The Unz Review • An Alternative Media Selection$
A Collection of Interesting, Important, and Controversial Perspectives Largely Excluded from the American Mainstream Media
 Brenton Sanderson Archive
Degas and the Jews
Email This Page to Someone

 Remember My Information



=>
Edgar Degas: Self Portrait 1865-66

Bookmark Toggle AllToCAdd to LibraryRemove from Library • B
Show CommentNext New CommentNext New ReplyRead More
ReplyAgree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
AgreeDisagreeThanksLOLTroll
These buttons register your public Agreement, Disagreement, Thanks, LOL, or Troll with the selected comment. They are ONLY available to recent, frequent commenters who have saved their Name+Email using the 'Remember My Information' checkbox, and may also ONLY be used three times during any eight hour period.
Ignore Commenter Follow Commenter
Search Text Case Sensitive  Exact Words  Include Comments
List of Bookmarks

It is customary in our political circles to link cultural modernism (and its negative social consequences) to Jewish influence. While there are strong grounds for this stance, things are sometimes more complicated than this narrative would suggest. Take, for instance, the group of painters who made up the French Impressionist movement of the late nineteenth century. Considered to be the first avant-garde movement of the Modernist period, Impressionism served as a springboard for many artistic movements of the twentieth century, including Symbolism, Fauvism, and Cubism. Yet among the leaders of the Impressionist movement were artists, like Cezanne, Renoir and Degas, who were notable for their antipathy to Jews.

Of this trio of leading Impressionists, the one who evinced the keenest aversion to Jews was Edgar Degas (1834—1917) who was described by Jewish artist Camille Pissarro as “that ferocious anti-Semite.” Though Degas is regarded as one of the cornerstone founders of Impressionism, he disliked the name and, indeed, many of the artists who made up the movement. He thought of himself as a realist and “pragmatist” painter first and foremost. But this did not stop him from leading the collective and co-organizing their ground-breaking exhibitions from 1874—86.

The label “impressionist’ was coined by a critic who said their paintings looked unfinished, as if they were “impressions” of a scene rather than finished paintings. While many of Degas’ paintings do look spontaneous, they involved intensive planning. He would study his subjects obsessively, making numerous sketches before starting a painting. He once observed: “I assure you no art was ever less spontaneous than mine. What I do is the result of reflection and the study of the great masters.” He seldom considered a painting complete, always striving to improve it. Degas combined the classical methods he mastered as a youth with Impressionistic sensibilities: he liked to experiment with light, angles, and focus. Sometimes subjects would have their backs to the viewer or be cut off by the edge of the canvas. He would paint them doing mundane things like ironing clothes.

Unlike other leading impressionist artists, Degas shunned landscape painting — the result of personal preference and the visual ailments that plagued him from middle age. Retinal problems led to his having trouble recognizing colors and made it hard for him to see in brilliant light. He therefore appreciated the low light of the theater and developed a strong preference for working there. From the 1870s, Degas explored the subject of dance which accounts for a large portion of his work. He is most famous for his paintings of ballerinas at work, in rehearsal, or at rest. He depicted them from various angles in hundreds of different positions. His failing vision doubtless affected his work, prompting more extensive strokes, bolder colors, and experimentation in a wide assortment of media, including pastels, photography, and printmaking. In his last years, Degas had to wear dark glasses outdoors and quit working altogether in 1912. He died in 1917 at the age of 83.

Despite Degas’s reputation as a reactionary bourgeois, for most of his long life he was a democrat and a republican. Degas mostly kept his politics — and his opinions about Jews — out of his art. Despite this, some critics insist that anti-Semitism “pollutes his pictures, seeping in to them in some ineffable way and changing their meaning, their every existence as signifying systems.” Jewish subjects appear recurrently in Degas’ canvases. Particularly noteworthy is his 1871 oil portrait of Rabbi Astruc, a leading figure in the Jewish world who helped establish the Alliance Israelite Universelle before his appointment as chief rabbi of Belgium in 1866. Regarding Degas’ portrait of Astruc, the Rabbi’s son never forgave the artist for “making a wreck of his splendid subject, replacing his tiny mouth with thin, sensual lips and changing his tender, loving regard into a look of greed.” For him, the portrait was “not a work of art — it is a pogrom.”[1]Gabriel Astruc, La pavillon des fantomes: souvenirs (Paris, D. Grasset, 1929), 98. Degas painted Astruc rapidly, accentuating in his subject what “he though were the traits of his race.” Degas was intrigued by physiognomy: the act of judging individuals from their appearance. Some critics contend that this interest is manifest in Degas’ allegedly unflattering depiction of his Jewish subjects.

Portrait or pogrom? Portrait of Rabbi Astruc (left) by Edgar Degas (1871)
Portrait or pogrom? Portrait of Rabbi Astruc (left) by Edgar Degas (1871)

Degas also depicted Jews in a series of paintings of Parisian brothels and their customers. These brothel scenes include clients whose facial features are recognisably Jewish. Callen argues that, in doing so, and by implicitly constituting Jews as a “racially impure ‘other,’” Degas was attempting to absolve himself and his audience of any potential charge of voyeurism.[2]Anthea Callen quoted in: Washton-Long, Baigel & Heyd (Eds.) Jewish Dimensions in Modern Visual Culture: Anti-Semitism, Assimilation, Affirmation, (Waltham MA: Brandeis University Press, 2010), 166.

L’Absinthe (The Absinthe Drinker) (1876) by Edgar Degas
L’Absinthe (The Absinthe Drinker) (1876) by Edgar Degas

Degas’ most famous painting, L’Absinthe (The Absinthe Drinker) from 1876, is considered a masterful representation of social isolation in Paris during a period of rapid industrial growth. This painting was censured as ugly and disgusting and shut away from viewers for a long time until it was introduced again in 1892. Numerous French nationalists (on the left and right) ascribed the immorality and degeneration of French social life encapsulated in this painting to Jewish influence. Jews were seen as “agents of social change; they were symbols of confusion and alteration. Against them, to be safe from the threat they posed, anti-Semites affirmed and invoked a stable social order, stable moral values, immutable and absolute categories.”[3]Roberta Crisci-Richardson, Mapping Degas: Real Spaces, Symbolic Spaces and Invented Spaces in the Life and Work of Edgar Degas (1834-1917) (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015), 31.

Widely cited by those eager to prove Degas’ anti-Semitic bona fides is his 1879 painting At the Bourse. It depicts the Jewish banker, speculator, and patron of the arts, Ernest May, on the steps of the stock exchange in the company of a certain Monsieur Bolatre.

At the Bourse by Edgar Degas (1879)
At the Bourse by Edgar Degas (1879)

Regarding this painting, Brown insists “there is a nasty, if subtle, suggestion of anti-Semitism in the depiction of May’s physiognomic traits,”[4]Marilyn R. Brown, Degas and the Business of Art (University Park: Penn State Press, 1994), 130. while for Armstrong, Degas’ “dark slovenly depiction of moneylenders might certainly be inflected with anti-Semitic racism.”[5]Carol M. Armstrong, Odd Man Out: Readings of the Work and Reputation of Edgar Degas (Getty Research Institute, 2003), 282. Jewish art critic Linda Nochlin claims this painting depicts Jewishness in an “unflattering, if relatively subtle way,” and “draws from the same polluted source of available visual stereotypes.”

It is not so much May’s Semitic features, but rather the gesture that I find disturbing — what might be called the “confidential touching” — that and the rather strange, close-up angle of vision from which the artist chose to record it, as though to suggest that the spectator is spying on rather than merely looking at the transaction taking place. … What is “revealed” here, perhaps unconsciously, through May’s gesture, as well as the unseemly, inelegant closeness of the two central figures and the demeanor of the vaguely adumbrated cast of characters, like the odd couple, one with a “Semitic nose,” pressed as tightly as lovers into the narrow space at the left-hand margin of the picture, is a whole mythology of Jewish financial conspiracy.

That gesture — the half-hidden head tilted to afford greater intimacy, the plump white hand on the slightly raised shoulder, the stiff turn of May’s head, the somewhat emphasized ear picking up the tip — all this, in the context of the half-precise, half-merely adumbrated background, suggests “insider” information to which “they,” are privy, from which “we,” the spectators (understood to be gentile) are excluded. This is, in effect, the representation of a conspiracy. It is not too farfetched to think of the traditional gesture of Judas betraying Christ in this connection, except that here, both figures function to signify Judas; Christ, of course, is the French public, betrayed by Jewish financial machinations.[6]Linda Nochlin in: Maurice Berger (Ed.) Modern Art And Society: An Anthology Of Social And Multicultural Readings (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 30.

This kind of speculative analysis of Degas’ work to establish his anti-Semitism is ultimately superfluous given the artist’s catalogue of statements critical of Jews. Toward the end of his life, Degas, for instance, declared without equivocation: “I detest them, those Jews! An abominable race that ought to be shut up in ghettos. Or even totally eradicated!” Ostensibly unable to conceive of the existence of rational and valid criticisms of Jews, Nochlin insists that “although Degas was indeed an extraordinary artist, a brilliant innovator, and one of the most important figures in the artistic vanguard of the 19th century, he was a perfectly ordinary anti-Semite. As such, he must have been capable of amazing feats of both irrationality and rationalization, able to keep different parts of his inner and outer life in separate compartments.”[7]Linda Nochlin, “Degas and the Dreyfus Affair: A portrait of the artist as anti-Semite,” Tablet, January 4, 2019. https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/arti...affair

Nochlin draws on the (now venerable) Jewish apologetic trope of characterizing anti-Jewish sentiment as akin to a virus. The fact that Degas, “stubbornly nationalistic, and blinded by fanaticism,” produced ‘At the Bourse’ while still friends with the Jewish author and playwright Ludovic Halévy, suggests, she claims, that this “virus was in a state of extreme latency, visible only in the nuances of a few works of art and intermittently at that. Or perhaps one might say that before the period of the Dreyfus affair, Degas … was anti-Jewish only in terms of a certain representation of the Jew or of particular ‘Jewish traits,’ but his attitude did not yet manifest itself in overt hostility toward actual Jewish people, nor did it yet take the form of a coherent ideology of anti-Semitism.”[8]Nochlin, Modern Art and Society, 35.

It was the Dreyfus Affair and the writings of Eduard Drumont that supposedly crystalized Degas’ nascent anti-Semitism into a fully delineated ideology. Through such influences, the “virus” of anti-Semitism “mutated” in the 1880s and 1890s from “stereotyped prejudices diffused all over Europe” into an organized movement and ideology (accompanied by the emergence of anti-Semitic literature, leagues and groups). By 1895 the artist was, “in addition to being a violent nationalist and uncritical supporter of the army, an outspoken anti-Semite.”[9]Linda Nochlin, The Politics of Vision: Essays on Nineteenth Century Art and Society (Taylor & Francis, 2018), According to some accounts, he had his maid read aloud from Drumont’s La Libre Parole and Rochefort’s L’Intransigeant. It was these publications that, according to Kleeblatt, “constructed the anti-Semitic identity of men like Degas.”[10]Norman Kleeblatt, “The Dreyfus Affair: Art Truth and Justice,” Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry Volume 5: New Research, New Views (United Kingdom: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2008) 425.

Despite the conclusion to the Dreyfus affair, there are no signs, according to a biographer, “that he ever thought he had taken the wrong side in the great clash of the two Frances.”[11]Roy McMullen, Degas: his life, times, and work (London: Secker & Warburg, 1985), 444. Chrisci-Richardson ascribes his anti-Semitism to his economic vulnerability — as an “inexcusable symptom of his life-long struggle for money and his uncertain social position.”[12]Roberta Chrisci-Richardson, Mapping Degas: Real Spaces, Symbolic Spaces and Invented Spaces in the Life and Work of Edgar Degas (1834-1917) (United Kingdom: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015), 12. Born into a well-off family, Degas suddenly experienced financial difficulties in 1874 with the death of his father and the closure of his brother’s business. He was forced to sell his home and started living with the subjects he was painting, offering his paintings as payment. According to Nochlin:

There was a specific aspect of Degas’ situation in the world that might have made him particularly susceptible to the anti-Semitic ideology of his time: what might be called his “status anxiety.” According to Stephen Wilson: “The French anti-Semites’ attacks on social mobility, and their ideal of a fixed social hierarchy, suggest that such an interpretation applies to them, particularly when these ideological features are set beside the marginal situation of many of the movement’s supporters.” Degas was precisely such a “marginal” figure in the social world of the late 19th century and had ample reason, by the decade of the ’90s, to be worried about his status.[13]Nochlin, Modern Art and Society, 39.

Degas was adversely affected by the crash of the Union Générale Bank in 1882. This event was widely interpreted as “the result of deliberate action against the Catholic finance house by its Jewish rivals, led by Rothschild.” The crash of the Bank was only one of the financial and business scandals attributed to Jews in France. Others included to Panama scandal (1892), and the failures of Comptoir des Metaux and the Comptoir d’Escomptes. In the aftermath of these scandals, Jewish financiers like the Halevys, the Hasses, the Schlumbergers, the Camondos, the Ephrussis and the Rothschilds, were “viewed with suspicion and thought to be working for the ruin of France.”[14]Stephen Wilson, Ideology and Experience: Anti-Semitism in France at the Time of the Dreyfus Affair (United Kingdom: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1982), 170.

For Chrisci-Richardson, as well as being a response to “Jewish capitalists monopolizing the wealth of France” and “Jewish workers taking the jobs from French workers,” Degas’ anti-Jewish outlook was also a response to his vision of Jewish immigrants as “carriers of revolution.”[15]Chrisci-Richardson, Mapping Degas, 297. By the 1880s various Jewish revolutionaries had established themselves in Paris, forming revolutionary circles, whether anarchist, anarcho-communist, or, later Bolshevik. Thousands of politically-radical Jews migrated to France, particularly to Paris, between 1880 and 1925. At the time of the Dreyfus trial, 40,000 of the 75,000 Jews in France were concentrated in Paris.

Fellow impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir also denounced Jews as vectors of political radicalism. According to Nochlin, Renoir was “openly anti-Semitic, a position obviously linked to his deep political conservatism and fear of anarchism.”[16]Nochlin, Modern Art and Society, 25. Capps laments that Renoir was an artist “who appeared to embrace the methods of early modernism but none of its revolutionary goals.”[17]Kristin Capps, “Why Absolutely Everyone Hates Renoir,” The Atlantic, October 15, 2015. https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/20...10335/ Renoir maintained there was a good reason for Jews having been repeatedly expelled from countries throughout history, and warned “they shouldn’t be allowed to become so important in France.” He observed that “the peculiarity of the Jews is to cause disintegration.”[18]Manet, Julie, Growing up with the Impressionists: the diary of Julie Manet (London: Sotheby’s Publications, 1987), 129.

In her diaries, Renoir’s daughter Julie regularly records her father expressing a variety of anti-Jewish views. In January 1898, during a discussion of the Dreyfus Affair, she quotes Renoir as saying. “[The Jews] come to France to earn money, but if there is any fighting to be done they hide behind a tree. … There are a lot of them in the army, because the Jew likes to walk about wearing a uniform.” Renoir also “let fly on the subject of Pissarro, ‘a Jew,’ whose sons are natives of no country and who do their military service nowhere.” Renoir goes on, “It’s tenacious[,] the Jewish race. Pissarro’s wife isn’t one, yet all the children are, even more so than their father.”[19]Ibid., 124.
(Manet, Julie, Growing up with the Impressionists: the diary of Julie Manet (London: Sotheby’s Publications, 1987), 129.)

Renoir’s famous 1880–81 painting Luncheon of the Boating Party, features more than a dozen figures and a dog. One of these figures, a man wearing a hat with his back turned to the viewer, is Charles Ephrussi, a Jewish art critic and collector. From a wealthy Jewish banking family, Ephrussi, the stereotype of the wealthy Jewish banker exemplified by the Rothschilds, played a key role in Renoir’s career. Ephrussi rubbed elbows with the Parisian elite and was an unrelenting networker and social climber. The writer Edmond de Goncourt once observed that “Ephrussi the Jew went to six or seven parties a night, so that he could climb to a position in the Ministry of Fine Arts.”[20]Menachem Wecker, “Was Renoir Anti-Semitic?,” National Review, November 18, 2017, https://www.nationalreview.com/2017/11/renoir-and-fr...mitic/

Luncheon of the Boating Party (1880–81) by Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Luncheon of the Boating Party (1880–81) by Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Ephrussi helped Renoir find buyers in the French Jewish community — where he gained popularity as a portraitist. Degas was particularly disappointed with what he saw as Renoir’s transformation into a Jewish-society portraitist. In 1880, he wrote: “Monsieur Renoir, you have no integrity. It is unacceptable that you paint to order. I gather you now work for financiers, that you do the rounds with Charles Ephrussi.” Shortly after Degas’ missive, Renoir ended his activity as a society portraitist. Aside from Degas’ chastisement, Renoir became exasperated with his Jewish patrons — especially the Cahen d’Anvers family. Writing to a fellow artist, he protested: “As for the 1,500 francs from Cahens, I must tell you that I find it hard to swallow. The family is so stingy; I am washing my hands of the Jews.” Over the following year, Renoir penned a succession of letters expressing his disdain for Jewish patrons, and severed all ties with the Ephrussi patronage circle. Melanson notes that:

As he renounced his Jewish patrons, and his anti-Semitic remarks became more frequent, Renoir’s wrath was directed at the artist most commonly associated with Jewish high society. [Léon] Bonnat painted almost every member of the salons juifs, including Albert and Louilia Cahen d’Anvers, Charles Ephrussi, Marie and Edouard Kann, Louise Cahen d’Anvers, Mme Leopold Stern, Mme Bischoffsheim, Countess Potocka, Joseph Reinach, Abraham de Camondo, and Henri Cernuschi. Like many society portraitists, Bonnat and his wife became members of high society, particularly the world of the salons juifs.

In the twentieth century, Jacques-Emile Blanche recalled the affinity of “wealthy Jewish financiers” for Bonnat. Blanche was correct in asserting that it was Bonnat, and not Renoir, who was truly the portraitist of Jewish high society. Blanche explained that Renoir’s Jewish patrons were “not at all convinced of [Renoir’s] talent” but were promised by Ephrussi “enormous returns on the sale of Impressionist pictures.” Accusing Jewish art patrons of speculation was a common trope of anti-Semitic discourse, and Blanche’s tone was demeaning when he described Ephrussi’s circle as “rather proud of their audacity” in commissioning portraits from Renoir that ultimately “ended up in the laundry room or were given away to former governesses.”[21]Elizabeth Melanson, “The Influence of Jewish Patrons on Renoir’s Stylistic Transformation in the Mid-1880s,” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, Vol. 12(2), 2013.

https://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/index.php/autumn1...atrons

Despite their anti-Jewish views, Jewish patrons and art dealers avidly bought up the work of Degas and Renoir. While Jewish artists of the first rank were few and far between (Pissarro perhaps excepted), Jews still dominated the art scene in Paris in the late nineteenth century as publishers, collector-patrons and dealers. They were, moreover, absolutely committed to the modernist movement, even to the point of making excuses for artists who, like Degas, Renoir and Cezanne, were anti-Dreyfusards and even openly anti-Semitic. Laufer notes that:

At the end of the long nineteenth century, the [non-Jewish owned] Parisian press often described French Jews as greedy, cosmopolitan, materialistic traitors — and avid collectors of modern art. While several of these characterisations are mere anti-Semitic stereotypes, French Jews did make up a disproportionately large number of the supporters of modern artists (particularly of the Impressionists and the Symbolists).[22]Mia Laufer, Jewish Taste: Modern Art Collecting, Identity, and Antisemitism in Paris, 1870-1914 (St Louis: Washington University Open Scholarship Institutional Repository, 2019), Abstract. https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/art_sci_etds/1814/

In his exposition of the political significance of the widespread Jewish involvement in cultural modernism, the Jewish historian Norman Cantor noted that: “Something more profound and structural was involved in the Jewish role in the modernist revolution than this sociological phenomenon of the supersession of marginality. There was an ideological drive at work.”[23]Norman Cantor, The Sacred Chain: The History of the Jews (New York, HarperCollins, 1994), 303.

15 Norman Lebrecht, Why Mahler? How One Man and Ten Symphonies Changed the World (London: Faber and Faber, 2010), 155-6.
This ideological drive was the urge to subject Western civilization (deemed a “soft authoritarianism” hostile to Jews) to intensive criticism. The late Jewish artist R.B. Kitaj concurred with this assessment, equating anti-Semitism with anti-modernism. “Jewish brilliance”, he said, “made the modern world.” Jews were agents of change, architects of human unease.[24]

Degas’ status as a Modernist master therefore sits incongruously, for today’s establishment critics, alongside his political conservatism and anti-Semitism. For Brody, the problem of Degas’ legacy “isn’t a matter of anti-Semitism or bigotry per se, but of a bilious repudiation of the world as it runs, or, in a word, modernity.” Echoing Jewish responses to Richard Wagner, critics have, in recent decades, confronted the “problem” of Degas’ legacy by character assassination — recent articles about the artist abound with epithets like “cruel,” “misanthropic,” “misogynist,” and “embittered man as well as a bigot.” Criticism inevitably centers on his adherence to a “virulent belief system” which, it is argued, is unredeemed by the sublimity of his art.

Brenton Sanderson is the author of Battle Lines: Essays on Western Culture, Jewish Influence and Anti-Semitism, banned by Amazon, but available here and here.

Notes

[1] Gabriel Astruc, La pavillon des fantomes: souvenirs (Paris, D. Grasset, 1929), 98.

[2] Anthea Callen quoted in: Washton-Long, Baigel & Heyd (Eds.) Jewish Dimensions in Modern Visual Culture: Anti-Semitism, Assimilation, Affirmation, (Waltham MA: Brandeis University Press, 2010), 166.

[3] Roberta Crisci-Richardson, Mapping Degas: Real Spaces, Symbolic Spaces and Invented Spaces in the Life and Work of Edgar Degas (1834-1917) (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015), 31.

[4] Marilyn R. Brown, Degas and the Business of Art (University Park: Penn State Press, 1994), 130.

[5] Carol M. Armstrong, Odd Man Out: Readings of the Work and Reputation of Edgar Degas (Getty Research Institute, 2003), 282.

[6] Linda Nochlin in: Maurice Berger (Ed.) Modern Art And Society: An Anthology Of Social And Multicultural Readings (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 30.

[7] Linda Nochlin, “Degas and the Dreyfus Affair: A portrait of the artist as anti-Semite,” Tablet, January 4, 2019. https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/degas-and-the-dreyfus-affair

[8] Nochlin, Modern Art and Society, 35.

[9] Linda Nochlin, The Politics of Vision: Essays on Nineteenth Century Art and Society (Taylor & Francis, 2018),

[10] Norman Kleeblatt, “The Dreyfus Affair: Art Truth and Justice,” Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry Volume 5: New Research, New Views (United Kingdom: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2008) 425.

[11] Roy McMullen, Degas: his life, times, and work (London: Secker & Warburg, 1985), 444.

[12] Roberta Chrisci-Richardson, Mapping Degas: Real Spaces, Symbolic Spaces and Invented Spaces in the Life and Work of Edgar Degas (1834-1917) (United Kingdom: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015), 12.

[13] Nochlin, Modern Art and Society, 39.

[14] Stephen Wilson, Ideology and Experience: Anti-Semitism in France at the Time of the Dreyfus Affair (United Kingdom: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1982), 170.

[15] Chrisci-Richardson, Mapping Degas, 297.

[16] Nochlin, Modern Art and Society, 25.

[17] Kristin Capps, “Why Absolutely Everyone Hates Renoir,” The Atlantic, October 15, 2015. https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/10/why-everyone-hates-renoir/410335/

[18] Manet, Julie, Growing up with the Impressionists: the diary of Julie Manet (London: Sotheby’s Publications, 1987), 129.

[19] Ibid., 124.

[20] Menachem Wecker, “Was Renoir Anti-Semitic?,” National Review, November 18, 2017, https://www.nationalreview.com/2017/11/renoir-and-friends-exhibit-phillips-collection-was-renoir-anti-semitic/

[21] Elizabeth Melanson, “The Influence of Jewish Patrons on Renoir’s Stylistic Transformation in the Mid-1880s,” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, Vol. 12(2), 2013.

https://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/index.php/autumn13/melanson-on-renoir-and-the-influence-of-jewish-patrons

[22] Mia Laufer, Jewish Taste: Modern Art Collecting, Identity, and Antisemitism in Paris, 1870-1914 (St Louis: Washington University Open Scholarship Institutional Repository, 2019), Abstract. https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/art_sci_etds/1814/

[23] Norman Cantor, The Sacred Chain: The History of the Jews (New York, HarperCollins, 1994), 303.

15 Norman Lebrecht, Why Mahler? How One Man and Ten Symphonies Changed the World (London: Faber and Faber, 2010), 155-6.

(Republished from The Occidental Observer by permission of author or representative)
 
Hide 105 CommentsLeave a Comment
Commenters to Ignore...to FollowEndorsed Only
Trim Comments?
    []
  1. Wokechoke says:

    I like Renoir a lot more now. “The God of Painting”, as Picasso called him.

    • Agree: René Fries
    • Replies: @Here Be Dragon
  2. Dutch Boy says:

    Degas’ weakness was precisely his anti-Semitism, which detracts from the critique of the Jewish religion and culture which promotes revolution and cultural degeneration. Jewish influence is bad not because of their noses or their DNA but because they are largely enemies of the good, the true, and the beautiful.

    • Disagree: Pheasant, ariadna
    • Troll: David Burberry
    • Replies: @David Burberry
    , @Sokrates
  3. Rich says:

    Degas was a great artist and clear thinker.

    • Replies: @Iris
  4. The critic quoted seems to be insinuating that the Paris stock market at the end of the 1870’s was not dominated by Jews.

    I wonder. When the Nazis barred Jews from the Berlin stock market in 1933, 80% of the brokers had to resign. If the situation was similar in the Paris of the previous century, then Degas’ portrayal of it could have been perfectly objective.

    Anyone have any figures?

    • Thanks: Pheasant
    • Replies: @Wokechoke
  5. excellent essay. Evidently,

    even (some of) the Jew-promoted radical artistes

    were Jew-wise. Really,

    it’s impossible to have any sustained interaction with Jews,

    without noticing certain malignant features.

    • Replies: @Z-man
  6. Trinity says:

    So when you tell the truth about Jews/Khazars that is considered anti-Semitic. Then there is the question if many of those who call themselves Jew (ish) are even Semites to begin with.

  7. neutral says:

    Degas was simply an artist who had a good understanding on the society he was trying to paint.

    • Replies: @Robert Dolan
    , @RestiveUs
  8. @neutral

    I’d like to have a beer with the man if he was still here.

    I’ll settle for Mel Gibson.

    • Agree: anarchyst, Iris
    • Replies: @michael severson
    , @loren
  9. It’s refreshing to read an essay dealing with art history here on Unz, but Sanderson’s piece seems a bit out of focus and unfinished.

    Apparently Degas knew where to draw the line avec les salons juifs.

    At least that’s the impression I have.

  10. Iris says:
    @Rich

    Indeed. Degas was a master of composition. He invented a new method of structuring paintings, where the object of his attention was represented as if captured by a random glance, as would happen in the real life or with modern photography.

    He also had an outstanding mastery of drawing, and a magical, oneiric sense of colours where he joined another giant, Paul Gauguin.

    Finally, his paintings carried the tenderness and love he had for the small, poor people he painted. In so many aspects, Degas was unique and exceptional.

    Russian art collectors recognised his talent very early. A painting most strikingly characteristic of Degas revolutionary art of composition is the “Blue Dancers” painting at Moscow’ Pushkin museum.

  11. Regarding French painters alone, the style of William-Adolphe Bouguereau is closer to my liking.

    • Replies: @Francis Miville
  12. Excellent article. I had been looking for more info on Degas’s attitude toward jews ever since I read Alan Dershowitz’s description of the painter as a “wild anti-semite.” It’s funny, the history of great men throughout Western Civilization is basically a who’s who of these so-called anti-semites. Maybe these great men were onto something. You could write another article on the “anti-semitism” of the great modernist poets of the early 20th century. I put anti-semitism in quotes or use “so-called” because there is no equivalent term to describe jewish antipathy toward non-jews, an attitude that most certainly exists and has existed for many centuries. But point that fact out and–how about that!–this also makes you an “anti-semite.” Neat trick.

    • Replies: @tomo
    , @thotmonger
  13. Wokechoke says:
    @Colin Wright

    Where are the customer’s Yachts?

  14. @Vergissmeinnicht

    Bouguereau was a master detail-worker for sure, but the problem is that all his subjects are rendered not as human one but as wax museum figures, and most probably that is what he wanted to convey anyway : many art viewers liked to be surrounded by sculptures as an already abstract precious object in itself though haphazardly figurative, the human figures they represented were only a pretext. Bouguereau painted a universe entirely made of sculptures, not living beings, and many in Paris, including Baudelaire, stood for the ideal wherefrom all life and organicity was banished.

  15. bwuce wee says:

    it seems hideously wrong to me that one of the great artists of history is remembered as an ‘anti-semite’?!?!?!?! an evvasive, slanderous, political term which is completely meaningless to most of the world’s humans. sort of like being remembered for hating clowns.

    • Agree: Colin Wright
    • Replies: @profnasty
    , @Dave Bowman
  16. Dumbo says:

    Meh. Unconvincing. I guess, for Unz readers, it is more important to prove that an artist is an “anti-semite” that he is or was a great painter.

    Degas and Renoir were great painters. Sometimes they painted Jews. Mostly they painted other subjects. There were (there are) a lot of wealthy Jews in France, and some of them were patrons of the arts. Some of the artists wrote harsh words about Jews. So what? That’s not really news, is it.

    Also, “anti-semite” is a Jewish term. Everyone may or may not be an “anti-semite” depending on the circumstances.

    Now, if you go into the 20th century modernist art, then you will find a lot more Jewish involvement.

    • Replies: @Colin Wright
  17. @Dumbo

    ‘Now, if you go into the 20th century modernist art, then you will find a lot more Jewish involvement.’

    I tend to see a connection between that and the disappearance of genuine artistic merit.

    Novelty is not art. If it takes an essay to explain it, write the essay — but don’t call it art.

    • Replies: @A B Coreopsis
  18. Skeptikal says:

    There is a weird circularity to Nochlin’s arguments, at least those presented here.

    Is it possible that Degas painted what he saw??

    Obviously, Jews were important participants in the Bourse.

  19. Cats with large eyes playing cards are a coded dog whistle to antisemitism. They represent a cabal of Rothschild bankers. On the medium of purple velvet, they dominate the art scene in Tijuana.

    • Replies: @ariadna
  20. JimDandy says:

    The third painting down would work as a Bob Dylan album cover.

    • LOL: Bardon Kaldian
    • Replies: @profnasty
  21. Ruckus says:

    Anyone else notice the faint resemblance to reptiles in Degas’s portrayal of Jewish subjects?

  22. Nietzsche says:

    No wonder Degas has always been one of my favorites. Fuuuuck the Jews.

  23. Anon[219] • Disclaimer says:

    A most powerful and illuminating little essay. Thank you.

  24. G J T says:

    I’d never heard of this guy, but I just assume that prior to WWII, everyone who had dealt with Jews and was not directly benefiting from their schemes was an anti-Semite. You’d have to have something seriously wrong with you not to be.

  25. ferocious anti-Semite
    ——————————-
    Anyone in his right mind is a ferocious anti-Semite.

  26. Tom says:

    Great article. thanks. I always loved Degas’ vision and admired his artistic genius. Realist and impressionistic (to an extent) painting is a difficult and intellectually demanding enterprise.Thousands of decisions go into the process of capturing the elemental meaning of a particular scene or face, etc. It requires a rare ability to eliminate that which is nonessential. It is the crafting of simplicity from complexity and arriving at a certain poetic vision. The result often looks as if it was easily done. This process requires enormous talent and discipline. History shows that Jewish artists rarely excelled in this kind of painting. They were behind the “modernist” schools which sought to delegitimize traditional painting, by avoiding the requirements of the craft of realist painting. They promoted ugliness and deformity and declared it to be great art. Above all, they promoted art that had little true artistic value. An entire “false market” was created, in the late 19th century and throughout the 20th century. When a Marc Rothko piece of garbage can sell for 167 million, something is rotten. It’s all about promotion and financing, two things Jews are brilliant at. I always say: Picasso and his ilk were great, except when you compare them to about a million other artists.

    • Agree: Alden, A B Coreopsis
    • Replies: @Ulf Thorsen
  27. @Trinity

    The Dna analysis refutes the khazarian hypothesis. Ashkenazi Jews are about 40% European and 60% Semitic on average according to dna analysis. I don’t understand the impetus for that idea anyway. It seems dear to Christian anti semites who don’t want Jews to have been the people of the Old Testament or to the occasional Jew like Arthur koestler who want the Jews of Europe not to have been the killers of Christ. Its refuted in either case.

    • Replies: @Ulf Thorsen
    , @anon
  28. Anonymous[661] • Disclaimer says:

    The deconstruction and forced disappearance continues against a number of monumental artists/writers/musicians who dared criticize Jewish behavior, Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot among them.

    For a delightful investigation into the Jewish creation and marketing of modern ‘abstract expressionism’ nothing beats Tom Wolfe’s erudite and irreverent “The Painted Word”.

    • Replies: @Wokechoke
  29. Renoir maintained there was a good reason for Jews having been repeatedly expelled from countries throughout history, and warned “they shouldn’t be allowed to become so important in France.” He observed that “the peculiarity of the Jews is to cause disintegration.”

    (Bold fonts supplied). You can substitute America and Western Europe for France and you have a perfect reflection of contemporary reality regarding Jewish power… and cunning.

    • Agree: Spender_CGB
  30. profnasty says:
    @bwuce wee

    I don’t hate clowns.
    I just feel better when they’re not around.

  31. Alfred says:

    One can say whatever one likes about Jews, but one must concede that by buying up the works of these artists and promoting them, they obtained fantastic returns.

    Renoir Work Sells for $78.1 Million (1990)

  32. profnasty says:
    @JimDandy

    A woman recently accused Bob of ‘raping’ her, in the 1960s, when she was, wait for it,…12 yrs old.
    I believe her. Probably most do believe.
    No one cares.
    Yes. It looks an excellent likeness.

    • Replies: @JimDandy
  33. ariadna says:
    @Reverend Goody

    No, that is dogs playing cards, not cats. I wonder if your apparent confusion is not in fact poorly masked anti-semitism!

    • Replies: @Reverend Goody
  34. everything is anti-semetic because the jew is ,at
    least subconsciously , keenly aware that they have
    destroyed all that is good and true and beautiful
    in this world.

    On to Madagascar with these Plague-Rats. Now.

  35. @Dutch Boy

    Any criticism of any jew for any reason is considered anti-Semitism by the jews. But of course you already know that.

  36. @Happy Tapir

    Not only does DNA refute the Khazar theory, but so too does the record of their behavior long before the Khazars.

    In terms of DNA here is yet another interesting study –
    https://www.science.org/content/article/did-modern-jews-originate-italy

  37. A few years ago I went to a Renoir exhibit in Fort Worth. Reviewing the exhibit for “Fort Worth Weekly,” 0ne writer hinted that if you were a Renoir fan you might be a white supremacist. I thought he was referring to the copious blond hair and creamy complexions of Renoir’s models, but perhaps the comment referred to some sort of anti-Semitic comments the artist had made. One might expect Renoir to be memory-holed, but given the value of his paintings, I don’t think that will happen. Same for Degas. As is the case with Wagner’s music, it may become obligatory for critics and historians to point out their political beliefs without banning their work.

    • Replies: @Colin Wright
  38. HT says:

    This is yet another reminder of a time when whites were quickly advancing civilization. Fast forward to today, when whites are irrelevant, have lost control of the countries they built and non-whites, including the Jews, are putting Western civilization in reverse.

    • Agree: anarchyst
  39. HT says:

    Compare the genius and talent of the paintings shown above to the “art” of Africans and understand why Western civilization exploded putting men on the Moon and why blacks still drink out of the same mud hole they defecate in.

  40. @Tom

    Jackson Pollock also comes to mind regarding the garbage that was being passed as art. I have also never liked Picasso. Distorted and ugly are two words that come to mind.

    • Replies: @tomo
    , @Dave Bowman
  41. @cohen

    There’s certainly more to the story. It’s almost obvious in my opinion. The Court decision banning abortion is actually an edict of the military dictatorship running the country. They need more babies, especially White and Asian babies, for several reasons.

    A) Cannon fodder for their world wars in which fighting is increasingly high-tech. B) The ethnic demographic curves are crossing (much faster than previously estimated) and if Whites or other high IQ people no longer reproduce it is curtains for America, end of the comedy show. (Pardon me for repeating this obvious fact). C) The pension and retirement systems of the entire western advanced world are in danger of collapse unless overall demographic trends improve soon. This last is a huge problem, little discussed.

    The Georgia guidestones contained text advising severe population reduction. So it had to go. Look at the timing – Abortion ruling and world war.

    Silly question. Given that the guidestones were blown up with explosives, which profession is proficient and practiced in their use? Bonus question: any folks like that in Georgia?

    Please to do not take my remark the wrong way. While it is true that I deplore the current supreme court (sorry, I meant to say military dictatorship), I do recognize the necessity for producing more potentially intelligent, civilizable human beings living within the confines of the USA. Presently it is a lunatic asylum without guards, doors, or straight-jackets, and certainly without doctors.

    • Replies: @Alden
  42. tomo says:

    Anti-psychopathism is a far more accurate description.

  43. tomo says:
    @Malcolm X-Lax

    I think that word would be misanthropic

  44. Durruti says:
    @Trinity

    So when you tell the truth about Jews/Khazars that is considered anti-Semitic. Then there is the question if many of those who call themselves Jew (ish) are even Semites to begin with.

    Repeat after me!

    “I am not an anti-Semite. I like Arabs.”

    The overwhelming percentage of Jews are not Semites. Zionist politicians use – appropriate the term Semite (essentially-someone from the Middle East), in order to lay claim to Arab Middle Eastern lands. It is a “trick” as Zionist war criminal and land thief, Netenyahoo, explained. Arthur Koestler settled the matter with his book “The Thirteenth Tribe.

  45. tomo says:
    @Ulf Thorsen

    I used to think I liked Picasso until I went to his museum in Malaga about a year ago.
    I was so looking forward to it only to be very disappointed with pretty much everything I saw there. There was noting inspiring or interesting there
    The house was nice and there is very old fig tree in the courtyard.

    • Replies: @A B Coreopsis
  46. anarchyst says:

    Harvey Weinstein…
    Anthony Weiner…
    Woody Allen…
    Roman Polansky…

    …and many others…

    What do they have in common?

    …They are all jewish criminal rapists and pedophiles

    Harvey Weinstein used the “casting couch” to sexually abuse and rape aspiring actresses on many occasions and is serving time

    Anthony Weiner served time for sexting underage girls

    Woody Allen married his adopted daughter and sexually abused Dylan Farrow…sick

    Roman Polansky raped and sodomized a 13-year-old girl and escaped to France to avoid prosecution

    Pedophilia and sexual abuse is a part of the jewish psyche.

  47. Alden says:
    @Agentinslacks

    Don’t forget how useful the Hispanics are to the military. They’re way more intelligent, able to learn to operate and repair complicated military machinery, and all around vastly more functional than blacks. Somewhat of a perfect NCO and combat class. Plus, it’s not just the Hispanics in America. There’s hundreds of millions in impoverished Central America. Happy to English and obtain American citizenship.

    A further thing that agrees with your thesis. The bulk of the career military comes from the impoverished south east states And those are the very states that have been restricting abortions for decades. Just one existing abortion clinic Dobbs , Dodd? was left in deepest darkest Mississippi. The SC ruling closed it down.

    So in about 20 years there should be a big crop of black and brown cannon fodder from the southern states. The eternal harvest of poor young men and teen boys with no future gathered in by the military.

    • Replies: @Alden
  48. Z-man says:
    @Haxo Angmark

    Really, it’s impossible to have any sustained interaction with Jews, without noticing certain malignant features.

    Yes. One example I have is of the enormously popular Martin & Lewis comedy team of the early 1950’s. Dean Martin just couldn’t put up with Lewis’s Jew crap any longer and he broke it up. Martin went on to have an even better career on his own.

  49. @Judson Hammond

    ‘…One might expect Renoir to be memory-holed, but given the value of his paintings, I don’t think that will happen. Same for Degas. As is the case with Wagner’s music, it may become obligatory for critics and historians to point out their political beliefs without banning their work…’

    Renoir…Degas…Wagner.

    Offhand, I think one could make a case that just those three alone have produced more of artistic merit than all of Jewry ever did — at least, post- the composition of the Old Testament and the Gospels.

    This wouldn’t be so remarkable. After all, Jews only make up a fifth of one percent of humanity. They should have achieved about as much and require about as much attention as Mormons do, or Guatemalans, or any other group of similar size.

    We pay too much attention to them, and they demand too much attention. Why are there Holocaust Museums everywhere, for example? Do monuments to the martyrdom of Joseph Smith carpet the planet? Do we all diligently read about the histories of the various Indian groups of Guatemala?

    Togo? Up on doings in Togo? There are about as many inhabitants of Togo as there are Jews.

  50. anon[415] • Disclaimer says:

    As a Jew, I’m most offended by the beauy in his paintings. More “Blue Gums”, less “Blue Dancers”.

  51. Alden says:
    @Alden

    Happy to enlist. Not happy to English. Spell check. Sometimes the wrong words just type themselves.

  52. @Trinity

    The highly speculative Khazar theory invented by Arthur Koestler in his book The Thirteenth Tribe has been rejected by many historians who are aware of the apologetic nature of the hypothesis. A crucial difficulty is that Ashkenazi groups speak a German-based language (Yiddish) rather than a Turkish-based language. The term Ashkenaz itself means German in Hebrew while Sepharad means Spain. Moreover, it is highly unlikely that the highly literate Ashkenazim have retained no trace of their Turkish origins. Genetic evidence also weighs heavily against such a hypothesis. According to Jewish journalist Tina Hesman Saey:

    “Large-scale genetic studies have shown that today’s diverse Jewish communities have remarkable genetic cohesion. The Jews of Iran, Iraq, Yemen, North Africa, the European Ashkenazi and other Semitic groups all originated in the Middle East. A common geographic origin can be observed for all major Jewish groups studied. This genetic research clearly disproved the story of the Khazars: a pre-10th century Turkic-Asian empire that converted en masse to Judaism. The researchers compared the DNA signatures of Ashkenazi Jews with those of people of Turkish descent and found no match. The DNA results support the hypothesis that the paternal gene pools of the European, North African, and Middle Eastern Jewish communities are derived from a common ancestral Middle Eastern population, and suggest that most Jewish communities remained relatively isolated from neighboring non-Jewish communities during and after the diaspora.“

    The Khazars nonetheless became a kind of all-purpose device. Arthur Koestler, for example, uses the Khazar conjecture to defuse racial anti-Semitism, which, from this point of view, would be misdirected, since Ashkenazi Jews are not Semites. Thus, if for some reason the Ashkenazim behave badly, evangelical Christians, for example, who are convinced that the Jews are God’s chosen people, will be able to continue to believe this since the bad Jews in question are not real Jews, but impostors. Antisemites use it also to escape accusations of antisemitism since their hate of Jews is directed at false jews called Khazars.

    • Disagree: Rich
  53. JimDandy says:
    @profnasty

    Yes, the retroactive cancel-machine is highly selective.

  54. anon[200] • Disclaimer says:
    @Happy Tapir

    Ashkenazi Yid and mouthpieces are 100% horseshit.

  55. @Pierre Simon

    ‘…According to Jewish journalist Tina Hesman Saey:

    “…The DNA results support the hypothesis that the paternal gene pools of the European, North African, and Middle Eastern Jewish communities are derived from a common ancestral Middle Eastern population, and suggest that most Jewish communities remained relatively isolated from neighboring non-Jewish communities during and after the diaspora.“…’

    Yes, but while your criticisms of Koestler’s hypothesis are partially valid (in fact, at some point some genetic evidence was turned up that partially supported it), the assertions you quote are also the product of wishful thinking.

    [MORE]

    A Jewish journalist… To make a long story short, these claims tend to be popular distortions of ‘studies’ that themselves have been carried out by groups visibly motivated to show that Jews come from Palestine. In fact, the historical evidence, other, less trumpeted genetic studies, and the very physiognomy of the Jews themselves show that Ashkenazi Jews in particular don’t derive much of their ancestry from either Palestine or the Middle East in general. Alicia Silverstone is not your basic Levantine.

    I could stand to read up more on the subject myself, but what seems most likely to me, and what I have read evidence to confirm, is that Jews, above all, are related to the gentile populations among whom they appeared. Netanyahu, for example, is a Polish Jew: he bears a striking resemblance to those twin brothers who were prominent in Polish gentile politics a decade or two back. When Yishai — a Tunisian Jew — made his ‘Israel is for the white man’ remark, I was inspired to go combing through photos of modern Tunisians. Fairly quickly, I found Yishai’s long-lost gentile twin brother. Do you really think all those Yemeni Jews migrated down the length of the Arabian Peninsula and once in place, multiplied whilst never interbreeding with their gentile neighbors yet coming to look remarkably like them — or at some point was Judaism introduced into Yemen and made converts among the locals?

    Etc. As I say, I could learn more about the topic, but as of now, I’d put money on at least Ashkenazim having not much more of a genetic tie to Palestine than you or I. In fact, the Jews of Palestine by and large stayed in Palestine, and are today known as ‘Palestinians.’

    Of course my real point — and the point the sources you cite seek to deny — is that modern Israel is, above all, a lie and a vicious, evil lie to boot. It’s all causing a great deal of misery in aid of absolutely nothing.

    • Replies: @Pierre Simon
  56. Mac_ says:

    Doing three finger show, self portrait. Thought it was labeled tri claw but is triad claw, symbolism/code. If search some claim ‘satanic’, which though the big con behind the symbolism is bad, isn’t about fairy stories. Won’t find actual meaning on web, though another year or few will change.

  57. https://rmx.news/article/wealthy-cohen-family-attempts-to-create-multicultural-noahs-ark-by-settling-70-refugee-families-in-small-french-town-but-residents-are-fighting-back/

    National Socialism had seen through the Janus-facedness of the Jewish system of world domination: Capitalism inevitably conjures up communism, since excessive wealth promotes and must provoke excessive social envy. It is always about selfishness and division of society. Like a shadow, one side of the worthless coin (capitalism) always carries the other (Marxism) with it.

    It is amazing how much admiration Elon Musk, for example, receives on the Internet just because he tweets some profane remarks that are completely irrelevant to world events, and spreads announcements on the net that he then fails to keep. They all want to be like him, but will never be able to be, because only a few can be rich at the expense of many. They admire his unattainability.

    But of which attitude does this testify? Of total selfishness and impersonality. If Musk would donate even a fraction of his gigantic fortune to cancer research or at least to the preservation of national interests, he would deserve reverence, but not like this! People like Musk blackmail whole national economies: “If your conditions are too expensive, I’ll go to China, there I can produce cheaper!”

    • Replies: @Good Days 're Comin'
  58. @ariadna

    Your question is antisemitic.

    • Replies: @DaveE
  59. @Good Days 're Comin'

    Hitler did not expropriate the German industrialists. He made a deal with them: “From now on, you will act exclusively in the national interest, and we will protect you from the communists from the East who want to get at you! In addition, you will get a lot of advantages from our territorial gains.”

    • Replies: @Good Days 're Comin'
  60. “Where there is no anti- Semitism, there are no Jews.” Theodor Herzl

  61. @Good Days 're Comin'

    Hitler not only overcame the seemingly insurmountable (but artificially created by the Jews) opposition between capitalism and communism, he even dissolved it, but suddenly all those who had previously eked out a dreary meaningless existence for decades, once again had a worthwhile goal in life, for which it was really and only worth fighting: the common struggle for survival and pride in one’s own kind. Suddenly, the employer recognized in the employee, even in the unemployed, the national comrade who, in truth, was genetically much closer to him than his former foreign “business partners”.

    How do I say this to the people who are brainwashed by the (((system))) , and who are genetically closest to us – just like then – but were mentally reprogrammed by the mortal enemy of our kind, thus aligned against their own kind? There one must make careful hints, until the person draws his own conclusions:

    “Was there ever any attempt or possibility to resolve these two opposites?”

    “There was, for a very short time in the last century. It was so successful that both the capitalist and communist sides of the world froze in shock and joined forces. But to mention the name of this model or concept is not only frowned upon, condemned and demonized 24/7 by all means of propaganda, it is downright ‘forbidden’ in many places. Not without reason, because the ruling system does not like it when one brings this truth to light.”

    • Agree: HdC
    • Replies: @anarchyst
  62. @Iris

    Sadly today, those painting are racist in the eyes of GlobalHomo/BLM, devoid of POC, trannys and small hats. Somehow I see a magic negro photoshopping these great masters art pieces and calling them his own by turning whites into blacks.

    Masta Artist Jonterious Jefferson; yeah dees are my paint’inz dat I done wif a computer.

    White Observer; but Masta Jefferson, they look exactly like famous paintings only the race is altered.

    Masta Artist Jonterious Jefferson; Nigga, ez you try’n ta say I can’t paint wif a computer?

    White Observer; no, I just noticed the slight difference.

    Masta Artist Jonterious Jefferson; Den keep on notice’s, cuz I got works ta do.

  63. @Colin Wright

    Speak White, man, your answer doesn’t make much sense! Something is not true simply because you feel it isn’t!

    • Replies: @Colin Wright
    , @Anonymous
  64. @Robert Dolan

    Though I should not drink beer because of its ease to ignite arthritic/gout, I’d settle for any beverage with Mel Gibson: “I’m with Mel”, a bumper sticker which has the subtlety of a sledge hammer for those who know its meaning.

    And, as for art patrons, like the public relations syndicateers who promote their interests, it’s like the Hollywood propaganda industry which promotes its product.

    A beer with Sasha Baron Cohen? Harvey Weinstein? Puke.

    • Agree: anarchyst
  65. @Pierre Simon

    Really it doesn’t make any sense trying to establish so-called Semitic features among the Jews.

    The article you referenced supports my own observations.

    The Jews as a whole are not an ethnicity. Judaism was a widespread religion two thousand years ago, with many historians claiming that about ten percent of the population in the ancient Rome were Jewish.

    A large Jewish diaspora of the ancient Greece were people completely illitarate in Hebrew. For them the Bible had to be translated into Greek so they could read it.

    The Jews of Ethiopia are typical East African Negroes.

    The Ashkenazi Jews are, in my opinion, composed of a number of European ethnicities. Some of them appear to be of Nordic or Slavic origin.

    Like this girl, Rotem Sela.

    Her mother Liora is Israeli-born and of Ashkenazi Jewish (Polish-Jewish) descent, and her father Avraham Sela is a fourth-generation Sabra (Israeli-born Jew).

    Or Yuval Scharf.

    Scharf was born in Tel Aviv, Israel, to a family of Ashkenazi Jewish (Polish-Jewish) descent.

    Where are the Semitic features?

  66. Wokechoke says:
    @Here Be Dragon

    You tried a few things there.

    There’s no way that Jews were 10% of the Roman empire’s population. I wouldn’t be surprised if Jerusalem’s Jewish population never breached 50%. Judea itself could have just as easily been no more than 50% Jewish and quite a bit less in the rural areas with a moneyed elite living off the peasants who conformed to various other religions. The Jews seem to have always been an urbanized literate elite that occasionally got turfed out by the locals.

    • Agree: Colin Wright
    • Replies: @Here Be Dragon
  67. Skeptikal says:
    @Here Be Dragon

    plastic surgery!

    Who does the best nose jobs??

    • Agree: Z-man
  68. RestiveUs says:
    @neutral

    Similar to a famous Austrian a few decades later.

  69. @Pierre Simon

    ‘Speak White, man, your answer doesn’t make much sense! Something is not true simply because you feel it isn’t!’

    I find it reassuring that this is all you can come up with. Hardly definitive — but reassuring.

  70. @Here Be Dragon

    ‘…The Jews of Ethiopia are typical East African Negroes…’

    You may be interested to know that an analysis of the culture of Ethiopia’s ‘Jews’ determined that they emerged as a distinct group about five hundred years ago.

    I always suspected that the Christianity of the Ethiopians provided the term ‘Jews’ as a means of labelling some outcast or otherwise distinct group. It’s a matter of cultural vocabulary — not of Jews emigrating from Palestine to Ethiopia at some point.

  71. @Here Be Dragon

    ‘Where are the Semitic features?’

    The irony is that the Jews of ‘Israel’ want to perceive themselves as white.

    The last thing they would accept is that they are somehow Palestinians of a particular religious persuasion.

    Happily, they’re not. Unhappily, that means they’ve no business being there at all. After all, if religion furnishes a claim, Christians and Muslims have rights to the place as well.

    • Agree: DaveE, Iris
    • Replies: @Here Be Dragon
  72. DaveE says:
    @Reverend Goody

    Your question is antisemitic.

    Well there ya’ have it. The anti-Semites are so numerous it’s not even possible to ask a question without the (((noise-machine))) going into warp-drive at 132 dB.

    You (((guys))) just can’t keep up anymore.

  73. Temites, chewing away with degeneracy, nothing new under the sun.

  74. anarchyst says:
    @Good Days 're Comin'

    The idea was the monetization of productive physical labor. Germany did not have any appreciable amount of precious metals or reserve currency, and few natural resources other than water and abundant coal reserves.
    Physical labor is the primary source of all economic value, not what some Talmudic gnome sitting on his pile of gold and silver claims it to be. A true national economy must exist to serve the people, not the other way around. No truly sovereign nation would let its citizens starve or suffer degradation and debt slavery simply to appease the lurking market worshiping demons.
    The German people was under no imperative whatsoever to starve or turn back to those supposedly idyllic days when Berlin was the cheap sex capital of Europe and women were often forced to prostitute themselves for a cup of sugar or a piece of bread.
    Hitler’s great crime (other than having lost the war) was that the National Socialist economic policies worked so well. This no doubt horrified the usurious overlords of Wall St. and the City of London, and enraged FDR , whose so called “New Deal” had been totally ineffective at dealing with the depression in the US.
    Even today, the monetization of labor is looked at negatively by business types and international shylocks, being seen as a liability (negative) rather than an asset.

    • Replies: @Francis Miville
  75. @Wokechoke

    There’s no way that Jews were 10% of the Roman empire’s population.

    You should perhaps consider that Judaism was a different religion back then. The Talmud was recorded in the 8th century. Two thousand years ago the teachings of what is now Judaism were only beginning to take shape in the diasporas of Babylon.

    The Jews of Greece, as well as the Jews of Rome of that time weren’t indoctrinated with rabbinical version of understanding the Bible. There was no such alienation back then. And after all it was an attractive religion at the time.

    And maybe it wasn’t ten percent of the population, but really even one percent is sufficient to support the idea of European origin of the Ashkenazim.

    I wouldn’t be surprised if Jerusalem’s Jewish population never breached 50%. Judea itself could have just as easily been no more than 50% Jewish and quite a bit less in the rural areas with a moneyed elite living off the peasants who conformed to various other religions.

    Not likely.

    Other religious practices should have been punishable. It is explicitly stated in the Bible that idol worship and worship of other gods are strictly forbidden in the Holy Land. Even though Jerusalem didn’t have the authority to execute people on its own, social regulations were imposed through tradition.

    Marriage, for example, should not have been possible for a non-Jew. Having a traditional burial, circumcision, etc. required being Jewish. The same as it was later necessary for the Christians, in order to be able to maintain a normal life, one had to confirm to the religious norm of the time, which was the Law.

    • Replies: @Colin Wright
    , @Wokechoke
  76. @Colin Wright

    That’s what I’m saying – most Jews are descendants of converts. Only this can explain such a variety of phenotypes.

    The irony is that the Jews of ‘Israel’ want to perceive themselves as white.

    Actually they are divided into communities, according to their place of origin, with a lot of animosity between them.

    Those who are white are white, and the others are not. The Sephardi and Mizrahi types are officially considered black.

  77. loren says:
    @Robert Dolan

    I m in el ay. I had a chance meeting with Mel and he was friendly.

  78. TikTok seems to attract 90%of all the nuts on the internet.

  79. Brewer says:
    @Pierre Simon

    In the first volume, which will shortly be published in Hebrew by the Zalman Shazar Center for Jewish History (another “Zionist” institution), considerable attention is devoted to the question of the origin of the East European Jews and to their link with the history of the Khazar kingdom……..No “nationalist” Jewish historian has ever tried to conceal the well-known fact that conversions to Judaism had a major impact on Jewish history in the ancient period and in the early Middle Ages. Although the myth of an exile from the Jewish homeland (Palestine) does exist in popular Israeli culture, it is negligible in serious Jewish historical discussions. Important groups in the Jewish national movement expressed reservations regarding this myth or denied it completely. – Israel Bartal, Avraham Harman Professor of Jewish History, member of Israel Academy of Sciences (2016), and the former Dean of the Faculty of Humanities at Hebrew University (2006–2010). Since 2006 he is the chair of the Historical Society of Israel.

    The origin of the Ashkenazi Jews, who come most recently from Europe, has largely been shrouded in mystery. But a new study suggests that at least their maternal lineage may derive largely from Europe.

    Though the finding may seem intuitive, it contradicts the notion that European Jews mostly descend from people who left Israel and the Middle East around 2,000 years ago. Instead, a substantial proportion of the population originates from local Europeans who converted to Judaism, said study co-author Martin Richards, an archaeogeneticist at the University of Huddersfield in England.
    The origin of the Ashkenazi Jews, who come most recently from Europe, has largely been shrouded in mystery. But a new study suggests that at least their maternal lineage may derive largely from Europe.

    Though the finding may seem intuitive, it contradicts the notion that European Jews mostly descend from people who left Israel and the Middle East around 2,000 years ago. Instead, a substantial proportion of the population originates from local Europeans who converted to Judaism, said study co-author Martin Richards, an archaeogeneticist at the University of Huddersfield in England.
    The origin of the Ashkenazi Jews, who come most recently from Europe, has largely been shrouded in mystery. But a new study suggests that at least their maternal lineage may derive largely from Europe.

    Though the finding may seem intuitive, it contradicts the notion that European Jews mostly descend from people who left Israel and the Middle East around 2,000 years ago. Instead, a substantial proportion of the population originates from local Europeans who converted to Judaism, said study co-author Martin Richards, an archaeogeneticist at the University of Huddersfield in England.
    https://www.livescience.com/40247-ashkenazi-jews-have-european-genes.html

    The meaning of the term “Ashkenaz” and the geographical origins of AJs and Yiddish are some of the longest standing questions in history, genetics, and linguistics. In our previous work we have identified “ancient Ashkenaz,” a region in northeastern Turkey that harbors four primeval villages whose names resemble Ashkenaz. Here, we elaborate on the meaning of this term and argue that it acquired its modern meaning only after a critical mass of Ashkenazic Jews arrived in Germany. We show that all bio-localization analyses have localized AJs to Turkey and that the non-Levantine origins of AJs are supported by ancient genome analyses. Overall, these findings are compatible with the hypothesis of an Irano-Turko-Slavic origin for AJs and a Slavic origin for Yiddish and contradict the predictions of Rhineland hypothesis that lacks historical, genetic, and linguistic support. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fgene.2017.00087/full

    • Thanks: Colin Wright
    • Replies: @Brewer
    , @thotmonger
  80. Cuckorean, LOL

  81. @Here Be Dragon

    ‘…Not likely.

    ‘Other religious practices should have been punishable. It is explicitly stated in the Bible that idol worship and worship of other gods are strictly forbidden in the Holy Land. Even though Jerusalem didn’t have the authority to execute people on its own, social regulations were imposed through tradition…’

    Here I suspect you’re wrong. Of course Jewish tradition portrays Palestine as 100% Jewish — but my impression is that this wasn’t the case.

    Herod would build a mighty fine temple in Jerusalem for the Jews — and then go elsewhere and build a mighty fine temple for the Baal worshippers. Samaritans were a living faith (still are — barely). One theory about Jesus is that he represented rural religious traditions against the urban Temple cult.

    Perhaps most plausibly, it needs to be recognized that yes, there may have been a Jewish orthodoxy recognizable to us in urban centers such as Jerusalem — but out in the sticks, more heterodox, incoherent, traditional beliefs still prevailed.

    That’s still the way it is. Want to hear what people around here have to say about Black Lives Matter? It would make the [i]Washington Post blanch.

    I very seriously doubt a single Jewish orthodoxy was ever imposed on all of Palestine. Even if the Bible implies it was.

    • Replies: @Here Be Dragon
  82. Wokechoke says:
    @Here Be Dragon

    Ashkenazi were merchants who bedded local women.

  83. Brewer says:
    @Brewer

    Apologies for the repetition. I’m off up town for a new mouse. My old one double and triple clicks according to its own dictates.

  84. Degas was never really all that sublime. His dancers were thick, horsey, ape-like and unattractive, just like the loser absinthe lady. But then again many people like ugly.

  85. “…Alan Dershowitz’s description of the painter as a ‘wild anti-semite…’”

    Well, Dershowitz is a wild sheeny kike.

  86. @Colin Wright

    My source is not the Bible, actually.

    There was a Roman historian of Jewish faith – Josephus. His book, Antiquities of the Jews, is my source.

    And according to Josephus, at that time there were several religious groups. One of them were the Zealots, who might literally kill people for breaking the religious Law. They were operating in Judea.

    Another group were the Essenes. These were an esoteric sect living in monasteries in the Judean Desert. To them belonged John the Baptist and Jesus, who later started his own sect.

    Then there were the Pharisees, who were then coming from the Babylonian cities with that new teaching, which later was recorded as the Talmud. It is with them Jesus is having arguments throughout the New Testament.

    And finally there were the Sadducees – the traditional priestly caste.

    The Samaritans were of the same faith, but had their own temple, and therefore were considered heretics.

    On top of that, there were the Romans who were living in Judea and Galilee, and had temples for the Roman gods built there as well.

    And apart from these, in the underground, there were the Gnostics.

    So yes, there was some variety back then.

    However, none of this is important if we are still talking about the Ashkenazim. Because there’s one argument that you and others who are trying to argue will have to swallow.

    The blue eyes. And the green eyes.

    There’s no other way to get blue or green eyes, except from the European blood.

    The haplogroups to which blue and green eyes are characteristic are those of low levels of melanin, and at the same time the brown eyes genes are dominant – i.e. any person with light eyes is of European origin, doesn’t matter where the person comes from.

    He or she can be born into any faith and in any country, but as long as the person has blue or green eyes color you may be certain, that this person is a racially pure European.

    A slightest admixture of Oriental, African or Turkic blood changes the eye color first. Therefore, at least a part of Ashkenazi Jews are one hundred percent white people.

    This is a biological fact.

    [MORE]

    • Replies: @Colin Wright
  87. @anarchyst

    What worked relatively well (and should be studied in much greater detail) was (((Schacht’s))) economics, not Hitler’s or any Nazi’s. (((Schacht’s))) theory, however brillant, remains based on Ponzi-like pyramidal schemes and in the case of Germany it depended heavily upon the prospect of planned Nazi invasions and occupations : the harsh truth was that Germany was impoverished not so much because of Versailles-imposed economic tutelage but because of the loss of its former neo-colonial empire in Eastern Europe and Russia, which provided most of the foodstuffs and raw materials to allow for Germany to specialize in top-notch industry. (((Schacht’s))) system was actually some form of supply-side economics as would be in vogue under R. Reagan later on : supply-side economics also worked surprising good, but in the 1930’s Germany such a result was achieved by increasing the Gini inequality index by a large margin, as happened under Reagan, resulting in the economic recovery bringing back only stagnant wages to the working classes (for longer work hours, as in the American 1980’s). The National Socialist system was necessary mostly as a form of mass psychological compensation for most people involved (it hadn’t yet engaged in too much direct physical repression beyond what was considered common practice in the US), often in the form of mass leisure activity such as sports or camping vacations in Italy that cost far less to the state than bringing up the real revenues. Like in the 1980 US it was based on mass credit, with the difference the VW car or the house you bought on credit would be delivered to you only when most of the credit was paid.

    • Replies: @Zumbuddi
  88. @Malcolm X-Lax

    I put anti-semitism in quotes or use “so-called” because there is no equivalent term to describe jewish antipathy toward non-jews

    The word is semitism and this denotes not just Jewish antipathy towards non-Jews, but also includes harmful conduct in the form of usury, loan sharking, bank laundering, blood money, finance ponzi schemes, greedy unscrupulous lawyers, cruel and capricious judges, sadistic medical researchers, destructive media Moghuls, double dealing business men, making and selling dangerous drugs, War mongering foreign policy diplomats, Back stabbing class mates and business partners… (But they were good to their mothers, gee.)

    As someone put it “antisemitism is something you catch from Jews.”

    But compare these two words on Wikipedia. Antisemitism has pages of content. Semitism has one lines regarding language! This question of Jewish conduct has been choked out intentionally. People in our society are not even supposed to imagine that there is such a thing as organized criminal Jewish networks that assist other branches of Jewish Power.

    In Pax Judaica it has become Judeo Lese Majeste to even criticize the atrocities regularly done by Apartheid Israel forces against the Palestinians.

  89. @Brewer

    Overall, these findings are compatible with the hypothesis of an Irano-Turko-Slavic origin for AJs and a Slavic origin for Yiddish and contradict the predictions of Rhineland hypothesis that lacks historical, genetic, and linguistic support.

    Another major weakness in the Rhineland hypothesis is that it depends on a “demographic miracle” to explain the population explosion of Jews in Eastern Europe, where other ethnic groups were not enjoying such surges in their populations in this rather crowded, tough neighborhood.

    Though some months ago I heard David Duke had a change of mind against the Khazar hypothesis and now believes Jews arose in great numbers there by other means.

    p.a. I like the work of this guy Mihaly Munkacsy. Some say he was commissioned to do a special work depicting the Ritual Jewish Murder of Solymosi Eszter (girl age 14), though Jews call it the Tiszaeszlar “Affair” in Hungary 1882.

    https://www.tuttartpitturasculturapoesiamusica.com/2011/12/mihaly-munkacsy-1844-1900-hungarian.html?spref=pi

    Ok, here it is. There was a better discussion about it on some other site.

    https://kinsmanredeemer.com/jewish-ritual-murder-painting

  90. @Colin Wright

    Primary examples include Leo Steinberg and Clement Greenberg — the latter made the celebrated observation that “anything truly original appears ugly at first”. Could have been a musing about his Volk.

  91. @tomo

    Another serious disappointment is time spent at the vast Musée Picasso in the Marais (Paris) — where bloat of this overly prolix artist meets its match in sheer repetitiveness.

  92. Fr. John says:

    Thank you for this article. I know now that I should respect, revere, and acknowledge the GENIUS in these men, for seeing the Deicides as the corrosive influence on ALL Western Society, as they are.

    Miles W. Mathis has written a lot on his site about this corrupt Jewish control of ALL Art and how (((they))) invented the Art as UGLY paradigm. Now I understand why.

    Jealousy of the Renoirs, Degas, and other French Geniuses, that they could never compare to.
    Jetez le Juif! – as a statement makes six million percent more sense, now.

    P.S> Jews are not Semites. Dr. Elhaik’s DNA study proved that, a decade ago.
    No semites, no ‘anti-semitism.’ The race is all a charade, and nothing more.

    • Replies: @ricpic
  93. ricpic says:
    @Fr. John

    Hey schmuck, the Jews you claim were jealous of Renoir and Degas BOUGHT their paintings, made their careers POSSIBLE.

    But you, blinded by your hatred, the oldest hatred, can’t see that simple and CENTRAL fact.

    • Disagree: Colin Wright
  94. Anonymous[124] • Disclaimer says:
    @Pierre Simon

    Something is not true simply because you feel it isn’t

    That’s certainly the Tribe’s stance toward Zündel, Duke, Irving, and anyone else daring to question the Holycost.

    Or toward those noting Israel’s many crimes.

    Or whoever notes the evil deeds of Sorosians.

    To wit: if the Nose senses that goyim are getting too close to Tribal Truths, it will sneeze and deny reality. Because on Planet Chutzpah, feelings trump(!) facts.

    Alas, Matzonians keep forgetting that money keeps folks in-check only so long. When gold no longer matters to pissed off Saxons, shit happens. And Shoahs. And expulsions.

    Did money save actual Louis 16 or fictive Marquis St. Evrémonde?

  95. @Here Be Dragon

    ‘…However, none of this is important if we are still talking about the Ashkenazim. Because there’s one argument that you and others who are trying to argue will have to swallow.

    The blue eyes. And the green eyes…

    You need to check my posts. I’m not on the side you think I’m on.

  96. I have a Renoir print of Le Pont Des Arts, and a Degas print of The Dance Class hanging in my room. Now I like them even more.

  97. @Ulf Thorsen

    Jackson Pollock also comes to mind regarding the garbage that was being passed as art

    Quite right. But the breathtakingly-arrogant, psychopathically-narcissistic and embarrassingly, laughably-talentless Jewish charlatan Mark Rothko makes Jackson Pollock look like an early and deeply-gifted explorer in the most important and priceless newly-hewn trails in human artistic endeavour.

    The link below is to the first of a series of three magnificent articles – by the same author as this one – which fully showcase and correctly define the ocean of pseudo-intellectual Jew bullshit which flowed from the cursed, sterile and worthless brush of the pretentious cretin Mark Rothko. “Anti-Semitic” ? Just a bit. Enjoy.

    https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2020/03/17/marl-rothko-abstract-expressionism-and-the-decline-of-western-art-part-1/

    • Replies: @Ulf Thorsen
  98. @bwuce wee

    it seems hideously wrong to me that one of the great artists of history is remembered as an ‘anti-semite’

    Quite so – except that Edgar Degas has not been, is not today, and, thanks to his colossal White artistic gift, never will be “remembered as an anti-Semite” – except by those who fervently wish every White person ever born to be remembered as an “anti-Semite”.

  99. @Dave Bowman

    Yes I’m aware of Rothko. Didn’t mean to ignore the point of the comment regarding him. There’s so much garbage that has been passed off as art for so long and we are awash in a sea of it and have been for at least a hundred years. It’s somewhat like comparing the difference between Beethoven or Bach to rock and roll or rap. Thanks for the link.

  100. Zumbuddi says:
    @Francis Miville

    Wasted ((((((((())))))))).

    Schacht was not Jewish, though he did join Masons.

Current Commenter
says:

Leave a Reply - Comments on articles more than two weeks old will be judged much more strictly on quality and tone


 Remember My InformationWhy?
 Email Replies to my Comment
$
Submitted comments have been licensed to The Unz Review and may be republished elsewhere at the sole discretion of the latter
Commenting Disabled While in Translation Mode
Subscribe to This Comment Thread via RSS Subscribe to All Brenton Sanderson Comments via RSS
PastClassics
Which superpower is more threatened by its “extractive elites”?
Analyzing the History of a Controversial Movement
The Surprising Elements of Talmudic Judaism
The Shaping Event of Our Modern World
How America was neoconned into World War IV
The Hidden History of the 1930s and 1940s