A Museum Tackles Myths About Jews and Money

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/20/arts/design/jews-money-myth-antisemitism-exhibition-london.html

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LONDON — Wrapped in a turban and a mink-lined robe, the old man sits in his opulent home, smiling wryly. The pouch in his hand is full to bursting. Gold coins are scattered across his desk.

The elderly figure is pictured at the center of a board game called the New and Fashionable Game of the Jew, which was popular in early 19th-century England. An 1807 original is on view at an exhibition running through July 7 at the Jewish Museum in London called “Jews, Money, Myth.” The show explores the ways in which Jews have been associated with money over the past 2,000 years.

Displays include objects that belonged to British Jews — buried medieval coins, tally sticks used as proof of loans, soup-kitchen tokens — and representations of Jews in painting; in literature, such as Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice” and Charles Dickens’s “Oliver Twist”; in caricatures; and in fascist propaganda.

The Jewish Museum’s aim is to “debunk a lot of the myths that still circulate today,” said Joanne Rosenthal, the exhibition’s curator, “such as Jews exerting a kind of sinister influence on world events, Jews financing disastrous wars around the world for profit, Jews being naturally drawn to money making.”

These centuries-old “tropes and stereotypes” still circulate on social media and beyond, Ms. Rosenthal added, and the exhibition invites visitors to look in a “calm and levelheaded way at the historical realities.”

The show opens amid signs of a resurgence of anti-Semitism in Europe. In a 12-country survey of Jewish respondents last year by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, 89 percent said anti-Semitism was on the rise. France reported a 74 percent surge in anti-Semitic acts last year, and President Emmanuel Macron said in February that anti-Semitism was at a postwar peak.

In Britain, there were 1,652 anti-Semitic incidents in 2018, up 16 percent from the year before, according to the Community Security Trust, an organization that monitors anti-Semitism in the country.

The opposition Labour Party in Britain has expelled a dozen members since last April as it investigates 673 complaints of anti-Semitism. Since 2015, numerous members have been expelled or suspended for making anti-Semitic remarks publicly or on social media, or for joining hate groups. A 2016 inquiry concluded that there was an “occasionally toxic atmosphere” in the party.

The “Jews, Money, Myth” exhibition is the brainchild of the Jewish Museum’s chief executive, Abigail Morris, who took over in 2012 and has since programmed a string of popular exhibitions. In 2015, she staged a show on the subject of blood in the Jewish religion and culture, a sensitive theme. But for many, the issue of Jews and money has proved far more unsettling, Ms. Morris said.

“I’ve never done anything in my life where people have been so scared,” she said in an interview at the museum. “Even the title scares people.”

She and her team noticed “a real shift” in anti-Jewish sentiment over the last two or three years, Ms. Morris said. Negative comments were now constant, rather than sporadic and linked to news coverage of Israel, she noted. “My contention is, it’s there, it’s getting bigger,” she said. “Not drawing attention to it won’t make it go away.”

The exhibition draws primarily on the museum’s own collection of historical objects from Britain, though there are also many from elsewhere in Europe. It opens with an entry from the 1933 Oxford English Dictionary that lists one of the definitions of the word “jew” as a verb meaning “to cheat.”

The myth of Jews and money can be traced back to the biblical figure of Judas, who betrayed Christ in exchange for some silver coins. In the show’s star attraction, Rembrandt’s “Judas Returning the Thirty Pieces of Silver,” on loan from a private collection, Judas is pictured on his knees, begging a group of priests for forgiveness.

The exhibition then recounts the arrival of the first Jews to England, soon after the Norman Conquest in 1066. Some worked in money lending and finance. One of the displays has a claim to being the world’s earliest anti-Jewish caricature: a doodle at the top of a 1233 record for taxes paid by Jews in Norwich, England. It depicts the wealthy Isaac of Norwich, a local money lender, as a three-headed Antichrist figure.

By the 19th century, Jews were regularly portrayed as beggars or poverty-stricken peddlers — the exhibition describes how most Jews in England at that time were economic migrants with limited financial means who were forced to scrape together a living any way they could.

Conversely, Jews were also portrayed as greedy bankers. One of the financiers who came in for much negative representation was Nathan Mayer Rothschild, who arrived from Germany in 1798, opened his namesake bank soon after, and went on to finance British military campaigns.

The exhibition includes an 1837 portrait of Rothschild — as well as an 1829 caricature depicting him as an overweight figure with a sack of money slung over his shoulder, titled, “The Man Wot Knows How to Drive a Bargain.”

As well as historical items, “Jews, Money, Myth” features two works of contemporary art specially commissioned for the exhibition, including one by a Turner Prize winner, Jeremy Deller. Mr. Deller’s contribution is a film: a compilation of excerpts from homemade propaganda videos from the United States and Europe, cartoons, televangelist programs, presidential speeches and political campaign ads, all of which make oblique or overt references to Jews and money.

The video also features campaigners in favor of Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union, who were filmed outside the Houses of Parliament in London recently. One of the protesters holds a placard that equates the Jewish financier George Soros and the Rothschilds with the European Union, saying they run Britain’s “fake news” television channels.

“If you go down to Parliament Square, you don’t have to try too hard or wait around too long before you see or maybe hear someone talking about Jews,” Mr. Deller said in an interview. Anti-Semitism “is here: It’s very much on the streets.”

Pictured in his film and elsewhere in the exhibition is a 2012 mural in the East End of London that shows six elderly financiers seated around a Monopoly board that rests on the backs of what appear to be naked slaves. When the mural’s creator complained of its removal by local authorities in 2012, he was defended on Facebook by the Labour leader Mr. Corbyn, stoking the criticism of his party’s attitudes toward Jews. Mr. Corbyn later apologized and said he had not examined the image closely, describing the mural as “deeply disturbing and anti-Semitic.”

David Feldman, a professor of history at Birkbeck, University of London who is director of the Pears Institute for the Study of Anti-Semitism (which was consulted for the exhibition), said the left sometimes did not initially identify certain patterns of behavior as racist or anti-Semitic.

Jews are “predominantly a middle-class population in Britain, so they don’t fit the idea of what a victim of racism ought to look like,” Professor Feldman said. “There is an expectation that the victims of racism are people of color, that they’re poor, and that in the case of Europe, either they or their forebears were colonial subjects.”

Professor Feldman added that anti-Jewish sentiment was creeping more into the mainstream.

“We have a situation in which people with anti-Semitic views are becoming bolder and more visible,” he said. “It is this which creates concern.”