For centuries, anti-Semitic caricatures have given Jews a hooked nose. This stereotype has its roots in medieval Christian art, as explained in this remarkable documentary series devoted to the history of anti-Semitism.
Jonathan Hayoun’s detailed investigation notably gives the floor to Sara Lipton. This American historian has identified, in the collections of the Louvre, the oldest known representation of this type: a man with a hooked nose turning his back to Jesus on the Cross, painted on a German reliquary from the 12th century.e century.
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At that time, the religious authorities sought to mark a distinction between Christians and Jews. On the sidelines of the scenes of the Passion played by the people, which contributed to inscribing the alleged deicide of the Jews in the collective imagination, the artists applied themselves to creating characteristic signs: a hooked nose therefore, a symbol of animality and of ugliness of soul, but also a short stature or a swarthy complexion. Inventions that the Nazis will recycle to stigmatize Jewish “malevolence”.
Welcome use of animation
Over the course of the four sections, some twenty historians, psychoanalysts, anthropologists and theologians follow one another to shed light on the construction of hatred of the Jews for two thousand years and to shed light on its religious, political or economic motivations. This broad panorama does not forget the voices that have been raised to combat it, from that of Abbot Bernard of Clairvaux (in the twelfthe century) until the shocking charge of the lawyer Robert Badinter against Holocaust denial and “forgers of history”.
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If 3D reconstructions – taken from video games Assassin’s creed to illustrate the
ancient period – leave something to be desired, we welcome the use of stylized animated images by Raphaëlle and Leonard Cohen, which allow us to tell the story of the various anti-Jewish massacres in history (in Alexandria in 38, then during the Crusades…) with strength and clarity.
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