Happy Merchant


The Happy Merchant is an antisemitic caricature of a Jewish man. The image appears commonly on websites such as 4chan, Reddit, Twitter and Instagram, where it is frequently used in antisemitic contexts.

History

The image was first created by the American cartoonist "A. Wyatt Mann", a pseudonym of Nick Bougas. 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 in 1992, but appeared online in February 2001.
The stereotypical image of a Jew from the cartoon began to spread on various internet communities, where users began to make variations of it.
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Description

The image is intended as a derogatory depiction, and employs many stereotypes of Jews. These include:
  • A large, hook-shaped nose
  • A kippah
  • A malevolent smile, with a slightly hunched back and hands being rubbed together, to indicate greed or scheming
  • Balding, tightly curled black hair and a tightly curled black beard

    Use

This image is a form of antisemitic propaganda, common on alt-right internet communities such as 4chan, other "chan" websites, and on other message boards.
In 2017, Al Jazeera appeared to have tweeted an image of the Happy Merchant on its official English-language Twitter account while referring to climate change deniers. Al Jazeera explained in an apology that they did not post the image in question, but replied to a user who did and then linked to the thread by accident.
A 2018 study published by Savvas Zannettou et al. focused on online antisemitism recorded that the Happy Merchant and its variations were "among the most popular memes on both 4chan's /pol/ board and Gab, two major outlets for alt-right expression. The study found that usage of the Happy Merchant on /pol/ remained largely consistent, while use of the meme on Gab increased after the Unite [the Right rally] in the US in August 2017. It was also determined that /pol/ influenced the spread of the Happy Merchant to other web platforms such as Twitter and Reddit.
The same study also found that the Happy Merchant has been incorporated into other common memes on the site, including Pepe the Frog, an originally apolitical caricature of a frog, which is often used by the alt-right for racist purposes.