A Deep Dive into the Postcard “The Price of Tolerance”

As with most antisemitic imagery, this multilingual postcard, produced sometime between 1920 and 1940, aimed to evoke a dual sense of abhorrence and fear in its viewers.

The card simultaneously depicted Jews as inferior and powerful. It signaled to viewers that Jews possessed a so-called racial inferiority and that this so-called inferiority—coupled with Jews’ purported power in global politics, finance, and media—posed an immediate threat. Everyone who handled this postcard, from the seller to the writer, to the postal workers, to the recipient and those they shared it with, consumed these messages.

The postcard shows a man wielding a whip against a helpless woman. The man wielding a whip is Jewish. The viewer knows this because he wears payot, the side curls traditionally worn by religious male Jews.

However, the imagery also taps into other racialized stereotypes about Jewishness that peaked in the 20th century. The man’s nose, lips, and ears are large. His ears draw to points. He appears misshapen and snively.

Antisemitic imagery frequently depicted Jews in this manner: elongated hooked noses and pointed ears were common visual cues. They intended to spark disgust in the viewer, harkening to characteristics of evil creatures from fairy tales, like goblins and demons.

In addition, large lips, missing teeth, and similar types of imagery are part and parcel of 19th- and 20th-century pseudoscience known as “racial science,” which increased in popularity at the turn of the 20th century and fueled many of these tropes about the Jewish body. “Scientific” publications, charts, and imagery used physical characteristics, skull measurements, and other data points to “prove” the racial superiority of whites.