The Jew Among Thorns

The Jew Among Thorns (Children’s and Household Tales No.110)

The next one ‚Der Jude im Dorn’ (The Jew Among Thorns / The Jew in the Brumble), Grimm’s Fairy Tale No. 110, is very controversial. It describes a Jew (standing in for all Jews) as being a greedy, depraved monster who deserves humiliation and punishment (this was a comment by Maria Tatar [1]).

⁋ It’s again a long story (you can read the entire tale here [2]. Wikipedia provides a synopsis [3].

After three years, a good servant only receives three hellers from his stingy master and is satisfied because he doesn't understand anything about money. He meets a little man who asks him for the money and, when he sees his good heart, grants him three wishes.

He wants a bird's reed [a blowpipe] that hits everything, a violin, whose music makes everyone dance, and third, that whenever I ask a favor of anyone, it will be granted.

Then he meets a Jew for whom he shoots a bird from a tree with the blowpipe. But when the Jew crawls through the thorns to fetch the bird, the servant lets him dance until he receives a large sum of money from him, which he  - but only in the first two print editions - had just stolen from a Christian.

Then the Jew runs to the judge, who has the servant caught and sentenced to death. On the scaffold, the servant asks to be allowed to play his violin again, whereupon the whole market square has to dance so long and so wildly until he is acquitted. Under the threat of the servant that he would play again, the Jew shouts that he has stolen the money and is hanged.

The servant fiddling on the Gallows so that everyone has to dance wildly

Von Hermann Vogel (1854-1921) - https://archive.org/stream/kinderundgesamme00grim#page/n5/mode/2up, Gemeinfrei, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17384914

In the Grimm publications in 1815 and 1819, the Jew was charactered as an  ‘old Jew’ who was a wicked rascal / scamp who had to pay a ransom to the main character, a tailor (who was probably as wicked as the ‘Jew’). The ransom was a bag filled with gold. However, in the first edition, this was not a bag filled with gold but one containing one hundred guilders … that he (the Jew) had just swindled from a Christian.

In 1837, Wilhelm Grimm modified it to: a Jew with a long goatee and a shabby coat (German: Rock), and the description ‘wicked rascal / scamp’ was used twice.

⸎As you can imagine, the NAZIs loved this Fairy Tale⸎

The newspaper Hilf mit! (Join and help!) (5 million copies) published this Fairy Tale and added the following [translated] introduction: 

‘As Greek and Roman historians tell us, there were many criminal and thieving people in ancient Egypt who teamed up with robber tribes from the desert and robbed, looted and murdered in the country. The Egyptian king drove the rabble out of the country. Under the leadership of the priest Osarsiph, who later called himself Moses, it moved through the desert to Palestine and founded the Jewish empire there.’

It was also published in ‘Familienkunde und Rassenbiologie für Schüler‘ (Family studies and biology of human races for students) accompanied with questions to answer.

One question was: In which narratives, descriptions and poems is the soul of the Jew portrayed correctly? The answer was: ‘The Jew Among Thorns’ 

Reference: Oliver Geister: Märchen in dunklen Zeiten (2021- Geschichte des Märchens im „Dritten Reich“

[1] https://german.fas.harvard.edu/people/maria-tatar; https://people.fas.harvard.edu/~tatar/Maria_Tatar/About_Me.html; https://twitter.com/mariamtatar.

[2] https://www.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm110.html.

[3] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Der_Jude_im_Dorn

[4] https://grimmbilder.fandom.com/de/wiki/Der_Jude_im_Dorn_(Illustrationen)