I’ve been saying it. I’ve been saying it for fifty damn years. Ain’t I been saying it Miguel? Nobody listened then, maybe someone will listen now. What’s so infuriating to me is that the truth has been obvious from the very beginning. How can it be that I am the only one who sees it? Go ahead. Laugh. I’m immune to laughter. But I can promise you this: once you see it, you will be unable to un-see it. You are one letter—one vowel—away from the truth, and Spielberg dangled that vowel like a participle in front of our faces right from the start.
“E” before “A,” except after…How does that old rule of grammar go? In this case forget the rules. All you need to do to understand the popularity of the movie “Jaws,” is to replace the “a” with an “e.” Go ahead, say it out loud. Let it sink in. I’ll wait.
Martha’s Vineyard was once (alas) a working man’s tourist destination. I mean, really, tours were given in school buses, the most uncomfortable means of transportation ever devised by man. Without air-conditioning. You were lucky if your window opened. Three hours of sweat and body odor from forty-or-so passengers, with a few nice views in between. You were expected to tip the driver and say thank you as you left the bus. That is a working man’s vacation. That was the lifeblood of Martha’s Vineyard. Those tourists would be dropped off near restaurants at mealtimes and souvenir shops at other times where they would leave their hard-earned money. Not big bucks, but enough to keep the low-keyed island economy going for the long off-season months. It was, and possibly still is, a mayfly economy; you make your living during the hectic three months of tourist season or else. Anything that would endanger those three months would threaten the island’s livelihood.
A man-eating great white shark would fit the bill. On the surface, that is what the film Jaws is about, but below the surface, therein lies a tale. The unseen menace in the depths of the ocean preys on a fun-loving young woman swimming after dark, and later, on an unsuspecting, innocent young boy enjoying a summer day at the beach. It is all so believable, and terrifying, but for all that, eerily familiar. It is not really the shark, as great and as white as it is, that frightens us, rather it is something more sinister. Something unknowable, but no, we know it! Jaws are The Jews.
That covert, unseen menace is the International Jew—the Zionist— of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and Jaws is Spielberg’s answer to the madness of the Protocols. To combat that dark bloodthirsty menace of every Gentile’s nightmare, Spielberg posits, you guessed it, a new type of Jew, a Jew-less Jew, disguised as a New England prep-school WASP. As if. There’s not a viewer of the movie that did not see through that hilarious masquerade and identify “Matt Hooper” for what he was: through and through a New York Jew. For a sidekick Spielberg gives us Brody, a good-hearted, attractive Gentile who would eventually ride in to save the day.
Spielberg’s genius—and it is true dramatic genius—now appears in the greatest foil since the days of Shakespeare. Quint. Quint meets Hooper and gives him the look that seems—how uncomfortable to the audience—so in place, so accurate. It is the look that says to Hooper: “You may fool the others, because they are fools, but you do not fool me.” That look. Hooper had seen it before. So unfair! Quint was suggesting, with a wry knowing smile, that there was no difference between the killer shark and Hooper himself. For Quint, the shark was a loan shark, and Hooper was a lone Jew, destined to be apart, regardless of adopted dress and academic credentials, different, unaccepted in polite society. As it had always been, up until and including the reported bad behavior of Robert Shaw towards Richard Dreyfus.
Hooper, the New Jew without a Jewish name, without kosher food, and with science as his sword, err... harpoon, sets off on his double quest: to vanquish the monster of the depths—the Old Jew of the Protocols—and to win Quint over, to prove that the New Jew can drink beer with the best of them. Hooper’s double quest, in a nutshell, is the story of modern Zionism. A New Jew, in a land of Jews, not alone, ready to be accepted into the fraternity of nations. Quint’s nightmare finally consumed him, literally, and Spielberg may be suggesting that Quint received his just deserts. Or the shark did, anyway. As for the New Jew, the fraternity of nations, with few exceptions, has not been fraternal.
Quint’s story line can be seen as superseding the Protocols. For Quint, the Protocols do not go far enough. The Jews do not just want to take over the world, they want to eat you or emasculate you as they do it (see: The Beepers of Beirut, et al). The Protocols of Zion, Matt Hooper, the Iranian atomic bomb, these are all Zionist false foreskin er… false flag operations.
Quint is one who knows, and that knowledge, that there is a Jew behind every tragedy, informed his understanding of the seminal event in his life, the sinking of the Indianapolis and the loss of his sea mates. How so? It could not have been easy at first. What did the Indianapolis have to do with Jews? Indeed, pertaining to all of Indiana itself, outside of the universities, one of the rarest of utterances that can be heard is: “Hi. I’m from Indiana, and I’m Jewish.”
The Indianapolis is the great Jew-less ship fighting in a war against a people of four letters starting with “J” and ending in “s.” Ok, it’s Japs, but that’s close enough. For a fevered, infested mind, it is close enough. Somewhere, there is a Jewish angle. Yes, the powers that be, the Rothschilds, somehow orchestrated this burnt offering of Gentile flesh.
The musical score carries a hint. That sinister two-note tuba. It resembles nothing more than the opening notes of Hava Nagila. That’s the evil genius of the Zionists, Quint knows. It is not enough to have them go down with the ship. There must be a prolonged, excruciating bloodletting for the International Zionist cause. Just so, it was orchestrated. Small circles of men in the shark-infested water, arms locked in brotherhood, facing outwards towards the approaching menace. Yes! Just this! The Jew puppet master has these doomed Gentiles flapping their legs, dancing a submerged Hora. Hava Nagila!
After hours upon agonizing hours of friends being torn away, the dance circle ever dwindling, nothing is left but the chill in the bones of the storyteller and the chill in the bones of the listener.
Quint’s hatred has metastasized through the shark jaws he is bleaching and hanging on the walls of his sanctuary into a full-blown belief system. It would seem that each jawbone hanging on the wall was a guilt offering by the survivor for each of his sea mates eaten. There, that one that he is boiling now, is it for a gone but not forgotten sea mate, or is it for someone not yet devoured? Into this walks the guileless Hooperstein, er… Hooper. It’s fine with Quint if the innocent Hooper feels a chill down his spine. We all should feel that chill, but none more than the Jew. For the Jew has a genetic disposition to face the unknowable with equanimity: who is for life, who is for death. Who knows untimely and unseemly death like the Jews?
Quint finally makes his peace with Hooper, and with the Angel of Death. He will go the way of his sea mates. Someone else will hang the jawbone of the shark that eats him. The Indianapolis had delivered the atomic bomb to Tinian Island. In the end, Quint must have seen the Jewish angle. Who developed the bomb? Eighty percent of the scientific leadership of the Manhattan Project were Jews. Eighty percent of those Jews were Hungarian Jews. Hungarian Jews are the Jews’ Jews. The absolute best minds of the world scientific community spent years trying to break the atom, and America won the race because of a handful of Hungarian Jews. For good or for worse.
Spielberg’s revenge was in having Quint devoured by the monster of his own making. The fevered mind engendered by the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was of one with all forms of Jew hatred, was of one with those who danced a different dance, the Cossack dance—arms locked, facing out, legs shooting up and out—one that they may have danced before, or during, or after ransacking a Jewish shtetl, raping and murdering the Jewish inhabitants. The bloodletting of those dances was of Jews, and Spielberg will not let you forget that. Through this movie, Jaws, he has forever infused this knowledge in the viewer’s DNA.
That is not the best of it (is Spielberg of Hungarian Jewish descent?). Jaws is considered the original summer “blockbuster” movie. Endless lines stood for hours to buy tickets to the movie, as if saying: “Scare the bejeebies out of me and take my money too.” Now that is a sweet revenge: not a bite of your leg, but a bite of your wallet. And it gets even better. What did Spielberg do with those movie-goers’ hard earned money? He built an army of documenters. To record the stories of Holocaust survivors. He did all that. He could have done much less, and his name would have been inscribed for an eternal blessing on the Gates of Heaven.
Fifty years. Fifty years since I sauntered down the aisle of the Capawock Theatre in Vineyard Haven, play-acting with my friends—many who had parts as extras in the movie, as did my sister and brother—feigning loudly that we were so afraid of what we were about to see. We sat giggling like ten-year-olds in the front row. Until the first chomp. That shut us up right quick. The bloodletting hasn’t let up since.
Fifty years for Jaws. On a mystic kabbalistic note, fifty is represented by the Hebrew letter “nun.” In ancient Hebrew, “nun” means “big fish.”
I kid you not.
I once taught a university course on animals and religion. The connection I made between Jaws and religious violence among human beings is that both are examples of scapegoating, identified by the theologian Rene Girard as a largely unconscious phenomenon running throughout human history. It serves the function of unifying the group doing the scapegoating and venting aggression in a socially acceptable way that relieves pressure in the group. A and B feel hostility but prefer not to break the social contract with one another, so they vent their aggression on C, who is considered expendable. We see it in witch burnings, pogroms, stonings, and lynch mobs. Leftists and Islamists do it regularly; both groups like to scapegoat Jews in the name of defending Palestinians. They don't give a damn about Palestenians; that is just a pretext for scapegoating Jews.
In the movie Jaws, the animal is demonized. One could argue that it is the result of Jungian psychological projection of the Shadow archetype. As noted above, throughout human history, different groups and individuals have been demonized and scapegoated, including (obviously) Jews, culminating in Christian pogroms and the Shoah, and more recently, anti-Zionism. Animals have always also been scapegoated, and there is interesting parallel in our language, using animal names to dehumanize (e.g., rat, cockroach, shark, snake, bitch, pig, dog, wolf, etc). The reference to Jews as rats by the Nazi is a key example. Animals are already regarded as lower and possessing undesirable traits by most of humanity, so naming humans with these names is regarded as an insult.
The Jewish author Isaac Bashevis Singer compared Nazism to human speciesism: " "In relation to [animals], all people are Nazis; for the animals, it is an eternal Treblinka." This comparison is insulting to those who regard animals as lower, but perhaps the point is that we ought not to denigrate any group, including animals.
In the course, I also taught the pro-animal theologies of different traditions. Judaism has a strong tradition of animal welfare, resulting in the emergence of several rabbis advocating plant-based diets for ethical reasons, as consistent with the halachic rejection of animal cruelty (see https://jewishveg.org/rabbinic-statement/). All religious traditions have some pro-animal element in them, though they follow them inconsistently because most people prefer to be meat-eaters. Only Jainism is consistently vegetarian.
As for Jaws, it demonized sharks, who, as it happens, are the victims of a hunt for their fins (for shark-fin soup), driving them to the brink of extinction. It is more of a statement on our own psychology than a statement about any one animal species. The enemy is us, so to speak. This is apparent with the demonization and scapegoating of Jews throughout history and to the present time, especially since Oct 7th when the radical Left erupted in hatred against Jews and gave tacit support for Hamas in countless protests. These are the same useful idiots whose worldview allows the immigration of millions of Islamists and their supporters into their midst, now resulting in the UK and Western Europe being unsafe for Jews. Ironically, this is done in the name of tolerance, leading to a more intolerant society.
A ride on the muse. Musing while writing? Often amusing. Nun - factoid of note.