Straw Jew beaten and burnt in revived ritual

A Polish town has been condemned for reviving an 18thcentury Easter ritual in which a straw caricature of an Orthodox Jew is dragged through the streets, beaten with sticks and then burnt at the stake.

The Judas court rite, where an effigy of Judas Iscariot is symbolically tried and punished for his betrayal of Jesus, was once widespread in rural southern Poland but had largely died out.

Last Thursday, however, a Judas figure with an exaggeratedly hooked nose and payot sidelocks was hanged from an improvised gallows on the high street of Pruchnik, a town in the foothills of the Carpathian mountains. The next day the straw doll was taken down and attacked by a crowd of children with wooden staves before being set on fire, decapitated, dismembered and then dumped in the river. At a time when nearly half of Poles believe in the existence of a global Jewish conspiracy and a quarter think that Jews once kidnapped Christian infants, it has heightened concerns about latent antisemitism.

Robert Singer, chief executive of the World Jewish Congress, described the ritual as a ‘‘blot on Poland’s good name’’.

‘‘Jews are deeply disturbed by this ghastly revival of medieval antisemitism that led to unimaginable violence and suffering,’’ he said. ‘‘One can only imagine how [Pope] John Paul II, who taught Catholics in his native Poland and all over the world that antisemitism is a sin against God and man, would have reacted to this.’’

Historians believe that the origin of the Judas courts lies in a pagan rite where effigies of the Slavic death goddess Marzanna were burnt or drowned to mark the end of winter.

With the coming of Catholicism the tradition became Christianised. Although the ritual was banned by the Roman Catholic Church, it survived in Pruchnik until 2011 before its renewal last week. – The Times