I never watched or read the cxartoon, so I can’t say whether anti-semitism is present or not. I can say that the argument you presented against it is weak and invalid.
Your statement was, “But Peyo couldn’t have intended to vilify Jews when he created the Smurfs. Remember, he only intended to do one episode with the Schtroumpfs/Smurfs, and Gargamel wasn’t in it.”
It isn’t Smurfs as characters that are being accused of anti-semitism, it is the Smurfs as a cartoon/comic book. The question is in the imagery of the evil nemesis. The portrait of the hook-nose Jew, arising in Middle Ages Europe and continuing in Middle-East political cartoons to this day, has so traumatized Jews and racially aware people that they are extremely sensitive to anything approaching that image. See what happens to you if you draw a picture that resembles the original Aunt Jemima.
When the Smurfs were spun off to be become lead characters Peyo had to introduce side characters to support his narrative. I suspect that to create a villain he reached into the undercurrent of European civilization to find a image that would be immediately identified as evil by his audience.
Gargamel looks to me to be a mixture of the arch-images of Jews, priests and capitalists: a typically French definition.
This said, I must say that there isn’t anything in Gargamel that says “Jew”. He’s got a hooked nose because he’s a sorcerer, and sorcerers/witches have hooked noses with pustules on it.
Anyway, congratulations to Gfactor and Valteron for a very good staff report about heroes of my childhood that I still like today (the graphic novel more than the cartoon). I’ll have more comments later.
I always assumed Gargamel’s nose assumed its present shape due to being broken in an explosion or other mishap. Note how his alchemical experiments are prone to failure and that his cat, Azrael, also has a disfiguring injury.
Wait a minute, wasn’t Disney’s Aladdin vilified for perpetuating the hook-nosed *Arab * stereotype? And weren’t the hook-nosed Indians in Disney’s Peter Pan were also cast as racially insensitive?
Are hook noses really a uniquely Jewish stereotype?
