Published: 2022-12-31

Jesus Burnt in the Stable. The Image of Christians in Józef Hen’s novel The Ping-Pong Player

Sławomir Jacek Żurek
Załącznik Kulturoznawczy
Section: Artykuły
https://doi.org/10.21697/zk.2022.9.11

Abstract

The article, consisting of four parts, examines Józef Hen’s novel Pingponista (The Ping-Pong player) as an example of “post-Jedwabne literary discourse” (Marta Tomczok). The first part is a short presentation of the history of the Roman Catholic Church’s teaching on Jews and Judaism, in which one can find anti-Judaic and anti-Semitic elements being presented for centuries by Church authorities. This situation was changed by the Second Vatican Council’s (1962–1965) declaration in Nostra aetate. Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions (p. 4). Nonetheless, the Church’s teaching of contempt toward the Jews had been influencing Christian thinking for a very long time. The second part of the article is a study of the main protagonists of Hen’s novel, who include both Poles and Jews. All of them visit a small Polish town (Cheremec) to commemorate the victims of an anti-Jewish pogrom in 1941. In the third part, observations are made about the different Christian attitudes toward Jews represented by the protagonists in The Ping-Pong Player. Only a minority of the Polish people in Cheremec took part directly in the pogrom, while a minority of them, in turn, defended the Jews. The majority of the town’s inhabitants were neutral and passive. The author ponders the reasons for this situation and considers it in the context of the town’s contemporary Polish population. He looks for connections between anti-Semitism and anti- Judaism and the axiologies guiding everyday Christians. According to him, Polish Catholics do not connect the events of the Holocaust to the history of religious teaching in the Magisterium of the Church and do not see in the murdered Jews the “chosen people” – the same ones they hear about on Sundays in readings from the Bible in Church. They do not understand that their Christian God – Jesus Christ – was (and is) also a Jew, a member of this persecuted people. The title of the article is taken directly from the novel, where the parish priest of the Catholic parish in Cheremec (Father Ziemowit) says that “Jesus burnt in the stable”, together with the Jewish inhabitants of the town. The fourth part of the article is an axiological analysis of the novel in the context of Christian-Jewish relationships and literary studies on recent Polish narratives of the Holocaust.

Keywords:

anti-Semitism, anti-Judaism, Jews, christians, Jedwabne, axiology, Holocaust, modern Polish literature

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Citation rules

Żurek, S. J. (2022). Jesus Burnt in the Stable. The Image of Christians in Józef Hen’s novel The Ping-Pong Player. Załącznik Kulturoznawczy, (9), 203–231. https://doi.org/10.21697/zk.2022.9.11

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