Delitzsch Lampooned in the German Press
An Assyrian king shoos away a slave carrying a sausage on a platter. He knows it’s not kosher.
Delitzsch never claimed that Babylonians observed the laws of kashrut (Jewish dietary laws) but he did assert that almost every other religious and ethical concept found in the Hebrew scriptures was unoriginal and had been derived from earlier Babylonian sources. Scholars who followed his lead were known as the Berlin School or simply Berliners.
The cartoon appeared on the cover of the German humor magazine Simplicissimus in March 1903.
Delitzsch, the public prosecutor (on the lower stand at right), accuses Moses of theft in this sober courtroom scene. But the defense attorney (at left) threatens to call God as a witness.
The cartoon appeared in the Lustige Blætter on February 4, 1903. The artist, cubist painter Lyonel Feininger, was known in the States as the hand behind the Chicago Tribune’s Sunday comic strips “Kin-der-Kids” and “Wee Willie Winkie’s World.”
In the same issue of Lustige Blætter, artist W. Anton Wellner poked fun at those members of Germany’s elite who were beginning to subscribe to Delitzsch’s theories. In the drawing, a footman with a telegram rushes past another servant in a wealthy German home.
Cartoons and captions are published in Reinhard G. Lehmann, Friedrich Delitzsch und der Babel-Bibel-Streit, Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis 133 (Freiburg: Universitätsverlag; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1994).