Oldal 472 [472]
OCR
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 sacred 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 containing 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 opinion 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 Slovak, 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). 469
