The purported “Jewish nose” has been a point of fascination from the Middle Ages onward. The nose – hawklike and hooked, or hoglike and broad – is the signal feature of the “Jewish face” in Christian mythology, so ubiquitous in imagery as to be instantly recognizable. For example, when Matthew Paris, influential polymath monk of St. Albans, tells his reader that the conniving and treacherous Robert the Clerk has faciem Judaicam , the “face of a Jew,” he provides no further description of this face. He just assumes that we all know what he means . As Raymond Barglow reminds us, “the pathway from visual experience to belief is commonly an erroneous one: we are deceived, waylaid, captured by what we see. … Seeing is always ‘seeing as.’” This article asks: When we see the “Jewish nose,” who are we “seeing as”? The dehumanizing, animalizing medieval notion of “the Jewish nose” persists into the present, but how does it function? What is embedded within ideas about hawk-nosed or pig-snouted Jews? What ideas and ideologies travel with these varieties of a simple facial feature? Further, what ideologies of beauty are embedded in modern scholarship on images of Jews in medieval art that often relies on terms like “stereotype” and “caricature” to describe physiognomic tropes they deem “demonizing” and “grotesque,” even when what an image contains is nothing more dramatic than a hooked nose? Here, I consider both medieval imagery and modern discussions thereof that carry forward medieval prejudice, even when attempting to fight against it.
Asa Simon Mittman (Sat,) studied this question.