The Happy Merchant is a common name for an image that depicts an antisemitic caricature of a Jewish man. The Happy Merchant is common on imageboards such as 4chan where it is frequently used in a hateful or disparaging context.

Happy Merchant
Caricature illustration of a stereotypical Jewish man
First appearance	Artwork by A. Wyatt Mann

History

The image was first created by a cartoonist called A. Wyatt Mann (a play on "A white man") a pseudonym of Nick Bougas.[1][2][3] The image was part of a cartoon that also included a racist caricature of a black man and used these images to say: "Let's face it! A world without Jews and Blacks would be like a world without Rats and Cockroaches." The cartoon was first released in print, but appeared online in February 2001.[1]

The image of the Jew in the cartoon was cropped out and began to spread on various internet communities, where users began to make variations of it.[1]

Description

The image is intended as a derogatory depiction of Jewish people, and employs many stereotypes of Jews. These include:

• A large, hook-shaped nose ("Jewish nose").
• A yarmulke (Jewish head garment).
• A malevolent smile and hands that are being rubbed together, to indicate greed or scheming behavior.
• Balding, tightly curled black hair and a tightly curled black beard.[4]

Use

The image is common on internet communities such as 4chan, other "chan" websites, and on other message boards.[5] In 2017, Al Jazeera tweeted an image that included the Happy Merchant on its official English-language Twitter account. The tweet was promoting a story about climate change, and insinuated that Jews were behind climate change. Al Jazeera later deleted the tweet, explaining that it had been used in a segment covering alt-right anti-semitic climate change conspiracy theories.[6]

A study published by Savvas Zannettou et al. on online anti-Semitism recorded the prevalence of the Happy Merchant and its variations on 4chan's /pol/ board and Gab. The study found that usage of the Happy Merchant on /pol/ remained largely consistent (with a peak during the US airstrike on Syria in April 2017), while usage of the meme on Gab increased after the Charlottesville rally in August 2017.[7] It was also determined that /pol/ influences the spread of Happy Merchant to other web platforms such as Twitter and Reddit.[8]

The same study also found that the Happy Merchant has been incorporated into other common memes on the site, including Pepe the Frog.[9]

The video game Ethnic Cleansing featured the image, although it was not yet called the Happy Merchant at that time.^{[citation needed]}

References

Publications

• Zannettou, Savvas (November 24, 2019). "A Quantitative Approach to Understanding Online Antisemitism". arXiv:1809.01644.

External links

• Happy Merchant entry at Know Your Meme