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Shay Hazkani
MORESHET
appearing in the movie clearly belongs to a certain stereotype, to either the German camp or the enemy one (the Jews) – and this is evident at every stage from their outward appearance, which is meant as a reflection of their moral values. This is an objective that the Nazi propagandist successfully attained.65 C. Juxtaposition of the music: when the “Aryan” types are shown in the film, the feeble and discordant background music is replaced by harmonious tones that reach particularly high octaves. D. The crawling snake: the Jew takes control of the world – the historic story line of the Wandering Jew is shown in animation. According to Taubert, who wrote the screenplay, the Wandering Jew began his travels from Mesopotamia to Egypt, and from Egypt to Palestine, from where he set out to conquer all of Europe. This is represented by a crawling snake − an image reminiscent of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Gradually, what emerges on the screen is a kind of spider web that covers not only Europe but the entire western hemisphere.66 The visual illustration of these wanderings recalls the outbreak of an epidemic or the spread of cancer through the human body. E. The Jew as a rat: this is perhaps the most famous scene of the entire film. It begins by showing the Asian brown rat, with the narrator informing the audience that it first strayed out of Asia on board ships that plied the seas, eventually reaching every corner of the earth. At first the trail of the wandering rat is shown on the map – and again it is a winding one, like that of the snake. In the second part of this scene, the picture changes and we are given a close-up of the rat itself, and then out of the sewers emerge more and more revolting rats that run about madly until they fill the entire screen, threatening to break out of it and leap out onto the hapless viewer. Only at this stage does the narrator explain to those in the audience who did not figure it out for themselves that the rat is actually the Jew himself.67 Gitlis maintains that the comparison of the Jews to rats not only creates the effect of repulsion but makes the Jew appear inhuman. In that sense the traits attributed to the Jew of being “evil,” “ugly,” or “filthy” refer not only to his external appearance but to his inner being, too.68 He maintains that the effect attained in this scene is a powerful need to stop the Jew from spreading any further: “The general rhythmic synchronization makes this