I was just watching the (unbelievably excellent) movie Norma Rae (with the unbelievably sexy Sally Field) and there’s a scene where Sally’s character - a working class Southern girl - upon meeting a Jewish guy for the first time, tells him, “I thought y’all had horns!”
This isn’t the first time I’ve heard that people in the South think or thought that Jews had horns. I was even told once by a Jewish girl my own age that, when she was at a gas station once somewhere in the rural South, a little girl asked her if she had horns. I simply didn’t believe this story, and still don’t believe it.
Has anyone in America in the current day or close to it ever really believe this? Or is it one of those things that Jews and others think supposedly-ignorant, backwards Southerners think, but which is actually totally untrue?
Also, did “No Jews/Irish/Blacks/whoever or Dogs Allowed” signs ever really exist?
My grandmother told me that when she first came to the US as a teen ager in the 1910s that there were No Jews signs on apartments for rent. She may have been repeating an urban legend though.
I suppose it’s something might have been told to and believed by a child - like the anti-semitic equivalent of Santa Claus or the tooth fairy. An adult would know that it wasn’t literally true even if they still believed various other stereotypes.
The answer to the last question is definitely yes.
The answer to first question is that I can’t say none do, but it’s not common, nor have I ever heard that they were commonly accused of it. It’s nothing I’ve ever heard alleged against southerners, and the belief itself is nothing I ever heard seriously expressed, even among my most redneck, racist, antisemitic relatives.
Yeah… Argent Towers, adults told little kids all sorts of stupid crap, like dragonflies sew your lips shut and swallowing a watermelon seed will cause a watermelon to grow in your belly, and lots of kids believed them. Why would it be so remarkable that a kid would believe something a racist told them too?
I grew up in rural NC. I went to school (K-12) with people who believed it and most them heard it from their parents/grandparents. The same parents also told their kids not to touch me because the black would rub off on them and they’d be turned into niggers. They taught them that all black people stink and that they should sniff loudly and yell, " I smell nigger!" whenever I walked by. I constantly surprised people in high school by not smelling bad. That stupid thing about the horns even came up when we were 17-18 years old. People who were leaving for college in a year or so still thought it was true. The story was that most people couldn’t see the horns because the Jews had put " The Evil Eye" on them. There was also some ridiculous crap about a ritual you could do to remove the spell and see the horns.
I suppose it’s a sign of progress that there are people now who can’t believe anyone ever took this bullshit seriously. Unfortunately, they really did and in some places they still do.
Here’s another quick story of a weird encounter. I was about fourteen and on Explorer’s group field trip to the hospital. One of my doctors was with us. The subject of my cancer came up somehow. One of the other kids asked me where I had gotten hit, “'cause his gramma got hit in the boob with an umbrella, and it gave her that boob cancer.” I’m laughing so hard right now. I hadn’t thought of that in years! I was the youngest in the group so he had to 15-16.
I worked with a guy from West Virginia who was taught that Jews had horns and had curly hair to cover the horns. He was 16 when he found out it wasn’t true. He grew up in the 1950s and early 1960s.
I knew a Jewish teen who had to explain to some of her friends in Texas that, yes, she was Jewish and no she didn’t have horns. Said incident occurred during the late 1970s or perhaps the early 1980s. In the version she was told, yarmulkes covered up the horns.
Apparently, there was at one time an artistic tradtion of portraying Moses with horns. (IIRC, it was inspired by a mistranslation in some edition of the Bible or another.) Is there a connection between that tradition and the myth, perhaps?
Dunno know about the past 50 years, but in WWII my dad told me the guys in his platoon didn’t believe he was really Jewish because he clearly was hornless.
… those aren’t horns… they’re supposed to represent divine inspiration. If you look closely at that picture, you’ll see those two “horns” have parallel grooves, it’s intended to look like beams of light. Think of it as the pre-Edison version of the “lightbulb going on” cartoon.
It’s relatively common to have images of saints wear between two and four “lightbeams” rather than a circle of metal. I have a tiny Nativity in which St Joseph, Mary and the Child come with those (the parents get 3 beams, the kid 4); so do the Three Kings in Mom’s Nativity (3 beams).
Wow. I never heard that in my small town southern growing up. In fact, there were (gasp!) Jews in the South pretty much throughout American history. There are many a southern town where (stereotype warning) a Jewish family owned the local department store/furniture store/cotton gin etc. I’m not saying that these towns were oases of religious tolerance, but they weren’t so unfamiliar with Jews that they thought they had horns.
My mother was a secretary for the Navy in WWII (no, not Secretary *of *the Navy, that’s different). She worked in Miami, and said one of her coworkers wouldn’t believe she was Jewish because she didn’t have horns. “We get them removed at birth nowadays,” Mom told her.
Hey intolerance isn’t exclusive to the south, and the south isn’t universally ignorant it intolerant. I grew up in Los Angeles. I graduated high school in 2000. I remember having a long conversation my junior year with a girl that, after two years of knowing me personally finally worked up the courage to ask me about the horns thing. Her grandpa had told her all about “the Jews” when she was little but I was the first one she ever knew personally.
Yeah; prejudice is an equal opportunity concept, ironically.
The thing is, the admittedly few Jews I knew growing up had been in the south for generations, and had southern accents, etc. Besides, Southerners and Jews have some things in common (stereotype warning), fatty foods and high maintenance women.
Yeah, I don’t think that belief was confined to the South. I didn’t hear it until I went to college–and it had been transferred to another religious group, so I heard it about both–but there were students who had, at least, heard the story told to them.
I’m from small town Minnesota and started college in 1979 at a college with a fairly large Jewish population. A Jewish girl from down the hall asked me if I thought that all Jews had horns. I stared at her like she was crazy. I had never heard of such a thing, and couldn’t believe anyone would be stupid enough to believe it would be true.
