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Happy Merchant

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Happy Merchant
Edited caricature illustration of a stereotypical Jewish man by "A. Wyatt Mann".
First appearanceArtwork 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 or X, where it is frequently used in hateful or disparaging contexts.

History

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]

Description

The image is intended as a derogatory depiction, and employs many stereotypes of Jews. These include:

  • A large, hook-shaped nose ("Jewish nose");
  • A yarmulke (Jewish head garment);
  • A malevolent smile, with a slightly hunched back and hands being rubbed together, to indicate greed or scheming;
  • Balding, tightly curled black hair and a tightly curled black beard.[5]

Use

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 US 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]

References

Notes

  1. ^ a b c "The Surprisingly Mainstream History Of The Internet's Favorite Anti-Semitic Image". BuzzFeed News. February 5, 2015. p. 11. Archived from the original on February 28, 2019. Retrieved July 30, 2021.
  2. ^ Malice, Michael (May 19, 2019). The New Right: A Journey to the Fringe of American Politics. St. Martin's Publishing Group. p. 40. ISBN 978-1-250-15467-5. 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.
  3. ^ Ellis, Emma Grey (June 19, 2017). "The Alt-Right Found Its Favorite Cartoonist—and Almost Ruined His Life". Wired. Archived from the original on July 2, 2018. Retrieved May 28, 2019. 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.
  4. ^ Perry, Marvin., and Frederick M. Schweitzer.Antisemitic Myths: a Historical and Contemporary Anthology. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008.
  5. ^ Savvas 2019, p. 2.
  6. ^ "The Happy Merchant". Anti-Defamation League. Archived from the original on July 10, 2020. Retrieved July 30, 2021.
  7. ^ Kestenbaum, Sam (May 31, 2017). "Al Jazeera Tweets, Then Deletes, Anti-Semitic 'Greedy Jew' Meme". The Forward. Archived from the original on July 30, 2021. Retrieved July 30, 2021.
  8. ^ Zannettou, Savvas, Tristan Caulfield, Jeremy Blackburn, Emiliano De Cristofaro, Michael Sirivianos, Gianluca Stringhini, and Guillermo Suarez-Tangil. "On the Origins of Memes by Fringe Web Communities." arXiv.org, September 22, 2018. https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.12512.
  9. ^ Savvas 2019, p. 9.
  10. ^ Savvas 2019, p. 11.
  11. ^ Savvas 2019, p. 10.

Bibliography

  • Zannettou, Savvas (November 24, 2019). "A Quantitative Approach to Understanding Online Antisemitism". arXiv:1809.01644 [cs.CY].
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