Jewish nose

Jewish nose or Jew's nose is a racial stereotype that refers to a hooked nose with a convex nasal bridge and a downward turn of the tip of the nose that was singled out as a hostile caricature of Jews in mid-13th century in Europe, and has since become a defining element of the Jewish stereotype. Although it has been found that this nose type is equally as common among Jews as it is in the general population in countries where this type of nose is most prevalent, such as in the Mediterranean region, the representation of the Jewish nose has persisted in antisemitic caricatures and has also been adopted by many Jews as a part of their ethnic identity.

Around the middle of the 19th century, and lasting for more than a century, the term "Jewish nose" was commonly used in scientific literature to describe a particular shape of nose which thought to be a race-based deformity characteristic of people with Jewish ancestry (which by unwitting efforts of plastic surgeons of early 20th century started to be viewed as a pathology to be corrected).Robert Knox, an 18th century anatomist, described it as "a large, massive, club-shaped, hooked nose." Another anatomist, Jerome Webster, described it in 1914 as having "a very slight hump, somewhat broad near the tip and the tip bends down." A popular 1848 essay "Notes on Noses" written by solicitor George Jabet under pseudonym Eden Warwick offers quite a different description, and specifies that though this nose is popularly identified as Jewish, should be properly defined as a 'Syrian nose'. He writes that it is "very convex, and preserves its convexity like a bow, throughout the whole length from the eyes to the tip. It is thin and sharp." (Jabet prided himself in his lack of connection to ideas of others and condemned scientific proofs.)

In the mid-19th century, Jewish folklorist, Joseph Jacobs, wrote: "A curious experiment illustrates this importance of the nostril toward making the Jewish expression. Artists tell us that the best way to make a caricature of the Jewish nose is to write a figure 6 with a long tail (Fig. 1); now remove the turn of the twist as in Figure 2, and much of the Jewishness disappears; it vanishes entirely when we draw the continuation horizontally as in Figure 3. We may conclude, then, as regards the Jewish nose, that it is more the Jewish nostril than the nose itself which goes to form the characteristic Jewish expression."

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