Inventing the Enemy: Essays

by Umberto Eco

  Tatiana was still cheerfully reviewing the situation when the bedroom door opened and “the Klebb woman” appeared . . . wearing a semi-transparent nightgown in orange crêpe de chine . . . One dimpled knee, like a yellowish coconut, appeared thrust forward between the half-open folds of the nightgown in the classic stance of the modeller . . . Rosa Klebb had taken off her spectacles and her naked face was now thick with mascara and rouge and lipstick . . .

  She patted the couch beside her.

  “Turn out the top light, my dear. The switch is by the door. Then come and sit beside me. We must get to know each other better.” (chapter 9)

  The Jew has been described as monstrous and smelly since at least the birth of Christianity, given that he is modeled on the Antichrist, the archenemy, the foe not only of man but of God:

  This is how he looks: his head is like a burning flame, his right eye is bloodshot, his left is a cat-like green and has two pupils, his eyelids are white, his lower lip is large, his right femur is weak, his feet large, his thumb flat and elongated. (Syriac Testament of Our Lord Jesus Christ, fifth century, volume 1, part 4)

  The Antichrist will be born from the Jewish people . . . from the union between a father and a mother, like other men, and not, as some say, from a virgin . . . At the beginning of his conception the devil will enter the mother’s uterus, by virtue of the devil he will be nurtured in the mother’s womb, and the power of the devil will always be with him. (Adso of Montier-en-Der, Letter on the Origin and Time of the Antichrist, tenth century)

  He will have two flaming eyes, ears like those of a donkey, the nose and mouth of a lion, so that he will set men to acts of most criminal folly amid the fires and most shameful voices of contradiction, making them deny God, spreading into their senses the most horrible fetor, mutilating the institutions of the church with the most ferocious greed; sneering with an enormous grimace and showing horrible teeth of iron. (Hildegard of Bingen, Liber scivias, twelfth century, volume 3, part 1, section 14)

  If the Antichrist comes from the Jewish people, his model must inevitably reflect the image of the Jew, whether in terms of popular anti-Semitism, theological anti-Semitism, or the bourgeois anti-Semitism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Let us start with his face:

  They generally have a bluish face, hooked nose, deep-set eyes, protruding chin, and strongly pronounced constrictor muscles around the lips . . . Jews are also prone to diseases which indicate a corruption of the blood, such as leprosy in the past and now scurvy, which is akin to it, scrofula, bleeding . . . It is said that Jews always have bad breath . . . Others attribute these effects to the frequent use of strong-smelling vegetables such as onion and garlic . . . Yet others say it is goose meat, to which they are very partial, that makes them dark and melancholic, given that this food is thickly coated with sticky sugar. (Baptiste-Henri Grégoire, Essai sur la régénération physique, morale, et politique des juifs, 1788)

  Later, the composer Richard Wagner was to complicate the picture with his considerations of voice and manner:

  There is something foreign about the outward aspect of the Jew that makes this nationality supremely repugnant; instinctively we wish to have nothing in common with a man who looks like that . . . It is impossible to imagine the representation of an antique or modern stage-character by a Jew, be it as hero or lover, without feeling instinctively that there is something incongruous, indeed ridiculous, in such a performance . . . But what repels us above all else is the particular tone with which the Jew speaks . . . Our ears are particularly offended by the shrill, sibilant, strident sounds of this idiom. The Jew uses words and constructs his phrases in a way quite contrary to the spirit of our national language . . . When we listen to him, our attention dwells involuntarily on how he speaks rather than on what he says. This point is of the greatest importance in explaining the expression produced by the musical works of the Jews. Listening to a Jew talking, we are inevitably offended by the fact of finding his discourse devoid of all truly human expression . . . It is natural that the inherent aridness of the Jewish character which we find so distasteful finds its greatest expression in song, which is the liveliest, most authentic manifestation of individual feeling. We might recognize the Jew’s artistic aptitude for any other art except that of song, which nature herself seems to have denied him. (Judaism in Music, 1850)

  Hitler proceeds with a greater delicacy, bordering almost on envy: “In regard to young people, clothes should take their place in the service of education . . . If the beauty of the body were not completely forced into the background to-day through our stupid manner of dressing, it would not be possible for thousands of our girls to be led astray by Jewish mongrels, with their repulsive crooked waddle” (Mein Kampf, 1925, translated by James Murphy).

  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, textbook
s 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 Martial: “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.

  And yet, at the dawn of the modern age, witches were said to meet in sects, to celebrate their sabbaths, to fly, to transform themselves into animals, and thus become the enemies of society, and as such to merit inquisitorial trials and death at the stake. This is not the place for examining the complex problem of the “witchcraft syndrome”—whether it represented a way of finding a scapegoat at a time of profound social crisis or the influence of Siberian shamanism or the phenomenon of eternal archetypes. What interests us here is the recurring model for the creation of an enemy—similar to the treatment of the heretic or the Jew. And it is not enough for men of science, such as Gerolamo Cardano in the sixteenth century, to raise their sensible objections:

  They are poor women of miserable condition, who scrape a living in the valleys feeding on chestnuts and herbs . . . Thus they are emaciated, deformed, ashen in color, with protruding eyes, and their gaze reveals a melancholy and bilious temperament. They are taciturn, distracted, and hardly distinguishable from those who are possessed by the devil. They are so firm in their opinions that anyone listening to their stories alone would be quite sure the things they say with such conviction were true, things that have never happened and will never happen. (De rerum varietate, book 15)

  A new wave of persecutions began in response to the spread of leprosy. Carlo Ginzburg, in his Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath (1991, translated by Raymond Rosenthal), records that lepers were burned to death throughout France in 1321 because they had been convicted of trying to kill the whole population by poisoning water supplies, fountains, and wells: “Leprous women who had confessed to the crime spontaneously, or as a result of torture, were to be burnt, unless pregnant; in that eventuality, they must be kept segregated until their confinement and the weaning of their offspring—and then burnt.”

  It is not difficult to identify here the origins of every persecution of those thought to be spreading plague. But Ginzburg describes yet another aspect of this phenomenon: the contagious lepers were automatically identified with Jews and Saracens. Various chroniclers relate stories that accuse the Jews of aiding and abetting the lepers, and many of them were sent to the stake with the afflicted: “The local population took justice into their own hands, summoning neither priest nor bailiff: they closed the people in their homes, together with their livestock, goods, and chattels, and set fire to them.”

  One leader of such a group confessed he had been bribed by a Jew, who had given him some poison (made with human blood, urine, three herbs, and pieces of the consecrated host) placed in a sack that was weighted so it would easily sink to the bottom of a drinking fountain. But, he said, it was the king of Granada who had gone to the Jews—and another source also added the sultan of Babylon to the plot. Three traditional enemies—the leper, the Jew, and the Saracen—were thus brought together in one fell swoop. Reference to the fourth enemy, the heretic, was provided in a detail: the assembled lepers had to spit on the host and trample on the cross.

  Rituals of this kind were later said to be practiced by witches. The fourteenth century saw the appearance of the first manuals for the trial of heretics by inquisition, such as the Practica inquisitionis hereticae pravitatis by Bernardo Gui and the Directorium inquisitorum by Niccolao Emeric, and in the fifteenth century (while Marsilio Ficino is translating Plato in Florence on the orders of Cosimo de’ Medici and, according to a well-known schoolboys’ ditty, people were preparing to sing “At last, at last, the Middle Ages are past!”) John Nider’s Formicarius, written between 1435 and 1437 and published in 1473, speaks for the first time in a modern vein about the various practices of witchcraft.

  Innocent VIII wrote about these practices in the papal bull Summis desiderantes affectibus of 1484:

  It has recently reached our ears—to our great distress—that in certain regions of Germany . . . persons of both sexes, heedless of their own well-being and straying from the Catholic faith, have no hesi
tation in giving themselves carnally to devils incubus and succubus, letting the progeny of women, animals, fruits of the earth, die or perish . . . by means of spells, charms, incantations, and other odious magical practices . . . Seeking, as our office requires of us, by way of appropriate remedies, to prevent the scourge of heretical depravity from spreading its poison to the detriment of innocent people, the aforementioned inquisitors Sprenger and Kramer are permitted to exercise the inquisitorial office in those lands.

  And Sprenger and Kramer, inspired also by the Formicarius, published their infamous Malleus maleficarum (Hammer of the Witches) in 1486.

  The records of the inquisition in 1477 against Antonia, of the parish of Saint-Jorioz in the diocese of Geneva, provide one of a thousand examples of how a witch was created:

  The accused, having abandoned her husband, went with Masset to the place known as “laz Perroy” near the stream . . . where a synagogue of heretics was held, and found there a large number of men and women, who courted, capered, and danced backwards with her. He then showed her a demon, called Robinet, who had the appearance of a Negro, saying: “Here is our master, to whom we must pay homage if you wish to have all you desire.” The defendant asked him what she had to do . . . and the said Masset replied: “Disown God your creator, and the Catholic faith and that adulteress the Virgin Mary and accept this demon called Robinet as your lord and master and do whatever he wishes of you . . .” Having heard these words, the accused began to feel regretful and refused at first to comply. But she eventually disowned God her creator, saying: “I disown God my creator and the Catholic faith and the Holy Cross, and accept you, Demon Robinet, as my lord and master.” And she paid homage to the demon by kissing his foot . . . Then in contempt of God she threw a wooden cross to the ground, trampled it under her left foot, and broke it . . . She was transported on a staff one and a half feet long; to reach the synagogues she had to lubricate it with the ointment contained in a pyx, which was filled with it, and place the staff between her thighs, saying: “Go, go to the devil!” and she was immediately transported swiftly into the air to the place of the synagogue. She also confesses that in the aforesaid place they ate bread and meat; they drank wine and danced again; the said demon, their master, having then transformed himself from a man into a black dog, they honored and worshiped him, kissing him on the behind; finally the demon, having doused the fire that was burning there with green flames illuminating the synagogue, exclaimed loudly: “Meclet! Meclet!” and upon that cry the men lay bestially with the women and she with the aforesaid Masset Garin. (quoted in La civiltà delle streghe by Giuseppina and Eugenio Battisti, 1964)