Since 1305 it adorns the facade of the church of St. Mary of Wittenberg
The German Supreme Court today rejected the lawsuit that demanded the removal of a “Judensau” from the church of Santa Maria de Wittenberg, the relief of an anti-Semitic sow that has adorned the facade of the temple in which the reformer Martin Luther used to preach since the Middle Ages. . Dating from 1305, it is a slab with a carved relief of a sow suckling Jewish children, while a rabbi lifts his tail to look at his behind. “Wittenberg sow” is an insult, but the Protestant religious community that houses the church has clearly distanced itself from its meaning, the judges ruled. By placing a plaque explaining the origin of the “Judensau”, church officials have turned a “monument of ignominy” into a “warning memorial”, the court stressed.
A Jewish plaintiff demanded the removal of the relief from the facade of the church in Wittenberg and went to the Supreme Court after failing with his demand in all the lower instances. The case had acquired a special relevance due to the fact that the church of Santa María is considered the mother house of the Protestant reform, since Martin Luther (1483-1546), a notorious anti-Semite, preached there. The current community of faithful recognizes that the “Wittenberg sow” is “a very complicated heritage, but also a historical document.” The president of the sixth chamber of the German Supreme Court, Judge Stephan Seiters, had highlighted during the oral hearing two weeks ago that the relief itself is “anti-Semitism engraved in stone.”
However, its offensive character and contrary to the law can be overcome, not only by removing the sculpture from the building’s façade, but also by “distancing itself from it and contextualizing” its meaning, the judges pointed out in their sentence. A clear explanation of its historical and religious significance, such as the one that was placed on the façade of the church in the 1980s, aims to stand up to “the marginalization, hatred and defamation” that the relief originally pursued. The Protestant parish lawyers stressed that the plaque placed to explain the origin of the relief and denounce its offensive nature had been agreed upon with the Wittenberg Jewish community. Among other things, he points out that reliefs such as the one in the church of Santa María were common in the Middle Ages and that in all of Germany there are still about 50 on the facades of as many churches.
The president of the Jewish Central Council in Germany, Josef Schuster, stressed that it is always better to place plaques explaining the meaning of such reliefs than to remove them and thus ignore and forget them. Schuster pointed out that there are other positive examples in the cathedral of Regensburg or the collegiate church of St. Peter in Bad Wimpfen. The highest representative of German Jews stressed, however, that both the Catholic and Protestant churches have a long anti-Semitic history, which is very difficult to repair.
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