Clichés still in circulation
In fact, such anti-Semitic clichés are still in circulation today. With astonishment one read the Emeritus Professor of Art History at the University of Hamburg Wolfgang Kemp’s (born in 1946) comments a year ago in his review of Vol. 5 of Erwin Panofsky Korrespondenz 1962-1968.
His review, entitled “Briefspenden für die Ordensgemeinschaft” (“Letters Donated for the Order”, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, No. 133, Thur. June 9, 2011), once again trotted out the hollow metaphor of the “old” Jew, “Ein altersmilder König der Kunstgeschichte” (“An age-mellowed king of art history”; a headline for which the FAZ editors were responsible) and “In diesem Band ist Panofsky alt geworden” (“In this volume, Panofsky has grown old”).
Well, yes, objectively speaking, the year 1962 had ushered in the eighth decade of this Jewish scholar’s life. Subjectively speaking, however, someone who up until the very end of his life was teaching graduate seminars at the prestigious universities of Princeton and New York, who delivered series of public lectures, who embarked on research trips to Spain, Italy, Sweden, Holland, and France and who, in addition to more than a dozen articles, wrote such substantial works as Tomb Sculpture (1964) and Problems in Titian (1969), could hardly be dismissed as “old.”
Spot the Gentiles: The JVG editors’s nose parade
Defamation
Yet in the context of the other attributes used by Kemp, “old” smacks of something supremely disagreeable, “Wir sollten damals also zu Panofsky wallfahren […]. Wir fanden einen kleinen, gnomenhaften Mann mit großen Augen und großer Nase” (“Thus at that time [in 1967] we were supposed to make a pilgrimage [to Munich] in order to see Panofsky […]. We found a short, gnome-like man with large eyes and a large nose”).
There it is again, the stereotype of the Jew with the disproportionate nose and eyes, rendered doubly contemptible by the pleonasm “short, gnome-like.” In German, gnome is a synonym for dwarf (see Hauff). According to Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm‘s German Dictionary “gnomenhaft” (“gnome-like”) means “klein, ältlich, runzelig” (“stunted, oldish, and wrinkled”). Hence Kemp’s ridicule of Panofsky matches the defamatory propaganda (satirized by Umberto Eco) which depicts the Jews as a race of senile and dwarfish people with big noses.
In truth, Panofsky had luminous eyes and a perfectly normal nose.