Ritual Murder Accusation Research Articles

The Jews and the Reformation by Kenneth Austin

Reviewed by: The Jews and the Reformation by Kenneth Austin Thomas Kaufmann The Jews and the Reformation. By Kenneth Austin. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020. 288 pages. $45.00 (cloth). This book is characterized by a remarkable achievement: it synthesizes solid research on the history of European Jewry from the late Middle Ages (fourteenth century) to the early modern period (late seventeenth century) into a concise, striking and easy-to-read overall presentation. In this respect, it is less a genuine research achievement than a compact and, in terms of the information available, impressive overview of the situation of Jews in the pre-modern era. The term "Reformation," chosen by the author, is problematic however because it is used to describe all of the conceivable religious changes and movements between the late Middle Ages and the advanced early modern period, as is common in Anglo-American research. With this approach, however, the term "Reformation" loses its traditional historiographical concision. The title of this important book is also problematic in that it suggests that it is about the Jewish people as such, when in fact, Kenneth Austin, Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Bristol, describes how different European societies dealt with the Jews, rather than tracing a history of interactions or the Jews' [End Page 175] view of their surrounding societies. None of this changes the fact that this is a comprehensive and convincing book in its own right, particularly with regard to the question of how individual Christian denominations have acted with reference to the toleration of Jews. The book clearly moves beyond previous stereotypes. A detailed presentation of the book's content is appropriate. The very helpful timeline begins with the pogroms against the Jews in connection with the First Crusade in 1095 and ends with the Glorious Revolution of 1688. In his introduction, Austin emphasizes the National Socialist embrace of Martin Luther to justify the anti-Jewish policy of the Third Reich and points out that this horizon must be kept in mind. Luther's position is to be understood in the context of his time. In contrast to a very one-sided focus on the "Jewish Question" in Luther's writings, the author establishes a broader perspective. The typical narrative of the Reformation as a factor in modernization and the development of tolerance, which was particularly popular in the nineteenth century, does not apply to attitudes toward Jews. The book presents a diversity of opinions in each Christian denomination. Austin goes back to the beginnings of the process of detachment and alienation between Christians and Jews in the first century CE. Paul, John Chrysostom, Augustine, and the IV Lateran Council prove to be particularly prominent individuals and factors in the increasing conflict between the two groups. The differentiated picture of a partial Jewish inculturation was set in motion in the late Middle Ages by various "popular attitudes": the accusation of ritual murder, first encountered in England in 1144; the charge of host desecration, first encountered in Paris in 1290; the supposition since the second half of the thirteenth century that Jews, especially Jewish doctors, inflicted physical suffering on Christians or poisoned them, which led to the charge of their responsibility for the plague epidemic of 1348. The crucial developments for the predicament of the Jews in the late Middle Ages were as follows. A process of economic demonization of the Jews had already begun in the twelfth century. Images like the confrontation between (blind) Synagogue and (triumphant) Church, the Judensau, and even the first Passion Plays, [End Page 176] date from this period. Nevertheless, conflicts with deadly results for Jews were the exception during the late Middle Ages. The intensified efforts to promote the Hebrew language under the sign of humanism, which partly included Kabbalah, increased interest in Judaism, but did not per se promote greater tolerance toward Jews. Respect for Hebrew was much less pronounced than for Greek and Latin, as Austin demonstrates through a number of authors, especially Erasmus. In the second half of the fifteenth century, the expulsion of Jews from various European countries increased. Austin estimates that the total number of Jews in Europe around 1500 was 500...

Blood Libel: On the Trail of an Antisemitic Myth by Magda Teter

Reviewed by: Blood Libel: On the Trail of an Antisemitic Myth by Magda Teter Edward Berenson Blood Libel: On the Trail of an Antisemitic Myth. By Magda Teter. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2020. 539 pages. $39.95 (cloth). Although there is a great deal of research on the history of the blood libel, much of it recent, Magda Teter's book is one of the rare works to focus extensively on the early modern period (1450–1790s). She does so with impressive erudition, working in multiple languages and in the archives of eight countries. The product is a dazzling intellectual history, a foray into hundreds of well-known and little-known sources that, examined together, provide a comprehensive picture of the creation, dissemination, and reception of this stubbornly persistent antisemitic myth. Medievalists such as Gavin I. Langmuir, John M. McCulloh, and Israel Yuval have examined the infamous early cases—William of Norwich, Hugh of Lincoln, and the Fulda blood libel of [End Page 196] 1235—while historians of modern European antisemitism have homed in on the explosion of ritual murder accusations in the long nineteenth century, especially those between 1880 and the Great War. But there has been less attention given to the early modern stories save for the widely-known tale of Simon of Trent (1475). It is these stories, however, and the extensive commentary they generated that have informed medievalists about the earlier cases and provided the backdrop and context for the modern ones. The pre-modern cases have perhaps received less attention than their medieval and modern counterparts because few historians possess Teter's linguistic firepower, capable as she is of working with sources in Latin, Italian, German, Polish, French, Russian, Hebrew, Yiddish, and Spanish. In arguing for the centrality of the early modern tales of ritual murder, Teter shows that the medieval stories had a mostly local resonance and affected Western culture much less than historians have thought. The case of William of Norwich (1144), generally considered the founding instance of the ritual murder accusation, "survived only in a few mentions in monastic chronicles" (7). The now-famous narrative of William's death, Thomas of Monmouth's The Life and Passion of William of Norwich (volumes issued between 1150 and 1172), "lay forgotten until the nineteenth century, when it was rediscovered and printed" (7). The limited resonance of this affair stemmed in part from the lack of judicial proceedings—the supposed Jewish culprits never stood trial—which kept it from generating much of a paper trail. A narrative by John of Tynemouth published in English and Latin in 1516 was the first full account of William's tale to become somewhat widely known. The death of Hugh of Lincoln in 1255, the first English case to result in the execution of Jews, resonated further, but that was mainly because it entered the English literary canon nearly a century and a half later as the basis of Geoffrey Chaucer's story "The Prioress's Tale." Several continental cases achieved greater notoriety largely because they produced reactions from the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II and Pope Innocent IV who both condemned the notion that Jews consume human blood, which in the [End Page 197] thirteenth century became the core of the accusation against Jews. In December 1235, 34 Jewish men and women were brutally killed in Fulda (central Germany) following accusations that they killed five young boys and collected their blood. In an imperial decree of 1236, Frederick pronounced "the Jews absolved of the grave crime" and forbade his subjects to issue accusations like the one at Fulda (34). Eleven years later, several Jews in Valréas, France were tortured and burned at the stake following the death of a Christian girl. Pope Innocent IV responded by issuing a similar, if more strongly worded, injunction against the blood accusation. In his Sicut Iudaeis, the Pope forbade Catholics to "accuse [Jews] of using human blood in their religious rites since in the Old Testament they are instructed not to use blood of any kind, let alone human blood" (35). Innocent IV diluted this apparently strong statement by adding, however, that "only those be fortified by this our protection who...

Editor's Introduction

Editor's Introduction Catherine Chatterley In this issue, we launch our first Scholars Forum. The Forum will be a section of an issue that brings together a group of leading experts in a sub-field of antisemitism research to discuss an important new book, a controversy, or a specific question. The subject of our first Forum is Madga Teter's new book, Blood Libel: On the Trail of an Antisemitic Myth (Harvard, 2020), a historical study based on printed and archival sources in 10 languages from eight countries over a period of eight centuries. The participants are leading experts on the subject of ritual murder accusations across Europe from the Middle Ages to the modern period: Elissa Bemporad, Hillel Kieval, Miri Rubin, Paola Tartakoff, Magda Teter, and Robert Weinberg. Our first article is a fascinating new study of Ingrid Rimland by Ben Goossen. Rimland was the wife of Ernst zündel and the founder of his Holocaust denial website in California (zundelsite.org). Goossen explores her life and work as a writer of popular Mennonite historical fiction, including her childhood in Nazioccupied Ukraine and her working relationship with several leading Mennonite intellectuals, before explaining her embrace of neo-Nazism and turn toward Holocaust denial and antisemitism. Samuel Ghiles-Meilhac's article on Houria Bouteldja and the Indigènes de la République provides readers with an intelligent appraisal of the Algerian-born French activist and the political group she founded in 2005. The article traces the history of this activist group and analyzes their public interventions and commentary on subjects concerning Jews including antisemitism, the Holocaust, zionism, Israel and Palestine, and terrorist attacks against Jews in France. Of particular interest is the Indigènes' concept of "state philosemitism," a term they coined to describe the French government's supposed privileged treatment of Jews resulting in the supposed special attention given to antisemitism above other forms [End Page 231] of racism in French public life. Likewise, Jews are accused by the Indigènes of being instruments of the French state and of European racist imperialism in general, and are told to reject their "false whiteness," which includes both zionism and their assimilated French identity. Finally, Philip Spencer provides readers with his reflections on the work of Robert Fine, who passed away in 2018. The focus of the article is on the problem of antisemitism on the Left and how Robert understood its development and persistence. Having worked closely with Fine for many years, Spencer is the perfect interpreter of Fine's work and the major intellectual influences on his thinking (Marx, Arendt, and Habermas). Robert Fine was dedicated to the concept of universalism and worked within the intellectual universe of the Left to try to provide a critique of, and an alternative to, its "self-inflicted failures." This issue's wide-ranging book reviews include a study of antisemitism in the comedy films of Nazi Germany, of the early roots of racism (including its antisemitic variant) in medieval society, an analysis of post-Vatican II Catholic doctrines on the Jewish people, a critical examination of Holocaust memorialization in post-Soviet Eastern Europe, a history of an American blood libel story in 1928 Massena, New York, and new biographies of zygmunt Bauman and Theodor Herzl. Sadly, antisemitism research has lost another two important senior scholars: Richard Levy (1940–June 23, 2021) and Manfred Gerstenfeld (1937–February 25, 2021). Richard will be missed by this editor as he was a very generous and helpful member of our advisory board. As always, I thank our authors, book reviewers, and expert readers for sharing their talent, expertise, and generosity with this publication. [End Page 232] Catherine Chatterley Founding Editor-in-Chief Copyright © 2021 Canadian Institute for the Study of Antisemitism

Conversion, Circumcision, and Ritual Murder in Medieval Europe by Paola Tartakoff

Reviewed by: Conversion, Circumcision, and Ritual Murder in Medieval Europe by Paola Tartakoff Sarah Ifft Decker Conversion, Circumcision, and Ritual Murder in Medieval Europe. By Paola Tartakoff. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020. In the thirteenth century, Christian Europe felt under attack from both internal and external enemies: heretics, Muslims, Jews. In response to these threats, whether real or imagined, lay and ecclesiastical authorities heightened their efforts to consolidate Christian identity and reinforce boundaries between faiths. Rising anti-Judaism, in particular, reflected anxieties about the potential instability of Christian identity. However, these attempts to construct social and legal separation between Christians and Jews went hand in hand with the constant blurring of lines. The rhetoric of boundary maintenance itself revealed the troubled nature of these boundaries. Conversion, although potentially desirable, highlighted the permeability of the borders between faiths. Power dynamics in medieval Europe meant that, in theory, conversion should occur in only one direction: toward Christianity. But reality was messier than theory. A small number of born Christians converted to Judaism; Jewish converts reverted to their former faith; liminal individuals occupied the interstices between Judaism and Christianity. In Conversion, Circumcision, and Ritual Murder in Medieval Europe, Paola Tartakoff offers a nuanced exploration of how Christians and Jews thought about these compelling yet dangerous movements between faiths. Tartakoff adopts the pioneering approach of intertwining the study of Christian conversion to Judaism with that of Jewish conversion to Christianity, which she describes as “two subjects whose historiographies have passed until now like ships in the night” (9). By exploring conversion as a bidirectional phenomenon, she offers new insight into both the experiences of converts and the multifaceted attitudes of both communities toward conversion. Her careful delineation of the parallels and divergences between converts paints a portrait of religious transformation, change, and fluidity that is at once broadly synthetic and richly detailed. [End Page 231] Tartakoff frames her narrative around a particular case study, an unusual situation that is illuminated by the broader context of anti-Judaism and multidirectional conversion in thirteenth-century Europe. In 1144, the Jews of Norwich had weathered the earliest recorded ritual murder accusation: they were charged with the murder of a Christian boy named William. Then, nearly a century later, in 1231, a group of Jews from the same city were accused of kidnapping and forcibly circumcising a Christian child named Edward, with the goal of making him a Jew. The story of Edward intersects in striking ways with false anti-Jewish accusations of ritual murder and host desecration, on the one hand, and Christian forcible conversions of Jewish children, on the other. Tartakoff contextualizes Edward’s story by placing it in conversation with discourses of anti-Judaism, Jewish and Christian attitudes toward conversion, and the lived experience of converts. In closing, she offers a speculative yet compelling reading of Edward’s case as a Jewish effort to reclaim a neglected child of contested religious status. The author begins the book by addressing thirteenth-century Christians’ renewed anxieties that Judaism was attractive to Christians and that Jews were actively seeking to lure Christians from their faith. These fears reflected broader concerns about the instability of Christian religious identity. Such concerns went beyond Judaism: the prevalence of Christian heresy and the reports of Christian apostasy to Islam disquieted church leadership. Ecclesiastical writers portrayed Christendom as under attack from diverse forces of spiritual corruption, forces that at times became blended into a single enemy. The Norwich circumcision case both highlighted and reinforced these anxieties. Tartakoff then investigates the link between fears of Christian apostasy and other manifestations of a multivalent Christian anti-Judaism. The thirteenth century witnessed the consolidation of discourses of anti-Judaism that cast Jews (in reality, a vulnerable minority) as powerful enemies bent on the destruction of Christendom and the suffering of Christians. The allegations of ritual murder and host desecration that plagued Jewish communities in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries framed Jews as dangers to present-day Christendom because they were deliberately working to reenact their past murder of Christ. Tartakoff focuses here on the motif of circumcision, central to the accusation levied against the Norwich Jews in the 1230s. Circumcision functioned as the sole aspect...

Satirizing the Blood Libel: Ritual Cannibalism, Infant Sacrifice, and Bloodied Knives in "A Modest Proposal"

Satirizing the Blood Libel:Ritual Cannibalism, Infant Sacrifice, and Bloodied Knives in "A Modest Proposal" Lori A. Davis Perry (bio) The ritual butchering of Irish children for profit, celebrated as a reasonable economic program that will benefit all concerned in Jonathan Swift's "Modest Proposal," suggests a moral vacuum on the part of the narrator that appalls modern readers. Claude Rawson has argued that the pamphlet targets the Irish simultaneously as a despised and identifiable subgroup and as rhetorical shorthand for the more universal "generalized savage" (3). Swift's contemporary readers, however, would have been subjected to an additional source of unease, for the pamphlet censures the ruling classes through pointed references to anti-Semitic tropes by alluding directly to the Blood, Conspiracy, and Economic Libels, the oldest and most dangerous libels against Jews. His Projector proposes an economic program in which Anglo cultural and national identity are transformed to reflect the most viral accusations against the Jews, thereby reversing centuries of moral posturing that depended to a large degree upon a perceived cultural distance from any and all elements of Judaism. The pamphlet thus translates fears of cultural, religious, and racial conflations between Anglo Christians and Jews into a potential reality, as traditional accusations against mythologized Jews become realized as proposed economic policy. Critical attention to anti-Semitism in British literature tends to focus primarily on either the medieval and early modern periods or the nineteenth century to the present. While Anglo-Jewish historians have paid some attention to the eighteenth century, as a general rule literary critics of philoor anti-Semitism have glossed over the period.1 In part, the absence of large Jewish populations in Britain, and their corresponding absence as overt literary characters, has encouraged literary critics to presume a level of cultural indifference, or even amnesia, about Jews among Swift's readers. Yet the absence of a large Jewish population had little effect upon British ideas about Jews; traditional narratives about Jews, no matter how fanciful, superstitious, [End Page 119] or contradicted by evidence, had been asserted in the British Isles and Europe for centuries, developing into a well-formed, long-lasting mythology that continues even into the current era. During Swift's lifetime, anti-Semitic tropes were so familiar as to be accepted nearly without question by readers throughout the British Isles, and formed the everyday knowledge, common opinions, and received ideas of what Roland Barthes describes as the cultural code. Indeed, the Anglo response to the idea of a Jew infuses not simply the literature but the language itself. Whether scholars, diplomats, travelers, or simply tradesmen and farmers, Swift's readers demonstrate a deep-seated awareness of libels against Jews and a corresponding concept of Judaism as antithetical to Anglo identity and culture. "A Modest Proposal" mines this knowledge for its satirical impact. European hatred toward Jews had increased dramatically in the eleventh century, culminating in the Rhineland massacres of 1096. Thereafter, murder accusations against Jews became routine, developing formal conventions over time. The first accusation of ritual murder by crucifixion appeared in Thomas of Monmouth's The Life and Miracles of St. William of Norwich in 1150. Ritual murder accusations (without the accusation of crucifixion) then appeared in Würzburg (1147), Gloucester (1168), Blois (1171), Bury St. Edmunds (1181) and Winchester (1192); inspired by Monmouth, later writers added crucifixion accusations as a matter of course (Langmuir 209-36, 263-81, 282, 298.). Ritual murder accusations spread quickly through Britain and France, but the accusation of cannibalism first appeared in Fulda Germany in 1235, where on Christmas Day, a miller and his wife went to church and returned to find their mill burnt down and the bodies of their five sons in the ruins. The Jews of Fulda, sixty miles north, confessed, presumably under torture, that two of them had killed the boys and drained their blood into bags, to be consumed for religious and/or medicinal purposes. As a result, thirty-four Jews were condemned to mass execution. Thus, the Blood Libel, which conflated ritual child murder and cannibalism, became widespread throughout Europe. After the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 adopted Transubstantiation as official Church doctrine, a Host Desecration Libel arose, in...

Editor's Introduction

Editor's Introduction Catherine Chatterley, Founding Editor-in-Chief In 2018, there was a significant rise in antisemitic violence. In France, there was a 74% increase in antisemitic incidents (from 311 to 541), including the torture and murder of an 85 year old Holocaust survivor (Mireille Knoll). Germany has just reported a 10 year record high of 1,646 antisemitic acts in 2018, in which 43 people were wounded. In the UK, 1,652 antisemitic incidents were recorded with 123 classified as violent (the total number is a 16% increase from the previous year). Canada reports that 2017 was the second consecutive year in which record numbers were reached: 1,752 antisemitic incidents (16 violent acts; 327 acts of vandalism; and 1409 acts of harassment). And, of course, the murder of 11 Jews (and wounding of another six) at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh on October 27, 2018 was the deadliest act of antisemitic violence in American history. There is growing agreement that the main sources of antisemitic violence in the Western world today are on the far-right, the far-left, and within Islamic supremacist circles. Unfortunately, it takes an upsurge in physical violence against Jews for people to recognize the threatening nature of antisemitism. However, few people seem to be willing to make the connection between the escalating rhetorical assault on Jews, Judaism, and the Jewish state since the new millennium and this increase in physical violence. This is perhaps something for scholars to consider as well—the connections between thoughts, words, and actions. In this issue of Antisemitism Studies, Sina Arnold and Jana König address the subject of rising antisemitism in Germany through an examination of refugee attitudes toward Jews, Judaism, Israel, and the Holocaust. Arnold and König foreground the diversity of experience among their interviewees and refuse to make assumptions about their attitudes based on their religious background. [End Page 1] Comparing the findings of their survey research to other German data, the authors discover a range of attitudes among recent refugees and conclude that researchers should not simply assume that the results of attitudinal surveys among newly arrived refugees are synonymous with those of German-born Muslims. The year 2017 was the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation, sparked by Martin Luther's storied nailing of his 95 theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg. Luther's relationship to the Jewish people has come under greater scrutiny in the last several decades. Thomas Kaufmann, a leading historian of this subject, examines Luther's theological attitudes toward Jews in the context of his own time and also how those attitudes were received by Germans later in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The shift in thinking about Jews between young and old Luther is explained with reference to specific developments in Luther's life and career. Kaufmann concludes with an analysis of the embrace of Luther by racist antisemites in later centuries, including the Nazi Party. Is antisemitism a metaphysical phenomenon? Jean Axelrad Cahan argues that antisemitism is not metaphysical by nature, against the suggestions of other scholars like Robert Wistrich and David Patterson. Instead, she suggests that antisemitism, like other forms of hatred, can be explained historically. The motivations of antisemites are varied and do include religious beliefs (even the Nazis used religious themes and imagery), but that does not make antisemitism a sacral or metaphysical phenomenon. Cahan examines the concept of political religion, and the scholarship on twentieth century totalitarianism, to help explain many of the obsessive and relentlessly destructive aspects of antisemitism used by others to argue for its metaphysical quality. Irven Resnick offers an analysis of a number of blood libel stories, including one recorded by the Dominican Thomas of Cantimpré describing both ritual murder and cruentation, in which the corpse of a murder victim spontaneously effuses blood in the presence of the murderer. This is the first story to appeal to the phenomenon of cruentation in order to indict Jews for a ritual murder. [End Page 2] More importantly, Resnick argues that Thomas's story provides an essential element in the evolution of the ritual murder accusation—in addition to killing Christian children, Jews are...

Violent Sensations: Sex, Crime, and Utopia in Vienna and Berlin, 1860–1914 by Scott Spector

Reviewed by: Violent Sensations: Sex, Crime, and Utopia in Vienna and Berlin, 1860–1914 by Scott Spector Kerry Wallach Violent Sensations: Sex, Crime, and Utopia in Vienna and Berlin, 1860–1914. By Scott Spector. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Pp. 296. Paper $25.00. ISBN 978-0226196787. The question “who is the murderer?” remains at the heart of countless media scandals today, just as over a century ago; many rely on graphic images of violence, brutality, and criminal activity. Scott Spector’s long-awaited book eloquently demonstrates that the fascination with such spectacles dates back to the 1860s, with the rise of media scandals about sexual practices (especially between men) and their potential connections to violent criminal acts. Ritual murder accusations that gained momentum in the 1880s made for Central European versions of the Dreyfus Affair, which strained Christian-Jewish relations and put allegedly treacherous Jews on trial. The fin-de-siècle, when killers similar to London’s Jack the Ripper and other marginal or degenerate figures came to signify urban modernity, marks a further turning point in this history. It was also around 1900 when new sensationalist texts about the criminality of the metropolis proliferated. Violent figures associated with the city became the subjects of modern scientific studies, legal investigations, and medical diagnoses. Yet in some cases they also emerged as subjects on their own terms. In rejecting the sufficiency of the “marginalization thesis” embraced by Richard Evans and others (namely that marginal figures merely validated more centered identities), Spector shifts the conversation toward a dialectical analytic that brings together “enlightened” and “decadent” discourses (2–3). Scientific, legal, and medical texts constitute the enlightened sources; [End Page 178] newspaper articles and popular books make up the decadent. Although Vienna and Berlin are the primary focus of this study, which innovatively explores cultural phenomena across national borders, noteworthy events elsewhere in Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire also receive attention. One of the book’s major claims makes it required reading for historians and German studies scholars alike: it was not after World War I, but rather in the decades prior to the war, when violent fantasies emerged on a mass scale. By positioning World War I “not as a cause but as a symptom” (14), Spector suggests that Weimar scholarship—on Lustmord, criminality, and sexuality, among other topics—must look to earlier decades for the origins of interwar-era incarnations (170, 196). The fin-de-siècle represents an especially key moment: Otto Weininger, Robert Musil, and, to a lesser degree, Sigmund Freud factor into Spector’s portrait of this time. In addition to its in-depth look at individual texts and criminal cases, the book also offers an early history of the fields of criminology, criminal psychology, and forensics. For Spector, Austrian Hanns Gross serves as a real-life Sherlock Holmes (56). German responses to the early criminal anthropological work of Cesare Lombroso, which privileged physical signs of degeneration ranging from forehead shape to tattoos, lead to a fascinating discussion of criminal accountability (Zurechnungsfähigkeit). Here we see the growing authority of expert witnesses and their knowledge, a trope that runs throughout the book. Spector makes the powerful argument that the fixation on “twilight conditions” or border states (Dämmerzustände) including epilepsy, somnambulism, alcoholism, and religious fanaticism, points to a rejection of will and a privileging of innate characteristics as explanations for crime or violence (252). Sexuality is at the core of several chapters on homosexuality and Lustmord, and scholars of gender and sexuality will find this history indispensable to understanding work on later developments in sexology. In weaving together various theories of homosexuality, Spector emphasizes the early conflation of same-sex and violent sexual practices, as well as the crime scandals that brought many alleged homosexuals into the limelight. The coinage of such terms as Urning (same-sex attraction) by Karl Heinrich Ulrichs and homosexual by Karóly Kertbeny (Karl-Maria Benkert) predates and informs the important work of Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Magnus Hirschfeld. One scandalous court case from 1889 led Krafft-Ebing to write the first article on lesbianism (Gynandrie); the story of Sándor (Sarolta) Vay here leads us to...

Violent Sensations: Sex, Crime, and Utopia in Vienna and Berlin, 1860–1914 by Scott Spector

Reviewed by: Violent Sensations: Sex, Crime, and Utopia in Vienna and Berlin, 1860–1914 by Scott Spector Cynthia A. Klima Scott Spector, Violent Sensations: Sex, Crime, and Utopia in Vienna and Berlin, 1860–1914. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 2016. 285 pp. This work opens up with an excellent introduction to the premises of Spector’s study, that is, the juxtaposition of modern life in the growing metropolis at the turn of the century with that of the burgeoning violence and deviance on the big city’s underbelly. The world of fin-de-siècle Vienna and Berlin evokes a rather romantic picture of modernity. Culture was in the forefront of society, progress was viewed as a positive for Europe, cafés thrived with their intellectual atmospheres, and mankind was beginning to see the benefits from the giant leaps in scientific and medical discovery. But Spector’s work reveals the seamier side of this time period: the ailments of the large modern metropolis and the scourge of the underworld whose deviance and degeneracy had, for the most part, been ignored by modern convention. Though Freud’s work in psychoanalysis and the emergence of science and technology marked the positive image of the great metropolis, questions remained: What image do Europeans, specifically Central Europeans, have of themselves? How do the sensational and the scientific affect Central European life? What is one’s place in this “new” world? Spector uses Berlin and Vienna as the sites for his study, as these two cities proffer a rapid growth in science and culture ironically fed by the lurking degeneracy and deviance. Using social science, court records, philosophical and literary works meant for an educated public, popular culture, crime reportage, emancipation movement literature, and personal records of sexual and criminal subjects, Spector laces together a fascinating study on the “Großstadt,” not only a home [End Page 121] to high-level intellectual endeavor but also a haven for the decadent, deviant, and sexually degenerate underworld. Divided into six chapters, the work is devoted to explaining how scientific discourse was fed by studies in criminology, homosexuality, sexual crime, degeneracy, and identity, all of which fed journalistic sensationalism. The work is a great journey into how science was actually fueled by its studies of the underworld and sexology, resulting in new views on identity, culture, and image in Central Europe. In chapter 1, Spector discusses just that—opposing discourses of the Enlightenment and criminal science. His investigation into whether criminal behavior was viewed as a biological feature or a sociological product of society itself creates a fascinating look into the science of criminology. Shapes of the skull and facial comparatives serve to amplify the question of the origins of crime. Is it nuture or nature? Further, in chapter 2, the author explores marginal identity and how it relates to violence. Homosexuality, homosexual emancipation, and medical discourses on sexuality as well as social and sexual degeneracy are discussed in detail. Spector continues with further studies in chapter 3, entitled “Identical Origins,” in which cases of sex scandals are brought out of court records into the public eye. They not only become fodder for sensationalistic newspapers but also show the emergence of the formerly taboo world of sexuality and how it managed to merge with the worlds of society and politics. This segues well into chapter 4, where feminism comes up against Otto Weininger’s misogynistic work Sex and Character. Here the author provides a thorough discussion of prostitution and sex murderers, for which he utilizes police files and case records. Alongside Sex and Character, Spector uses Robert Musil’s works to explore violent fantasy, linking it to a critique of Central European civilization. The last chapter, entitled “Blood Lies: The Truth about Modern Ritual Murder Accusations and Defenses,” is a discussion of Jewish ritual murder and how it fits in with the modern metropolis in terms of modernity, enlightenment, degeneracy, race, and gender. As Spector writes, “If the modern central European cultural imaginary had an ambivalent relationship to its community of ‘internal others,’ this pointed to a self-reflection that is obscured by most interpretations of episodic anti-Semitism and the primitive self was as much...

Similia similibus: Queer Time in Thomas of Monmouth’s Life and Miracles of St William of Norwich

The Life and Miracles of St William of Norwich by Thomas of Monmouth is most notorious as the first example of a ritual murder accusation against a Jewish community in medieval England. However, the overwhelming focus on the Life’s place in a linear history of ever-increasing persecution has obscured the text’s own interest in non-linear chronology and temporality. This article draws on recent discussions of temporality in queer theory to show how William’s body becomes a point of temporal instability in the Life, and suggests a reconsideration of the figure of the child in queer readings of narrative time.

On Faith and Fanaticism: Converts from Judaism and the Limits of Toleration in Late Imperial Russia

On Faith and FanaticismConverts from Judaism and the Limits of Toleration in Late Imperial Russia Ellie R. Schainker (bio) She was a convert from Judaism in the imperial Russian provinces assailed by her family and friends for communal betrayal. Brought to life in the Ukrainian artist Nikolai Kornilovich Pimonenko’s painting Zhertva fanatizma (Victim of Fanaticism; 1899), this converted Jewess was inspired by an actual female convert in a shtetl (Yiddish: small town) in the Pale of Jewish Settlement in late imperial Russia who converted to marry her Christian lover and was then tormented by her former coreligionists. Although contemporary Jews decried Pimonenko’s art as antisemitic for casting the former Jewess as an innocent victim of Jewish wrath and aggression, they also appropriated the sketch and another like it for circulation on postcards with the accompanying Hebrew words ha-meshumedet (the Apostate) and ha-bogedet (the Traitoress), thus renarrating the events to cast moral blame on the neophyte and legitimize the collective ire of the Jewish community.1 More than a controversial episode in the artistic representation of Jews, Pimonenko’s illustration is the product of a long history of storytelling about conversion as a conflictual boundary crossing. It gives figural rendering to a wide-ranging conversation over the course of the 19th century about Jewish violence in the face of conversion. The popular press and jurists alike mediated this conversation in the late imperial period to mark Jews as both religious and social “fanatics,” whose violent intolerance toward apostate kin rendered them undeserving of imperial toleration. In particular, conservative voices in the late imperial press linked stories of conversion-inspired violence to the medieval ritual murder accusation to generate a new blood libel myth in which Jews ritually sacrificed their converted family members. [End Page 753] Click for larger view View full resolution Postcard of Nikolai Kornilovich Pimonenko’s 1899 painting Victim of Fanaticism, printed by a Jewish publisher active in Berlin and retitled in Hebrew ha-meshumedet (The Apostate). Similarly, the German title reads Baptized Jewess in Native Village. Credit: Collection of Prof. Shalom Sabar, Jerusalem. Violence as a concept long framed the relation of the state and imperial subjects to conversion as a boundary crossing during the long 19th century. Many Jews narrated conversion as Christian violence against vulnerable Jewish children; and conversions for many converts and their clerical and administrative allies were often understood as endangered by the violence of Jewish families and communities who sought to physically repress deviant behavior. Violence in these stories not only consisted in the infliction of physical pain but also inhered in the language of dispute over the violation of confessional and communal boundaries. Claims of physical harm referred either to direct or to structural violence—at times religious coercion and at times perceived assaults on religious truth, thus causing despair and humiliation.2 The stories of aggression told about Jews expanded the scope of violence in the Russian Empire to everyday forms of conflict, suggesting that minority groups like the Jews were usurping the state’s monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. Beginning in the mid-1860s and the era of reform, conservative voices in the Russian press, in line with some jurists, harnessed these stories of violence to create a narrative of gendered violence in which Jews were designated as [End Page 754] inherently fanatical. This discrediting discourse came on the heels of the 1863 Polish insurrection and ensuing Russification campaigns in the northwestern region. In addition, the 1864 judicial reforms provided public, civil channels for cantonist converts from Judaism to challenge their coerced baptisms in the pre-reform army and for prosecutors to indict relapsed converts and their alleged Jewish enablers on charges of leading neophytes astray or of “seduction” (sovrashchenie).3 In this late imperial discourse of Jewish violence, the female convert as victim was used to construct an ethnoconfessional political order that set “fanatical” minorities apart from the rational, tolerant, and civilized imperial order. The female victim symbolized the vulnerability of religious truth to heterodoxy, especially because women were identified as vessels of religion across faith communities. In addition, exclusion and humiliation often breed intimate and domestic violence. Thus gendered violence served...

Inspecting the pious body: Christological morphology and the ritual-crucifixion allegation

The first ritual-murder accusations appeared at a time in which a theology that was increasingly invested in Christ's human body was articulated. Forms of mimetic devotion emerged across Latin Christendom, but were considered highly controversial. The Life and Miracles of St William of Norwich, this essay argues, is an attempt to think about some of the problems that arise from this theology. By interpreting Jewish actions, both real and alleged, the author, Thomas of Monmouth, deployed a Christian bodily logic in order to make a claim about William's sanctity based on his physical ‘likeness’ to Christ in suffering. While in the end this rhetorical and theological scheme was not widely accepted by the author's contemporaries, the Christological grammar of bodily hermeneutics that the Vita articulates resonated in the language of subsequent allegations.

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

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. …

Manos manchadas de sangre: los orígenes cristianos del mito antijudío del crimen ritual

The anti-Jewish accusation of ritual murder did enjoy great popularity in Middle Age. It did “spontaneously” rise in medieval Europe (around the middle of twelfth century) and did know countless variants. Its definitive version was the killing (preferably by crucifixion) of a Christian child by the Jews in order to include his/her blood to the unleavened bread. However, its remotest origin must be searched in Antiquity. In fact, its infant development can be found in Socrates, the fifth-century ecclesiastical historian (Hist. Eccl., VII, 16), who reports that, in the Syrian district of Inmestar around the year 415, some drunked Jews tied a Christian child to a cross on the Purim feast and flogged him to death. This awful account must be sited into the context of a Theodosian constitution (C.Th., XVI, 8, 18, year 408) that did forbid to offend the Cross during the Jewish feasts.

The Blood Libel Legend: Its Longevity and Popularity

Jewish ritual murder accusations, in their common apprehension, refer to alleged killing of Christians by Jews in furtherance of religious rites, or specifically Jewish practice. The blood libel, however, is a special variant, and a subset of the broader ritual murder accusation, and came much later into the panoply of accusations leveled at the Jews in the Middle Ages. This essay seeks to address the explanations given by scholars for the popularity and longevity of the blood libel as it touches on the following aspects of the legend: what gave rise to the blood accusations in the Middle Ages when the consequences were so horrific and brutal? Who “first” made the accusations against the Jews in medieval times, and who stood to benefit from such charges, or were they occasioned by economic, social, and religious circumstances that defined medieval Europe? But most importantly, what sustained and popularized it from the twelfth to the twentieth century?

Empowerment, Defiance, and Demise: Jews and the Blood Libel Specter under Stalinism

By examining different cases of blood libels that occurred from the 1920s through the decade following Stalin’s death, this study suggests that the ritual murder accusation in the Soviet Union dwindled at first, then intensified, and eventually underwent an idiosyncratic and secular metamorphosis that culminated with the 1953 “Doctors’ Plot” accusation: the denunciation of a group of prominent and predominantly Jewish doctors for allegedly conspiring to murder Soviet leaders. While the blood libel was generally prosecuted in the interwar period, in the postwar years it was usually ignored, though perhaps indirectly encouraged. Jews—as well as local authorities—reacted in a variety of ways to allegations of ritual murder. But overall, it was the status, power, and influence that Jews held in a given city or town at the time of a concocted accusation that determined their responses to the blood libel and that shaped the legal provisions and enforcement steps taken by the party, police, and civil authorities.

THE BRITISH EMPIRE AND JEWS IN NINETEENTH CENTURY MALTA

This essay examines the role of Jews in Britain’s imperial strategy and asks whether Britain could have built its empire without them. Recent scholarship concerning Jews and the British Empire places Jews in the “informal empire”, in economic and other activities outside political rule. This was the case in nineteenth‐century Malta, where Jews established themselves in commercial activities in support of Britain’s military ambitions in the Mediterranean. They received some political recognition, though this was short‐lived. Despite the efforts of Moses Montefiore, the British government refused to yield space for building a synagogue. The success of Malta’s leading Jews, in the early and mid‐century, meant that they were never above suspicion. In the late nineteenth century, the British government shielded the Jewish community from an accusation of ritual murder, but this had more to do with promoting British interests vis‐à‐vis the Catholic Church in Malta than advancing Jewish interests. Colonial policy concerning Jews did not result from a coherent rationale concerning Jewish interests nor consistent Jewish influence.

Anderl of Rinn, the Accusation of Jewish Ritual Murder, and the Historical Memory of Childhood

The legend of Anderl of Rinn is almost unique among the ritual murder accusations lodged against Jews during the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period. The story of Anderl provides a glimpse not only of the long and tragic history of anti-Semitism but also of the history of childhood. Due to a lack of sources, and the fact that his story was not recorded until decades later, it is impossible to gauge the accuracy of any elements of his life or death. The documents that exist, however, do shed an interesting light on the treatment of some children in European history since, without much in the way of facts to work with, the authors who crafted the legend of Anderl of Rinn had little choice but to portray him as a typical child, borrowing elements from the treatment of children both in their own day and in what they knew of the medieval past.

Anti-Jewish Incidents in the Lublin Region in the Early Years after World War II

In the early years following World War II, the Lublin region was one of the most important centres of Jewish life. At the same time, during 1944-1946 it was the scene of anti-Jewish incidents: from anti-Semitic propaganda, accusation of ritual murder, economic boycott, to cases of individual or collective murder. The wave of anti-Jewish that lasted until autumn of 1946 resulted in a lengthy and, no doubt incomplete, list of 118 murdered Jews. Escalating anti-Jewish violence in the immediate post-war years was one of the main factors, albeit not the only one, to affect the demography (mass emigration) and the socio-political condition of the Jewish population in the Lublin region

Zajścia antyżydowskie na Lubelszczyźnie w pierwszych latach po drugiej wojnie światowej

In the early years following World War II, the Lublin region was one of the most important centres of Jewish life. At the same time, during 19441946 it was the scene of anti-Jewish incidents: from anti-Semitic propaganda, accusation of ritual murder, economic boycott, to cases of individual or collective murder. The wave of anti-Jewish that lasted until autumn of 1946 resulted in a lengthy and, no doubt incomplete, list of 118 murdered Jews. Escalating anti-Jewish violence in the immediate post-war years was one of the main factors, albeit not the only one, to affect the demography (mass emigration) and the socio-political condition of the Jewish population in the Lublin region

Anti-semitic violence as reenactment: An essay in cultural history

At the turn of the century, circa 1900, the art historian Aby Warburg became interested in the atavistic—how over long stretches of time the seemingly irrational persisted and reemerged in new forms in the modern era. Ritual murder accusations provided a prominent example, and these examples, the article argues, were at the heart of his own conception of cultural history. Using Warburg as a starting point, the article suggests that we have yet to develop a fully articulated cultural history of anti-Semitic violence, and that our explanations remain bound to immediate context and to contemporary politics. This is certainly the case with Shulamit Volkov's famous concept of ‘anti-Semitism as cultural code,’ which lacks sufficiently sharp tools to understand how the long history of anti-Semitism, entangled as it was in Christian – Jewish relations, continued to shape anti-Semitic violence in the late nineteenth century. J. L. Austin's theory of speech acts, by contrast, allows us to consider both the synchronic dimension of anti-Semitic violence, and its connection to the diachronic, or long-term. This approach also has important implications for our understanding of hate speech more generally.