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When Ytzig Met Shtrul: On Schmoozing and Jewish Conspiracy in Romanian Art Humor Breaks the Code: Confirming or Dispelling Convictions But what if the artists had made clear their intentions, revealing the dialogue by simply writing it next to the image? What if the viewers had been given the opportunity to eavesdrop on the conversation? The caricaturists saw this through. Starting with the end of the 1850s, when the Romanian political caricature made its debut, the representations of the foreigners were consistently metonymic. Rather than real types, the caricaturists preferred symbolical personifications of nations. The interaction of the characters was therefore not interpersonal, but international. Based on this acknowledgment, the Jew or the Jews, when a group was configured, represented the Jewry. At the beginning of the 1890s, alongside the metonymic ethnotypes, social types, of different ethnicity, underwent an amplitude increase on the caricaturists’ sheets. ‘The readers discovered a fresh dose of humor in these self-referential—often denominated and engaged in real interethnic and intraethnic interaction—new figures. The Jewish chit-chat, with its strange topics and funny talk, capitalized on this context, popping up constantly in illustrated epigrams and gag cartoons. In 1889, the Romanian caricaturist Constantin Jiquidi had one of his drawings published in the Revista Noud”® magazine (ill. 224). Two Jews are gazing at one another in a face-to-face standstill. Close-by, another Jew is addressing the viewer, revealing, by means of an epigram, what goes on: “They'd cheat each other in no time,/ But what use, try as they may,/ Neither one will get a dime:/ They are both Jews, aren’t they?"" It seems the artist has an informer. The verses are not distant, they do not have the impersonal voiceover of a narrator, as they belong to a Jew, a double-agent that is entitled to know and to report on what his comrades are discussing. The situation is reminiscent of a central and eastern European belief that one Jew’s deceitfulness is useless in the face of another. Zwei Juden wissen, was eine Brille kostet (Two Jews both know how much a pair of glasses costs), says an old German proverb (Schwarzfeld 2004: 126). As we move to another example, we find a different Jewish rendezvous (ill. 223). Two friends are discussing spiritedly, probably debating on the newspaper that one of them is holding in his hand. An epigram gives us the chance once more to find out the topic of discussion. This time, the Jews are debating politics: “Beresh Leibu and Avram/ Got politically involved,/ With some matters that are, damn,/ Usually in a bathhouse solved!.” The drawing is a mockery of the political affairs that the Jews are apparently handling. The political involvement of the two does not consist in policy practices or acting on behalf of a given political role, but in a mare tittle-tattle of what goes on in the country. Moreover, when 20 Revista Nouä, no. 10, November 1889. 21 The translation of the epigrams from Romanian and the adaptation were realized, preserving the phonetic rhymes, by the author himself. Intentional licenses, meant to ridicule the way Jews talked, were however irreproducible. 499
