Wax plaque of a Jewish family waiting for a boy to pass swallowed money

Hand-carved wax mold to cast an image of a Jewish family watching a young boy sitting on a chamber pot situated on the kitchen table. The characters in the image all have several stereotypical physical features commonly attributed to Jews: thick eyebrows, large noses, hooded eyes, fleshy lips and bowed legs. In the scene, a young Jewish boy has eaten a ducat (a coin) and his family is feverishly trying to retrieve it by spoon-feeding him a substance to help him excrete the coin. The family appears to be more concerned about retrieving the coin than for the boy’s comfort. The image is from the satirical, antisemitic booklet, “Die Schabbes Lamp vunn pollische Messing: mit ächt koschere Schimen” [The Schabbat lamp of polished brass: with authentic kosher lampshades] published in 1835. However, the caption on the plaque names the boy “Moishele,” while in the original book he is called “Lämmle.” The book was written under the Jewish sounding pen name of Itzig Feitel Stern, which was likely the nom de plume of multiple people over a period of several years. It is thought that Heinrich Holzschuher and Johann Friedrich Sigmund von Holzschuher both used this same pen name, possibly along with other writers. The books are printed in a right to left format, mimicking the orientation of Hebrew writing. They contain antisemitic pictures, poems, and stories written in a pseudo-German language, which the author used to ridicule and mock Jewish speech. Several antisemitic works of this type were written under this pen name. The model is one of the more than 900 items in the Katz Ehrenthal Collection of antisemitic artifacts and visual materials.