The Singular Beast: Jews, Christians, and the Pig

by Claudine Fabre-Vassas, Carol Volk

Overview

Throughout history, the slaughter and consumption of the pig has been the inspiration for role-playing and taboos, and at the center of practices that defined the boundaries between Christians and Jews. A provocative exploration of the pig in European culture and anti-Semitism, The Singular Beast chronicles the cultural and religious character of the pig -- and details the folkloric beliefs still found among both provincial and urban Europeans and the rituals that have been associated with it from the Middle Ages to today.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231103671
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	09/22/1999
Series:	European Perspectives: A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	448
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.50(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Claudine Fabre-Vassas is a research fellow at the Centre Nationale Recherche Scientifique and teaches at the École de Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris.

Carol Volk is a translator and Foreign Service Officer based in Washington, D.C.

Table of Contents

One. An Anological Being
One. The Red Men
Two. Children's Stories
Three. The Circle of Metamorphoses
Two. From One Blood To the Next
Four. The Jew's Sow
Five. Red Easter
Six. Old Jews, Young Christians
Seven. The Little Jew
Three. Christian Flesh
Eight. The Return of the Pig
Nine. Blood and Soul
Ten. The Bone That Sings. The Time of Sacrifice

Editorial Reviews

Fabre-Vassas argues that the cultural tension between those who did and those who did not eat pork helps set the stage for a murderous anti-Semitism.... Taking her cue from Claude Levi-Strauss, [she] studied the culinary habits of southern France, and the way in which the pig began to be associated with the Jew in the anti-Semitic imaginings of peasant culture, and by implication the rest of Europe.

The New York Times

A stunning compendium of porcine and theological folklore.... With remarkable acuity, The Singular Beast shows how the pig, the Jew and the Christian have been locked in a fatal and macabre pas de trois for the past two millenniums.

Times Literary Supplement

Fabre-Vassas's work in particular illuminates the fear of otherness that, as a dimension of human consciousness, underlies the relationship between those who are persecuted and those who persecute... The extensive and detailed research in The Singular Beast provides ample evidence of how Jewishness became imbued with all manner of hateful traits.... Through ethnography and text, Fabre-Vassas offers a rich and nuanced protrait of anti-Semitic beliefs and practices that remained deeply embedded in twentieth-century European society.

Janet Liebman Jacobs

[A] masterful demonstration of the role of the pig as that animal which, because of its own natural and cultural anomalousness, came so powerfully to symbolize the dialectic of identity and difference obtaining between Christians and Jews.

David Gordon White

A stunning compendium of porcine and theological folklore.... With remarkable acuity, The Singular Beast shows how the pig, the Jew and the Christian have been locked in a fatal and macabre pas de trois for the past two millenniums.

Time Magazines Literary Supplement

Fabre-Vassas's work in particular illuminates the fear of otherness that, as a dimension of human consciousness, underlies the relationship between those who are persecuted and those who persecute... The extensive and detailed research in The Singular Beast provides ample evidence of how Jewishness became imbued with all manner of hateful traits.... Through ethnography and text, Fabre-Vassas offers a rich and nuanced protrait of anti-Semitic beliefs and practices that remained deeply embedded in twentieth-century European society.

— Janet Liebman Jacobs

Religious Studies Review

[A] masterful demonstration of the role of the pig as that animal which, because of its own natural and cultural anomalousness, came so powerfully to symbolize the dialectic of identity and difference obtaining between Christians and Jews.

— David Gordon White

Journal of Religion

[A] masterful demonstration of the role of the pig as that animal which, because of its own natural and cultural anomalousness, came so powerfully to symbolize the dialectic of identity and difference obtaining between Christians and Jews.

Journal of Religion - David Gordon White

Fabre-Vassas's work in particular illuminates the fear of otherness that, as a dimension of human consciousness, underlies the relationship between those who are persecuted and those who persecute... The extensive and detailed research in The Singular Beast provides ample evidence of how Jewishness became imbued with all manner of hateful traits.... Through ethnography and text, Fabre-Vassas offers a rich and nuanced protrait of anti-Semitic beliefs and practices that remained deeply embedded in twentieth-century European society.

Religious Studies Review - Janet Liebman Jacobs

Fabre-Vassas argues that the cultural tension between those who did and those who did not eat pork helps set the stage for a murderous anti-Semitism.... Taking her cue from Claude Levi-Strauss, [she] studied the culinary habits of southern France, and the way in which the pig began to be associated with the Jew in the anti-Semitic imaginings of peasant culture, and by implication the rest of Europe.

The New York Times