Happy Merchant
Antisemitic caricature
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Happy Merchant is an antisemitic caricature of a Jewish man. The image appears commonly online, where it is frequently used in antisemitic contexts. It was created by the American artist and filmmaker Nick Bougas in 1992, first appearing in an issue of Tom Metzger's white supremacist WAR newspaper. It was one of many cartoons Bougas illustrated for the publication, which were issued under the pseudonym "A. Wyatt Mann".
| Happy Merchant | |
|---|---|
Edited caricature illustration of a stereotypical Jewish man by "A. Wyatt Mann" (Nick Bougas). | |
First appearance | 1992 in WAR |
| Created by | Nick Bougas |
History
The image was first created by the American cartoonist "A. Wyatt Mann" (a word play on "A white man"), a pseudonym of Nick Bougas, an American filmmaker and cartoonist.[1][2][3] It was one of numerous cartoons Bougas created for the white supremacist newspaper WAR, operated by Tom Metzger. The newspaper self-described as the "most racist newspaper on Earth".[3][4] That Bougas was the person behind the A. Wyatt Mann pseudonym had been suspected for years, but was only confirmed in 2015.[1][4] Under his own name he drew for Jim Goad's magazine Answer Me!, among other publications.[3]
The cartoon was first released in print in 1992 in WAR,[3][4] but appeared online in February 2001.[1] 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."[4] 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]
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 kippah (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 anonymous image board websites, and on other message boards.[6] In 2024, writer Spencer Sunshine described it as "ubiquitous in the Alt Right".[3]
The image prominently appears in Ethnic Cleansing, a white supremacist video game released in 2002.
In 2017, Al Jazeera appeared to have tweeted an image of the Happy Merchant on its official English-language Twitter account while referring to climate change deniers.[7] Al Jazeera explained in an apology that they did not post the image in question, but replied to a user who did and then linked to the thread by accident.[8]
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.[9] The study found that usage of the Happy Merchant on /pol/ remained largely consistent (with a peak during the United States missile strike on Syria in April 2017), while use of the meme on Gab increased after the Unite the Right rally in the US in August 2017.[10] It was also determined that /pol/ influenced the spread of the Happy Merchant to other web platforms such as Twitter and Reddit.[11]
The same study also found that the Happy Merchant has been incorporated into other common memes on the site, including Pepe the Frog, an originally apolitical caricature of a frog, which is often used by the alt-right for racist purposes.[12][13]
See also
- Triple parentheses – Antisemitic symbol