Deborah Jo Miller, Cornell University
Paper Delivered April 16, 1994 at the Fordham University Conference on "Violence in the Middle Ages"
Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his 1972 Nobel Lecture said, "Violence does not and cannot exist by itself; it is invariably intertwined with the LIE." I began this paper out of a desire to explore the relationship between belief in a particular lie, the myth of Jewish ritual murder, and the anti-Jewish violence which for eight centuries has tended to follow in its wake. I soon found that this project was far too large to be dealt with in one conference paper, and have therefore largely confined myself to raising some questions in preparation for further research.
The first recorded instance of a ritual murder accusation is found in Thomas of Monmouth's biography of 'Saint' William of Norwich, a twelve year old boy who was, according to the monk Thomas, crucified during Easter week 1144 by the Jews of England in mockery of Christ's passion. The legend that Jews annually tortured and killed a Christian child in contempt of Christ was disseminated through England and northern France in the second half of the twelfth century and led to the establishment of several shrines to so-called 'martyred innocents.' A second version of the fantasy, the more familiar and dangerous blood libel, arose independently among German burghers in about 1235 and spread rapidly on the continent, sparking riots and quasi-legal executions almost everywhere it appeared despite repeated condemnation of the libel by popes and secular rulers alike. (note- The term "blood libel," though commonly misused as a synonym for "ritual murder accusation," properly refers only to the alleged murder of non-Jews by Jews in order to extract blood or body parts for religious, magical, or medicinal purposes.)
The Christian fantasy of Jewish ritual murder has proved to be one of the most enduring legacies of the middle ages, resulting in the deaths of countless Jews over the centuries. Anyone today hearing of a blood libel in Eastern Europe or the former Soviet Union recognizes it as the prelude to a pogrom; the pattern is, by now, all too familiar. It is therefore perhaps not difficult to understand why modern scholars assume that this pattern always held true, and why they have accorded to the medieval libels an un-nuanced, undifferentiated treatment in which all references to Jewish ritual crime are treated as recipes for violence and are assumed to have eventuated pogroms or trials. In reality the ritual murder fantasy prior to 1235 did not occasion popular violence, and only once during this time was it used as a pretext for official persecution. Nevertheless, and despite the more careful scholarship of historians like Gavin Langmuir, the secondary literature is still full of careless references to massacres which in fact never occurred (such as the so-called "Norwich pogrom of 1144").
The unexplained death of the twelve-year-old William of Norwich in 1144 was not accompanied by anti-Jewish violence of any sort, nor did the boy's later elevation to sainthood have any tangible consequences for the Jewish community of Norwich. The myth that he was crucified by Jews was not an expression of popular animosity towards Jews; it was the hagiographical creation of one monk intent on securing a relic-shrine for his cathedral priory. When Thomas of Monmouth arrived in Norwich and began his campaign to have little William recognized as a saint, the boy's body had been lying in the cemetery for five years exhibiting a singular lack of thaumaturgic power. In the hopes of generating a cult, Thomas wrote a Vita casting William in the boy martyr tradition and protraying his death as a crucifixion by the local community of non-believers, the Jews (pagan persecutors being somewhat rare in 12th century Norfolk). Initially the story was received with skepticism, but eventually the determined efforts of a pro-William faction within the monastery generated some popular interest in the new saint, and a cult developed. Thaumaturgic relics conferred both prestige and revenue on the church which possessed them, and it is not surprising that, once the fame of the William's shrine spread beyond Norwich, others would attempt to imitate its success. Ritual murder stories modelled on Thomas's vita appeared in Gloucester in 1168, in Bury St Edmunds in 1181, in Winchester in 1192, and in Paris in 1163.
On only one occasion was this early version of the ritual murder fantasy exploited as a pretext for violence against the Jews. In 1171 Count Theobald of Chartres, whose amorous affair with a Jewish woman had evidently aroused the ire of a number of local nobles including his wife, arrested and executed 30 Jews in his town of Blois for an alleged ritual murder, although in this case there was no dead body and not even a missing child. What is important to note is that the violence was official, not popular, the event was isolated, and that the persecutors' motives were specific, personal, and political. Elsewhere shrines to alleged victims of Jewish ritual crime were erected, but Jews themselves were left unmolested (with the exception of one Jewish man in Winchester, who was arrested but subsequently aquitted and released).
Perhaps because modern students of Jewish-Christian relations cannot avoid looking at the past through the lens of the Holocaust, we tend to regard the absence of violence in moments of crisis or tension between the communities as an anomaly requiring explanation. This is a point to which I will return in a moment, but first I will look at some of the ways historians try to account for the puzzling phenomenon of peaceful coexistence of Jews and Christians.
One theory is that only vigilant official protection can safeguard Jews from the perennial wrath of the mob. Maurice Samuel, writing on the Beiliss blood libel case of 1911, remarks: "At the time of the Yushchinsky murder, pogroms were not being countenanced by the administration; therefore they did not occur." A more succinct and illuminating statement of the state of Jewish-Christian relations in early 20th century Kiev could hardly be found; the assumption behind it is that Christian animosity towards Jews was a constant force kept in check, and that once the restraints on that hostility were removed it would inevitably break forth into pogroms. For the medieval period, however, one finds that the presence or absence of effective governmental protection is rarely sufficient to explain patterns of popular violence against the Jewish minority (nor, or course, does it address the question of official persecution). To cite one example, the Norwich accusation appeared during the period usually referred to as the "anarchy" under King Stephen, and yet there is no hint that the Jewish community was in real danger of being attacked (in fact, if our source is to be believed, the Jews felt secure enough to joke about the libel). It is noteworthy that none of the English accusations of ritual murder is mentioned in Jewish literature either in England on the continent, in contrast to the well-documented massacres in England at the time of the third crusade.[1] Nor did English Jews find it necessary to seek specific protection from the charges, either from clerical or lay authorities. Ritual murder accusations in the twelfth century simply did not result in anti-Jewish riots, and explaining this fact solely in terms of official protection implies a more efficient peacekeeping apparatus than I can see elsewhere in medieval society.
Salo Baron, one of the few scholars to note the lack of impact these first accusations had on Jewish life, attributed the absence of violence to general skepticism regarding the tales.[2] But this, too, seems an overly simplistic explanation. Large numbers of Christians did believe the accusations on one level; miracles do not occur nor cults evolve in the absence of belief, and there was no shortage of miracles at the shrines of "martyred innocents." To me, one of the most striking aspects of the early ritual murder fantasy is the phenomenon of mental compartmentalization that seemed to enable some people to believe in mythical Jews who annually crucify Christian children, without however equating these culprits in every sense with the real Jews living in their own town.
The fact that the accusations were literary creations from within the monasteries provides one clue to understanding this paradoxical situation. Historians have tended to connect the appearance of the first ritual murder accusations with a general atmosphere of heightened Christian zeal and anti-Jewish animus, but this is too crude an assessment of the situation in twelfth-century England. As an aside I might add that we could gain a more accurate picture of the day-to-day relations between Jews and Christians were we to devote more careful attention to sources like financial records and Hebrew responsa, rather than uncritically accepting the rhetoric of a hagiographer bent on promoting his patron's sanctity. A more careful examination of the sources reveals that the presumed connection between popular hostility and the appearance of the first ritual murder myth is a false one. Doubtless these rumors, by contributing to a negative stereotype of the 'Jew', had some effect on Christians' attitude towards their Jewish neighbors, but the effect is difficult, perhaps impossible, to trace or quantify. What is clear at this point is that the mere existence of ritual murder accusations should not be used, as it frequently is, to support careless assertions about the "rising tide" of popular anti-Jewish sentiment during the twelfth century. All available evidence suggests that ritual murder accusations prior to the first appearance of the so-called blood libel in Germany in 1235 were products of a rhetorical tradition, purveyed by elites in elite writings, and qualitatively different from the pogrom tradition which would arise in the thirteenth century as the result of still imperfectly understood social cleavages and anxieties. The first ritual murder accusations, we must recall, were artiulated in the monastic scriptorium and not the local tavern.
The blood libel which began circulating in German towns in the second third of the thirteenth century may well have been born in a tavern; in any case, it seems to have emerged among Christian burghers and to have drawn on the already prevalent idea that Jews, out of hatred for Christianity, wickedly murder in secret Christians (of any age) whenever they get the opportunity to do so. This antecedent joined forces with with popular ideas about the properties of blood, anxieties surrounding the Real Presence in the Eucharist, and fears relating to sorcery and heresy to coalesce into Europe's first blood libel. (There is no space here for an elaboration of the specific psychological factors that may have shaped the myth itself. These have been discussed elsewhere by myself and others.)
The accidental death of five children in a fire was the occasion for the first blood libel. The annals of Erfurt and Marbach record tha on Christmas of the year 1235, the citizens of Fulda joined with crusaders to put 34 Jews of both sexes to the sword
because two of the Jews had, on holy Christmas Day, cruelly killed the five sons of a miller who lived outside the city walls, and was at the time at church with his wife; they had collected their blood in bags smeared with wax, and had then, after they had set fire to them, gone away. When the truth of this occurrence was made known, and confessed to by the guilty Jews themselves, they were punished, as stated above.[3]
The ominous mention of a confession suggests that some sort of extra-legal trial had taken place within the brief space of three days and that torture had been used. Although only two Jews were accused of the crime, thirty-two were considered accomplices and punished since the blood was allegedly collected for the entire community.[4]
The Fulda incident did not end with the execution of the Jews; rather the case was subsequently brought--quite literally--before the emperor. Certain Christians carted the bodies of the five dead boys all the way from Fulda to Hagenau to show to Frederick II as evidence that Jews needed Christian blood at 'parasceve,'[5] a term which in this context must designate Good Friday.[6] Frederick was not impressed, and is reported to have said, 'If they are dead, then bury them, since they are not good for anything else.'[7] But despite official condemnation of the blood libel by pope and emperor alike, it swept through the area sparking popular riots and lynchings in a number of other towns.
How do historians account for the popular violence that attended the blood accusations? By and large, they don't. The scholarship on medieval antisemitism concentrates on the origins and development of the antisemitic myths and stereotypes but takes for granted an inevitable causal connection between beliefs about Jews and violence against them. To date there has been little attempt to investigate the nexus between myth and murder or to investigate the mechanisms whereby beliefs are translated into action. Troubled by this omission, I turned hopefully to the recent work of Gavin Langmuir, but found that even he takes for granted a natural progression from belief to action, from stereotype to violence. Two examples will illustrate:
"Thomas disseminated his fantasy by word of mouth and by the account he wrote of it. Others picked up the story and spread it further. The belief was then translated into action."[8] But how? By what mechanism, and what agents? By using the passive voice, the historian begs these important questions.
"The greatest slaughter of Jews at any one time in the Middle Ages was caused, however, by a totally different fantasy [that Jews were responsible for the Black Death.]"[9] Is there convincing evidence that the fantasies by themselves caused massacres? Precipitated would surely be a more appropriate word.
Thus assuming that there is a natural connection, an inevitable causal relationship between accusations of ritual crime and attacks on Jewries, has not only led historians to interpolate violent episodes in some instances; it has also prevented them from carefully investigating the other factors which may have been operating when anti-Jewish violence did erupt.
I think we must test our assumption that blood libels "cause" violence. There is at least some evidence, in fact, that the causal relationship might be the other way around. In Germany there existed prior to 1235 a long tradition of accusing Jews of (non-ritual) murder whenever a Christian's corpse was found, accusations which frequently resulted in attacks on entire Jewish communities. In March of 1147 in the midst of the volatile and emotive atmosphere of the second crusade, the discovery of a drowned Christian in Wurzburg precipitated the killing of 22 Jews.[10] In 1179 some Christians travelling by boat on the Rhine found the body of a Christian on the shore. They accused some Jews travelling on another boat of murder and followed them to Boppard, where they injured the alleged killers and threw them into the river. They then paraded the body of one of the Jews through several towns as evidence of Jewish wickedness. Only later did the emperor and bishop intervene and impose a fine.[11]
In 1195 the discovery near Speyer of the body of a Christian woman raised similar accusations, with even more violent results. A group of Christians from the town took it upon themselves to exhume the recently buried body of R. Isaac bar Asher ha-Levi's daughter, which they hung naked in the marketplace with a rat tied in the hair, until the father could ransom and re-inter the corpse. The following day they surrounded the rabbi's house, slew him along with eight others, and set fire to a number of Jewish homes. The rest of the Jews fled under cover of darkness, having taken refuge in the synagogue, and the Christian mob then burned the synagogue and plundered Jewish homes. Duke Otto and the emperor later fined the bishop and burghers, forcing them to pay for the rebuilding of the Jewish houses and synagogue.[12] This pattern of murder allegations followed by popular violence was repeated with slight variations in Vienne (1181), Neuss (1197), Nürnburg (1198), and Erfurt (1199), where local authorities showed themselves unable (or perhaps unwilling) to deter the riots. Although the fantasy of a Jewish conspiracy is absent from all these accusations of non-ritual murder, collective retribution was exacted from entire Jewish communities for crimes imputed to one or two of their members.
It is against this background of anti-Jewish violence, particularly in the Rhineland where the oldest and largest Jewish communities were established[13] and where so many Jews had met a violent death during the First Crusade, that the first blood accusation arose in 1235 and rapidly spread. Indeed, this very background of popular violence against Jews in many ways prepared the ground for the blood libel by engendering a persecutors' mentality which dehumanized the victims, not only making them objects of suspicion and mistrust, but also attributing to them a secret desire for collective vengeance.[14] Could the blood libels have arisen out of a need for an ex post facto rationalization for persecution of Jews? (M. Schultz, in an article in the journal of psychohistory, brings up the interesting point that persecutions of Christians by Romans, and more recent persecutions of Christian missionaries by the Chinese, were also followed by blood libels, evidence which she sees as suggestive of a 'psychological nexus' between the two phenomena.) Again, I am reminded of Alexander Solzhenitsyn: "Whoever has once announced violence as his METHOD must inexorably choose lying as his PRINCIPLE. At birth, violence behaves openly and even proudly. But as soon as it becomes stronger and firmly established, it senses the thinning of the air around it and cannot go on without befogging itself in lies..."[15]
All this is at present mere speculation, of course, and much research remains to be done. At this stage in my research I am just beginning to look to models and theories from the fields of sociology, psychology, and anthropology which may help explain why anti-Jewish violence appeared in certain circumstances and not in others. Modern theories of collective behavior may prove particularly helpful in this regard.
My suspicion is that collective violence by Christians against minority groups, including Jews, is a far more complex phenomenon than is commonly acknowledged by medieval historians and is one which I am not yet equipped to explain. My purpose with these preliminary remarks has been to challenge the common assumption that violence against Jews can be adequately explained by vague references to "popular hostility" or "antisemitism." I am heartened by the fact that my conclusions here seem to accord in a general way with those of Professor Robert Moore, who postulates that Europe became a "persecuting society" in the high middle ages for reasons that had less to do with popular antipathy towards persecuted minorities -- Jews, lepers, heretics, etc. -- than with fundamental transformations in the social and economic organization of majority society.[16]
Unless the relationship between belief and action is problematized, we risk
basing the whole study of the historical rise of antisemitism on a tautology in
which violence is "explained" in terms of increasing Christian "hostility" to
Jews, but the existence of said hostility is itself deduced from the references
to anti-Jewish violence. I shall welcome all suggestions for how to break out
of this circular pattern of reasoning.
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