Newspaper Page Text
By Howard Ames
(A Seven Arts Feature)
Passover, the holiday of free
dom, recalls to many Jews the
fact that joyous season bears
with it also memories of some
of the most horrible atrocities
suffered by Jews around the
world for many, many years
Those horrors resulted from
Passover, he disappeared from
his home. A Franciscan monk,'
who had criticized sharply the
cordial relations in the com
munity between Jews and
Christians, had predicted that
the Jews would commit a
ritual murder. Sure enough,
little Simon’s body was found
in a river. Jews were arrested
Passover-Reminder of Horrors
Of Ritual Murder Charges
the blood libel, the ritual mur
der charges leveled against
Jews, usually linked with Pass-
over. I remember that, as a
child in Ukrainia, I shuddered
with fear every Seder night
when the door was opened
twice, once to admit the hun
gry, then to admit Elijah. For 1
had been brought up with re
ports of the stories about a
dead Christian child being
placed on the doorstep of a
Jew’s home as a prelude of ac
cusations that the Jews had
murdered the child to use its
blood in connection with the
Passover ritual.
As far back as Josephus.
Jews were accused of this hor
rible deed. In the time of
Josephus, a Greek would be
the victim of the Jews’ alleged
sacrificial practices against
human beings, although the
Greeks mentioned n,o blood.
The canard lived on. The early
Christians themselves had been
accused similarly. But when
Christianity triumphed, they
were the people who spread
and perpetuated the libel. One
count by a scholar shows that,
between 1144 and 1940, there
had been at least 151 blood
libels spread against the Jews,
in vitually every country in
Europe, in the Middle East,
one even in the United States.
As a result of most of these
charges, many hundreds, at
times thousands, of Jew were
tortured, murdered, expelled
from their homes. Not once in
all these years—not once—has
the charge been proven. To be
sure, there were sometimes
“confessions"—usually by old
Jews who had been tortured
and who had later repudiated
their “confessions.” On the
other hand, some of the most
respectable Christians, from
pi pes to lay scholars, have re
pudiated the charges. Never
theless, they persisted.
The case of Simon of Trent
may illustrate how such a libel
developed and what had fol
lowed. Simon was a 3-ycar-old
boy in the Italian city of Trent
faiso known as Trentino). In
the year 1475, shortly before
in wholesale lots. A Jew who
had converted to Christianity,
and was serving a prison sen
tence for a routine crime, ob
tained his freedom from jail by
accusing the Jewish commun
ity of the murder of Simon
Imprisoned Jews were tortur
ed, an 80-year-old Jew “con
fessed,” several Jews were be
headed, and the anti-semitic
persecutions became so severe
that the issue reached Pope
Gregory XIII. The pontiff or
dered Jewish property in Trent
confiscated, t h e Franciscan
monk and the dead child were
declared saints, a chapel in
honor of “Saint Simon” was
erected in Trentino’s Church of
St. Peter.
The irony of the Simon af
fair is this: Only last year, the
bishop of Trent “demartyrized”
Simon, finding that the entire
affair—which cost scores of
Jewish lives—had been a hoax.
It turned out that, for some
reason, Simon had never been
officially made a saint anyway.
But his role of “Martyr” was
removed from his name. The
action regarding Simon was
the first concrete measure
taken by the Catholic Church
after Pope Paul VI officially
decreed that the Jews are no
longer considered to have been
collectively guilty of killing
Jesus.
A notorious case within this
writer’s memory was that of
Mendel Beilis, a Jewish work
er in a brick kiln in Ziev. He
was arrested in 1911 on a
charge that he had killed a 12-
year-old Christian boy for
ritual purposes. The real rea
son for the Czarist Govern
ment’s need of a libel against
Jews was that the Duma—the
Russian national legislature—
was considering some legisla
tion to ease the persecutions
against Russian Jews. So the
Beilis case developed.
High Russian police officials
submitted reports showing
that the boy had been murder
ed by a band of crooks because
he had “squealed” against
them. The Ziev chief of secret
The Southern Israelite
29