On the other side, authors of Rohling’s ilk had far fewer inhibitions when it came to popularizing the ritual-murder charge. Not only did anti-Semitic authors forgo serious source criticism; some could hardly read Hebrew. This was true of Ippolit Liutostanskii, a Polish-born, defrocked Catholic priest, who, after being tried for rape, turned to anti-Semitic polemics in order to earn money. He succeeded for a time in the 1870s and 1880s, aided, no doubt, by a depiction he had made of himself studying the Talmud wearing a tallith and tefillin. But when he was brought to court by the editor of a Hebrew newspaper, it became clear that Liutostanskii could not read Hebrew; indeed, he could not even decipher the alphabet.92 Other authors were not quite as crass, but August Rohling, easily the most widely read and cited anti-Semitic “authority” on ritual murder, desisted from a similar public challenge issued by a young rabbi from Galicia, Joseph Bloch. If Rohling could translate a randomly selected page of the Torah in a public forum, Bloch would hand him the handsome sum of three thousand Austrian gulden. Rohling, however, refused to countenance such a public embarrassment.93 In the course of the dispute, it also emerged that Rohling had simply plagiarized most of the translations in his The Talmudic Jew from Eisenmenger’s Judaism Discovered.94
Anti-Semitic authors also unscrupulously appealed to recorded history as proof of the veracity of the ritual-murder charge. Typically, they published long lists of historic cases complete with the text of Jewish confessions. In 1700, Eisenmenger had already composed such a list, reporting but fifteen cases while assuring his readers that there were many more. By the mid-nineteenth century, the list had greatly expanded. In 1866, Constantin Ritter Cholewa von Pawlikowski, an Austrian anti-Semite, cobbled together in his Talmud in Theory and Practice a list of seventy-three “human sacrifices” between 169 B.C.E. and 1860.95 After Pawlikowski’s work appeared, plagiarisms of the expanded list abounded. Rohling reproduced much of Pawlikowski’s material in 1870. So too did Henri Desportes, a French priest whose Mystery of Blood among the Jews of All Times appeared in 1889 and devoted nearly two hundred pages to the enumeration and description of at least one hundred ritual murders that had allegedly been committed since the twelfth century.96 For readers with anti-Semitic proclivities, these lists no doubt hardened the belief in ritual murder. For even if one claimed that some cases seemed dubious, it proved harder to demonstrate that all of them were fabrications of anti-Semitic fantasy.
It is exceedingly difficult to gauge the popularity of these specific works. Some, like Rohling’s, went into many editions in many languages and, as even Rohling’s detractors admitted, reached a wide audience. Joseph Bloch, for example, conceded that Rohling’s work had made the Talmud “a universal topic: in coffee houses, ale and public houses, in club meetings and in popular assemblies,” and that pamphlets for and against “were carried even to the miserable huts of laborers.”97 What was retained in these “miserable huts” one may only surmise: perhaps Rohling’s claim that in the Talmud Christians are called dogs and asses; or perhaps his equally notorious contention that the cabala demands the slaughter of Christian virgins.
IV
Violence had come in great waves, the unsteady climate of the Crusades and the rise of eucharistic piety creating the first massive swells that overwhelmed western Europe’s oldest Jewish communities. That this violence was something new we can deduce from the lamentations of the Nuremberg poet Mose b. Eleasar Hakohen, who around 1300 hoped that the Rintfleisch massacres of 1298 would be “the final scene of a fifth millennium overly rich with persecution.”98 The Christian year 1240 was the Jewish year 5000, and, as we know, Hakohen’s hopes were not fulfilled. Already the fourteenth century of the Christian calendar had brought still greater calamities as well as a permanent break in the civilization of German Jewry. In the three centuries that followed, violence erupted less dramatically but still repeatedly, especially in Poland, where most Jews now lived. A period of relative calm ensued, marked by the hope of enlightenment and the promise of emancipation. But there were serious forebodings: the Hep-Hep riots of 1819, the spillover violence of the revolutions of 1830 and 1848, and smaller tremors in between.99 The seas began to stir.
In 1881, the storm broke; on this, modern historians agree. “The year 1881 marks a turning point in the history of the Jews as decisive as that of 70 A.D., when Titus’s legions burned the Temple at Jerusalem, or 1492, when Ferdinand and Isabella decreed the expulsion from Spain,” writes Irving Howe.100 “If 1933 and the years immediately subsequent to it mark European Jewry’s culminating agony,” the historian David Vital has recently argued, “1881 marks the first great milestone on the road to it.”101
That year witnessed the worst outbreak of anti-Jewish violence in modern history prior to the twentieth century. Starting in the district capital of Elisavetgrad, in Ukraine, during Easter week, the riots swiftly spread as the government reacted with insufficient resolve and as angry workers and peasants traveled by rail, river, and road from the cities to the towns and villages throughout the countryside. It was a modern massacre: urban in origin, driven by ideology, fueled by the press, and abetted by politicians from afar. Incoherent and unorganized, the actual violence remained more imitative than planned.
The pogroms were framed by political events that provoked people to act. All across central and eastern Europe, the onset of a severe economic depression in 1879, combined with a series of political realignments, brought about the collapse of liberal influence in the halls of government. In the Russian Empire, the collapse was especially abrupt. On March 13, 1881, the liberal Czar Alexander II, whom Disraeli called “the kindliest prince who has ever ruled Russia,” was assassinated.102 His heir, Alexander III, tightened the grip of autocratic rule and, following the counsel of a mystical prelate, Konstantin Pobedonostsev, pursued a policy of “orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality.” Clearly, this signaled a turn for the worse. Still, the government, contrary to what many historians used to believe, did not incite violence. It merely reacted so slowly that those who attacked Jews with sabers and clubs could think the czar looked approvingly upon their savage work. By the end of 1881, there had been an estimated 259 separate pogroms; they left tens of thousands of Jews homeless, caused millions of rubles worth of damage, and involved unsettling physical attacks as Jews were killed, beaten, and maimed and Jewish women raped.103 Like the medieval massacres of Rintfleisch and Armleder, the pogroms effected a trauma and left a vast Jewish community wondering what place on this earth they might still call home.
Other pogroms, some involving ritual-murder charges, followed—in 1903, 1905, 1906, and 1911. These pogroms, and the deteriorating situation of Russian Jews generally, also inaugurated a stream of emigration that, when the dam broke in 1881, turned from a modest trickle into a raging torrent: from roughly 40,000 in the 1870s, to 135,000 in the decade following the riots in Elisavetgrad, to nearly a million Jews in the twenty years thereafter. It was the largest movement of people in Jewish history, as more than a third of eastern Europe’s Jews left “the land that held the dust of their ancestors” behind for the New World.104
The violence spread far to the west, to Hungary, Galicia, and West Prussia and Pomerania, where in 1881 in Neustettin a synagogue fire, blamed on the Jews, led to the only other late-nineteenth-century outbreak of anti-Semitic rioting in Germany commensurate with that in Konitz in 1900. It happened roughly in the same area and included many of the same towns, not least, Konitz itself.105 Throughout Europe, the number of ritual-murder cases also increased. One erupted in the spring of 1882 in the town of Tisza-Eszlar, in the northeastern part of Hungary. Like the Russian and German empires, the Austro-Hungarian empire had also undergone an abrupt political transition brought about by deepening economic depression and inflamed national passions, and this perhaps explains the atmosphere of uncertainty that enveloped the case of a servant girl, Esther Solymosi, who had disappeared. Pulled by popular sentiment, the Hungarian police arrested a number of Jewish citizens, though they had l
ittle evidence against them, until a fourteen-year-old boy implicated his father by claiming that he had seen him taking part in the ritual killing inside the synagogue. The trial, which took place in the summer of 1882, culminated in a confrontation between the boy and his father. “I don’t want to be a Jew anymore!” the son said. “Won’t you be sorry if they hang me?” the father replied. The excited gallery cheered at the son’s every word, but the police later determined that the son could not have seen what he had claimed to see, and the Jews of Tisza-Eszlar were acquitted.
For the Jews of Hungary, the acquittal seemed like “the victory of truth” over the “phantoms of dark centuries.”106 Still, these phantoms proved tenacious, not least, in Germany. On January 22, 1884, in the small town of Skurz, about fifty miles east of Konitz, a fourteen-year-old boy had been found brutally murdered, his throat slit, his face slashed seven times, his limbs severed from his body, his legs expertly separated in two at the knees, his intestines ripped out, and his white body parts naked and drained of blood.107
“The Jews committed the murder in order to have Christian blood for the Easter holidays,” the good people of Skurz, a town of about two thousand, concluded, most of them German and Polish Catholics.108 Mankowski, a worker, came forward to claim that he had seen a poor Jewish butcher and rag seller named Hermann Josefsohn walking away from the scene of the crime on the morning of January 22. As if to foreshadow the events in Konitz, the police arrested Josefsohn after Mankowski claimed to have seen him “carrying a heavy sack on his back” with “a round object that looked like a human head sticking out of the lower corner.”109
The police also arrested two other Jews, the sixty-five-year-old, “well-to-do” merchant Bloos and his son.110 One witness noticed a commotion in the merchant’s house, where many Jews had supposedly assembled. The witness heard someone with “a Jewish accent” call the boy in, and two other witnesses corroborated the story, adding details. Mrs. Reimann, a widow, who lived in the same house as Bloos, said that she had heard a loud noise and then the sound of something falling coming from the goat pen. The story received further embellishment from the servant girl Katharina Kowalewska. She had come home around four o’clock in the morning and gone to visit Mrs. Reimann, when she heard the sound of broken glass coming from her master’s apartment. The next day, a Catholic butcher named Josef Behrend identified a vessel of blood in the possession of Bloos as the blood of the slain boy.111
The blood turned out to be oxen blood. Bloos and his son were released, and so was Hermann Josefsohn. Yet Josefsohn, who had spent several months in prison awaiting trial, could not easily return to his home town without “placing himself in danger of being beaten to death.”112 In May 1884, the mood in Skurz was indeed portentous and the local police, anxious about impending riots, called for reinforcements. Meanwhile, the Berlin police inspector who had come to solve the crime charged the two men who had supposedly seen Josefsohn carrying a sack with perjury and another with the murder of the fourteen-year-old boy. The man charged with murder was Josef Behrend, the Catholic butcher.
The case went to trial in late April 1885 in Danzig, then a predominantly German city, where it was judged by a jury of twelve men, six Catholics and six Protestants. The Berlin police thought they had their man. Mankowski, the worker who had testified that he had seen the Jewish butcher Hermann Josefsohn carrying a sack near the scene of the crime, admitted that he had lied. In fact, he had seen Josef Behrend. The case against Behrend appeared damaging. But on the witness stand, Mankowski retracted his statement, saying he could no longer be sure whether he had seen the Jewish or the Catholic butcher skulking around the scene of the crime with a sack on his back. Faced with conflicting evidence, the jury deliberated. In a split decision, it found Behrend “not guilty,” the verdict falling, according to one source, along religious lines: Protestants found him guilty, Catholics moved to acquit.113 As was the practice with split decisions, the court was required to let Behrend go. After the trial, Behrend fell into penury and resorted to begging on the streets. The Berlin-based German anti-Semitic League even took up a collection for him.114 Evidently, the effort was not a success, for soon thereafter Behrend emigrated to Minnesota, where it was rumored that on his death bed he confessed to the crime.115
These ritual-murder cases in the 1880s demonstrated the continuing emotional resonance of the blood libel. They also revealed that the anti-Semitic ritual starting with general suspicion, moving to specific accusation, and culminating in waves of violence needed little rehearsal. The “ruts in the pathways of the mind,” to use Karl Mannheim’s phrase, had been furrowed many times before.116
Far from abating, the accusations multiplied. In its bimonthly newsletter, the Berlin-based Association against Anti-Semitism counted seventy-nine bona fide ritual-murder charges made in Europe between 1891 and 1900. It actually counted more, but some cases were so self-evidently planted by anti-Semitic politicians that they never took hold. It may, however, have missed other cases, since some went unreported and others got lost in small-town newspapers. Yet the association’s list constitutes the most comprehensive survey we have for a ten-year period. Moreover, the pattern that results when we consider these accusations as a whole proves revealing.
The accusations occurred throughout all of Europe, the vast majority east of the Rhine. The seventy-nine incidents break down as follows: thirty-six in Austria-Hungary (with thirteen in Hungary, eight in Bohemia, six in Moravia, six in German Austria, and three in Galicia); fifteen in Germany; eleven in Bulgaria; five in Russia; two in Romania; and one each in Serbia and in France. Of the seventy-nine accusations, fourteen escalated into some level of violence against Jews. In more than half the cases, specific charges were made against individual Jews, as opposed to the more general claim that “the Jews did it.” When not listed as a crowd, the accusers typically came from humble backgrounds, though rarely from the peasantry. Of those named, eight were servants, seven were mothers of the victims, and one was the grandmother. There were also two apprentices, two peasants, two beggars, a worker, a nun, a soldier, a father of a missing child, and three young girls and two young boys. Not one member of the upper classes filed an initial accusation (except in one case where a lawyer did so on behalf of a mother). In six cases, the accusation came directly from the pages of an anti-Semitic newspaper. Conversely, the Jews who were incriminated typically belonged to the middle and upper classes. They were usually merchants (unless butchers) and, in a disproportionate number of incidents, were masters who employed Christian girls as maids.
The relationship between a Christian maid and her Jewish master constitutes an important motif in turn-of-the-century ritual-murder accusations, as many of the stories came from the maids themselves. For example, at Easter in 1894 in the Bohemian town of Lobositz, on the Elbe, a maid named Maria Lincha from the village of Wottitz supposedly overheard her master and his brother conspiring to ritually slaughter her. She had even seen the vessel they were to use to collect her blood. Further investigation showed that other women had told her stories about a similar case that had occurred the preceding Easter in the nearby town of Kolin, where the dead body of a servant girl was found in the Elbe. The girl, Marie Havlin, had committed suicide, but a Czech anti-Semitic newspaper claimed that she displayed stab wounds on her body; in bold headlines, the paper accused the girl’s master of killing her for her blood.117 Similarly, in 1896 in the town of Mährish-Trübau, two servant girls spread the rumor, soon dignified in print, that the Jewish merchant Moritz Moller had drawn the blood of his former maid, Philomena Waclawek, by pricking her arm and leg joints with a needle. Medical examiners, however, found no such pricks, and Waclawek spent three months in prison for the fantastic stories she told to her credulous friends.118 Stories of this sort spilled over into Germany as well. In Schoppinitz, Upper Silesia, in 1898, a servant girl accused her Jewish master of slicing her breasts while she slept. The officials charged with the investigation declared the story an invention and
dismissed the case.119
Historians, however, must take such imagined tales seriously, for they open windows onto the mentality of people who otherwise leave few documentary traces. Servants were ordinarily of lower-class background, born in a village or the countryside, and usually undereducated. As Christian maids, they lived and worked in near-intimacy with Jews, who tended to be from the middle or upper class, generally from the town or city, and who were typically more educated than they. It may have been the maids’ first time away from home and their first close encounter with members of another religious group. Moreover, as the accusations make clear, the fear of men and perhaps of rape (not unknown in master-maid relations) imparted emotional force to at least some of the charges involving mutilation.
But the maids were not alone. Their fears were often corroborated by rumors among friends and by the propaganda of anti-Semitic newspapers. Thus, in the Hungarian village of Szenicz in June 1894, a washerwoman never returned after having delivered clothes to the Jewish family Keszler. Immediately, local people thought it a case of ritual murder. Another maid claimed to have seen a number of rabbis and a kosher butcher gathered in the Keszler house. The missing girl, it turned out, had fallen into an overflowing stream during a flash flood.120 Rumors of this type were also spread in print. In Vienna, during Passover in 1897, the anti-Semitic Deutsche Volksblatt listed the names of four maids who had served in Jewish households and were now supposedly missing. In all four cases, it was easy to document their whereabouts.121 Nonetheless, the paper never printed a retraction, and the rumors, once let loose in the public realm, were not easily dismissed.
A second genre of murder accusations involved missing children. Mothers brought their children to market, sometimes to Jewish stores, and when the children wandered off, the mothers quickly concluded that the Jews had taken the children away. A case in Bucharest, in the kingdom of Romania, whose status as an independent country was not yet two decades old, proved typical. One day in August 1893, two Christian women entered Pascal’s porcelain shop and somehow lost track of the child. The younger woman, the mother, immediately yelled at Mrs. Pascal, the Jewish proprietor, “Give me back my Jonica,” and “You have hidden him to kill him.” Meanwhile, according to one report, the older woman wrung her hands in anger. Then a crowd began to gather, and the mother again cried out for her boy: “My Jonica, my Jonica, now they are going to cut your throat.” Within minutes of the commotion, a peasant woman brought the child back to the mother.122
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