The belle juive archetype reveals antisemitism and misogyny on the part of the creator, for although the characters and the specific approaches to them varies with each appearance, the common thread shared by all is the Jewess’ basic function as an erotic symbol of the other, the strange and the forbidden, who is singular in her vulnerability and damning seductiveness. In his essay “Jew and Anti-Semite” (1946), Jean-Paul Sartre writes:
There is in the phrase ‘a beautiful Jewess’ a very special sexual signification, one quite different from that contained in the words ‘beautifulRumanian’, ‘beautifulGreek’, or ‘beautifulAmerican’, for example. This phrase carries an aura of rape and massacre. The ‘beautiful Jewess’ is she whom the Cossacks under the czar dragged by her hair through the streets of the burning village […] Frequently violated or beaten, she sometimes succeeds in escaping dishonor by means of death, but that is a form of justice; and those who keep their virtue are docile servants or humiliated women in love with indifferentChristians who marryAryanwomen. I think nothing more is needed to indicate the place theJewessholds as a sexual symbol in folklore.[6]
Furthermore, Anthony Bale in his essay “The Female ‘Jewish’ Libido in Medieval Culture” points specifically at the Christian-Jewish conflict as the source of the phenomena, remarking that: “The Jewess’s body is a site of competing jurisdictions, Christian and Jewish, with the rivalry between men articulated through controlling the Jewess […] the Jewish women is that which licenses an unsettling – but useful – alliance of sex and violence within normative codes of Christian conduct, an imaginary Jewish body for the self-regarding gratification of the Christian devotional body”.[7]