By Oliver Moody, Berlin

High up on the façade of the town church in Wittenberg, the timeworn stone figures of three Jews suckle on the teats of a giant sow. Behind her, a caricature of a rabbi lifts her hind leg to inspect her backside for omens.

Above the whole ensemble stand the words Schem Hamphoras, a garbled form of one of the Jewish names for God and part of the title of a virulently antisemitic tract by the German church’s best-known preacher, the Protestant theologian Martin Luther.

More than seven centuries after it was carved, the notorious Judensau (Jew-sow) of Wittenberg is causing division in the Protestant church and anger in Germany’s Jewish community as a legal campaign to have it taken down escalates through the country’s court system. The sculpture has become an ugly emblem of the country’s age-old struggle with antisemitism, in the midst of a new surge in hate crimes against Jews.

“It spreads the message that even today Jews can be slandered and degraded in this evil manner,” Volker Boehme-Nessler, professor of law at the Carl von Ossietzky University in Oldenburg, said. “If you tolerate this kind of aggression against a minority, you make antisemitism acceptable in polite society.”

The lawsuit against the Judensau was brought last year by Michael Düllmann, a member of the Sukkat Shalom synagogue in Berlin, who has resolved to take his case to the European Court of Justice if necessary.

 
Mr Düllmann, 75, argued that the presence of the stone relief was a criminal offence against modern German Jewry and that Wittenberg should be stripped of its Unesco world heritage status if the sculpture remained in place. Several protests have been held outside the church and a petition for the statue’s removal has more than 10,000 signatures .

The town council and the mayor, however, said that while the Judensau might be unpleasant, it was a testament to the antisemitism of its age and should be left as a reminder of the darker side of German history.

Last month the district court in Dessau-Rosslau ruled that the sculpture was a symbol of a bygone era and should stay on the façade as a “witness of its times”.

Yet the controversy did not die there. Mr Düllmann’s lawyers are appealing and Friedrich Kramer, 54, the incoming bishop of the surrounding diocese, has declared himself in favour of removing the relief.

The relief is identified with Luther, father of the Protestant Reformation, who wrote anti-Jewish material in the 16th century. Luther’s works, including Vom Schem Hamphoras, which equated Jews with the devil and gave the Wittenberg Judensau its slogan, were reprinted by the Nazis.

Richard Harvey, a Jewish theologian from north London who started the petition, said he had seen the sculpture during a conference in the town church. “It struck me as a terrible thing that this statue, which is abusive, antisemitic, blasphemous and offensive, should be there,” he said. “It should be moved out of a public and spiritual space.”