A German appellate court ruled Tuesday that a 700-year-old sculpture dubbed “Jew pig” — which depicts a rabbi peering inside the animal’s anus — can stay on the exterior of a church where Protestant firebrand Martin Luther once preached.

The 13th-century “Judensau,” or Jews’ sow, bas relief on St. Mary’s Church in the eastern town of Wittenberg is a reminder of rampant anti-Semitism during the Middle Ages.

It also features Jewish children suckling milk from the teats of the pig, an animal considered unclean in Judaism.

Plaintiff Michael Duellmann had argued that the sculpture is “a defamation of and insult to the Jewish people.”

He said after the verdict that he would appeal the case in Germany’s Federal Court of Justice — and was prepared to take it all the way to the European Court of Human Rights.

Despite his disappointment, Duellmann said he was happy with the debate the case had sparked within Germany’s Protestant Church, adding that the same discourse is needed in the Catholic Church and Jewish communities in his country and Israel.

“This whole discussion process has been moving ahead with this legal case, and that’s a good thing,” said Duellmann, who has suggested moving the sculpture to the nearby Luther House museum.

After a court in Dessau rejected Duellmann’s case in May, he took it to the higher state court in Naumburg, which in its ruling Tuesday said he had no right to have the sculpture removed because “in its current context” it is not of “slanderous character” and doesn’t violate his rights.

It found that the statue is “part of an ensemble which speaks for another objective” on the part of the parish, a reference to the memorial and the information sign.

“The presentation of a part of the building in its original condition that was originally meant to be insulting is not necessarily insulting,” the court said. “Rather, you can neutralize the original intent with commentary as to the historical context. This is the case with the Wittenberg sculpture.”

In 1570, after the Protestant Reformation, an inscription referring to an anti-Jewish tract by Luther was added to the sculpture.

St. Mary’s Church said it acknowledged, with sadness, that there were those who would be offended by the sculpture.

But it added that in 1988, in consultation with the Jewish community, it had added a memorial to the ground underneath it, referring to the persecution of Jews and the killing of 6 million people during the Holocaust.

Pastor Johannes Block has said the church also considers the relic unacceptably insulting, but argued that it “no longer speaks for itself as a solitary piece, but is embedded in a culture of remembrance” thanks to the 1988 memorial.

“We don’t want to hide or abolish history, but take the path of reconciliation with and through history,” Block said.

Sigmount Koenigsberg, a member of Berlin’s Jewish community, told Reuters: “We don’t want this ‘Judensau’ to disappear. It should be on public display but not on the side of a church. It belongs in a museum alongside clear historical context about anti-Semitism in the Middle Ages.”

Luther is said to have nailed his 95 theses to the door of another church in Wittenberg in 1517, leading to a split with the Roman Catholic Church and the birth of Protestantism.

He came to be linked to Germany’s darkest history, as his later sermons and writings were marked by anti-Semitism.

With Post wires