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More than "Sheer Coincidence": The Antisemitism of Disney's Animated Villains

This is a paper I wrote for a Jewish studies class. It was inspired by a tumblr post, so I thought it was fitting to share here. Most will be under a "read more" link, as it is about 25 pages including the bibliography. Please feel free to ask questions, and enjoy.

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On June 19, 2022, Tumblr user fantastic-nonsense published a post about Disney’s 2010 animated film Tangled, and the film’s villain, Mother Gothel, which starts, “*sigh* the ‘Mother Gothel is an anti-semitic caricature’ discourse is going around again.” They argue that, because Mother Gothel’s appearance was based on two non-Jewish women, Gothel’s voice actress Donna Murphy and singer Cher, any claim that Mother Gothel’s large nose or dark, curly hair resemble antisemitic caricatures was simply projection. The goal of Gothel’s design was to make her as visually distinct as possible from Rapunzel, not to make her “look Jewish.” They continue with a question:

“[I]f Gothel was blonde with a ‘normal’ nose…but literally nothing else about her changed, would you be saying that she’s an anti-semitic stereotype?...All I’m saying is that Gothel (and thus Tangled) is unreasonably linked to those tropes…There is a very distinct difference between being actively anti-semitic and Tangled, which has anti-semitism being projected on it because its villain bears passing similarity to anti-semitic caricatures out of sheer coincidence.”

The user has since deleted the original post, but a reblog remains further arguing their point. In an attempt to defend the film from criticisms of antisemitism, fantastic-nonsense stumbles upon a fundamental conundrum of analyzing villainous characters such as Mother Gothel: Is it possible to create a villainous character that avoids all potential antisemitic pitfalls? And, despite fantastic-nonsense insisting it’s a “sheer coincidence,” why do so many Disney villains have stereotypically Jewish traits?

Unmasking Antisemitism: The Origins of Disney’s Jewish Villains

Jewish people have long been viewed as villainous in various gentile European cultures, a view brought to the United States through colonization. Accusations of blood libel go back to the 12th century and have been noted from eastern Europe to England. Famous authors and playwrights such as Charles Dickens and William Shakespeare indicate a centuries-long trend of villainous characters defined by their Jewishness, and infamous business magnate Henry Ford published accusations of predatory banking practices and fervent Christian hatred in his pamphlet series The International Jew in the early 1920s, before Disney was a studio. With centuries of association between Jews and villainy as a backdrop, there is little surprise that Disney turned to antisemitic tropes in the construction of one of its earliest villains.

The 1933 short Three Little Pigs is remembered as one of the most successful shorts from Disney’s Silly Symphonies series. Not only was the film the source of the song “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” which became an anthem to “Depression-weary audiences,” but the film was a milestone in character development, versus the characters existing only to serve gags. Walt Disney was so proud of the finished film, he said, “At last we have achieved true personality in a whole picture.” Part of developing the characters’ personalities was creating a menacing villain, an archetype Disney would come to be known for, and the Big Bad Wolf is one of its earliest successes on this front. The film follows the typical narrative of the fairy tale, with a trio of pigs each building their own house, one of straw, one of sticks, and one of brick. We see the Wolf approach them as the first two are frolicking after constructing their flimsy houses, drool pouring from his mouth filled with sharp teeth. While the Wolf is able to simply blow away the straw house, the house of sticks proves to be a bit stronger, and he resorts to trickery, pretending to give up and leave the pigs alone before returning dressed as a sheep and asking for shelter. The pigs sees through this disguise, refuse him entry, and his anger gives him the strength to blow down the house of sticks. When the pigs flee to the house of bricks, the Wolf returns with a new disguise: a Jewish peddler.

Wearing a large brown overcoat, green-tinted glasses and a skullcap, and adorned with a fake beard and long nose, the Wolf knocks on the door of the brick house with a rack of brushes around his neck, proclaiming in a Yiddish accent, “I’m the Fuller Brush man, I’m giving a free sample!” The pig from the brick house, quickly seeing through his tricks, proceeds to hit him with said free sample before pulling a welcome mat from beneath the Wolf’s feet, causing him to land on his face and his false nose to bend 90° towards the sky. The Wolf rips off the disguise in anger, and the short continues.

The association of Jews and the peddling profession arose during the 19th century, as peddling helped facilitate the mass migration of Jews across the globe during that time. Peddling was more accessible to poor immigrant Jews than owning a store, and the freedom of self-employment allowed them to maintain their own schedule and keep Shabbat, unlike factory jobs. As most peddlers did not maintain the job for more than a decade, nor pass it down to their sons, peddlers represented a lack of assimilation, perpetually tying the occupation to otherness, which facilitates the villainization of peddlers through their Jewishness.

The stock character of the “Jew peddler” quickly entered popular culture, giving all manner of creatives, from commentators to novelists, a new punching bag in their library of cultural symbols. As Hasia Diner describes the figure in her book Roads Taken: The Great Jewish Migrations to the New World and the Peddlers Who Forged the Way, “Sinister and shadowy, exotic or absurd, he made a good subject for mockery, with his odd accent, his clothing, his lack of a fixed abode, and his distinctive bodily features: in this milieu, a prominent hooked nose was a sure sign of Jewishness, a long beard a likely trait as well.”

Director Burt Gillett created a costume for the Disney short’s villain which ticked off every box in the “Jew peddler” playbook. A symbol of “trickery, otherness, and greed,” and pervasively believed to be dishonest, the peddler costume serves not only as a disguise for the Wolf, but to highlight those traits in his villainous hunt of the pigs. Audiences would have had a pre-existing cultural understanding of the Jewish peddler as a costume. Throughout the 19th and into the early parts of the 20th century in the United States, local newspapers reporting on masquerade parties described “Jew peddler” costumes among princesses and pirates. With his two costumes being a play on the phrase “a wolf in sheep’s clothing” and the known manipulative figure of the Jewish peddler, the characterization of the Wolf is clear: He is so manipulative, even his choice in costumes shows off his deviousness.

There is a more intelligent side to the gag of the Jewish peddler costume; not only would the Wolf seem less threatening dressed as a Jewish peddler, but the pigs would assume he kept kosher and didn’t eat pork, easing their worries. Still, the use of antisemitic stereotypes to emphasize the Wolf’s dangerous and manipulative nature has been recognized as offensive, including by the company itself. A 1948 re-release of the short edited the animation to remove the antisemitic costume. The Wolf still dresses as a peddler, but without any Jewish signifiers, maintaining the overcoat but swapping the skullcap and green-tinted glasses for a bowler hat and clear ones, and forgoing the nose and beard altogether. Initially, the original audio was maintained, as the new animation of the wolf still matches the original dialogue, but a new version of the Wolf’s audio was recorded and replaced the Yiddish accent at a later date. Instead of hawking his wares in a Yiddish accent, the Wolf puts on a low, unintelligent-sounding voice and tells the pigs, “I’m working my way through college!” This is the version of the short that is available on Disney+, where no mention is made of the short’s history or the edits that were made to it. Although the Wolf does not have the same notoriety as many of Disney’s villains from feature-length films, he didn’t fall into complete obscurity, making a cameo in Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) alongside the pigs, and appearing in the 2002 direct-to-video film Mickey’s House of Villains. 90 years after his first appearance, the Wolf’s legacy resonates in the designs and characterization, which Walt so highly praised, of the villains who came after him.

Hooked-Nosed Hags and Mincing Manipulators: Jewish-coding in 20th Century Disney Films

Disney took its first leap into feature-length animation in 1937 with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Released only four years after Three Little Pigs, the film displayed a marked improvement in many areas of animation, particularly character design. While previous Disney shorts had largely starred animals, Snow White featured an entirely human or human-like cast. Unable to differentiate between hero and villain by species, designers needed other visual signifiers to indicate a character’s villainy or heroism to the audience. As former Disney character animator Andreas Deja wrote on his blog, where he frequently catalogs stories from Disney’s older films, “[Walt] Disney insisted on strong contrast between good versus evil, and that needed to be clear in the characters' design as well as their acting.”

In 1749, German philosopher and playwright Gotthold Ephraim Lessing wrote in his play Die Juden (The Jews), “And is it not true, their countenance has something that prejudices one against them? It seems to me as if one could read in their eyes their maliciousness, unscrupulousness, selfishness of character, their deceit and perjury.” For centuries, antisemites have posited that Jews not only are evil, but look evil based on their natural physical appearances. This idea quickly made its way into Disney’s understanding of character design. Although Three Little Pigs’ Wolf is the only villain who takes on an explicitly Jewish appearance, Disney has designed its villains with stereotypically Jewish traits as a visual indicator since its first feature film. This notion of visual signifiers of internal traits is derived from race science, a concept the American government had latched onto with the Dillingham Commission, a Congressional committee analyzing immigration in the United States at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. In the Commission’s Statistical Review of Immigration, published in 1911, the “Hebrew” people were the third-lowest ranked group in the “Caucasian race.” As Jews were considered one of the least desirable groups of white people, common traits amongst them were quickly associated with villains, regardless of their background.

Snow White’s Queen Grimhilde does not have many stereotypically Jewish traits upon first glance. This is essential to the story, as the Queen was previously the “fairest one of all” until her title was taken by Snow White, whose beauty outshone hers even while dressed in rags. Because she is also beautiful, she could not be designed with ugly, villainous, “Jewish” traits. However, when she finds out the Huntsman failed to kill Snow White, she adopts a disguise in order to poison her without being recognized, much like the Wolf in The Three Little Pigs. Her disguise transforms her from a beautiful, regal woman into a decrepit witch, with a massive, hooked nose and deep eye bags, both common traits in antisemitic caricatures, marking her new form as Jewish. Her transformation marks her change into a more active villain role, pursuing Snow White herself instead of sending a henchman to find her. By the end of the film, the Queen’s internal ugliness, through her vanity and envy of Snow White, has physically manifested, showing that she was never really as beautiful as the kind-hearted and button-nosed Snow White.

The contrast between the Aryan features of Disney’s leading ladies and the ugly and Jewish-coded traits of their female villains continued for decades. Cinderella’s stepmother, Lady Tremaine, and her daughters are both drawn with large noses compared to Cinderella, who has a button nose similar to Snow White. Lady Tremaine is given a hooked nose and heavy-lidded eyes, just as Queen Grimhilde had in her disguise. Her less exaggerated appearance befits her more realistic villainy, portraying personal greed and child abuse rather than a magically enhanced poisoning plot. The stepsisters, on the other hand, are given bulbous noses, similarly to Snow White’s seven dwarves, largely indicating ugliness rather than Jewishness. In both cases, their designs are “more reminiscent of 101 Dalmatians male villains Horace and Jasper, rather than typical Disney female features.” All three are given features reminiscent of Disney’s male character designs, compared to Cinderella’s “proper” femininity, which, at this point in Disney’s history, was always white.

Maleficent and Aurora’s designs in Sleeping Beauty function similarly. Maleficent’s pointed nose, prominent horns, which Jews are often accused of having, and green skin make her appear inhuman compared to Aurora’s upturned nose and blonde hair. Maleficent’s appearance is also juxtaposed against the film’s good fairies, Flora, Fauna, and Merryweather, who look entirely human aside from their wings. Sleeping Beauty also furthers the concept of appearance reflecting personality, giving the cruel Maleficent an unnatural skin tone, and displaying her most powerful form, a dragon, at the climax of the film. It is important to note that both Maleficent and Queen Grimhilde use magic and potions in their villainy, while their respective princesses do not use magic on their own. Judaism and witchcraft have long been associated in European Christian concepts of witches, and these films both bring that trope into a new world of storytelling.

While Disney’s early female villains were largely coded as Jewish by their designs and the juxtaposition between them and Disney’s respective female lead’s designs meeting Euro-centric standards of beauty, male villains’ coding comes at the nexus of homosexual and Jewish male stereotypes, alongside their designs. In her description of the coverage of Leopold and Loeb’s 1924 murder trial, Sarah Imhoff wrote that “the press coverage did not often explicitly cite their Jewishness because it did not need to. Journalists and commentators were able to convey Jewishness without stating it directly. Certain characteristics—intellectual, physically weak, not fit for manual labor, perverted, and prone to illness and psychiatric imbalance—painted a gendered portrait of a Jewish man even without reference to race or religion.” Many of Disney’s male villains fit such descriptors, indicating their Jewishness to the audience without the religion ever being mentioned. Additionally, these descriptors–particularly “perverted,” which at the time was a euphemism for both religious and sexual deviance-- are often applied to gay men, while homosexuality was treated as its own psychological issue. Both queer and Jewish men are seen as feminine, not meeting the white Christian ideal of a strong, straight, and stable man. With such overlap, queercoding of male characters often coincides, intentionally or not, with Jewish-coding.

The effeminate, mentally unstable villain can be found as early as the 1950s with Peter Pan’s Captain Hook, a willowy man in a plumed hat prone to comedically anxious outbursts, with black, wavy hair and a large nose. Captain Hook is voiced with a British accent, as many of Disney’s male villains do (including Jafar, Scar, and Governor Ratcliffe, whose fitting British accent stands out against John Smith’s strangely American one), which is not typical of Jewish characters in American media. However, “unlike the good characters of the film, who are endowed with physical features more generally identified with Northern European characters, the Captain Hook character would appear to be more Southern or Eastern European…he is the villain, and the writers and artists chose to give him physical characteristics that somehow reflect his villainy.” The author does not mention Jews in his analysis, but the majority of American Jews are descended from Eastern European Jews, and the comparison is bolstered by the non-visible Jewish stereotypes Hook fits as well. Again, Hook’s features are contrasted against Peter Pan and Wendy’s straight, brown hair and upturned noses, matching his implicitly Jewish characteristics with an implicitly Jewish appearance.

The Disney Renaissance, a period from 1989-1999 which saw massive success for Disney and a notable Broadway influence on the films, also saw a barrage of male villains with notable Jewish-coded traits. While Aladdin’s Princess Jasmine has a slightly larger nose compared to her white princess predecessors, Jafar still has much more prominent and hooked nose and heavy-lidded eyes, traits even more prominent in early iterations of his design. Jafar fits many of the descriptors applied to Leopold and Loeb in lieu of calling them Jewish; he is a manipulative magician with a wiry frame, contrasted by Aladdin’s larger build and ability to run and swing around Agrabah to avoid guards, and becomes mad with power after wishing to become a genie himself. Appearance-wise, in addition to the Jewish-coded traits mentioned above, Jafar’s dress-like robe and elaborate headpiece give him a feminine appearance next to Aladdin’s pants and vest, and bare muscular chest, affirming his masculinity. Imhoff notes that, because of Jews’ intelligence and lack of physical prowess, the prevailing stereotype was that “Jews tended not to commit courageous crimes, but rather chose crimes where they did not have to confront their victims directly.” She extrapolates, “Jewish men’s crimes were crimes of intellect, not passion; manipulation, not aggression; outsmarting, not overpowering.” Jafar displays these methods of criminality multiple times, tricking Aladdin into fetching the genie’s lamp from the Cave of Wonders, lying to Jasmine about Aladdin being sentenced to death, and hypnotizing the Sultan with his staff to steal an heirloom jewel. Although Aladdin uses his wits to defeat Jafar by trapping him in the magic lamp, his physical strength both make him more attractive and capable in Jasmine’s eyes than Jafar, who pursues her for political gain.

The Lion King’s Scar is a more prominent example of the juxtaposition between the strong but simple hero and the weak but wily villain. After feminizing himself, proclaiming “I shall practice my curtsy,” when his brother King Mufasa tells him that Simba, Mufasa’s son, will one day be Scar’s king, Scar says, “Well, as far as brains go, I got the lion’s share. But when it comes to brute strength, I’m afraid I’m at the shallow end of the gene pool.” While the heroic Mufasa, and later Simba, are muscular and broad, Scar is drawn almost emaciated, his hips swinging with each step in an effeminate manner. Like Jafar, Scar rarely involves himself directly in his crimes, sending his hyena henchmen to do his dirty work while he devises a plan. While animated lions lack the physical traits associated with Jews, Scar’s strangely dark mane contrasts with Mufasa and Simba’s reddish fur, and the dark circles of fur around his eyes resemble both heavy eyelids and eyeshadow, serving as both a feminizing and Jewish trait. When Scar and Simba fight at the climax of the film, Scar resorts to gaslighting, trying to convince Simba that he is responsible for his father’s death, and tricks, throwing burning ashes into Simba’s face, rather than beating him with brute strength.

Pocahontas’ Governor Ratcliffe fits oddly into the field of simultaneously feminized and Jewish-coded villains. His purple outfit, braided hair, and posh mannerisms make him by far one of Disney’s most effeminate villains, and he is one of the most explicitly money-hungry villains in Disney’s film library, singing lyrics such as “It's mine, mine, mine/For the taking/It's mine, boys/Mine me that gold!” blatantly assigning Ratcliffe the stereotype of the greedy Jew. Yet the historical setting of the film, 17th century Virginia, makes it highly unlikely that Ratcliffe could possibly be Jewish. Still, his overwhelming greed and feminine mannerisms insert Jewish stereotypes into even the most unlikely settings, highlighting the pervasiveness of the stereotypes beyond direct acknowledgements of Judaism.

Although Hercules’ Hades is less feminized than his 90s predecessors, his coding is bolstered by frequent use of Yiddish words in his dialogue, describing Hercules as “the one schlemiel who can louse” up his plan, calling him “The yutz with the horse!” when directing the titans to attack him, and convincing Hercules to fall for his scheme by telling him, “We dance, we kiss, we schmooze, we carry on, we go home happy.” Portrayed as a fast-talking swindler, calling back to the fear of peddlers Disney utilized in Three Little Pigs, Hades follows the trend of having a hooked nose and deep-set eyes, as well as being significantly weaker than Hercules, who is characterized throughout the film by his immense strength and lack of forethought. While Hades nearly succeeds in getting Hercules to kill himself by diving into the River Styx to save Megara, once Hercules achieves godhood and becomes immortal, all it takes is a single punch to knock Hades himself into the river and defeat him.

Both Hades and Jafar also play upon fears of not just homosexuality but sexually deviant heterosexuality in their respective films. While Jewish men were characterized as feminine due to circumcision in the late 19th century, “Jews were not thought to endanger society by their supposed homosexuality but rather by their evil heterosexual drives. […] But while family life was intact among the Jews themselves, it was, so racists asserted, directed against the family life of others.’” While neither Jafar nor Hades express genuine attraction toward their female leads, each interferes with their predestined heterosexual relationship with the male lead. When Jafar fails to retrieve the lamp from Aladdin before he uses it, foiling his plan to become Sultan, his parrot henchman Iago suggests that Jafar marry Jasmine as a means of becoming Sultan instead. Jafar proceeds to brainwash the Sultan into pronouncing him Jasmine’s fiance while she builds a relationship with Aladdin, and nearly succeeds in forcing her to marry him, before Aladdin interrupts his plan. Hades gained leverage over Megara after she made a deal with him for a man who left her, and has her woo Hercules only to sacrifice her, using Hercules’ emotions to manipulate him into nearly killing himself trying to save Megara. In both cases, genuine heterosexuality triumphs over “evil heterosexual drives.” Even with Aladdin’s Arabian-inspired setting and multiple mentions of Allah by the Sultan, conceptions of pure heterosexual love shaped by Christian values save the heroines from deviant, and implicitly Jewish, heterosexuality.

Across decades, genders, and settings, Disney has not only continued to rely on antisemitic stereotypes to communicate villainy through character design, but has developed its villains to incorporate increasingly specific stereotypes that have been applied to Jews for decades, if not centuries.

(Not Her) Mother Knows Best: Mother Gothel and the Blood Libel of Tangled

The 2000s was a time of experimentation for Disney Animation. As the success of the Renaissance began to fade, Disney turned to genres and technologies it hadn’t worked with before. The early 2000s saw an onslaught of films with unprecedented science fiction elements, such as Atlantis: The Lost Empire, Treasure Planet, Lilo and Stitch and Meet the Robinsons. Beginning with Dinosaur in 2000, Disney slowly made its way into the field of CGI animation, developing its technology at a rapid pace across films like Chicken Little, Bolt, and the aforementioned Meet the Robinsons. After this decade of experimentation, Disney released a film which combined the musical and princess elements of the Renaissance with the CGI it had been developing, releasing its first CGI princess film: Tangled. A reimagining of the fairytale of Rapunzel, the film has been a topic of discussion since its release for both its villain, Mother Gothel, who embodies a wide variety of traits, both in her design and characterization, that have been negatively associated with Jews; and its story, which bears striking similarity to a long-standing antisemitic canard: blood libel.

Beginning with accusations of using blood in religious rituals in the 12th century, in the 13th century, an additional accusation further vilify Jews: “Jews killed Christian children to obtain their blood, turning ‘ritual murder’ into ‘blood libel’ or ‘ritual cannibalism.’” Jews were not only accused of killing Christian children, but using their bodies for personal gain. Although Tangled forgoes any child killing, its prologue tells a chillingly familiar tale of the kidnapping and exploitation of a beautiful, blonde infant by a dark and curly-haired, crooked-nosed woman, adapting the blood libel narrative for a new audience, just as blood libel narratives have adapted to fit “changing cultural and political climates.”

In developing a story fit for a feature-length movie, Tangled adds magical elements to its narrative absent from the original fairy tale. In the film, a drop of sunlight fell to earth in the form of a flower with incredible healing capabilities. This flower is discovered by Mother Gothel, whom the audience meets as an old woman, who discovers a song which, when sung to the flower, makes her young. Her young appearance incorporates many of the antisemitic archetypes present in previous villains including long, black, curly hair, dark, hooded eyes, and a pointed nose with a bump. Gothel hides the flower to hoard its powers for herself, immediately establishing her as greedy, another common antisemitic trope. When the pregnant queen falls ill, the search party is sent for the mythical flower, hoping it will heal her. It is found, and after drinking a medicine made from it, the queen recovers and gives birth to a healthy girl, Rapunzel, with hair that is inexplicably bright blonde, as both the queen and king have brown hair. Aging and growing desperate, Gothel sneaks into the castle and cuts a lock of Rapunzel’s hair, only to discover that the hair, which has gained the flower’s magic, loses that magic when cut. She decides to kidnap Rapunzel, hiding her away and raising her as her own to continue utilizing the hair’s magic properties.

Many Disney films have utilized the contrast between villains’ and heroes’ character designs to indicate to the audience which role they play, with villains getting Jewish-coded features and heroes largely getting Western European ones. In nearly every way, Rapunzel and Gothel’s designs are completely opposites. Gothel’s frizzy dark hair could never be related to Rapunzel’s blonde, straight, silky mane. Gothel’s eyes are dark and hooded where Rapunzel’s are green and wide. Gothel’s nose is bumpy and hooked where Rapunzel’s is small and turns up. Gothel is curvaceous where Rapunzel is petite. In every way that Rapunzel fits the Aryan ideal, Gothel sits firmly in the category of other, even if both are white. Gothel’s foreign appearance was very intentional by the film’s director. In an interview, co-director Byron Howard said, “So, Gothel is very tall and curvy, she’s very voluptuous, she’s got this very exotic look to her. Even down to that curly hair, we’re trying to say visually that this is not this girl’s mother.” This goal in character design was repeated by him and co-director Nathan Greno in various interviews.

More than simply creating visual difference between Rapunzel and Mother Gothel, Gothel’s “voluptuous,” “exotic look” plays into the classic trope of the “Beautiful Jewess,” an orientalized beauty who tricks others with her alluring appearance, “‘her beauty conceal[ing] her powers of destruction.’” Gothel gaslights Rapunzel to keep her in her tower, convincing her that her naivete makes the outside world too dangerous for her to live in, and the contrast between Gothel’s curvy and sexualized body and Rapunzel’s petite frame only serves to bolster her claims. It is notable that early iterations of Gothel’s design show her without many of the visually “Jewish” traits she has in her final designs, with straighter hair tied back in a low bun, rather than the large curly hair seen in the film. Several designs have long, but not hooked, noses, and higher collars, avoiding the “Jewish seductress” aspect of her design. Yet these designs were rejected in favor of one influenced by two famous women: Donna Murphy, who voiced Mother Gothel, and Cher. Cher in particular was looked to for being “very exotic and Gothic looking,” playing into the orientalization of the Beautiful Jewess, where “the physical beauty and sensuality of the Jewish woman, her dark hair…were almost always described using orientalizing tropes and characteristics.” Although neither Cher nor Murphy is Jewish, both have the dark, curly hair and large noses associated with Jews, and the choice to base Gothel’s appearance off of them, particularly Cher’s “exotic” beauty, plays directly into pre-existing antisemitic tropes, whether intentionally or not.

Like Queen Grimhilde and Jafar before her, Gothel utilizes a disguise as part of her villainy. However, Gothel’s disguise, her false youth, is constant throughout the film, rather than temporary for one evil act. The Beautiful Jewesses’ “imaginary proximity to seduction, sexuality, theater, and dance, as well as to masquerade and costumes, certainly had just as much to do with their femininity—situated outside of bourgeois gender roles—as with their Jewishness.” Both Gothel’s Jewish features and her sexualized femininity play a role in the manipulative nature of her youthful disguise.

Not only do the narrative similarities to blood libel and the design of Mother Gothel play into antisemitic tropes, but more so than previous evil mother figures in Disney films, Gothel fits the “stereotype of the overbearing, over-involved, suffocating Jewish mother.” While Queen Grimhilde and Lady Tremaine force Snow White and Cinderella, respectively, into servanthood, Gothel pretends to care for Rapunzel, as exemplified in the song “Mother Knows Best.” In addition to warning Rapunzel of the dangers of the world outside her tower, she guilts her for wanting to leave her, singing “Me, I'm just your mother, what do I know?/I only bathed and changed and nursed you/Go ahead and leave me, I deserve it/Let me die alone here, be my guest.” Her overbearing and manipulative parenting strategies were a key part of her character, and of Rapunzel’s, according to Howard and Greno. In an interview with Den of Geek, Greno said, “If it’s a story about a girl who’s stuck in a tower, and we wanted Rapunzel to be a smart character, she’s being manipulated. So, if Mother Gothel was a mean villainess…you’d be like, Why is Rapunzel staying in the tower? You needed to buy that this girl would be there for 18 years. Mother Gothel can’t be mean. She has to be very passive-aggressive,” and Howard added, “Gothel has to be more subtle…than a one-note, domineering mother.” By playing on the loving but overbearing Jewish mother trope, Tangled establishes Gothel as a convincingly threatening and manipulative villain. The movie’s narrative tropes, character designs, and character personalities that play upon antisemitic tropes, make it difficult to deny the antisemitism present in Tangled.

The Twist Villain; Or, How Every Villain is a Little Bit Jewish

In the 13 years since Tangled’s release, many of the antisemitic tropes that had become staples of Disney’s villainous characters have been absent from its films. This coincides with a trend often referred to as the “twist villain,” where the film presents a fake villain to the audience, only to reveal that a “good” character was secretly the villain the whole time. Villains like King Candy from Wreck-It Ralph, Hans from Frozen, Robert Callahan from Big Hero 6, and Mayor Bellwether from Zootopia all fall under this trope. Because these characters are not meant to be read by the audience as evil based on their design, they lack the Jewish-coded traits like dark, curly hair, hooked noses, and deep-set eyes that have been used to mark villains as evil in the past. Other films, in lieu of a proper villain, opt for a hero’s internal conflict or a non-malicious antagonistic force to drive the story, such as Moana, Frozen II, and Encanto. These new story structures seem to eliminate the antisemitism present in other Disney films. Yet the trend of villains hiding in plain sight, lulling even the audience into a false sense of security before revealing their true colors, also plays into centuries-old antisemitic tropes.

In 19th century German criminal justice literature, “the ‘Jewish crook’ (jüdischer Gauner), a code term for a type of criminal that could apply to non-Jews as well,” was defined by “dangerous criminality masked by an assumed identity—a falsely benign exterior.” Because Disney has created an association between stereotypically Jewish traits and villainy for decades, priming audiences to read such traits as evil, by creating villains who hide their true character from both audiences and other characters, both through their actions and their non-Jewish-coded appearances, the films which use a “twist villain” both reaffirm the visual villainy of such traits and play upon another antisemitic trope.

In many ways, it seems impossible for Disney to create a villain that avoids some antisemitic trope, if avoiding stereotypically Jewish character designs only leads to affirmation of another trope. Unfortunately, it may very well be impossible. As John Appel notes in Jews in American Caricature: 1820–1914, “Jews, too, have been described as penny-pinching misers, cheats and ostentatious consumers, pushy parvenus and clannish separatists, radical unbelievers and Orthodox fanatics, ‘red’ Communists and arch-capitalists, draft evading slackers and cowardly soldiers and, more recently, bloodthirsty Israeli militarist occupiers of peaceful villages.” Whether a villain is stingy or greedy, cowardly or bloodthirsty, oddly insular or the mastermind controlling everything, they fall into a Jewish stereotype. Especially when the concept of Jews being sneaky or able to trick others comes into play, it is nearly impossible to create a villain who doesn’t hit one stereotype or another. Certainly, designs and narrative beats like the ones in Tangled make the Jewish-coding of villains far more obvious, but history’s view of Jews has permanently branded them as villainous.

That doesn’t mean that every villain is equal. Hans’ duplicity in Frozen does not raise as many alarms as the multi-layered antisemitism in Tangled. Nor does it mean that every Disney film, let alone every piece of fiction influenced by centuries of antisemitism, should be disregarded. But understanding how antisemitism has influenced Disney’s villains, and, by virtue of its films’ success and cultural dominance, impacted how the American public perceives Jews because of these portrayals, these trends can be acknowledged and criticized, instead of being willfully ignored by insisting that 90 years of cinematic history is simply a “sheer coincidence.”

Bibliography

Aladdin. Walt Disney Pictures, 1992.

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