What is the Judensau?
Judensau is German for “Jewish sow”—a female pig. The first visual depictions of the Judensau appeared in Germany in the thirteenth century. Over the following six centuries, the anti-Jewish imagery intensified as the obscene nature of the images amplified. Common representations included depictions of Jews lying underneath the sow suckling on her teats.[1] Other identifiable Jews are depicted holding up the sow’s tail while one or other person stares at her anus or ingests her excrement.[2] In some representations, the devil is present watching on, portrayed with stereotypical Jewish features.[3] A sixteenth-century representation showed a demon, identified as Jewish by the round rouelle on his clothing,[4] incongruously playing the bagpipes while riding a vomiting pig.[5] In typical examples of the Judensau, the devil assists in the process by holding up the pig’s tale to support the “Jew eating the excrement. The Devil also wears the rouelle indicating his close association with the Jews.”[6] Often, a Jewish male was shown mounted backwards on top of the sow, an accepted sign for determining whether the sow was on heat. It also exemplified the rider as an object of humiliation and a symbol of evil.[7] Various depictions of the Judensau did not share a standard form, except for the usual rendering of, and association between, Jews and pigs; history and geography influenced individual representations. Children were often shown suckling at the teats of the sow. Sometimes, the animal was presented with a pig’s body and a human head.
Origins of the Judensau
The literary origins of the Judensau are not firmly established. References in the homilies of John Chrysostom[8] (349-407) in 386 to Jews as gluttons and pigs are a significant and early influence. He claimed:
The Jews live for their bellies, they gape for the things of this world, their condition is not better than that of pigs or goats because of their wanton ways and excessive gluttony. They know but one thing: to fill their bellies and be drunk, to get all cut and bruised, to be hurt and wounded while fighting for their favourite charioteers.[9]
Chrysostom’s character flensing of Jews was aimed at those considered as Christian backsliders and hybrid worshippers—those who attended synagogue and church—as a warning against the potential corruption that would result from mixing in close quarters with Jews.[10] His identification of Jews as exhibiting obsessive carnality, gluttony, profanation, and wasteful consumption found expression in his correlation with pigs. Chrysostom invented, and/or nurtured, a style of anti-Jewish porcine rhetoric that would be adapted and expanded by medieval admirers. His sermons against the Jews “demonstrate a model of abasement and abjection that is not terribly far from the complex of scatological and sexual perversions united in the image of the Judensau.”[11]
Chrysostom may have chosen a pig for the purposes of descriptive comparison, but he was not the originator of the use of grotesque imagery to characterize Jews. The New Testament is a prime source of anti-Jewish rhetoric, though Adele Reinhartz cautions “debate still rages over whether the New Testament itself is anti-Jewish or whether its statements about Jews and Jewishness have been distorted in an anti-Jewish direction by Christian interpreters over the past twenty centuries.”[12] A key New Testament text that shaped the construction of many Judensau images is John 8:44: “You are from your father the devil, and you choose to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning and does not stand in the truth, because he has not truth in him.”[13] A common feature of Judensau iconography was the lurking presence of Satan/devil/demon wearing recognizable emblems, such as the rouelle.[14] Reinhartz considers later generations of Christian interpreters amplified biblical authors’ intentions and imaginations: “the New Testament provided subsequent Christian theologians and leaders with plenty of fodder for what later became a widespread, though not universal, anti-Jewish agenda that went far beyond what New Testament authors would have envisaged or (I conjecture) desired.”[15]
The depiction of grotesque images of Jews in medieval art and literature requires appreciation of the cultural context in which these images arose. Istvan Czachesz has pointed to notions that emerged in early Christianity related to the inhabitants of hell and the underworld: people are sitting in hell in filth: “The idea that people sit in dirt in hell seems to be an archaic one…Sinners are dirty and they remain eternally in dirt in the underworld.” The usual literary descriptions for the source of this dirt is “mud or filth, but there are also many references to bodily discharges: blood, sweat, pus, and excrement, the latter occurring especially frequently.”[16] Modern interpreters have revised their understanding of the grotesque dimensions of art and culture in the Middle Ages: “scatology is no longer seen as something marginalized, but is rehabilitated as an important part of medieval art and culture.”[17] Obscene images were a familiar component of medieval Christian architecture: “pornographic and scatological sculptures are common features in cloisters and churches from the Romanic period.”[18] In art and literary culture, “the scatological transforms pride into humiliation” and was a standard feature of medieval theological contests and disputes.[19] Jeff Persels and Russell Ganim observe that “much Early Modern vernacular art and literature is disorderly, is unclean, is thus ‘dangerous,’ ‘subversive,’ and is in need of the neo-Classical bath it will receive in subsequent centuries.”[2] Filth, foul smells and excrement operated in the Middle Ages to delineate the religious other and separate members of different religions from one another by creating disgust and revulsion. Impurity and filth created theological and emotional space between people of different religions.[21]
Another likely direct literary antecedent of the Judensau is the ninth century text, De Universo (also known as De Rerum Naturis), an encyclopedic dictionary compiled by Rabanus Maurus (c. 780-856).[22] Rabanus explicitly compared the putatively unclean and sinful nature of the pig with Jews in Book 7. Rabanus “identified the Jew and the pig because of the pig’s negative natural attributes: that is, its lust, wantonness, and gluttony. These are the qualities that the Jew and the pig share.”[23] Rabanus’ 22 volume library was mostly literary and included a limited selection of simple miniature illustrations.
The literary collections of Rabanus and others were the foundation for illustrated bestiaries.[24] Medieval bestiaries were a source of association between Jews and pigs.[25] Bestiaries “largely focused on each animal’s religious meaning. The key theme was how to be a good Christian.”[26] Debra Higgs Strickland observes how the medieval bestiaries solidified “the Christian belief that certain undesirable animals are appropriate symbols of Jews because they all share irrational, bestial natures.”[27] She maintains that “such poisonous attitudes doubtless informed popular anti-Jewish animal motifs such as the Judensau, whose conception and iconographical origins may well lie in the bestiaries.”[28]
An influence on evolving medieval anti-Jewish propaganda was legal custom. The 13th century practice of the Judeneid, or Jewish oath, correlates with the emergence of the Judensau. To establish proof and corroboration in lawsuits in German courts, Jews were required to take an oath standing barefoot on skin taken from a sow, establishing the connection between Jews and unclean animals. This requirement “served as a medium for anti-Jewish derisions: the Jew shall stand on a sow’s hide, stipulates the Schwabenspiegel,[29] and illustrations in manuscripts not only translated the written word into visual stimuli but emphasised the connotation with one of the major anti-Jewish images of the Middle Ages, the Judensau.”[30]
This compilation of influences ensured the Judensau image persisted in Germany and beyond into and beyond the Renaissance.[31] The efficacy of pig iconography was propelled by the ubiquity of pigs in European communities, especially Germany.[32] Pigs were unruly co-habitants with humans. Pigs became “a formative influence on definitions of social order…They were both a flexible species and a demanding one that trotted and jumped and swam right through the boundaries that humans had set for them.”[33] Alison Stewart claims that medieval “dogs and pigs indicated human qualities, albeit undesirable ones, that overlapped with these animals…Pigs and dogs can be seen as emblematic of evaluation and change at a time of ‘moral panic’.”[34]
Judensau in Public Spaces
Images of the Judensau proliferated for around 600 years. Most images were created and displayed in Germany, though neighboring countries produced allied versions.[35] It may be that Judensau images found in France, Switzerland, Poland and Sweden were confined to those areas “under heavy German influence, if not actually populated by Germans.”[36] In any case, “by the fifteenth century and on through the sixteenth, the Judensau motif was ubiquitous in word and image throughout German lands.”[37]
Media for presenting these images varied; their presence was pervasive. Images were “hammered into metal gates, sculptured into choir stalls, corbels, and church gargoyles, carved into wood, and appeared on the handles of walking sticks, in game cards, in faience, and on hundreds of prints and posters.”[38] The printing press was a powerful tool for disseminating and popularizing the Judensau. Original versions may have been sculpted in stone, but the printing press enabled viral duplication and distribution across European communities. After Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press with movable type around 1450, job printings of ephemeral materials and broadsides (individual single-sheet prints) became common: “among these job printings were anti-Jewish publications, which appeared in increasing numbers from the 1470s onward.”[39] Many printed images were displayed in public squares, on street corners and drinking halls. A famous Judensau adorned the tower (until demolished in 1801) above the bridge which formed the major entrance to the city of Frankfurt.[40] The depiction “portended the Jewish threat to Christian existence by depicting the ritually murdered corpse of Simon of Trent hovering above the porcine scene.”[41] The image was “affixed there not by some bigoted individual but by ‘the city government’. The city was still paying for its upkeep when Goethe was a child, and remembered being traumatized by it.”[42]
As a young Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) fretted over the existence of this grisly image as a “public monument,” the general population became accustomed to the presence of these grotesque representations. Ideas communicated in these depictions of Jews could seep into the consciousness of ordinary citizens as they went about their daily lives: the Judensau “legitimized the fears and deadly superstitions and helped perpetuate them from generation to generation.”[43] Precisely when the Judensau image ceased to be disseminated is disputed by scholars. In his monumental study, Isaiah Shachar argued the centuries-long usage of the Judensau image ended abruptly at the dawn of the Victorian era, in deference to a spirit of greater genteel sensibilities.[44] Maya Balakirski-Katz argues that while this may have been the case in Germany, “a burgeoning antisemitism and the more general fascination with medieval history and art seem to have occasioned the revitalization of the motif” among French intellectuals into the twentieth century.[45]
Judensau in Church Spaces
Judensau images were not only displayed in public spaces. The first representations appeared in 13th century stone sculptures within German churches and cathedrals. Images were carved into wood and stone and displayed on choir stalls, internal walls, and external walls of churches. Artworks in medieval churches acted as the literature for the illiterate, so, according to Pope Gregory the Great “paintings are placed in the churches to enable the illiterate to read on the walls what they cannot read in the books.”[46]
One significant representation of the Judensau is a sculpture on the exterior south-west wall of the church of Wittenburg, near Dessau in Germany. The stone sculpture, now badly weathered, dates to the 14th century. It shows four Jewish men and a sow. The Wittenburg church is famous as the place where Martin Luther (1483-1546) proclaimed his 95 theses which, according to legend—if not reliable history—he nailed to the door of the church in 1517, thus sparking the Protestant Reformation. In 1543, Luther provided an interpretation of the Judensau sculpture adorning his local church in typically spiteful and crude fashion:
Here on our church in Wittenberg a sow is sculpted in stone. Young pigs and Jews lie suckling under her. Behind the sow a rabbi is bent over the sow, lifting up her right leg, holding her tail high and looking intensely under her tail and into her Talmud, as though he were reading something acute or extraordinary, which is certainly where they get their Shemhamphoras.[47]
The Wittenberg Judensau has proven to be an enduring contentious presence up to the current day. In his treatise, Luther for the first time associated the Jewish Talmud with a pig’s anus. He deliberately corrupted the term for the ineffable name of God. These acerbic tropes were later cast in stone. Around 200 years after he made his initial declaration, “Luther’s boorish comparison of the Talmud to a pig’s rectum was literally carved into stone in Wittenberg, when the word “Rabini” (rabbi) and the title of Luther’s treatise, Von Schem Mephoras (On the Ineffable Name of God), were inscribed above the Judensau.”[48] Luther’s intention was “to teach his followers to hate his adversaries.”[49] On 11 November 2015, the synod of the Evangelical Church in Germany released the statement, Martin Luther and the Jews: A Necessary Reminder on the Occasion of the Reformation Anniversary. The second part of that document noted: “For centuries, people had recourse to Luther’s advice…They appealed to Luther’s late writings in order to justify hatred and persecution of Jews, in particular with the emergence of racist anti-Semitism at the time of National Socialism…In the 19th and 20th century Luther was a source for both theological and ecclesial anti-Judaism, and political anti-Semitism.”[50]
Modern Judensau Representations
Images of the Judensau persisted: “the Judensau lived on—especially in books, pamphlets, posters, playing cards, and ornaments—into the nineteenth century.”[51] The dawn of the twentieth century denoted a “highwater mark” in antisemitic sentiment throughout Europe.[52] The assertion of “Nazi racial ideology breathed new life into medieval representations of the Jew.”[53] During the Nazi era “Saujud was a common German invective,”[54] and “the word Judensau was scrawled on the windows of Jewish businesses.”[55] After the war, awareness of the Judensau largely evaporated in public consciousness.
The Judensau has not disappeared completely. By 2022, there were “48 so-called Judensäue in Western Europe and there are still 30 in Germany. They can be found on churches’ facades (the most prominent instances include Roman Catholic as well as Protestant churches), at different heights, as well as in their interior, and some in areas closed to the public.”[56] Campaigns to remove them from public display have proven ineffective. In 1988, on the fiftieth anniversary of Kristallnacht, a debate emerged about the fate of the Wittenberg Judensau. The decision was taken to let the sculpture remain in place with the addition of a plaque which, among other messages, reminds visitors that six million Jews died “under the sign of the cross.”[57]
Attention to the modern presence of the Judensau image has galvanized opposition on both sides of the issue. In German communities “there have been tumultuous demonstrations against such images, accompanied by vitriolic charges of murderous anti-Semitism, on the one hand, and of anti-intellectual, antihistorical image burning, on the other.”[58] Efforts to remove the Wittenberg Judensau completely from the site were re-kindled in the lead up to the 500th anniversary in 2017 of Martin Luther’s actions at Wittenberg. They were unsuccessful.[59] Similar attempts to remove the Judensau at Regensburg Catholic Cathedral met a similar response: the placement of an “information board” at the site declaring that “The Free State as the owner of the cathedral and the Diocese of Regensburg as the user distance themselves from the anti-Jewish depiction from the late Middle Ages.”[60] The Judensau sculpture was not removed and remains on the south-side wall of the cathedral, facing the former Jewish ghetto.
Remembering the Judensau
The Judensau image is multifariously offensive: it infantalizes those suckling at the sow’s teat; it violates and profanes laws of kashrut which forbid the eating of pork; it associates Jews with animality; it profanes the holy scriptures and the name of God by locating them on the sow’s belly and/or anus; it associates all Jews with Satan and demons; it characterizes all Jews as greedy and lascivious; it implies and/or depicts bestiality. The intention is to humiliate, deride and wound: Birgit Wiedl describes the purpose as dehumanizing Jews by showing them “as a different, and lesser form of being, as offspring of a beast…Thus, the Judensau stresses the ‘alien quality’ of the Jews…firmly establishing the distinct notion that Jews simply were ‘another category of beings’, a nonhuman life form.”[61] For medieval artists, “animal images were useful instruments to illustrate the Jews’ intellectual and moral shortcomings. Animal imagery was easily transferred to medieval art and iconography; perhaps best known is the Judensau (―Jew‘s Sow) motif.”[62] The use of porcine imagery also allowed an easy transference to children’s play: “The road to the Holocaust was paved by anti-Semitic puppets, showing, for example, Jews transforming to pigs, inculcating into German children an image of the racist insult Judensau.”[63]
A precise evaluation of the influence of the Judensau on medieval Europeans is difficult to verify. Voigtlander and Voth have detected evidence that the presence of the Judensau in a medieval German community fomented violence directed towards Jews in that community. They analysed data on the incidence of pre-bubonic plague pogroms in Germany. They found a “highly consistent and significant pattern of differences” between German places that contained Judensau sculptures: “there are no Judensau sculptures in localities without a pogrom in 1349.”[64] Caroline Walker Bynum describes the power that existed in the iconographic representation, which extended beyond their impact on personal attitudes:
The Judensau was not merely anti-Semitic propaganda, the conveyer and inducer of attitudes. It effected as well as suggested action. In the early modern period it was placed on the doorways and porches of churches, the gates of cities, and the gables of inns to announce that Jews were unwelcome; it was even thought to ward off their presence in a talismanic way and insure that they would not return from exile.[65]
Bynum thinks of the Judensau, not merely as an artwork, but as a talisman or amulet, protecting Christians from the potential influence of Jews and warding off their presence in churches and houses. For her, it is more than a vulgar image; it is a record of hate: “they are horrible objects—evidence for and record of scapegoating, fear of the other, inflicted pain, opportunism, warped devotion, and deep belief.”[66]
Scholars debate the extent of the relationship between medieval anti-Jewish antagonisms and the atrocities of the twentieth century. John Phelan provides a balanced assessment of the impact of ancient animosities on modern consciousness:
Tragically, a straight line can be drawn from Chrysostom and Augustine through Martin Luther and his virulent On the Jews and Their Lies to European anti-Semitism and the murder of six million. This is not to discount the rise of secular and anti-religious anti-Semitism, particularly in the late nineteenth century. But it is to insist that this secular anti-Semitism grew in European soil already well plowed and sown with anti-Jewish seed planted and nurtured by Christians.[67]
Conclusion
The story of the Judensau is an illustration of what Mary Boys calls the “troubling tellings” of the Christian tradition—historical narratives that derive from times when church people were not at their best. She says that, for Christians, “experiencing shame at the church’s disparagement of the Jews is at least a prelude to a conversion to history. We need to stay with this shame long enough for it to serve as a catalyst for change.”[68] In her view, the troubling tellings “invite not only personal grief but also consideration of what it would mean for the church to repent.”[69] John Pawlikowski adds that “there is little question that the greatest challenge posed to Christians in dialogue with Judaism is coming to grips with the history of antisemitism….The church will need to commit itself to a complete and honest evaluation of its record in this regard.”[70]
A number of scholars and religious leaders has spoken about this process of repentance in terms of the practice of teshuvah,[71] a concept from Jewish tradition.[72] Michael Signer has distinguished teshuvah and apology: “an apology would be a once and done-with moment. By shifting the term to Teshuvah—a Hebrew term—rather than simply using penitence, the Catholic Church is calling for a process. It will be long and it will require many, many years.”[73] Significantly for the story of the Judensau and representations of the image in current Christian contexts, Signer advises that “Teshuvah does not imply forgetting, but the ritualisation of memory so that the deed will not be performed again as it was in the past.”[74] Barbara Meyer maintains that “for a widespread popular memory to be changed, multiple processes of examining and retelling the story are necessary.”[75]
Caroline Bynum cautions in relation to the Judensau, merely explaining, and distancing from, the existence of false history or erasing remaining images is insufficient: “whatever the ultimate goal of tourist pamphlets, artists’ protest actions, historical or art historical conferences, or exorcizing liturgies, those involved must recognize that neither erasure nor contextualizing will remove the infamy of such things from memory.”[76] Historical correction is not enough. The Judensau challenges Jews and Christians about how we see and remember. These images connect us to our destructive European past. They require response, repentance, return.