I read a couple of articles about that book and most of Fitzgerald’s other output that gently suggested that a lot of his stuff was, uh, at best loosely inspired by true events in his life and the life of older relatives and that (as a guy who also wrote a book on fictional storytelling) Fitzgerald may not have been one to let fact or plausibility get in the way of a good yarn. Well, as I think about it, there is almost necessarily a considerable dash of fabrication to the book you mention and the Great Brain books because (a) he moved events about 20 years back IIRC from his actual birth/youth in the early 1900s because he wanted it to be an Old West book; (b) the long stretches of dialogue that he reproduces verbatim clearly would not be possible to remember 50+ years down the road.
FWIW: two years ago, I saw a “NO KIKES, A-RABS, OR NIGGERS ALLOWED” sign in front of a store in Taft, California.
Wiki, FWIW:
Emphasis mine.
This is so unbelievably hard for me to believe. What kind of store was it? Why didn’t you take a picture of it on your cell phone?
Talk to some people who have been to Taft. This is the same place where when my high school volleyball team would play them, parents would shout at our team that they needed to go back where they came from, that they were niggers and wetbacks, etc. Folks from around here know all too well about Taft. I played exactly one tennis match out there in high school and a group of adult men sat across the street, shouting at us to go back where we came from. Taft has a long, long history of serious racism- I’m talking burning crosses, tar and feathering racism. Hooded Americanism by Chalmers goes into Kern County’s racism, but Taft specially. Unfortunately, there is a decently strong racist culture in Kern County, particularly in the “country” places like Taft or even Oildale. It’s not a secret either.
It was a little gas station off the main road (we were trying to get to the highway to get to the beach and made a wrong turn). It was 645 AM. We pulled up, looked up, saw the sign, gave each other a horrified looked, and got out of there as fast as we could. I’ve always said I should have taken a picture, but it was just too freaky, even if that sort of thing is more common around those parts.
Absolutely!!! Some things die hard!
What do you expect for a town that was formerly known as Moron?
Actually, Amish are Swiss Anabaptists, and having a conversation with my German friend and his father about it many years ago, the simile that they chose, and which seemed closest to their cultural and local experience was to compare them to “Huguenots”. Which, if I might say is a much more apt French translation of “Amish”. Mormons on the other hand would be much too far removed from that “Huguenot” heritage and movement to be accurately translated as such… Mormons are, well, Mormons.
I’m not certain I could have resisted the urge to stick around and do some performance art with that bad boy. Sure, some might call it violent vandalism, but I prefer to think that if the act has a clear message, the method by which it is conveyed can be art. 
A family friend was asked in the bathrooms at Walt Disney World whether he wore his kippa to cover his horns. This would have been circa 1990.
I believe Huguenots were Calvinists, which is fairly different from Anabaptists.
I think it’s obvious he didn’t believe Jews had horns. I’m 99.99% sure he was some fuckwad who thought it would be hysterical to insult your friend with an anti-Semitic slur. If I had been in your friend’s shoes, I would’ve been strongly tempted walk over and tell him to take a look, take off my kippa, and headbutt the guy. (Of course, that would just be my initial impulse. I wouldn’t approve or condone using violence in this situation … but I would understand.)
Like Argent, I find this next to impossible to believe. With the advent of cell phone cameras, this is something that would be sent around the world as attachments in emails. Or something. I have no reason to doubt you, but that is a tough one for me to buy. Although I can’t blame you one bit for getting out of there as fast as you could.
But, to be honest, this thread was also tough for me to buy. I’ve never heard that Jews had horns, so maybe that says something about my mostly white working class town. When I read the thread title, and then the OP, I thought it was ridiculous. But given the stories in the thread, I imagine that it did happen. That blows me away. Racism exists, and did when I was a kid. I heard about Jews being clannish and money-centric, for example, and some of the other Jewish stereotypes. So I was aware of the Jews as a group of people… but horns? That’s even stranger than thinking black people have tails.
Are the horns supposed to represent a connection to Satan or evil?
I usually learn at least one new thing on this board every time I read it. But this is something I find disturbing if people actually believed this. Racism is one thing, but people with horns? Sheesh. I don’t care how ignorant you are, or how unfamiliar you are with a group/race of people… to think they have horns (or tails) boggles the mind.
Question for anyone who thought this as a child or knew of this sterotype. If Jews were thought to have horns, what were Arabs thought to have underneath that head wrap?
Pretty much. Unless it’s deliberate joshing among friends, those who invoke the “Jews have horns” slur are trying to say that while Jews don’t literally have horns, they are less than human.
Apparently so. Sometimes people say the stereotype comes from Michelangelo’s Moses. I always saw it as more provincial and stupid than antisemitic, although people can certainly be all of those things at the same time. Like I said, I know at least one person who was asked her horns 10 or 15 years ago, and I don’t remember thinking that the questioner was Jew-bashing or anything - it just sounded like an honest, very stupid question from someone who had never met a Jew before and who was probably raised and surrounded by people who’d never met a Jew.
Oh good old Taft.
Seriously though, some parts of Kern County are scary bad. Hell, some high schools in Bakersfield aren’t exactly equal utopias.
But isnt this all coming from Christianity rebooting or retconning a lot of positive ancient Middle Eastern/Mediterranean symbols into evil ones?. Werent horns supposed to be signs of wisdom or power in the Middle East (the same way daemons got turned into demons ). So, maybe the horns were there originally, except they didnt have the negative overtones Christianity later associated them with?
If you read the entries I linked to, you’ll see that the Moses sculpture has horns because they’re a symbol of power in Near Eastern cultures and because of the Bible translation Michelangelo was working from. But you’ll also see that people were making art that portrayed Jews as demonic (including giving them horns) for centuries before that.
I’m not sure what you’re saying here.
Well, the Bible translation thing is the one trick always pulled when someone doesnt like what the Bible says. I’m not saying it is right or wrong in this case, I have no fucking idea, but I am ready to bet that’s also the case of most people defending one translation over another.
(Besides, it’s kind of contradictory to say the translation actually meant he had golden skin and not horns, AND at the same time recognize that horns were symbols of power in the Near East, AND that Michelangelo -who wasnt living in the Near East nor was especially familiar with its obscure and ancient lore- picked on that. You cant have the three reasonings all at once, they’re clashing into one another).
What I meant is that maybe the association between horns and Moses is an ancient one, was strictly linked to Moses and not Jews in general (he would have gotten the symbolic horns from his conversations with God), but when Christianism later decided to “clean the house” of its many pagan or pre-Christian symbols, they re-labeled a lot of those things as “evil”. Mix that with later Christian antisemitism and you end up with “Jews have horns, they’re either diabolical or sub-humans”. When the origin of the myth might actually have been a positive thing, and not at all an antisemitic trope.
Yes.
The rest of your question is, yes, too.