¹ I do not discuss the famous York riot of 1190 in this paper and would refer anyone interested in it to Barrie Dobson's excellent study, "The Jews of Medieval York and the Massacres of March 1190." Borthwick Papers, 45 (York, 1974). Although one does not know what to make of the York citizen's subsequent claims to have been uninvolved in the violence, there is plenty of evidence that this attack, like the crusader massacres which occured in the Rhineland in 1096, was orchestrated by certain unscrupulous members of the petty nobility for their own personal reasons.

²S.W. Baron, Social and Religious History of the Jews p. 137: 'one cannot escape the impression that in these early stages the accusation was not taken too literally even by its exponents.'

³Annales Ephordenses, MGH SS 16: 31, translated in Strack, pp. 178-9; see also Zunz, pp. 29-30; Salfeld, pp. 122-3; and Aronius, no. 474, pp. 207-9. Aronius believes the number should be thirty-two Jews, killed by both burghers and crusaders.

⁴There is a subtle distinction between the violence at Fulda and what had gone before. Whereas Christian mobs had hitherto been known to take vengeance on entire Jewish communities for the 'crimes' of individual Jews, at Fulda thirty-four died because they were all perceived to be guilty of involvement in a Jewish conspiracy to obtain and use Christian blood. The fact that only two Jews were accused of the 'murder' itself was unimportant, since the crime supposedly went far beyond murder.

⁵Ibid.

⁶Cf. A. Blaise, Dictionnaire Latin-Français des auteurs Chrétiens (Turnhout, 1954), s.v.; cf. Luke 23: 54 (Vuglate).

⁷Aronius, p. 208, 'Si mortui sunt, ite, sepelite eos, quia ad aliud non valent.'

⁸ Langmuir, p. 299.

⁹ Langmuir, p. 301.

¹⁰Zunz, p. 22; Salfeld, pp. 119-20.

¹¹Zunz p. 25; Baron, p. 133.

¹²Baron, pp. 133-4.

¹³Cf. A. Haverkamp, Medieval Germany 1056-1273, trans. H. Braun and R. Mortimer (Oxford, 1988), p. 343.

¹⁴M. Schultz, 'The Blood Libel: A Motif in the History of Childhood,' Journal of Psychohistory 14 (1986), p. 11.

¹⁵ Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Nobel Lecture, tr. F. D. Reeve (New York, 1972), pp. 32-3.

¹⁶ R. I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance in Western Europe, 950-1250 (Oxford, 1987).

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