Anti-Semitic art? Or historical treasure? Wittenberg Judensau is saved.

Published by carolyn on Thu, 2020-02-06 01:13

The famous Judensau (Jews' sow) relief sculpture at Martin Luther's church in Wittenberg, Germany has been spared by a court from being taken down. It's an example of folk art that appeared first during the 13th century in Europe, and remained popular for over 600 years.


By Carolyn Yeager

THE ABOVE IMAGE IS THE MOST FAMOUS EXAMPLE of the Judensau in Germany. Since 1305, it has adorned the State Church of Wittenberg where Martin Luther nailed his “95 theses” to the door in 1517. German Jews have since 1988 been on a campaign to remove and destroy such ancient artwork because, for them, it is offensive. Many churches have complied with Jewish wishes and removed their own Judensau sculptures, woodcuts and engravings.

In the example of the Wittenberg church, the case was brought by an unidentified member of the local Jewish community. But a county court has ruled that, since the relief sculpture is part of a UNESCO World Heritage site, it cannot be touched. The church was given World Heritage status because it is the site of the first-ever celebration of mass in German instead of Latin. Sadly, other churches do not have that protection.

Luther mentioned this specific sculpture on the church in his 1543 book Vom Schem Hamphoras, in which he compares Jewish people to the devil. He wrote:

"Here in Wittenberg at our parish church a sow is carved in stone. There are young piglets and Jews lying underneath, sucking. Behind the sow there is a rabbi, who lifts the sow's right leg up and with his left hand he pulls the tail over himself, bends down and looks with great diligence at the sow under the tail into the Talmud, as if he wanted to read and see something sharp and special. There they certainly have their shem of Hamphorah... So the Germans talk about someone who pretends to be very clever without any reason: Where did he read it? In the butt of a sow ..." .

What is the meaning of those words? At the website “Christian and Jew” we read:

One of the most famous representations is the sandstone relief on the south-east pillar of the town church of Wittenberg. The later-added inscription "Rabini, Schem Ha Mphoras" above the “Judensau" refers to Jewish mysticism, in which statements about the nature of God were derived from combinations of numbers and words. The sequence of letters of "Shem Ha Mphoras" (= the undisguised name) possessed miraculous powers according to the belief of the Jewish Kabbalists. It was therefore regarded as particularly holy and was hidden from the uncalled. This probably refers to the unpronounceable holy name of God. So the headline above the Judensau picture reads: "This is what the inexpressible holy name of the God of the Rabbi [Jewish God] looks like".

From Wikipedia:

The image appears in the Middle Ages, mostly in carvings on church or cathedral walls, often outside where it could be seen from the street (for example at Wittenberg and Regensburg), but also in other forms. The earliest appearance seems to be on the underside of a wooden choir-stall seat in Cologne Cathedral, dating to about 1210. The earliest example in stone dates to ca. 1230 and is located in the cloister of the cathedral at Brandenburg. In about 1470 the image appeared in woodcut form, and thereafter was often copied in popular prints.

But if the Jews have their way, there will be fewer and fewer until they are all gone, and this part of history will be lost to us—due to 'one-way' political correctness and the ever-growing demand to wipe out all “anti-Semitism”. There is plenty that Jews produce that is offensive to Christians, Europeans, and Germans in particular, but our people do not go to court to object to it. Why not, we should ask. Much, if not most of it is produced by Jews. Much of it is pornographic, and utterly despicable, such as the well-publicized Crucifix floating in a jar of urine, at one time presented as 'art' and displayed in art museums. That is just one example out of many. Christian clergy today overlook all of these insults, and instead direct their moral outrage to defending perceived attacks on Jewish people and the Jewish religion!

Here are a few examples of other Judensau artwork that has survived. May God preserve it.

Judensau in the Collegiate Church in Bad Wimpfen

Judensau at the Cathedral of St. Peter in Regensburg.

Judensau in the Cathedral of St. Martin in Colmar


In 1215 the IV Lateran Council initiated the social isolation of the Jews. It demanded that Jews and "Saracens" (Arabs and Muslims) should bear a distinctive mark. As a result, Jews were obliged to wear a yellow or red Jewish hat and a yellow ring on their mantle (collar), Jewish women a ribbon on their bonnet and a yellow ring on their mantle. Jews were thought to be guilty of the plague, host (sacrament) desecration and ritual murder. Sometimes the motif of the "Judensau" was also associated with ritual murder legends (murder of Christian children by Jews). In the Middle Ages the Jews were only grudgingly tolerated by their Christian environment, often persecuted and expelled. 

The "Judensau" motif insults Jews and their religion in several ways:

a. The pig is an unclean (unkosher) animal for Jews (Leviticus 11:7). All contact with him is avoided. The consumption of pig meat and fat or even pig milk is an abomination to Jews. The religious feelings of Jews are hurt. In antiquity, people tried to force Jews to eat pork when persecuting them (2 Maccabees 7:1+2).

b. An intimate relationship with an animal (sodomy) is a mockery for Jews and Christians alike.

c. The almost family relationship between pig and Jews makes the observer think of a kinship between the Jews and the pig, the Jews being of a completely different kind than the Christians.

d. Jews are accused in such pictures of a reference to debauchery and sin. It is suggested that dealing with their religion is "filth".

e. In some representations the pig has the tusks of a boar and at the same time the udders of a sow. This is probably an allusion to the alleged absurdity of the Jewish religion. Christian theologians of the Middle Ages often denigrated the Jewish religion as unreasonable and stupid.

f. The depiction of Jews sitting backwards on a pig [as here] is supposed to show the alleged "wrongness" of Judaism.

We know that the common people of that time were illiterate, and were given religious instruction through pictures, statues and word of mouth. Clearly the judensau was intended to instruct the Christian faithful not to associate with Jews.

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Art & Culture, Germany, Jews

Comments

The Europeans of the Middle Ages were absolutely ferocious to the Jews. No pandering:

Into the tiny hamlets — there were no cities — of the awakening West, these finished cosmopolitans built their ghettos. Money-thinking, which seemed evil to the deeply religious West, was the forte of this highly civilized alien people. Interest-taking was forbidden by the Church to Christians, and this conferred a monopoly of money on the strangers. The Judengasse was a millennium ahead in Cultural development of its surroundings.

The legend of the Wandering Jew arose at this time, expressing the feeling of uncanniness that the Westerner felt in the presence of this landless stranger who was everywhere at home, although it seemed to the West that he was nowhere at home. The West understood as little of his Torah, Mishnah, Talmud, Kabbalism, and Yesirah, as he of its Christianity and Scholastic philosophy. This mutual inability to understand generated feelings of alienness, fear and hatred.
The hatred of the Westerner for the Jew was of religious motivation, not racial. The Jew was the heathen, and with his civilized and intellectualized life, he seemed Mephistophelean, Satanic to the Westerner. The chronicles of the time record the horrors which the contact of these two utterly alien groups begot. Jews were massacred in London on the day of coronation of Richard I in 1189. The next year 500 Jews were besieged in York castle by a mob, and to avoid its fury, resorted to cutting each other's throats. King John had Jews imprisoned, their eyes or teeth plucked out, and hundreds butchered in 1204. When a Jew in London forced a Christian to pay him more than 2s. a week on a loan of 20s., mob action killed 700 Jews. Crusaders, for centuries, massacred whole Jewish populations of towns, when they stopped on their way to the wars in Asia Minor. In 1278, 267 Jews were hanged in London, accused of clipping coins. The outbreak, in 1348, of the Black Death, was attributed to the Jews, and massacres were the result all over Europe. For 370 years, the Jews were banished from England, until readmitted by Cromwell.

David, but WHY were the Jews treated so "ferociously" as you say, by the Europeans? Why do you Jews never ask yourselves "WHAT ARE WE DOING THAT HAS EVERY PEOPLE WE LIVE AMONG EVENTUALLY KICKING US OUT OR KILLING US?" If it was just Christian Europeans then perhaps we could say it was "Christian bigotry" maybe but we have pagan Egyptians, Greeks, Persians, Romans, Carthaginians etc all having great deals of difficulties with Jews and the same old behaviors being mentioned. #ASK-JEWS-WHY

"Why do you Jews never ask yourselves" 

David is not a Jew. I think his purpose in posting this is to show that Europeans did not always treat Jews with such deference as we do today ... and maybe we should go back to that behavior in our own homelands. That's my guess.

It occurred to me as I was preparing the above, how awful those with sympathy to Jews would/will think of anyone (in this case, me) defending these artworks. What immediately came to mind was all the charges of brutality they love to direct against the National Socialist Germans - an endless number and variety of them - lies for which they feel no shame and no regret. There is really no comparison and some of them know it, but are of the type that they get away with as much as they can.

I feel I need always to repeat: Don't feel sorry for the Jews. They've always done very well for themselves throughout history. Feel sorry for those who are displaced by them, through force or trickery.

Jews don't respect court decisions unless it's the decision they want.

From NPR comes this only-to-be-expected news: https://www.npr.org/2020/02/08/803208726/a-german-jew-vows-to-fight-on-to-remove-anti-semitic-sculpture-after-court-defea

Michael Düllmann, a member of Berlin's Jewish community, calls the sculpture defamatory and sued the local parish to get it removed in 2018. The district court rejected his claim. Now that the Higher Regional Court in Naumburg has also struck down his appeal, he intends to take the case to higher courts. [...]

Düllmann is determined to press his case. "We will appeal to the highest civil court in Germany, the Federal Court of Justice in Karlsruhe," Düllmann says. "Then we will go further to the Constitutional Court, then, if necessary, to the EU court for human rights in Strasbourg."

By then they will have aroused an worldwide movement against Germany. They don't take no for an answer. For this reason, if no other, Jews are an abomination and a threat to every culture and nation! This is why they are despised! Take the picture of Michael Düllmann from the internet and use it for a dart board. If I played darts, I would.

They NEVER want to leave and they ALWAYS want to get back in! Apparently the con is just too damn good. Now take Germany for instance; they were allegedly rounded up, cattle carred, tattoed, gas chambered, lampshaded, saponified, einsatzgruppened, and burnt in "ovens" but now the numerous survivors are crawling over the country making demands. Would you ever go back to a country that did 1/10th of that to you???                   
The Jewish war against Christ will end in about twenty years; they will do away with Passion Plays, and then make the cross a "hate symbol". Eventually the Gospel will disappear.