IX. THE JEW IN FOLK-LORE.

It is related in the Legenda Aurea of John Capgrave that St. Brendain, on his famous voyage, came to an island filled with beautiful birds whose music entranced the souls of listeners. The birds told the saint that they had been angels; when the rebel angels plotted their designs in heaven they had been tempted by the Archfiend to join his party; they did not yield, but dallied with the temptation, and when the wicked beings were cast into the sea of fire, they were transformed into birds. They sang hymns of joy, awaiting their release.

On the other hand, the ill-omened “Seven Whistlers” or “Seven Plovers,” of English superstition are said to have been Jews who assisted in the crucifixion of Jesus.

These birds are types of the fables that flitted about the world in the Middle Ages, each the transformation and diminution of their like which had been set free by the decay of both European and Jewish mythology. Christianity had preserved both with care. The Jewish mythology it had disintegrated and recombined for its own supernatural authentication; to the European deities it had given a new lease of life by degrading them to devils, affirming their power to haunt and harm their former worshippers. If there had been any kindly attributes or pleasant tales associated with these deities they were transferred to the Christian saints; if any evils had been told of such, they were intensified under the sweeping anathema of the new religion.

Into this miasmatic atmosphere anti-Semitic prejudice and theology were diffused. The same process as that just mentioned concerning “paganism” presently overtook the Jews. When all hope of changing or exterminating it had passed away the theological theory was naturally formed by which all the good in the Jewish system was transferred to Christianity, and everything repulsive was diabolised. Unfortunately for the Jews their anathema came later than that which had degraded the deities and beliefs of pagan Europe; their sacred forms, rites, superstitions were the more vivid; so that the fading phantoms of European mythology were able to acquire new life by union with the fresher ones imported from the East. In this way the demons, gnomes, witches, which, from representing the majesty as well as the menace of nature, had been doomed to bear responsibility for all its cruelties, now came to nestle with the Jews. These were already the normal scapegoat for the fall of man and martyrdoms of Christians; now there entered into them a troop of imaginary horrors worse than any known to their most barbarous days. Of these a few characteristic examples may be selected from the very large number known to every student of folk-lore.

The periodical assemblies of witches believed to occur in various wild places were called “Witches’ Sabbaths,” because Jews were supposed to be the chief attendants at them. They there received their wages for supporting the kingdom of Antichrist. They celebrated a grand mass before the Devil. The blood of Christian children was said to be essential to their sacrifices. In some regions where, under the ancient religion, the effigy of winter had been burnt on one or another day of spring, it became the custom to burn it on Good Friday and under the name of Judas. The ceremony of scourging and burning Judas still takes place annually in the London Docks. In Spain it is considered necessary to spit after pronouncing the word “Jew;” and from that country the paganised effigies of that people have spread through distant regions of the world. In some regions (as Oldenberg) the birthday of poor everlasting Judas is said to be February 14, in others (as Franconia) it is fixed as April 1, and these days are unlucky. The stigma of Iscariot passed upon certain trees, as the aspen, which was said to tremble perpetually because he hung upon it; and the Judas-tree, with its blood-drop blossoms. In the Bergstrasse, or high road between Darmstadt and Heidelberg, the peasantry still believe that every Jew possesses the “evil eye,” and that if a sick person wishes to die swiftly he must get a Rabbi to pray for his convalescence. In sundry places Jews are believed able to foretell the weather by means of dividing a loaf of bread, putting the parts together again, and shoving it with a mysterious word into an oven. They are also believed to spread diseases by spells written in Hebrew on bits of paper, and to deal in such charms. In some regions noises heard in mines were indifferently attributed to kobolds, or to the ghosts of Jews believed to have been made to work in them as slaves by the Romans. In East Friesland it is considered very unlucky to meet a Jew first in the morning; if a Jew is the first to enter one’s house on Monday, or even to look into the window, it renders the whole week unlucky to the house, and was once an offence that might be prosecuted.⁠[25] Other Jews impaled in the ever-repeated Christian legend took on, in the popular imagination, the diabolical forms into which the pagan deities had been degraded by missionaries. In storms Herod was said still to hunt the Innocents. The Perigord peasant names the fierce thunderstorm “la chasse Herode.” This was probably an ingenious development of the Herr-Rote, or Haar-Rote, the red-haired demon-huntsman. Associated with him was Herodias. Grimm says that the Italians sometimes identify their misshapen fairy Befana—a terror to children, who has sprung out of Epiphania—as Herod’s daughter (Salome); so that both mother and daughter were made into evil wanderers.⁠[26] Herodias, who prompted her daughter to demand the head of John the Baptist, was associated with Diana and Holda in the nocturnal expeditions of demons and witches. She was at the head of an aerial host of such. Only from midnight to cockcrow can she rest, and then sits upon oaks and hazel-trees. She was said to have an unrequited passion for John, and when his head was brought in on a charger would have kissed it, but it recoiled and blew upon her, and she was whirled into the air, where she wanders. In Lower Saxony whirlwinds are accounted for by the dancing of Herodias, as elsewhere to that of the devil. Herod and Herodias are said by Josephus to have been banished to Lyons, and eventually to have died in Spain; perhaps this may account for the special prominence she holds in the folk-lore of Spanish America. In Mexico the puppet Herodias dances in a kind of Punch and Judy show in Holy Week, to the music of rattles made of “Judas bones.” In Eugene Sue’s Wandering Jew Herodias appears in Arctic America. M. Gaston Paris cites several Italian proverbs in which Judas and Malchus are united (as in Sicily, lu Juda—Marcu) to characterise an ugly or unpleasant countenance. It has been thought (though I have not investigated the matter) that our puppet-show, Punch and Judy, is a distant outcome of an old play, Pontius cum Judæis, in which the Jews were severely handled by the pro-consul.