The nose is the organizing feature of the reproduced images that have been placed on this page, in a layout comprised of different kinds of media including portraits, photography, and text: the page features reproductions of ancient Egyptian portraits alongside an anthropological photograph of a Polish Jew in German-occupied Lodz, taken in late 1939 or early 1940. The images and their layout entwine science and scholarship with antisemitic and racist propaganda. Different kinds of media make different claims on reality and history.

This page is from a book on ancient Judentum (a German term that includes Judaism, Jews, and Jewry) published jointly, in Nazi Germany in 1943, by a prominent geneticist, Eugen Fischer, and a prominent scholar of ancient Judaism, Gerhard Kittel. The book's untranslatable title, speaking of Ancient World Judentum (Das Antike Weltjudentum), suggests the immanent conspiratorial nature of the Jews; the book belongs to the same general context as the then-ongoing Nazi annihilation of European Jewry. Its purpose can be made legible by reconstructing the manipulations involved in the handling and interpretation of the images and Talmudic quotations. Studying it brings up larger, looming questions: how to read such texts? how to look at such images? Are they part of Jewish history? Can they be useful for Jewish studies, and if so for what purposes and under what assumptions or constraints?