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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