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overall: Height: 17.250 inches (43.815 cm) | Width: 13.625 inches (34.608 cm)
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Etching depicting a Jewish thief caught stealing from his employer, a silver smith, and bargaining with police officers to lessen his punishment. A block of Cyrillic text beneath the image records the conversation as the thief tries to reduce the number of times he should be whipped. Eventually, the Jewish man tries to bribe the officers with a pocket watch, in exchange for avoiding his punishment entirely. Old prejudices surrounding wealth and business practices form persistent stereotypes about Jews as greedy, unscrupulous, disloyal, and untrustworthy wrongdoers. They were often portrayed as hoping only to enrich themselves, often at the expense of others. These stereotypes originate from the economic and professional restrictions placed on early European Jews. They were barred from owning land, farming, joining trade guilds, and military service. The restrictions limited Jews to the occupations of retail peddling, hawking, moneylending, and pawning goods. In these roles, Jews would often be described as charging high interest, offering low compensation for goods, or working against the honest citizens dealing with them. Over time, the tendency to bargain unscrupulously for a lower price was referred to as “Jew[ing] someone down”. Consequently, Jews were perceived as morally deficient and willing to engage in unethical business practices. This stereotype was often depicted as a shabbily dressed Jew, described as an untrustworthy individual, selling cut-rate or stolen items or bargaining excessively to get the best deal. This print is one of the more than 900 items in the Katz Ehrenthal Collection of antisemitic artifacts and visual materials.
The print was donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2016 by the Katz Family.
Print of an etching in black ink on tan paper, depicting a room where five men are arranged around a central table with an explanatory Ukrainian passage below the image. Two uniformed policemen sit at the table, which is just in front and to the right of a large cabinet full of small boxes visible through a door. One man sits behind the table, holding a powder horn in one hand while squinting as he sniffs something held to his nose by the other hand. The second man, sitting to the left of the table, holds a pocket watch, his arms resting to either side of a small, open box of jewelry on the table. He looks across the table as he speaks to a bearded Jewish peddler, who is flanked by two men standing to the right of the table. The peddler has a large nose and thick eyebrows over hooded eyes. He wears a skullcap and a patched coat fastened by a knotted, cloth belt at the waist. A rope hangs from his belt as he leans forward and gestures while speaking. To the peddler’s left, and slightly behind, is a large, rotund man in a long robe-like coat with a double-headed eagle patch on his left breast. Another man stands behind them, just in front of a doorway. The Cyrillic title and explanatory paragraph are centered beneath the image. There is a pencil marking in the lower right corner. The paper has discolored edges and several tears at the bottom center. front, bottom right corner, pencil : 120
JEWS Etching of a Jewish thief bargaining with police to lessen his punishment
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.