JOURNALfor the STUDYof ANTISEMITISM

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their alleged crimes, which included accusations of host desecration and
deicide.
The Jews were believed to have two ways to eliminate the smell, one
of which involved murder and cannibalism; it was said that Jews killed
Christian children to obtain their blood for ritual purposes, one of which
was said to occur during the Passover Seder. It was alleged that Jews consumed
cups of this blood as a way to alleviate the Jewish stench. The other
choice was acceptance of baptism. A direct quote from the time states that
“the water of baptism carried off the Jews’ odor” and that this left them
with a fragrance “sweeter than that of ambrosia floating upon the heads
touched by the sanctified oil.”
This accusation went beyond those expressed in the extreme anti-Jewish
rhetoric of Martin Luther, causing him to say, “So long as we use violence
and slander, saying that [the Jews] use the blood of Christians to get
rid of their stench . . ., what can we expect of them?” 10
Another discriminatory feature used by Wagner is that of vision. 11
Poor eyesight is a class attribute that was never applied to anyone but Jews.
The medieval view was that Jews were blind to Christianity, that the synagogue
was veiled. Statues of a blindfolded woman, an allegory representing
“the synagogue defeated,” still decorate churches in Europe; one stands
today in an alcove on the exterior of Strasbourg’s cathedral, and postcards
of it may be purchased at nearby shops. This notion eventually was concretized
as weak eyes, which, among other things, caused squinting and blinking,
characteristics that are found in the outsider. Wagner carried the idea of
good vision of the Volk to a higher dimension in suggesting that they recognize
each other by glance alone, and can “see” the outsider as being
different.
Finally, in The Ring, Wagner gives coded messages about the dangers
of race mixing. The character Hagen, who has a gnome father but a Volkish
mother, bears no good maternal characteristics. Instead, he retains the
depraved character of his father, namely that of a liar, usurper, and villainous
murderer. But his racially pure counterpart, Siegfried, the product of an
incestuous twin brother-sister relationship, is an idealized hero who is hand-
10. The statement appears in Martin Luther’s pamphlet, Dass Jesus ein
Geborner Jude Sei, and is contained in the online Jewish Encyclopedia article on
Martin Luther under the pamphlet’s title.
11. See Marc A. Weiner, Richard Wagner and the Anti-Semitic Imagination
(Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), chap. 1, “The Eyes of the
Volk.” Here, Weiner discusses the importance of vision as it appears in Wagner’s
antisemitic writings.