The Butcher's Tale

by Helmut Walser Smith

  The first fifty years of the next dark century proved like our own “ravaged century,” particularly destructive.31 Within a generation of the Rintfleisch massacres of 1298, and in many of the same towns, another army of men, first following a self-anointed king named Armleder, then following his successors, roamed from town to town, ax, pick, and cudgel in hand, and murdered Jews. Although the marauders started in Franconia, they spilled blood far beyond its boundaries, in Hessen, in the Rhineland, along the Mosel, and in Swabia; then in Alsace and in the lands of Austria, Bohemia, and Moravia.32 “Jew bashers” they called themselves, as they clubbed the Jews of more than a hundred communities with their primitive and blunt tools of death. The motives of these people are unclear. They were peasants and townsmen. This one wanted plunder, another revenge, a third deliverance from his tedious days. Some evidence points to the nobility’s indebtedness to Jewish creditors. There had also been rumors of host desecration, and forgeries charging the same.33 And the night had only begun. “For there followed the absolute saddest days for the Jewish communities in almost all of Europe, as far as the cross is prayed to,” the great Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz wrote in the middle of the nineteenth century.34

  The massacres followed on the accusation that the Jews had poisoned the wells, first articulated in Spain, then in France, then in the great cities of the Holy Roman Empire, where Jews were now killed at a dizzying pace. In February 1349, they were murdered in Strasbourg, where two thousand Jews were driven to a cemetery, pressed into a hastily constructed barn, and in the course of six days burned. In March, they were attacked in Worms, where to avoid the hatchets of the butchers the Jews set their own homes on fire, they and their families inside. And they were besieged in the large and venerable Jewish community of Mainz, where in August of that same year, six thousand Jews fought the ravaging army and killed many of its members before they, too, torched their own dwellings, thus reducing the Jewish quarter to a soft blanket of ash.35 The killings, which began in November 1348, almost always occurred on the weekends and on holy days, as confused and credulous peasants, landless laborers, wandering journeymen, and angry artisans vented their wrath, typically on the signal given by complicitous town magistrates and lords locked in a struggle for power and jealous of Jewish assets.36 The result, more planned than spontaneous, was unabated killing in the many Jewish communities in southern Germany, such as Memmingen and Reutlingen, Haigerloch and Horb, Ravensburg and Meßkirch, Speyer and Konstanz, and in the north as well, in cities like Dresden, Braunschweig, Halle, and Dortmund.37 In all, misery rained on more than three hundred communities, almost the only towns spared being in areas where the bubonic plague raged less savagely. For many Jewish families, this was simply the end, and those who survived must have thought of Job. “As water wears away stones / and torrents wash away the soil / so you destroy man’s hopes.”38

  By the mid-fourteenth century, a great divide, visible on the streets of German cities, had been cut into the history of Germany’s Jewish communities. In Nuremberg, for example, the authorities razed a number of Jewish houses, tore down the synagogue and built the Liebfrauenkirche in its stead, and created an open marketplace (the Hauptmarkt, where the famous Christmas toys are sold). Townsmen also plundered the cemetery, using the cut stones to build a spiral staircase for the Laurentiniuskirche.39 Although Jews would live in places like Nuremberg again, few returned to the same ashened streets and blood-stained hometowns of their fathers. We know this because we can compare the lists of martyrs with the family names of those who gave offerings for the dead a generation later, and the names are not the same.40 Rather than return, Jews who survived the ordeal, especially the poorer among them, wandered, eventually settling elsewhere in a German empire sufficiently fractured that they could find a place to reside in it.

  Their wanderings shifted the center of gravity of German Jewry away from the old Rhenish cities in the west to the center, to Hessen and Franconia, and to the southwest, to the patchwork of territories that later made up Alsace, Baden, and the northern parts of Württemberg.41 In the course of the next century, many Jews, especially the wealthier among them, also migrated south to northern Italy and east to the more hospitable lands of Poland and Lithuania.42 The greater part, however, found refuge in the countryside, families here and there settling in small villages, typically without a synagogue or a shul of their own.

  But wherever they went, the tale of ritual murder followed them. In the fifteenth century, it resurfaced at the time of the early witch trials and concurrently with the smoldering pyres of the Spanish Inquisition.43 That ritual-murder charges should again come to the fore reminds us of the degree to which such charges served as a sensitive barometric needle for a wider history of tolerance and persecution. Like the guidelines for the persecution of witches, which were codified and set to print in the famous Malleus Maleficarum of 1486, ritual-murder charges were also standardized. By the late fifteenth century, the many strands of mystical belief that had informed these charges began to converge, creating, according to the historian R. Po-Chia Hsia, “a single tradition of discourse.”44 This tradition became manifest at the ritual-murder trial of Trent in 1475, where, in the course of a savage torture, the Jews accused of murdering a two-year-old child (who would later be martyred as Simon of Trent) confessed to the crime in terms of an increasingly standardized story of how and why, when and to whom, ritual murder occurred. The central elements of this story consisted of Jews who, during Passover, murdered and drew the blood of prepubescent Christian boys in order to reenact the killing of Christ.

  The trial at Trent represented a turning point in the history of ritual-murder accusations. It was, for one, paradigmatic for the increasing involvement of the offices of the court in these cases generally. As a result of the court’s involvement, the language of accusation became ever more standardized, at the same time that the uncontrolled effects of ritual-murder charges, the massacres that accompanied them, declined in importance.45 Trent proved to be a turning point in another way. Aided by the powerful, newly invented printing press, the “facts” of the case were more easily disseminated (in chronicles, pamphlets, and broadsheets) than ever before. No longer primarily the stuff of rumors and hearsay, ritual-murder accusations now became part of the more solid material of printed history.46 The encyclopedic Nuremberg Chronicle, for example, included a story of how nine Jews held a young Christian boy named Simon, drained blood from his penis, and collected it in a vessel. A woodcut, one of nearly two thousand in the Nuremberg Chronicle, identified each Jew who allegedly participated in the murder by name, though the overall composition of the picture rendered it abundantly clear that the Jews acted in concert, with each Jew assigned a precise role in the event. Copied from the chronicle and pirated in cheap editions, this particular woodcut, as well as many others, made its way across the Holy Roman Empire and, in penny pamphlets and broadsheets, reached a wide audience.

  The ground was thus prepared for the expulsion of the Jews who, in the aftermath of great trauma, had reestablished communities in the years after the plague. Cologne banished its Jews in 1424, Speyer in 1435, Konstanz and Augsburg in 1440, the bishopric of Würzburg in 1453, the archbishopric of Mainz in 1470, Passau in 1478, Nuremberg in 1499, Brandenburg in 1510, and Regensburg in 1519. Perhaps more than any other Christian fantasy about the Jews, the charge of ritual murder, along with host desecration, served to justify the expulsions.47

  I

  Soon thereafter a shift occurred. If ritual-murder accusations had been centered in the German-speaking lands of central Europe, they began to drift eastward, and to some extent southward. Partly, this was the result of the Jewish migrations of the fourteenth century and the expulsions of the fifteenth. It was also a direct consequence of the Reformation. Martin Luther, hardly a philosemite, vigorously attacked the realms of superstition, to which ritual murder belonged. He also severed the theological buttresses, most significantly the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, that
lent credence to ritual-murder charges. If, as Luther now taught, wine merely symbolized the blood of Christ, the host his body, then the logical construction on which ritual murder was founded—involving the sacrifice of real bodies and real blood—came crashing down. Luther was not the first to question the validity of transubstantiation. In his critique of eucharistic devotion, John Wycliffe in Oxford had preceded him by more than a century. But Luther’s critique cut deeper.

  The reformers also subverted the authority of the Catholic clergy, who, so they believed, fabricated lies and superstitions in order to hide their own malice and incompetence. In 1540, the first sustained Christian defense of Jews in a ritual-murder case stemmed from a theologian, Andreas Osiander, who became famous as the man who published writings by Galileo. He excoriated the medieval clergy for whipping up the charge of ritual murder in order to fool and deceive Christians and persuasively argued that in the Old Testament the drawing of blood is strictly forbidden: “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed” (Genesis 9:6). Dietary laws forbade it as well: “But you must not eat meat that has its lifeblood still in it” (Genesis 9:4).48 There were other reasons to doubt the occurrence of ritual murder, some practical (if Jews needed blood, they did not have to kill for it), some related to the flawed nature of past trials (previous confessions had been extracted by torture). In all, Osiander offered twenty reasons why Jews could not commit ritual murder. He then suggested twelve reasons why in the case at hand (the supposed ritual murder in the Hungarian town of Pösing in 1529) Jews could not have committed the crime. He also gave seven hints as to how the real killer might be found.49

  Osiander’s treatise figures prominently in the story of how the Reformation helped reverse the tide of ritual-murder accusations. Yet the treatise also stood for another development that would have a profound effect on Christian-Jewish relations: it signaled the emergence of more and more Christian scholars, mostly Protestant, who could read the Hebrew texts. These scholars dramatically altered the possibilities of biblical exegesis and managed to liberate Jewish texts from the shroud of superstition that enveloped them. In the process, certain beliefs about Jews, the ritual-murder charge foremost among them, proved increasingly difficult to maintain.50

  In the wake of the Reformation, accusations of ritual murder in the German-speaking lands waned, especially in Protestant parts of the Holy Roman Empire. Moreover, magistrates discontinued torture as a means for extracting confessions, at least in German-speaking lands. As a result, Jews were no longer put to death for allegedly committing the crime of ritual murder. There were, however, isolated Protestant intellectuals who propagated the legend. In the year 1700, for example, Johann Andreas Eisenmenger, a professor of oriental languages at the University of Heidelberg, penned an ill-spirited work alleging the veracity of ritual-murder charges.

  Eisenmenger’s two-volume work is useful—both for gauging the state of ritual-murder beliefs in Protestant Germany and for understanding the subsequent fate of these beliefs throughout Europe. For more than twelve hundred pages of these weighty tomes, Eisenmenger denigrated the Jews and their faith. Yet for all its subsequent notoriety, the section on ritual murder seemed anemic by comparison, receiving only six pages, which begin with the concession that “in present-day Germany one no longer hears about such gruesome deeds.” Although Eisenmenger attributed the demise of ritual murder to effective punishment against it, his tone struck unwanted notes of ambivalence. From printed sources, he had unearthed two cases from the ancient period, eight from the medieval era (Aragon, 1250; London, 1257; Munich 1282; Weissensee, 1303; Prague, 1305; Munich, 1345; Trent, 1475; and Regensburg, 1486), three from the sixteenth century, and two from the seventeenth. Of the fifteen cases, he communicated detailed information about only one: Trent. For the rest, he drew most of his evidence from second- and third-hand accounts. Finally, and quite uncharacteristically, he concluded the section on ritual murder with a question.

  Since many diligent authors have written that the Jews need Christian blood, and have documented this with examples that the murdered children are usually killed at Easter, one can assume that not all of it is necessarily untrue. But I leave it open whether the case goes this way or that.51

  Eisenmenger’s skepticism was in step with his time. In Protestant Germany, chimeras of Jewish magic slowly ceased to capture the learned imagination.52

  Did such illusions nevertheless retain a hold on the popular imagination? Eisenmenger assumed that they did. So too did Johann Jacob Schudt, whose four-volume work Jewish Curiosities constitutes a rich source of early eighteenth-century folklore by and about Jews, especially in Frankfurt am Main.53 In this work, Schudt wrote of a woman who brought a saucer of blood to the cattle market, hoping to sell it to the Jews as human blood; and of people who, when they lost track of their children, immediately went to the Jewish quarter to look for them.54 Unlike Eisenmenger, however, Schudt attempted to dispel such fantasies products, he thought, of a superstitious mind. “As certainly and as truthfully as I am sure of my town,” he wrote, “the Jews do not eat or drink Christian blood, nor do they bake it in their easter cakes, nor do they drive away their stench with it, nor ease the process of birth with it, nor stroke the dying with it.”55 Yet, while arguing against particular charges, especially as they pertained to the Jews he knew, Schudt nevertheless left open the possibility that ritual murders might have occurred, especially because “in the past 1,300 years so many writers have provided credible news of it.”56 Indeed, in Frankfurt there was a daily reminder of ritual murder. As one walked underneath the bridge tower, one could observe a depiction of Simon of Trent, the martyred child, his body punctured by awls and covered in blood. In 1609, the Jews of Frankfurt petitioned to have the painting removed, but the Frankfurt city council rejected the plea. In 1678, the painting was even renovated, and it would remain on the bridge tower for nearly another century, long enough for the young Goethe to have seen “the infamous and derisive painting.”57 There is no doubt that the painting, though perhaps also the copy of Eisenmenger’s work in his father’s library, encouraged Goethe’s initial aversion to the Jewish quarters. “It took a long while before I dared go there,” he wrote in his autobiographical Dichtung und Wahrheit (Poetry and Truth). “I had in my mind the old legend of the cruelty of the Jews toward Christian children….”58 Though no longer as widely prevalent as it once had been, the ritual-murder charge did not simply die out in Protestant Germany, but rested in repose.

  In predominantly Catholic Germany, the idea of ritual murder retained more of a hold on the learned as well as on the popular imagination, though here, too, it slowly loosened its grip. In the seventeenth century, the case with the greatest public resonance was, significantly, a historical one: the alleged murder of young Andreas Oxner of Rinn. The murder supposedly occurred in 1462 after the boy’s father sold his son to traveling merchants, who then killed the boy in a forest. At first, suspicion did not fall on the Jews, but after the events in Trent, which occurred thirteen years later, in 1475, the story of Andreas Oxner of Rinn took on the semblance of superstition; the populace became convinced that the Jews had tortured the boy on the “Jew stone,” and a cult was created around Oxner’s remains. Yet even this critical version of the events, which derives from late nineteenth-century scholarship, can no longer be verified. Recent research suggests that a child named Andreas Oxner perhaps never existed, the date 1462 in all likelihood a product of a seventeenth-century invention, the work of a doctor named Hippolytus Guarinoni from Hall, in the Tirol, who had heard of the story and collected evidence, however dubious, to support it.59 Once in print, the legend assumed new legitimacy. By 1670, the people of Rinn had built a parish church on top of the “Jew stone” and named the village around it Judenstein. They also collected and published documents detailing the boy’s torment, and appealed to the Holy See for approbation. The church granted their plea, as it had the one for the martyred Simon of Trent. In 1753, Pope Benedict XIV sanc
tioned religious ceremonies paying homage to Andreas Oxner of Rinn as a victim of Jewish ritual murder.60

  The legend of Judenstein, and its subsequent consecration in the church, was not a unique moment of darkness in the light of the Christian world. Instead, it served as an important part of a Catholic religious revival centered on fascination with the martyrdom of saints and the innocence of children, visible in the changing iconographic representation of Simon of Trent. In the fifteenth century, artists rendered the two-year-old boy as a small man, emphasizing the drawing of blood from his penis; later, in the Baroque era, they portrayed him as a cherubian baby-child, his sexual organs hidden, the cuts placed elsewhere.’61 The renewed interest in ritual-murder and host-desecration charges also manifested itself in local acts of preservation. In Endingen, near the southwest German city of Freiburg, a fading panel showing how the Jews murdered a Christian family of beggars in 1470 was renovated in 1614.62 In 1619 and again in 1722, the people of Lienz, in the Tirol, renewed the stone documenting the martyrdom of four-year-old Ursula, who “in Anno Domini 1452 … was tormented and killed by the Jews on Good Friday, and since then rests here.”63 In Pulkau, near Vienna, a chapel had been erected on the site of the alleged host desecration of 1338, and now, in the seventeenth century, painters refurbished the fresco that portrayed the scene.64 In Korneuburg, new depictions of the alleged host desecration of 1298 were painted in 1660, and in Deggendorf, likewise the scene of a 1338 massacre supposedly following a host-desecration charge, local Catholics carried, as the centerpiece of their procession, a host, a shoemaker’s awl, and the prick the Jews supposedly used to torture the host.65 In 1732, a fresco describing the “discovery of the host” was painted in the Grabkirche, the text to one of the pilgrimage scenes reading, “The Jews were killed by the Christians out of a zeal for justice pleasing to God. God grant us that our fatherland is at all times free of this hellish scum [Höllengeschmeiß].”66 There was also a popular song, “The Deggendorfer Song,” that described the event, and, until well into the twentieth century, the citizens of Deggendorf performed a play commemorating it.67