The Jewish Pig
Once upon a time, Jesus Christ
bumped into a Rabbi sitting of
the side of the road with some friends.
They had all been arguing about this man who claimed
to be the Son of God and when the Rabbi recognized Jesus he decided to put Him to the test.
"If you are truly the Messiah," the skeptical Rabbi said to J.C., "then you can surely see what lies beneath this barrel next to me."
The Rabbi believed some pigs were napping there. Unbeknownst to him, however, the pigs had been replaced by his own son.
"Know and understand, Rabbi," said Jesus, "it is your firstborn son who sleeps there."
The Rabbi laughed out loud. "Some Messiah!" he and his friends sneered. "He can't even tell the difference between a pig and a child!"
Christ tried to convince the Rabbi of the Truth, but the Rabbi would not listen. So Christ simply turned the child into a pig and walked away.
And ever since then, the story goes, the Jew has refused to eat pork lest he consume his own offspring....
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
This relatively benign tale was told by early Christians in Poland to explain the Jewish taboo against pork in terms of cannibalism. But it grew into a series of beliefs that implied that Jews were actually a sub-human race of pig-like monsters. Christian Poles believed Jewish women had horizontal vaginas like sows, and that they carried their babies for only six months. Butchers renamed the most succulent part of the pig, a single vertebrae near the base of the spine, "The Jewess" or "Damsel in the Swine." Some parts of Germany created a "cloven foot" tax all Jews were forced to pay, while others required them to swear to tell the truth in court while standing on the flayed skin of a sow, i.e., to literally swear "on their mother's body." 
If found guilty, Jews were hung upside down, as opposed to by the neck, in a parody of the way one slaughters and bleeds a hog. In a bizarre reversal, some pigs received court trials as humans: the famous hog of Falaise was tried for murder while wearing a jacket, breeches and gloves. When found guilty of murdering a child-an accusation frequently leveled at Jews-the animal was hung while wearing a human mask.
Then in the 13th century a curious image began to appear on the walls of German churches. It was of a pig nursing its young. Only instead of piglets suckling on the sow's teats, it was a group of Jewish boys. The image was called the judensau, or Jewish Pig, and it began to give official church sanction to the growing morass of anti-Semitic superstition, according to Claudine Fabre-Vasas' mesmerizing Le Bete Singuliere (The Singular Beast). Peasants came to believe that circumcision, then only performed by Jews, was actually a castration like the one performed on male pigs to keep their flesh edible. The pig castrators of the French Pyrenees adopted a uniform similar to that worn by the Hebrew mohel who performs the act of circumcision, including the mohel's trademark red silk belt. Cutting off part of the ear was a traditional way of marking a pig whose flesh was inedible. So peasants applied it to "inferior humans," like Jews, and the phrase "here's your father's ear" eventually became one of Europe's most popular anti-Semite jeers. The upside to this insanity was that it allowed the Romans to forego the ritual murder that had kicked off their Easter rites. The tradition had been to put an elderly Jewish man into a barrel lined with spikes and roll him down the side of Mount Testacio, according to Fabre-Vasas. By 1312 Jews were so associated with swine that a pair of pigs were substituted for the human, albeit only after being dressed in fine silk suits and driven in an elegant carriage to the mountaintop. The Roman Jewish community, of course, was forced to pay for the cost of the carriage.
The development of printing turned the judensau into "a forceful image which kept imprinting itself on the mind, conditioning, indeed stereotyping, an attitude towards Jews," according to Isaiah Shacher's study of the subject, The Judensau. The illustration became de rigeur for anti-Semitic tracts, but it also graced the covers of popular travel guides. This version, however, had been "improved" by the addition of an elderly rabbi who was pictured eating excrement jetting out of the 
pig's rear. The father of Germany's Protestant revolution, Martin Luther, expounded upon this hateful bit of pornography in 1543. "The Rabbi," he wrote, "bows and stares with great attentiveness (into the pig's rectum) and into the Talmud as if he wanted to read something intricate and extraordinary... and the letters that fall from this (they) gobble down." Luther's "analysis" was embellished over the next few centuries. One best seller explained that in the past "pious Jews did not approve of the sow for eating (but) today the Jews ignore this and make her their mistress." Another used the judensau image as proof that "the sow is the brother to the Jews." The concept was such a hit in Germany that Christian house painters hid theimage on the walls of their Jewish customers by covering it with a layer of watery plaster that would eventually peel away and "miraculously" reveal the "true nature of Judaism."
The kosher taboo against consuming blood underwent a similar metamorphosis, with anti-Semites claiming that Jews were actually obsessed the stuff because they used human blood in their religious ceremonies. The best stuff came from Christian children, a belief that became so deep rooted that rumors of Jews sacrificing Christian children was still causing riots among Polish-Americans in the 1920s. This cocktail of bigotry, fear and ignorance was unfortunately fortified by some Jewish dietary laws that limited communication between the two groups by not only banning the eating of non-kosher foods, but also any food even merely touched by a non-believer. Sharing wine between the religions was taboo, as was shared meals. "The Christians interpreted these ancient laws-formulated long before Christianity-as meaning that to a Jew everything Christian was unclean" wrote historian Will Durant, and retaliated by banning "Jews and harlots" from touching food in the market. Kosher meat could only be displayed in stalls selling diseased flesh.
These inversions of Hebraic food taboos would be laughable were their ramifications not so ghastly. "If it was impossible for men in the age of enlightenment and later to conceive of Jews as their fellow humans it was not just because of religious differences," wrote Shacher. "It seems clear that the judensau-honoring the Jew more or sometimes less humorously with porcine ancestry-had been contributing to a transfer of the Jews to a totally different, non-human category... or as the German would put it, unsereiner." Nazi scientists modernized this notion of non-human Jewry with the use of "scientific" terms. "Non Nordic man," wrote the authors of New Fundamental Problems of Racial Research, "occupies an intermediate zone between Nordic man and the animal kingdom," and is worthy of extermination. It worked. Christian women found "guilty" of fornicating with Jews were forced to stand on street corners with a sign around their neck identifying them as a sow. Interviews with Germans involved in Nazi massacres indicates that many felt no revulsion at the murders themselves but only at the messy carnage, a feeling they compared to working in a butcher shop.
Human beings magically transformed into animals are the stuff of fables and fairy tales. But racist propaganda is just that, tales told to frightened, foolish adults, and Hitler was the master storyteller. He first re-classified one of the world's oldest races as "sub-human" with the quasi-science of eugenics. Then he made this discovery "true" by forcing them into sty-like ghettoes and reducing the people into an animal-like subjugation. Once the transformation was complete, or close enough, his henchmen built a netherworld of slaughterhouses where the "Jewish pigs" were butchered and turned into products like soap and lampshades. But in the end it was not the Jews that Hitler's fantasy transformed into animals. It was the German people. In his famous study of Nazi atrocities, Violence without Moral Restraint, Herbert Kelman points out that when people dehumanize their victims in order to rationalize violence, it is they who become "increasingly dehumanized � until (they) lose the capacity to act as a moral being." Hitler must have forgotten that most fairy tales have notoriously moral endings.
You are reading an excerpt from In the Devil's Garden: A Sinful History of Forbidden Food. For more information-or to learn about the Spanish Inquisition's kosher "food sniffers"- please click here. .
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bumped into a Rabbi sitting of
the side of the road with some friends.
They had all been arguing about this man who claimed to be the Son of God and when the Rabbi recognized Jesus he decided to put Him to the test.
"If you are truly the Messiah," the skeptical Rabbi said to J.C., "then you can surely see what lies beneath this barrel next to me."
The Rabbi believed some pigs were napping there. Unbeknownst to him, however, the pigs had been replaced by his own son.
"Know and understand, Rabbi," said Jesus, "it is your firstborn son who sleeps there."
The Rabbi laughed out loud. "Some Messiah!" he and his friends sneered. "He can't even tell the difference between a pig and a child!"
Christ tried to convince the Rabbi of the Truth, but the Rabbi would not listen. So Christ simply turned the child into a pig and walked away.
And ever since then, the story goes, the Jew has refused to eat pork lest he consume his own offspring....
Then in the 13th century a curious image began to appear on the walls of German churches. It was of a pig nursing its young. Only instead of piglets suckling on the sow's teats, it was a group of Jewish boys. The image was called the judensau, or Jewish Pig, and it began to give official church sanction to the growing morass of anti-Semitic superstition, according to Claudine Fabre-Vasas' mesmerizing Le Bete Singuliere (The Singular Beast). Peasants came to believe that circumcision, then only performed by Jews, was actually a castration like the one performed on male pigs to keep their flesh edible. The pig castrators of the French Pyrenees adopted a uniform similar to that worn by the Hebrew mohel who performs the act of circumcision, including the mohel's trademark red silk belt. Cutting off part of the ear was a traditional way of marking a pig whose flesh was inedible. So peasants applied it to "inferior humans," like Jews, and the phrase "here's your father's ear" eventually became one of Europe's most popular anti-Semite jeers. The upside to this insanity was that it allowed the Romans to forego the ritual murder that had kicked off their Easter rites. The tradition had been to put an elderly Jewish man into a barrel lined with spikes and roll him down the side of Mount Testacio, according to Fabre-Vasas. By 1312 Jews were so associated with swine that a pair of pigs were substituted for the human, albeit only after being dressed in fine silk suits and driven in an elegant carriage to the mountaintop. The Roman Jewish community, of course, was forced to pay for the cost of the carriage.
The development of printing turned the judensau into "a forceful image which kept imprinting itself on the mind, conditioning, indeed stereotyping, an attitude towards Jews," according to Isaiah Shacher's study of the subject, The Judensau. The illustration became de rigeur for anti-Semitic tracts, but it also graced the covers of popular travel guides. This version, however, had been "improved" by the addition of an elderly rabbi who was pictured eating excrement jetting out of the
pig's rear. The father of Germany's Protestant revolution, Martin Luther, expounded upon this hateful bit of pornography in 1543. "The Rabbi," he wrote, "bows and stares with great attentiveness (into the pig's rectum) and into the Talmud as if he wanted to read something intricate and extraordinary... and the letters that fall from this (they) gobble down." Luther's "analysis" was embellished over the next few centuries. One best seller explained that in the past "pious Jews did not approve of the sow for eating (but) today the Jews ignore this and make her their mistress." Another used the judensau image as proof that "the sow is the brother to the Jews." The concept was such a hit in Germany that Christian house painters hid theimage on the walls of their Jewish customers by covering it with a layer of watery plaster that would eventually peel away and "miraculously" reveal the "true nature of Judaism."The kosher taboo against consuming blood underwent a similar metamorphosis, with anti-Semites claiming that Jews were actually obsessed the stuff because they used human blood in their religious ceremonies. The best stuff came from Christian children, a belief that became so deep rooted that rumors of Jews sacrificing Christian children was still causing riots among Polish-Americans in the 1920s. This cocktail of bigotry, fear and ignorance was unfortunately fortified by some Jewish dietary laws that limited communication between the two groups by not only banning the eating of non-kosher foods, but also any food even merely touched by a non-believer. Sharing wine between the religions was taboo, as was shared meals. "The Christians interpreted these ancient laws-formulated long before Christianity-as meaning that to a Jew everything Christian was unclean" wrote historian Will Durant, and retaliated by banning "Jews and harlots" from touching food in the market. Kosher meat could only be displayed in stalls selling diseased flesh.
These inversions of Hebraic food taboos would be laughable were their ramifications not so ghastly. "If it was impossible for men in the age of enlightenment and later to conceive of Jews as their fellow humans it was not just because of religious differences," wrote Shacher. "It seems clear that the judensau-honoring the Jew more or sometimes less humorously with porcine ancestry-had been contributing to a transfer of the Jews to a totally different, non-human category... or as the German would put it, unsereiner." Nazi scientists modernized this notion of non-human Jewry with the use of "scientific" terms. "Non Nordic man," wrote the authors of New Fundamental Problems of Racial Research, "occupies an intermediate zone between Nordic man and the animal kingdom," and is worthy of extermination. It worked. Christian women found "guilty" of fornicating with Jews were forced to stand on street corners with a sign around their neck identifying them as a sow. Interviews with Germans involved in Nazi massacres indicates that many felt no revulsion at the murders themselves but only at the messy carnage, a feeling they compared to working in a butcher shop.
Human beings magically transformed into animals are the stuff of fables and fairy tales. But racist propaganda is just that, tales told to frightened, foolish adults, and Hitler was the master storyteller. He first re-classified one of the world's oldest races as "sub-human" with the quasi-science of eugenics. Then he made this discovery "true" by forcing them into sty-like ghettoes and reducing the people into an animal-like subjugation. Once the transformation was complete, or close enough, his henchmen built a netherworld of slaughterhouses where the "Jewish pigs" were butchered and turned into products like soap and lampshades. But in the end it was not the Jews that Hitler's fantasy transformed into animals. It was the German people. In his famous study of Nazi atrocities, Violence without Moral Restraint, Herbert Kelman points out that when people dehumanize their victims in order to rationalize violence, it is they who become "increasingly dehumanized � until (they) lose the capacity to act as a moral being." Hitler must have forgotten that most fairy tales have notoriously moral endings.
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Politics of the Baguette |
The Erotic Patissier |
The Jewish Pig |
What People |
