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Anti-Semites Critique The Wine Monopoly
[ WINE BROADSIDE [S.V.]] Anonymous. Der Wein Jud. Etching with German and Latin text, including Biblical verses. Trier, 1628.
Broadsheet, [24.2 x 33 cm], With 1-1.5 cm margins. Cleanly repaired tear touching 1 word in lower border, a few patched wormholes, one in printed surface. Very good.
$4,850 Rare first edition of this anti-Semitic broadsheet, a derisive attack on the perceived Jewish monopoly on the German wine industry during the Thirty Years War (1618-48). A wealthy, Janus-headed merchant rides on a large wine-barrel wagon, driven by a devil straight towards Hell's flaming maw. Identified as Jewish by the circular patch on his jersey which Jews were required by law to wear in Germany, as well as the caricatured facial features, the figure draws on the iconographic tradition of Bacchus as well as the subversive mockery of Carnival parades.
Although unsigned, the etching was most likely produced in the Rhine and Moselle region. One of the casks in the wine cellar in the upper left bears the date 1624, the year in which the archbishop of Trier renewed the commercial regulations permitting Jewish merchants to be involved in the wine trade. Based on the date inscribed on the well, the broadside was produced in 1628, after ten years of war. At that point, fields had been repeatedly plundered by Protestant and Catholic troops, and harvests were irregular at best. The failing crops forced farmers to mortgage their land; with each year they became more indebted to Jewish moneylenders. Jewish merchants also controlled a substantial portion of the wine distribution system, setting prices and further limiting the financial autonomy of vineyard producers.
The broadside's creator remains unknown; one of the wagon's barrels bears the monogram -S.V. A second, laterally transposed edition of the etching, also signed -S.V., appeared in 1629. A related unsigned 1629 broadsheet entitled "The Corn and Wine Jew" (with a somewhat different image and text) extends the critique beyond the wine industry to corn and grain merchants who were also affected by poor harvests and increased dependence on the Jewish community.
* Harms-Schilling I.170 (laterally transposed image, also signed ?S.V.,? dated 1629).
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