Do Jews Have Horns?

Despite not being in the Superbowl this weekend ("Bashanah ha'ba-ah"...maybe next year), the Redskins continue to generate the top news stories in Washington sports.  This week the big story centers on Redskins owner Daniel Snyder, who has filed a $2 million lawsuit against the owners of the Washington City Paper.  (The full complaint is here.)  The suit alleges that Snyder was libeled and defamed in a November article.

One of the suit's most provocative claims is that an image of Snyder that accompanied the article (seen here...the top one)--with scribbled horns, mustache, etc.--is antisemitic.  In a letter on Snyder's behalf, the Redskins' general counsel writes, "How would you react if you were vilified by an anti-Semitic caricature of you?"

Without debating the merits of Snyder's claim, I thought it would be interesting to discuss the strange origins of the misconception and sometimes-accusation that Jews have horns.

It all starts with Moses.  In the Torah portion Ki Tissa, which we will read in two weeks, Moses returns to the people from his encounter with God on Sinai.  "And it was as Moses came down from Mount Sinai and the two tablets of the testimony were in the hand of Moses when he came down from the mountain and Moses was not aware that the skin of his face was beaming when he spoke with Him" (Exodus 34: 29).

"The skin of his face was beaming"--in Hebrew, "karan or panav."  "Or panav," "the skin of his face," is the easy part.  But what does the verb "karan" mean?  It's a little hard to tell, since it doesn't appear in this form anywhere else in the Bible.  What does appear is the related word "keren," a common noun that means "horns" or "antlers" of rams, gazelles, oxen, etc.  Early Jewish interpreters decided that "karan" was a metaphor, that rays of light emanated from Moses' face, just like horns appear from an animal's head.

Some Greek translators of the Bible thought that "karan" meant that Moses had literal "karnayim" ("horns," plural of "keren").  Following them, the Vulgate--the major Latin translation of the Bible--rendered the phrase, "cornuta esset facies sua"--"[Moses'] face was horned."  The horns of Moses became a standard image in the Christian world. Michelangelo's statue of Moses (pictured here...the bottom one) is perhaps the most famous of many examples.

Note: the idea that Moses had horns was not originally derogatory.  In the ancient world, horns were associated with power and authority.  During the Middle Ages, the image of the Jew with horns took on a more sinister meaning.  It was used to make Jews seem like animals, or worse, like the Devil.

This week's controversy over the Dan Snyder lawsuit shows that this particular Jewish stereotype remains a highly sensitive issue in the our community.  What a remarkable impact for a 2000-year-old confusion over a single Hebrew word.

Shabbat Shalom.