The Jew's Daughter and the Myth of Zagreus
by H. M. Belden
Modern Language Notes, Vol. 39, No. 3 (Mar., 1924), pp. 161-166
[I've made some spelling corrections, which I assume were intentionally made by Belden, an English professor. Whether these misspellings were passed down to fellow Ozark collectors Randolph (who spells "and" as "an' "), and Max Hunter (who spells "the," as "th"), is unknown.
R. Matteson 2013]
THE JEW'S DAUGHTER AND THE MYTH OF ZAGREUS
The sources of the belief in the ritual murder of a Christian child by the Jews-- a belief still held in Russia, as the trial at Kiev just before the outbreak of the recent war shows, and preserved in a fossil state even in America in the ballad of The Jew's Daughter [1] have been thoroughly investigated by a professor of theology at the University of Berlin.[2] He shows that belief in the efficacy, both therapeutic and sacrificial, of human blood is a widespread primitive notion, especially strong in Christian Europe in the middle ages, and by no means extinct. Such a belief, combining with an instinctive tendency to ascribe to an exclusive, alien, and oppressed cult bias-femus parodies of one's own religious mysteries, is probably sufficient to account for the various records of ritual murder preserved in the medieval chronicles. It has not, so far as I know, been explained why the charge does not appear until the twelfth century. [3]
Once made, it was implicit in the conditions of the time, racial, social, and religious, that it should be repeated and should spread thru Christendom.
A like charge had been made against the early Christians when they were a secret and oppressed communion in the old Roman world. Minucius Felix in the Octavius [4] gives a detailed account of how, according to common belief, Christian novices were initiated by the ritual murder at their hands of an infant disguised as a lump of dough--a procedure imagined from suggestions in some of the Dionysiac mysteries. As these mysteries undoubtedly had an influence in shaping early Christian belief and ritual, it is not improbable that the accusation preserved in the English ballad is a reflection, coming down thru ecclesiastical tradition, of a charge formerly made against the Christians themselves, and that its origin is therefore neither --Christian nor Jewish, but pagan.
In the light of this possibility it is suggestive to note the resemblance between the ballad, certain forms of it especially, and the Greek myth of Zagreus as gathered by Miss Harrison [5] from Clement of Alexandria and others:
'The infant god variosly called Dionysos and Zagreus was protected by the Kouretes or Korybantes who danced around him their armed dance. The Titans desiring to destroy him lured away the child by offering him toys, a cone, a rhombos, and the golden apples of the Hesperides, a mirror, a knuckle-bone, and a tuft of wool. The toys are variously enumerated. [6] Having lured him away they set on him, slew him, and tore him limb from limb. Some authorities add that they cooked his limbs and ate them. Zeus hurled his thunderbolts upon them and sent them down to Tartarus. According to some authorities, Athene saved the child's heart, hiding it in a cista. A mock figure of gypsum was set up, the rescued heart placed in it, and the child brought thereby to life again. The story was completed under the influence of Delphi by the further statement that the limbs of the dismembered god were collected and buried at Delphi in the sanctuary of Apollo.'
It is a curious coincidence, if it is nothing more, that in the ballad [7] (not, I believe, in the chronicle records) the boy is enticed, as he is in the Zagreus myth, by a series of offerings.
Further, in the ballad the officiant is a woman. This has no parallel either in Jewish or in Christian ritual.[8] It may, of course, be nothing but an evidence of the romantic temper of balladry. But one remembers that the ritual attendants of Dionysus are women.[9] Even Our Lady's draw-well [10] and the miraculous retention of life in the murdered boy are called to mind by Athene and her cista in the myth.
The ways of tradition are often like those of Providence, past finding out. Whether a given story or practice found at different times and places shall be explained by the assumption of communication from a common source or on the theory of separate spontaneous origin under corresponding conditions is and perhaps always must be, in many cases, matter of opinion. In the present case it seems to me that there is at least the possibility of the transmission of these imaginings thru ecclesiastical tradition,[11] from the time when Christianity was working itself free from the welter of religions in the later empire. I can even imagine some ballad-loving friar of the fourteenth or fifteenth century, who could sing like Huberd and at the same time had some acquaintance, whether at first hand or fourth makes little difference, with the gruesome imaginings recorded by Felix and Clement and Arnobius, setting afloat the ballad that has come down to us. But I have no expectation of finding his performance 'writ in ancient history'-- any more than of finding Rinordine's castle there.
H. M. BELDEN.
University of Missouri.
Footnotes:
1-Cf. Journal of American Folk-Lore, XIX, 2.93-4, two versions taken down from oral tradition in Missouri. One of them runs:
THE JEW'S GARDEN
It rained all night and it rained all day,
It rained all over the land;
The boys in our town went out to play,
To toss their ball around -round -round,
To toss their ball around.
Sometimes they tost their ball too high,
And then again too low;
They tost it into a Jew's garden,
Where no one would dare to go.
Out came the Jew's daughter, out came the Jew's daughter,
Out came the Jew's daughter all drest,
And said to the boy, 'Little boy, come in,
And get your ball again.'
I won't come in, I shan't come in,
I've often heard it said
'Whoever goes into a Jew's garden
Will never come out again.'
The first she offered was a yellow apple,
The next was a bright gold ring,
The third was something so cherry red
Which enticed the little boy in.
She took him by the lily-white hand
And led him thru the hall
Into a cellar so dark and dim
Where no one could hear him call.
She pinned a napkin 'round his neck,
She pinned it with a pin,
And then she called for a tin basin
To catch his life-blood in.
'Go place my prayer-book at my head,
My bible at my feet,
And if any of my playmates ask for me
Just tell them that I'm asleep.
'Go place my bible at my feet,
My prayer-book at my head,
And if any of my playmates ask for me
Just tell them that I am dead.'
2 H. L. Strack, The Jew and Human Sacrifice. 5th ed., trans. by H. Blanchamp, with special preface and additions by the author. London, 1909.
3 The killing of a Christian by drunken Jews at Inmestar in the fifth century is hardly a case in point. In the eleventh century the Jews of Chieti wer 'accused of making a waxen image of 'Christ, which they transpierced with knives' (H. C. Lea, Engl. Hist. Rev., iv, 230), but this is not the same thing as ritual murder. The earliest recorded case seems to be that of William of Norwich in 1137. From that time the accusation spread rapidly over western Christendom, appearing in France and Germany in the twelfth, in Spain and Switzerland in the thirteenth, and in Bohemia early in the fourteenth century; in Italy not til the fifteenth.
4 Cap. 8 (p. 13 in the Teubner ed.). Felix was the earliest Latin Christian apologist; the Octavius is dated by Baehrens circ. 162. It is an essay in dialog form, reflecting a temper curiously like that of the author of the Letter on Enthusiasm, and well worth reading. Some of the remarks put into the mouth of Octavius fit modern conditions (as reveald in Strack's account of certain doings in eastern Europe in the nineteenth century) very neatly. It appears (cap. 28) that the Christians were accused of all sorts of indecencies and obscenities, as wel as absurdities, e. g. worshiping an ass's head. 'Quis tam stultus,' says Octavius, 'ut hoc colat? Quis stultior, ut hoc coli credat? ' And he understands very well the sycology of these accusations (cap. 27): 'Ideo inserti mentibus im- peritorum odium nostri serunt occulte per timorem.; naturale est enim et odisse quem timeas et quem oderis infestare, si possis.' Fear played its part, as well as policy and greed and fanaticism, in the medieval prosecutions. The Hugh of Lincoln story in the Annals of Burton as recounted by Child (111, 236) represents that 'the information given by his playmates as to when and where they had last seen him rotused a strong suspicion among the Christians that he had been carried off and killed by the Jews; all the more because there were so many of them present in the town at that time, and from all parts of the kingdom, though the Jews pretended that the occasion for this unusual congregation was a grand wedding.'
5. Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, p. 491.
6. Clement's list (Cohort., p. .5) is given in two lines which -he quotes from 'the Thracian Orpheus':
KWVOS Kai '6pq3og KaL 7 razIyvea Ka/ure-oyvua
MrXca Tr XpTfitE KaX& rap' 'Eaoreplt3v Xreyvowrv.
That of Arnobius (Adv. Nationes, v, 19), likewise credited to Orpheus ('prodidit in carminibus Thracius'), runs: 'talos,. speculum, turbines, volubiles rotulas, et teretis pilas [of. 'to toss their ball around ' in the ballad] et virginibus aurea sumpta ab Hesperidibus mala.' Both passages are given in Abel, Orphica, p. 230.
7 In versions G, K, S, U in Cbild the series is apple, ring, cherry red as blood; in J it is apple, fig; in L it is apple, sugar; in M it is apple, fig, cherry red as blood; in the Missouri version it is apple, ring, something so cherry red. All these are versions recorded in the nineteenth century or later. Versions A (Jamrieson), B (Percy), C (Percy papers), D (Herd), E (Motherwell), F (recent Irish), and N (Newell, Games and Songs of American Children) do not show a series. But this constitutes no more than a very faint presumption that the versions without the series ar the older.
8 Nor does it appear in any of the early chronicle or other records as reported by Child in his preface to this ballad. The boy is simply ' stolen or 'kidnapped.' In the French versified miracle of Gautier de Coincy the boy is indeed enticed into a Jew's house 'by flattery and promises,' but the enticer is a man, not a woman. The malign figure of the Jew's daughter seems to belong only to the ballad form of the story.
9. Not to be sure in the myth as here given; but remember the death of Orpheus.
10 In versions A, B, C, E, F, N.
11. The charge appears to have been nowhere formulated until the Crusades had brought western Christendom into contact with the East and the Greek church. And it was formulated by churchmen. Lea says (1. c., p. 234) that in one case in Germany in the fourteenth century it was ' proved that an ecclesiastic had arranged the affair in order to excite enmity against the Jews.' A century earlier, despite the more humane and liberal attitude revealed in Innocent IV's two bulls of 1247, it was an ecclesiastic, Sir John of Lexington, who took charge of the case of Hugh of Lincoln in 1255. He was, Matthew Paris tells us (Hist. Aiaj., anno 1255), 'vir quidem eircumspectus et discretus, insuper eleganter literatus. Qui ait: Audivimus quandoque quod talia Judaei in opprobrium Jesu Christi domini nostri crueifixi non sunt veriti attemptare.' Having got into the swet-box the luckless Jew into, whose house the boy is alleged to have disappeared, he proceeds to prompt his confession- 'animavit eum et stimulavit ad hoc domini Johannis industria.' And the confession begins: 'Vera sunt quae dicunt Christiani.