German church’s ‘Jew pig’ sculpture can stay in place, judges decide
The 13th-century engraving, known widely as Judensau, has been denounced by campaigners as antisemitic
Michael Daventry is Jewish News’s foreign and broadcast editor
Germany’s top court has ruled that a 700-year-old antisemitic statue can stay upon a church where the Protestant theologian Martin Luther once preached.
The 13th century sandstone relief, the subject of a long-running dispute, depicts three young Jews drinking from a sow’s teats while a rabbi lifts her tail and hind-legs to inspect her backside for omens.
Widely known as Judensau, or “Jew pig”, it is placed four metres above ground level on St Mary’s Church in Wittenberg, a town 90 kilometres southwest of Berlin.
The Federal Court of Justice said that while the statue “derides and denigrates Judaism as a whole”, the church had remedied the situation by adding a memorial explaining its historical background.
“The legal system does not require its removal” despite its defamatory nature, the court added.
Michael Düllmann, who filed the case and has campaigned for years to relocate the Wittenberg statue to a nearby museum, told the German news agency dpa that the courts “[never] really took seriously the propaganda effect, the poisoning effect on society”.
Germany’s main Jewish group has argued that the memorial beneath the sculpture should be reworded.
Josef Schuster, who leads the Central Council of Jews, said Tuesday’s federal court decision to allow the stay to remain in place was “understandable” but added the memorial needed a stronger condemnation of antisemitism.
A bishop for the region, Friedrich Kramer, indicated the church might support a change to the memorial.
He told the AP news agency: “For us as a church, there can be no question that we face our history with all its misdeeds, and our handling of it.”
Lower courts ruled against Düllmann in 2019 and 2020, saying the statue did not constitute an offence.
At least 20 similar sculptures dating from the Middle Ages are known to exist on churches around Germany.
Wittenberg is the town where Martin Luther is said to have nailed his theses challenging Catholicism to a church door in 1517 — an act that led to the Protestant Reformation in Germany.
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