The medieval host desecration story generally follows this format:
A Jewish man (or sometimes a group of Jewish men) desires to procure a sacred host wafer or wafers, sometimes after having publicly doubted the sancitity of the host or the truth of the transubstantiation. The Jewish man finds a poor Christian woman, or a thief, or a poor priest, and pays him or her to steal the host from the church (sometimes the hired hand employs further stock characters in the plot).
Once he has the host, he takes it to his home, or to a temple, and, usually in a ritualistic manner, defiles the host in one or more ways. These include: stabbing the host, burning it, or tossing it into boiling water or oil. With each attempt, a miraculous incident occurs. This incident can include: songs of angels, strange lights, or the transformation of the host into a Christ-child. The Jewish man will sometimes injure himself in fear, which will later provide further evidence of his crime.
The Jewish man will attempt to hide the wafer, sometimes by breaking it into pieces and sending it to neighboring communities. He can hide it in wells, under floorboards or behind stones, in offal heaps, in rivers or streams, or underground. The wafer makes its location known to nearby Christians through further songs and miracles. Once discovered, the Christians will quickly capture the Jewish man, or his accomplices who will then implicate the Jewish man. The Jewish man will confess to the authorities, usually under torture. The authorities or the Christian community will execute the Jewish man, and sometimes his family, or they will force the family to convert. Very often the authorities, the church or the Christian community will slaughter the Jewish community, or force them to convert, or expel them from the city. The Jewish man (and the Jewish community's) property will be confiscated by the authorities or the church, his home and temple razed, and a chapel will be built at the location of the miracle.
Showing posts with label Host desecration. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Host desecration. Show all posts
Saturday, May 3, 2008
The Comedian
Isaac sent me the link to this video last night of comedian Dane Cook telling a story about an atheist. I’ll warn you, the ecstatic delight in violence and hate at the punchline disturbed me so much that I had trouble falling asleep.
But the story has some important thematic and structural similarities to the medieval host desecration stories told about Jews, which is a central element of Atheist.
Cook begins his story weaving this way and that, but the central thrust is that some jerk sneezed on him. It’s a failure of character we can all agree on: don’t sneeze on people. It’s gross, it’s uncivilized, and most importantly for the story, it shows a disdain for your fellow human beings. It’s crucial to assign the villain in these stories a universally agreed-upon flaw. It’s even more crucial to tie that flaw in the story to the central quality of the villain. In this story, the villain’s disdain is a direct result of his atheism.
In the host desecration story, the Jew is usually given some nasty quality that can be tied to his Jewishness. Avarice is old standard, also disdain, a violent temper, or deviousness. Whatever the flaw is, it has to bullseye the anxiety of the audience about the villain’s stock type. Since Jews in medieval Europe were often in the loan business (as that was the only trade they were allowed to practice), avarice worked neatly. When a Christian heard a story about a Jew paying a poor Christian to steal a host wafer, it fit in with fears of loss of financial control to these yamurkle-sporting fellows. It’s a nice trick that Cook doesn’t reveal his villain is an atheist until almost halfway through his story: it allows his listeners to connect “atheist” to “disdainful.”
Cook shows his Christian charity by restraining his anger and saying, “God bless you.” The villainous Atheist then reveals himself, showing contempt for the storyteller (and by extension, the audience). In the desecration stories, the reasoning behind the Jew’s theft of the host and violent acts upon it is often summed up in an overt statement about the credulity of Christians that believe the wafer to be Christ’s flesh. It allied the Christian listener to the teller (“Jews think you’re a fool”), making the later miracles and travesties plausible and acceptable. Cook allies the audience with himself in a similar manner through the “God Bless You” section. (“We all say, God Bless You! Atheists think you’re a fool!”).
As a side note, it’s at this point in the story where I suspect it’s, at best, a collection of different incidents collected into one story; or, at worst, a lie. Storytellers work in both manners, and that’s legit, except when the lie is offered as a true anecdote that we should act on. And I do think Cook is encouraging action, if not directly. But the story is suspect, if you think about it: Notice there’s no location given? It’s somewhere where the Atheist has the time and comfort level to get into a theological argument? And honestly, I don’t believe any atheist would declare their atheism every time someone says “God bless you.” Who has time for that? All that said, even if the story is true, his telling of it follows the pattern of desecration stories, even when it turns into a fantasy.
Cook and the Atheist get into a theological argument where the Atheist mocks Cook’s Catholicism and declares his own version of the afterlife, where the Atheist will die into the ground and come back as a tree. Normally that would define the Atheist as not really an atheist. He’s a nature-centered, Mother-Earth, reincarnation-based, hippie-dippy-ist. This is important, though. In host desecration stories, the Jew has to confirm certain fundamental aspects of the Christian worldview. The desecration of the host is often ritualistic (confirming that the host really is sacred). Sometimes the Jew directly challenges the Christian God, rather than addressing the Old Testament God he would actually believe in. In Cook’s story, the Atheist accepts the premise that he has a soul, which many if not most atheists do not believe. It confirms the worldview of the listener: the Atheist has anxieties about death, and faith in the unverifiable, but he’s too mule-headed to accept Christianity. And it’s not like Cook isn’t aware of atheism’s fundamental rejection of the soul and the afterlife. He makes a joke about it. But for the purposes of Cook’s story, the Atheist has to paradoxically have faith in a soul, otherwise the story can’t work. In desecration stories, the Jew has to paradoxically believe the Christian host is holy. Again, the function of this is to create alliance between storyteller and audience in their worldview, so that the later violence is acceptable and just.
Speaking of violence, when Cook engages in the fantasy of chopping the reincarnated Atheist-tree down with an axe, dragging him through the mud, grinding him up in a woodchipper, turning him into paper and printing the Bible on him, it’s a fair distinction that he’s not commiting actual violence. But his violent imaginings follow the same pattern as the results of the desecration stories, so I take no comfort in that. In the host desecration stories, after the guilty Jew is caught, he’s killed, sometimes with his family and neighbors; and the site of the desecration, usually the Jew’s home or temple, is converted into a chapel. This reconfiguring of the villain’s property (or flesh) to serve the faith is more than in the service of irony. It’s a deliberate threat of postmortem aggression against every Jew (or Atheist) that steps out of line: not only will I destroy you, but everything you own will be made mine. The ecstatic screams and howls of Cook’s audience leave no room for doubt as to the delight they take in such an idea. I wonder, if Cook had followed his punchline with the suggestion, would the audience have gone out and made their rage plain to the next atheist they met? The notion was certainly hanging in the arena he played. To me, Cook's macho swagger as he relays the story feeds the fire of violence in the listeners, perhaps not inciting them directly, but certainly in their private minds. I have trouble believing that a person could walk out of that show, having engaged in that bloodlust, and not be changed.
You could defend Cook’s story by claiming it’s not atheists he’s attacking, but condescending people. But if that were true, the final punchline (turning the corpse into a Bible) wouldn’t make any sense. This illustrates the importance of first painting the Atheist or Jew with a common character flaw: it provides the storyteller and listener a psychological defense if confronted with their bigotry.
In the end though, it’s not Cook’s story but the rapturous reaction of his audience that’s frightening. Part of what I want to get to in this play are the reasons why we believe implausible stories. The righteous joy in the voices of that audience show how Cook provided them with something they all desperately wanted: justification to hate. Cook makes a joke that he doesn’t like to say “Gesundheidt” because he feels like it’s a tribute to Hitler. I think his bit is very much a tribute to Der Fürhrer’s method of crowd control.
But the story has some important thematic and structural similarities to the medieval host desecration stories told about Jews, which is a central element of Atheist.
Cook begins his story weaving this way and that, but the central thrust is that some jerk sneezed on him. It’s a failure of character we can all agree on: don’t sneeze on people. It’s gross, it’s uncivilized, and most importantly for the story, it shows a disdain for your fellow human beings. It’s crucial to assign the villain in these stories a universally agreed-upon flaw. It’s even more crucial to tie that flaw in the story to the central quality of the villain. In this story, the villain’s disdain is a direct result of his atheism.
In the host desecration story, the Jew is usually given some nasty quality that can be tied to his Jewishness. Avarice is old standard, also disdain, a violent temper, or deviousness. Whatever the flaw is, it has to bullseye the anxiety of the audience about the villain’s stock type. Since Jews in medieval Europe were often in the loan business (as that was the only trade they were allowed to practice), avarice worked neatly. When a Christian heard a story about a Jew paying a poor Christian to steal a host wafer, it fit in with fears of loss of financial control to these yamurkle-sporting fellows. It’s a nice trick that Cook doesn’t reveal his villain is an atheist until almost halfway through his story: it allows his listeners to connect “atheist” to “disdainful.”
Cook shows his Christian charity by restraining his anger and saying, “God bless you.” The villainous Atheist then reveals himself, showing contempt for the storyteller (and by extension, the audience). In the desecration stories, the reasoning behind the Jew’s theft of the host and violent acts upon it is often summed up in an overt statement about the credulity of Christians that believe the wafer to be Christ’s flesh. It allied the Christian listener to the teller (“Jews think you’re a fool”), making the later miracles and travesties plausible and acceptable. Cook allies the audience with himself in a similar manner through the “God Bless You” section. (“We all say, God Bless You! Atheists think you’re a fool!”).
As a side note, it’s at this point in the story where I suspect it’s, at best, a collection of different incidents collected into one story; or, at worst, a lie. Storytellers work in both manners, and that’s legit, except when the lie is offered as a true anecdote that we should act on. And I do think Cook is encouraging action, if not directly. But the story is suspect, if you think about it: Notice there’s no location given? It’s somewhere where the Atheist has the time and comfort level to get into a theological argument? And honestly, I don’t believe any atheist would declare their atheism every time someone says “God bless you.” Who has time for that? All that said, even if the story is true, his telling of it follows the pattern of desecration stories, even when it turns into a fantasy.
Cook and the Atheist get into a theological argument where the Atheist mocks Cook’s Catholicism and declares his own version of the afterlife, where the Atheist will die into the ground and come back as a tree. Normally that would define the Atheist as not really an atheist. He’s a nature-centered, Mother-Earth, reincarnation-based, hippie-dippy-ist. This is important, though. In host desecration stories, the Jew has to confirm certain fundamental aspects of the Christian worldview. The desecration of the host is often ritualistic (confirming that the host really is sacred). Sometimes the Jew directly challenges the Christian God, rather than addressing the Old Testament God he would actually believe in. In Cook’s story, the Atheist accepts the premise that he has a soul, which many if not most atheists do not believe. It confirms the worldview of the listener: the Atheist has anxieties about death, and faith in the unverifiable, but he’s too mule-headed to accept Christianity. And it’s not like Cook isn’t aware of atheism’s fundamental rejection of the soul and the afterlife. He makes a joke about it. But for the purposes of Cook’s story, the Atheist has to paradoxically have faith in a soul, otherwise the story can’t work. In desecration stories, the Jew has to paradoxically believe the Christian host is holy. Again, the function of this is to create alliance between storyteller and audience in their worldview, so that the later violence is acceptable and just.
Speaking of violence, when Cook engages in the fantasy of chopping the reincarnated Atheist-tree down with an axe, dragging him through the mud, grinding him up in a woodchipper, turning him into paper and printing the Bible on him, it’s a fair distinction that he’s not commiting actual violence. But his violent imaginings follow the same pattern as the results of the desecration stories, so I take no comfort in that. In the host desecration stories, after the guilty Jew is caught, he’s killed, sometimes with his family and neighbors; and the site of the desecration, usually the Jew’s home or temple, is converted into a chapel. This reconfiguring of the villain’s property (or flesh) to serve the faith is more than in the service of irony. It’s a deliberate threat of postmortem aggression against every Jew (or Atheist) that steps out of line: not only will I destroy you, but everything you own will be made mine. The ecstatic screams and howls of Cook’s audience leave no room for doubt as to the delight they take in such an idea. I wonder, if Cook had followed his punchline with the suggestion, would the audience have gone out and made their rage plain to the next atheist they met? The notion was certainly hanging in the arena he played. To me, Cook's macho swagger as he relays the story feeds the fire of violence in the listeners, perhaps not inciting them directly, but certainly in their private minds. I have trouble believing that a person could walk out of that show, having engaged in that bloodlust, and not be changed.
You could defend Cook’s story by claiming it’s not atheists he’s attacking, but condescending people. But if that were true, the final punchline (turning the corpse into a Bible) wouldn’t make any sense. This illustrates the importance of first painting the Atheist or Jew with a common character flaw: it provides the storyteller and listener a psychological defense if confronted with their bigotry.
In the end though, it’s not Cook’s story but the rapturous reaction of his audience that’s frightening. Part of what I want to get to in this play are the reasons why we believe implausible stories. The righteous joy in the voices of that audience show how Cook provided them with something they all desperately wanted: justification to hate. Cook makes a joke that he doesn’t like to say “Gesundheidt” because he feels like it’s a tribute to Hitler. I think his bit is very much a tribute to Der Fürhrer’s method of crowd control.
Monday, April 21, 2008
Seriously, a couple of books
Okay, I'm not messing around this time. There's many books responsible for this travesty of a vaudeville that is Atheist Viagra. Here's two of them:
1. Miriam Rubin's Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jewry. This is the book that planted the vicious seed of this play. I've always been fascinated by the function that stories play in both society and the individual psyche. In medieval Catholic Europe, stories of host desecrations were used to rouse the populace to massacre Jewish communities and steal their property. The stories are full of what we would call stereotypes: the conniving Jew, of course, but also the weak woman, the penitent thief, and the truthful child. The stories are consistently cast with these characters. Part of Rubin's point is that the stories depended on these caricatures, agreed upon by the population, in order to work their magic. This struck me right in the grey matter. We artists often concern themselves with the avoidance of stereotype, the search for truthful characters; but perhaps there are there fundamental agreements we make with our audience about types of people in the world? What are they, and how do we manipulate them?
Rubin never uses her historical distance to point up the absurdities of the story that seem obvious to us in the twenty-first century. But she does look at the reasons why the stories were found so acceptable and rarely resisted. In thinking about this, I wondered about stories that gain popular credence in contemporary society that are nevertheless demonstrably false: urban myths (more on these later). What function do they serve both in our society and in ourselves?
One thing the author also does is place one of the only extant contemporary responses from the Jewish community to the massacres, a verse lament, smack dab in the middle of the book. This takes the book out of the realm of scholarly publication and into something more artistic accessible, at least to a spongehead playwright like me.
But what was really awkward was explaining to my five-year old why they were cooking a child on the cover.
2. How to Have a Soul-Winning Church by Gene Edwards. This is a "how-to" guide for, well, winning souls. It mixes sales techniques with evangelism in a way that I think is at the heart of American Christian Fundamentalism. Edwards has a lot of practical advice, as well as thoughts on what the function of Christianity should be in our country (printed in 1962, he advocates the church as an "assassin of communism").
Not much more to say about this book. It has to be read (or at least leafed through) to be appreciated. I'll quote from the introduction, Edwards' argument of purpose:
I rephrase this in purely functional terms: an organization whose entire function is to grow the organization.
More books later
1. Miriam Rubin's Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jewry. This is the book that planted the vicious seed of this play. I've always been fascinated by the function that stories play in both society and the individual psyche. In medieval Catholic Europe, stories of host desecrations were used to rouse the populace to massacre Jewish communities and steal their property. The stories are full of what we would call stereotypes: the conniving Jew, of course, but also the weak woman, the penitent thief, and the truthful child. The stories are consistently cast with these characters. Part of Rubin's point is that the stories depended on these caricatures, agreed upon by the population, in order to work their magic. This struck me right in the grey matter. We artists often concern themselves with the avoidance of stereotype, the search for truthful characters; but perhaps there are there fundamental agreements we make with our audience about types of people in the world? What are they, and how do we manipulate them?Rubin never uses her historical distance to point up the absurdities of the story that seem obvious to us in the twenty-first century. But she does look at the reasons why the stories were found so acceptable and rarely resisted. In thinking about this, I wondered about stories that gain popular credence in contemporary society that are nevertheless demonstrably false: urban myths (more on these later). What function do they serve both in our society and in ourselves?
One thing the author also does is place one of the only extant contemporary responses from the Jewish community to the massacres, a verse lament, smack dab in the middle of the book. This takes the book out of the realm of scholarly publication and into something more artistic accessible, at least to a spongehead playwright like me.
But what was really awkward was explaining to my five-year old why they were cooking a child on the cover.
2. How to Have a Soul-Winning Church by Gene Edwards. This is a "how-to" guide for, well, winning souls. It mixes sales techniques with evangelism in a way that I think is at the heart of American Christian Fundamentalism. Edwards has a lot of practical advice, as well as thoughts on what the function of Christianity should be in our country (printed in 1962, he advocates the church as an "assassin of communism").Not much more to say about this book. It has to be read (or at least leafed through) to be appreciated. I'll quote from the introduction, Edwards' argument of purpose:
This book is for the minister who desires to have the most effective Christian witnesses and soul winning church possible -- for the church that wants to see men come to Christ every week.
The goal of this book is to show you how a church can witness to, and seek to win, every human being in the city. This book is for the Christian who, more than anything else in all the world, wants to be a soul winner.
This is for the minister who wants to grow laymen in his church, who do nothing but talk soul winning, eat soul winning, dream soul winning, and do soul winning.
I rephrase this in purely functional terms: an organization whose entire function is to grow the organization.
More books later
Two Researchy Things
Both of these came up in my first meeting with Sydney (costume designer) and I think are worth looking at:
1) Host Desecration. Host Desecration plays were these little sketches performed in churches to help whip up pogroms against Jews. The idea was that, since the host was the literal body of Christ, stories started up about Jews torturing and desecrating the host. These Medieval answers to the urban legend would be recited from the pulpit (and, at times, acted out). And then the popular anger that arose would be directed at the nearby Jewish populations. In some ways, Atheist Viagra is an oddly-skewed Atheist Host Desecration Play.
2) The other thing that came up was stage magic particularly the idea of stage magic in the 19th century. This came up because formally the play works in very similar ways. Someone comes forward and essentially says "I am going to trick you" and then, even though you know it is coming you (hopefully) get suckered into it. I find thinking about this play as a stage magic trick very helpful. Perhaps we should all watch The Prestige again...
1) Host Desecration. Host Desecration plays were these little sketches performed in churches to help whip up pogroms against Jews. The idea was that, since the host was the literal body of Christ, stories started up about Jews torturing and desecrating the host. These Medieval answers to the urban legend would be recited from the pulpit (and, at times, acted out). And then the popular anger that arose would be directed at the nearby Jewish populations. In some ways, Atheist Viagra is an oddly-skewed Atheist Host Desecration Play.
2) The other thing that came up was stage magic particularly the idea of stage magic in the 19th century. This came up because formally the play works in very similar ways. Someone comes forward and essentially says "I am going to trick you" and then, even though you know it is coming you (hopefully) get suckered into it. I find thinking about this play as a stage magic trick very helpful. Perhaps we should all watch The Prestige again...
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