A Treasury of Deception

by Michael Farquhar

  A contemporary chronicler summarized the tale of William around 1155: “In [King Stephen’s] time, the Jews of Norwich brought a Christian child before Easter and tortured him with all the torture that our Lord was tortured with; and on Good Friday hanged him on a cross on account of our Lord, and then buried him. They expected it would be concealed, but our Lord made it plain that he was a holy martyr, and the monks took him and buried him with ceremony in the monastery, and through our Lord he works wonderful and varied miracles, and he is called St. William.”

  No one in Norwich seems to have given William a second thought after he died, except for a few distraught family members, one of whom eventually accused the local Jews of killing the boy (not by crucifixion) based on another relative’s dream. The bishop who heard the charge was rightfully skeptical, and the story faded into a bit of provincial folklore—that is, until Thomas of Monmouth arrived in town about five or six years later. The monk became obsessed with William’s murder and soon launched a campaign to create a saint. A product of the twelfth century, Thomas, wrote historian Gavin I. Langmuir, was “concerned with his status on earth and in heaven, and convinced that loyal service to William would benefit him in both realms.” Plus, saintly relics and shrines often meant big money in the Middle Ages. (See Part VI, Chapter 1.)

  The “evidence” Thomas gathered for his hagiography of William was, to be generous, a joke. It was based on rumor, speculation, and, perhaps, a little of the monk’s imagination. One of his most incendiary sources was a converted Jew named Theobold, who supposedly told him that “in the ancient writings of his Fathers it was written that the Jews, without the shedding of human blood, could neither obtain their freedom, nor could they ever return to their fatherland. Hence it was laid down by them in ancient times that every year they must sacrifice a Christian in some part of the world.” Norwich apparently had that honor in 1144.

  Despite the obvious absurdities of Thomas’s story of St. William, it quickly gained currency throughout England. Soon other accusations of Jewish ritual murder popped up across the kingdom. The charge was heard in Gloucester in 1168, in Bury St. Edmunds in 1181, in Bristol in 1183, and in Winchester in 1192, 1225, and 1235. Then, in 1255, came one of the most famous cases of all—that of little St. Hugh of Lincoln. Nineteen Jews were hanged for the alleged crimes against this child, one of them dragged to the gallows tied to the tail of a horse. And nearly one hundred more blameless people were imprisoned in the Tower of London.

  According to one chronicler, the Jews had been summoned “to be present at a sacrifice to take place at Lincoln, in contumely and insult of Jesus Christ.” Like St. William of Norwich, St. Hugh was said to have been crucified. “They scourged him till the blood flowed,” the chronicle continued, “they crowned him with thorns, mocked him, and spat upon him, each of them also pierced him with a knife, and they made him drink gall, and scoffed at him with blasphemous insults, and kept gnashing their teeth and calling him Jesus, the false prophet.”

  Predictably, all sorts of miracles were attributed to this allegedly martyred boy. One of the more colorful held that Hugh actually spoke, prayed, and sang—despite being dead. The story of St. Hugh eventually became embedded in the English psyche through popular ballads and the immortal literature of Geoffrey Chaucer. His Prioress’s Tale—which tells the story of another Christian child slaughtered by Jews “in Asie in the gret citee”—ends with a tribute to St. Hugh (reproduced here in a modern translation):

  Hugh of Lincoln, likewise murdered so

  By cursed Jews, as is notorious

  (For it was but a little time ago),

  Pray mercy on our faltering steps, that thus

  Merciful God may multiply on us

  His mercy, though we be unstable and vary,

  In love and reverence of His mother Mary.

  Amen.

  The Blood Libel meshed well with other medieval superstitions about Jews—devils in disguise, it was said, who poisoned wells, corrupted children, and, of course, killed Christ. After incubating in England, the slur gradually infected the rest of Europe, where horrific images of ritual murder may still be seen in the paintings and stained-glass windows of some churches across the continent. Persecution inevitably followed the story wherever it spread. In 1492, for example, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain ordered the expulsion of all the Jews residing in their kingdom. (Edward I of England had done the same thing two centuries earlier.) Some historians say the religiously motivated act was prompted in part by reports of an infant sacrificed by Jews in the town of LaGuardia several years before. Tomás de Torquemada, Spain’s infamous inquisitor general, took a special interest in that case, which resulted in eight people burned at the stake before wildly cheering crowds.

  Throughout the rest of the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the Industrial Revolution, the Blood Libel clung to the popular consciousness like a poisonous leech. And it wasn’t just ignorant peasants who spread the tales of human sacrifice, but priests, professors, and politicians who kept the spirit of St. William of Norwich alive around the world. Eastern Europe at the turn of the last century was particularly receptive.

  It was the Easter season, 1899. A nineteen-year-old Christian girl was found murdered outside the little Czech town of Polna, her corpse, it was said, suspiciously drained of blood. The Jews had done it, people surmised, just as they had in Tisza-Eszlar, Hungary, seven years before. The trial of a local Jew named Leopold Hilsner was a sensation that filled newspapers and dominated conversation. “All pretexts are to no avail,” declared Dr. Karel Baxa, future mayor of Prague, as he appealed to the most primitive anti-Semitism with the assertion that a blood sacrifice had occurred. “This motive for murder really existed. The world has been made aware of the fact that there are people who try to kill their neighbors in order to get hold of their blood. That is ghastly and terrible.” Hilsner was convicted and sentenced to hang. It fell to Tomáš G. Masaryk, founder and first president of Czechoslovakia, to plead for justice and reason. “People [like Dr. Baxa] who pretend to save the Czech nation actually poison it with base, incongruent lies and ignorance,” Masaryk wrote. “Shame!”

  2

  The Protocols of the Elders of Zion

  As Masaryk struggled for the soul of the emerging Czech nation, the Blood Libel was supplemented by an especially goofy (though no less evil) conspiracy theory that has resonated across the globe: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. For a century now, this silly forgery has been trotted out by fanatics everywhere as proof positive that Jews are out to rule the world.

  The Protocols contain the master plan of an alleged Jewish conspiracy to take over the globe. “Soon we will start organizing great monopolies,” reads one passage, “reservoirs of colossal wealth, in which even the large fortunes of the Gentiles will be involved to such an extent that they will sink together with the credit of their government the day after a political crisis takes place.” The document, an amateurish (and extensively plagiarized) rehash of long-established anti-Semitic literature and mythology, is believed to have been fabricated in Paris under the auspices of the tsarist secret police. It was published in Russia around the turn of the last century—perfect fodder for the anti-Jewish pogroms that were then being carried out there. Tsar Nicholas II was among the Protocols’ most ardent enthusiasts. “What depth of thought!” the gullible monarch jotted in the margins of his copy. “What foresight—What precision in the realization of the program!—Our year of 1905 has gone as though managed by the Elders—There can be no doubt as to their authenticity—Everywhere one sees the directing and destroying hand of Judaism.” All this from the guy who believed Rasputin was a holy prophet.

  The execution of Nicholas and the rest of the imperial family in 1918 was for many further evidence of the evil elders at work—especially paranoid fascists in Germany. The Protocols informed much of the Nazi philosophy Hitler spun in Mein Kampf and later put into practice. “The extent to which the whole existe
nce of [the Jewish] people is based on a continual lie is shown in an incomparable manner in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which the Jews hate so tremendously,” the future dictator wrote in his tedious screed. “The Frankfurter Zeitung [a leading liberal newspaper] is forever moaning to the public that they are supposed to be based on a forgery; which is the surest proof that they are genuine. What many Jews do perhaps unconsciously is here consciously exposed. But that is what matters. It’s a matter of indifference which Jewish brain produced these revelations. What matters is that they uncover, with really horrifying reliability, the nature and activity of the Jewish people, and expose them in their inner logic and their final aims.”

  Hitler got a resounding Amen! from his pal in America, auto magnate Henry Ford. Both men were students of the Protocols and both hated Jews, shared passions which seem to have bonded them. Hitler kept a portrait of the industrialist in his office, and Ford proudly accepted from the führer the Grand Service Cross of the Supreme Order of the German Eagle, the highest honor for foreigners the Nazis bestowed. By helping to spread the word about the Protocols and the Jewish threat, Ford rendered Hitler a great service. He did it in a series of eighty articles that ran in his newspaper, the Dearborn Independent.

  “Not only does the Jewish Question touch those matters that are common knowledge,” the paper warned, “such as finance and commercial control, usurpation of political power, monopoly of necessities, and the autocratic direction of the very news that the American people read; but it reaches into cultural regions and so touches the very heart of American life.”

  The articles were assembled into a book, The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem, which was translated into more than a dozen languages and became an international bestseller. At one point it was second only to the Bible in sales. Hate, like automobiles, was being mass-produced. “All in all,” writes historian Norman Cohn, “The International Jew did more than any other work to make the Protocols world famous.”

  Ford was unfazed by evidence that proved the Protocols were a crude forgery. “The only statement I care to make about the Protocols is that they fit in with what is going on,” he said in 1921. “They are sixteen years old, and they have fitted the world situation up to this time. They fit it now.”

  Hitler stood by his friend, and enthusiastically endorsed his presidential aspirations. “I wish that I could send some of my shock troopers to Chicago and other big American cities to help in the elections,” he said. “We look to Heinrich Ford as the leader of the growing Fascist movement in America. . . . We have just had his anti-Jewish articles translated and published. The book is being circulated in millions throughout Germany.” And throughout the rest of the world as well.

  Today the Protocols are everywhere, from neo-Nazi Web sites to extremist newspapers in the Middle East. Many of the September 11 terrorists were reported to have studied the Protocols, as did Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. Even a visionary like Henry Ford could never have imagined such a legacy.

  3

  Witchcraze

  “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.”

  —EXODUS 22:18

  James VI of Scotland (later James I of England) felt under siege in 1590. There were plots against his throne, and he knew exactly who was responsible: witches. That “these detestable slaves of the Devil” existed, the king had no doubt. In fact, he wrote a widely read treatise on their wicked ways called Daemonologie, intended, he said, “to resolve the doubting hearts of many; both that such assaults of Satan are most certainly practiced, and that the instruments thereof [witches] merits most severely to be punished.” Accordingly, King James, patron of the Bible that would later bear his name, presided over the first major witch hunt in Scotland, during which nearly one hundred people were tortured and executed for allegedly engaging in diabolical acts against him.

  It was just one episode in a savage era of European history, when an estimated two hundred thousand people, mostly women, were accused of being in league with the devil. Many were hideously tortured to elicit unfounded confessions, and about half were hanged, beheaded, or burned at the stake. One scholar called these witch persecutions “the greatest [European] mass killing of people by people not caused by war,” and historians have long grappled with the reasons why the witchcraze ever occurred. Some attribute it to the religious upheavals of the era, while others cite economic and cultural shifts. What seems certain, though, given the vast numbers of women maimed and killed, is that this terrible lie thrived in an environment of toxic misogyny.

  “All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which in women is insatiable,” declared the authors of the Malleus Maleficarum (Witches’ Hammer), a fifteenth-century text by two German priests that became the bible of witch hunters for the next three centuries. With their high sex drive and low character, it was reasoned, women were far more susceptible to seduction by the devil. “For as that sex is frailer than man is,” King James wrote in Daemonologie, “so is it easier to be entrapped in these gross snares of the Devil, as was over well proved to be true, by the serpent’s deceiving of Eve at the beginning. . . .”

  The very essence of womanhood was transformed into something evil during the witchcraze. As a mother suckles her child, for example, so it was said that witches nursed hellish spawn off a mark on their bodies called “the devil’s teat.” And the older, more outspoken or impoverished a woman was, so much greater the likelihood was that she would be named as a witch. Reginald Scot, a contemporary English observer who was actually skeptical about witchcraft, described witches this way: “Women which be commonly old, lame, bleare-eied, pale, fowle, and full of wrinkles.” In other words, grandmothers. It was these women, writes historian Barbara Walker, who “could be called witches and destroyed, like domestic animals past their usefulness. . . . The old woman was an ideal scapegoat: too expendable to be missed, too weak to fight back, too poor to matter.” But it wasn’t just poor, older women who fell victim to the madness. Men, women of the establishment, children, and even entire families were persecuted. Mothers were often executed with their daughters and sons because witchcraft was believed to be hereditary and nurtured in the home.

  By far the most vicious witch hunts occurred in Germany, where more than half of all the executions in Europe took place. The statistics are horrifying. Six hundred people were put to death by the bishop of Bamberg, for example, and 390 were burned at Ellwangen between 1611 and 1618. In Würzburg, forty-one young children were executed, while the hunt at Trier was so extensive that two local villages were left with only one woman each. The fate of the Pappenheimer family in Bavaria graphically illustrates just how cruel the witchcraze in Germany could be.

  The family lived on the fringes of society as beggars and privy cleaners, and in 1660 was accused of witchcraft by a condemned criminal. Under intense torture, Anna Pappenheimer confessed to all kinds of diabolical activities, like making a murderous powder out of the hands of dead children, and flying on a piece of wood to rendezvous with the devil. After a long, well-publicized trial, meant to reinforce the power of the local duke, the Pappenheimers were convicted and sentenced to death. The executions that followed were a ghastly public spectacle that drew thousands. Anna’s breasts were cut off and, in a gross mockery of motherhood, forced into the mouths of her two grown sons. Chunks of flesh were gouged out of her husband and sons with red-hot pincers. The abused and bleeding family was then put on a cart and taken to the execution site in a long procession of clergymen, municipal officials, and other dignitaries as the crowd sang hymns and the church bells tolled. Upon reaching the appointed place, Paulus Pappenheimer’s arms were broken by a heavy iron wheel, and he was impaled by a sharpened stick. Finally, the family was tied to stakes and set on fire. Eleven-year-old Hansel Pappenheimer was forced to watch the agonies of his parents and two older brothers before he was himself executed three months later.

  Although the “orgy of hatred against women,” as historian Anne Llewellyn Barst
ow called the witchcraze, subsided by the end of the eighteenth century, its spirit has been revived many times in subsequent centuries. Remember the Taliban?

  4

  A Big Red Lie

  “People always have been and they always will be stupid victims of deceit and self-deception in politics.”

  —NIKOLAI LENIN

  Some political philosophies seem swell on paper, like Plato’s Republic or More’s Utopia. They’re enlightened, but ultimately they are impractical. That’s why they remain ideas, concepts to be bandied about in coffeehouses and college classrooms. Too bad the theories of Marx and Engels weren’t left in the libraries as well. The workers’ paradise they envisioned in the nineteenth century was a fantasy co-opted in the twentieth by a succession of monsters and tyrants who called themselves socialists. In the name of the people, these agents of misery unleashed corrupt, unworkable systems that consumed more than one hundred million lives, and spewed forth almost as many lies. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin told a good many of them. It was his brutal, totalitarian regime that inspired many of the world’s Communist despots—from Mao to Pol Pot, Ceausescu to Castro.

  One of the most obscene myths Stalin ever created around himself was the idea that he was the wise, benevolent father of the Russian Motherland, devoted to the welfare of his people, even as he massacred millions of them. “Of all the treasures a state can possess,” he declared, “the human lives of its citizens are for us most precious.” An estimated 14.5 million of his “precious” citizens died of disease and starvation when they were forced off their land and onto state collective farms. Many more were murdered for refusing to cooperate. “Liquidate the kulaks [prosperous farmers] as a class,” Papa Joe ordered in 1929.