamation League.
Antisemitism in the history of the Jews in the Middle Ages became increasingly prevalent in the Late Middle Ages. Early instances of pogroms against Jews are recorded in the context of the First Crusade. Expulsions of Jews from cities and instances of blood libel became increasingly common from the 13th to the 15th century. This trend only peaked after the end of the medieval period, and it only subsided with Jewish emancipation in the late 18th and 19th centuries.
Funny Girl is a 1968 American biographical-musical film directed by William Wyler and written by Isobel Lennart, adapted from her book for the stage musical of the same title. It is loosely based on the life and career of comedienne Fanny Brice and her stormy relationship with entrepreneur and gambler Nicky Arnstein.
Anti-Zionism is opposition to Zionism. Although anti-Zionism is a heterogeneous phenomenon, all its proponents agree that the creation of the modern State of Israel, and the movement to create a sovereign Jewish state in the region of Palestine—a region partly coinciding with the biblical Land of Israel—was flawed or unjust in some way.
Stereotypes of Jews are generalized representations of Jews, often caricatured and of a prejudiced and antisemitic nature.
Stereotypes of Jews in literature have evolved over the centuries. According to Louis Harap, nearly all European writers prior to the twentieth century projected the Jewish stereotypes in their works. Harap cites Gotthold Lessing's Nathan the Wise (1779) as the first time that Jews were portrayed in the arts as "human beings, with human possibilities and characteristics." Harap writes that, the persistence of the Jewish stereotype over the centuries suggests to some that "the treatment of the Jew in literature was completely static and was essentially unaffected by the changes in the Jewish situation in society as that society itself changed." He contrasts the opposing views presented in the two most comprehensive studies of the Jew in English literature, one by Montagu Frank Modder and the other by Edgar Rosenberg. Modder asserts that writers invariably "reflect the attitude of contemporary society in their presentation of the Jewish character, and that the portrayal changes with the economic and social changes of each decade." In opposition to Modder's "historical rationale", Rosenberg warns that such a perspective "is apt to slight the massive durability of a stereotype". Harap suggests that the recurrence of the Jewish stereotype in literature is itself one indicator of the continued presence of anti-Semitism among the readers of that literature.
Economic antisemitism is antisemitism that uses stereotypes and canards that are based on negative perceptions or assertions of the economic status, occupations or economic behaviour of Jews, at times leading to various governmental policies, regulations, taxes and laws that target or which disproportionately impact the economic status, occupations or behaviour of Jews.
Antisemitism in Spain is the expression through words or actions of an ideology of hatred towards Jews on Spanish soil.
"Jewcan Sam (A Nose Job Love Story)" is a single and music video by the American Jewish pop punk band The Groggers. The song and video, commissioned by Miami plastic surgeon Dr. Michael Salzhauer, follow a Jewish high school student being turned down by a girl because of his large nose and subsequently trying to correct it with rhinoplasty. Both the band and Salzhauer received heavy criticism for the video's portrayal of plastic surgery, as well as perceived antisemitic imagery.
Shylock is a fictional character in William Shakespeare's play The Merchant of Venice. A Venetian Jewish moneylender, Shylock is the play's principal villain. His defeat and conversion to Christianity form the climax of the story.
The Jew Among Thorns, also known as The Jew in the Brambles, is an antisemitic fairytale collected by the Brothers Grimm. It is a tale of Aarne–Thompson type 592. A similar antisemitic tale in the collection is The Good Bargain.
The claim that there was a Jewish war against Nazi Germany is an antisemitic conspiracy theory promoted in Nazi propaganda which asserts that the Jews, framed within the theory as a single historical actor, started World War II and sought the destruction of Germany. Alleging that war was declared in 1939 by Chaim Weizmann, president of the World Zionist Organization, Nazis used this false notion to justify the persecution of Jews under German control on the grounds that the Holocaust was justified self-defense. Since the end of World War II, the conspiracy theory has been popular among neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers.
Zionist antisemitism or antisemitic Zionism refers to a phenomenon in which antisemites express support for Zionism and the State of Israel. In some cases, this support may be promoted for explicitly antisemitic reasons. Historically, this type of antisemitism has been most notable among Christian Zionists, who may perpetrate religious antisemitism while being outspoken in their support for Jewish sovereignty in Israel due to their interpretation of Christian eschatology. Similarly, people who identify with the political far-right, particularly in Europe and the United States, may support the Zionist movement because they seek to expel Jews from their country and see Zionism as the least complicated method of achieving this goal and satisfying their racial antisemitism.
↑ Schrenk, Bernice (2007), "'Cutting Off Your Nose to Spite Your Race': Jewish Stereotypes, Media Images, Cultural Hybridity", Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, 25 (4): 18, doi:10.1353/sho.2007.0121, S2CID36457835 .
1 2 3 Preminger, Beth (2001), "The "Jewish Nose" and Plastic Surgery: Origins and Implications", Journal of the American Medical Association, 286 (17): 2161, doi:10.1001/jama.286.17.2161-JMS1107-5-1.
↑ Holden, Harold Miller (1950), Noses, World Publishing Company, p.69, hdl:2027/uc1.b3426003, A considerable study has been made on the 'Jewish' nose. It has been found that this nose is far less prevalent among Jews than popularly supposed. Furthermore, it is most prevalent among Jews when it is also prevalent among the general population, as among Mediterranean or Bavarian people.
1 2 3 Goildblatt, Roy (2003). "As Plain as the Nose on Your Face: The Nose as the Organ of Othering". Amerikastudien / American Studies. 48 (4): 563–576. JSTOR41157893.
1 2 Joshua Louis Moss (2014), "'Woody the Gentile': Christian-Jewish Interplay in Allen's Films" in Vincent Brook and Marat Grinberg (eds), Woody on Rye: Jewishness in the films and plays of Woody Allen. Brandeis University Press, pp. 100–122, ISBN978-1-61168-479-7.
↑ Fine, Steven (2013). "How Do You Know a Jew When You See One?". In Greenspoon, Leonard J. (ed.). Fashioning Jews: Clothing, Culture, and Commerce. Purdue University Press. pp.19–20. ISBN978-1557536570.
↑ Bilde, Per (2002). Flavius Josephus, Between Jerusalem and Rome: His Life, His Works, and Their Importance. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock. p.60. ISBN1850750602.
↑ Streicher, Julius (c. 1939). "How to Tell a Jew". research.calvin.edu. From Der Giftpilz, an anti-Semitic children's book published by Julius Streicher, the publisher of Der Stürmer. Translated by Randall Bytwerk, 1999, for the Calvin Archive of Nazi Propaganda. Retrieved 2016-05-29.
↑ 'Seine Nase, zu flach auf den Schnurrbart abfallend, deutete auf seine Herkunft hin'. Cited Yahye Elsaghe 'German Film Adaptations of Jewish Characters in Thomass Mann,' in Christiane Schönfeld, Hermann Rasche, Processes of Transposition: German Literature and Film, Rodopi, 2007 pp. 133ff.
↑ Marcus, Lisa (2008). "May Jews Go To College?". In Phyllis Lassner; Lara Trubowitz (eds.). Antisemitism and Philosemitism in the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries. Rosemont Publishing. p.141. ISBN9780874130294.
↑ "Sind vielleicht ihre Nasen eben durch dieses lange an der Nase Herumgeführtwerden so lang geworden? Oder sind diese langen Nasen eine Art Uniform, woran der Gottkönig Jehova seine alten Leibgardisten erkennt, selbst wenn sie desertiert sind?" – Christa Stöcker (ed.), Reisebilder II. 1828–1831, chapter 2: Die Bäder von Lukka. Berlin: Akademie, 1986, p. 77.
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