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 (formerly Twitter) where it is frequently used in hateful or disparaging contexts.
| Happy Merchant | |
|---|---|
 Edited caricature illustration of a stereotypical Jewish man by "A. Wyatt Mann". | |
| First appearance | Artwork by A. Wyatt Mann |
History
editThe 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
editThe 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
editThis 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
editNotes
edit- ^ 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.
- ^ 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.
- ^ 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.
- ^ Perry, Marvin., and Frederick M. Schweitzer.Antisemitic Myths: a Historical and Contemporary Anthology. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008.
- ^ Savvas 2019, p. 2.
- ^ "The Happy Merchant". Anti-Defamation League. Archived from the original on July 10, 2020. Retrieved July 30, 2021.
- ^ 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.
- ^ 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.
- ^ Savvas 2019, p. 9.
- ^ Savvas 2019, p. 11.
- ^ Savvas 2019, p. 10.
Bibliography
edit- Zannettou, Savvas (November 24, 2019). "A Quantitative Approach to Understanding Online Antisemitism". arXiv:1809.01644 [cs.CY].
External links
edit- Happy Merchant entry at Know Your Meme