Sounds to kill Jews by

Few things - even thunder and cannon - can have made more noise than the mob in the pre-industrial age. Shakespeare introduces crowd noise to punctuate and underscore events of great note - Coriolanus “Splitting the air with noise” on his return, Julius Caesar unfazed on hearing that “ghosts did shriek and squeal about the streets” - although I don’t know of any detailed accounts by Our Bill or by any earlier writers of soundscapes of urban disruption. Yet the aural sensation must have been so powerful that the odd echo should not surprise us, and that’s why I want to indulge in some mild speculation re a Catalan Jew-killing ceremony.

The pastoral letter issued by Cardinal Gomá on January 30th 1937 was clear: the Civil War was the fault of the masons, the Jews, the communists. His fervent anti-Semitism was shared by many to the right and left, although the massacres, deportations and prohibitions of previous centuries meant that there wasn’t anyone much left to hate. The role of the Franco regime in allowing Jews to flee France during the war is well known and has, I think, distracted attention from the popularity until comparatively recently of genocidal traditions. Here is FC from Torelló, up on the Vic plain:

If intended as a symbolic reinterpretation of the noise of pogrom, then the part played by mallet on plank (or, sometimes, on earth) would be clear enough, but the rattles would be difficult to explain. Without further evidence I’d be tempted to believe that, rather than medieval slaughter, the children were actually recreating machine age violence, the crack-crack and thud-thud of repeating weapons, the chatter of automatics. So was this in fact a nineteenth century invention?

Trevor @ 19 June 2004 5:25 PM

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Comments

1. JezzaBabe
   6:40 PM on 20 June 2004

   The rattles are easy. A roncador is a snorer, so what you’ve got is a record of a massacre conducted while the victims were asleep.

2. MM
   3:13 PM on 21 June 2004

   Somehow there’s something so sad about this plaintive, ‘At least they could have put on a little play’, although at the same horrible. I couldn’t work out if it was a little boy or a little girl (’us girls’ … ‘”little boy’)

3. Trevor
   10:03 AM on 22 June 2004

   @MM: Sorry, it’s a little girl. Change made.
   @Jezza: Isn’t that too plausible to be true?

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