Cartoon in Italian Tax Guide Seen by Some As Anti-semitic

A caricature of a Jews that appears in an Italian government guidebook to filling out income tax forms has been criticized by the local media and Jewish community for being anti-Semitic.

The drawing is just one of many cartoons filling the book, including exaggerated pictures of taxpayers about to commit suicide, having payments squeezed out of them by a large press, and other drawings meant to be amusing.

The picture that has raised controversy appears in a section of the guide explaining how taxpayers should treat contributions to Jewish organizations.

It shows a Jew in a skullcap and beard, with glasses perched on his long nose, hunched over a table containing a stack of money, coins and a menorah. The Jew is drooling greedily as he licks his thumb to count another stack of money in his hand.

In the section on contributions to Christian churches, the book features an irreverent cartoon of four jolly monks in knee-length habits.

The cartoon illustrating “contributions to the Jewish community,” however, “is a shocking image, even if the context is undoubtedly satirical,” wrote the Turin daily La Stampa.

“Was it a gaffe? An innocuous oversight? Or the signal of an anti-Semitism that is both more dangerous and more unconsciously indebted to the most obsolete stereotypes embroidered around the figure of the Jew?” the paper queried.

Adriana Goldstaub of the Center for Contemporary Jewish Documentation in Milan said the only possible explanation for this caricature is that other cartoons in the book, including the irreverent drawing of the four monks, are very broadly satirical.

“Still, there is no doubt that the cartoon of the Jew drooling over money surpasses any acceptable limit,” she told La Stampa.