12. In the early 13th century, Judensau began to be depicted on German churches
When you hear the word ‘folk-art’, you probably think of cute ceramics and naive wood-carvings sold by ageing hippies. But folk-art of the past could take many horrible forms, none more so than the German tradition of the Judensau (‘Jew’s Sow’). Seizing on the Jewish prohibition about eating pork (Leviticus 11:2-8), the Judensau depicted Jewish people in obscene contact with a pig, either copulating with it or sucking its teats (or both, as in the depiction above). These offensive images were displayed outside of churches, cathedrals, and even ghettoes, to let the Jews know how much they were despised.
The pig had a dual meaning in the original Judensau images. As well as being horribly offensive to Jews, mingling accusations of bestiality with an unclean animal, medieval Christianity saw pigs as beasts of Satan. For when Jesus banished demons out of a possessed man, they instantly possessed a herd of swine, which promptly jumped off a cliff (Mark 5:1-20). The Judensau returned after several hundred years with the rise of the Nazis and their antisemitic propaganda in the 1920s, and the porcine insult morphed into the modern idiom of a pig equating to a dirty individual.
