Ideology of Tintin - Tintin and The Jews

Tintin and The Jews

Some aspects of Tintin's adventures have resulted in accusations of antisemitism being levelled at Hergé, accusations that are often connected to his work during World War II for Le Soir, a newspaper that collaborated with the Nazis during the German occupation of Belgium.

Before the war, there were some instances of sinister Jewish-looking figures in Tintin's adventures. In The Broken Ear (1935–7), Tintin questions a shopkeeper who is selling copies of the fetish he is looking for: the man wears a kippah, speaks in broken French and rubs his hands with "invisible soap".

As the war began, the first version of Land of Black Gold (1939–40) was being published. This version was set in the British Mandate of Palestine and featured Jewish terrorists led by a Rabbi. The story was suspended due to its political nature, but completed after the war.

The most serious instance of alleged antisemitism, however, featured in The Shooting Star (1941), which appeared during the German occupation. In a scene that appeared in Le Soir on 11 November 1941, two evil-looking Jewish men, Isaac and Salomon, watch Philippulus the Prophet inform Tintin that the end of the world is nigh. One of them, speaking in very twisted French, looks forward to this as it means that he will not be obliged to pay off his creditors. In addition, the sponsor of the rival expedition sent to find the meteorite is called Blumenstein, is given the appearance of a stereotypical Jewish businessman and uses underhand and potentially lethal methods to delay Tintin's ship. His bank is located in New York and his crew attempts to plant the American flag on the meteorite.

After the war and the exposure of the Holocaust, Jewish people became noticeably absent from Tintin's adventures. Land of Black Gold was redrawn at the request of Hergé's British publishers who felt that it was out-of-date now that the state of Israel had been established. The Irgun members in the British Mandate were replaced with a domestic insurgency in a fictional Arab emirate. The scene with Isaac and Salomon was left out of the book editions of The Shooting Star, while "Blumenstein" was renamed "Bohlwinkel" and relocated to the fictional country of São Rico. According to Hergé, both the original and the later name were honest mistakes: he thought Blumenstein was a common American name, and chose Bohlwinkel because it sounded like "bollewinkel", a candy store.

Hugo Frey has argued that anti-Semitism continued in the post-war Flight 714. Tintin's old nemesis and the mastermind of the plot in the book is the evil Rastapopoulos, who Frey argues is an example of anti-Semitic caricature, though other writers argue against this, pointing out that Rastapopoulos is not Jewish (his drugged ramblings about the past of his family mentioning Erzurum and his surname make him likely a Turk of Greek ethnicity), and surrounds himself with explicitly German-looking characters: Kurt, the submarine commander of The Red Sea Sharks, Doctor Krollspell, whom Hergé himself referred to as a former concentration camp official, and Hans Boehm, the sinister-looking navigator and co-pilot, both from Flight 714.

In other works, Hergé showed much sympathy for oppressed peoples, such as the Chinese in The Blue Lotus, the black African Muslims about to be traded as slaves in The Red Sea Sharks and the Gypsies of The Castafiore Emerald falsely accused of theft.