The "Other" on the Internet

In “The Spectral Jew”, Steven Kruger explores the role of Jews in English literature and why they continue to appear even after their expulsion from England in 1290. In medieval English literature the Jews had a role to play in the consolidation of Christian identity and the support of Christian hegemony. This is accomplished by creating a binary relationship; there is Christianity, and there is the “other”. In the online community, on image boards particularly, there is again this use of the “other” for a similar purpose.

Image boards are a type of online forum in which anonymous discussion is held through messages posted with attached images. It’s the equivalent of an electronic bulletin board, with users carrying out discussions by “posting” new material to it. Originating in Japan, these boards tend to be heavily influenced by Japanese culture, but have taken on a variety of other cultural perspectives. Particularly unique is the development of contained subcultures, which exist only online in particular subsections of image boards.

Image boards borrow heavily from one another, and all possess the same system of subsections, which delineate where particular subjects of discussion are to be held. There has been an emerging trend in which image board subsections that focus on politics and news related subject matter have been heavily mixed with racist content and discussion. The anonymous communication system of image boards has been notorious for creating intentionally offensive content purely for the purpose of causing upset (trolling). The content is often horrifying to the target audience, but members of these communities find it amusing because they know it has no basis in true belief on the side of its creators.

However, in the politically focused subsections on these sites is a strange dialogue between people who pretend to be racist for the purpose of amusement and genuine members of white nationalist websites. The result is a bizarre discussion of political and racist subject matter that is a mixture of the fraudulent and the genuine. Though the racism extends to many different peoples, the overwhelming focus in is anti-Semitism. The discussions, whether they are broadly political or focused on particular news stories, have an anti-Semitic charge.

As in medieval English literature, Jews function here as the “other”. Their otherness is used to consolidate identity by defining what is not a part of that identity. In medieval literature there is Christianity and there is the “other”. On these image boards, there is the white race/white community and there is the “other”. Though the antisemitic content is usually posted in an off hand manner or in a context of humor, there are instances in which it can be extremely aggressive and at times even macabre.

Though the Jews most frequently function as the "other" in these communities, they are not the only race suffering horrible slander. The ethos of these image boards is adapted to contextualize current events in a manner that promotes white power by subverting nonwhite peoples. A current event that has been used in this manner is the outbreak of ebola in western Africa. Ebola has been anthropomorphized as young girl, in the style of an anime character; she has been dubbed "ebola-chan" (chan is a Japanese suffix used to describe a young person or a child and has a connotation of cuteness). People will create posts attached to pictures of her with comments directed at character of ebola-chan herself: "We love you ebola-chan, destroy them all!", "Good luck ebola-chan", "Keep up the good work!", etc. The death of nonwhites in Africa is a strengthening of the white race; the subversion of the "other" strengths the white community and the character of ebola-chan is its icon of this process. Though the context may have changed, the use of the "other" has continued.

Blood Libel in the United States

Blood libel is an accusation against Jews that they kill Christian children and use their blood for Jewish religious rituals. As we discussed medieval European blood libel in class today, I was reminded of an incident in 2011 where Sarah Palin controversially accused the media of committing blood libel against her after the shooting in Tucson, Arizona. She was not referring to anyone Jewish, but because the phrase seemed to be part of her vocabulary, I wondered if there was any history of real blood libel in the United States.

There has only been one incident in the United States recognized as an incident of blood libel. In 1928, citizens of a small New York town called Massena accused the Jewish residents of kidnapping and killing Barbara Klemens, a four-year-old girl who had gone missing the same day. It was two days before the Jewish holiday Yom Kippur, and when a Greek immigrant suggested to a state trooper that the Jews might have murdered her to use her blood in Jewish foods, the police searched Jewish-owned shops and summoned Berel Brennglass, the local rabbi, to the station. Brennglass told the police that the blood libel accusation was ridiculous, but an angry mob had already formed outside the station, and the Ku Klux Klan had also become involved in the search for Barbara.

Articles from the Messena blood libel case

Barbara showed up by herself the next day. According to her, she simply got lost and slept in the woods. However, Jewish papers around the country had picked up the story and wrote of a "near pogrom" and Jews fearing for their lives. Due to the national outcry, Mayor Gilbert Howes apologized, but he refused to resign. According to some accounts, the incident ended quickly after the apology, but others remember harassment and a boycott of Jewish businesses for weeks after the incident, and the town's Jewish population has shrunk to only 10 people today. 

The Massena incident had most of the same characteristics found in European incidents, specifically the accusation that Jews used Christian blood for religious food. This idea came from a Greek immigrant who would have had experience with European antisemitism. I found another earlier incident in Georgia that occurred 1913-1915, during which a Jewish factory supervisor named Leo Frank was convicted in a high-profile trial of killing a 13-year-old girl who worked in his factory and sentenced to death. When the governor commuted his sentence to life imprisonment, a mob broke into the work farm where Frank was, took him into the woods, and lynched him. The state of Georgia granted Frank a pardon in 1986, and some historians believe that the factory janitor was the real murderer.

The Leo Frank case seemed to have characteristics of both European antisemitism and American racism to me. First of all, lynching a Black man for allegedly raping or sexually harassing a white woman had a long history in the South, and similar allegations were made against Frank, who while not Black, was not white either. Witnesses from the factory claimed that he had made sexual advances towards the girls and boys in the factory, including Mary Phagan, the murder victim, and prosecutors portrayed him as a sexual deviant who tried to rape Mary before killing her. Frank was also a wealthy Northern industrialist, which tapped into Southern resentment that had existed since the end of the Civil War. Some of the sentiments against Frank mixed Southern racism and old stereotypes of Jews from Europe. For example, former US representative Thomas E. Watson described Frank as "a member of the Jewish aristocracy who had pursued 'Our Little Girl' to a hideous death," and wrote "If Frank's rich connections keep on lying about this case, SOMETHING BAD WILL HAPPEN." Historian Albert Lindemann summed up public sentiment of Frank in his book The Jew Accused, "- a rich, punctilious, northern Jew lording it over vulnerable and impoverished working women"(Lindemann 239). 

Leo Frank

Mary Phagan

Some people saw Frank as a rich Jew who controlled the justice system of the country, similar to European beliefs that Jews controlled the financial systems. Just as Europeans resented Jews as their debtors, the people of Georgia viewed Frank as a symbol of financial oppression not only from the Jews but from the North as well, combining antisemitism with regional prejudice. Watson even refers to a "Jewish aristocracy," indicating that this prejudice could have been applied to Jews as a group. 

While the Leo Frank case does not fit the definition of a blood libel since it doesn't involve Jewish ritual murder, it shares many similarities, such as the murder of a white Christian child and resentment of wealthy Jews who supposedly control the country's systems. 

forward.com/articles/164493/decades-old-blood-libel-case-roils-town/?p=all

northcountrypublicradio.org/news/story/19305/20120214/massena-apos-s-history-still-tied-to-1928-quot-blood-libel-quot-incident

law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/frank/frankaccount.html

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Frank