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Author
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Comment
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neverossa
Registered
User
(12/9/05 7:16 am)
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the jew among the thorns
Hello, I'm working on an article on the ritual murder accusation and the starting point should be the Grimm's tale (The Jew among the thorns). Do you have any other ideas of similar tales across European culture? I think there must be something inside the Russian tradition.
Thanks a lot for every suggestion!
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Veronica Schanoes
Registered
User
(12/9/05 9:27 am)
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ritual murder
You mean accusations of murdering people as part of religious rites? In the second-to-last chapter of
Ulysses
Stephen Dedalous sings an anti-semitic song to Leo Bloom, about a Jewish girl who lures a little gentile boy into her house and then kills him (as we do). I don't know the history of the song, but I bet some of the Joyce scholars out there have traced it out.
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neverossa
Registered
User
(12/9/05 12:11 pm)
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ritual murder
Hi Veronica,
yes I know that part of the Ulysses - it's related to Little Hugh a boy found killed in the thirteenth century on which there's also a story in Chaucer and the ballad in Childe (the one told to Bloom).
I've almost all the historical informations (I can't use anyway Joyce, 'cause I'm not working on literature, just folklore and history) - I'm only looking for folk tales very similar to the Grimm's one - I'll use them as an introduction. About the little martyrs (William of Norwich, Hugh of Lincoln, Simon of Trento) there's a wide literature and lore but what I miss is not a tale on the victim, but one (just a folk-tale for the "reality" of the accusation I think I've read almost all) on the alleged murderer. The thorns in the tale are important because they drew blood, just like the Jewish people were supposed to do in medieval and early modern times. I was thinking of Russian tradition, because in eastern Europe the accusations lasted until the nineteenth century. I think Kiev (and Damasco, but it's no more Europe) was one of the last place in which a Jew was accused.
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Van45us
Registered
User
(12/9/05 12:44 pm)
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Re: ritual murder
It's because of "myths" like these that the German (and plenty of other Europeans) people were ready to let 6 million die. Even until recently Catholic priests were spreading stories like this in eastern Europe, and the church even apolgized for it.
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Midori
Unregistered User
(12/9/05 12:51 pm)
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Long Lankin
There is an interesting parallel here to the ballads of Long Lankin...a sort of dark mysterious fey who charms the serving girl to hand over a baby and with a silver bowl beneath "prick and prick him til the blood flows."
I wonder if the song is as much about the fear of the "Other" as it is about a fear of the Jews. Are there indeed other narratives with the same structure but different surface images?
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Midori
Unregistered User
(12/9/05 12:52 pm)
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second thought
I had a second thought just as I was sending this...have you looked at the AT for other variants? Both as tale type and as motif?
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Veronica Schanoes
Registered
User
(12/9/05 1:15 pm)
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interesting...
Very interesting indeed. I wonder if the thorns have any resonance with Christ being forced to wear a crown of thorns?
I didn't know if that Ulysses song was a genuine ballad/folk song or not, but I figured it must be.
If you don't mind me taking you a little off-topic, I usually find your research questions fascinating--is this part of your larger project re: blood? How does it fit in?
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Don
Registered
User
(12/9/05 1:35 pm)
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Re: second thought
Since you're starting with Grimms' tale, you'll probably need to know that two written sources from the early 17th century that the Grimms used as the basis of this tale depicted not a Jew but a monk. The monk became a Jew based on two contemporary oral versions the Grimms encountered, which differed from the tale they printed in other respects.
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neverossa
Registered
User
(12/9/05 2:18 pm)
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monk, motifs, blood
Don thanks a lot: that's what I needed to know. Do you know where can I find the variants?
Midori: yes I checked the index. Mostly for blood, it's full of it. I'll check the ballads. The fear of the other goes together with the Jew: the Jew is "the other" - but this would be a very long discourse...
Veronica: that's what happened. I wrote the first draft of the first chapter and it ended that I wrote too much about Jews and medieval times. So I'm going to cut that part, but saving it for an article (on which I'll work in summer, now I can just collect material, I'm working hard on the rest of the research). Just I wanted to start it with folklore and I thought about the Grimm's tale.
The connection between the monk and the Jew is striking and sounds very familiar to me: in the early modern after the Reform, the catholics gained many of the tracts of the Jews in protestant countries (and viceversa).
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