Pages

Tuesday, June 16, 2020

Slave-owner statues are terrible. Statues of Jews having sex with pigs are historic.

From TheJC:

A German medieval church has reinstated an antisemitic sculpture depicting a Jewish male in an obscene pose with a pig after a local authority ruled that the object had protected status.

The church, in the town of Calbe, 45 miles northwest of Leipzig, is one of 30 religious buildings in Germany to have a Judensau – ‘Jew-sow’ – sculpture which dates back to the Middle Ages, when antisemitism was rife in the country.

After the carving was taken down to be restored, the parish decided in March that it was too offensive to return to the buttress and should be hung elsewhere.

But this move has been shelved after the listed buildings authority in the Salzland district decided the sculpture was part of  the history of St Stephen’s church history.

In a compromise, the sculpture was restored to its perch, but will remain covered up until the authority decides what to do with it.

Alfred Reichenberger of the Saxony Anhalt office for monument protection said: “Of course everyone involved is entirely clear that this is an abusive caricature that needs to be dealt with critically.

“There just seems to be disagreement about how to do that.”

Here is the Kalbe Judensau, showing the Jew and the pig in a sexual act.

calbe

 

For hundreds of years, this – and dozens more – of these obscene sculptures have been publicly visible in Europe.

This one, in Bad Wimpfen Ritterstiftskirche St. Peter, has spikes on it – to protect it from being defecated on by birds. Because, after all, that would be terrible.

judensau

 

Here’s the thing: None of the people who swear up and down that they are disgusted by antisemitism and racism and bigotry are taking hammers and ladders to smash these statues to bits.

They are taking down and defacing statues of people who might have owned slaves or represented a political ideology that people oppose, but these statues and sculptures are specifically meant to send a message that Jews are subhuman, disgusting people. The other statues are not inherently offensive, but they remind people of offensive things; these sculptures were created for only one purpose – to offend Jews and to tell Christians how terrible Jews are.

Where are the social justice warriors who are so offended by Winston Churchill? Where are the people with ropes and sledgehammers and ladders who are so eager to take down other statues but who have no problem living with pure antisemitic images in their midst?

The answer is that even the people who claim to be disgusted by antisemitism, aren’t. Jews are expected to be too civilized to take a sledgehammer to these statues and people who claim to love Jews don’t love Jews that much.

That is the lesson that Jews can take from this. It is easy to say one is offended by antisemitism, but there are very few that are willing to act on it.