For decades, a Belgian Jew named Arthur Langerman has been assembling what can best be titled “antisemitica.” Ben Cohen describes this frightening record of the casualness, and obscenity, of European hatred of Jews:
Gathered entirely between the end of the Second World War and the present day, Langerman’s collection . . . spans several centuries, from a grotesque 16th-century painting that depicts the supposed slaughter of the infant Simon of Trent for Jewish ritual purposes to a contemporary cartoon that shows a menacing spider marked with a Star of David sinking its claws into a map of the Gaza Strip.
The images—widely considered the largest collection of its kind in the world—are drawn from across six centuries, from all over Europe, the Middle East, and North America. This spread in terms of geography and time is matched by the sheer range of formats: postcards, newspaper and magazine cartoons, paintings, sculptures, and everyday objects such as coffee mugs transformed into trinkets with the addition of a Jewish caricature. Taken together, they demonstrate that anti-Semitism was not just an ideology of hatred, but a perverse type of entertainment through which the non-Jewish creators of such content—in the main, artists and caricaturists who are themselves no longer remembered—stripped Jews of their humanity and dignity.
It’s not that the anti-Semitic motifs contained within are unfamiliar, more that the cartoons, paintings, and objects that showcase them across the years do so through the most virulent and repellent representations. Jews are invariably portrayed as ugly and corpulent, as demonstrated in the World War II-era caricatures of tuxedoed Jewish capitalists surreptitiously serving Communist interests; dirty, as demonstrated by a crude drawing from Poland showing a sinister Jewish family delightedly living in a hovel as one of its children defecates into a bowl on the floor; and predatory.
Read more on Algemeiner: https://www.algemeiner.com/2023/04/17/der-jude-an-exclusive-glimpse-into-the-worlds-largest-collection-of-antisemitic-artifacts/