Journal for the Study of Antisemitism

2009] WHEN FAIRY TALES KILL 201
A rabbi was arguing with his friends whether or not Christ was the Messiah
and met Jesus. “If you are truly the Messiah then you can surely see
what lies beneath this barrel next to me,” the skeptical rabbi said. (The
rabbi thought some pigs were napping there but the pigs had been
replaced by his own son.) When Jesus told him that it was his son, the
rabbi sneered, so Christ turned the son into a pig and walked away.
In several European areas, butchers renamed the most succulent part of
the pig the “damsel” or “Jewess.” Several provinces in Germany created a
“cloven foot tax” for Jewish visitors. In court, Jews were required to tell the
truth while standing on the flayed skin of a sow or swearing on their
mother’s body. If declared guilty, Jews were hung upside-down as a butchered
hog. Pig castrators in the Pyrenees adopted the uniform of the Jewish
mohel (circumciser) (Allen 2002). The link between Jew and pig would
continue up to pre-Third Reich times, when women who had intercourse
with male Jews wore signs declaring themselves pigs (Allen 2002) (see
Felsenstein 1995; Wistrich 2002, 2010).
Conversion from Judaism to Catholicism was no guarantee against
Jewish ways. Many Jews were forcibly converted to Catholicism, though as
early as 1598, the converso or marrano/pig was synonymous with infidel
and renegado. Suspicion that the converso/marrano was secretly a Jew is
depicted in “The Bloody Children of the Jews.”
Duke Bogislav of Pomerania was among those who expelled the Jews,
many of whom at that time were living at Damm near Stettin, at Bart, and
in all the small towns in the country. Among these Jews there were a man
and a woman who had themselves baptized. The Duke allowed them to
stay, and they moved to the vicinity of Lake Trieb. However, their baptism
was only for the sake of appearance, and in reality they remained
Jews. For this reason, they were visibly punished by God. Every time the
woman gave birth to a child, it came to the earth with a bloody hand.
Because the Christian women observed this, everyone shied away from
them, and no one wanted to have anything to do with them. Therefore the
Jew and his wife moved away from Lake Trieb, first to Lassahn, and then
to Usedom. But the curse followed them wherever they went, until they
finally underwent a spiritual conversion and confessed that previously
they had remained Jews in their hearts.
Most frightening is the lack of separation between social fantasy and
murderous reality. Indicative of the phenomenon are the antisemitic shrines
to Jewish malevolence (see Antisemitica), but more horrific are the actual
numbers of Jews killed due to Christian and Muslim folklore (see identified
myth and death toll in Tables 1 and 2).
In the social mind, Jews conspire, and plot, and ready themselves to