The revival of interest in the ritual-murder charge, itself part of a larger religious renewal, also found its way into printed texts. Many of the ritual-murder cases of the medieval period—Munich, 1285; Weissensee, 1303; Ueberlingen, 1331; Lienz, 1442 had long since languished in obscure Latin chronicles and learned treatises. As Catholics in the seventeenth century became fascinated with local traditions of piety, they produced regional martyrologies, such as Matthew Rader’s Bavaria Sancta, which, replete with detailed engravings, reinforced anew the image of martyred children suffering just as Christ had suffered on the cross. Such themes were also taken up in popular plays at the time, an important part of the culture of the Catholic Reformation. In southwest Germany, The Endinger Judenspiel, whose first documented staging occurred in 1610, dramatized the “ritual murder” of 1470. In the play, Jews freely confess to the crime of ritually killing a beggar family; miracles then occur, and the Jews are burned at the stake.68 From the surrounding area, pious Catholics streamed into Endingen to watch the play, and the relics of the slain family became a popular site for pilgrimages.69 In the Tirol, a similar spectacle commemorated the trial and tribulations of Andreas Oxner (“Anderl”) of Rinn. Written by a Jesuit in 1621, the play enjoyed considerable popularity and was staged many times.70
In these myriad ways, then, Catholic culture (in pictures, plays, print, and the stones of commemorative chapels) shaped the superstitions of common Catholic folk. It is possible that many of these superstitions survived on their own as part of a rich oral culture, passed down from parent to child, but they also received fresh sustenance from a Catholic religious revival that attempted to render the suffering of Christ and the community of saints as something of great immediacy. Even as the universal church marked its official distance from the ritual-murder charge, local Catholics, clergy and laity alike, continued to reinvent it.
In the course of the seventeenth century, however, the main stage for new ritual-murder accusations dramatically shifted eastward, mainly to the Catholic territories of Poland, where, as a result of successive expulsions from the west, more than one-third of the world’s Jews lived. In a recent study of ritual-murder accusations between 1547 and 1787, one team of scholars counted eighty-two public accusations in Poland alone, though not all of these charges ended up in court.71 The cases tended to be concentrated in flash points, most spectacularly in Sandomierz province, in Galicia, but they also flared up more modestly in places that would soon be part of Prussia: Bromberg (Bydgoszcz) in 1713 and Posen (Poznan) in 1736.72 Although there were chronological concentrations as well, what impresses is the even stretch of cases from the end of the fifteenth century to the eighteenth—a time when, in other parts of Europe, the rays of Enlightenment seemed to render ritual-murder charges an atavism of a darker past.
Unlike large-scale witchcraft accusations, however, these charges survived into the modern era, fostering divisiveness, enmity, and violence wherever they were made. And as they were increasingly invoked in eastern Europe, they again took on different hues. In 1475, the events in Trent had established an archetypal narrative, centered on Jews drawing the blood of prepubescent Christian boys at Passover. Its passage to eastern Europe, however, caused the tale to unravel all over again. The single story was then told in variations in which girls counted as victims again … at Czechry (Poland) in 1600, for example, and at Orcuta (Hungary) in 1764, though the majority of accusations still involved the ritual killing of Christian boys. In its various manifestations, the miraculous and multifarious powers of blood also reappeared as a central motif in the accusations. In Szydlow in 1597, Jews allegedly blessed their synagogue by sprinkling it with Christian blood. In Sandomierz in 1698, and in Michnow in 1747, blood supposedly squirted from the body of the slain when the killer stood in its presence. Most, but not all, ritual-murder accusations continued to surface at Passover. The girl “slaughtered” in Czechry in 1600 was killed in May; another case in Sandomierz in 1710 involved the death of a child in August; and the case in Orcuta began when a child was found “dead in a brushwood on June 25.”73
In Poland, as in Catholic Germany, the printed word of the educated elite rendered the accusation of ritual murder sharper still and emphasized its broad appeal. Of the pamphlets and broadsides written against the Jews, the most famous, A Criminal Case about an Innocent Child, stemmed from the spiteful pen of Abbé Stephan Zuchowski. Published in 1713, the pamphlet recounted the charges leveled at the Jews of Sandomierz, who, after their torture, met death by execution.74 In well-worn arguments, Zuchowski also pointed out that there were ten reasons why Jews needed Christian blood, primarily because they hated Christians, especially Catholics. Like other authors before him, Zuchowski buttressed his argument by appealing to an authority, in particular to Eisenmenger, but also to Polish and Lithuanian authors. He also used history to great effect, listing, as the genre now demanded, eighty instance of Jewish ritual murder that had allegedly occurred in Poland over the preceding three hundred years.75
During the eighteenth century, the situation in Poland deteriorated. Around midcentury, the Jews of Poland issued a desperate plea, entreating Pope Benedict XIV to intercede on their behalf against the ritual-murder charge. “Over the past ten years,” it was claimed in 1758, “whenever anyone coincidentally found a Christian corpse, a murder was assumed to be certain and, without further reflection, it was assumed that the Jews of the area committed it for reasons of the aforesaid superstition.”76 The Vatican passed the issue on to Cardinal Ganganelli, who studied the recent spate of ritual-murder cases in Poland and found all of the accusations groundless. On the basis of Ganganelli’s researches, Pope Clement XIII instructed the Polish nuncio, who in turn informed the prime minister of Poland, that the Vatican considered the charges of ritual murder leveled against the Jews of Poland to be without foundation in fact.77
Ritual-murder accusations had declined in Poland by the end of the eighteenth century, as a result partly of papal admonitions against them and partly of the Polish parliament’s (the Sejm) abolition, in 1776, of the use of torture to extract confessions. The Jews of Poland no longer had to corroborate fantastic stories in order to save themselves and their loved ones from a horrible fate that, not so long ago, included the amputation of hands and feet, tearing off skin in strips, and burning at the stake.78 “Who can count the dust and ashes,” the rabbi of Posen asked on his way to the gallows, “of those who were burned and quartered for the faith of Israel?”79
III
For nearly two centuries, German Jews, most of whom now lived quiet impoverished lives in the countryside, had been spared major outbreaks of violence directed specifically at them. Having survived the Thirty Years’ War more safely than the Christians around them, Jews had also been less affected by the subsequent calamities of the crisis-ridden seventeenth century. Moreover, the one major anti-Jewish upheaval, the Fettmilch uprising of 1614 in Frankfurt am Main, ended with the triumphant return of the Jews to their homes in Frankfurt’s Judengasse and the execution of the pastry baker who incited the riot. The riot also failed to spread, and many Jews found refuge in Christian homes. For Jews, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were not the best of times; but they were far from the worst.
After a nearly two-hundred-year hiatus in accusations, ritual murder resurfaced. In 1819, in Dormagen, a village on the left bank of the Rhine between Düsseldorf and Cologne, a missing girl caused the local Catholic population to accuse the Jews of murder, even though the police had yet to find the girl’s body. On October 14, 1819, the local chronicler of Dormagen wrote,
There are thousands of opinions. The prevailing one is that the Jews captured the child because at times, according to an old legend, they must have Christian blood. And since the disappearance of the child coincides with the end of the Feast of the Tabernacles, there are all kinds of witnesses who claim to have seen either the Jew Sekel with a sack or the Jew Schimmel lurking around houses at midnight.80
The accusations dre
w sustenance from the popular cult of “the good Werner,” the fourteen-year-old boy allegedly murdered by the Jews in the village of Oberwesel in 1286. The cult enjoyed great renown in the late Middle Ages, but with the advent of the Reformation its popularity began to wane. Still, it did not disappear—in part because of the influence of an entrenched oral culture as well as the newer power of the printed word. In a Westphalian almanac of 1745, for example, the calendrical entry for Easter Monday, April 19, was simply “Werner.” Ordinary people, the writer must have assumed, understood that on this day, many years ago, “good Werner” had fallen into the hands of bloodthirsty Jews.81 Eagerly exploiting the legend, the bishopric of Trier consecrated him as a “diocese saint” in its own calendar of holy days. Around this time, the Oberwesel parish also renovated a relief depicting the boy’s brutal slaughter. And every year until the French Revolution, the locals participated in a procession to his supposed birthplace, the village of Womrath.82 Accusations of murder thus resonated in the collective memory, and their immediacy was now reinvigorated as the town of Dormagen became, for a time, a place of pilgrimage for the pious.83
The murder accusation also occurred in an atmosphere of fervent hatred. Only two months before the murder, in August 1819, violent anti-Jewish riots, the so-called Hep-Hep riots, flashed from Würzburg through the Franconian hinterland to Frankfurt am Main, the towns of northern Baden, and then all the way to Hamburg, Danzig, and even Copenhagen.84 Staged against the background of an economic downturn and the resultant pauperization of the artisan class, these riots—the first supraregional outbreak of anti-Semitic violence in Germany since the Middle Ages—laid bare the widespread disapproval of an incipient Jewish emancipation and revealed people’s chagrin at the return of Jews to cities from which they had been expelled.85 If the murder accusation in Dormagen occurred in this tumultuous context, it also inspired violence of its own. On October 30 in the nearby village of Hülchrath, rioters stoned the Jewish schoolhouse, demolished gravestones in the Jewish cemetery, and bloodily assaulted local Jews.86 All of this—the return of ritual-murder belief and the violence that accompanied it—constituted a dismaying vestige of an era insufficiently past.
A second accusation came fifteen years later, this time in the Rhenish hamlet of Neuenhoven, not far from the town of Neuss. Although the substance of the charges recounted a familiar story (Jews had murdered a six-year-old boy and drawn off his blood), the resulting violence wracked the local Jewish communities with considerably more force than had been felt at Dormagen. According to a local newspaper, the Elberfelder Zeitung, “a numerous crowd” attacked “the dwellings of two Jews living in Neuenhoven, and they were almost entirely laid to waste together with the furniture and goods in them, while at the same time the Synagogue at Bedburdyk was stormed and completely destroyed.”87 For months on end, scenes of anti-Semitic violence erupted in town and country, marring the idyllic landscape of the left bank of the Lower Rhine. In some towns, only the presence of the Prussian military saved the Jews from additional attacks. Moreover, the Neuenhoven case encouraged further denunciations: in Willich, in the county of Krefeld, in 1835, Jews were again accused of committing ritual murder, as they would be in Düsseldorf in 1836 and again in 1840.88
What is most striking about these cases is the clash between the world of popular religiosity, steeped in the lore of medieval accusation, and the rational reaction of public officials. In a decree dated July 26, 1834, two weeks after the murder in Neuenhoven, the president of the district of Düsseldorf denounced the ritual-murder accusation as “a superstition sprung from the barbarism of centuries long past” and pointed out that the facts of the case should have “completely banished any thought of the reality of the silly tale.”89
This statement marks an important moment in the history of the ritual-murder accusation. Infused with optimism, enlightened officials supposed that by decree they could mold a less superstitious, more informed public sphere. This was a time when officials began to believe in the emerging power of public education and the printed word to eradicate baseless fantasies, such as those about ritual murder, that bedeviled the popular imagination. And there were indeed grounds for hope. In Germany, literacy had become the common property of an increasing number of men and women. In 1840, according to one rough estimate, 40 percent of Germans could read; in 1870, 75 percent; in 1900, 90 percent a “revolution in reading,” as one historian called it.90 To be sure, not all Germans steeped themselves in the works of Goethe, Schiller, and Lessing, but a great number of people read newspapers, almanacs, and penny pamphlets. As newly created knowledge was more easily disseminated, and as a public sphere based on the free exchange of ideas began to form—so early nineteenth-century reformers thought—the belief in magic and miracles, monsters and demons, would slowly but surely disappear. “The disenchantment of the world,” to use Max Weber’s phrase, would bring forth a more rational man.
Yet the ritual-murder accusation persisted. In Germany, accusations surfaced in Bavarian Swabia in 1845, in Cologne in 1861, in the Westphalian village of Enniger in 1873, in Xanten in 1891—in Catholic, not Protestant, regions. To enlightened German liberals, there was no riddle here. Since the 1830s, religious revival had swept the Catholic countryside. Reinforced by social tensions between town and country and by a political conflict over mixed marriages, the revival spoke in an increasingly secular age to deep desires to reen-chant the world. But to German liberals, self-appointed eradicators of superstition, the revival raised the specter of mass mystification. They saw before them a long, drawn-out struggle for civilization against barbarism, for the forward claims of the modern against the backward pull of the medieval.91
The printed word, they thought, would be a weapon in their arsenal. But with respect to ritual murder, as had already been true in Trent in 1475 and in Sandomierz in 1710, it turned out to be a double-edged sword. Print could be wielded by the purveyors of prejudice as well as by the combatants for civilization. Book production constituted a case in point. In nineteenth-century Germany, a dramatic increase in titles addressing aspects of the blood libel occurred, with the bulk of books following major cases that elicited wide discussion first in Damascus in 1840 and then again in Tisza-Eszlar (Hungary) in 1882. By the end of the century, there existed a sizable literature on the problem of ritual murder, with authors ranging from Grub Street pamphleteers to well-meaning Protestant pastors and theologians on both sides of the question. The discussion was also international. Books on ritual murder, pro and contra, appeared not only in German but also in Russian, Hebrew, French, Yiddish, Polish, Italian, English, Hungarian, Czech, Dutch, and Greek. Moreover, major works were often translated. Penned by Isaac Baer Levinsohn, the most important work defending the Jews of Russia against ritual-murder accusations, Efes Damim (No Blood), was originally published in Wilna in 1837 and included text in Hebrew, Latin, Russian, and Polish. The book was subsequently translated into German, French, and English. But on the other side of the debate, the scribblings of August Rohling, a fraudulent professor of Catholic theology who had taught in Milwaukee, Münster, and Prague, were also translated. Originally published in German by established Catholic publishing houses, Rohling’s work was translated into Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Dutch, French, and English.
Nineteenth-century works on ritual murder differed radically in sophistication, style, and scholarly rigor. It should not be surprising that works defending Jews against the ritual-murder charge were typically composed in a high academic style and adhered to the strictest canons of evidence. Hermann Strack, Regius Professor of Theology at the University of Berlin, whose work The Jew and Human Sacrifice remains the best general book on the subject, devoted much of his career to showing—by close and critical readings of sources—that the ritual-murder charge had been a hoax from the start, and its modern purveyors nothing but frauds in pseudo-scholarly dress. Yet his style was forbidding, and his prose often choked on the garlands of endless textual citations. Equally forbidding fo
r all but the most learned was Moritz Stern’s Source Contributions to the Position of the Popes on the Jews, which gathered together the medieval papacy’s impressive record denouncing the ritual-murder accusation. Yet Stern refused to translate some of his sources, letting the Latin- and Italian-language documents speak for themselves. Some authors, however, attempted to appeal to a wider audience. In 1901, Friedrich Frank, a Bavarian priest, wrote a popular refutation of the ritual-murder accusations. Relying heavily on the work of Strack, while forgoing Strack’s elaborate scholarly apparatus, Frank showed that the accusations had almost always been fabricated and that in almost all cases the church, as well as many learned men, had opposed them.
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