Abstract
The passage of centuries has not effaced the devilish aura that has persistently surrounded the Jew. He has appeared as an impure creature, working in league with Satan for the downfall of Christendom, a pernicious and corrupting figure, cynically auctioning away the values that tradition has hallowed.
The author seeks to explain how such a myth has survived the cultural, social, economic and political upheavals the western world has known after the middle ages. He gives his answer through a study that is directed firstly to the medieval gargoyle of a church in Alsace, then to the diabolical role attributed to the Jew by the rumours of white slavery cir culating in Orleans, Amiens and Strasbourg.
Three revealing approaches emerge. From a socio-economic standpoint, the Satanic image of the Jew is seen as a ten dentious interpretation of the role he has actually played in western economics, resulting in his becoming, today, the sinister symbol of the ' success at any price ' life style. A cul tural standpoint analyzes the secularization of the myth created by medieval theology, that presented this contemptible outcast of society as the privileged eye-witness of Christ's martyrdom and triumph.
In Hitler's version, the Jew achieves his dominant position over other peoples by propagating subversive political ideas among them, and undermining their religious and moral foun dations. In a psycho-sociological perspective, the identification of Jew with devil is placed within the wider dialectic relating man with the Other. The Jew repeatedly incarnates the stran ger in his nearness, his radical difference, and his irreducible otherness.