The Butcher's Tale

by Helmut Walser Smith

  The butcher’s tale, after all, was not a wholly new creation. Cobbled together “in the age of the telephone and x-ray” in a West Prussian town, it harked back, in its figurative language as well as in its detail, to an old trope of the Western literary imagination handed down through Chaucer. In the Canterbury Tales, in “The Prioress’s Tale,” we read,

  Fro thennes forth the Jues han conspired

  This innocent out of this world to chace.

  An homycide thereto han they hyred,

  That in an aleye hadde a privee place;

  And as the child gan forby tor to pace,

  This cursed Jew hym hente, and heeld hym faste,

  And kitte his throte, and in a pit hym caste.98

  The butcher’s tale bore lamentable testimony to the enduring force of fiction, and in particular to those places, to quote Toni Morrison, “where imagination sabotages itself, locks its own gates, pollutes its vision.”99

  Detail of map of central ‘Europe showing the major cases of ritual-murder accusations throughout history.

  CHAPTER THREE

  History

  Ez bringent noch alliu jar

  die juden Kristes matter dar

  ein kristen sie mordent

  In every year it happens still

  the Jews Christ’s passion offer

  when a Christian boy they kill

  —SEIFRIED HELBLING,

  thirteenth-century knight and poet

  The butcher’s tale was based on a story even older than the poetry of Chaucer. “In every year it happens still … ,” Seifried Helbling wrote at the end of the thirteenth century, his words suggesting that the ritual-murder tale had already firmly lodged itself in the dark recesses of the Christian imagination.1 Yet the tale, like hatred of Jews generally, had not always been there, and while one can only speculate about the long half millennium between Augustine and Abelard, filled as it may have been with more sympathy than antagonism, more tolerance than tension, it does seem that the Christian world that created tales of Jewish ritual murder belonged squarely in the millennium we just recently left behind.2

  The first officially documented accusation of ritual murder occurred in 1150 when, in the first volume of his The Life and Passion of Saint William the Martyr of Norwich, Thomas of Monmouth described the murder of a young boy that took place in Norwich, England, in 1144 as a symbolic crucifixion.3 The tale of murder, with Thomas’s embellishments, then found its way into the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle penned by the monks of Peterborough Abbey, a scribe having brought it up to date in 1154.

  Now we wish to tell some part of what happened in King Stephen’s time. In his time the Jews of Norwich bought a Christian child before Easter, and tortured him with all the same tortures with which our Lord was tortured, and on Good Friday hanged him on a cross for love of our Lord, and afterwards buried him imagined that it would be concealed, but our Lord showed that he was a holy martyr, and the monks took him and buried him reverently in the minster, and through our Lord he performs wonderful and manifold miracles; and he is called St. William.4

  In this brief passage we can already see in bold outline the major motifs that would inform the tenacious tale for centuries: that Jews killed Christian boys before Easter; that because they hate Christians, the Jews tortured the boys; that the killing was in imitation of the killing of Christ; that Jews were not only a timeless menace but also a present threat; and that the murdered boy, as a martyr for the Christian community, performed miracles.5

  The tale started as a learned tale, for Thomas of Monmouth was an educated monk from Wales whose Life made him a notable hagiographer.”6 But because few copies of the Life were made, subsequent dissemination of the story depended on the monks of Peterborough, who incorporated it into the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Probably, some people of Norwich believed that Jews had killed the boy when the murder occurred in 1144; but the idea that it was a ritual killing in all probability stems, as the historian Gavin Langmuir has argued, from the all-too-creative fiction of Thomas. In the canticles that sounded throughout the abbeys of Christendom, this was a new and terrible note.7

  It resonated in the twelfth-century northern European world of Bernard of Clairvaux and Thomas à Becket, a world that brought forth the love affair of Abelard and Heloïse, the troubadours of Languedoc, and the heart-wrenching, illicit, pining of Sir Lancelot for Arthur’s Guinevere. In the shadows of the great Cathedrals Durham and Canterbury, St. Denis and Chartres new learning flourished, as men like Peter Lombard and John of Salisbury labored to understand the astronomy of Ptolemy, the geometry of Euclid, the mathematics of the Islamic world, the verse of Ovid and the orations of Cicero, and, just beyond the turn of the century, carefully guarded in select scriptoria across the Alps and on the other side of the Pyrenees, the ethical and metaphysical works of Aristotle. This was a world marked by a great renaissance.8 At the same time, however, it was marred by a deteriorating image of Jews, a distended sense that Jews were the implacable enemies of Christendom, not just blind to the truth but deceitful, threatening, and dangerous.9

  The idea that Jews murdered Christians soon found its way into the Christian faith. The early tales of ritual murder were not isolated alcoves beneath an otherwise glorious cathedral. Rather, these tales, and tales like them about other groups, provided a firm foundation for a newly constructed “persecuting society,” begun in 1096 with the First Crusade, which unleashed a destructive fury against the Jewish communities along the Rhine. In the course of the twelfth century, this emerging “persecuting society” also erected walls of intolerance against heretics, lepers, and homosexuals. Buttressed by the stiff legalism of the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, the new persecutions culminated in the Inquisition, entrusted in 1232 to the Dominican friars.10

  By the mid-thirteenth century, a shift in the motifs inscribed in the tale of murder had occurred. The initial tales involved murders, sacrifices, and crucifixions; they did not, however, involve the ritual use of blood. That was a German invention, mentioned for the first time in 1236 in the Annals of Marbach. The reference is to the Fulda case of 1235. While a miller and his wife attended mass on Christmas Day, their mill, which was outside the city walls, burned down and their five sons perished. Local Christians, though perhaps sojourning crusaders, accused the Jews of killing the boys, drawing their blood, carrying it away in wax bags, and using it for curative or religious purposes.11 Three days after Christmas, on December 28, citizens (or crusaders) “put to the sword” thirty-four local Jews after two Jews, in order to escape torture, confessed to the crime. The citizens (or the crusaders) later brought the exhumed corpses of the children to Emperor Frederick II in the Alsatian city of Hagenau. Although Frederick did not find the accusation made in Fulda credible, he nevertheless summoned spiritual and secular authorities and solicited their opinions. But their opinions conflicted, and Frederick brought together a commission of converted Jews from all over Europe, who in the spring of 1236 denied that Jews used Christian blood. Indeed, they argued, the opposite was true: blood, of any kind, polluted, and the Torah and Talmud strictly forbade its consumption. On the strength of this recommendation, Frederick, in an imperial bull of July 1236, “fully acquitted the Jews of Fulda of the crime attributed them, and the rest of the Jews of Germany of such a serious charge.”12

  The populace, however, was not so easily convinced. The blood libel spread, and violence against Jews ensued. In the following spring, another major case occurred, this time in Valréas, a village in the Vaucluse, in southern France, after two Franciscan monks accused the Jews of crucifying and exsanguinating Meilla, a two-year-old Christian girl. Some Jews were tortured in order to draw their confession; others were simply murdered. Desperate, the Jews of Valréas appealed to the Holy See for protection, and in two papal bulls, both issued on May 28, 1247, Pope Innocent IV condemned the persecution of the Jews in Valréas.13 Just over a month later, in a third papal bull, on July 5, 1247, he declared as erroneous the charges that Jews slaughter
ed Christians in order to use their blood.14 The response of Innocent IV, motivated as much by fear of uncontrolled violence as by a genuine conviction of the untruth of the blood libel, inaugurated a long tradition of Vatican condemnation of the ritual-murder charge.

  Although disclaimed by the high church, the ritual-murder charge at Fulda occurred in a climate of concern about heresy. The more immediate pressure, however, came from a more general persecutorial brooding, particularly evident in southern Germany, the domain of Conrad of Marburg, the severe confessor of Elizabeth of Thüringen. In 1231, the archbishop of Mainz, the most powerful prelate of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, made Conrad an inquisitor. Formidable and fanatical, Conrad rode from town to town (on a donkey, we are told, in imitation of Christ), thundering against the heretical demons of his phantasmic imagination. The heretics he accused were put to the sword or tossed into a lake or consumed by flames. Against apostates, especially the Rhineland Cathars, he preached vigilance. A storm of denunciations and counterdenunciations now descended on southern Germany; one of the charges was that the heretics profaned the wafer degrading, befouling, even stabbing it.

  This was the specter of host desecration. It stuck at a sensitive question concerning the Eucharist: whether the wafer and the wine was the real body and blood of Christ, a mystical corpus and fluid, or, as some heretics had it, merely bread and wine, a symbol.

  Starting in the late twelfth century, theologians increasingly argued that the Eucharist constituted a sacrament involving the real presence of Christ.15 This reorientation was then sanctioned by the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, which asserted that “the body and blood” of Jesus Christ “are truly contained in the sacrament of the altar under the forms of bread and wine, the bread and wine having been changed by God’s substance, by God’s power, into his body and blood.”16

  A remarkable claim, no less wondrous for its ritual recurrence, the doctrine of transubstantiation came to rest not on the wisps of mystical insight but firmly on the logical and categorical constructions of Aristotle, the man whom the medievals called “the philosopher,” “the master of those who know.” In the early discussions concerning the true nature of transubstantiation, the influence of Aristotle, mediated by Boethius, was mixed with Augustine’s symbolism and Plato’s forms. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the question of the real presence of Christ in the host thus remained open. But in the course of the thirteenth century, as Aristotle’s texts were newly translated, his influence, not only in logic but also in science, became more palpable.17

  The resulting epistemic shift turned on the nature of substances, which for Aristotle were not the magical numbers of Pythagoras or the unchanging essences of Plato but perceptible things, the ordinary matter of the world. Substances consist of both matter and form, which in Aristotelian logic are separable, just as Eve was made from the rib of Adam. A substance that exists in matter may thus appear in a form external to it. Analogously, the body of Christ may take on the appearance of bread. “All the substance of the bread is transmuted into the body of Christ,” Aquinas writes, and this transmutation “is not a formal conversion but a substantial one.”18 Aquinas’s caveat is crucial and thinkable only within Aristotelian logic, for it means that the wafer does not become Christ but rather the substance of Christ, and substance is separable into matter and form. When a Christian devours the wafer, it is the accidental form that he eats. “Whatever is eaten as under its natural form, is broken and chewed as under its natural form,” Saint Thomas tells us, “but the body of Christ is not eaten as under its natural form, but under the sacramental species.”19 Christians, thanks to this Aristotelian nuance, do not practice what the anthropologist Beth Conklin has in another context called “compassionate cannibalism.”20

  To our symbolically impoverished sensibilities, this line of reasoning may stretch credulity, but it is nevertheless important to recall that in the thirteenth century Aristotelian categories possessed all the force that the Hegelian dialectic did in the two centuries before our own. Like the followers of Hegel, those who argued on the wings of Aristotle were not stuck in a mire of obscurantism but rather soared among the most widely acclaimed thinkers of the day.21 And just as in later centuries when men like Lenin committed unspeakable crimes, and poets like Mayakovski justified them, because they thought themselves instruments of larger historical forces, so in the thirteenth century the wonder of the Eucharist brought forth new patterns of power and persecution. It inaugurated, inter alia, centuries of host-desecration charges: that Jews tortured the wafers until they bled and that it was Christ the savior who was bleeding. The new emphasis on the corporeality of the host, on Christ’s real presence in the sacrament, also secured the emotional context for the ritual-murder charge, of which host desecration was merely a symbolic variation.

  The key, m one way of thinking about it, is the psychological process of “projection,” which simply states that one person imputes to another what he himself really thinks or does. This particular psychological defense mechanism is especially powerful when a person thinks or acts in a way that is shameful to himself or his community. According to this line of reasoning, there was something disturbing about a ritual in which the body and blood of Christ was consumed as food and sacrificed to God. That disturbing element was imputed to the Jews. To put it in terms of the relational structure of the two rituals, one imagined, the other real: ritual-murder accusations represented a projection onto Jews of the ineffable that in the celebration of the Eucharist, Christians, not Jews, practiced ritual cannibalism.22

  The charges of ritual murder and host desecration rested on a projected fantasy of the medieval imagination. No one ever saw a Jew commit ritual murder or desecrate a host, and in the scores of cases that would follow those in Fulda and Valréas, no Jew, except those who suffered the pain of torture, ever admitted to participating in such acts. Yet the cases, first of ritual murder, later of host desecration, continued unabated in Pforzheim (Baden) in 1267, in Weissenburg (Alsace) in 1270, in Mainz in 1283, in Munich in 1285, in Oberwesel (the Rhineland) in 1287, in Krems (Lower Austria) in 1293, in Bern in 1294, in Weissensee (Thuringia) in 1303, and in Prague in 1305. The accusations were not all cut from the same cloth, however. In some cases, townspeople saw miracles. In Oberwesel, the corpse of the tortured fourteen-year-old “good Werner” supposedly swam up the Rhine River and healed the sick. In Pforzheim, the murdered girl allegedly bled anew when the populace inspected her; her face also seemed to blush and her hands to levitate. In other cases, the drawing of the blood defined the legend, as happened in Weissensee, where the Jews were said to have opened all the veins of Konrad, a schoolboy. And in still other cases (in Prague, for example), the story centered on a crucifixion. In terms of motif, most instances of alleged ritual murder involved the killing of boys, though not all, for the cases in Valréas and Pforzheim began when townspeople discovered the lacerated corpses of young girls. The murders sometimes happened in the spring, around the time of Passover, but this was by no means always true, for in Weissenburg the events took place in June or July, in Pforzheim in July, in Munich in October, and in Fulda in December. Still, in almost all cases, the accusations focused on blood.

  In the medieval period, folktales about the magical powers of blood abounded. Variations on these tales recounted how Jews used Christian blood to prepare sauces for Passover, and how they baked matzo in it; they told of Jews who ate the hearts of Christian children, and of Jews who purged themselves of sin by washing in Christian blood. Some of the folktales referred to the role of Christian blood in specific religious rituals: that the Jews used it for communion on the Sabbath, for example. A different genre of tales described Jewish use of Christian blood as a talisman against the tribulations of everyday life. According to these legends, Christian blood cured illnesses, especially leprosy; it eased childbirth and coagulated the wound made by circumcision; it rejuvenated; it diluted the Jew’s own stench; it even served as an aphrodisiac.23r />
  By the end of the thirteenth century, as eucharistic devotion intensified, host-desecration charges against Jews also broke out. The first major case was in Paris in 1290; it then spread, at first tentatively and then with ferocity, striking in 1298 a spate of Franconian towns: Röttingen (near Rothenburg ob der Tauber), Iphofen, Lauda, Weikersheim, Möckmühl, and Würzburg.24 From Franconia it traveled down the Danube, bringing the scourge to two communities near Vienna, Korneuburg in 1305 and St. Pölten in 1306. Thereafter, outbreaks were intermittent, until they erupted in full force in 1338, wreaking severe havoc in Pulkau, a town northwest of Vienna, and in the Bavarian town of Deggendorf, where, at the signal of the church bell on Sunday, September 30, the locals attacked their Jewish neighbors, plundered their wares, and burned their houses to the ground, killing, in the course of the day, every last Jewish man, woman, and child.25

  The destruction sometimes followed its own pathways, and at other times it seemed that there was a grim stalker, bringing worse calamities still, on its heels. This was true of the cases in Franconia, a dangerous landscape where power devolved into the hands of many. In 1298, a leader named Rintfleisch, perhaps a knight, more likely a butcher, arrayed a private army of men to massacre Jews, citing charges of host desecration sufficiently odious that “God permitted such persecution.”26 It is impossible to ascertain the total number of Jews killed by Rintfleisch, his peasant followers, and the city magistrates who colluded with them. In a Hebrew elegy, part question, part plea, we hear that “once Abraham brought his only son to sacrifice,” but “how many thousands have been brought to you as sacrifice now.”27 More prosaically, the Christian chronicler Gottfried of Ensmingen estimated the death toll at ten thousand souls.28 The blossoming Jewish communities of Franconia, like Nuremberg, Bamberg, Würzburg, and Rothenburg ob der Tauber, were trampled underfoot, and many smaller communities, like Forchheim and Hollfeld, would never recover.29 “May my viol become a mourning song and my flute the voice of tears,” intones another Hebrew lamentation of the time.30