The Singular Beast - (European Perspectives: A Social Thought and Cultural Criticism) by Claudine Fabre-Vassas (Paperback)

About the Book

This original account of the significance of the pig and its relationship to Jews in European Christian culture encompasses a vast array of folklore, history and ritual. Practices related to the breeding, slaughter and consumption of the pig have inspired both religious and secular taboos and rituals, laid out by the author in fascinating detail.

Book Synopsis

Throughout history, the slaughter and consumption of the pig has been the inspiration for role-playing and taboos, and at the center of practices that defined the boundaries between Christians and Jews. A provocative exploration of the pig in European culture and anti-Semitism, The Singular Beast chronicles the cultural and religious character of the pig -- and details the folkloric beliefs still found among both provincial and urban Europeans and the rituals that have been associated with it from the Middle Ages to today.

Review Quotes

[A] masterful demonstration of the role of the pig as that animal which, because of its own natural and cultural anomalousness, came so powerfully to symbolize the dialectic of identity and difference obtaining between Christians and Jews.--David Gordon White "Journal of Religion"

A stunning compendium of porcine and theological folklore.... With remarkable acuity, The Singular Beast shows how the pig, the Jew and the Christian have been locked in a fatal and macabre pas de trois for the past two millenniums.-- "Times Literary Supplement"

Fabre-Vassas argues that the cultural tension between those who did and those who did not eat pork helps set the stage for a murderous anti-Semitism.... Taking her cue from Claude Levi-Strauss, [she] studied the culinary habits of southern France, and the way in which the pig began to be associated with the Jew in the anti-Semitic imaginings of peasant culture, and by implication the rest of Europe.-- "The New York Times"

Fabre-Vassas... has written an examination of Christian attitudes toward Jews, particularly during the Middle Ages.... [I]n the historical anti-Semitic literature, the Jews were associated with the pig's lowly traits.... Fabre-Vassas offers a solid, scholarly study.-- "Library Journal"

Fabre-Vassas's work in particular illuminates the fear of otherness that, as a dimension of human consciousness, underlies the relationship between those who are persecuted and those who persecute... The extensive and detailed research in The Singular Beast provides ample evidence of how Jewishness became imbued with all manner of hateful traits.... Through ethnography and text, Fabre-Vassas offers a rich and nuanced protrait of anti-Semitic beliefs and practices that remained deeply embedded in twentieth-century European society.--Janet Liebman Jacobs "Religious Studies Review"

About the Author

Claudine Fabre-Vassas is a research fellow at the Centre Nationale Recherche Scientifique and teaches at the École de Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris.

Carol Volk is a translator and Foreign Service Officer based in Washington, D.C.