The Saturnine History of Jews and Witches

Scholarship on fifteenth- and sixteenth-century discourses of witchcraft has not focused to any great degree on the connection between the persecution of Jews and that of witches in Germany during this period, though the construction of Jews as Saturn-ruled, melancholic, phlegmatic, and physiologically toxic contributed much to the debates on witches. Typed according to similar figures of "pollution," Jews and witches were subjected to similar court procedures and suffered comparable "cleansings," tests, and tortures at the hands of the Inquisition. This article argues that such concepts of the "polluted blood" of women, witches, Jews, and effeminate men may have influenced the witchcraft iconography of the sixteenth-century artist of Strasbourg, Hans Baldung Grien (1484/86-1545).