A Tale of Ritual Murder in the Age of Louis XIV: The Trial of Raphaël Lévy, 1669, by Pierre Birnbaum, translated by Arthur Goldhammer

Abstract

A Tale of Ritual Murder in the Age of Louis XIV: The Trial of Raphael Levy, 1669, by Pierre Birnbaum, translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture. Stanford, California, Stanford University Press, 2012. iii, 178 pp. $60.00 US (cloth). Pierre Birnbaum's study of a ritual murder trial in seventeenth-century France succeeds in achieving what good microhistories do best: it exposes readers to the fate of a relatively unknown historical event/figure in order to force us to reevaluate our understanding of the past. Birnbaum excavates a criminal trial in which a Jew was accused of kidnapping and killing a young Christian boy in 1669. The defendant, Raphael Levy, was executed even though he steadfastly maintained his innocence. Birnbaum convincingly argues that Levy's trial and execution need to be remembered by the French today. Like the trial of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish military officer wrongfully accused of treason in the late nineteenth century, Levy's experience and its erasure from mainstream historiography reveals how anti-Semitism can contaminate modern French political culture. Raphael Levy, a Jew living in the French borderlands near Metz, was accused of having murdered young Didier Le Moyne in order to extract his blood to perform an occult Jewish ritual. Such ritual murder accusations were a rare but regular occurrence in late medieval Germany, but until now historians have not recognized their existence in France. During the course of Levy's trial, the specific allegations of a single murder quickly mushroomed into more general accusations of Jewish desecration of the Host. This second set of charges resulted in several prominent Jews of Metz being imprisoned and interrogated. In the end, Levy was burnt at the stake in January 1670, but the others were spared by the timely intervention of Louis XIV who explicitly denied the existence of Jewish blood rituals and ordered that all defendants be exonerated. Birnbaum constructs a forceful and dramatic narrative of these harrowing events. The strength of his analysis lies in linking this seventeenth-century trial to twentieth-century political culture. Birnbaum demonstrates that Levy's trial has been largely forgotten by historians, but occasionally deployed by French anti-Semitic writers to malign the Jewish people. Nevertheless, as a specialist in twentieth-century politics and Jewish history, Birnbaum's relative lack of knowledge about the seventeenth century results in some errors: early modern French courts did not prosecute 100,000 witches and current research about the French monarchy under Louis XIV belies his blithe statements about rational bureaucracy. More importantly, Birnbaum missed opportunities to strengthen his central argument that anti-Semitism has a long history in France. A richer religious context would have helped readers to understand why Jews were particularly vulnerable to harassment in the late seventeenth century. Birnbaum notes a rise in criminal accusations against Jews in Lorraine during the 1660s and 1670s; at one point during the Levy trial, Christian crowds sought to attack and expel all Jews from Metz. …