Abstract

On 1 April 1899, the day before Easter, the body of Anezka Hruzova or Agnes Hruza, a 19-year-old Christian seamstress who had disappeared on Ash Wednesday, was found in the Brezina Forest near Polna. This city was a German-speaking town of about 5,000 people including 212 Jews, in eastern Bohemia about 60 miles from Prague, and close to the Bohemian-Moravian border in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Hruza's throat appeared to have been cut and her head partially severed. A small pool of blood and some stained stones were found, as were torn clothes and a rope near the body. At once, the rumor spread among the general public, fostered by the anti-Semitic press, that the victim had been murdered by Jews, raising the age-old blood libel, the accusation that the Jews murdered Christians in order to obtain their blood for ritual purposes, the baking of unleavened bread, or Passover matzos. Articles in the press and in brochures repeated the occurrence and denunciation of ritual murder. Within a few days, the day after the girl was given a martyr's funeral, a 22-year-old Jew, Leopold Hilsner, was arrested. He was a weak-minded, lazy, unemployed shoemaker who lived with his mother and who often walked in the area where the body was found. One woman witness had told the legal committee, set up by the local authorities to investigate the crime and which paid for testimonies, that she had seen Hilsner and two other Jews at the scene of the crime on the day of the murder, March 29. When later confronted with Hilsner at his trial, she conceded she could not be certain he was the same man she saw. Two other people asserted they had seen Hilsner and the two other men running toward the murder scene on the afternoon of March 29 and then walking away from it. Hilsner was charged with Hruza's murder; his arrest and the charge triggered anti-Semitic riots and the destruction of property in the Jewish part of town. The original examination of the body stated that Hruza sustained a number of wounds to the blood covered head through the use of stones or sticks. Her skin was lacerated and she had suffered bruises on her arms. Her clothes were violently torn off and she had been dragged a distance into the hollow. A tremendous wound was found on her throat, which had been cut with great force by a long, sharp instrument. There was a strangulation mark found at the center of her neck. The throat wound was fatal, the strangulation mark dangerous. It suggested that a noose, part of which was found at the crime scene, had been thrown over the head of the vic-

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