Just how deep-rooted is antisemitism, really?

This week the Guardian published a cartoon (above) by its regular cartoonist Martin Rowson, depicting the resignation of the former BBC director-general Richard Sharp. The cartoon is entitled The Copros Touch (a pun on the Midas Touch; copros means shit) and shows Boris Johnson sitting atop a big dung heap, holding large bags of money, at the bottom of which are large wheelie-bins labelled “families”, “friends”, “sponsors” (with ‘patrons’ crossed out) and a bin bag labelled “the reputation of everything” and various other items, including a “code book” and various papers, one of them with ‘BBC’ on it. Sharpe is walking past, clutching a large box with the name of his and Rishi Sunak’s former employer, Goldman Sachs, on it, with his CV partly obscuring the name so that the words look like “Gold Sack”, i.e. moneybag(s). Johnson is shown saying “Cheer up matey; I put you down for a peerage in my resignation honours!” (a peerage means a seat in the House of Lords, affording lifelong input into legislation, although votes in the Lords can be reversed in the Commons). The cartoon drew a large volume of complaints that it was antisemitic, because Sharp is Jewish and the complainers saw supposed “antisemitic tropes”, among them his exaggerated nose, references to gold and the large squid in his Goldman Sachs box, echoing (to them) a trope of Jews having their fingers in just about everything. The Jewish Chronicle, which republished the cartoon after the Guardian removed it, quoted Simon Sebag-Montefiore as suggesting that the “once-great liberal champion is auditioning to be Der Sturmer and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion“.

Rowson has issued a personal apology via his own website and today the Guardian‘s Readers’ Editor published its own pious apology in the comments section; on Monday they allowed Dave Rich of the Community Security Trust to explain to all of us why he and other Jews “in the know” regard it as antisemitic:

Rather than drawing a yellow star on each Jewish target, Nazi-style, artists down the ages have instead given their subjects stereotypically “Jewish” features. The outsized nose and lips, grotesque features and sinister grin have been part of antisemitic imagery for centuries, a way of portraying Jews as repulsive and sinister. You can find them in medieval woodcuts of the fictitious allegation that Jews crucified Christian children and drained their blood (the ritual murder or “blood libel” charge), in Victorian cartoons in Punch and in the Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer …

Rowson says that Sharp’s Jewishness was not in his mind, but in a way that is beside the point. For centuries our world has taught us that this is how to imagine wealthy, powerful Jews, especially those accused of wrongdoing. The fact that his pen veered, however unthinkingly, towards these antisemitic motifs shows how easily, and unthinkingly, they can rise to the surface.

These claims about how subconscious antisemitic tropes easily rise to the surface is made without evidence. Speaking as a non-Jew raised in a partly Catholic extended family in the 1980s and who went to three Catholic schools, I can say that a lot of us did not come across such stereotypes until our teenage years or adulthood. I first heard of “hooked noses” when I saw the film “Life of Brian”: the scene where Brian furiously denies being of Roman parentage: “I’m a kike, a Yid, a Heebie, a hooknose … and I’m proud of it!”. (One of the Catholic schools had one of the most reactionary school leaderships in London, but they didn’t teach us about Jews being Christ-killers.) I did hear of Jewish stereotypes of stinginess at boarding school and came across a reference to “a Jew-usurer” in Jane Eyre when studying it at A-level, as an example of a type of person without any feelings, but these exposures were occasional, not constant. Punch magazine ceased publication in 2002 and its circulation had been low for many years previously; I never came across one of their magazines, although I came across references to them (mostly from many years ago) at school and college. They boast of inventing the cartoon as we know it; until the 1840s a cartoon was a draft of an artwork rather than a satirical sketch. The name Crystal Palace originated there. Der Stürmer ceased publication when the Nazi regime fell, and its publisher was hanged after the Nuremberg trials. Most of us may have seen one or two of their cartoons while studying the Holocaust at school (since Nazi Germany is a popular subject in school history lessons), but we haven’t been fed a diet of them since childhood.

The truth is that Jews know about these things because they are taught about them and the rest of us are not, so we don’t. There is a saying that if you “scratch a gentile, you find an antisemite”, that antisemitism is always lurking beneath the surface and waiting for that ‘scratch’ to reveal itself. This gives Jewish leaders the ability to level accusations of antisemitism when the person they are accusing did not know the person they were criticising or lampooning was Jewish and may not have heard of the supposed antisemitic trope they are being accused of. Most of us have heard of Jews being likened to sewer rats, for example, but octopuses and squids are a great deal more obscure and in this case the image of someone having their fingers in a lot of pies — a major bank, the government, the BBC — would have seemed apposite. The sketch does exaggerate Sharp’s features, yes, but cartoons always do that. Rowson’s depiction of Rishi Sunak (who is in Sharp’s box with the squid) and Boris Johnson look nothing like them either, and as Sharp is looking straight at the reader, we cannot tell if he has a hooked nose or not. The “Gold Sack” wording on the box is taken as a reference to Jews controlling money or just having lots of it; Sharp does indeed have lots of money, and has a lot of rich friends, and (more to the point) is likely to get a substantial payoff, as is common when powerful people fail, and that recent prime ministers have indeed given honours and peerages to some unsavoury characters whose public service record is not great.

We need to stop giving the likes of the Jewish Chronicle, CST and other ‘establishment’, pro-Israel Jewish bodies such credence when they make such accusations. A person not known to be racist, or known to be anti-racist, should be presumed innocent if accused of racism on the basis of a so-called antisemitic trope, especially an obscure one, and especially if the person depicted was a justifiable target or what was depicted was essentially true, or at least would have seemed that way to many people who are not racist (if the author is a noted racist or conspiracy theorist, explaining why these themes are antisemitic to those unaware is quite appropriate). Jews are not an impoverished or powerless minority by any means and they have never been persecuted in this country in anything like recent history; we do not owe it to British Jews to accommodate their snowflakery when talking about corruption or oppression.