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Visual Representations of “Self” and “Others”: Images of the Traitor and the Enemy in Slovak
An important instrument in these stereotypes and images of “the other” is their
contrast with the self-image of supposed non-others. The contrast “dirty Jew-clean
Christian” is clearly expressed by, once again, the Antisemitic Almanac: “The God
of your fathers and the inheritance of your children demand that you shake off
the yoke of disgusting, dirty, knavish Judaism ... Come therefore under our sa¬
cred banner, the banner of anti-Semitism, of clean Christianity.””* Contrasts are, of
course, widely used in images of ethnic antagonism. In a cartoon ridiculing liberal
Hungarian policy, the Slovak and the Serb appear in the role of victims, in a typical
positive image as young, handsome youths in traditional village dress, members of
the lower (peasant) classes, in sharp contrast to the overbearing, fat, shrill Magyar
and the ugly, bogus (wealthy) Jew in bourgeois dress, hiding behind the Magyar’s
back (ill. 209).
When liberals passed a bill in 1894 legalizing civil marriages, recognizing the
Jewish religion and making it possible to leave the Church, in Cernoknazník the
criticism of liberals was turned into criticism of Jews, who were seen as a hidden
force of secularization in society, overturning traditional Christian morality (ill.
210). The image of the Jew-philanderer also began to appear, in connection with
the attribute of “the foreign” as sexually more potent and, thus, threatening. This
image is found also in folklore, for example, in folksongs,?? without however con¬
taining the motif of punishment found in the cartoon.
Jews, in the end, began to appear as universal mechanisms of evil in the
country. Toward the end of the century, Cernoknaznik’s cartoons on the theme
of relations among Magyars, Jews, and Slovaks frequently expressed the opin¬
ion that Jews were the true threat to the country. In one cartoon this is clearly
depicted in an image of the Hungarian homeland, from which a Magyar, a Slo¬
vak, a Székely, and a Romanian are all fleeing before the “Khazar invasion”?
(ill. 211).
Slovak Madarén
While in cartoons of the Jew madarén the basic idea was to unmask the Jewish
(physical and mental) core in supposedly assimilated Hungarian citizens, in order
to connect (and interchange) two different images of “others,” in the mid-1880s
there appeared in Cernokñaënik a series of cartoons depicting a class of “apostates”
(odpadlici) who were of Slovak origin or were, at any rate, so considered by Slovak
“national-patriots” (mdrodovci).
22 Slovensky obräzkovj antisemitsky kalenddr na rok 1886:44. For more on this contrast see also
Krekoviéova (2005: 75).
25 For more on this point see Krekovicovä (1998).
24 A reference to the theory ofthe Khazar origin of Jews in Europe, which was and still is popular in
anti-Semitic discourse. The goal of this theory is to show that European Jews in fact have nothing in
common with the “chosen” people (see also Panczova 2010: 96-97).
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