The Judensau (Jews' sow) on mediaeval churches

 

The Judensau (German for "Jews' sow") was a standard feature of mediaeval churches in Germany and elsewhere. Over 25 of them still survive on German churches. During the Nazi period, classes of school children were taken to see at least one of these. [1] Today the term Judensau survives as a neo-Nazi insult. [2]

This weathered sculpture of a Judensau is from the south façade of the Regensburg cathedral. It depicts three Jews, who were originally identified by pointed hats. They are insultingly shown suckling from a sow – an animal they even refused to eat because it was “unclean”. (And, indeed, the pigs of mediaeval Regensburg rooted through the alleyways, living on garbage.)

The Jews were the only ones in Christian Europe to resist conversion, an affront to the “universal” church, which is what “catholic” means. The sculpture faced the ghetto in order to mock the Jews who lived there. But the Church didn’t confine herself to ridicule alone. Every year, after a rousing Good Friday sermon about “Christ-killers”, the faithful would spill out of the cathedral and storm the ghetto next door. Recent excavations of cellars of this ghetto – all that is left after a mediaeval pogrom – have revealed secret doors from one house to the next to help the terrified Jews escape their tormentors.

In 2005 a plaque was reluctantly installed on the cathedral – in German only. It sounds somewhat less than repentant: “This sculpture needs to be seen in its historical context”. [3]

It seems a bit impolite to ask which all-powerful institution in mediaeval Europe created this “context”. And even less polite to ask what this carefully-fostered hatred of Europe’s only non-Christian holdouts finally led to….

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List of known or surviving examples of the Judensau in churches (in Germany, unless otherwise specified) [3]

Aerschot (Belgium), choir stall, Notre Dame, 16th c.
Bad Wimpfen Ritterstiftskirche St. Peter, 13th c.
Basel (Switzerland), Cathedral, 1432
Bayreuth, Stadtkirche (city church)
Brandenburg, Cathedral, c. 1230
Cadolzburg, outer city gate, 15th c.
Colmar, St. Martin Cathedral, 14th c.
Eberswalde, St. Maria Magdalena, late 13th c.
Erfurt, choir stall, early 15th c.
Gniezno/Gnesen, Cathedral, mid 14th c.
Heiligenstadt, Annakapelle (St. Anne’s Chapel), c. 1300
Heilsbronn, cloister church, 15th c.
Köln, Cathedral, 14th c.
Lemgo, Marienkirche (St. Mary’s) 13th c.
Magdeburg, Cathedral, end of 13th c.
Metz. Cathedral, 14th c.
Nordhausen, 1380
Nuremberg, St. Sebald c. 1320
Regensburg, Cathedral, mid 14th c.
Spalt, near Nürnberg, former Chorherrenstift (choir monastery), 15th c.
Strasbourg
Uppsala (Sweden), Cathedral, mid 14th c.
Warburg
Wittenberg, Stadtkirche (city church), 14th c.
Xanten, Cathedral, c. 1265
Zerbst, Nikolaikirche (St. Nicholas), 15th c.
Vienna (Austria) Neustadt, 15th c. (formerly in a house [chapel] at Hauptplatz 16, now in the City Museum)

No longer existent in:

Anhalt-Köthen, Dessau,
Diesdorf (near Magdeburg),
Frankfurt am Main,
Freising (until 1921, the last reference to it)
Friedberg
Heidingsfeld
Kehlheim (until the 1st half of the 19th c. In a private house, taken down by order of the royal district judge, 1895 once more on the city pharmacy, 1945 probably "removed by order of an officer of the US Army"
Salzburg,
Torgau

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Notes

1. According to an elderly parishioner attending church in Cadolzberg in July 2003, during the Nazi period schoolchildren were taken to see the Judensau in the cathedral (Münster). This owuld seem to suggest that the surviving example on the outer city gate may not have been the only one.
Wolfram Kastner, "Feuerwehr löscht das Wort 'Judensau': Die staatliche Sau-Skulptur bleibt ohne Kommentar", haGalil.com ("thelargest Jewish online magazine in German"), 5 August 2003. http://www.klick-nach-rechts.de/gegen-rechts/2003/08/judensau.htm

2. In Nazi parlance Judensau means "Jewish sow", which deftly turns the name of the sculpture into a slur. But to argue, as the Wikipedia article does, that therefore the Nazi use is "historically separate and morphologically opposite" is naive at best. As the school tour(s) demonstrate, the Nazis were eager to foster this tradition and a slight semantic shift to make the word more "useful" to them is hardy proof of any separate development. That's the way language works.

3. "A Medieval Trace of German Anti-Judaism", Deutsche Welle, 1 April 2005. http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,1537282,00.html

And where antisemitism can't be blamed on the mediaeval mind, it's attributed solely to a 20th-century ideology:

At a ceremony in Parliament marking the 70th anniversary of the imposition of fascist anti-Semitic racial laws in Italy, [Gianfranco] Fini said Italians in general as well as the Catholic Church, not fascism alone, bore some responsibility for the fascist-era persecution of Jews.

L'Osservatore Romano wrote that fascism was solely responsible for "the infamy of the racial laws" of 1938."

"Vatican raps politician over remarks", JTA (Jewish Telegraphic Agency), 17 December 2008. http://jta.org/news/article/2008/12/17/1001635/vatican-criticizees-politician-over-remarks

4. The list is found at the end of Wolfram P. Kastner and Günter Wangerin, "Öffentliche Distanzierung von der 'Judensau' in Cadolzburg: Staatliche Sau-Skulptur erhält einen distanzierenden Kommentar", haGalil.com, 7 January 2003. www.hagalil.com/archiv/2004/01/judensau.htm