From facial appearance to customs: this brings us to the Jewish enemy who kills young children and drinks their blood. He appears very early, for example, in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, where there is a story, much like that of Saint Simonino of Trento, of a young boy seized while passing through the Jewish quarter while singing “O alma redemptoris mater.” His throat is slashed and his body thrown into a pit.
The Jew who kills young children and drinks their blood has a very complex genealogy: the same model existed earlier in Christianity, in the creation of the enemy within—the heretic. A single example is enough:
In the evening, when we light the lamps and commemorate the passion, they take young girls initiated into their secret rites to a particular house, they snuff out their lamps as they wish no one to witness the indecencies about to take place, and give vent to their licentious practices on whomever it might be, even upon sister or daughter. Indeed they believe they are pleasing the demons by violating the divine laws that forbid union with those of the same blood. Once the ritual is over, they return home and wait for nine months to pass: when the time comes for the godless children to be born of a godless seed, they assemble once again in the same place. Three days after the birth, they seize the wretched children from their mothers, cut their tender limbs with a sharp blade, fill cups with the blood that spurts forth, burn the newborns while they are still breathing by throwing them on a pyre. Then they mix blood and ash in cups to obtain a horrible concoction with which they contaminate food and drink, secretly, like someone poisoning mead. Such is their communion. (Michele Psello, De operatione daemonum, eleventh century)
The enemy is sometimes seen as different and ugly because he belongs to a lower class. In The Iliad, Thersites (“crooked, lame in one foot; his shoulders rounded and bent over his chest; his head pointed and sprouting tufts of hair,” book 2, line 212) is socially inferior to Agamemnon and Achilles, and is therefore jealous of them. There is little difference between Thersites and Edmondo de Amicis’s character Franti in his novel Cuore (Heart, 1886): whereas Odysseus attacks Thersites, drawing blood, society punishes Franti with imprisonment.
(25 October): And beside him there’s a tough, cheeky-looking fellow called Franti who has already been expelled from another school . . . (21 January): Only one boy could laugh while Derossi was talking about the king’s funeral, and that was Franti. I hate him. He’s evil. When a father comes to school to reprimand his son, [Franti] thinks it’s funny; when a boy cries, he laughs. He’s frightened of Garrone, and thumps the builder’s son because he’s small; he torments Crossi as his arm is paralyzed; he taunts Precossi, whom everyone likes; he even pokes fun at Robetti, in the second year, who walks on crutches after having saved a young child. He goads everyone who’s weaker than him, and when it comes to blows, he gets vicious and hurts people. There’s something repulsive about that low forehead, those dark eyes, which he keeps half-hidden beneath the peak of his waxed cotton cap. He fears nothing, laughs in the teacher’s face, steals when he can, lies brazenly, is always arguing with someone, brings large pins to school to prick his classmates, he rips buttons off his jacket and off those of other boys, and plays with them, and his school bag, exercise books, textbooks are all crumpled, torn, dirty, his ruler dented, his pen chewed, his nails raw, his clothes creased and torn from fighting . . . The teacher sometimes pretends not to see his mischief, and that makes him worse. When he tried to treat him kindly, he insulted him; when he scolded him, he covered his face with his hands, as if he were crying, and he was laughing.
The born criminal and the prostitute are obvious examples of ugliness, due to their social position. But with the prostitute we enter another world, that of sexual enmity or what might be called sexual racism. For the male who dominates and writes, or by writing dominates, the woman has always been portrayed with hostility from the earliest times. Let us not be deceived by angelic descriptions of women. On the contrary, precisely because great literature is dominated by sweet, gentle creatures, the world of satire—which is that of the popular imagination—continually demonizes the woman, from antiquity, through the Middle Ages, and up to modern times. From antiquity, I will limit myself to one example from Martiaclass="underline" “You, Vetustilla, who have outlived three hundred consuls; you have but three hairs and four teeth and have the chest of a grasshopper, the legs and color of an ant. You walk about with a forehead more wrinkled than your gown and breasts like cobwebs . . . Your eyesight is like that of owls in the morning and you smell like he-goats; your buttocks are like those of a withered duck’s bottom . . . Only the funeral torch can penetrate this vagina” (Epigrams, book 3, no. 93).
And who could be the author of this passage? “The female is an imperfect animal, stirred by a thousand passions that are disagreeable and loathsome even to think about, let alone to discuss . . . No other animal is less clean than she: not even the pig, wallowing in mud, is as ugly as they are, and if anyone should wish to deny this, let him examine their parts, let him search out the secret places where, in shame, they hide the fearful instruments with which they remove their superfluous humors.” If someone as irreligious and bawdy as Giovanni Boccaccio (in The Crow) could think such a thing, then imagine what a medieval moralist must have thought and written to emphasize the Pauline principle that, if such temptation could be avoided, it would be better never to experience the pleasures of the flesh. The churchman Odo of Cluny recalled in the tenth century that
the beauty of the body is only skin-deep. If men could see beneath the flesh, with the power of the Boeotian lynx to penetrate visually within, they would be nauseated just to look at women, for all this feminine charm is nothing but phlegm, blood, humors, gall. Consider what is hidden in the nostrils, in the throat, in the stomach: everywhere, filth . . . and we are repelled to touch vomit and ordure even with our fingertips. How then can we ever want to embrace what is merely a sack of excrement! (Collationes, book 3, chapter 133, col. 556 and 648)
From what might be called this “normal misogyny” we come to the creation of the witch, a masterpiece of modern civilization. The witch was certainly also known in classical antiquity, and I will mention only the witches in Apuleius’s Golden Ass and in Horace: “I myself saw Candia, wrapped in a black gown, barefooted and hair disheveled, howling with the elder Sagana. Pallor had rendered both of them horrible to behold” (Satires, book 1, no. 8). But in antiquity, as in the Middle Ages, witches and wizards were generally linked to popular beliefs and were thought to represent fairly infrequent instances of possession. Rome at the time of Horace did not feel threatened by witches, and witchcraft in the Middle Ages was still regarded as a phenomenon of autosuggestion—in other words, the witch was someone who believed she was a witch, as the ninth-century Canon episcopi stated:
Certain depraved women, having turned to Satan and been led astray by his illusions and seductions, believe and claim they have ridden certain beasts at night, in the company of a multitude of women, following Diana . . . Priests must constantly preach to God’s people that these things are all raised in the minds of the faithful not by the divine spirit but by the force of evil. Satan, in fact, is transformed into an angel of light and takes possession of the mind of these poor women and rules over them due to their lack of faith and their incredulity.