By staff
Title: Antisemitic materials, Europe and America, 19th - 20th Centuries
ID: RG-72.13/RG-72.13
Primary Creator: Victor, Ed (1960s -- 1990s)
Extent: 0.0
Overall these postal cards, being blank of sent as correspondences reflect a certain societal trend with regard to the Jews. The Jews are largely marginalized by the means of the presentation. It is a certain, perhaps an officially established narrative to show the Jews as unattractive, if not ugly, doing their business no matter what. Largely their conduct would be in contradiction with the established norms of the Christian society or overall with the non-Jewish society.
We shall distinguish between the level of the grotesque, satire, humor to determine the border when a relatively harmless and simply humorous images are no longer that innocent and would become a severe anti-Jewish and de-facto antisemitic and offensive images. Overall, the content, would it be a narrative, an illustrative images, or the caption is equally a parody and by all means is antisemitic. A typically stereotyped by perception the Jewish anti-societal customs are reactively overemphasized in terms of the generalization, making all Jews guilty of the of money lending, lies, false representation, egoism, primitive talks and deliberately unattractive in their Jewish attire. These postal cards were published in Britain, United States, France, Poland, Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary.
Sold at the popular European resorts Marienbad and Karlsbad, these postcard had become a part of the milieu and often were used for regular correspondences and by these means disseminating antisemitism. With a slogan "Gruss aus Karlsbad," or "Gruss aus of Marienbad," that is Greetings from Karlsbad and Marienbad, both the European famous health care resorts in Austria-Hungary (nowadays Czech Republic). Thus a series of these antisemitic, pretentiously satiric postal cards became a popular well-recognized images. It was a false representation of the Jews and at the same time a signature of those famous resorts.
Some postcards like printed in German language were of rather political inclination, disclaiming, as they pretended, a false Jewish patriotism. The other demonstrated the Jewish exploitation over non-Jews, for example showing the car with a Jewish family and the three ordinary non-Jewish people being used inside the car instead of the engine.
Another facet of anti-Jewish satire of a cartoon style was a demonstration of a Jewish anti-societal position, regardless to the country of residence. It was equally presented on American, British, German, Austrian, French, Czech, Hungarian and Polish series.
Some satirical, if not mocking Jewish religious practices, were a series of postcards deriding Jewish holidays and religious customs.
It is should be noted that the overall antisemitic postcard published in America and Britain had been used in mundane correspondences, that is the second or the rare pages of them were usually used for a short narratives, while the antisemitic postcard published in Europe, for the rare exceptions, were not filled with any narrative and remained blank on the rare side.
