The figure of the sow’s tail pleased him so well that he again used it later in the same year in his “Vom Schem Hamphoras.” There he alludes to the piece of sculpture which had originally supplied him with the idea: “Here, at Wittenberg, outside our parish church there is a sow chiselled in the stone; under her are piglets and little Jews all sucking; behind the sow stands a Rabbi, who lifts, with his right hand the sow’s hind leg and with his left her tail, and is intently engaged poring over the Talmud under the sow’s tail, as though he wished to read and bring to light something especially clever. That is a real image of Schem Hamphoras.... For of the sham wise man we Germans say: Where did he read that? To speak coarsely, in the rear parts of a sow.”[941]
The “devil” also is drawn into the fray the better to enable Luther to vent his ire against the Jews. At the end of the passage just quoted he says: “For the devil has entered into the Jews and holds them captive so that perforce they do his will, as St. Paul says, mocking, defaming, abusing and cursing God and everything that is His.... The devil plays with them to their eternal damnation.”[942]—And elsewhere: “Verily a hopeless, wicked, venomous and devilish thing is the existence of these Jews, who for fourteen hundred years have been, and still are, our pest, torment and misfortune. In fine, they are just devils and nothing more, with no feeling of humanity for us heathen. This they learn from their Rabbis in those devils’ aeries which are their schools.”[943]—“They are a brood of vipers and the children of the devil, and are as kindly disposed to us as is the devil their father.”[944]—“The Turk and the other heathen do not suffer from them what we Christians do from these malignant snakes and imps.... Whoever would like to cherish such adders and puny devils—who are the worst enemies of Christ and of us all—to befriend them and do them honour simply in order to be cheated, plundered, robbed, disgraced and forced to howl and curse and suffer every kind of evil, to him I would commend these Jews. And if this be not enough let him tell the Jew to use his mouth as a privy, or else crawl into the Jew’s hind parts and there worship the holy thing, so as afterwards to be able to boast of having been merciful, and of having helped the devil and his progeny to blaspheme our dear Lord.”[945] The last clause would appear to have been aimed at the Counts of Mansfeld, who had allowed a large number of Jews to settle in Eisleben, Luther’s birthplace.
The temporal happiness which the Jews looked for under the reign of their Messias, Luther graphically compares to the felicity of a sow: “For the sow lies as it were on a feather-bed whether in the street or on the manure-heap; she rests secure, grunts contentedly, sleeps soundly, fears neither lord nor king, neither death nor hell, neither devil nor Divine anger.... She has no thought of death until it is upon her.... Of what use would the Jews’ Messias be to me if he could not help poor me against this great and horrible dread and misfortune [the fear of death], nor make my life a tenth part as happy as that of the sow? I would much rather say: Dear God Almighty, keep Your Messias for Yourself, or give him to those who want him; as for me, change me into a sow. For it is better to be a live pig than a man who is everlastingly dying.”[946]
Such passages as the above are frequently to be met with in Luther’s writings against the Jews. In them his object plainly was to confute the misinterpretation of the Bible and the scoffing objections to which Jewish scholars were given. Yet so utterly ungovernable was the author’s passion that it spoiled the execution of his noble task. He scarcely knew how to conduct a controversy without introducing sows, devils and such like.
Was it really to Luther’s credit that the sty should loom so large in his struggle with his foes?
Duke George he scolds as the “Dresden pig,” and Dr. Eck as “Pig-Eck”; the latter Luther promises to answer in such a way “that the sow’s belly shall not be too much inflated.”[947] The Bishops of the Council of Constance who burnt Hus are “boars”; the “bristles of their backs rise on end and they whet their snouts.”[948] Erasmus “carries within him a sow from the herd of Epicurus.”[949] The learned Catholics of the Universities are hogs and donkeys decked out in finery, whom God has sent to punish us; these “devils’ masks, the monks and learned spectres, from the Schools we have endowed with such huge wealth, many of the doctors, preachers, masters, priests and friars are big, coarse, corpulent donkeys, decked out with hoods red and brown, like the market sow in her glass beads and tinsel chains.”[950]
The same simile is, of course, employed even more frequently of the peasants. “To-day the peasants are the merest hogs, whilst the people of position, who once prided themselves on being bucks, are beginning to copy them.”[951]—The Papists have “stamped the married state under foot”; their clergy are “like pigs in the fattening-pen,” “they wallow in filth like the pig in his sty.”[952]—The Papists are fed up by their literary men, as befits such pigs as they. “Eat, piggies, eat! This is good for you.”[953]—We Germans are “hopeless pigs.”[954]
Henry of Brunswick is “as expert in Holy Writ as a sow is on the harp.” Let him and his Papists confess that they are “verily the devil’s whore-church.”[955] “You should not write a book,” Luther tells him, “until you have heard an old sow s——; then you should open your jaws and say: Thank you, lovely nightingale, now I have the text I want. Stick to it; it will look fine printed in a book against the Scripturists and the Elector; but have it done at Wolfenbüttel. Oh, how they will have to hold their noses!”[956]
Another favourite image, which usually accompanies the sow, is provided by the donkey. Of Clement VII. and one of his Bulls Luther says: “The donkey pitched his bray too high and thought the Germans would not notice it.”[957] Of Emser and the Catholic Professors he writes: “Were I ignorant of logic and philosophy you rude asses would be after setting yourselves up as logicians and philosophers, though you know as much about the business as a donkey does about music.”[958] Of Alveld the Franciscan he says: “The donkey does not understand music, he must rather be given thistles.”[959] The fanatics too, naturally, could not expect to escape. All that Luther says of heavenly things is wasted upon them. “They understand it as little as the donkey does the Psalter.”[960]