Tale of the seven drunken vineyards, or something like it. It had started rather innocently, with a champagne breakfast (all included), and ended Jack Londonesque, King Alcohol. In between we climbed the Munster North tower – after all, from 1647 to 1874 the highest building of mankind. The South Tower was never finished, giving the Munster a rather post-modern look. Someone told us that the Munster gave “des Boches”, the Germans, the finger. A joke, of course. France and Germany are rather close these days, nothing of the “hereditary enmity” of our Fathers and Grandfathers. Strike that, it’s Great-Grandfathers and Grandfathers, considering my age. It’s an impressive little cathedral – we’ll see bigger ones, but it was good for starters. Gothic cathedrals are something you don’t have at all in Asia, and Pranee was truly impressed by the apparent lightness of the building due to its big, elongated windows.
We went there at quarter to one, to watch the astronomic clock in the transept strike 13, which it dutifully did, while all the tourists in the church counted whispery. An incredible Clock from the 16th century, renewed in the 19th, it shows Earth’s and Moon’s orbit, plus the inner and outer planets (until Saturn). Even the precession of the earth’s axis is shown (something that takes 25,800 years for one revolution), and the guide assured us that the indicator was in fact connected by the “slowest moving cogwheels on earth” to the clock’s mechanism. The vista from the tower was absolutely incredible, up and down the Rhine valley, with the Black Forest to the west, and the Vosges Mountains to the east, and the town far below us. I was glad that we had decided against overdressing, the stairs would not end as we climbed up. Well, that was a lot easier to do when I first visited Strasbourg in 1965, when I was 16.
And then Pranee dragged me to the South transept Portal and asked me what those two women statues meant. It was Ecclesia (the church) and Synagogue, referring to Paul 2 Kor 3:14
But their minds were made dull, for to this day the same veil remains when the old covenant is read. It has not been removed, because only in Christ is it taken away.
Consequently, Ecclesia is depicted as a monarch, ruling over a defeated Israel, blinded by a veil, a broken lance in her hand, the one used on Jesus on the cross. The stereotypes of Christian hate of Jews are all there, down to the “jewish” physiognomy. Whenever you want evidence for the inherent Anti-Semitism of the Catholic church, all you have to do is point to Strasbourg Munster South Transept Portal…it’s still there.
A little exhausted we sat down at a Bistro, and had a petit dejeuner, followed by a respectable coq au vin, and a very acceptable dry pinot blanc with it. Pranee insisted I give a short abstract of European and German Anti-Semitism through the ages. She was terrified, not at the fact of a hated people – the Koreans are disliked all over Asia – but at the regular circles of pogroms all over Christian countries, the blood, the violence, and the viscous lies. Accusing them of slaughtering Christian babies in their rituals, fake documents, Elders of Zion, Murderers of Jesus, etc. “But wasn’t that Jesus guy a Jew himself?” she asked in German. And an elderly Alsatian at the next table replied that, no, to his stern belief Jesus was an Aryan. Proof: he is always depicted as blond. When I intervened that in Italy and Spain, he’s always brunette, he switched to French and commented unsavory about me and my “pagan mail-order-bride”. Well, put it on the wine, my French was non-existent today - instead, I lifted my glass, smiled and said with a heavy German accent “A votre santé”.
We escaped to a guided tour of a few renowned vineyards, “avec degustation”, with the inadvertent result of a solid intoxication, which neither of us noted until the bus stopped before our hotel. One moment we were feeling fine, a bit jittery, but really fine, and the next moment, breathing the fresh evening air, we were reduced to a drunkard pair without any sense of direction. Like someone cut the sinews on the back of our knees. A porter – apparently used to the phenomenon – guided us professionally to the lift, wishing a good night…
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