Palestinian Authority cartoon echoes Nazi themes

A leering, hook-nosed Jew, beginning to disrobe, prepares to pounce upon a helpless non-Jewish woman who cowers in fear on the ground before him. This disturbing image, so common in anti-Semitic propaganda in past centuries, this week made an appearance with a modern twist: the hook-nosed would-be rapist wore an Israeli army uniform, and his intended victim, a weeping Muslim woman, wore a headdress indicating that she represented the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem.

The cartoon, titled “Al-Aqsa is Being Raped,” would be outrageous even if it were the handiwork of some anonymous street corner scribbler. But it is a far more serious matter when it appears—as this one does—on the official website of the Palestinian Authority’s National Security Forces, according to a report by Palestinian Media Watch.

The stereotype of the Jew as sexual defiler reaches back to medieval times. The 13th-century ruler Alfonso X, of Castile, decreed capital punishment for any Jew who, “in great insolence and boldness,” had intimate relations with a Christian woman. With the invention of modern printing techniques and the advent of political cartooning in the late 18th century, sexually themed anti-Semitic cartoons began to appear.

In “Solomon Enjoys Himself with Two Pretty Christian Girls,” 18th-century English caricaturist Thomas Rowlandson drew a beak-nosed Jew grasping bags of money while cavorting with two topless young women. “Moses in the Bullrushes,” by English cartoonist G. M. Woodward in 1799, portrayed a swarthy-looking Jew ravishing a woman in a thicket of tall reeds. Turn-of-the-century French cartoonist Henry Gerbault depicted an obese, sweaty Jew patronizing a non-Jewish prostitute and then shortchanging her on the payment.

Similar themes surfaced in the writings of the early German advocates of racial anti-Semitism, who helped pave the way for the rise of Nazism. Theodor Fritsch’s “Antisemiten-Katechismus,” first published in 1887, argued that Jews, because of their biological nature, caused “moral devastation” among young German women.