Happy Merchant

The Happy Merchant is a common name for an image depicting 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 hateful or disparaging contexts.

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

History

The image was first created by the American cartoonist A. Wyatt Mann (a word 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 stereotypical image of a Jew from the cartoon began to spread on various internet communities, where users began to make variations of it.^[1]

The Happy Merchant meme endorses the idea that Jews secretly conspire to conquer the world.^[4]

Description

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

• A large, hook-shaped nose ("Jewish nose")
• A kippah (Jewish head garment)
• 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 appeared to have tweeted an image of the Happy Merchant on its official English-language Twitter account while referring to climate change deniers.^[7] 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.^[8]

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.^[9] The study found that usage of the Happy Merchant on /pol/ remained largely consistent (with a peak during the United States missile strike on Syria in April 2017), while use of the meme on Gab increased after the Unite the Right rally in the US in August 2017.^[10] It was also determined that /pol/ influenced the spread of the Happy Merchant to other web platforms such as Twitter and Reddit.^[11]

The same study also found that the Happy Merchant has been incorporated into other common memes on the site, including Pepe the Frog.^[12]

See also

• Triple parentheses – Antisemitic symbol