An anti-Semitic sculpture from the Middle Ages may remain on the facade of a church in eastern Germany, the country’s highest court ruled on Tuesday, in response to a lawsuit that argues that the display of the piece is an insult to the entire community. Jewish population.
The “Judensau”, or “Jewish sow”, is a 13th-century piece of sandstone displayed in a church in Wittenberg, in the east of the country, that features a caricature of a rabbi lifting the tail of a sow while two Jewish children suckle. on the animal’s teats. In Judaism, pigs are considered unclean.
The sculpture is one of about two dozen similar pieces from the Middle Ages that are still displayed in churches around Germany and elsewhere in Europe.
On Tuesday, Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court rejected an appeal and upheld the lower court rulings that dismissed the Wittenberg case, saying the work does not violate laws. For Justice, the play became a memorial of the Church’s anti-Semitic attitudes over the centuries.
That’s because the church that exhibits the sculpture installed, in 1988, a bronze plaque under the anti-Semitic work with a frame contextualizing the piece and remembering the 6 million Jews who died in the Holocaust. The installation took place on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Crystal Night, when Jewish properties were burned and destroyed in Nazi Germany.
In response to the Supreme Court’s decision, the Central Council of Jews, the nation’s ethnic federation, said it understands the court’s decision, but that the 1988 plaque with the explanation does not have sufficient impact, and the Church must recognize his guilt for centuries of anti-Semitism.
“The church’s defamation of Jews must be in the past once and for all,” said Council President Josef Schuster.
Wittenberg is the city where Martin Luther is said to have nailed his theses challenging Catholicism to a church door in 1517, which led to the Protestant Reformation in Germany. The Stadtkirche church, which exhibits anti-Semitic work, is the same church where Luther preached.
