Journal for the Study of Antisemitism

200 JOURNAL FOR THE STUDY OF ANTISEMITISM [ VOL. 1:187
they pray in autumn at their great feast” (Oi¸steanu 1999, 197). The black
magic theme is exemplified in the stories of “The Magic Ring” and “The
Magic Lock.”
There was once an old Jew who was a great magician. The magician
could raise a mountain, but he could not get at the treasure inside it, for
the burden of his sin was so great that the mountain would not let him
enter. So he found a peasant lad who performed this task for him. In the
mountain, the peasant lad found precious gems, huge stones, which his
father wanted to sell on his own account. When the peasant lad entered
the city, a Jew immediately came up to him and cried, “Farmer, anything
to sell, anything to barter?” “Not a lot, but something,” said the peasant,
and received more than a thousand for his stones. The Jewish magician
tried to get back the magic lock taken from him by the boy. But even the
three giants bound to do the sorcerer’s bidding expressed reservations
about obeying his commands. “What does the accursed Jew want from
us?” said the three giants, for they were angry at having to obey the
villain.
Invariably, the Jew was seen as a malady—a bacteria or virus that was
contagious. Spending any time with The Jew made a person vulnerable to
the ways of The Jew. Like the bite of a vampire, contact with The Jew
could leave a victim weak-willed. Such viral Jewishness knew no bounds.
During Russia’s and Poland’s presidential campaigns, opponents were
accused of having “Jewish” thoughts or a Jewish family member in their
background. Such traits could undermine the current social order with openness
to new ideas.
A contaminable social disease, The Jew was to be contained, killed, or
expelled from the social body. The Nazi documentary film The Eternal Jew
(1940) depicts Aryans living healthily, whereas rich Jews reside by choice
in bug-infested and dirty homes. In real life, containment took the form of
ghettoizing, from the streets of Italy to Russia’s Pale, from France’s Villejuif
to India’s Cochin and England’s Jew Town.
Dirty Jewish blood was believed to poison wells. Law affirmed the
social fantasy such that the “dirty Jew” (Dundes 1997) was banned from
German public swimming pools and quarantined during the typhus and
cholera epidemics of 1892 (Markel 1999). These untermenschen, contaminating
creatures (Clendinen 1999), sometimes were simply poison (Glass
1997). Such antisemitic legends continue to excite the social imagination
(Matard-Bonucci 2005; Mayo 1988).
Where The Jews were not magical, or disease-carrying, or the Devil,
they were simply pigs. Judensau (jew/pig) iconography still adorns several
European cathedrals. Tales of the Judensau abound.