Offset lithograph poster in black ink on light brown paper depicting a caricature of a man’s head on the body of a black feathered eagle with the top of its wings nailed to a stone wall. He has a bald crown, black hair, and short, curled black sidelocks in front of small, furry ears with pointed tips. His forehead is furrowed, there are hairy moles on his face, and he has stereotypical Jewish features: thick, bushy eyebrows, a hooked, beak-like nose, and fleshy lips. Tears and saliva are dripping from the corners of his closed, heavily lidded eyes and mouth. His neck is bent, his head hanging to the right with his face in quarter profile. His wings are partially folded and his talons are loosely raised up in front of a short, feathered tail. There is French text across the top and bottom. It is adhered to a slightly larger linen backing.
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The Katz Ehrenthal Collection is a collection of more than 900 objects depicting Jews and antisemitic and anti-Jewish propaganda from the medieval to the modern era, in Europe, Russia, and the United States. The collection was amassed by Peter Ehrenthal, a Romanian Holocaust survivor, to document the pervasive history of anti-Jewish hatred in Western art, politics and popular culture. It includes crude folk art as well as pieces created by Europe's finest craftsmen, prints and periodical illustrations, posters, paintings, decorative art, and toys and everyday household items decorated with depictions of stereotypical Jewish figures.
The poster was donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2016 by the Katz Family.
overall: Height: 27.375 inches (69.533 cm) | Width: 20.500 inches (52.07 cm)
Poster with a caricature of Philipp de Rothschild with his weeping face on the body of an eagle nailed to a wall. It was part of Musee des Horreurs, an antisemitic series featuring 52 vicious caricatures of well known Jews and others involved in the Dreyfus Affair. It was produced in 1899-1900 by an artist under the pseudonym V. Lenepveu. The Rothschild family was not involved in the scandal, but their prominence made them targets of the anti-Jewish fanaticism engulfing France. The Dreyfus Affair was a political scandal revolving around antisemitism that inflamed France in the late 19th century. Alfred Dreyfus was an army captain found guilty of treason in 1894 for selling French military secrets to the Germans. Antisemitic publications used Dreyfus as a symbol of the disloyalty of all French Jews. In 1896, another man was tried and acquitted of the same crime. Emile Zola, a prominent author and journalist, wrote a letter to protest the verdict, titled"J'Accuse" in which he accused the French Army of covering up its unjust conviction of Dreyfus. Zola was charged with libel and the Dreyfus Affair grew into a national political crisis. An Army intelligence officer was found to have forged the document proving Dreyfus's guilt. But in a second trial at Rennes, despite the confession of the traitor, Esterhazy, the Army again convicted Dreyfus. On September 9, he was sentenced to prison for another ten years. The verdict was met with outrage around the world, and there were threats to boycott the World's Fair in Paris in 1900. Dreyfus was offered a pardon by the president to end the crisis, which he accepted September 19. The poster is one of the more than 900 items in the Katz Ehrenthal Collection of antisemitic artifacts and visual materials.
Caricature of Philipp de Rothschild as a weeping eagle nailed to a wall