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The Jew as Other: A Century of English Caricature, 1730-1830
From: Columbia University
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 aricatures of Jews from eighteenth-century England, most of which are drawn from the Israel Solomons Collection at the library of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, are featured on the site for "The Jew as Other: A Century of English Caricature, 1730-1830" (www.jtsa.edu/library/exhib/jewoth/index.shtml). The objective of the exhibit is to shed light on attitudes toward Jews in England, a country that had a reputation as an oasis of tolerance in eighteenth-century Europe. Despite the progressive and humanitarian ideals of the Enlightenment, Jews were depicted in English popular culture as they had been since the Middle Ages: as blasphemers, unscrupulous moneylenders and seducers of Christian virgins. |
 The online version of the JTS library exhibition consists of 12 caricatures, a form that was widely available and extremely popular in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Caricatures were sold in print shops and on the street by itinerant peddlers; their popularity led to the foundation of satirical journals like Punch, in the 1840s, and they are seen today as the forerunners of the newspaper cartoon. |
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