Ritual murder legend
A blood libel (also: ritual murder fable , blood libel , blood libel , blood libel , blood lie ; English blood libel ) says socially discriminated minority ritual murders by members of a majority group. The colporteurs often take up unexplained cases of kidnapping, accidents or death, especially of children , and offer scapegoats for them. The legends are used to defame the alleged perpetrators, reinforce and justify their suppression , persecution and murder.
Historically, ritual murder charges were particularly effective in European Christianity , claiming that the Jews needed the blood of Christian children for their Passover celebration and for various magical or medicinal purposes. This allegation first surfaced in England in 1144 and has become an enduring stereotype of Christian anti-Judaism . The legend often caused Jewish pogroms , lynching and judicial murders of the accused, their relatives and communities. It was specifically constructed by local, regional or state interest groups and later immigrated into folk tales and religious folklore . It linked church influence with superstition and worked on the basis of combined factors of economic hardship, social dissatisfaction and apocalyptic fears. She founded the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory of an alleged world Jewry that secretly meets for the most serious crimes against non-Jews.
From England the legend reached the German-speaking area (13th century) via Spain and France , then to Italy , Poland and Lithuania (15th century), finally to Russia (18th century) and the Ottoman Empire (19th century) . It survived the Age of Enlightenment and, parallel to anti-Semitism , experienced a new upswing in Central and Eastern Europe since 1800. The National Socialists used them to systematically incite the people before and during the Holocaust . It currently lives on unchanged and in new varieties, especially in right-wing extremism and Islamism .
Antiquity
Greco-Roman tradition
Allegations of ritual child murder , human consumption and the drinking or cultic use of human blood are known from ancient Greek literature since the histories of Herodotus (5th century BC). Originally they were not directed against Jews, but other foreign peoples.
In ancient Greece , human sacrifices continued until around 480 BC. Devalued and forbidden. But at the same time some people of different faiths and strangers were demonized with accusations of secret ritual human sacrifices. In Hellenism , educated Greeks circulated such rumors against Judaism . This was part of the Hellenistic educated middle usual ancient anti-Semitism .
The sophist Apion slandered the Jews in Alexandria around 40 AD against the Roman emperor Caligula in order to break Jewish resistance to the imperial cult . Apion's allegations, which the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus reproduced in his counter- writ Contra Apionem (94 AD), culminated in the story: The Seleucid ruler Antiochus IV. Epiphanes had 167 BC. A Greek was found tied up in the Jerusalem temple . He reported that Jews captured him, locked him up in the temple and fattened him for a year for a ritual human sacrifice, which they performed annually. In doing so, they would eat the flesh of the sacrifice and swear a mighty oath to their god to maintain enmity with the Greeks.
The individual motifs of the legend (human sacrifice, cannibal consumption of sacrifice, a stolen stranger, for a god, as an annual ritual, in the central shrine, to reinforce enmity) can each be traced back to older models, including the anti-Jewish treatises of the Egyptian Manetho (3rd century BC) . Chr.). According to the ancient historian Bezalel Bar-Kochva, the human sacrifice motif and the cannibalism motif were combined to form an anti-Jewish slander before the Maccabees uprisings (from ~ 160 BC) in Persia and Egypt and reached Apion through court historians of the Seleucids and Romans.
According to Josephus, he named the Greek historians Poseidonios and Apollonius Molon (both 1st century BC) as sources of the legend . He wanted to justify the desecration of the temple and the persecution of the Jews by Antiochus. Diodorus had already justified his persecution of the Jews with alleged Jewish customs.
The Suda , a Byzantine lexicon from the 10th century, quoted from the work About the Jews by the (otherwise unknown) Greek historian Damokritos (before or shortly after the destruction of the temple in AD 70): “... that the Jews put their heads in front of you bow a golden donkey and every seven years catch a gentile, offer it as a sacrifice, tear his flesh and kill him in this way. ”Damocritus probably varied the legend handed down by Apion here.
In the Roman Empire , educated Romans transferred the established allegations to the Christians from around AD 150 and claimed, as before from Jews, that they worshiped donkey heads and ate small children in secret rituals. Such allegations have been apparently confirmed by torture interrogations of Christians. However, they are almost only documented in the works of Christian apologists and church fathers who opposed them: including Justin the Martyr in his Apologiae pro Christianis (around 150); in dialogue with the Jew Tryphon (around 160); with Origen in Contra Celsum (around 250); with Eusebius of Caesarea in the Praeparatio evangelica (around 320).
The opponents of Christians misinterpreted their customs, such as the adoption of abandoned Roman newborns and the Eucharist . The nightly celebrations of the Christians increased the Roman distrust: it was believed that they practiced secret occult and anti-state practices there. In the course of the persecution of Christians in the Roman Empire , the regional and state persecutors accused the Christians, among other things, of kidnapping newborns and toddlers in order to secretly kill and eat them. This is what the Christian Minucius Felix described in his dialogue Octavius (around 200):
“A child, covered with dough to deceive the innocent, is placed before the initiate. This child is killed by the newcomer through wounds which are completely invisible to the eye; he himself, deceived by the pastry, thinks the stitches are harmless. The child's blood - what an abomination! - they slurp greedily, his limbs distribute them with true competition. Through this sacrifice they fraternize ... "
Judaism
For Judaism , infanticide and cannibalism marked the idolatry of foreign peoples. The Israelites knew in the old days still cults which demanded a victim of the first child ( 2 Chr 33.6 EU ; 2 Kings 23,10 EU ). This prohibits the Jewish Torah strictly and repeatedly ( Ex 13.2 EU ; 13,12f EU ; 22,28f EU ; 34,19f EU ; Num 3,15f EU ; 18.15 EU ; Deut 15:19 EU ) and threaten it with death penalty ( Lev 20,2–5 EU ). The biblical prophets condemned human sacrifice as idolatry ( Isa 57.5 EU ; Jer 7.31 EU ; 32.35 EU ; Ez 16.20 EU ; 23.37 EU ) and made them taboo .
Possibly already in the time of the father around 1200 BC Until 800 BC at the latest In Judaism according to Gen 22 EU animal sacrifices replaced every human sacrifice. The Torah forbids this as an "abomination for YHWH " repeatedly and strictly ( Lev 18.21 EU ; 20.2-5 EU ; Dtn 12.31 EU ; 18.10 EU ). The Torah also strictly regulated animal sacrifices and, among other things, forbids Jews to enjoy blood, since life is in the blood and this belongs exclusively to the Creator God ( Gen 9.4 EU ; Lev 3.17 EU ; 7.26-28 EU ; 17.10 –14 EU ). This invalidated an essential justification for sacrifice, the surrender and absorption of another's life force.
The apocryphal book of wisdom justified in the 1st century BC The fictitious extermination of the Canaanites when the Israelites took over the land with their alleged child sacrifices ( Weish 12.5 EU ).
Christianity
Child murder allegations first appeared in Christianity against some Gnostic or Christian sects. Augustine of Hippo passed down a rumor about the Montanists that they had inflicted small wounds on a one-year-old child, withdrew its blood, mixed it with flour, baked it into bread and consumed it at their Lord's Supper . If the child died, they would have been venerated as a martyr , if not, as a high priest .
The church fathers took over the biblical prohibition of human sacrifices and justified it with the death of Jesus Christ on the cross : There God's reconciliation with the world happened once and for all ( John 3:16 EU ). The vicarious self-sacrifice of the Son of God made all further sacrifices superfluous ( Heb 9.12 EU ; 10.10 EU ). Therefore, they initially did not assume any cultic human sacrifice to Jews. But with the thesis of the Jewish collective guilt for the death of Jesus, the replacement of the chosen people of God Israel by the church and the continuing self-cursing of the Jews ( Mt 27.25 EU ), they created the theological basis on which later ritual murder legends were based (see substitution theology ). After the Constantinian Revolution , the church, which rose to the state religion of the Roman Empire by 391 , also claimed the political isolation of its faith. Soon it was almost only the Jewish minority who questioned their claim to absoluteness , rejected belief in the Messiah dignity and divinity of Jesus and the salvific effect of his death, and resisted all attempts at conversion. As a result, Jews were considered to be the main enemies of Christianity alongside “heretics” and were systematically discriminated against.
In late antiquity , allegations of ritual murder by Christians against Jews were still rare and alluded to the dogma of the murder of God established around 160 AD . With the rule of the church, the belief in the healing power of the Christian sacraments was dogmatized. At the same time, the idea grew that the Jews wanted and had to repeat the torture and crucifixion of Jesus Christ over and over again because of their hereditary association with Satan or the Antichrist . This is shown by the visual crime that Athanasius of Alexandria († 373) ascribed to the Jews of Berytos ( Beirut ), ignoring the biblical prohibition of images : They would have repeated Jesus' torture on a picture of Christ . The picture began to bleed and work wonders ; this moved the Jews to baptism . This legend was later widely spread and modified many times: for example in the world chronicle of Sigebert von Gembloux († 1112), but also by the Protestant Hieronymus Rauscher († 1569). She lives on as a pilgrimage legend in Oberried (Breisgau) to this day.
The ancient church historian Socrates Scholasticus described in his Historia ecclesiastica (~ 415) an accident at a Jewish Purim festival: drunken Jews hung a Christian boy in a Syrian village and more likely accidentally tortured them to death. Cecil Roth , the British editor of the Encyclopaedia Judaica , saw the origin of the Christian ritual murder legend here and interpreted it as a misperception of Jewish customs. This explanation is today rejected as speculative, since that episode contains no references to a ritual sacrifice and blood consumption and the Christian legend nowhere referred to the Purim festival.
High Middle Ages
Since the High Middle Ages, charges of ritual murder have spread in Europe ruled by the Roman Catholic Church . They became an integral part of the persecution of people of different faiths, especially Jews, and more rarely so-called heretics and witches .
The anti-Jewish origin legend
In Norwich , the second largest English city at the time, the Christian boy William was found dead in 1144 . As is common with unsolved deaths, local Jews were suspected of being his murderers, but the local bailiff protected them and a court dismissed the charges. The Benedictine monk Thomas came from Monmouth to Norwich around 1150 and wrote his seven-volume work The Life and Passion of Saint William the Martyr of Norwich from then until his death in 1172 . He claimed Jews bought, martyred, and crucified 12-year-old William in March 1144. His body was found on Easter Saturday. From then on, miracles would have repeatedly occurred at his grave. The legend, issued as a factual report, was intended to establish a cult of saints and martyrs in Norwich, recruit pilgrims who believe in miracles and thus generate income for the construction of a cathedral, which began in 1096. Although the Pope did not authorize this cult, the English bishops approved the project and thereby legitimized the ritual murder allegation against Jews.
The key passage of the legend reads:
“At that time, the Jews bought a Christian child before Easter and did him all the tortures that our God suffered; and on Good Friday they hung it on a cross because of our God, and then they buried it. They thought it would not be discovered, but our God revealed that the boy was a holy martyr, and the monks took him and ceremonially buried him in the monastery, and thanks to our God he does great and varied miracles, and he becomes St. Called William. "
These motifs appeared again and again in many ritual murder charges in the following centuries:
- Reference to the annual Easter date,
- Motive of the "innocent child",
- Kidnapping or "buying" and torturing the victim,
- blasphemous mocking imitation of the crucifixion of Jesus,
- Proof of guilt by miracles emanating from the corpse of the alleged victim.
Only the enjoyment of blood was still missing.
Monmouth portrayed William's torture as prearranged vengeance by Jews for atrocities that Christians would have alleged against them regarding the crucifixion of Jesus. With this he alluded to the god murder theory with which the Christian crusaders justified their pogroms against the Jews, and projected their motives and deeds back onto the Jews.
The Vogt, who had protected the Jews in 1144, had died in 1147. Participants in the Second Crusade (1147–1149) returned to England, needed work and income. In 1149 an indebted Christian craftsman, Simon de Novers, had killed his creditor, the Jewish banker Deulesalt, in Norwich. In 1150 Novers was tried in London. In 1150/51 Williams' body was reburied first in the monastery chapel, then the cathedral. To relieve Novers, his defense counsel, the Bishop of Norwich, brought the alleged murder of the Jews of William into play. Monmouth wanted to back up this claim with his legend. He also called the Jew, in whose house William was allegedly captured and tortured, "Deulesalt".
During the trial, he further adorned the legend, claiming that his fellow monk Theobald von Cambridge, a converted Jew, told him about an annual meeting of the leading Jews of Spain in Narbonne . There it will be drawn by lot in which city a Christian child is to be sacrificed in the current year in order to provide Christian blood to Jewish communities around the world. In 1144 the lot fell on Norwich. Jewish writings demanded this annual sacrifice because that was the only way the Jews believed they could regain their freedom and lost homeland.
Here began the theory of the Jewish world conspiracy. She linked the alleged Jewish ritual murder with the Jewish hope of liberation, which the Passover festival is reminiscent of, and portrayed this as the cause of the suffering of Jesus and the Christians. Accusations of ritual murder were therefore always brought up in Holy Week or close to the Jewish Passover festival.
The historian Israel Yuval interpreted the Christian ritual murder charges as a reaction to the self-extermination of Jewish communities among the Gezerot Tatnu in 1096 in the Rhineland . Given the choice between baptism and death, many Jews killed their children first, then themselves. Jewish chronicles glorified this as the “sanctification of the name of God” ( Kiddush Hashem ) in anticipation of coming divine justice. This has encouraged Christians to attribute a malevolent greed for revenge on Christians and for child sacrifice to Jews. The Christian legends reflected the Jewish martyr theology. Without denying Jewish suffering, Yuval gave Judaism a share of responsibility for medieval ritual murder legends. This declaration did not prevail.
Sham processes
In Blois , France , in 1171 Jews were accused of throwing a dead Christian child into a river. No child was missing and no body was found. The threatened local Jews reported the case to King Ludwig VII , who promised them help. Nevertheless, the bishop and the Count of Blois declared dozens of Jews murderers in a show trial. The defendants turned down offers to buy their ransom and be baptized as a Christian so that their congregation would not be exposed to future blackmail. More than 30 Jews were burned on May 26, 1171. The abbot Robert von Torigni later claimed in his chronicle a Jewish ritual murder and thus subsequently legitimized the mass murder. The Jewish prayer liturgy for Yom Kippur and Tisha beAv reminds of this.
Legends about Richard in Pontoise (1167), Harald in Gloucester (1168) and Rodbertus in London (1181) also portrayed these deaths of Christian boys analogously to the torture and crucifixion of Jesus and described miracles to prove the guilt of the Jews and to confer a cult of saints establish. With the pogrom of 1171 in Blois, ritual murder charges spread to France and Spain. Also in 1179 in Paris , in 1182 and 1250 (Domingo de Val) in Saragossa , Jews are said to have crucified Christian boys. All trials ended with death sentences.
In 1191 in Bray-sur-Seine a royal vassal murdered a Jew. The victims' relatives obtained in exchange for money that the perpetrator was convicted and handed over to their community. Its execution at the Purim festival was then presented by many alleged witnesses as ritual murder and confirmation of further ritual murder charges. King Philip II used this to consolidate his rule in the region. He moved to Bray, where the Jews were given the choice between baptism and death, and 80 members of the congregation were sentenced to death at the stake. Many killed themselves beforehand. In Winchester , England, however, a lawsuit against Jews because of the missing corpse was dismissed in 1192. In 1244 a dead baby was found in London, wounds on the corpse were interpreted as Hebrew characters and London Jews were charged. They could not be convicted and averted a death sentence against large fines. The London chronicler Matthäus Paris stated that earlier reports of ritual murders, convictions of martyrs and subsequent miracles had led the clergy to make this charge.
In 1255 the boy Hugh was found dead near a Jew's house in Lincoln . He was tortured, admitted that he had been commissioned to commit a ritual murder, was then dragged through the streets of London and finally hanged. King Henry III took up the indictment and hung more Jews after a show trial in 97 (other sources: 18). Other accusations of murder against Jews emerged after the corpses of Christian baptized girls: for example in Boppard (1179), Speyer (1195), Valréas (1247), Pforzheim (1267), Lienz (1442). They show how the accusation was removed from its ritual context and generalized.
Folklore and literature
Around 1200, a legend in England told of a young monastery student who walked through the Judengasse and sang the Marian hymn Alma redemptoris mater . A Jew killed him out of anger and buried him in his house. But his corpse continued to sing and betrayed the perpetrator. Chronicles also spread the motif: Matthew of Paris († 1259) depicted Hugh's alleged torture in gruesome Passion-like details. Prosecutors referred to this in later cases, such as the city preacher of Celle , Sigismund Hosemann , in his pamphlet The Difficult to Convert Jews in 1699 -Hertz . Geoffrey Chaucer (approx. 1340-1400) took the legend of the Song of Mary in his Canterbury Tales and linked it with the motif of the Herodian child murder (Mt 2.16) and the alleged martyrdom of Hugh of Lincoln.
These legends intensified hatred of Jews until the Jews were expelled from England in 1290. After that, only small Jewish enclaves remained in some English cities. The stereotype of the bloodthirsty, insidious Jew, lurking for crimes against Christians, found its way into English plays, for example in Christopher Marlowe's The Jew of Malta (1592) and William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice (1596–1598).
Christian blood as a "remedy"
In 1215 the 4th Lateran Council dogmatized the doctrine of transubstantiation : Because wine and bread were to be transformed into the real blood and body of Christ at the Eucharist, magical powers were ascribed to the host . Their abuse could have far-reaching consequences in popular superstition. Since then, the ritual murder accusation has been combined with that of the host offense . With the development of Christian blood mysticism , in addition to the analogy to the suffering of Jesus, the assertion that Jews need Christian blood to bake in their matzos , for magic or to heal their innate ailments came more and more often . According to this, they are not only compelled to commit such murders because of religion, but also by their “nature”. They were said to have an analogous sacramentalization of their rites and assumed their own belief in the salvific effect of blood.
This blood charge first appeared in Fulda on German-speaking soil in 1235 . Five children were killed in a house fire on Christmas Eve. Local Jews were charged with murdering two of the victims and sacking their blood for use as a medicine. The files do not speak of a ritual killing; but the whole Jewish community seemed involved. Crusaders who happened to be present burned 34 of their members to death on December 28th. Since this mass murder , German Ashkenazim referred to all such ritual murder charges, including the earlier English and French ones, as " blood libel ".
The Dominican Thomas von Cantimpré wrote in 1263 that God had punished the Jews with an ugly flow of blood since their self- curse ( Mt 27.25 EU ), which only stopped when they were converted. "But they believed that they could be freed from their secret torment if they shed Christian blood!" That is why they murdered Christians every year.
Unsuccessful protection efforts
In order to prevent similar pogroms, Emperor Friedrich II had the precedent of Fulda investigated in 1244 by a large commission of theologians made up of Jewish converts from all over Europe. The result was:
“Neither in the Old nor in the New Testament one can find out that the Jews would be eager to let human blood flow out, on the contrary [...] they guard against being stained by any blood according to the Bible, in the commandments given by Moses Hebrew called entitled , and in the Jewish laws called Talmilloht ( Talmud ) in Hebrew . There is also a not inconsiderable probability that those who are banned from even the blood of permitted animals cannot be thirsty for human blood. The following speaks against this accusation: 1) the horror of this matter; 2) that nature forbids it; 3) the human connection that Jews bring to Christians; 4) that they would not willingly endanger their lives and property. For these reasons, we have decided, in consensus with the ruling princes, to acquit the Jews of the empire of the serious crime of which they have been charged and to declare the remaining Jews free from all suspicions. "
With this rational justification, he forbade further ritual murder charges. But these continued to take place, spread across Europe and almost all ended with mass executions or massacres.
In 1247 in Valréas, after cruel torture, the accused admitted everything the accusers wanted to hear: Jews around the world would crucify a Christian child on Good Friday to insult and disempower Jesus , collect his blood and drink it on Holy Saturday , their holy Sabbath, just like in the past to be atone and saved through sacrifice in the temple. The Jewish communities responded to this case with a petition to the Pope in Rome . Innocent IV (1243–1254) thereupon issued a protective bull to all Frankish and German bishops, which named frequent reasons for the ritual murder charges:
“We have heard the pleading complaint from the Jews that some church and secular dignitaries as well as other nobles and officials in your cities and dioceses have invented godless charges against the Jews in order to plunder them on this occasion and to take their belongings. These men seem to have forgotten that it is precisely the ancient writings of the Jews that bear witness to the Christian religion. While the Scriptures state the command: You shall not kill! and even forbid them to touch the dead on Passover, the false accusation is made against the Jews that they ate the heart of a murdered child on that festival. If the body of a person killed by an unknown hand is found somewhere, it is thrown to the Jews with malicious intent. It is all just an excuse to persecute them in the most cruel way. Without a judicial investigation, without conviction of the accused or their confession, yes, in disregard of the privileges graciously granted to the Jews by the Apostolic See, they are deprived of their property in an ungodly and unjust manner, they are exposed to hunger pangs, imprisonment and other tortures and condemned a shameful death… Because of such persecution, the unfortunate find themselves compelled to leave those places where their ancestors lived from ancient times. Fearing a complete extermination, now call the Apostolic See for protection ... "
He therefore called on the addressees to urge Christians to "treat Jews in a friendly and benevolent manner". But it was also he who officially forbade the Talmud and disputations with Jews so that they could not explain their religion to Christians. He also allowed the Inquisition to reinforce blood charges, which were often formulated by priests and theologians, with confessions of torture. Between 1264 and 1267 there were constant pogroms against the Jews . After the Habsburg government came to power , ritual murder trials increased, for example in Mainz in 1283 , in Munich in 1286 and in Oberwesel in 1288 .
A protective bull from Pope Gregory X. (1272) shows that accusations were deliberately falsified: Christians would not only wrongly accuse Jews of child abduction, but would even deliberately hide children and threaten Jews with charges in order to extort money from them. Nevertheless, the belief in the legend lived on: Sometimes Jews were even offered children to buy. Further protective bulls from Martin V (1417–1431), Nikolaus V (1447–1455) and Paul III. (1534–1549) show the continuity of the charges. Papal and royal bans remained largely ineffective. In ritual murder trials from 1200 to 1500, only one acquittal is known (1329 in Savoy ).
The Kalisch Statute , which Duke Bolesław the Pious issued in 1264, guaranteed all Jews of Greater Poland the protection of their lives and property and forbade them to be discriminated against in court. The oath of an accused Jew should serve as evidence in court. The document is only known as a copy from the 16th century. The following rulers of Poland confirmed the rights enacted therein. Nevertheless, ritual murder trials took place in Poland later, for the first time in 1547.
Cult foundation
In 1287 Jews are said to have murdered Werner von Oberwesel for religious reasons. The legend originated in 1288 and triggered bloody persecution of the Jews throughout the Rhineland . As a result , 26 Jews were murdered in Bacharach . Heinrich Heine recalled this in his fragmentary story The Rabbi von Bacherach . A cult developed around the boy's corpse: it was ascribed a special luminosity and initially refused to bury it. Around 1370, a Latin chronicle reported that Jews hung him by his feet in order to obtain a host that he was about to swallow. Thereupon Werner was venerated as a martyr with a festival every year on April 19th and later on April 18th.
Rudolf von Bern was murdered on April 17, 1294 . The Bernese Jews were held responsible as perpetrators. He, too, was later venerated as a martyr. In addition, the stereotype was anchored in popular belief by means of Christian art and popular passion plays . Altar and ceiling paintings in churches show how Jews injure or butcher the cross-shaped body of their alleged victim with knives or lances , withdraw blood from him, collect it, etc .; often after a previous circumcision , for example on the Herrenberg Altar by Jörg Ratgeb (1518).
In 1303 the Jews in Weißensee (Thuringia) were said to have committed a ritual murder of the missing boy Conrad, which led to their persecution in the region. Conrad began to be venerated as a saint. This episode has been reported in several chronicles. It was also known to Martin Luther and in 1543 it served him to impute secret intentions to murder the Christians from all Jews.
Early modern age
Heretics and witches
In the 15th century there were also allegations of ritual murder against female and male " witches ". They were accused of practices that the Church Inquisition had placed under the Cathars and Waldensians since the 13th century and "confirmed" with torture interrogations: nightly orgiastic gatherings with devil worship or rituals of homage to evil spirits and child sacrifices. After only isolated complaints against suspected magicians had been heard, a threatening sect was now adopted that secretly agreed to practices such as " black magic " and used them to destroy Christianity. Motifs such as the " witch's sabbath " (from Shabbat ), the " synagogue " (for the witch's dance) and ritual murder came from older anti-Judaist ideas.
The chronicle of Hans Fründ from Lucerne described the circumstances surrounding a witch hunt in Valais around 1431 and listed for the first time what supposedly happens on a witch's Sabbath: devil pact , air flight, production and use of witch ointments , orgiastic meals with stolen food, magic spells, ritual child murder and Cannibalism. Trial files and chronicles such as those of the Heidelberg court chaplain Matthias von Kemnat show how the Jews assumed secret practices were transferred to heretics and witches according to conspiracy theory.
Jews
During the same period, 30 ritual murder charges against Jews in the German-speaking area were documented, four in Spain and Italy, two in Poland and one in Hungary . Almost all of them ended with pogroms and executions of the accused. In 1431, following such charges, the Jewish communities of Ravensburg , Überlingen and Lindau were destroyed. In Ravensburg, a 13-year-old boy was found hanged in the Haslachwald between Ravensburg and Weingarten. Initially, a carter who had driven the boy into the forest was accused, but he accused the Jews of having committed ritual murder. The Ravensburg Jews were then taken prisoner. Some of them were burned in August 1430. Others were able to flee or were driven out of the city. In 1431 the city of Ravensburg decided never to accept Jews in the city again. In 1559 the city had this ban expressly confirmed by Emperor Ferdinand I. It remained in effect until the 1870s. In 1451 Pope Nicholas V extended the inquisition under John of Capistrano against Jews. He renewed the allegations of ritual murder and host sacrilege against them, which Innocent IV had rejected in 1247. Once the charges were brought, the reasons for them were exchanged at will until the confession, extorted through torture, produced the desired result.
A trial against Jews was carried out in 1453 in Breslau on charges of ritual murder.
An interrogation protocol from Endingen am Kaiserstuhl in 1470 reflects the desperate search of the Jew Merklin, who is not very familiar with Christian superstition, for the "correct" answer that would end his torment: He and his relatives need the Christian blood as a healing medicine; then for epilepsy of one of his sons; then as an odor against their foul body odor; then as chrism (anointing oil) for circumcision. The Christian blood was supposed to guarantee for the accusers the redemption that the Jews had lost according to patristicism since Jesus' blood sacrifice. Merklin's family was burned alive. Emperor Friedrich III. was able to prevent the expansion of the procedure to other cities, save the Regensburg Jews after a tough legal battle between 1476 and 1480 and thus preserve the imperial jurisdiction over the imperial cities.
The story of Simon von Trient became known throughout Germany and Northern Italy and had consequences: In 1475, Bernhardin von Feltre, as the newly appointed prior of the Franciscan monastery, began a series of sermons against the Jews of Trento , which ended their previous peaceful coexistence with the Christians. On Maundy Thursday (May 23) he publicly blamed the Jews for the disappearance of a boy and prophesied that they would prove their wickedness before Easter. The Jewish farm owner Samuel found Simon's body in the stream in front of his house on Holy Saturday and reported the find to the authorities. They arrested him and other representatives of the Jewish community. In a two-year process, the Tridentine bishop Johannes Hinderbach used all available torture confessions from ritual murders in the Lake Constance area for his own interrogations. 14 of the accused died of torture, the rest made sham confessions.
Before the trial was over, Hinderbach commissioned printed works that illustrated Simon's alleged torture in drastic woodcuts. Thereupon Pope Sixtus IV commissioned a commission of inquiry to examine the case. Its chairman, a friend of Feltres, established the injustice of the torture confessions, but at the same time the right to arrest the Jews and bring charges against them. This has now been dropped without any result. But with "eyewitness reports" about Simon's suffering and petitions, Feltres Orden finally achieved that the Pope canonized Simon.
In Bishop Hinderbach's collection of alleged ritual murder cases from 1475, local informants testified that in 1442 or 1443 a girl's corpse covered with many stab wounds was recovered from the river near Lienz . Two local Jews suspected of being murderers were tortured for everything. They were hanged, their wives and a Christian woman who allegedly sold the sacrifice to them were burned alive. This ritual murder legend for "Ursula Pöck" was the oldest from the 15th century, but despite several attempts at resuscitation, it received little attention. After 1945, cultural evidence was removed without a stir.
After pilgrims flocked to Simon's grave in Trento, unexplained deaths of children were also remembered elsewhere, which could be passed off as ritual murders in order to initiate lucrative veneration of saints : for example in Padua (1475), Brescia , Milan (1476), Motta di Livenza (1480) and Marostica (1485). Few of them successfully sparked a cult. It was not until 1588 that a pope, Sixtus V , allowed the cult of Simon of Trent.
The Schedelsche Weltchronik from 1493 showed vivid pictures of Jews in order to substantiate the common anti-Judaistic stereotypes. Among them were the alleged crucifixion of William of Norwich and the ritual killing of Simon of Trient as striking examples of all ritual murder legends of the Middle Ages. The picture for Simon even gave the names of his alleged Jewish murderers. It was reprinted many times; a group of figures designed afterwards was located in the church of St. Peter and Paul in Trento until 1965. An equally powerful mural on a bridge tower in Frankfurt am Main , created around 1475, combined Simon's corpse with a “ Judensau ” and a caption reminiscent of “the Jew's rogue” in league with the devil .
According to Johannes Matthias Tiberinus , the pseudo-medic Hippolyt Guarinoni authenticated the alleged ritual murder of Simon again around 1620 by having his bones excavated, prepared into a mummy and then "autopsied". His report found exactly 5812 wounds on Simon's body. Guarinoni created and propagated the legend about Anderl von Rinn according to this pattern in the course of the Catholic Counter-Reformation . The reason for this gave him an unnamed child's corpse, which had been exhibited as a relic in the village church of Rinn since 1612 , but which had largely remained unnoticed. There were no Jews living in Rinn. With the help of the city council and the Jesuits in nearby Innsbruck , Guarinoni constructed a Jewish ritual murder out of it, initially with unsuccessful interrogation of the villagers, from 1619 with his own fictional texts, and finally in 1642 with a long poem. As the exact date of his murder, he invented July 12, 1462, i.e. before the year Simons died, gave the child the name of the apostle Andrew , who also bore Simon's father, and his mother, like Simon's mother, the name Maria. In 1620 Guarinoni had the skeleton exhumed in Rinn and found 20 wounds on it. From 1621 a play by the Innsbruck Jesuits, the premiere of which was also attended by Archduke Leopold V , quickly popularized the legend. By 1670 a pilgrimage church was built over the alleged crime scene, the "Judenstein". In 1671 the relic was ceremonially transferred and exhibited there. Pilgrimages, processions and many other plays about Anderl soon followed. In 1730 a baroque series of images depicted the invented ritual murder in a bloody and vivid manner . In 1754, Pope Benedict XIV officially permitted the cult of Ander with the bull Beatus Andreas . A literary fiction thus became a “ Volkstum ” of Tyrol and a profitable pilgrimage that lasted for centuries. The "Anderl game" was imitated in the near and far and made a significant contribution to the upswing of the Tyrolean folk drama.
Fade away
In the 16th century, the anti-Judaistic ritual murder accusation in the church theology of Central Europe receded and could hardly be enforced in court. More and more often, complaints turned out to be untrue and fraudulent: for example 1504 in Frankfurt am Main, 1529 in Pösing and 1540 in Sappenfeld . Jews accused there quoted the anonymous pamphlet by the Nuremberg reformer Andreas Osiander , which refuted the accusation exegetically and logically: Whether it was and is plausible that the Jews of the Christians hypocritically strangle children and use blood . The reply by Johannes Eck in 1541 again presented all the alleged evidence that has been handed down to us about the religious bloodthirstiness of the Jews, but found hardly any scholarly supporters. Catholic theologians now also appealed to Pope Innocent IV's rejection of the ritual murder charges. The Sappenfeld Jews were acquitted. In 1563 a ritual murder charge was heard for the last time before the Reich Chamber of Commerce. There was no longer any question of the Jews needing Christian blood, and the accused was released.
Later, Catholics also ascribed such practices to Protestants and Freemasons , while the Puritans believed Catholics to do so.
Modern times
Poland and Lithuania
Since most German-speaking cities had expelled the Jews by around 1700, new ritual murder charges were seldom made there; but all the more so in Eastern Europe , where many displaced Jews had fled. In Poland in particular , the newly arrived Jews were initially welcomed and treated with tolerance. But 1407 was the first accusation of ritual murder in Cracow , accompanied by a pogrom. In the Lublin Union , historians from 1500 to 1800 have identified at least 89 ritual murder charges and trials; it is estimated that 200 to 300 executions were carried out as a result.
In 1758 the Jewish communities of Poland asked Pope Benedict XIV to defend them against the frequent allegations of ritual murder by Catholics in their country. After his death, the Holy Office commissioned the Franciscan Lorenzo Ganganelli to investigate the allegations. In his report he came to the conclusion that historical and current example cases were unfounded. He called Jew-inciting Christians "rabble" and "liars" and showed Polish bishops contradictions in their arguments for the alleged ritual murders. One must reasonably suspect that the allegations as a whole are only “slander” of the Jews by Christians.
In Andreas von Rinn 1462 and Simon von Trient 1475, whose cults had recognized popes, Ganganelli found legitimate suspicions for Jewish ritual murders. At the same time, however, he emphasized: Even if these ritual murders did actually occur, they were individual cases, which in no case should the relatives of the perpetrators or even all Jews be blamed and should be passed off as a peculiarity of the "Jewish nation". Jewish ritual laws forbid human, especially child sacrifice. In doing so, he made the enforcement of case-by-case reviews based on the legally correct taking of evidence the duty of the Holy See. Pope Clement XIII agreed . on December 24, 1759 on all points. The Jewish complainants received a papal letter instructing the Polish nuncio to place them under his protection. It was not until 1762 that he informed the Polish king of this attitude of the Pope and his mandate to allow allegations of ritual murder only after individual evidence and then to judge.
Russia
In Russia , Gavriil the Boy , a Greek Orthodox boy who was later canonized as a martyr, is said to have fallen victim to a Jewish ritual murder - according to a tradition that has never been questioned within the Greek Orthodox Church. Some tsars used ritual murder legends to discriminate against Jews and against liberalism ; So they were an expression of overall political anti-Semitism there. The first ritual murder trial there in 1799 in Senno ended for four accused Jews with acquittal for lack of evidence. Then Tsar Paul I requested an official report on Belarus' Jews. The later Minister of Justice, Gawriil Romanowitsch Derschawin , who was commissioned as the author, considered ritual murders to be the fantasy product of ignorant fanatics, but did not rule out the possibility that they could actually have been committed earlier. There are still living perpetrators in the Jewish communities. Therefore, such charges should be taken seriously and pursued.
After another case in Hrodna in 1816 , Tsar Alexander I issued an ukase on March 6, 1817, prohibiting Jews from being accused in future without sufficient evidence and only because of the superstitious ritual murder legend. At the same time, however, he allowed acquittals to be examined , for example in the case of Welisch in 1823. The governor-general Tschowanski - a well-known enemy of Jews - charged with the investigation in his 1824 report accused the entire Jewish community of Welisch as having commissioned the murder. The new Tsar Nicholas I then closed all Jewish schools and synagogues in the city. Tschowanski now tried to prove that Jews were involved in further unsolved murder cases and to open the case in Grodno again.
But in 1835 the State Council acquitted the Jews of Welisch who had been imprisoned since 1825, convicted three witnesses for perjury and banished them to Siberia . The tsar accepted the verdict but did not confirm the ukase of his predecessor from 1817, as he believed in Jewish sects that needed Christian blood for their rites. On the occasion of the fall of Saratov in 1853, he commissioned a special commission to investigate the alleged "dogmas of the religious fanaticism of the Jews". Although this found no evidence until 1856 and advised the case to be closed, the State Council sentenced the accused to life imprisonment in the labor camp. Alexander II, who was considered the reform tsar, confirmed the judgment in 1860 and rejected requests for pardon. Two of the convicts committed in detention suicide , the third was pardoned 1867th Despite a reform of the judiciary, the indictment in Kutaisi ( Georgia ) was admitted in 1879 and ended with an acquittal for ten Jews.
Under Alexander III. Despite the growing anti-Semitic mood, no ritual murder trials took place, only again in 1900 in Vilnius under Nicholas II (1902 acquittal after revision). In 1903 in Kishinev , Orthodox priests and the daily Bessarabetz , which was co-financed by the Ochrana secret service, raised rumors of ritual murder after an already resolved murder case, which led to a serious pogrom. Between February 6 and 9, 45 to 49 Jewish residents of the city, including women, the elderly and infants, were murdered under the cry of “Kill the Jews”. 400 to 500 were injured and over 700 of their homes and businesses were looted and destroyed. The police did not intervene. The Tsar did not respond to international protests and a petition from the US Senate. This gave a boost to Zionism ; Tens of thousands of Jews left Russia as they did after the state-tolerated Jewish pogroms of 1880.
In 1910, a Jewish family in Smolensk managed to convict the main witness and a local clergyman who was the editor of the reactionary newspaper Russkoye Snamja ("Russian banner") and chairman of the Soyuz russkowo naroda (" Association of the Russian People ”). In 1911, Chana Spektor, a Jew, was acquitted in Tarashcha that same month after being charged. After protests, the Senate upheld the acquittal in 1912.
The trial of Mendel Beilis in Kiev in 1911 was the last internationally acclaimed Russian ritual murder charge. It was constructed by the Tsarist Interior Ministry itself in order to be able to reject parliamentary demands for the repeal of the anti-Jewish gag laws that have been in force for decades. Despite fabricated evidence, a jury unanimously acquitted the accused after two years in prison in 1913; but he had to emigrate. The attitude of the state authorities met with frequent criticism abroad and brought Russian anti-Semitism into the focus of the global public. It also contributed to the understanding of conservative and revolutionary Russian opposition members on the " Jewish question ". After 1918, opponents of the Bolsheviks portrayed the murder of the Tsar's family as a ritual murder: the heirs to the throne were literally bled to death , as if they were slaughtered . Since the widespread theorem of Jewish Bolshevism often equated the revolutionaries with Judaism, severe anti-Semitic excesses in the areas dominated by the whites were the result.
Ottoman Empire
The Ottoman Empire, which was shaped by Islam , cultivated religious tolerance against the minorities of Christians and Jews. In the 15th century it took in the Jews expelled from Spain . Since then there have also been blood charges against Jews here. They all came from Orthodox Christians - Greeks and Armenians - who saw the Jews as economically privileged competitors. However, they were very rare until 1800 and were all rejected by government decrees.
From 1830 and again from 1860, however, such charges increased by leaps and bounds: 80 cases were recorded by 1900, the majority of them in Turkish port cities in the Mediterranean. This was due to heightened tensions between Christian Greeks and Muslim Turks and the growing pressure from the European colonial powers. Anti-Jewish agitators tried to use the ritual murder legend modeled on Christian groups for political purposes and to stir up unrest in the population. At first they found little faith among Muslims.
However, a pamphlet from 1803 - The Refutation of Judaism and its Customs - was translated into numerous languages and distributed mainly in the Balkans and Asia Minor . The author was the Greek monk Noah Belfer , who posed as a converted Jew ( Neophytos , "the born again") and claimed under the pseudonym EG Jab that his father initiated him as a 13-year-old into baking Christian blood in the Passahmazzen and gave him the Oath required to share this secret with only one in ten of his future children. It is known only to the rabbis.
The Damascus affair, which was also initiated by Christian monks in 1840 and sparked anti-Jewish riots in some cities of the Ottoman Empire, had an international impact . The Vatican supported the ritual murder charge there, which was supported by torture of eight high-ranking Jews, child abduction, extortion and bribery. It was followed by further ritual murder charges against Jews in the Arab and European countries. The affair mobilized the West European and North American public against such blood accusations in the Middle East and is therefore the first sign of a globalized media society.
In 1870, Jewish merchants in Constantinople had to open their trading sacks at Passover because it was believed that they were used to transport children's corpses. In 1872 a pogrom followed in Smyrna ; a synagogue was burned down in Marmara . In 1874 the Turkish police were able to prevent another pogrom in Constantinople.
Austria-Hungary
The aggravated situation of the Jews in Eastern Europe led to return movements from around 1800 onwards. This was followed by new ritual murder charges in the countries of immigration such as Austria-Hungary , for example in the Hungarian Tiszaeszlár in 1882 and in the Bohemian Polná in 1899. These were now also in the context of modern anti-Semitism. In the case of Tiszaeszlár, the Hungarian political elite under Prime Minister Kálmán Tisza immediately defended the accused Jews. The member of the National Council and lawyer Károly Eötvös obtained her acquittal in court. Hungary's authorities and ruling parties resolutely opposed and limited the pogroms of Jews that followed the unsubstantiated indictment in some parts of the country.
France
In France, the Jewish cattle dealer Raphaël Lévy was charged, tortured and executed in Metz in 1670 on charges of ritual murder. A Jewish exonerating witness, who was also accused, was saved from execution by Louis XIV forbidding any further ritual murder trial and even the mere belief in ritual murder charges. A theologian achieved Levy's legal rehabilitation posthumously, but diatribes spread this and other legends of ritual murder well into the 18th century. Even proponents of Jewish emancipation like Henri Grégoire did not rule out the possibility of some past Jewish ritual murders.
In the Dreyfus Affair (1894–1906) modernized ritual murder charges reappeared in France. Some representatives of Catholic ultramontanism accused Jews, as they did 200 years earlier, of being behind the government's secularization . The Catholic newspaper La Croix accused Jews of destroying the soul of France through its supposed radical secular anti-Catholic agenda, just as Jews used to murder Christian children. In order to get the judiciary to intervene, Dreyfus' defense attorney, Joseph Reinach, reminded of the judicial murder of Raphael Lévy and the ban on trial of the then king. - In 2001 a great-great-nephew of Didier Le Moyne , the boy allegedly murdered by Levy, apologized publicly to his only descendant for the injustice done to his ancestor.
Glatigny , the home community of the alleged victim Lévys, banned all Jews from entering the place and only lifted this ban , which had been strictly observed for 344 years, in 2014.
Academic Discourse in Europe
Since the Enlightenment, ritual murder legends had become implausible among the educated. But since 1800 early anti-Semites tried to revive them and to underpin them pseudoscientific. In 1840 there was a lively public debate in London over the Damascus affair. Earlier rejections of the legend were rediscovered, including Vindiciae Judaerum (1656) by the Portuguese-Dutch rabbi Menasse ben Israel (1604–1657). His public holy oath that Jews are innocent of such crimes was taken by later well-known rabbis and spokesmen for Judaism such as Jacob Emden (1697–1776), Jonathan Eybeschütz (1690–1764), Solomon Hirschell (1762–1842) and David Meldola (1714–1818 ) often repeated.
Jews who converted to Christianity also opposed the legend of the ritual murder. In 1840, Alexander McCaul published Reasons for Believing that the Charge Lately Revived Against the Jewish People Is a Baseless Falsehood and initiated a public protest letter signed by 58 converts, first and foremost Michael Solomon Alexander (1799–1845), first bishop for the Anglican Church in Jerusalem . It said:
“We, the undersigned, Jews by origin, […], but now, by God's grace, members of the Church of Christ, solemnly declare that we have never heard of it directly or indirectly among Jews, much less know about the custom of being Christians murder or use Christian blood. We believe this charge, which has been brought up against them so often in the past and only recently revived, is an illegal and satanic lie. "
In Berlin, the convert Joachim Heinrich Biesenthal (1800–1886) published the book Ueber the origin of the charges against the Jews under the pseudonym Karl Ignaz Corvé .
In 1871, the Catholic Old Testament scholar August Rohling (1839–1931) tried with the influential book The Talmud Jew, translated into many languages, to prove that the Jewish religion commands its followers to harm and kill Christians wherever they can: including through blood sacrifices. In doing so, he resorted to the anti-Judaistic book Entdecktes Judenthum by Johann Andreas Eisenmenger (1654–1704) published in 1751 . In the same year the rabbi Isaak Kroner published the neglected counter- writings distorted, untrue and invented in the Talmud Jew Professor Dr. August Rohling’s .
In the years that followed, Rohling appeared as an expert witness at many ritual murder trials, for example in Tisza-Eszlár in 1883 after a severe pogrom. The Protestant convert and Old Testament scholar Franz Delitzsch demonstrated in detail that Rohling only argued with distorted and falsified Talmudic quotations ( Rohling's Talmud Jew Illuminated , Leipzig 1881). He brought out his counter- opinion as a book ( Checkmate the blood liars Rohling and Justus , Erlangen 1883). After Rabbi Joseph Samuel Bloch (1850–1923) accused Rohling of deliberate falsification and perjury in Vienna, the latter reported him for defamation. After the court admitted Delitzsch as a counter-expert, Rohling withdrew his lawsuit and then lost his academic teaching license. His writings were nevertheless distributed in large numbers, for example by the Catholic Bonifatius Association.
The Protestant theologian and Judaist Hermann Leberecht Strack (1848–1922) campaigned against the anti-Semitic propaganda, which had been intensified since 1880, with several works. In 1891 he published the essay Der Blutaberglaube bei Christians und Juden , which he then expanded into a comprehensive work against the campaign of the Osservatore Cattolico at the time and had it reprinted several times from 1892. From 1900 he published The Blood in the Faith and Superstition of Mankind. With special consideration of 'folk medicine' and the 'Jewish blood rite' .
In France, the journalist Bernard Lazare and the religious scholar Salomon Reinach responded to the anti-Semite Edouard Drumont's work La France Juive (1886) with historical treatises, including on the legend of the ritual murder ( L'accusation de meurtre rituel , 1893).
Germany
Cult lore
In Central Europe, legends of ritual murder against Jews outlived the Enlightenment and the French Revolution . They lived on orally, especially in rural areas, and were supported and kept alive by written and pictorial tradition, especially the veneration of saints. The well-known Bavaria Sancta by Jesuit Matthäus Rader from 1627 (translated into German in 1704) had a great influence . She renewed some medieval ritual murder legends or invented new ones and described the alleged victims as martyrs, "blessed" or "saints" of Bavaria .
In the struggle of anti- Jewish opponents and nationalists against the emancipation of the Jews , these legends received a new impetus in the 19th century and were still popular in some areas in the late 19th century. There were also new legends, for example against Freemasons , who were often portrayed as tools or allies of the Jews.
Even after the pilgrimages to Werner von Oberwesel's coffin ended in 1545, ceiling paintings in the village church showed his alleged martyrdom until 1834. In the hospital church in Oberwesel , a relief image and altar panels were regularly restored and only removed in 1968. The diocese of Trier included Werner in the local calendar of saints in 1761 and celebrated his alleged death with a procession every year until 1963 . Womrath , his alleged place of birth, dedicated a new chapel with cult paintings to him in 1911 and celebrated an annual "Werner Festival" with specially composed songs. In Cologne Cathedral it was carved into the choir stalls along with a Jewish motif. At Johanneken von Troisdorf , the attempt to establish a cult foundation was less sustainable.
Waves of persecution
In many places, the mere rumor of ritual murder threatened the local Jews, for example in Ilsenburg (1599), Feuchtwangen (1656), Gerabronn (1687), Gunzenhausen (1715), Reckendorf (1746), Markt Erlbach (1758), Muggendorf , Pretzfeld (1785) ), Küps (1797), Uhlstädt-Kirchhasel (1803), Höchberg near Würzburg (1830), Thalmässing , in Nördlinger Ries (1845) and in Enniger (1873), Kempen (1893), Berent (1894) Burgkunstadt (1894), Ulm (1894), Berlin (1896), Issum (1898), Skaisgirren (1898), Schoppinitz (1898), Langendorf (1898), Braunsberg in Schlesien (1898), Oderberg (1900) and Neuss (1910).
In the Catholic Rhineland , dozens of ritual murder charges repeatedly led to serious riots against Jews: for example in Dormagen in 1819 , although the murdered girl was demonstrably the victim of a sexual offense there. Nevertheless, synagogues, cemeteries and houses were attacked by Jews and partially destroyed in Neuss , Grevenbroich , Hülchrath , Emmerich , Binningen (Eifel) and Rheinbrohl ; There was no looting. In the previous months, the more economically motivated Hep-Hep riots had taken place in larger cities in other regions . In Neuenhoven, Bedburdyck , Stessen (today districts of Jüchen ), after a sexual crime against a boy (July 15), there were again weeks of serious excesses against Jews, which this time were followed by looting and attempted murder, for example in Grevenbroich, Neuss, Düsseldorf , Rommerskirchen , Güsten , Aachen and Xanten . The Prussian military had to end the riots because the local gendarmerie often failed to intervene.
In 1835 in Willich near Krefeld, after a child's corpse was found, rumors of ritual murder against Jews were immediately raised. An apprentice craftsperson who pretended to be an eyewitness and tried to blackmail a local Jewish merchant was convicted of the murderer. In 1836 in Düsseldorf local newspapers continued to hear rumors of ritual murder a year after a child's body was found. In 1840 an old Jewish couple was imprisoned in Jülich for a week for allegedly attempting to murder a nine-year-old girl. After it turned out that relatives had incited the girl to make the incriminating testimony, the initially large-scale reports about it ebbed. This case echoed the internationally acclaimed Damascus affair.
1862 was taken during Holy Week in Cologne a hysteria in the population. A man who was leading his own child by the hand was threatened by a crowd as an alleged Jewish kidnapper and was only able to identify himself as the father with difficulty. Other suspected child murderers were severely ill-treated. A Catholic passer-by, whom children had shouted "Blood Jew" afterwards, was beaten by adults hurrying to almost death.
propaganda
From around 1870 onwards, there was a tendency among German nationalists to construct pseudoscientific instead of religious explanations for “Jewish ritual murders”. Now, racist anti-Semites derived the alleged Jewish “thirst for blood” from racial characteristics and relied on previous church declarations. Pope Pius IX saw the church threatened by the "synagogue of Satan", elevated Simon of Trient to a martyr and saint in 1867 and praised the anti-Semitic pamphlet The Jew, Judaism and the Judaism of the Christian Peoples , which accused the Jews of the tendency to ritual murder. He awarded its author Henri Roger Gougenot des Mousseaux a high ecclesiastical order. Bishop Konrad Martin von Paderborn also published writings that claimed that Jews needed the blood of Christian children for their religious practice. The anti-Semite Max Liebermann von Sonnenberg circulated such Christian ritual murder accusations as free brochures in mass circulation. The National Socialist ideologue Alfred Rosenberg translated the Mousseaux pamphlet into German in 1921.
In 1881 the Jesuits founded in 1850 , under Leo XIII. published the influential Catholic journal La Civiltà Cattolica a year-long anti-Jewish article series. The authors claimed that the Jews, “if given too much freedom, would immediately become the persecutor, oppressor, tyrant, thief and destroyer of the countries” in which they lived. Attempts were also made to prove Jewish ritual murders: however, it was not the Passover but the Purim festival that was the reason for this. Lists listed hundreds of alleged blood murders; current processes in Russia and Austria were cannibalized. The European governments were advised to introduce “special laws for a race that is so extraordinarily corrupted through and through.” The Vatican also repeated the conspiracy theory of Jewish world domination over supposed secret sects like the Freemasons more often (until 1930).
The Brothers Grimm included two ritual murder narratives in their collection of German legends : the “Judenstein” as a version of the legend by Anderl von Rinn (no. 353) and “the little girl killed by the Jews” (no. 354). For many other German-language collections of sagas, alleged Jewish ritual murders were popular material. Sun took Charles Paulin the Anderle legend still 1972 in its "Most Beautiful Tyrolean Tell" and adorned them with gruesome details. At the same time, German folklore suppressed all Jewish legends. So it contributed significantly to the hatred of Jews. Only a few folklorists were aware of this: Will-Erich Peuckert's collection “Schlesische Sagen” from 1924 contained only regional ritual murder legends, commented on them critically and positively contrasted them with a Jewish Messiah story.
The folkish writer Max Bewer claimed in his collection “Thoughts” (1892) that the Jews needed Christian blood to carry out homeopathic therapy in order to keep their race clean. He tried to unite Christian, nationalist and racist enemy images of "the Jews".
The affairs in Xanten and Konitz
After a criminal trial for an alleged ritual murder in Skurz near Danzig in 1885 and another case of "ritual blood drawing" (the case of Max [Moses] Bernstein [* 1864]) on February 21, 1889 in Breslau , the rabbinate candidate Bernstein was accused was to have drawn blood from an eight-year-old Christian boy, which the newly appointed Minister of Justice Hermann von Schelling examined more closely), the " Buschhoff Affair " broke out in 1891 after the discovery of a child's corpse on June 29 in Xanten : Adolf Buschhoff , the Butcher and former butcher of the small Jewish community, was suspected of ritual murder. Witnesses claimed they saw the child play in front of his house just before the time of the murder and then went inside. After riots against the homes and shops of local Jews, an anti-Semitic press campaign and a bogus police report that supported the testimony, Buschhoff was charged with murder in April 1892. 160 witnesses were interrogated whose allegations had become much more precise and sharper since the first interrogations. But Buschhoff was able to show a complete alibi and was acquitted on July 14th. His house in Xanten had been destroyed the day before; his professional existence was ruined and he could no longer return there. During and after the trial there were serious anti-Jewish riots in the Neuss and Grevenbroich districts, as in 1819 and 1834. There, Jewish cemeteries were devastated, windows thrown in, trees cut down, gardens destroyed, houses inhabited by Jews set on fire, and attempts to blow up the Grevenbroich synagogue. A quarter of the Jewish residents of Neuss left the place and moved to other areas. The rest were socially ostracized and impoverished in the following years. In the Reichstag election in 1893 , the liberal-Catholic city councilor Clemens Freiherr von Schorlemer-Lieser achieved enormous votes against the surrounding trend with anti-Semitic propaganda and support for the Prussian-Protestant Christian-Social Party of Adolf Stoecker, which was otherwise rejected in the Rhineland .
In addition, the widely published affair was followed by many more ritual murder accusations throughout the following decade, also in distant and predominantly Protestant regions: for example in 1893 in Kempen and Posen , 1894 in Berent , Burgkunstadt , Rotthausen , Ulm , 1895 in Berlin , Cologne, Mienken , 1896 in Berlin, Seckenburg , Zerkow , 1898 in Bromberg , Chorzów , Issum , Langendorf , Schoppinitz , Skaisgirren , 1899 in Braunschweig , Breslau , Versmold , 1900 in Königshütte , Meseritz , Myslowitz , Übermatzhofen , Pudewitz , Rogasen , 1901 in Großschönau , Kleve , Oderberg , Rittel , Rosenberg , Schneidemühl , Strehlen , Uetersen , 1902 in Marienburg and Schlochau . These cases mostly received only local attention. At the same time, however, the particularly frequent accusations of ritual murder in Tsarist Russia and in the Habsburg KuK monarchy from 1890 to 1917 were always picked up by the German press and given high public attention.
The violent death of Ernst Winter on March 11, 1900 in Konitz (West Prussia) only attracted national attention through targeted, anti-Semitic press propaganda. A Berlin newspaper publisher, Wilhelm Bruhn , who was later convicted of breach of the peace , fueled the rumor of ritual murder with an investigative committee that included many respected city citizens. In competition with the police, he pursued traces that were supposed to point to Jewish perpetrators, and presented the Jewish butcher Adolph Lewy as a suspect. The press took up every insignificant detail and evidently untrue testimony and used it to create scenarios of the course of events. A series of postcards showed the body parts, where they were found, the accused, the main witnesses who were later convicted of perjury while observing the crime, their execution as ritual slaughtering in the butcher's cellar, those present, including the butcher's son, who was well known in the city, with beards, top hats and phylacteries. Underneath were slogans like “Guard your children!”, “Warn the murderers, the Christians to protect their most expensive goods”, “Blood-hungry sect among the Hebrews”. The image motifs were put into circulation during the ongoing police search for the perpetrator, their sale was intended to finance the construction of a tomb for the murder victim.
In addition to anti-Semitic newspapers, Catholic and Evangelical Lutheran press organs also adopted the indictment. The propaganda, which lasted for months, was followed on June 10, 1900 (a Sunday) by a crowd at the Konitz market. Neither the mayor nor the gendarmerie stopped the crowd from completely destroying Lewy's house and the local synagogue. Jews were also attacked in the neighboring towns of Prechlau and Kamin . Since the authorities did not protect them, many fled the area and left their property behind; Congregations only met secretly in their homes for private worship. The anti-Jewish mood persisted in the area for years: in 1903 an elderly Jew was slain in Stegers near Schlochau after denying any Jewish involvement in the murder of Ernst Winter in an inn.
Weimar Republic and the Nazi era
In the Weimar Republic , it was mainly the National Socialists and other ethnic movements, associations and newspapers that spread legends of ritual murder. In his fictional but autobiographical story, Das Judenauto, from 1962, Franz Fühmann described how a Sudeten German student heard and received rumors of anti-Semitic ritual murder in school in the 1920s.
The anti-Semitic hate speech “ Der Stürmer ”, published by Julius Streicher , has been using these rumors since 1923 for its caricatures to portray Jews as particularly repulsive, insidious “bloodsuckers”. It resorted to anti-Judaist inflammatory pamphlets such as those by Eisenmenger and Rohling. Articles about children who had disappeared or were found dead were always linked to references to the “Jewish blood ritual”. In July 1926, on the occasion of a double murder in Breslau, a booklet was published which dealt exclusively with alleged ritual murder cases by Jews. By 1929, at least nine individual issues had been published on this subject alone. In magazines observers to let Hermann Esser also made in Breslau about the alleged ritual murder. The legend has also been linked to contemporary anti-Semitic motifs in various ways. In 1928 , Johannes Dingfelder wrote an article in Alfred Rosenberg's magazine Der Weltkampf under the title “Slaughter and World Conscience”, which ostensibly deals with animal welfare and a derived ban on slaughter , but which primarily aimed at spreading the false assertion that slaughter carried out by Jews stand in connection with a "belief in blood" which, especially in "fanatical orthodox Jewish circles [...] every now and then [...] leads to so-called ritual murders of people". In the same year "Stürmer" it was said about the murder of Helmut Daube that he was probably murdered by a "Jewish secret sect" who performed dark rituals with the genitals of adolescents. This served conspiracy fantasies, similar to the popular protocols of the Elders of Zion , and voyeuristic needs through a strongly sexual connotation of alleged Jewish sex crimes, forced prostitution and trafficking in adolescent children.
On March 17, 1929, the boy Karl Kessler was found dead near Manau. Thereupon the dentist Otto Hellmuth wrote as a "special reporter" an editorial in the following "Striker", which claimed:
“The autopsy showed that the body was completely bled out. ... This is the perfect proof that this can only be a Jewish blood murder. "
The examining magistrate publicly contradicted every detail of the fictitious text. But Hellmuth and the striker editor Karl Holz held well-attended lectures on the subject of "Blood Murder in Manau" around Easter (March 31, 1929) and distributed a hate speech entitled "Jewish Morals and Blood Mysteries", the 50th alleged allegedly proven Jewish ritual murders. As a result, numerous Jews in the area were arrested and had to prove an alibi. A plaque and later a memorial stone with the inscription "Karl Kessler - victim of a ritual murder" was set up at the place where the body was found. Local Nazi activists held annual commemorations there. Hellmuth rose to the position of Gauleiter of Mainfranken and in 1934 and 1937 he “cleared up” the case in order to highlight his services to the Gau from the time before the seizure of power . After a large "memorial service" on March 19, 1937, the Gestapo arrested nine Jews in Würzburg and Erlangen , who linked spread rumors with the boy's death. Although all the accused had a solid alibi, they were imprisoned until November 1937.
On May 1, 1934, the "Striker" published a leaflet with the title "Jewish murder plan against non-Jewish mankind uncovered", the cover picture of which depicted an alleged Jewish ritual murder. The text accused the Jews of planning the murders of leading Nazi representatives, including Adolf Hitler , on the basis of alleged inclinations to commit ritual murder . The Reich Representation of German Jews protested against the publication by sending a telegram to the Reich Chancellery and to the Reich Bishop of the DEK , Ludwig Müller : It threatens Jews in life and limb, violates their faith and endangers Germany's reputation abroad. There was no answer. The Gestapo also feared that the leaflet would trigger an unmanageable flood of individual acts of violence against Jews. It was allowed to appear anyway; however, Hitler had the remaining edition confiscated. With this ritual murder campaign, the Nuremberg Laws of September 1935 were initiated, above all the prohibition of marriages and sexual contact between Jews and non-Jews (" Rassenschande ").
A rare example of scientific moral courage during the Nazi regime were the articles by the Breslau folklorist Will-Erich Peuckert on the keywords "Freemason", "Jew" and "ritual murder" in the concise dictionary of German superstition . They knowledgeably refuted the anti-Semitic ritual murder legend and conspiracy thesis of a relationship between Jews and Freemasons. A denunciation by the Nazi folklorist Walther Steller led to a Gestapo interrogation of Peuckert in 1935 and the withdrawal of his academic license to teach because of "political unreliability".
In May 1939 another special issue of the “Stürmers” on the subject of ritual murder followed, which, like the chronicles of the Middle Ages, lined up “historical evidence” and made use of well-known motifs. The cover picture of this edition was taken from the Bavaria Sancta from 1627. However, a call to readers to send the editorial staff material on similar previous or current cases did not get the desired response. New spectacular accusations did not materialize, so that only the new edition of well-known legends remained. The “striker” intensified his propaganda at the beginning of the war all the more: The war was presented as the last ritual murder of “ world Jewry ”.
A typical inflammatory pamphlet from the environment of the fascist sect Bund für Deutsche Götterwissennis by Erich and Mathilde Ludendorff was the book by Wilhelm Matthießen : Israel's ritual murder on the peoples (Munich 1939). She tried to derive an alleged religious compulsion of Judaism to sacrifice blood from the Bible and claimed a Jewish "secret plan for the annihilation of peoples".
During the war, Nazi pamphlets repeatedly emphasized the connection that Hitler had constructed in his January speech in 1939, for example in 1942:
“... Committing ritual murders was reserved for the inherently low, criminal instinct of the Jews - murders to indulge their bloodlust, murders to satisfy their insatiable hatred of the goyim, murders to obey the law of faith. What kind of god must it be who demands such bloody sacrifices from his followers? ... The Jew still believes he has one last trump card in hand, since he has succeeded in making Jewish Bolshevism, in conjunction with the no less Jewish capitalism of the British and Americans, serve his interests. But ... the war unleashed by the Jews will end with the radical annihilation of Judaism ... A dark chapter of human history, incomprehensible stupidity and delusion comes to an end, and a better Jewish-free time begins. "
At this point the Holocaust was in full swing. Because of its historical constancy, folklore and anchoring in the collective unconscious, the ritual murder legend was ideally suited to justify it. In 1943 Hellmut Schramm published a 475-page “historical investigation” in the Theodor Fritsch- Verlag (Berlin), which presented itself as the sum of all previous inflammatory writings and explicitly referred to Vatican explanations: The Jewish ritual murder . After reading it, Heinrich Himmler ordered the head of the Reich Main Security Office , Ernst Kaltenbrunner , to investigate ritual murders in the areas occupied by Germany. He wanted to use this as radio propaganda . At the same time he ordered an edition of the book and had it sent to the subordinates charged with mass shootings:
"I am sending you several hundred copies so that you can distribute them to your Einsatzkommandos , but above all to the men who have to do with the Jewish question."
In the final years of the war, Hitler demanded a propaganda film about the Damascus affair, analogous to the film Der Ewige Jude , which could no longer be made during the war.
Outside of Europe
Rumors of ritual murder were spread against Europeans in China , India and Madagascar in the 19th century . These in turn subject the Voodoo religion imported from West Africa in Haiti to ritual murder practices, for example in the popular book by Sir Spencer St. John in 1886, Haiti or the Black Republic .
In Massena (New York) , the only known ritual murder charges against Jews in the US occurred 1928th Who raised it is unknown. What was special was that the local authorities, police, judiciary and the mayor made the suspicions their own without looking.
Since 1945
Roman Catholic Church
In the Roman Catholic Church, the decree Nostra Aetate of October 28, 1965 sealed the abandonment of the divine murder theory and declared the fight against all forms of anti-Semitism to be an all-Christian duty. This also removed the theological basis of the Christian ritual murder legend.
The cult around Werner von Wesel in the diocese of Trier was only discontinued in 1963. It disappeared from the Catholic calendar of saints in 1965.
The cult of Simon of Trient was banned in 1965 by the responsible diocesan bishop; a papal commission found a miscarriage of justice and overturned Simon's canonization.
The annual pilgrimages to the Judenstein for Anderl von Rinn were officially discontinued in 1954, despite considerable opposition from Auxiliary Bishop Paulus Rusch , the apostolic administrator of the Diocese of Innsbruck , and the local population. Pope John XXIII had the cult around Anderl von Rinn discontinued by decree in 1961. Catholic cult followers, however, invoked the papal recognition of the Anderle cult of 1755 and claimed that it came close to an irreversible infallibility decision . Bishop Reinhold Stecher tried to enforce the cult attitude with reference to Nostra Aetate since 1985. In 1988 the Vatican officially declared the matter to be a "matter of the Diocese of Innsbruck", but supported Stecher's steps and declared all anti-Jewish ritual murder legends to be unfounded superstitions. Stecher had a fresco of Anderl's "Slaughter" painted over in the local chapel and suspended the main initiator of the pilgrimages, chaplain Gottfried Melzer . Nevertheless, local and regional Catholic fundamentalists and right-wing extremists continue the pilgrimages. Until 1993 Melzer published the Loreto-Bote , printed in Switzerland and distributed in Tyrol and Bavaria , a weekly paper specializing in anti-Semitic superstitions. In the spring of 1990 a special issue on the subject of ritual murders and the desecration of the host was published there as works of hatred by the opposing church , in which the editors stated "with great emphasis":
“The martyrdom of the blessed von Rinn child bears all the signs of a Jewish ritual murder. Ritual murders and the desecration of the host are intrinsically related: both of them reveal the abysmal hatred of Satan for the life created by God, and the hatred of God himself, which is mysteriously present in the 'bread of life'. Satan has his special tools for these outrages: ... We must look for them in a special way also in the descendants of those who had Jesus Christ ... crucified and persecuted his followers relentlessly. "
The authors then again presented 36 cases from medieval and modern anti-Jewish hate literature up to 1932 as facts and linked them to a global conspiracy theory in which they also took up ideas of the taxil swindle :
"Since Satan has been the 'murderer of mankind from the beginning' (Jn 8:44), and since the cultic worship of Satan is an essential part of Freemasonry [...],
and since the core force and management body of Freemasonry are made up of people of exclusively Jewish descent, one must consequently say that the deadline solution planned by the top of Freemasonry and the one realized by the lower representatives of Freemasonry , this mass murder of unborn children (60 million annually) is to be regarded as an 'everlasting' and 'incessant' human sacrifice to Satan [...]. [...]
Parts of the bodies of the innumerable children murdered in their wombs are consumed and ingested by people in the form of medicines and beauty products made from the bodies of those killed. How much longer will the blood of the murdered cry out for vengeance ?! The purpose of this worldwide 'ritual mass murder' is obvious: [This] is to pave the way for the 'Lord of the world'. "
Melzer was supported by right-wing extremists such as Christian Rogler and Catholic theologians such as Robert Prantner , Engelwerk member and author in the Austrian magazine Zur Zeit published by Andreas Mölzer , an offshoot of Junge Freiheit . In it, event notices and advertisements called for “Anderle commemoration”. Melzer was convicted of sedition in Austria in 1998.
With his confession of guilt in 2000, John Paul II asked Jews for forgiveness for the sins that “not a few Catholics committed against the people of the covenant and the Beatitudes”. He remembered the "sufferings" "that have been inflicted on the people of Israel in history". This was the first time that a pope confessed that Catholic Christians were complicit in the persecution of Jews.
The Vatican did not officially revoke earlier papal decrees that recognized cults surrounding alleged ritual murder victims. The historian David Kertzer , who was able to evaluate the Vatican archives opened in 1998 for the period 1800–1938, saw them as a sign of the suppression of the church's involvement in the emergence of anti-Semitism.
Europe
With the end of National Socialism, the legend of the ritual murder did not disappear. In connection with refugee movements of surviving Jews, new pogroms broke out in Eastern Europe in 1946. The Kielce pogrom on July 4, 1946 was triggered by allegations of ritual murder, as were attacks on Jews in Kunmadaras , Miskolc and Özd in Hungary in May and July 1946. In Karcag near Kunmadaras, seven Christian children are said to have disappeared and cannot be found; the rural population believed that Jews would process them into sausage. An angry crowd prevented the arrest of a locally known collaborator of the National Socialists, killed three and injured 18 of 73 Jews in the town.
In France, the 1969 rumor about Orléans was reminiscent of ritual murder legends. This anti-Semitism was strongly condemned by the press, politicians and trade unions, and there was no violence against Jews.
In 2007, the work Pasque di sangue (“Passover of the Blood”) by the Israeli historian Ariel Toaff was published in Italy . He relied on torture interrogations from the Damascus affair of 1840 and interpreted the statements made as possibly correct. The work sparked an international debate and many protests. Thereupon the publisher stopped selling. In the thoroughly revised second edition from 2008, Toaff clarified that the claim that Jews could have used Christian blood was a legend.
Islamic countries
Since the Damascus affair in 1840, anti-Semitism has also developed in Islamic countries, in the context of which the anti-Jewish ritual murder propaganda appears more frequently. In Egypt, Jordan , Iran and Saudi Arabia in particular , legends of ritual murder are being spread in state-controlled media right up to the present day.
1983 published Mustafa Tlas , a former foreign minister of Syria , the anti-Semitic pamphlet Fatir Ziun ("The Matze of Zion"). In it he pretended to investigate the Damascus affair historically. He took slander and torture-extorted statements from Jews of the time as evidence of his thesis: The Talmud prescribes ritual murder for Jews as a religious act. They needed the blood of Gentiles for the matzos of their rituals. The Talmud also urges Jews to "hate humanity". To this end, he referred to August Rohling's work The Talmud Jew from 1871, which had also been translated into Arabic since 1899. In Europe this "hidden, destructive evil of the Jewish ideology" had become known, but in Arab countries the Jews had benefited from Islamic tolerance until 1840.
In September 2000 the Second Intifada against Israel began. In view of this, the Arab state media published new ritual murder charges against Jews. On 24 October 2000, the alleged PLO AGENT, and Mufti Sheikh Nader Al-Tamimi in stations Al Jazeera that there could be no peace with the Jews, as they sucked the blood of Arabs during their festivals of Purim and Passover. The Egyptian state newspaper Al-Ahram published a full-page article by Adel Hamooda on October 28, 2000 with the title: “A Jewish matzo made from Arab blood.” The author stated that his grandfather had already told this story to the children of his hometown. At the time, he thought it was a children's fairy tale, but later discovered in French court files of the Damascus affair of 1840 that it was true. These files were translated into Arabic and published in 1898. Hamooda then cited extensively excerpts from torture interrogations as evidence.
On March 10, 2002, the lecturer at King Faisal University Umayma Ahmad Al-Jalahma described alleged Jewish customs during the Purim festival in the Saudi Arabian government newspaper Al Riyadh : “The Jewish people are obliged to find human blood for this festival so that their clergy can do this Being able to prepare pastries for the holidays. "
In autumn 2003, the early evening series Al Shatat (“The Diaspora ”) appeared first on the Hezbollah Al-Manar TV station in Syria, then also on Al-Mamnou TV in Jordan and Iran . It reached an audience of millions via the Saudi satellite ArabSat . She staged the anti-Semitic protocols of the Elders of Zion for children and expanded them to include modern anti-Semitic legends such as the perpetrator-victim reversal, according to which Jews helped Hitler in the Holocaust. One episode shows two rabbis catching a Christian boy, cutting his throat, collecting his blood and using it to bake matzo, which they then also give to secular Jews for consumption. In a further episode, rabbis stage a “Talmudic criminal court”: They hold the convict of a relationship with a non-Jewish woman, fill his mouth with liquid lead, cut off his ear and slit his throat. Initially, the series was to be shown on Syria's state television and translated into several languages. In response to international criticism, the Syrian government withdrew the plan and denied that it supported the production. However, the director of the station emphasized: "The series shows the truth and nothing but the truth."
In late 2005, a Dr. Hasan Haizadeh in a program on the Iranian state broadcaster Jaam-e Jam TV : Before the Passover festival in 1883 in Paris and London, Jews murdered 150 French and many English children in order to take their blood. This was the result of investigations at the time that were forced through public riots against Jews. But Western historiography, influenced by Jews and Zionists, never mentions these incidents. - In April 2015, the Iranian news agency Alef listed alleged ritual murders of Jews from the past. As one of the sources she gave an edition of the NSDAP propaganda paper “Der Stürmer” from 1939.
From 2009, Barack Obama became the first US president to hold a private Seder meal with his family for the annual Passover. The Palestinian Nawwaf Al-Zarou wrote in a newspaper article: "Does Obama even know the relationship, for example, between 'Passover' and 'Christian blood'?! ... Or are his actions just salivating the Jewish Council ..." In a long text he then tried to present Jewish ritual murders at Passover as a fact. To do this, he relied on the book by Ariel Toaff, which had recently been discussed in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz . On March 27, 2013, the PLO -affiliated organization Miftah , which supports BDS , published Al-Zarou's articles on its website. After a blogger made this known, Miftah attacked him as the author of a "smear campaign" and only deleted the article from their English, but not from the Arabic website. The UN , the European Union (EU), eight EU states, several non-governmental organizations (NGOs) from the USA and two German party foundations had funded Miftah with millions in funding. Most continued to do so despite criticism after the incident. In 2016, Miftah took over an article by the neo-Nazi group National Vanguard , which represented the anti-Semitic conspiracy theses of a Jewish media control and a Zionist Occupied Governments in the USA. This became public again in 2019 when two members of the US House of Representatives organized their visit to Israel through Miftah.
On May 12, 2013, party politician Khaled Al-Zaafrani declared on Egyptian state television: “It is well known that they [the Jews] do matzos during the Passover, which they call 'Blood of Zion'. They take a Christian child, slit its throat and slaughter it. ”The French kings and Russian tsars discovered this ritual in the Jewish quarters. All pogroms against Jews in their countries are the result of the discovery that Jews kidnapped and slaughtered Christian children.
Sheikh Khaled al-Mughrabi taught young people in May 2015 in the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem: "The Jews are looking for a toddler, kidnap it and put it in a barrel with nails on the inside." In order to endorse their wish for eternal life fulfill, they then ate “bread kneaded with children's blood”. These facts were revealed in Europe and led to the expulsion there and to the extermination of the Jews in Germany.
Germany
The German Basic Law protects the personal rights of members of religious minorities (Article 4). The German penal code makes the dissemination of anti-Semitic propaganda as incitement to hatred (Section 130), insult (Section 185) or slander (Section 187) partially a punishable offense.
Right-wing extremists, however, spread anti-Semitic ritual murder legends and historical inflammatory pamphlets on the Internet. Hellmut Schramm's pamphlet from 1943 has been circulating online as an English translation since 2001. After the murder of Theo van Gogh in Amsterdam on the anniversary of the November pogroms in 1938 , November 9, 2004, the German College of Reinhold Oberlercher and Horst Mahler , classified as actively anti-constitutional , published a inflammatory pamphlet entitled “Semitic ritual murder”.
Newer variants
Anti-Israeli cartoons
On January 27, 2003, Holocaust Remembrance Day , the 2003 British newspaper The Independent published the Sharon cartoon by Dave Brown . It shows Ariel Sharon , Israel 's prime minister at the time, biting the head of a Palestinian baby with the caption, “What's the problem? Have you never seen a politician kiss a child? ”In response to a complaint from the Israeli government, the illustrator Dave Brown named Francisco de Goya's picture Saturn sacrificing his son as a model for the caricature; this is not motivated anti-Semitically. For this he won the annual award of the British Political Cartoon Society .
On Holocaust Remembrance Day 2013, the British Sunday Times published a cartoon by Gerald Scarfe : It showed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a bricklayer with a bloody trowel, building a wall with the blood and body parts of Palestinians. The line of text read: “Israel elections. Will cementing the peace continue? ”The drawing was often understood and criticized as an allusion to the legend of the ritual murder. Scarfe apologized for the "very unfortunate timing" of the publication, stressing that he was not an anti-Semite and had only criticized Netanyahu's policies.
Anti-Israel hate speech
Since the Gaza conflicts of 2009 and 2014 , anti-Israel rallies have shouted the anti-Semitic slogan of “Israel child murderer”, along with slogans such as “Israel drinks our children's blood from the glasses of the UN”, “Remove the tumor from Israel”, “Jew Jew cowardly pig, come out and fight alone ”,“ Intifada to victory ”. The slogan "Child Murderer Israel" could also be heard at the annual Al-Quds Day in Berlin. In anti-Semitism research, it is considered a modern variant of the legend of ritual murder. The fact that the German police often failed to crack down on such inflammatory slogans met with criticism in media comments.
Fetus recovery
In the USA, some Christian fundamentalists and anti- abortionists direct ritual murder legends not only against Jews but also against Satanists and Chinese , who they accuse of killing fetuses for ritual or medical purposes.
Organ trafficking
As a variant of the anti-Semitic ritual murder legend, repeated claims of a worldwide murderous organ trade by Israel are valid . In 2009, the journalist wrote Donald Boström in the newspaper Aftonbladet in Sweden without supporting documents, the Israeli army (IDF) start Palestinians, they prefer involuntary autopsies and gather them body organs before they kill. He linked this to an Israeli organ dealer in the 1990s who, however, was unrelated to the IDF, had traded organs from Israel (regardless of who) and was therefore convicted by Israeli courts in 2001. The article circulated on anti-Semitic websites as alleged evidence of an organ trafficking ring in Israel. Subsequently, for example, Israel's humanitarian aid after the 2010 Haiti earthquake was portrayed as a cover for organ theft.
Bouthaina Shaaban, who later became a media advisor to Syria's dictator Bashar Assad , also made the same accusation . Following Bostrom's Aftonbladet article in 2010, she claimed on the website of the Palestinian organization Miftah that Israel was stealing " Ukrainian children in order to harvest their organs."
The Palestinian and BDS supporter Mana Tamimi posted on Twitter on September 23, 2015, shortly before the highest Jewish holiday, Yom Kippur : “ Vampire Zionists who celebrate their Kebore day [...] by drinking Palestinian blood. Yes, our blood is pure and tastes good, but in the end it will kill you. ”The UN had previously listed her as a human rights activist and then removed her from their list. Her husband Bassem Tamimi posted on October 14, 2015 during his Amnesty International- sponsored lecture tour through the US: “What is the intention when Israelis arrest CHILDREN of Palestinians? TO STEAL YOUR ORGANS. The same Zionists who do this control the media. So don't expect the BBC to cover it… ”. He also showed a photograph of a boy's body with a large cut and stitches.
In 2018, union leader Robrecht Vanderbeeken claimed in a newspaper in Belgium : Israel starved the people of Gaza to death, poisoned them, kidnapped their children and murdered them for their organs. After complaints, the paper only removed the part of the sentence about the alleged theft of organs, but maintained the other allegations about kidnapping and killing children: they did not want to assume a causal connection between the two.
Ritual child abuse by elites
The conspiracy ideologist Ted Gunderson accused a satanic “elite” of ritual child abuse as early as the 1980s (see abuse allegations at the McMartin preschool ). Similarly, singer Xavier Naidoo has believed since 2010 that unnamed elites organize, secretly and ritually abuse, torture and kill disappeared children. For example, he sang on Olli Banjo's “Kopfdisco” album : He “learned” “what you love to do so much. Hm, you like to fuck seriously injured children ”. In an interview with the Internet platform “Nexworld”, Naidoo named the case of the Belgian sex offender Marc Dutroux “and the many things that are going on in Germany ” as topics that were important to him . There are "traces that lead to the Belgian royal family". The Stasi was also involved in the case. Naidoo said: "No matter how many thousands of years old these rituals may be: I think they have to stop now." In 2012 he released an untitled additional track with rapper Kool Savas on the album "Gespaltene Personality". There was talk of satanic conspirators who ritually kill young children: “Occult rituals seal the pact with power, part of a lodge camouflaged under a suit and robe. They write their own commandments. ”Sexist fantasies of violence should punish the alleged child murderers:“ I'll cut your arms and legs off, and then I'll fuck your ass like you do with the little ones. I'm just sad and not angry. Still, I would kill you. You kill children and fetuses and I'll crush your balls. ”He was charged with sedition for this. In an interview, he explained that the lines of text were "about terrible ritual murders of children, which actually happen a lot in Europe, but which no one speaks about, no one reports." He did not want to comment further.
Since Donald J. Trump took office as US President (January 2017), some of his followers have been spreading conspiracy theories on social media under the acronym QAnon , including new variants of the legend of ritual murder: There is an international secret society that kidnaps children, trapped in basements and tunnel systems hold them, torture them there and sell them as sex slaves or draw their blood from them in order to win a rejuvenating agent for celebrities of the elite. The conspirators are said to include "deep state" officials , Jewish secret circles, Trump's defeated rival Hillary Clinton and her Democratic Party . According to the expert Miro Dittrich ( Amadeu Antonio Foundation ), the QAnon legend is supposed to justify all the failures of Trump's politics from secret opposing forces. The motif of the blood-drawing ritual murder of children by the elite comes from anti-Semitic legends of the 15th century.
The conspiratorialist Alex Jones linked the already existing conspiracy thesis of an international pedophile ring (called Pizzagate ) shortly after Trump's election victory in November 2016 with his defeated rival candidate: “When I think of all the children Hillary Clinton personally murdered, hacked and raped, then I'm afraid I don't care a bit to stand up against it. Yes, you heard right. Hillary Clinton personally murdered children. ”He later added that Clinton smelled of sulfur in order to demonize her as a tool of Satan in anti-Semitic tradition. A listener armed with a firearm then attacked the pizzeria that Jones had claimed to be the center of the secret society. A neo-Nazi shouted about "Jewish ritual murder" in front of the pizzeria.
The assassin, who killed nine people in the 2020 attack in Hanau (February 19), also believed in secret societies run by US elites that abuse children. Since the COVID-19 pandemic from March 2020, QAnon supporters have also been spreading this legend in Germany.
In April 2020 Naidoo spread in a video that an elite cartel of pedophiles was distilling the rejuvenating elixir " Adrenochrome " from the blood of kidnapped children . The rapper Sido also considers celebrity treatments with the blood of kidnapped children possible.
literature
Overall representations
- Raphael Israeli: Blood Libel and Its Derivatives: The Scourge of Anti-Semitism. Routledge, London 2017, ISBN 1138507741
- Frauke von Rohden, Regina Randhofer: ritual murder. In: Dan Diner (Ed.): Encyclopedia of Jewish History and Culture Volume 5: Pr – Sy. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2014, ISBN 3-476-02505-5 , pp. 235–243.
- Hannah Johnson: Blood Libel: The Ritual Murder Accusation at the Limit of Jewish History. University of Michigan Press, 2012, ISBN 0472118358 .
- Susanna Buttaroni, Stanisław Musiał (ed.): Ritual murder. Legends in European History. Böhlau, Vienna 2003, ISBN 3-205-77028-5 ( online excerpt ).
- Ritual murder. In: Gerhard Muller (Ed.): Theologische Realenzyklopädie Volume 29 , Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 1998, ISBN 3-11-016127-3 , pp. 253-259.
- Alexander Baron: Jewish Ritual Murder: Anti-semitic Fabrication or Urban Legend? Anglo-Hebrew Publishing. London 1994, ISBN 1-898318-36-0 .
- Rainer Erb: The legend of ritual murder: On the history of the blood accusation against Jews. Metropol, Berlin 1993, ISBN 3-926893-15-X .
- Alan Dundes: The Blood Libel Legend: A Casebook in Anti-Semitic Folklore. The University of Wisconsin Press, Madison 1991, ISBN 0-299-13110-6 .
- Stefan Rohrbacher, Michael Schmidt: Images of Jews. Cultural history of anti-Jewish myths and anti-Semitic prejudices. Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1991, ISBN 3-499-55498-4 (pp. 269–291: ritual murder and sacrifice of the host ; pp. 304–368: the barbarism of centuries long past ).
- Ronnie Po-Chia Hsia: The Myth of Ritual Murder: Jews and Magic in Reformation Germany. Yale University Press, New Haven 1988, 1990, ISBN 0-300-04746-0 .
Partial aspects
- Jürgen W. Schmidt: No case of “ritual blood extraction” - the criminal trials against the rabbinate candidate Max Bernstein in Breslau in 1889/90 and their sexual psychological background. In: Specialized prose research - Border Crossing 8/9, Deutscher Wissenschaftsverlag, Baden-Baden 2014, ISSN 1863-6780, pp. 483-516.
- Daniel Roos: Julius Streicher and "Der Stürmer" 1923 - 1945. Schöningh, Paderborn 2014, ISBN 3-506-77267-8 .
- David I. Kertzer: The Popes against the Jews. The Vatican and the rise of modern anti-Semitism. List, Munich 2004, ISBN 3-548-60386-6 .
- Johannes T. Groß: Accusations of ritual murder against Jews in the German Empire (1871-1914). Metropol, Berlin 2002, ISBN 3-932482-84-0 .
- Hannelore Noack: Unteachable? Anti-Jewish agitation with distorted Talmudic quotations. Anti-Semitic incitement by demonizing the Jews. Publishing house for scientific literature, Paderborn 2001, ISBN 3-935023-99-5 .
- John M. McCulloh: Jewish Ritual Murder: William of Norwich, Thomas of Monmouth, and the Early Dissemination of the Myth. In: Speculum. Columbus Ohio, 1997 / No. 3 (July), pp. 698-740, ISSN 0739-3806 .
- Gerd Mentgen: About the origin of the ritual murder fable. In: Ashkenaz. Journal for the history and culture of the Jews 4/1994, pp. 405– 416
- Stefan Rohrbacher: ritual murder accusations on the Lower Rhine. In: Menora 1/1990, pp. 299-305
- Georg R. Schroubek : On the criminal history of the blood charge . In: Monthly for criminology and criminal law reform . Cologne 1985, No. 65, pp. 2-17, ISSN 0026-9301 .
- Georg R. Schroubek: The "ritual murder" of Polná - traditional and modern delusional belief. In: Rainer Erb, Michael Schmidt (Ed.): Anti-Semitism and Jewish history - studies in honor of Herbert A. Strauss. Berlin 1987, pp. 149-171.
Web links
- overview
- Richard Gottheil, Hermann L. Strack, Joseph Jacobs: Blood Accusation. In: Isidore Singer (Ed.): Jewish Encyclopedia . Funk and Wagnalls, New York 1901-1906.
- TheGolem: The Blood Libel.
- Antiquity
- Pieter W. van der Horst: De Mythe van het Joodse Kannibalisme. (2006; Dutch)
- Ritual Murder in Christianity - Origins and Causes of an Ancient Pagan Prejudice.
- middle Ages
- Fordham University Medieval Source Book: A Blood Libel Cult: Anderl von Rinn, d. 1462 (English)
- Fordham University: Medieval Sourcebook: Ephraim ben Jacob: The Ritual Murder Accusation at Blois, May, 1171 (English)
- Modern times
- Nils Freytag: The Konitz case. (Review on historicum.net)
- Adolph Kohut : Ritual Murder Trials. Significant cases from the past. Basch, Berlin-Wilmersdorf 1913. Freimann Collection, Goethe University Frankfurt, digitized
- present
- MEMRI: Egyptian weekly newspaper: 'The Jews murder non-Jews in order to use their blood for religious rituals' August 19, 2004 (English)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Wolfgang Benz (Ed.) Handbook of Antisemitism Volume 5: Organizations, Institutions, Movements. De Gruyter, Berlin 2012, ISBN 3-598-24078-3 , p. 219
- ↑ Achim Bühl: Anti-Semitism: History and Structures from Antiquity to 1848. Marix, 2020, p. 126
- ↑ a b c Bezalel Bar-Kochva: The Image of the Jews in Greek Literature - The Hellenistic Period. University of California Press, 2010, ISBN 978-0-520-29084-6 , p. 253 and fn. 1
- ↑ Erich S. Gruen: The Construct of Identity in Hellenistic Judaism: Essays on Early Jewish Literature and History. De Gruyter, Berlin 2016, ISBN 978-3-11-037302-8 , p. 249
- ↑ Bezalel Bar-Kochva: The Image of the Jews in Greek Literature - The Hellenistic Period. 2010, p.241 - 278 .
- ^ Tricia Miller: Jews and Anti-Judaism in Esther and the Church. James Clarke & Co, 2015, ISBN 9780227902523 , p. 51
- ^ David Flusser: Judaism of the Second Temple Period, Volume 2: The Jewish Sages and Their Literature. William B. Eerdmans, 2009, ISBN 978-0-8028-2458-5 , p. 309
- ↑ Hans Lietzmann: History of the old church. (1936) New edition: De Gruyter, Berlin 1999, ISBN 3-11-016498-1 , p. 152 f.
- ↑ Peter Schäfer: Jesus in the Talmud. 2nd edition, Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 2010, ISBN 3-16-150253-1 , p. 205
- ↑ Hans Huebner: The wisdom of Solomon: Liber Sapientiae Salomonis. The Old Testament German, Apocryphal Volume 4. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1999, ISBN 3-525-51404-2 , p. 160
- ↑ Susanna Buttaroni: Ritual Murder . Legends in European History. Vienna 2003, p. 63
- ↑ Irmgard Bruns: From the Jewish sect to the state religion: power struggles in early Christianity. Patmos, 2008, ISBN 3491704146 , pp. 194f .; Susanne Galley: Judaism. Campus, Frankfurt am Main 2006, ISBN 3593379775 , p. 54.
- ↑ Wolfgang Benz: Handbook of Antisemitism Volume 3: Terms, Theories, Ideologies. De Gruyter, Berlin 2010, ISBN 3-11-023379-7 , p. 153
- ↑ Patricia Healy Wasyliw: Martyrdom, Murder, and Magic: Child Saints and Their Cults in Medieval Europe. Peter Lang, New York 2007, ISBN 978-0-8204-2764-5 , p. 111 ; P. 261 ; Cecil Roth: The Feast of Purim and the Origins of the Blood Accusation. (1933) Reprinted in: Alan Dundes (Ed.): The Blood Libel Legend , pp. 261-272
- ↑ Wolfgang Benz (Ed.) Handbook of Antisemitism Volume 5: Organizations, Institutions, Movements. Berlin 2012, p. 353f.
- ↑ Wolfgang Wippermann: Racism and belief in the devil. Frank & Timme, 2005, ISBN 3865960073 , p. 65
- ↑ a b Frauke von Rhoden, Regina Randhofer: Ritualmord. In: Dan Diner (Ed.): Encyclopedia of Jewish History and Culture Volume 5: Pr-Sy. Springer VS, Wiesbaden 2014, ISBN 978-3-476-02505-0 , pp. 235–243, here p. 236
- ^ Stefan Rohrbacher, Michael Schmidt: Judenbilder. Reinbek 1991, p. 18.
- ^ Jacob Rader Marcus, Marc Saperstein (Ed.): The Jews in Christian Europe: A Source Book, 315-1791. (1999) Hebrew Union College, 2015, ISBN 9780822963936 , p. 87
- ^ EM Rose: The Murder of William of Norwich: The Origins of the Blood Libel in Medieval Europe. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2015, ISBN 978-0-19-021962-8 , p. 8
- ↑ EM Rose: The Murder of William of Norwich , Oxford 2015, pp. 75–81
- ↑ Augustus Jessop (ed.): The Life And Miracles Of St William Of Norwich By Thomas Of Monmouth. Cambridge Library, 2011, ISBN 9781108039765 , p. 71 (Introduction)
- ^ Rainer Erb: The legend of ritual murder , Berlin 1993, p. 72
- ^ Israel J. Yuval: Two Nations in Your Womb: Perceptions of Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. University of California Press, Berkeley 2006, ISBN 0520217667 , p. 185
- ^ Hannah R. Johnson: Blood Libel: The Ritual Murder Accusation at the Limit of Jewish History. University of Michigan Press, 2012, ISBN 0472118358 , pp. 104f.
- ^ Stefan Rohrbacher, Michael Schmidt: Judenbilder , 1991, p. 276
- ↑ Rainer Erb: Die Legende vom Ritualmord , Berlin 1993, pp. 52–54
- ^ Rainer Erb: Die Legende vom Ritualmord , Berlin 1993, p. 63; Richard Utz: Hugh von Lincoln and the myth of the Jewish ritual murder. In: Ulrich Müller, Werner Wunderlich (ed.): Medieval myths in 7 volumes: Rulers-Heroes-Saints. (1996) Universitätsverlag, Konstanz 2001, ISBN 3-86764-117-X , pp. 711-722.
- ^ Stefan Rohrbacher, Michael Schmidt: Judenbilder , 1991, p. 278
- ^ Stefan Rohrbacher, Michael Schmidt: Judenbilder. Reinbek 1991, p. 280
- ↑ Hannah Johnson, Heather Blurton: The Critics and the Prioress: Antisemitism, Criticism, and Chaucer's Prioress's Tale. University of Michigan Press, 2017, ISBN 9780472130344 , pp. 57-105
- ^ Douglas M. Lanier: The Merchant of Venice: Language and Writing. The Arden Shakespeare, 2019, ISBN 9781472571502 , p. 77
- ^ Gavin I. Langmuir: Toward a Definition of Antisemitism. University of California Press, 1996, p. 266
- ↑ Paul Joseph Weiland: A Messiah from Galilee. The non-fiction book on Christianity. Araki, 3rd edition 1991, ISBN 3-9520016-1-9 , p. 414 ; Willehad Paul Eckert: The Trento Jewish Trial. In: Paul Wilpert (Ed.): Judaism in the Middle Ages: Contributions to Christian-Jewish conversation. P. 326, fn. 133
- ↑ Julius Höxter (Ed.): Source texts on Jewish history and literature (Judaica). Marix, 2009, ISBN 3865391982 , pp. 235f.
- ↑ Josef Kastein: A history of the Jews . FV Éditions, 2018, ISBN 979-1-02990554-4 , p. 427 ( Online in Google Books in the Google Book Search - first edition: Löwit, Vienna / Jerusalem 1938).
- ↑ Josef Kastein: A history of the Jews . FV Éditions, 2018, ISBN 979-1-02990554-4 , p. 428 ( Online in Google Books in the Google Book Search - first edition: Löwit, Vienna / Jerusalem 1938).
- ↑ Article ritual murder. In: Gerhard Müller (Ed.): Theologische Realenzyklopädie Volume 29, Berlin 1998, p. 257.
- ↑ Susanna Buttaroni: Ritual Murder . Legends in European History. Vienna 2003, pp. 215-218
- ↑ Heinrich Heine: The Rabbi von Bacherach (1840) (text from Project Gutenberg)
- ↑ Maike Lämmerhirt: The ritual murder legend in the Thuringian area and the persecution of the Jews of Weißensee 1303. In: Enno Bünz, Helmut G. Walther, Stefan Tebruck (ed.): Religious movements in the Middle Ages. Böhlau, Vienna 2007, p. 737
- ↑ Rita Voltmer, Franz Irsigler: The European witch hunts of the early modern times - prejudices, factors and balances
- ↑ Niklaus Schatzmann: Withering trees and bread like cow dung: Witch trials in the Leventina 1431-1459 and the beginnings of the witch hunt on the southern side of the Alps. Chronos, 2003, ISBN 3-0340-0660-8 , p. 58
- ↑ Birgit Studt : Fürstenhof and history. Legitimation through tradition. Böhlau, Cologne 1998, ISBN 3412035920 , pp. 337-351.
- ^ Ravensburg (district town) - Jewish history / synagogue . Alemannia Judaica (2003)
- ^ Andreas Angerstorfer : Jewish reactions to the medieval accusations of blood from the 13th to the 16th century. In: Rainer Erb (ed.): The legend of ritual murder - On the history of the blood accusation against Jews. Berlin 1993 (= Center for Research on Antisemitism. Series Texts - Documents - Materials. Volume 6), pp. 133–156.
- ^ Johannes E. Trojer: Hitler time in Villgratental: persecution and resistance in East Tyrol. Haymon, 2016, ISBN 9783709937600 , p. 17
- ↑ Magda Teter: Blood Libel. Harvard 2020, p. 15
- ↑ a b Willehad Paul Eckert: From the files of the Trient Jewish Trial. In: Paul Wilpert (Ed.): Judaism in the Middle Ages: Contributions to Christian-Jewish conversation. (1966) De Gruyter, Berlin 2015, ISBN 9783110842159 , pp. 283–336, here pp. 288f.
- ↑ Heinz Schreckenberg: The Jews in European Art. Göttingen 1996, pp. 343-345
- ^ Stefan Rohrbacher, Michael Schmidt: Judenbilder. 1991, p. 287.
- ^ Klaus Davidowicz: Anti-Semitism and village culture: The case of Andreas von Rinn. In: by Markus Himmelbauer et al. (Ed.): Renewal of the Churches: Perspectives from the Christian-Jewish Dialogue. Herder, Freiburg 2018, ISBN 3451022907 , pp. 45–65, here pp. 48–52
- ^ Bernhard Fresacher: Anderl von Rinn: Ritual murder cult and reorientation in Judenstein 1945-1995. Tyrolia, 1998, ISBN 3702221255 , p. 19
- ^ Stefan Rohrbacher, Michael Schmidt: Judenbilder. Reinbek 1991, p. 302
- ↑ Article ritual murder. In: Gerhard Müller (Ed.): Theologische Realenzyklopädie Volume 29, Berlin 1998, p. 254.
- ↑ Thomas Brechenmacher: The Vatican and the Jews: History of an unholy relationship. Beck, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-406-52903-8 , p. 61 ff.
- ↑ Ute Weinmann: Part of Dogma - Anti-Judaism is widespread in the Orthodox Church to this day. Jewish General , April 21, 2017
- ^ Edward H. Judge: Easter in Kishinev. Anatomy of a pogrom. Decaton, Mainz 1995, ISBN 3-929455-30-7
- ^ Raimund Elfering: The "Bejlis Affair" in the mirror of the liberal Russian daily "REČ '". (PDF pp. 15–18)
- ↑ Michael Hagemeister, The 'Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion' and the Basel Zionist Congress of 1897. In: Heiko Haumann (Ed.): The dream of Israel. The origins of modern Zionism , Beltz Athenaeum, Weinheim 1998, p. 259.
- ^ Daniel Pipes: Conspiracy. The fascination and power of the secret. Gerling Akademie Verlag Munich 1998, p. 150.
- ↑ Jacob Barnai: Blood libels in the Ottoman Empire. In: Shmuel Almog (ed.): Antisemitism Through the Ages (Studies in Antisemitism Series) , Pergamon Press 1988, ISBN 0-08-035850-0 , pp. 189-194.
- ↑ The "Hilsner" 1899. Radio Prague, April 17 1999th
- ^ Raimund Elfering: The "Bejlis Affair" in the mirror of the liberal Russian daily "REČ '" . (PDF p. 14)
- ^ Regina Fritz: After war and the murder of Jews: Hungary's history policy since 1944. Wallstein, Göttingen 2012, ISBN 9783835322851 , p. 47
- ^ 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
- ^ Daniel Gerson: France. In: Wolfgang Benz, Brigitte Mihok (Ed.) Handbook of Antisemitism Volume 1: Countries and Regions. De Gruyter, Berlin 2008, ISBN 3-11-023510-2 , p. 118
- ^ Ulrich W. Sahm : Ban lifted after 344 years. Jewish General, January 22, 2014
- ^ Heinrich Graetz: Damascus affair
- ↑ Jewish Encyclopedia, Blood Accusation pronounce false
- ^ Jewish Encyclopedia: Joachim Heinrich Biesenthal
- ↑ DISS: Fake Talmud Quotes. Dr. Kroner, Dr. Bloch and the Rohling / Bloch trial from November 1885
- ↑ Bautz: August Rohling
- ↑ Hermann Strack: The blood superstition among Christians and Jews. Minden 1891.
- ^ Hermann L. Strack: The blood superstition in mankind. Blood murders and blood rites. At the same time an answer to the challenge of the Osservatore Cattolico. Beck'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, Munich 1892
- ↑ Hermann L. Strack: The blood in faith and superstition of mankind. Eighth edition 1923; Reprint: Ulan Press, 2012
- ↑ Ulrich Wyrwa: Judaism and Historicism: On the emergence of Jewish history in Europe. Campus, 2003, ISBN 3593372835 , p. 112
- ↑ Heinz Schreckenberg: The Jews in the art of Europe: a historical picture atlas. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1996, ISBN 3525633629 , p. 287
- ^ Stefan Rohrbacher, Michael Schmidt: Judenbilder . Rowohlt, 1998, p. 313.
- ^ Stefan Rohrbacher, Michael Schmidt: Judenbilder. Reinbek 1991, SS 305.
- ↑ Jürgen W. Schmidt: No case of "ritual blood drawing" , Baden-Baden 2014, p. 483.
- ^ Jonathan Frankel: The Damascus Affair: "Ritual Murder", Politics, and the Jews in 1840. Cambridge University Press, 1997, ISBN 0521483964 , p. 419
- ↑ Johannes Schmitt: "Des Satan's Synagogue": Catholic anti-Semitism (I). The Popes in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Saarland University, March 2002
- ↑ Christoph Daxelmüller: Folklore - an anti-Semitic science? In: Hans Otto Horch et al. (Ed.): Conditio Judaica: Judaism, anti-Semitism and German-language literature from the First World War to 1933/1938. De Gruyter, Berlin 2011, ISBN 3484106905 , pp. 190–226, here p. 220f. . - Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm: The Little Maiden Killed by the Jews , German Legends No. 354
- ^ Thomas Gräfe: Thoughts (book by Max Bewer, 1892). In: Handbook of Anti-Semitism Volume 7: Literature, Film, Theater and Art. De Gruyter, Berlin 2015, ISBN 978-3-11-025873-8 , p. 135
- ↑ Jürgen W. Schmidt (2012/13), p. 483 ff.
- ^ Stefan Rohrbacher, Michael Schmidt: Judenbilder. Reinbek 1991, p. 347.
- ^ Stefan Rohrbacher, Michael Schmidt: Judenbilder. Reinbek 1991, p. 349; Johannes T. Gross: Accusations of ritual murder against Jews in the German Empire (1871-1914). Berlin 2002, p. 108.
- ↑ Christhard Hoffmann, Helmut Walser Smith, Werner Bergmann: Exclusionary Violence: Antisemitic Riots in Modern German History. University of Michigan Press, 2nd edition. 2002, ISBN 0-472-06796-6 , p. 102.
- ↑ Franz Fühmann: The Jewish car. A fortnight out of two decades. 2nd edition, Diogenes, 1968; literary analysis: Susanne Klockmann: Das Judenauto. In: Stephan Braese, Holger Gehle, Doron Kiesel, Hanno Loewy: German Post-War Literature and the Holocaust. Campus, Frankfurt am Main 1998, ISBN 3-593-36092-6 , pp. 129ff.
- ^ Dennis E. Showalter : Little man, what now? The striker in the Weimar Republic. Archon Books, 1982, ISBN 0-208-01893-X , p. 257.
- ↑ Dirk Walter: Anti-Semitic Crime and Violence - Anti-Semitism in the Weimar Republic , Bonn 1999, p. 183
- ^ Stefan Rohrbacher, Michael Schmidt: Judenbilder. Reinbek 1991, p. 355.
- ↑ Aron Benario and others (eds.): "Because human dying never stops--": Aspects of Jewish life in the past and present. Ferdinand Schöningh, 1997, ISBN 3-87717-780-8 , p. 73.
- ^ Stefan Rohrbacher, Michael Schmidt: Judenbilder. Reinbek 1991, p. 356f.
- ↑ Saul Friedländer: The Third Reich and the Jews: 1933-1945. Beck, Munich 2010, ISBN 3-406-60654-7 , p. 57
- ^ Otto Dov Kulka: German Judaism under National Socialism 1: Documents on the History of the Reich Representation of German Jews 1933-1939. Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 1998, ISBN 3-16-147267-5 , p. 140
- ↑ Hans J. Gamm: Judaism. Lit Verlag, 2010, p. 98
- ^ Harm-Peer Zimmermann: Walther Steller in Breslau (1920 to 1937). Folklore and hairdressing under the sign of National Socialism. In: Nordfriesisches Jahrbuch, New Series Volume 30, 1994, pp. 41–54.
- ↑ Ruggero Taradel: L'accusa del sangue: storia politica di un mito antisemita Biblioteca di storia. Editori riuniti, 2002, ISBN 88-359-5128-3 , pp. 183 and 279 (Italian); Robert Werner: The Regensburg ritual murder accusations - Sex pueri Ratisbonae. Developments, connections with Trient and Rinn, relics. In: Historischer Verein Regensburg und Oberpfalz (Ed.): Negotiations of the Historischer Verein für Oberpfalz and Regensburg 150 (VHV0) 2010, p. 97
- ^ Stefan Rohrbacher, Michael Schmidt: Judenbilder. 1991, p. 355; "Der Stürmer": ritual murder special issue, May 1939 (title page)
- ^ Stefan Rohrbacher, Michael Schmidt: Judenbilder. 1991, p. 422, footnote 77
- ^ Stefan Rohrbacher, Michael Schmidt: Judenbilder. Reinbek 1991, p. 358.
- ↑ Wolfgang Benz: The Jewish ritual murder (Hellmut Schramm, 1943). In: Wolfgang Benz (Hrsg.): Handbook of Antisemitism Volume 6: Publications. De Gruyter, Berlin 2013, ISBN 3-11-025872-2 , p. 378 ; NS document: Heinrich Himmler: An order for Ernst Kaltenbrunner
- ^ Andreas Gößling: Voodoo: gods, magic, rituals. MayaMedia, 2020, ISBN 3-944488-43-1 , pp. 33f.
- ^ Edward Berenson: The Accusation: Blood Libel in an American Town. WW Norton, 2019, ISBN 0393249425
- ↑ Thomas Brechenmacher: The Vatican and the Jews. CH Beck, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-406-52903-8 , p. 268.
- ↑ Achim Bühl: Antisemitismus , 2020, p. 62
- ↑ Thomas Albrich: Jewish life in Tyrol and Vorarlberg from 1700 to 1805. Haymon, Vienna 2014, ISBN 978-3-7099-7341-7 , p. 31 and fn. 94
- ↑ Kurt Schubert: Christianity and Judaism through the ages. Böhlau, Vienna 2003, ISBN 3205770846 , pp. 90f.
- ^ Diocese of Innsbruck (ed.): Judenstein. The end of a legend - documentation. Innsbruck 1995; Bernhard Fresacher: Anderl von Rinn. Ritual murder cult and reorientation in Judenstein 1945–1995. Innsbruck / Vienna 1998, ISBN 3-7022-2125-5 ; Konrad Breitsching, Hermann Steidl (Ed.): Particular law of the Diocese of Innsbruck. Innsbruck 2010, p. 557f.
- ^ Stefan Rohrbacher, Michael Schmidt: Judenbilder. Reinbek 1991, p. 360.
- ^ Stefan Rohrbacher, Michael Schmidt: Judenbilder. Reinbek 1991, p. 362.
- ^ German Bishops' Conference: Pope John Paul II's request for forgiveness. Press release, March 12, 2000
- ↑ David Kertzer: The Popes against the Jews. The Vatican and the rise of modern anti-Semitism. Propylaea, 2001, ISBN 3-549-07147-7 (preface).
- ↑ Peter Kenez: Antisemitism in Post World War II
- ^ Sabina Loriga: The Controversies over the Publication of Ariel Toaff's “Bloody Passovers”. In: Journal of The Historical Society Volume 8, Issue 4 November 18, 2008
- ↑ Fatir Ziun (Mustafa Tlas, 1983). In: Wolfgang Benz (Hrsg.): Handbook of Antisemitism Volume 6: Publications. Berlin 2013, p. 196
- ↑ a b Leading Egyptian Newspaper Raises Blood Libel. Memri, November 6, 2000
- ↑ Esther Webman: Anti-Zionism, anti-Semitism and Criticism of Israel. The Arab Perspective. In: Moshe Zuckermann (Ed.): Anti-Semitism - Anti-Zionism - Israel criticism. Tel Aviver Yearbook for German History 2005. Wallstein, 2005, ISBN 3892448728 , pp. 306–329, here p. 309
- ^ Saudi Government Daily: Jews Use Teenagers' Blood for 'Purim' Pastries. Memri.org, March 12, 2002
- ↑ Tilman Tarach: The Eternal Scapegoat: Israel, Holy War and the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion". 5th edition 2016, Edition Telok, ISBN 3-9813486-2-1 , pp. 136-138
- ↑ Wolfram Stender, Guido Follert, Mihri Özdogan (eds.): Constellations of anti-Semitism: anti-Semitism research and socio-educational practice. Springer VS, Wiesbaden 2010, ISBN 978-3-531-17235-4 , p. 129
- ↑ Michael Borgstede: Hezbollah and Syria cooperate: hatred of Jews in the evening program. Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung / HaGalil, February 23, 2004
- ↑ Tilman Tarach: The Eternal Scapegoat. 5th edition 2016, pp. 139f.
- ^ Raphael Israeli: Blood Libel and Its Derivatives , London 2017, p. 138
- ↑ Adam Kredo: This Blood Libel Brought to You by the West. Washington Free Bacon, April 1, 2013; Gerald M. Steinberg: Palestinian NGO Blood Libel, Funded by EU and US Times of Israel, April 11, 2013
- ↑ David French: Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib Partnered with Vicious Anti-Semites to Plan Their Trip to Israel. National Review, August 16, 2019
- ^ A b Anna Merlan: Republic of Lies: American Conspiracy Theorists and Their Surprising Rise to Power. Metropolitan Books, 2019, ISBN 1250159059 , p. 40
- ↑ Egyptian Politician Khaled Zaafrani: Jews Use Human Blood for Passover Matzos. Memri, May 12, 2013
- ↑ Tilman Tarach: The Eternal Scapegoat. 5th edition 2016, p. 151; Itamar Marcus, Nan Jacques Zilberdik: Jews make matzah bread from blood, sacrifice humans to Satan - in Al-Aqsa lesson. Palwatch, June 2, 2015
- ↑ Wolfgang Benz: "The Eternal Jew". Metropol, Berlin 2010, ISBN 3-940938-68-8 , p. 169
- ↑ Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution: Report on the Protection of the Constitution 2004 (PDF p. 102)
- ^ Ministry of the Interior of North Rhine-Westphalia : Report on the Protection of the Constitution of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia for the year 2004 (PDF p. 109)
- ↑ Trond Berg Eriksen, Hakon Harket, Einhart: Judenhass: The history of anti-Semitism from antiquity to the present. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2019, ISBN 3-525-36743-0 , p. 572
- ↑ Helga Embacher, Bernadette Edtmaier, Alexandra Preitschopf: Anti-Semitism in Europe. Case studies of a global phenomenon in the 21st century. Böhlau, Vienna 2019, ISBN 3-205-23269-0 , p. 142
- ^ Jörg Lau: Another Brick in The Wall. Anti-Semitism and Pop Culture. Time online, January 28, 2013
- ^ Alan Cowell: Murdoch Apologizes for 'Grotesque' Netanyahu Cartoon in British Paper. New York Times, Jan. 29, 2013
- ↑ Georg M. Hafner, Esther Schapira: Israel is to blame for everything: Why the Jewish state is so hated. Bastei Lübbe, Cologne 2015, ISBN 3-8479-0589-9 , p. 21 and p. 50–60
- ↑ Anti-Semitic demo in Berlin: "Death, Death, Israel". HaGalil, July 23, 2006
- ↑ Christian Heilbronn, Doron Rabinovici, Natan Sznaider (eds.): New anti-Semitism? Continuation of a global debate. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 2019, ISBN 978-3-518-12740-7, p. 210 ; Lars Rensmann : How can that be? Welt online, August 3, 2014; Jan Süselbeck : What is secondary anti-Semitism? literaturkritik.de No. 9, September 2014
- ^ Jan-Philipp Hein: European Sunday Speeches. Schweriner Volkszeitung, August 9, 2014
- ↑ James McConnachie, Robin Tudge: The Rough Guide to Conspiracy Theories. 3rd edition, Penguin, London 2013, ISBN 1-4093-6245-0 , p. 101
- ↑ Nathalie Rothschild: The Blood Libel That Won't Quit. Tablet Magazine, December 3, 2012
- ^ John-Paul Pagano: Blood Libel: The Conspiracy Theory That Jews Are 'Anti-Human'. National Review, September 23, 2019
- ↑ Sarah Judith Hoffmann: What is behind the BDS movement, which calls for a boycott of Israel? Deutsche Welle, December 2, 2017; Stefan Frank: Society Switzerland-Palestine wanted to hold an event with a terrorist and anti-Semite. Audiatur-online.ch, 23 August 2018
- ↑ Jutta Ditfurth: Attitude and Resistance. An epic battle for values and world views. Osburg, Hamburg 2019, ISBN 978-3-95510-203-6 , p. 157 (quotations translated with original spelling); Yair Rosenberg: Why is Amnesty International Sponsoring a US Tour for a Palestinian Promoter of the Blood Libel? Tablet Magazine, October 16, 2015; ADL Condemns Blood Libel Accusation Posted by Palestinian Activist on Social Media. Anti Defamation League, October 16, 2015
- ↑ Belgian trade union boss says Israel kills Palestinian kids for their organs. Times of Israel, October 19, 2018
- ↑ Musical ritual murder legends. Distant Worlds, September 28, 2012; Hidden Song: Naidoo & Savas: Gay Conspiracy Theories. Queer.de, September 25, 2020; Harald Peters: Kool Savas and Naidoo are brilliantly humorless. Welt Online, September 21, 2012
- ↑ Suspicion of sedition: Public prosecutor investigates Xavier Naidoo. Spiegel Online, November 14, 2012
- ↑ a b c Sebastian Huld: Conspiracy theory QAnon: Horror tale of child torturers goes around. N-tv, May 12, 2020
- ^ David M. Perry: The New Blood Libel: The tragic history — and scary future — of fake news and anti-semitism. Pacific Standard, October 31, 2018
- ↑ Weeping Xavier Naidoo: Abduction cult, cannibalism, ritual murders. Rolling Stone April 3, 2020; Christoph David Piorkowski: Contortions of the conspiracy ideologues: The serious error of the simple truth. Tagesspiegel, June 9, 2020; Andre Wolf: Contemporary ritual murder legends: Adrenochrome. Mimikama, June 30, 2020
