Raphaël Lévy

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Raphaël Lévy (born 1612 in Flévy / Chelaincourt; died January 17, 1670 in Metz ) was a French cattle dealer who was burned at the stake on an anti-Judaistic ritual murder charge .

Life

Lévy was a small cattle dealer in Boulay , Lorraine , who traveled to Metz in 1669 shortly before Rosh Hashanah to buy a shofar for the high holidays . There he was arrested because the three-year-old Christian Didier Le Moyne had disappeared on the road between Boulay and Metz and Levy was accused of ritual murder of the child. Lévy was charged in a full anti-Semitic hatred, but Lévy protested his innocence despite torture . His defense lawyer Meyer Schwabe, one of the elders of the Metz community, was himself covered with fabricated accusations of mocking Jesus on Good Friday. Although the allegations against Schwabe and Lévy became increasingly bizarre and contradictory, both were sentenced to death . However, the royal director of Metz was able to save Schwabe through his intervention and also prevent a pogrom against the Jewish community , but for Lévy any help came too late. He was publicly burned at the stake on January 17, 1670 in Metz.

Aftermath

The Royal Council of State forbade the local authorities to punish Schwabe. Louis XIV himself generally forbade any further ritual murder trial and even forbade the mere belief in an accusation. However, the judicial murder shows that the legend of the ritual murder as an instrument of Christian hatred of Jews persisted in France even beyond the beginning of modern times. Clerical- reactionary circles there blamed the Jews for the progressive separation of church and state in the course of the Enlightenment, and they hardly shrank from defamation. In the Dreyfus affair , the clerical newspaper La Croix accused the accused that the Jews were now destroying the Christian soul of France through their allegedly radical secular anti-Catholic agenda just as they had previously murdered small Christian children. Glatigny , the home community of the alleged victim Levys, banned all Jews from entering the place and only lifted this ban , which had been strictly observed for 344 years, in 2014.

literature

Pierre Birnbaum: A Tale of Ritual Murder in the Age of Louis XIV: The Trial of Raphaël Lévy, 1669. Stanford University Press, Stanford 2012 ISBN 978-0-8047-7404-8

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Zvi J. Kaplan: From Ritual Murder to Treason: Antisemitism in Early Modern and Modern France , review of: Pierre Birnbaum. A Tale of Ritual Murder in the Age of Louis XIV: The Trial of Raphaël Lévy, 1669. on H-Net , May 2013
  2. ↑ Ulrich Sahm : Ban lifted after 344 years Jüdische Allgemeine of January 22, 2014
personal data
SURNAME Lévy, Raphaël
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Victim of an anti-Semitic judicial murder
DATE OF BIRTH 1612
PLACE OF BIRTH Flévy , Chelaincourt
DATE OF DEATH January 17, 1670
Place of death Metz