The Butcher's Tale

by Helmut Walser Smith

  77. Ibid., 41–43. See also Simon Dubnow, History of the Jews in Russia and Poland, trans. I. Friedlaender, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1916), 1:179–80. Cardinal Ganganelli was to become Pope Clement XIV.

  78. In their inquisitorial methods, the Poles proved especially severe. See Dubnow, History of the Jews in Russia and Poland, 1:172–80.

  79. Quoted in ibid., 175.

  80. Cited in Stefan Rohrbacher, “Die ‘Hep-Hep-Krawalle’ und der ‘Ritualmord’ des Jahres 1819 zu Dormagen,” in Antisemitismus und jüdische Geschichte: Studien zu Ehren von Herbert A. Strauss, ed. Rainer Erb and Michael Schmidt (Berlin, 1987), 137.

  81. Rohrbacher and Schmidt, Judenbilder, 11–14.

  82. Stefan Rohrbacher, “Ritualmord-Beschuldigungen am Niederrhein: Christlicher Aberglaube und antijudische Agitation im 19. Jahrhundert,” Menora 1 (1990), 300. By the end of the nineteenth century, the Werner cult was, we may assume, still, or again, alive and well. In 1911, a new Werner chapel was built, and a Catholic newsletter, Pastor Bonus, celebrated “the holy Werner” as the “last German martyr.” See Stefan Rohrbacher, “Volksfrömmigkeit und Judenfeindschaft: Zur Vorgeschichte des politischen Antisemitismus im katholischen Rheinland,” Annalen des Historischen Vereins für den Niederrhein 192–93 (1990), 131.

  83. Rohrbacher, “Die ‘Hep-Hep-Krawalle,’” 145.

  84. See the map of Hep-Hep riots in Stefan Rohrbacher, Gewalt im Biedermeier: Antijüdische Ausschreitungen in Vörmärz und Revolution (1815–1848/49) (Frankfurt am Main, 1993), 127.

  85. Jacob Katz, Die Hep-Hep-Verfolgungen des Jahres 1819 (Berlin, 1994).

  86. Rohrbacher, “Die ‘Hep-Hep-Krawalle,’”139.

  87. Elberfelder Zeitung, 26 July 1834, cited in Strack, The Jew and Human Sacrifice, 206.

  88. Rohrbacher, “Ritualmord-Beschuldigungen am Niederrhein,” 304–6, 323, n. 62. The Jews were also accused, more than twenty years later, in Cologne in 1861.

  89. Cited in Strack, The Jew and Human Sacrifice, 207.

  90. Rolf Engelsing, “Die Perioden der Lesergeschichte in der Neuzeit,” in Engelsing, Zur Sozialgeschichte deutscher Mittel- und Unterschichten (Göttingen, 1973), 140.

  91. Johann Gustav Droysen, Politische Schriften, ed. Felix Gilbert (Mumch, 1933), 3–4.

  92. D. Chwolson, Die Blutanklage und sonsterliche mittelalterliche Beschuldigungen der Juden (Frankfurt am Main, 1901), 116–17.

  93. Joseph S. Bloch, My Reminiscences (Vienna, 1923), 67.

  94. Strack, The Jew and Human Sacrifice, 155–56. Eisenmenger’s work was printed in 1700 but not published until 1710, because of efforts on the part of the Jewish Community of Frankfurt am Main to halt its appearance. See Jacob Katz, From Prejudice to Destruction: Anti-Semitism, 1700–1933 (Cambridge, Mass., 1980), 14.

  95. Constantin Ritter Cholewa von Pawlikowski, Der Talmud in der Theorie und in der Praxis, 2nd ed. (Regensburg, 1881), 245–312.

  96. Henri Desportes, Le mystère du sang chez les juifs de tous les temps (Paris, 1889), 53–250.

  97. Bloch, My Reminiscences, 71.

  98. Das Martyrologium des Nürnberger Memorbuches, 179–80.

  99. On the violence in the early nineteenth Century, see Rohrbacher, Gewalt im Biedermeier.

  100. Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made (New York, 1976), 5.

  101. David Vital, A People Apart: The Jews in Europe, 1789–1939 (Oxford, 1999), 282.

  102. Disraeli cited in Howe, World of Our Fathers, 7.

  103. Although only an estimate, the death toll may well have numbered in the hundreds. On the pogroms of 1881–84, see I. Michael Aronson, Troubled Waters: The Origins of the 1881 Anti-Jewish Pogroms in Russia (Pittsburgh, 1990). For pogroms in Russia generally, see John Klier and Shlomo Lambroza, eds., Pogroms: Anti-Jewish Violence in Modern Russian History (Cambridge, 1992).

  104. The rough figures are from Zvi Gitelman, A Century of Ambivalence: The Jews of Russia and the Soviet Union, 1881 to the Present, 2nd ed. (Bloomington, 2001), 12. The quotation is from Howe, World of Our Fathers, 25.

  105. Christhard Hoffmann, “Political Culture and Violence against Minorities: The anti-Semitic Riots in Pomerania and West Prussia,” in “Exclusionary Violence”: anti-Semitic Riots in Modern German History, ed. Werner Bergmann, Christhard Hoffmann, Helmut Walser Smith (Ann Arbor, 2002), 67–92.

  106. Dubnow, Weltgeschichte des jüdischen Volkes, 10:106–7.

  107. MVAA 11, 51 (18 Dec. 1901), 424.

  108. JP, 16, 17 (23 April 1885), 166.

  109. Ibid., 167; ibid., 15, 20 (18 May 1884), 203.

  110. JP 15, 20 (15 May 1884), 203.

  111. Otto Glagau, “Der Mord in Skurz vor Gericht,” Der Kulturkämpfer(May 1885), 26. 112.

  112. JP 15, 20 (15 May 1884), 204.

  113. Simon Dubnow, Weltgeschichte des jüdischen Volkes (Berlin, 1929), 10: 50–51.

  114. Glagau, “Der Mord in Skurz,” 32.

  115. MVAA 11, 51 (18 Dec. 1901), 424.

  116. Karl Mannheim, Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction (New York, 1940), 279–81.

  117. Strack, The Jew and Human Sacrifice, 222–23.

  118. Ibid., 226–27.

  119. MVAA 10, 31 (1 Aug. 1900), 241–43.

  120. MVAA 7, 35 (28 Aug. 1897), 273–79.

  121. MVAA 10, 31 (1 Aug. 1900), 241–43.

  122. MVAA 7, 35 (28 Aug. 1897), 273–79.

  123. MVAA 4, 15 (15 April 15 1894), 241–43.

  124. MVAA 10, 31 (1 Aug. 1900), 241–43.

  125. Judith R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago, 1992), 204.

  126. Der Xantener Knabenmord vor dem Schwurgericht zu Cleve, 4.–14. Juli 1892; vollständiger Bericht (Berlin, 1893), 17 (hereafter XK).

  127. Ibid., 32.

  128. Ibid., 16.

  129. Ibid., 142.

  130. Ibid., 408.

  131. Ibid., 183.

  132. Ibid., 407.

  133. Ibid., 408.

  134. Ibid., 327, cited in Schoeps, “Ritualmordbeschuldigung und Blutaberglaube,” in Köln und das rheinische Judentum, ed. Jutta Bohnke-Kollwitz et al. (Cologne, 1984), 293.

  135. XK, 327. For a comment on the Landgerichtsrat’s observations, see MVAA 10, 28 (11 Aug. 1900), 218.

  136. XK, 268–69.

  137. Ibid., 109.

  138. Ibid., 162.

  139. Bernd Kölling, “Blutige Illusionen: Ritualmorddiskurse und Antisemitismus im niederrheinischen Xanten am Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts,” in Agrarische Verfassung und politische Struktur: Studien zur Gesellschaftsgeschichte Preußens, 1700–1918, ed. Wolfgang Neugebauer and Ralf Pröve (Berlin, 1998), 355–59.

  140. Ibid., 358–59.

  141. XK, 399.

  142. For the role of the educated, see Kölling, “Blutige Illusionen,” which argues convincingly that one cannot simply ascribe ritual-murder accusations to the uneducated or to the continuing vitality of superstition.

  143. XK, 217.

  144. Ibid., 18, 214–16.

  145. See Bergmann, Hoffmann, and Smith, eds., “Exclusionary Violence.”

  146. Cited in MVAA 2, 30 (24 July 1892), 253.

  147. Cited in ibid.

  148. Schoeps, “Ritualmordbeschuldigung und Blutaberglaube,” 298.

  149. XK, 473–75.

  150. Ibid., 475.

  151. Ibid.

  152. Ibid., 386.

  153. On the reaction of the press, see the illuminating work of Barnet P. Harston, “Judaism on Trial: Antisemitism in the German Courtroom (1870–1895)” (Ph.D. diss., University of San Diego, 1999), 235–38.

  154. On the debate in the Prussian Landtag, see Harston, “Judaism on Trial,” 238–39; Schoeps, “Ritualmordbeschuldigung und Blutaberglaube,” 290–92.

  155. XK, 388.

  156. Ibid. 387–88.

  157. Harston, “Judaism on Trial,” 245–49.

  158. JP 23, 29 (22 Aug. 1892), 559.

  15
9. Rohrbacher, “Volksfrömmigkeit und Judenfeindschaft,” 139; MVAA 2, 31 (31 Aug. 1892), 267.

  160. Edward Muir, Mad Blood Stirring: Vendetta in Renaissance Italy, readers edition (Baltimore, 1993), xxiv.

  161. Peter Gay, The Cultivation of Hatred (New York, 1993), 35–127.

  162. Adolph Kohut, Ritual-Mord Prozesse (Berlin, 1913), 37.

  163. Wolfgang Treue, “Schlechte und gute Christen,” 109.

  164. Ibid., 102–3; Hsia, Trent 1475, 31.

  165. Treue, “Schlechte und gute Christen,” 103; Hsia, The Myth of Ritual Murder, 70.

  166. Treue, “Schlechte und gute Christen,” 102.

  167. GStAPK, Rep. 77, Tit. 500, no. 50, Bd. 1, 42, Appendix 2 to LA Konitz, 25 April 1900.

  168. Kohut, Ritual-Mord Prozesse, 37.

  CHAPTER FOUR: ACCUSATIONS

  1. SZ 36, 303 (2 July 1900).

  2. KB, 16.

  3. IdR 6, 6–7 (1900), 331.

  4. GStAPK, Rep. I/84a (2.5.1), Nr. 16774, 51, Wulff, 2 May 1900; MVAA 12, 42 (15 Oct. 1902), 322.

  5. A sense of this can be gleaned from marriage registers, extant for 169 marriages between the years 1874 and 1877. See Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, Family History Library, film no. 1189050, Konitz, Standesamt, Zivilregister, 1874–77. Of the men to be married, only 22 percent were actually born in Konitz; the rest came from the villages in Konitz county and in neighboring counties, as well as from other towns in the area. Of the women, 36 percent were born here. Both of these figures suggest a high level of in-migration. Although the differences in the kinds of sources used preclude precise comparisons with studies based on immigration and emigration data, the evidence from Konitz tends to support two contentions advanced by Steve Hochstadt, Mobility and Modernity: Migration in Germany, 1820–1989 (Ann Arbor, 1999), 107–34, that towns, and not merely large cities, experienced considerable migration and that the period of high migration antedates 1881, the conventional starting point for considering the empire’s migration history.

  6. This insight is based on the geographical origins of marriage patterns. See Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, Family History Library, film no. 1189050, Konitz, Standesamt, Zivilregister, 1874–77. Very few people came to Konitz from the larger cities. From Danzig, there is not one person in the marriage register; from Berlin, only two. Moreover, very few people made their way from the western parts of Germany to Konitz.

  7. See GStAPK XIV, 226B, vol. 12. In order to calculate the number of heads of households earning under 900 marks, I have subtracted the “Censisten” from the total heads of households reported in the census of 1905. This procedure may slightly inflate the number of people below the threshold. Conditions were certainly better in Konitz than in the surrounding countryside, where 92 percent did not meet the threshold for income tax, and they were even better than in some of the other West Prussian towns. On the economic conditions of the latter, see Karl Bessier, Die Kriminalität der Provinz Westpreussen (Halle, 1915), 189; for regional differences in income more generally, see Gerhard A. Ritter and Klaus Tenfelde, Arbeiter im Deutschen Kaiserreich, 1871 bis 1914 (Bonn, 1992), 477–81.

  8. The quotation is from Gustav George, Enthüllungen zur Konitzer Mordaffäre (Berlin, 1903), 23.

  9. Here and in what follows, the social composition of the streets is drawn from the street lists in Addressbuch der Stadt Konitz (Konitz, 1905), a copy of which can be found in the library of the Chojnice Local History and Ethnography Museum. It has been supplemented by the Archiv Panstwowe w Bydgoszcz/Akta Miasta Chojnice, 1675/161 Kontrol-liste für die Volkszählung am 1. Dezember 1885, and various pieces of evidence that surfaced in the trials and other documents. On the Rähmstrasse as a dumping ground, see Hermann Hamburger, Der Konitzer Mord: Ein Beitrag zur Klärung (Breslau, 1900), 12.

  10. GStAPK, Rep. 77, Tit. 500, no. 50, Bd. 2, 262, Magistrat der Stadt Konitz, 4 Aug. 1900.

  11. Similarly, in East Germany, at the height of the power of the state security forces, men made up 90 percent of the unofficial informants (IM) of the so-called Stasi. See Alf Lüdtke and Gerhard Fürmetz, “Denunziation und Denunzianten: Politische Teilnahme oder Selbstüberwachung?” Sozialwissenschaftliche Informationen 27, 2 (1998), 82.

  12. ML, 32.

  13. Regina Schulte, Sperrbezirke: Tugendhaftigkeit und Prostitution in der bürgerlichen Welt, 2nd ed. (Frankfurt am Main, 1984), and Dorothee Wierling, Mädchen für alles: Arbeitsalltag und Lebensgeschichte städtischer Dienstmädchen um die Jahrhundertwende (Berlin, 1987).

  14. On the Rosenthal case, see also Mathias Niendorf, Minderheiten an der Grenze: Deutsche und Polen in den Kreisen Flatow (Zlotów) und Zempelburg (Sepólno Krajenskie), 1900–1939 (Wiesbaden, 1997), 98–101.

  15. KB, 20.

  16. Ibid.

  17. Ibid.

  18. Her mother, who confounded the police by changing the details of the original testimony, supported Radtke’s behavior. KB, 20.

  19. GStAPK, Rep. I/84a (2.5.1), Nr. 16776, 48–51, Oeffentliche Sitzung des Schwurgerichts zu Konitz, 30 Oct. 1900.

  20. Ibid.

  21. Ibid.

  22. Ibid.

  23. Ibid.

  24. MP, 227.

  25. Ibid., 436–38.

  26. KB, 35

  27. ML, 87–92.

  28. GStAPK, Rep. I/84a (2.5.1), Nr. 16775, 113, Speisinger Protokoll, 27 March 1900, in Settegast, 22 Aug. 1900.

  29. SZ 36, 291 (25 June 1900).

  30. ML, 96. This is not from Speisinger’s account. In the trial against Moritz Lewy, Martha Lehmann, née Hoffmann, did not shy away from saying this outright.

  31. GStAPK, Rep. I/84a (2.5.1), Nr. 16775, 341, Speisinger Protokoll, 27 March 1900, in Settegast, 22 Aug. 1900.

  32. Ibid., 349.

  33. ML, 95–97.

  34. See the report on the Speisinger trial in DZ 42, 468 (6 Oct. 1900).

  35. ML, 189.

  36. MP, 414.

  37. SZ 36, 289 (23 June 1900).

  38. SZ 36, 315 (7 July 1900).

  39. GStAPK, Rep. I/84a (2.5.1), Nr. 16775, 58, Deposition Anna Lubke, 10 July 1900.

  40. ML, 41.

  41. Ibid., 385.

  42. SZ 37, 323 (13 July 1901)

  43. Ibid.

  44. ML, 32.

  45. Ibid., 66.

  46. Ibid., 78.

  47. GStAPK, Rep. I/84a (2.5.1), Nr. 16776, 290, Kracht, 26 March 1901.

  48. SZ 36, 423 (10 Sept. 1900).

  49. See the fascinating work of Kathy Stuart, Defiled Trades and Social Outcasts: Honor and Ritual Pollution in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge, 1999), 18, as well as the important work on which it is based: Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (London, 1966).

  50. MP, 545–46.

  51. SZ 36, 201 (lMayl900).

  52. MP, 297; ML, 267, 290.

  53. MP, 569–70; KB, 29. Brueggemann referred to her as Helene Lewy. That, however, is the name of her daughter.

  54. MVAA 10, 36 (5 Sept. 1900), 291.

  55. JP 31, 37 (14 Sept. 1900), 384.

  56. ML, 248.

  57. MP, 281.

  58. Ibid., 399.

  59. Ibid., 332.

  60. MVAA 12, 42 (15 Oct. 1902), 325.

  61. GStAPK, Rep. 77, Tit. 500, no. 50, Bd. 2, 130, Polizeikonferenz Komtz, 20 May 1900; SZ 36, 260 (7 June 1900).

  62. MP, 946–47.

  63. Ibid.

  64. Ibid., 226.

  65. For other early, though unspecific, accusations, see SZ 36, 144, Beilage (27 March 1900).

  66. SZ 36, 177 (17 April 1900).

  67. ML, 317.

  68. The quotation is from Antonio R. Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York, 1994), 248.

  69. On individual memory, see Daniel L. Schacter, Searching for Memory: The Brain, the Mind, and the Past (New York, 1996), and Endel Tulving and Fergus I. M. Craik, The Oxford Handbook of Memory (Oxford, 2000).

  70. XK, 327.

  71. A. Eulenburg, “‘Retroaktive’ Suggestion und Ha
llucination bei Zeugen,” Nation (Oct. 20), reprinted in MVAA 10, 43 (24 Oct. 1900), 340.

  72. Elizabeth F. Loftus, Julie Feldman, and Richard Dashiell, “The Reality of Illusory Memories,” in Memory Distortion: How Minds, Brains, and Societies Reconstruct the Past, ed. Daniel Schacter (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), 65.

  73. GStAPK, Rep. I/84a, Nr. 16776, 314–15, Kracht, 26 March 1901.

  74. MP, 429, 434.

  75. MP, 349; GStAPK, Rep. I/84a, Nr. 16775, 324, Lautz, 21 Nov. 1900.

  76. GStAPK, Rep. I/84a (2.5.1), Nr. 16774, 300–23, Wehn, 3 July 1900.

  77. Alan Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England (New York, 1970), 168.

  78. Keith Thomas, “Anthropology and the Study of English Witchcraft,” in Mary Douglas, ed., Witchcraft Confessions and Accusations (London, 1970), 68. With respect to twentieth-century accusations, see the path-breaking work of Robert Gellately, The Gestapo and German Society: Enforcing Racial Policy, 1933–1945 (Oxford, 1990); Eric A. Johnson, Nazi Terror: The Gestapo, Jews and Ordinary Germans (New York, 1999); and the special issue of the Journal of Modern History 68, 4 (Dec. 1996), entitled “Practices of Denunciation in Modern European History, 1789–1989,” ed. Sheila Fitzpatnck and Robert Gellately.

  79. Quoted in John Putnam Demos, Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England (New York, 1982), 277. For the argument that large-scale cases of witchcraft accusations are usually dysfunctional, see H. C. Erik Midelfort, Witch Hunting in Southwestern Germany, 1562–1684: The Social and Intellectual Foundations (Stanford, 1972), 4.

  80. Michael Geyer, “Resistance as an Ongoing Project: Visions of Order, Obligations to Strangers, and Struggles for Civil Society, 1933–1990,” in Resistance against the Third Reich, 1933–1990, ed. John Boyer and Michael Geyer (Chicago, 1994), 326.

  81. Ibid., 341.

  CHAPTER FIVE: PERFORMING RITUAL MURDER

  1. Jan T. Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (Princeton, 2001), 19.

  2. Ibid., 120–21, 124.

  3. For a more detailed treatment, see Werner Bergmann, Christhard Hoffmann, and Helmut Walser Smith, “Exclusionary Violence”: anti-Semitic Riots in Modern German History (Ann Arbor, 2002), 1–4.

  4. Clifford Geertz, “Notes on the Balinese Cockfight,” in Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York, 1973), 452.

  5. KB, 9. Mayor Deditius speculated that the anti-Semitic movement got its start because of anger in the Polish Party and the Center Party that Jewish delegates gave decisive votes to the candidate of the German Conservative Party, Arnold Osiander, in the runoff race of the supplementary Landtag election of 4 May 1900. For the results, see Thomas Kühne, Handbuch der Wahlen zum Preussischen Abgeordnetenhaus, 1867–1918 (Düsseldorf, 1994), 27.