I recently decided that I would look up twentieth century art forgers and see what – if any – jewish involvement in this business. While it is impossible to really know how many art forgers have gone undetected throughout history. We can list the major ones that have been detected and specifically in this case we can look at the twentieth century for which he have the best records.
The major art forgers active in the twentieth century that I have found are listed below.
Wolfgang Beltracchi (nee Wolfgang Fischer)
Yves Chaudron
Zhang Daqian
Eric Hebborn
Elmyr de Hory (nee Elemer Albert Hoffmann)
Geert Jan Jansen
Thomas Keating
Mark Landis
Lothar Malskat
Han van Meegeren
John Myatt
Ely Sakhai
Emile Schuffenecker
Of these thirteen individuals; two are were jewish.
These were:
Elmyr de Hory (nee Elemer Albert Hoffmann) (1)
Ely Sakhai (2)
This translates to 15 percent of known major art forgers active in the twentieth century being jews, while jews were only 0.2 percent [(12,900,000/6,082,966,429)*100] at the century’s end. (3) This means that jews were represented a whopping seventy-five times above their demographic representation among known major art forgers in the twentieth century.
Even discounting that fact then it useful to point out that one of the two jews - Elmyr de Hory – is widely regarded as the greatest art forger of the twentieth century! (4)
Not exactly a statistical aberration then!
References
(1) http://www.reporterherald.com/columnists/trivially-speaking/ci_31835329/art-forger-faked-his-way-around-worldlife
(2) https://web.archive.org/web/20150929004401/http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/11/30/1101577485488.html
(3) Population statistics from http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jewish-population-of-the-world and https://www.infoplease.com/world/population-statistics/total-population-world-decade-1950-2050 respectively.
(4) http://www.sleek-mag.com/2017/03/28/art-forgers/ ; https://web.archive.org/web/20060221211321/http://www.crimelibrary.com/criminal_mind/scams/elmyr_de_hory/