Racialized Sacred Spaces: Narratives of Exclusion and Inclusion in Northern European Churches

Summary

Early modern sacred spaces are intimately concerned with ethnicity and race, as reflected in the varying degrees of inclusivity evoked through the interior designs of Northern European churches. Serving as hubs that furthered social cohesion, church buildings were central to early modern socialization and to the integration of community members from different ethnic, cultural, and religious backgrounds. Church interiors also reinforced social distinctions through seating arrangements that stratified congregations according to class and gender. Many churches displayed coats of arms of influential families to make privilege visible, and some featured designated women's benches to preserve gender distinctions. 3 In a similar vein, parish churches regularly signposted racial distinctions through a strategic showcasing of racialized artifacts, thereby promoting and normalizing views on race and inclusivity among a given congregation.

Although early modern communities might not always have embraced the racial norms encoded in a given interior design, there are documented cases of racialized artifacts informing social practice, and vice versa. At St. Johannis Church in Schweinfurt, Bavaria, several fifteenth to the seventeenth-century baptisms of Jewish, Turkish, and Black congregants were performed at a font underneath a massive mural depicting the baptism of the Ethiopian chamberlain from the Acts (8:26–40). On at least one such occasion, the preceding sermon commenced with a reading of a passage describing the Ethiopian's baptism in the Acts, illustrating how the vision reified in the mural inspired both inclusive discourse as well as social practice.

Similar links between artifacts, discourse, and social practice can be observed with exclusionary texts, such as the recently much debated Judensau (Jews’ sow) outside Wittenberg Cathedral (c.1305). The sandstone sculpture shows two Jews suckling a sow and a rabbi looking into her backside and was placed parallel with the Jüdenstraße (Jewish street), presumably to provoke and discredit the Jewish community. The sculpture is referenced in Martin Luther's antisemitic tract Vom Schem-Hamphoras (1543), which prompted some sixteenth-century readers to engrave Luther's nonsensical phrase “Rabini Schem HaMphoras,” a bastardized version of “Shem ha-Mephorash” (a synonym for Yaweh), onto the sandstone itself, thus explicitly linking artifact and antisemitic discourse. These ties between the sculpture and social contexts were further consolidated when a printer from Wittenberg reproduced the sculpture together with its inscription in an antisemitic pamphlet in 1596, presumably to promote a tightening of antisemitic legislation in the Duchy of Saxony.