Inventing the Enemy: Essays (2 page)

Pliny the Younger can find no particular allegations against the Christians, since he has to admit they are not involved in committing crimes; in fact, their actions are virtuous. Nonetheless he sends them to their death because they do not sacrifice to the emperor, and this stubbornness in refusing something so obvious and natural establishes their difference.

Then, as contact between peoples becomes more complex, a new form of enemy arises: he is not just the person who remains outside and exhibits his strangeness from a distance, but is also the person within, among us—today we would call him the foreign immigrant—who behaves differently in some way or speaks our language badly. He appears in Juvenal’s satire as the cunning, swindling, brazen, lecherous Greek, capable of debauching even his friend’s grandmother.

The Negro, due to the color of his skin, is a stranger wherever he goes. The entry for “Negro” in the first American encyclopedia, published by Thomas Dobson in 1798, states:

In the complexion of negroes we meet with various shades; but they likewise differ far from other men in all the features of their face. Round cheeks, high cheek bones, a forehead somewhat elevated, a short, broad, flat nose, thick lips, small ears, ugliness, and irregularity of shape, characterize their external appearance. The negro women have the loins greatly depressed, and very large buttocks, which gives the back the shape of a saddle. Vices the most notorious seem to be the portion of this unhappy race: idleness, treachery, revenge, cruelty, impudence, stealing, lying, profanity, debauchery, nastiness, and intemperance, are said to have extinguished the principles of natural law, and to have silenced the reproofs of conscience. They are strangers to every sentiment of compassion, and are an awful example of the corruption of man when left to himself.

The Negro is ugly. The enemy must be ugly because beauty is identified with good (
kalokagathia
), and one of the fundamental characteristics of beauty has always been what the Middle Ages called
integritas
(in other words, having all that is required to be an average representative of a species; by this standard those humans missing a limb or an eye, or having lower-than-average stature or “inhuman” color were considered ugly). That is why the giant one-eyed Polyphemus and the dwarf Mime immediately provide us with a model for identifying the enemy. Priscus of Panion in the fifth century describes Attila the Hun as small in stature, with a broad chest and large head, small eyes, a thin graying beard, a flat nose, and—a crucial feature—a swarthy complexion. But it is curious how Attila’s face is similar to the physiognomy of the devil, as Rodolfus Glaber described him more than five centuries later—gaunt face, deep black eyes, forehead furrowed with wrinkles, flat nose, protruding mouth, swollen lips, thin narrow chin, goatish beard, hairy pointed ears, straight disheveled hair, canine teeth, elongated skull; he was also of modest stature, with a slender neck, protruding chest, and humped back (
Histories,
book 5, part 3).

When Liutprand of Cremona is sent by Emperor Otto I as envoy to Byzantium in 968 and encounters a hitherto unknown civilization, he finds the Byzantine emperor devoid of
integritas:

I came before Nicephorus, a monstrous being, a pygmy with an enormous head, whose small eyes gave him the appearance of a mole, with an ugly short broad thick graying beard, a neck as long as a finger . . . the color of an Ethiopian, “whom you wouldn’t want to bump into in the middle of the night,” fat belly, thin loins, thighs too long for his small stature, short legs, flat feet, and dressed in a fetid, threadbare peasant’s garment faded with use. (
Relatio de legatione Constantinopolitana
)

Fetid. The enemy invariably stinks, as the French psychologist Edgar Bérillon wrote at the beginning of the First World War (1915) in
La polychésie de la race allemande.
In this volume he demonstrated that the average German produced more—and fouler smelling—fecal material than did the Frenchman. If the Byzantine stank, so too did the Saracen. In
Evagatorium in Terrae sanctae, Arabiae, et Egypti peregrinationem,
the fifteenth-century monk Felix Fabri notes that “the Saracens exude a certain horrible stench, for which they perform continual ablutions of various sorts; and since we do not smell, they do not care if we bathe together with them. But they are not so indulgent with the Jews, who smell even more . . . Thus the stinking Saracens are pleased to find themselves in the company of those like us who do not smell.”

For Giuseppe Giusti, it was the Austrians who stank. Arriving at the Basilica of Sant’Ambrogio in Milan, he recorded these impressions:

     I enter, and find it full of soldiers,
those soldiers from the north,
Bohemians and Croatians,
lined up like poles in a vineyard.

I drew back; since standing there
amid that rabble, I must admit
a feeling of disgust, of suffocation,
of filthy breath, which, by your calling,
you can scarcely feel: even the candles
(excuse me, your Excellency)
on the altar of that fine house of God,
seemed to reek of tallow. (
Sant’Ambrogio,
1845)

The gypsy inevitably stinks, given that he feeds on carrion, as Cesare Lombroso tells us in
L’uomo delinquente
(1876, volume 1, chapter 2), and so does James Bond’s enemy Rosa Klebb in Ian Fleming’s
From Russia, with Love
(1957)
.
She is not only a Soviet Russian but, worse still, a lesbian:

Outside the anonymous, cream painted door, Tatiana already smelled the inside of the room. When the voice told her curtly to come in, and she opened the door, it was the smell that filled her mind while she stood and stared into the eyes of the woman who sat behind the round table under the centre light.

It was the smell of the Metro on a hot evening—cheap scent concealing animal odours. People in Russia soak themselves in scent, whether they have had a bath or not, but mostly when they have not . . .

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.