The Happy Merchant is a common name for an image depicting an antisemiticcaricature of a Jewish man. The image appears commonly on websites such as 4chan or X (formerly Twitter) where it is frequently used in hateful or disparaging contexts.
History
The image was first created by cartoonist A. Wyatt Mann (a wordplay 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 stereotypical image of a Jew from the cartoon began to spread on various internet communities, where users began to make variations of it.[1]
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.[5]
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.[6]
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 Jewish people were behind climate change. Al Jazeera later deleted the tweet, explaining that it had been used in a segment covering alt-right antisemitic climate change conspiracy theories.[7]
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.[8] 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.[9] It was also determined that /pol/ influences the spread of Happy Merchant to other web platforms such as Twitter and Reddit.[10]
The same study also found that the Happy Merchant has been incorporated into other common memes on the site, including Pepe the Frog.[11]
^Ellis, Emma Grey (June 19, 2017). "The Alt-Right Found Its Favorite Cartoonist—and Almost Ruined His Life". Wired. Archived from the original on July 2, 2018. Retrieved May 28, 2019. But internet anti-Semites (or at least people fishing for a reaction) started splicing Garrison's work together with the work of Nick Bougas, aka A. Wyatt Man, a director and illustrator responsible for one of the web's most enduring anti-Semitic images.
^ Perry, Marvin., and Frederick M. Schweitzer.Antisemitic Myths: a Historical and Contemporary Anthology. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008.
^Zannettou, Savvas, Tristan Caulfield, Jeremy Blackburn, Emiliano De Cristofaro, Michael Sirivianos, Gianluca Stringhini, and Guillermo Suarez-Tangil. "On the Origins of Memes by Fringe Web Communities." arXiv.org, September 22, 2018. https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.12512.
