Jews have been killed for centuries based on a slanderous accusation. While often repeated, that it is false is certain.
by Massimo Introvigne*
*This article collects, for ease of reading, a series of articles published on this site in October 2021.
Table of Contents
Why Blood Libel Is a Lie
The deadliest anti-Semitic lie has been historically the “blood libel,” according to which Jews need Christian blood for certain secret rituals. It is a subject worth of study not only because of its importance in the history of anti-Semitism, but because it became a model for accusations of atrocities against other religious minorities.
In 2004, I noticed that the large literature available on this dangerous myth had a hole of sort. A key document of the controversy had never been published in its original Italian version, although translations in German, French, and English had appeared in the 19th and 20th century. The document was an official, and skeptical, Vatican report on the accusations of ritual homicide against Jews by Cardinal Lorenzo Ganganelli (1705–1774) approved by the Holy Office on December 24, 1759. In 1769, Ganganelli will be elected Pope with the name Clement XIV.
I republished the Ganganelli report in 2004, which was somewhat timely, as in 2007 Israeli historian Ariel Toaff, the son of Italy’s most beloved rabbi, Elio Toaff (1915–2015), shocked historians by publishing a book where he seemed to lend some credibility to at least one case of blood libel. After criticism, he withdrew his book from circulation, and later published a more cautious second edition.
I will return to the incident involving Toaff (who, by the way, criticized my 2004 edition of Ganganelli in his book) in a subsequent article of this series, which examines different features of the blood libel myth. My purpose here is not to offer an inventory of the blood libel incidents, traditionally estimated at between 150 and 200 from the Middle Ages to the present, but probably more numerous, since Daniel Tollet in 2000 reviewed 112 cases for Poland and Lithuania alone between 1407 and 1789. Instead, I will focus on a few main episodes, emblematic for constructing one or rather several typologies of the myth, and on the explanations advanced by historians regarding its genesis and development.
These episodes are, in police jargon, cold cases, and cases that have been cold for centuries. We have no way of knowing what exactly happened. We know, however, with reasonable historical certainty what did not happen in the cases of ritual murder attributed to Jews. The victims were not killed by Jews who needed their blood for ritual reasons. It is not impossible that some of these murders occurred in the context of religious disputes and sectarian violence. But that is not what “blood libel” is all about. What it is, falsely, claimed is that Jews killed Christians to obtain the blood of victims, and use it for religious or magical purposes.
The most current, but comparatively more recent, version is that Jews mixed Christian blood with Passover unleavened bread. But there are older versions of the legend. Medieval and Eastern European sources sometimes state that the wound of circumcision does not heal unless it is washed with Christian blood. Or that Jews are condemned after the killing of Jesus Christ to suffer in perpetuity from hemorrhoids, from which only potions based on Christian blood may heal them. Another variant claims that among the Jews also men, not only women, have after the death of Jesus Christ menstruations, until they drink the blood of a Christian victim. In yet other versions, Christian blood would free Jews from eye infections, enter into the composition of powerful love potions, and free Jews from the special odor because of which, however much they disguise themselves, non-Jews immediately identify them as such.
There are two decisive arguments for excluding any kernel of truth in connection with these legends. The first concerns blood in general, the second Christian blood. The taboo against the consumption of blood is one of the strongest and most characteristic of the Jewish religion. In Genesis 9:4 God enjoins to Noah and his sons: “You shall not eat flesh with its life, that is, its blood.” And Moses is commanded in Leviticus 7:26–27: “You shall not eat any blood in any of your dwellings, whether of bird or beast. Whoever eats any blood, that person shall be cut off from his people.” Leviticus 17:10–14 presents the prohibition even more extensively, and the injunction is reconfirmed inter alia in Deuteronomy 12:23, “Only be sure that you do not eat the blood, for the blood is the life.”
The Talmud is, if anything, even more obsessive about the prohibition of taking blood of any kind and in any form. Thus the treatise Kerithoth 21a–b discusses at length, for example, the permissibility of consuming eggs containing blood, or insect blood, reporting more or less restrictive views. The treatise Hullin 109a reports the opinion that, before being consumed, the heart of an animal should be “split in the middle and emptied of blood.” In the case of an animal liver, Hullin 110a implies that the blood that is to be removed from it should not fall into the pot, where it would contaminate all the otherwise kosher food in it.
An entire chapter of the Talmud, Hullin VI, is devoted to the duty of “covering” the blood, precisely the form of “burial” mentioned in Leviticus 17, still practiced in the course of ritual slaughter. Hullin 113a explains how to remove the blood from raw meat, then sprinkle salt on it to absorb the remaining blood, and finally wash the meat to remove the salt. Only through this process does the meat become kosher, and the use of salt, now more often part of the procedure for preparing meat certified as kosher on an industrial scale, was until a few decades ago a common practice in Jewish households.
The second reason why the blood accusation is absurd is that it assumes that Jews believe in the redemptive capacity of the blood of Jesus Christ. Essentially all Christian authors who supported the blood libel claimed that Jews use the blood of innocent Christian victims (most often, but not exclusively, children) because of the connection that, through baptism, this blood has acquired with the blood of Christ. Through the sacrilegious use of Christian blood, the Jews, this literature argues, delude themselves into thinking that they are magically participating in the benefits of redemption, which would otherwise be denied them by their obstinacy in not converting to Christianity. To carry out these practices, Jews should therefore believe in the efficacy of the blood of Christ and Christian baptism: and at the same time not believe in it, since not only do they not convert but they kill Christians because they hate their religion. The contradiction is evident.
We are therefore faced with a myth, a folkloric motif, duly indexed as such in the list used by folklorists around the world originally compiled by Stith Thompson at number V361: “Christian child killed to provide blood for a Jewish ritual.” But a myth, and a lie, in which name innocent Jews have been killed, as we will see in the subsequent articles.
The English Origins of the Lie
In the previous chapter, we saw how the lie claiming that Jews ritually kill Christians to use their blood in magical rituals, a main tool of anti-Semitism, has been debunked as mere slander from centuries, yet continues to be repeated. Where did it come from?
Posidonius (135–51 BC) reports that when in 168 BCE King Antiochus IV (215–164 BC) invaded and desecrated the temple of Jerusalem, he found a Greek prisoner there. The latter told him that every seven years the Jews captured a Greek, fattened him up, killed him, ate his entrails, and swore eternal enmity to the Greeks. The story, so contrary to everything we know about Old Testament Judaism as to appear a mere invention of Antiochus’ propaganda against the Jews, resurfaced on several occasions in Greek literature. This was a primitive version of the blood libel since it mentions “eating the entrails” but not drinking the blood, and of course did not involve Christians.
That Jews killed Christians in their feasts was repeatedly claimed in the early Middle Ages, but this was not the blood libel as we know it either. The blood libel lie was born in a precise place and at a specific date, in Norwich, England, on March 25, 1144, Easter Day, when the lifeless body of the 12-year-old leatherworker apprentice William was found in the locality of Thorpe Wood. On Monday before Easter 1144, a man posing as a cook to the archdeacon of Norwich had asked a woman called Elviva if he could employ her son William during the week of Easter. Elviva agreed, and the boy left with the man. Nothing more was known about William or the false cook until Easter, when the boy’s body was found. Elviva’s sister then remembered having been forewarned in a dream that her family would suffer a crime at the hands of the Jews, and started accusing the local Jews of having murdered William.
Initially, the accusations remained within the family circle, and no authority investigated William’s death. In the following month of April, however, a synod was held in Norwich, presided over by Bishop Eborard of Montgomery (1072–1146), which offered William’s family the opportunity to publicly accuse the Jews of the crime. Some agitation followed, and the Bishop asked the sheriff to take some Jews into custody in the castle of Norwich until calm would return. This happened quickly, and the Jews were released.
The incident would have been forgotten had it not been for Thomas of Monmouth (ca. 1120-1180), a Welshman famous for his vast erudition who arrived in Norwich probably in 1146 and became a Benedictine monk there in 1150. Thomas’s fame is precisely linked to De vita et passione Sancti Willelmi martyris Norwicensis (The Life and Passion of Saint William, the Martyr of Norwich), a work written over a period of nearly twenty-five years since it was probably begun in 1149 and completed in 1173. It was Thomas who created the hagiographic legend of the holy martyr William, and also the first embryo of the blood libel in the form in which we know it today. Upon arriving in Norwich, Thomas became passionate about the story of William, made it a constant object of his preaching, and began to collect testimonies of miracles that would occur through the intercession of the little martyr. In 1150, he obtained the translation of his body to the monks’ chapterhouse, which seemed to multiply the miracles.
In the meantime, Thomas collected testimonies about suspicious wounds on the body of William, and of a rich citizen of Norwich who, dying in 1149, had allegedly revealed in confession that on Easter day of 1144 he had met in Thorpe Wood a Jew, Eleazar (long since dead), who carried a human body in a sack, believed to be that of William. Curiously, this testimony had not surfaced at the time of the agitation against the Jews during the synod of April 1144.
Thomas also reported that a Cambridge Jew called Theobald had been converted by the miracles at William’s tomb and allegedly told Thomas that every year wealthy Spanish Jews gathered at Narbonne to decide, by drawing lots, in which nation of Europe the annual sacrifice of a Christian boy prescribed by their “secret scriptures,” which asked them to spill or collect Christian blood, should take place. In 1144 the choice fell on England, whose communities gathered to draw lots for the name of the city where the rite was to be celebrated. Fate “favored” Norwich, or so said the mysterious Theobald, of whom nothing is known and who was probably just a figment of Thomas’ imagination. The body of “Saint” William was translated to the crypt of the martyrs of Norwich Cathedral, but his worship declined rapidly.
However, the legend that Jews “ritually” killed Christian boys was born, and had tragic consequences. In Fulda, Germany, in 1235, 34 local Jews were put to the sword by passing crusaders because they were accused of killing five sons of a Christian miller, collecting their blood in bags sealed with wax, and burning them in a magic ritual. For the first time there was a mention there of preserving the Christian blood. Emperor Frederick II (1194–1250), after appointing a commission of experts, declared the Jews of Fulda and of all Germany “entirely innocent of these grave accusations,” and Pope Innocent IV (1195–1254) in his bull of September 25, 1253 mentioned the case of Fulda to “forbid that some of them [Jews] be accused of using human blood in their rites, since even in the Old Testament it is forbidden for them to make use of any kind of blood, let alone human blood”—a very reasonable position.
Soon, however, England offered a case destined to be made famous by literature and art. On July 27, 1255, an eight-year-old boy, Hugh, disappeared in Lincoln. He was found dead almost a month later, at the bottom of a well that belonged to a Jew called Copin. A certain John of Lexington (probably a judge) intervened, and suggested that this was a repetition of the Norwich case, the boy had been crucified by the Jews, and his blood used for rituals. More unfortunate than his Norwich co-religionists, Copin was arrested and tortured, until he confessed that every year the Jews of England, in hatred of Jesus Christ, kidnapped a Christian boy, scourged him, crowned him with thorns, and finally crucified him, collecting his blood.
Copin and 18 other Lincoln Jews were executed, and another 91 Jews were imprisoned in the Tower of London. Franciscans and Dominicans in London, skeptical of stories of ritual murder, intervened on behalf of the accused, and at least most of them were released, although documents are contradictory and some might have been executed. Hugh’s body was enshrined in the Cathedral of Lincoln, and only in 1955 the Church of England forbade the worship and decorated the grave, which had been already partially demolished at the times of the Commonwealth, with an inscription apologizing to the Jews for the Christians’ complicity in their persecution.
The Lincoln episode is important because it gave rise to one of the best-known English folk ballads, “Sir Hugh,” of which several versions exist, so well-known in the United Kingdom that James Joyce (1882–1941) had it sung in Ulysses by young Stephen, who did not realize its anti-Semitic implications, in the house of the Jew Bloom. Whether the ballad predated the 14th century and thus influenced the “Prioress’s Tale” in Geoffrey Chaucer’s (1343–1400) Canterbury Tales is a matter of controversy. Certainly Chaucer’s tale, although set in an imaginary “Christian city in Asia,” is influenced by the Lincoln episode, explicitly mentioned at the end of the text, though the story is different. The boy killed by the Jews continues to sing even after his death thanks to a miraculous grain placed on his tongue by the Virgin Mary herself, until the grain is ritually removed by a Christian abbot, and the boy quietly passes away, after the Jews have been executed.
The Prioress’s Tale was a preferred theme in Pre-Raphaelite paintings in the 19th century. Edward Coley Burne-Jones (1833–1898) made in 1858 a magnificent wardrobe, presently at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, decorated with scenes of the story as a wedding gift to William Morris (1834–1896) and Jane Burden (1839–1914), the muse of the Pre-Raphaelites. He later painted the scene of the Virgin and the miraculous grain in a watercolor of the 1890s, now at the Delaware Art Museum.
There are always doubts whether these pieces should be exhibited today, because of their anti-Semitic implications. But it is generally recognized that Burne-Jones downplayed the anti-Jewish element and focused on the grain’s miracle, which has so far allowed the wardrobe and the watercolor to remain on display in their museums and part of exhibitions about the Pre-Raphaelites.
The Case of Trent, 1475
The expulsion of Jews from England in 1290 made Lincoln’s the last episode on English soil where Jews were falsely accused of killing Christian children and using their bloods in sinister rituals. The legend of Hugh of Lincoln, however, circulated in Germany, and determined several blood libel incidents. As it had happened in previous cases, the Vatican was skeptical. Pope Gregory X (1210–1276) on October 7, 1272, thundered against those who “assert in a very false way that the Jews kidnap children in secret and make sacrifice of their hearts and their blood, because their law prohibits precisely and expressly that the Jews themselves […] drink blood, not even of animals […]. We order that the Jews imprisoned for this frivolous accusation be released from prison, nor in the future be imprisoned on the basis of the same frivolous accusation, except in the case—which we do not believe possible—in which they were caught in the act of committing a crime.”
Local bishops, however, sometimes disagreed, particularly in Austria and what is today the partially German-speaking Italian region of Trentino Alto Adige. The worship of one Andreas Oxner (Andreas of Rinn), allegedly ritually murdered by Jews at age 3 in 1462 in Rinn, near Innsbruck, continued until 1984, when the Catholic Church finally forbade it.
What was perhaps the most famous blood libel case of them all occurred in Trent, Italy, in 1475. In that year, Passover fell on March 23, and Christian Easter on March 26. On March 24, Good Friday, the dyer Andreas Unferdorben presented himself to the Prince-Bishop of Trent, Johannes Hinderbach (1418–1486), complaining that his two-and-a-half-year-old son Simon had disappeared on the evening of Thursday, March 23. The father, apparently at the urging of a Swiss citizen called Zanesus, who was ferociously anti-Semitic and familiar with the blood libel stories, asked that the houses of the small Jewish community of Trent, which had only thirty members divided among the three families of Samuel, Tobias, and Engel, be searched.
The searches were inconclusive, but around lunchtime on the Christian day of Easter, Samuel’s cook discovered the body of little Simon in his cellar, where there was a water collector connected to an external irrigation ditch. Persuaded the body had been thrown there by Christians to falsely accuse them of murder (although the child might simply have fallen in the water collector and drowned), the Jews went to the castle to inform the authorities of the macabre discovery. The Jews’ protests were not heard, and all the men in their community plus one woman were arrested.
The Jews were soon tortured, and accused Zanesus of the murder. The Swiss was in turn arrested and tortured, but got off thanks to an alibi confirmed by his wife. The torture, gradually extended to include the women of the Jewish community, and finally elicited confessions where some of the Jews admitted to have killed little Simon, bleeding him slowly to obtain the blood that they then mixed, according to a secret ritual of theirs, with the Passover unleavened bread, and drank mixed with wine at the Passover banquet.
On June 14, nine Jews were sentenced to death. The eldest, Moses, died in prison as a result of torture, although some official documents recorded his death as suicide. Two converted to Christianity and were beheaded. The six who did not convert were burned at the stake. After an additional investigation four other Jews were sentenced and hanged on January 16, 1476, and one who first converted to Christianity and then retracted his conversion was subjected to the torture of the wheel and burned at the stake on January 19. All women either died in prison or converted, and their children were baptized and educated in Christian homes. The Jewish community of Trent was completely destroyed. Bishop Hinderbach, with the help of the new tool of the press and no less than thirty books and pamphlets, started vigorously promoting the worship of the “blessed martyr Simonino,” whose body was exposed in the parish church of San Pietro.
The Vatican was not enthusiastic. Pope Sixtus IV (1414–1484), with a brief of July 23, 1475, in which he forbade any act of worship towards the little Simon, sent to Trent an apostolic commissioner, the bishop of Ventimiglia Battista de’ Giudici (1428–1484), a learned Dominican, to ascertain what was going on and why the prescriptions of at least three different Popes, which had condemned the blood libel accusation against the Jews, had been ignored. The skeptical de’ Giudici quickly clashed with the local bishop Hinderbach, who told the Pope that a decision blaming him for the execution of the Jews would offer the Emperor a pretext to march on Trent and put an end to the city’s semi-independence with the bishop as a ruler, which would be very much detrimental to the interest of the Church.
A dying Pope Sixtus IV on June 20, 1478, signed a bull that on the one hand declared Bishop Hinderbach innocent of accusations of illegality, acknowledging that in trying and executing the Jews it had respected the legal procedure, but on the other hand reiterated the statements of previous Popes that the blood libel accusations were false. The Pope ordered the city to return the dowries confiscated from the imprisoned Jewish women, and to avoid any future violence against the Jews.
Trent interpreted the bull to the effect that the worship of the “blessed martyr Simonino” was not prohibited, and it became popular in the city, which in 1588 obtained from Pope Sixtus V (1521–1590) a proper Mass and Office for the alleged martyr. A procession to be held every ten years was instituted, the last one taking place in 1955. In 1965, in fact, the Vatican’s Sacred Congregation of Rites issued a decree prohibiting any act of worship to “blessed Simon.” This decree would serve as the basis and model for the gradual suppression of the veneration of all the various alleged victims of Jewish ritual homicides for whom Mass and Offices had been granted in Italy, Spain, and other countries, where the fame of the Trent case had determined an epidemic of blood libel accusations and worship of pseudo-martyrs.
On October 28, 1965, with a document dated from Rome on the same day of the promulgation of the Declaration Nostra Aetate on the Relations of the Church with Non-Christian Religions of the Second Vatican Council (which at n. 4, among other things, “deplores hatred, persecution and all manifestations of anti-Semitism directed against the Jews at any time and by anyone”), the bishop of Trent, Alessandro Maria Gottardi (1912–2001), forbade any further manifestation of worship and ordered that the remains of little Simon be removed from the urn in the parish church of San Pietro and buried in the city cemetery. On February 1, 1967, the Italian Rabbinical Council, noting these developments, in turn revoked the ban once pronounced against the city of Trent. But the case was not fully closed.
The Ariel Toaff Incident
By the 21st century, it was the common scholarly consensus that the blood libel was a lie, and that incidents where Jews were accused of having killed Christian children to use their blood in sinister rituals had been fabricated by anti-Semitic propaganda. They included the alleged killing of a child later called “Saint Simonino” in Trent, Italy, in 1475, discussed in our last article, where confessions were obtained from the local Jews through torture.
In 2007, however, Ariel Toaff, professor of history at the Bar-Ilan University of Ramat Gan, in Israel, and son of the most famous Italian rabbi, the then 91-year-old Elio Toaff (1915–2015), published with a respected academic publisher, il Mulino, a book in Italian titled Pasque di sangue (Passovers of Blood). It shocked both the Jewish world and the academic community by suggesting that the Jews of Trent in 1475 might indeed have been guilty of the murder of little Simon, and might have used his blood for magical rituals. Reactions were so strong that the publisher and the author agreed to withdraw the book only one week after its release, although pirate editions were kept on the Internet by anti-Semitic organizations. Toaff republished a much more cautious version of the book in 2008, presenting his theories as mere possibilities.
One of the reasons Toaff’s book was controversial is that it was used by the Hezbollah, and the Syrian and Iranian governments, to support the blood libel accusations they were already including in their anti-Jewish propaganda. Although my own studies were attacked by Toaff in Passovers of Blood, in my critical review of the book in 2007 I argued that the fact that the Jewish scholar had supplied ammunitions to Middle Eastern anti-Semitic propaganda was politically important but irrelevant for the truth or falsehood of Toaff’s argument. I believed his reconstruction of the Trent incident was false, irrespective of what political purposes it might serve.
Toaff argued that at least from the early Middle Ages to the 15th century it existed a “violent and aggressive fundamentalism” (the anachronistic use of the term “fundamentalism” was his) among a group, small but not insubstantial, of Ashkenazi Jews, who actually sacrificed Christian children in order to ritually take their blood.
Toaff’s book was a tour the force, but the pages dedicated to the blood libel were decidedly in the minority compared to those that dealt with other topics, which were not without interest but did not prove his theory about the blood libel. Much of the book was devoted to: the involvement of Jews in espionage activities (which could have “perhaps,” one of the most frequently used words in the text, involved an attempt to assassinate the Turkish sultan of the time, and in rather shady affairs of the Republic of Venice); to anti-Christian invectives in medieval and early modern Jewish literature and rituals; to blasphemous parodies of Christianity, involving the crucifixion of a lamb at Easter, of which certain Jews of Crete were “perhaps” guilty; to the killing of Christians, some “perhaps” by crucifixion, by Jews (and vice versa) during riots; to the drama of some desperate Jewish mothers who “perhaps” killed their own children to save them from kidnapping and forced conversion to Christianity; to accusations against Jesus Christ in the Jewish anti-Christian controversy, arguing that he was conceived not by a virgin but by a menstruating woman; to Jewish iconography that depicted with evident complacency the blood of slain enemies; to a conspiracy “perhaps” hatched by Jews to kill those responsible for the Trent blood libel accusation; and to the superstitious practice of some Jewish communities, where the blood of circumcision would be considered to be the bearer of therapeutic benefits.
To those who would object that all this obviously had nothing to do with the blood libel, Toaff replied that it was instead the foundation that allowed him to come to two conclusions. The first was that the aversion of medieval Jews to Christians was so extreme as to make accusations of murder credible. The second conclusion was that, despite the well-known Biblical and Talmudic prohibitions against the use of blood, the image of blood returned in the Middle Ages in Jewish iconography and folklore, and there were cases in which the taboo was overcome, and blood was used for healing purposes.
Toaff also re-examined, even allowing himself a few exclamation points, as if to indicate that he had finally found the smoking gun, the opinions of two esteemed rabbis of the modern era, Jacob Reischer (1670–1734) of Prague and Hayyim Ozer Grodzinski (1863–1940) of Vilnius, who authorized the use of certain drugs based on dried animal blood. However, outside of this medical use, which was not uncommon in the medicine of the time in general, Toaff’s perusal of rabbinical opinions found only responses condemning any superstitious use of blood.
When in what is actually the shorter part of his book, Toaff started dealing with blood libel incidents, he tried to reverse the conclusions taken for granted by mainline scholarship. One was that confessions extracted with abundant use of torture cannot be considered as evidence by historians. Toaff replied that this should not be the case, because several documents, including the minutes of the Trent case of Simonino, report a whole series of statements of the defendants on typically Jewish rituals and practices that the Christian judges could not have known. Toaff’s theory is not new, and was already discussed on the subject of witchcraft.
Historians of witchcraft spent much of the twentieth century debunking the so-called “Murray heresy,” which also played an important role in the origins of modern neo-witchcraft or Wicca in England and the United States. Margaret Alice Murray (1863–1963), Egyptologist by profession and historian of witchcraft by passion, published from 1917 several writings on witches, culminating in 1931 with The God of the Witches. Murray, who will survive the controversy over her historiographic “heresy,” and live to the respectable age of one hundred years, argued that the confessions of the witches obtained through torture were nonetheless believable, because they were full of allusions to a peasant folklore that the learned inquisitors could not have known by themselves.
Toaff was aware that the objection that he was a late follower of the “Murray heresy” would be addressed to him, and stated since the very first pages of his book that the blood libel cases were different from those of witchcraft. This is true, but it is Toaff’s methodology in assessing confessions rendered under torture that looks very much like the “Murray heresy” adapted and applied to the blood libel.
Murray has been answered to the point of boredom that, even under torture, the alleged witches certainly retained their language and mixed in what interested the judges (including admitting to having had sexual intercourse with the Devil) real information about their world and peasant traditions. If we affirm that everything the accused of witchcraft told in the trials was false, we are certainly wrong. But we are more seriously mistaken if we believe that everything in the records of witchcraft trials is true. Just as the women (and men) accused of witchcraft recounted details that were often true about magical and superstitious practices, but certainly gave voice to their own or the judges’ fantasies when they told of having coupled with the Devil or of flying on broomsticks, so it is possible that the Jews tortured in Trent opened a window on a world of popular superstitions of the time, but this does not mean that what they “confessed” about the ritual murder of little Simon and the assumption of his blood was true.
Somewhat naively, Toaff reminded his readers that torture was permissible under the laws of the time and that the cruel procedures used in Trent, “although unacceptable to our eyes today, were in fact normal.” But what exactly does this change? When Toaff mentions blood libel cases accompanied by “objective evidence,” such as that of Endingen in 1470, one would expect a use of the term “evidence” in accordance with current legal language. In the case of Endingen, in contrast to others where the allegedly sacrificed child reappeared after a few days alive and well, a corpse was found. But the finding of a corpse only proved that the missing child was dead. It did not prove anything about who killed him, and why.
From here to conclude that the depositions of the accused, who were extensively tortured, in trials such as that of Trent allow us to conclude that “the use of the blood of a Christian infant in the celebration of Passover was apparently the object of a meticulous regulation” among a group of Ashkenazi Jews, the step is decidedly longer than Toaff’s leg. Among other things, he had to discredit the inquiry of the papal legate sent from Rome, Archbishop Battista de’ Giudici (1428-1484), who declared the Jews of Trent “completely innocent” and the stories of ritual homicide “fantasies.” Toaff responds by exhuming all the gossip of the time about de’ Giudici, who not only “perhaps” was “accompanied by three Jews” in his trip to Trent, but had also a bad reputation as “a gourmet” and a glutton.
Historians of the blood libel also agree that the fact that dozens or even hundreds of accounts of ritual murders imputed to Jews are similar to each other is a strong indication of their falsity. It is the accounts, not the facts, that copy each other, as is the case for witchcraft. Here, again, Toaff reverses mainline scholarship. For him, the fact that dozens of different accounts reported the same facts and the same details is a prove that the facts really happened. A conversation with sociologists who studied hundreds of different, but similar, allegations of Satanic ritual abuse during the “Satanic panics” of the late 20th century might have persuaded him that the opposite is true.
Toaff’s work was not based on any new discovery. On the case of Trent, he did not bring new documents but tried to overturn their mainline interpretation, without realizing that by using his method one would have to admit that witches went to meet the Devil riding their brooms, or even (since dozens of accounts are similar in this case as well) that hundreds of Americans in the 1990s were kidnapped by little green men from some distant galaxy.
Looking at it in retrospect, we can consider Toaff’s book as a typical product of the fad for revisionist history of the first decade of the 21st century, and of intra-Israeli struggles where ultra-orthodox Jews were accused of all sorts of secret and dangerous superstitious practices by their more liberal co-religionists. It did not add anything significant to serious historiography about the blood libel, whose study continued to be conducted by mainline scholars largely ignoring or dismissing Toaff’s book.
Blood libel accusations in Poland and Lithuania
According to French historian, Daniel Tollet, “prior to the introduction of the Counter-Reformation in Poland, the accusation of ritual crime [against the Jews] was virtually nonexistent.” It was when Jews started being considered by Catholics “the actual or potential allies of heretics” that a Polish-Lithuanian cycle of blood libel was born.
The Jesuits, whose members popularized in Poland and Lithuania the worship of the little Simon of Trent discussed in our previous articles, were according to the same author at the origin of the first cases that occurred in Vilnius in 1568 and 1589. Already in 1547, two Jews had been burned in Rawa, Poland, but it was the 17th century, an era in which blood libel cases were almost absent in the rest of Europe, that offered in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as many as 38 cases.
In 300 years, until the end of the 18th century, there were, according to various sources, between one and three thousand capital sentences, not all of them executed and not only of Jews, because their Christian “accomplices” were also sentenced. But acquittals were not scarce either, and the courts were particularly mild in the case of conversion to Catholicism. Tollet himself relates this attitude to the penetration in Polish Catholic circles of millenarian ideas about the conversion of the Jews as a necessary pre-condition for the end of the world.
The same famous Jesuit Piotr Skarga (1536–1612) who was at the origin of the diffusion of the worship of Simon of Trent in the Commonwealth was among the most active propagators of the theory according to which the Poles descended from the Jews of the Old Testament, in the Polish language there are traces of Hebrew, and the Poles are a chosen people destined to convert the Jews in view of the end of the world. When the theme of ritual homicide emerged, the Jesuits did not propose to expel Jews from the Commonwealth, but to convert them to Christianity.
At the end of the 17th century, however, a more radically anti-Jewish position also emerged, convinced that the presence of large numbers of Jews on Polish soil was a divine punishment for the sins of the nation. This tendency was embodied by the archpriest of Sandomierz Cathedral, Stefan Zuchowski (1666–1716), the instigator of two episodes of blood libel in his city in 1698 and 1710, which not coincidentally put him at odds with the more nuanced and “conversionist” position of the Jesuits.
Polish-Lithuanian kings were generally skeptical about the blood libel accusations, and often pardoned Jews sentenced by local courts. Sometimes, they asked the Vatican to rein in local Catholic bishops who believed in the blood libel. Pope Paul III (1468–1549) intervened in one of the early cases by admonishing the bishop of Vilnius, Pawel Holszanski (1485–1555), not to prosecute Jews accused of the ritual murder of as many as fifty children in Tykocin (now in Poland). In this case, the joint intervention of the Pope and the King led to the release of all the accused.
Yet the accusations, trials and executions continued, although in the transition from the 17th to the 18th century they became, in Tollet’s words, “ruralized,” in the sense that the episodes almost always took place far from the major cities. In the 18th century, there were 38 cases in the Commonwealth, the same number as in the previous century. These are record figures in the history of blood libel, and demand an explanation. One simple reason was that, at that time, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had the largest concentration of Jews in the world, almost one million. The diffusion of Hasidism and the Kabbalah also made malevolent Christians suspect that secret, sinister rituals were at work.
More catastrophic for Polish Jews was the conversion to Catholicism in 1759 of one of the most famous Jewish “false Messiahs,” Jakob Frank (1726–1791). The newly converted Frank began to challenge the rabbis, who had always opposed his movement, to public theological disputes, where he openly argued that the Talmud obliged Jews to use Christian blood in their rituals.
Frank’s statements were forwarded to the Vatican, where they were met by the traditional skepticism about the blood libel. In 1756, in Jampol, Poland (now part of Ukraine), the discovery of the corpse of a Christian child believed to have been murdered led to the indictment of fifteen Jews for ritual homicide. The civil authority concluded that death had been accidental, and acquitted the Jews. But the Bishop of Luck, Antoni Erazm Wołłowicz (1710–1790), who had taken an active part in the trial, decided to appeal.
The Council of the Four Countries, the representative body of the Polish-Lithuanian Jewish communities, collected the sum of 3,046 “red” (i.e. gold) zlotys to finance the journey of one of the accused, Olikim Jelek (or Jacob Selek) to Rome, armed with a plea to Pope Benedict XIV (1675–1758) to stop the appeal process. The pope referred the case to the Holy Office, and the latter instructed the Franciscan Lorenzo Ganganelli (1705–1774), a bishop and a consultant to the Congregation, to prepare a report (called “vow”). After requesting and obtaining more information from the nuncio in Poland, Ganganelli, who in the meantime had become a cardinal (and will become Pope Clement XIV in 1769), presented his report, which was approved by the Holy Office on Christmas Eve 1759.
As mentioned in the first article of this series, I published the report in its original Italian, for the first time, in 2004. This was not the first Vatican intervention on the Polish-Lithuanian blood libel cases in the 18th century, because in 1706 the Congregation for the Propagation of Faith had authorized the printed publication of a refutation of the accusations of ritual homicide prepared by the Rabbi of Rome, Tranquillo Vita (Hezekiah Manoah Hayyim) Corcos (1660–1730). But certainly the text of Cardinal Ganganelli had a very different authority in the eyes of the world episcopate.
The report was severely critical of the bishop of Luck and concluded, with a wealth of arguments, for the imaginary character of the accusations of ritual homicide and use of blood by the Jews. Ganganelli could not ignore the fact that previous Popes had authorized the worship of two alleged victims of Jewish ritual murder, Andreas of Rinn and Simonino of Trent, and wrote that perhaps they were the exception that confirmed the rule, but he also mentioned that the approval had been very cautious and accompanied by statements against the blood libel in general.
That Ganganelli did not propose to ban the worship of Simonino and Andreas has been taken by Italian historian Marina Cafiero and others as a sign that he was aware he was a minority voice in the Catholic world, and powerful interests were at work to perpetuate the veneration of the spurious saints and the blood libel myth. Certainly, in the 19th century more anti-Semitic positions will prevail in the Catholic Church, including on the blood libel. However, at the time of Ganganelli, he was expressing the Vatican’s official position, although one not all local bishops were very happy to accept.
When Benedict XIV died, the new Pope Clement XIII (1693–1769), followed up the recommendations contained in the Ganganelli report, and in a bull of February 9, 1760, addressed to the apostolic nuncio in Warsaw wrote that the blood libel was nothing more than an “ill-founded persuasion of the people.” The nuncio reported the Papal bull to King Augustus III Wettin (1696–1763), who in 1760 definitively dismissed the Jampol case, and in 1763 forbade courts in the Commonwealth to sentence Jews for ritual murder. There were subsequent trials (the last one in Olkusz in 1787) but all ended with acquittals. Cardinal Ganganelli’s vow and the coordinated action of the pontiffs and kings finally brought an end to the epidemic of blood libels in Poland and Lithuania.
However, an echo of the blood charge remained in Polish Catholic emigration to the United States. Three of the American blood libel cases of the 1910s and 1920s, in Fall River (Massachusetts), Chicago, and Pittsfield (also in Massachusetts), arose from accusations by Poles against their Jewish neighbors. Other cases, such as that of Clayton (Pennsylvania) in 1913, were attributed by the authorities to rumors spread by “Slavs,” and the most famous of all, disturbing the quiet of the town of Massena (New York) in September 1928, to a restaurateur of Macedonian origin. None of the U.S. episodes led to a trial. In Massena, the fact that a rabbi, Berel Brennglass (d. 1966), was interrogated before a little girl, Barbara Griffiths, who had been lost in the woods was found safe and sound, caused a national scandal, and the immediate intervention against the local authorities of the governor of the State of New York and even of the Catholic Church, which blamed the Ku Klux Klan for the incident.
After Massena, blood libel accusations were no longer taken seriously by the U.S. authorities. Unfortunately, the situation was different in Poland. As late as in 1946 in Kielce there was a real pogrom, which left 42 dead, against Jews freed from Nazi concentration camps, accused of a ritual crime in the agitated political climate of the time.
The Case of Damascus, 1840
The emancipation of the Jews, a process that took place between the end of the 18th and the end of the 19th centuries in the majority of European countries, the Enlightenment, its Jewish version called Haskalah, and the French Revolution represented a watershed for the Jewish world in general. They also had an effect on the blood libel, i.e., on accusations that Jews ritually killed Christian boys to use their blood in superstitious rituals. In the 19th century, rightly or wrongly, the Catholic Church perceived the Jews, or some of them, as allies of the Enlightenment and anti-clericalism. New brands of anti-Semitism also emerged, centered not on the Jews’ religion but on their alleged racial characteristics or on their identification by some Socialists with the bourgeoisie and capitalism.
A by-product of this new situation was that the Catholic Church, or a large part of it, abandoned its traditional caution about the blood libel. As we have seen in previous articles, while there had always been local bishops who believed in blood libel, the Vatican’s official documents consistently denied its reality, although some ambiguity derived from the fact that the worship of spurious child saints allegedly murdered by the Jews was not suppressed until after the Second Vatican Council.
In the 19th century, the situation changed. When blood libel accusations were raised against the Jews, Vatican-connected publications and high Catholic dignitaries often supported them, seeing this as a tool in their larger confrontation with the “revolutionary” Jews.
The most famous case of alleged ritual murder of the 19th century concerned the Sardinian Capuchin Father Thomas from Calangianus (Francesco Antonio Mossa, 1766–1840), an apostolic missionary who disappeared in Damascus on February 5, 1840, together with his local servant Ibrahim Amara. Father Thomas was a missionary both of faith and of public health, who became known in Damascus for having vaccinated thousands of children of all religions. He also became an international sensation when, in the Christian and Muslim communities of Damascus, rumors spread that he had been the victim of a ritual homicide by Jews, and the blood libel rumors found credence with the local authorities. Subjected to torture, a Jewish barber, Solomon Halek, confessed to having participated in the murder together with members of the most famous and wealthy Jewish families of Damascus, the Harari, the Farhi, and the Picciotto.
In turn, arrested and tortured, Rabbi Moses Abu el-Afieh confessed, announced a sensational conversion to Islam, and declared he had collected in an ampoule the blood of Father Thomas to deliver it to the Chief Rabbi of Damascus, Jacob Anteli (1774–1846). The latter resisted torture, and refused to confess.
On February 28, human remains were found in a pipe. It was declared that they were of Father Thomas, and a solemn funeral was celebrated on March 2. This was the beginning of a long investigation, which lasted several months, with eleven Jews subsequently imprisoned and a press interest that gradually spread throughout the world, with hundreds, then thousands of articles.
Damascus was, at the time, under the control, exercised through Governor Sherif Pasha (1818–1887), of Egypt’s Viceroy Mohammed Ali (1769–1849), whose power was de facto, though not de jure, independent of that of his theoretical superior, the Ottoman Sultan of Constantinople.
The Ottoman Empire had traditionally been tolerant of Jews, and Ottoman authorities had dismissed a good dozen of cases of blood libel in the years before 1840, considering the innocence of the accused as a matter of course. If arrests and torture were carried out in Damascus, it was because of the relentless efforts made in support of the accusations by the French consul, Count Benoît-Ulysse de Ratti-Menton (1799–1864), who personally presided over the first phases of the investigation, based on France’s right of patronage of the Capuchins friars. The anti-Semitic prejudices of the French aristocrat were obvious.
If the defendants were not executed, and all but two of them were able to recant their confessions, attributing them to fear or torture, including the rabbi who had converted to Islam, and be finally declared innocent, it was due to the decisive action of two diplomats of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Italian Giovanni Merlato in Damascus and Antonio Laurin in Alexandria, supported from Vienna by the head of the Austrian government, Prince Clemens von Metternich (1773–1859).
Metternich asked the Vatican to intervene in favor of the defendants in Damascus, as Popes had done for blood libel cases in Europe in the previous century. But times had changed, the Secretary of State Cardinal Luigi Lambruschini (1776–1854) openly supported the accusers of the Jews, and all Metternich was able to obtain from Pope Gregory XVI (1765–1846) was that caution on the issue was recommended to the official Catholic press.
The case of Damascus is remembered as a moment of awareness on the part of European Jews of the problems of their co-religionists in countries with Islamic majorities. It led two important representatives of European Judaism, the English Sir Moses Montefiore (1784-1885) and the French Adolphe Crémieux (1796-1880), to mobilize in favor not only of the defendants in Damascus but of discriminated Jews in the Middle East in general.
Their efforts were opposed by Socialists, who saw the Jews as a bastion of capitalism. In a Socialist rally in Germany in 1847, the speaker argued that not only can the story of ritual murder in Damascus be given credence, but that also Christians, who were after all part of a Jewish sect, once “slaughtered human beings and consumed real human flesh and blood in the eucharist.” The 29-year-old speaker would soon become famous. His name was Karl Marx (1818–1883).
Marx notwithstanding, the supporters of the Jews of Damascus won their day, and the life, liberty, and reputation of the defendants were saved, except for one who had died in jail as a result of torture. However, forty years after the events, the Vatican-sponsored Jesuit publication La Civiltà Cattolica launched in 1881 a series of articles claiming that the Jews of Damascus were guilty and that the blood accusations were believable.
The Jesuits were not alone. The Catholic canon of Prague Cathedral, August Rohling (1839–1931), had already emerged with his Der Talmudjude (1871) as the greatest European champion of the blood libel. The anonymous book Il sangue cristiano nei riti ebraici della moderna sinagoga (The Christian Blood in the Jewish rites of the modern synagogue) was published in Prato in 1883 and signed by a “Neophyte” who presented himself as “an ex-Rabbi, now Greek monk.” It was in fact a simple compilation of texts by Rohling and others, and was accompanied by a hagiography in Sardinia around the figure of the “martyr” Father Thomas, whose “ritual murder” was described with horrific details in a book signed by a Father G.B. from Mondovì, Piedmont, in 1850 and in the anonymous Aceldama of 1896.
Orthodox and Muslim authors in the Middle East also maintained that the Damascus Jews were guilty, and new blood libel accusations were advanced against the Jews in Egypt, in Alexandria in 1870, 1880, and 1881, and in Port Said in 1882 and 1892. All were resolved after some turmoil thanks to the decisive intervention in favor of the Jews of European consuls, including the Italian ones.
Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) himself mentioned the case of Father Thomas, and the use of the Damascus blood libel in the Arab world for anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli propaganda purposes has continued well into the 21st century. Mustafa Tlass (1932–2017), who was the Syrian Minister of Defense for thirty years, emerged as the most fervent propagandist, with works translated and spread in many languages. The case of Father Thomas featured prominently in Tlass’ propaganda, and continued to be used by anti-Semitic authors in the Muslim world (including through movies and TV series), but also in Italy, Russia, and elsewhere.
Some stories never go away. The Catholic Church has long since forbidden any worship of Father Thomas as a martyr killed by the Jews. However, when I visited Damascus in 2006, I met both Catholic and Orthodox clergy and asked whether the Capuchin’s story was still remembered. Yes, they answered, and they were still persuaded that the 1840 accusations against the Jews were true.
The Tisza-Eszlár Incident, 1882
In the last decades of the 19th century, apart from the Ottoman Middle East that we discussed in the last article of this series, the accusation that Jews ritually murdered Christians to use their blood in secret rituals mostly appeared in countries of Central Europe, especially Hungary and Bohemia, with some episodes in Greece (the best known in Corfu, in 1891). Compared to the medieval and 16th-century cases, the pattern was different: there were trials but rarely convictions, the incidents became a topic of political debate between anti-Semitic movements and their opponents, and a substantial part of the Catholic press (led by the Jesuit La Civiltà Cattolica) systematically took sides against the accused Jews.
One of the most famous cases happened in Tisza-Eszlár, in Hungary, in 1882. On April 1, Eszter Solymosi (1867–1882), a 14-year-old girl working on a farm, disappeared. It was the Saturday before Passover, and there was some excitement in the local synagogue. The previous schochet, the person in charge of kosher slaughter, had moved to another town, and three candidates who came from outside were interviewed for a possible replacement.
The mother and the farm owner started searching for Eszter. They met the keeper of the synagogue, József Scharf (1850–1905), who tried to reassure them by saying that many years earlier, in his home village of Hajdunanas, a young Christian girl had disappeared and the Jews were immediately accused of ritual murder; but she was later found safe and sound. As will emerge at the trial, this naïve attempt to reassure the women was catastrophic. In fact, it persuaded Eszter’s mother that Jews had killed her daughter, and she denounced them to the local authorities. Justice took its course, and on May 13 the investigation against the Jews officially opened, involving virtually all members of the small Jewish community of Tisza-Eszlár, which numbered twenty-five families.
The investigators first claimed to have obtained the “confession” of Samuel (“Schamu”), the 5-year-old son of janitor József Scharf, according to whom his father had lured Eszter into the house and “the schochet” (without specifying which one, as that day there were three in Tisza-Eszlár) had cut the girl’s neck. Her blood was then collected into a dish by Samuel and his 14-year-old brother Móric. Arrested, the Scharfs denied everything, but Móric was taken into custody by the local commissioner who locked him in his country residence, where he was watched over by a brutal ex-convict. Battered and intimidated, Móric eventually confessed that Eszter had been lured into his house by his father; that a Jewish beggar, Hermann Wollner, led her to the synagogue; and that here the schochet Solomon Schwarz opened a vein in her neck with a knife and collected her blood in a jar, while the other two candidates held her down. Móric allegedly observed all this through a keyhole.
However, the corpus delicti was missing because Eszter was nowhere to be found. On June 18, in the village of Csonkafuzes some boatmen fished the body of a girl out of the river Theiss. The mother did not recognize her as Eszter, but claimed that the clothes were hers. The first examination, conducted by local doctors, stated that it was a girl between 18 and 20, dead only eight to ten days, so it could not be Eszter. The accusers did not give up, and accused the Jews of having dressed an unknown body with Eszter’s clothes to confuse the investigators.
On July 29 the investigation concluded with the committal for trial of fifteen of the original 72 suspects: four for murder (the three candidates for the position of schochet and the beggar Wollner), six, including József Scharf, for complicity in the murder, and five for concealment of a corpse. Their salvation came from a Christian, Károly Eötvös (1842–1916), a brilliant lawyer, journalist and member of the Parliament, who headed a defense team that included four other lawyers and three illustrious physicians: the famous pathologist Gustav Scheuthauer (1832–1894), the physiologist Geza Mihalkovits (1844–1899) and the medical examiner Johann Belky (1851–1892). The trial will be remembered as one of the first in Hungary where modern forensic medicine played a decisive role.
However, several months passed before the exhumation of the body found in the river requested by the defense, during which the defendants remained in prison. Only protests in Parliament by Eötvös and his colleagues, and a series of inspections from Budapest, put the trial back on track and obtained the requested exhumation on December 7. The three luminaries concluded that the local doctors had not considered the consequences of prolonged immersion in water, and that this was a fourteen-year-old girl, presumably Eszter, but no one had made incisions in her neck, thus excluding the hypothesis of ritual murder. In fact, the experts said, there was no evidence that the girl had been murdered. The prosecution reported the affair to the National Health Council, which on March 16 criticized the report of the three experts of the defense; however, the latter will maintain a considerable weight at trial.
The trial opened on June 17, 1883, in the court of the county seat, Nyíregyháza. The prosecutor’s case rested on the testimony of the boy Móric Scharf, who had been kept segregated from his family, yet made contradictory and confusing statements. Unexpectedly, Solomon Schwarz tried to save all the other defendants, by confessing of having killed the girl, not in a ritual crime, but by hitting her in a fit of rage after an argument and throwing her into the river. The judges did not believe him, although they declared that the body found in the river was indeed Eszter’s, and that they could not come to a conclusion on whether the girl had been the victim of an accident or had been killed.
On August 3, all defendants were acquitted. Promoted by the anti-Semitic movement, at the time strong and well organized in Hungary, riots broke out throughout the country. However, the sentence was upheld on appeal on 22 December 1883 and by the Royal Curia, the last instance, on 4 April 1884. Móric Scharf was returned to his family, and declared to the press, with a version that he will always maintain, the innocence of his father and the other defendants, attributing his previous confession to the violence and threats he had suffered.
The Catholic priest of the village and some Catholic media had supported the accusers in the affair. Emperor Franz Joseph (1830–1916), true to the tradition of his family that had repeatedly intervened over the centuries against accusations of ritual murder directed at Jews, and who had been described as “very concerned” about the affair, rejoiced at its conclusion. However, as in other cases of blood libel, the story did not go away. Arch-conservative Catholics continued to celebrate the girl as a martyr, and as recently as 2016, right-wing extremists organized pilgrimages to the grave of Eszter, claiming she had been ritually murdered by the Jews.
The Strange Case of a Girl in Bohemia
In 1896, a monumental painting (225 by 392 centimeters) was exhibited in Paris, with the title “A Ritual Murder in Hungary.” The author was indicated as “a famous Hungarian master,” and the rumor was spread that he was the then very popular Mihály Munkácsy (1844–1900). Although at that time his health was declining, and he will soon be admitted to a mental hospital, Munkácsy was still able to protest and inform the media that he was not the author of the painting. Undaunted, anti-Semites exhibited again the painting as a work of Munkácsy in Brussels in 1898 and in St. Petersburg in 1914, against the protests of the artists’ family, claiming that his denial of authorship had been a manifestation of his mental illness.
The pseudo-Munkácsy painting was clearly inspired by the case of Tisza-Eszlár that we discussed in the previous article of this series, although the girl represented seems older than Eszter Solymosi, who died at age 14.
Meanwhile, another case in Xanten, in the district of Düsseldorf, had led in 1891 to the last blood libel trial in Western Europe, with the Jewish defendant acquitted, except for the Nazi attempt to take up an old charge in Bamberg in 1929 and to do the same in Klaipeda, Lithuania, in 1936, and in Velhartice, Bohemia, in 1940.
The girl in the false Munkácsy painting resembled much more the victim in another famous case, Polna, except that the canvas was first exhibited three years before that incident, which is important for the tensions it revealed within both the Austro-Hungarian administration and the Catholic Church.
On April 1, 1899, the body of a young seamstress from the nearby village of Klein Veznic, Anežka Hrůzová (Agnes Hruza, 1880–1899), was found in a forest near Polna, Bohemia, with her clothes torn and her throat slit. Near the site a rope was found, with which the young woman was tied, or perhaps the body dragged to the site after the murder. The local doctors declared that there had been no rape, and suspicions focused on four vagrants who had been seen wandering around the forest the night before.
One of these was a Jew, Leopold Hilsner (1876–1928), weak in body and mind. The only “evidence” against him were stains on his pants that were attributed, with some doubt, to blood. The accusation, which was based largely on the writings on blood libel of the anti-Semitic Catholic canon of the Cathedral of Prague, August Rohling (1839–1931), was enough to send him to trial. He was not accused of being the individual executor of the crime, as the doctors believed him too weak to fight successfully against the much more vigorous Agnes. He was prosecuted as an accomplice of two other vagrants in whose company he had been seen, believed to be Jews and have collected the blood of the victim in anticipation of Easter. Tried in Kuttenberg (Kutná Hora) from September 12 to 16, 1899, in a climate of widespread anti-Semitism, Hilsner was sentenced to death.
His attorneys appealed to the Royal Curia, which ordered the repetition of the trial in Písek, considering the court in Kuttenberg susceptible to prejudice against the accused, who remained in jail. In prison, Hilsner was shown the gallows on which, he was assured, he would be hanged, but he was promised commutation of the sentence to life imprisonment if he named his accomplices. Hilsner, a man of very simple mind, was impressed, and named two other Jewish vagabonds that he had known, Joshua Erbmann and Solomon Wassermann, then tried to retract. Fortunately for them, the two had ironclad alibis: at the time of the crime one was in prison, the other in a beggars’ home in Moravia. Irritated, the investigators decided to accuse Hilsner also of another murder, that of the maid Maria Klima, who had disappeared on July 17, 1898, and whose body was probably (because the state of decomposition prevented identification with absolute certainty) found in the same forest near Polna the following October 27.
The case was the occasion of clashes throughout the Austro-Hungarian Empire between anti-Semites and their opponents. It also caused controversies within the Catholic Church. The Jesuits of La Civiltà Cattolica in Rome supported the Austrian anti-Semitic press. Worse still, on November 23, 1899, the Vatican daily newspaper L’Osservatore Romano published an anonymous article, “L’omicidio rituale giudaico” (Jewish Ritual Murder), which affirmed the reality of ritual murder, in sharp contrast with Papal pronouncements of previous centuries that had declared the blood libel a lie.
The article did not go without reactions. The opposition was led by the Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Herbert Vaughan (1832–1903), who wrote to Pope Leo XIII (1810–1903) asking him to condemn the article in L’Osservatore Romano and reiterate the teachings of his predecessors against the blood libel. The times, however, had changed.
The Pope referred the controversy to the Holy Office on December 4, 1899. Some documents of its meetings are missing in the Vatican archives, and it is unclear what role, if any, played the Spanish prelate, future cardinal and Secretary of State, Rafael Merry del Val (1865–1930), whose opinion was certainly solicited. On the one hand, it was believed that he was of the same family of Dominguito del Val, one of the pseudo-saints allegedly murdered by the Jews to take his blood in 1250, although the story only surfaced in the 16th century and probably Dominguito never existed. On the other hand, Merry del Val was hostile to anti-Semitism, and he would later join the Society of Friends of Israel, whose aim was to oppose anti-Semitic propaganda, including the blood libel.
The congregation of the Holy Office met for the decision only on July 25, 1900. His decision consisted in one line: “Respondeatur per Secreteriam Status petitam declarationem dari non posse” (Let it be answered through the Secretariat of State that the requested declaration [condemning the blood libel] cannot be granted”). According to Italian historian Giovanni Miccoli (1933–2017), some of the members of the Holy Office were afraid that a declaration against the blood libel would be read as contradictory with the public worship of Simonino of Trent and Andreas of Rinn, although the main motivation of the decision was political, as Catholics were allied with anti-Semitic parties in several countries. The single-line response of the Holy Office, on the other hand, avoided both contradicting the previous magisterium, who had condemned the blood libel, and taking a position on the substance of the matter.
Shortly after the response of the Holy Office, the court of Písek on November 14, 1900, declared Hilsner guilty of the two murders of Anežka and Maria Klima and of slander against the other vagrants he had accused, and sentenced him to death. The Royal Curia confirmed the decision. However, Emperor Franz Joseph (1830–1916), who as we have mentioned in the previous article of this series did not believe in the blood libel, commuted the sentence to life imprisonment.
Several intellectuals, including non-Jews, kept fighting for the revision of the process, none with greater zeal than Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk (1850–1937), the father of Czech independence and later the first president of the Czechoslovak Republic. Masaryk claimed that Anežka was killed elsewhere, perhaps in a family or work dispute, then dragged into the forest to make one of the vagrants take the blame. As for Klima, Masaryk insisted that nothing linked her to Hilsner except the place where her “probable” corpse was found. The efforts of Masaryk and others succeeded only in getting Hilsner pardoned by Emperor Charles I (1887–1922), who had succeeded Franz Joseph, in 1916, and he thus spent the last fourteen years of his life outside of prison.
Even after his death, periodic attempts to obtain his official rehabilitation continued, but requests were never granted by the Communist regime. In the 21st century, Czech authorities indicated that annulling the 1900 decision was a task for the Austrian courts, while the Austrian Minister of Justice stated in 2009 that this should be done in the Czech Republic. Although the decision has not been formally annulled, both Czech and Austrian authorities, and Catholic bishops, have apologized for what they now consider an unjust sentence motivated by anti-Semitic prejudice, and inscriptions honoring Hilsner as an innocent victim were unveiled both at his grave and on the house where he lived his last years in Vienna.
On the other hand, as it happens in Hungary for the case of Tisza-Eszlár, right-wing extremists still make pilgrimages to Polna to the grave of Anežka Hrůzová and the site where her body was found, affirming their belief that she was the victim of a Jewish ritual murder.
The Fixer
In 2007, I visited for the first time Tashkent, Uzbekistan, and went to look for the grave of Justinas Pranaitis (1861–1917), the famous or rather infamous Lithuanian Catholic priest who was, in the years before World War I, the most tireless propagandist of blood libel, the accusation that Jews ritually murdered Christian boys and girls to use their blood in secret rituals.
Finally, I discovered that there was no such grave. Pranaitis died on January 28, 1917, shortly before the Russian Revolution. When the latter reached Uzbekistan, Catholics were afraid that the grave of the staunch anti-Communist priest would be desecrated, and moved his body to a secret location. The secret was kept so well that, when the Soviet Union fell, nobody remembered where Pranaitis was buried. In the Catholic Cathedral of Tashkent, however, defying political correctness, a portrait of the controversial priest was still kept. Only half-jokingly, local Catholics told me that the portrait could not be removed because the ghost of Pranaitis roamed at night in the cathedral and would certainly seek revenge.
Pranaitis was famous for his anti-Semitism throughout Europe, but today he is mostly remembered for his role in the Beilis affair. Although it was not the last case of blood libel, it was the last that had a worldwide resonance. The facts, comparatively simple, concealed a much more complex political and religious game.
On March 12, 1911, a Christian boy, Andrei Yuschinsky (1898–1911), disappeared in Kiev on his way to school. Eight days later, his mutilated body was found in a cave. A lamplighter claimed to have seen him in the company of “a Jew,” later identified as Menahem Mendel Beilis (1874–1934), a father of five who worked at the Zaitsev brick factory.
Others stated that Andrei did not go to school, but went to visit his friend Zhenya (1898–1911), the son of Vera Cheberyak (1878–1919), a woman with a heavy criminal record. Vera was interrogated, and to divert suspicions from herself directed the police to the trail of a Jewish ritual murder, naming Beilis and unknown accomplices.
On July 21, 1911, Beilis was arrested, and preparations began for the trial. The Russian prosecutors called Pranaitis to assist them as an expert, asking him to come to Kiev from remote Tashkent, where he had been sent in 1902 by the Vatican in an attempt to slow down his anti-Semitic activities. International media covered the case, and the Jewish community internationally mobilized to help Beilis, and disqualify Pranaitis who was expected to be the prosecution’s star witness. Meanwhile, anti-Semites in Kiev agitated against Beilis.
Lord Nathaniel de Rotschild (1840–1915) contacted the English Catholic hierarchy, which, as we discussed in the previous article of this series, had tried without success to have the Vatican publicly confirm the Papal documents of previous centuries declaring the blood libel a lie, in order to assist in the Bohemian case of Polna.
Mindful of what had happened then, the British bishops this time did not ask for a new Papal document but for a simple letter that, on behalf of the Vatican, would confirm that the bull of Innocent IV (1195–1254) of July 5, 1247, and the report of Cardinal Ganganelli (1705–1774) of 1759, both declaring the blood libel a lie and discussed in our previous articles, which the defense intended to use in the trial, were authentic documents. When the Vatican declined to intervene in the Polna case, the Pope was Leo XIII (1810–1903). He had now been replaced by Pius X (1835–1914) who, since his time as Patriarch of Venise, had befriended the Jewish community. He directed his Secretary of State, the Spanish cardinal Rafael Merry del Val (1865–1930), whose role in the Polna affair is controversial but who was himself critical of anti-Semitism, to confirm the authenticity of the documents, which he did in a letter to Lord Rotschild dated October 18, 1913.
The letter arrived while the trial was in progress, but in time to be filed in the Kiev case, in which Pranaitis had claimed that both the 1247 bull and the Ganganelli report were false. Pranaitis was a Catholic priest, and he was publicly contradicted by the Vatican’s Secretary of State.
Although this was a jury trial, and anti-Semitism was rampant in the Russian Empire, the prosecution had very much insisted on Pranaitis, who was further discredited when it was proved that contrary to what he had stated, his knowledge of the Hebrew language was rudimentary only. The defense was also able to suggest that Vera Cheberyak and her circle of criminals were much more likely candidates for the role of murderers than Beilis, an honest man with a good reputation.
On October 28, 1913, after a long deliberation, the jury acquitted Beilis, although the sentence did not clarify who had killed Andrei, nor did it state that the blood libel was a lie in general, as the defense would have wished. Beilis emigrated to Palestine, then to the United States, where he published a successful autobiography in 1926 and died in 1934.
The Beilis affair has an important literary and political posterity. It inspired several novels, none more famous than The Fixer, published in 1966 by Bernard Malamud (1914–1986), whose title refers to Beilis’ work as a handyman, and which was made in 1968 into a film of the same title by John Frankenheimer (1930–2002).
One critic of Malamud was Russian dissident and Nobel Prize laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008), who wrote about the trial in an ambiguous manner, without clearly affirming the innocence of Beilis. Solzhenitsyn deplored the quick execution of both Vera Cheberyak and the prosecutors in the Beilis case by the Bolsheviks as vengeance rather than justice, and suggested that the fact that a jury of common Russian citizens, including several peasants, had acquitted the defendant proved that anti-Semitism was less prevalent in Czarist Russia than many believed.
Solzhenitsyn’s attitude towards the Jews is a complicated matter, and there was certainly the risk that his subtle distinctions might be exploited by the anti-Semites, which were re-organizing themselves in post-Soviet Russia. Pranaitis’ books were in turn quoted and even reprinted in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, and fueled resurgences of blood libel accusations at the fringes of the Catholic and Orthodox Churches.
The Catholic Church after the Second Vatican Council moved to eradicate all reminiscences of the blood libel accusations and the worship of pseudo-saints allegedly murdered by the Jews (claiming they had never been formally canonized nor beatified in the first place, only their local worship had been authorized or tolerated), although dissidents rejecting Vatican II keep them alive. In Poland and elsewhere controversies remain where paintings inspired by the blood libel myth are still on display in Catholic churches. Blood libel accusations against the Jews periodically resurface in Muslim countries.
As we mentioned earlier, right-wing organizations in Eastern Europe (and beyond) still honor the pseudo-martyrs allegedly ritually killed by the Jews, including Andrei Yuschinsky in Kiev. And as late as March 2021, the Brazilian Israelite Confederation had to file charges against Roberto Jefferson, president of the Brazilian Labor Party, which has more than one million members, after he posted on Instagram that Jews routinely “sacrifice children” (Jefferson was later in the year arrested on unrelated charges).
The blood libel can no longer be mentioned in polite company, but did not totally go away. Every time we see it rearing its ugly head, we should remember that vigilance is still needed against anti-Semitism, and that the blood libel lie proves how easily slander against unpopular religious minorities is believed by many, and may lead to tragic consequences.