A Convenient Hatred: The History of Antisemitism (15 page)

Aelward told the priest that he had never told this story to a single person. But, he claimed, Eleazar and his companion had confessed the murder to the sheriff. They then bribed him to keep their secret and to force Aelward to do the same. Aelward spoke out only as he lay dying—three years after Eleazar’s death in 1146 and the sheriff ‘s own death shortly thereafter.

Thomas of Monmouth’s second story came from William’s aunt, who now came forward to say that William had come to see her on the day of his disappearance. With him that day was a cook who had offered the boy a job. Suspicious of the cook, the aunt asked her daughter to follow the pair when they left. The little girl told her that William and the cook entered Eleazar’s house and that the door closed behind them. The girl died before Thomas came to Norwich, so he had only her mother’s word for the story. Still, it appeared to connect Eleazar to the child.

The aunt’s account revealed a gap in the complicated story that Thomas was weaving. What had happened to William between the time he supposedly entered Eleazar’s house and the discovery of his body in the woods several days later? Once again, Thomas found a witness, this time
a Christian woman who, in 1144, had worked for Eleazar as a servant. She claimed that on the day William disappeared, Eleazar had ordered her to bring him a pot of boiling water. When he carried the pot into another room, she peeked through a crack in the door to see what he did with it. She told Thomas that it was then that she saw a boy tied to a post.

Like Aelward, the woman had up to that point told no one what she had seen. According to Thomas, she was afraid she would lose her job. She also feared for her life, because she was “the only Christian living among so many Jews.” This was an odd comment in a community that had no Jewish quarter; for the most part, Jews and Christians in Norwich lived side by side.

Thomas’s most prized, and most amazing, testimony came from Theobold, a monk who was nowhere near Norwich in 1144. Theobold told Thomas that he had been born a Jew and had converted to Christianity because of William’s martyrdom. He claimed that he and every other Jew in England in 1144 knew that a boy would be killed in Norwich on Good Friday. According to Theobold, prominent Jews gathered in Spain just before Passover each year to determine where a Christian child would be sacrificed. Jews who lived in the selected country drew lots to decide exactly where the crime would take place. In 1144, England was the country selected, and Norwich was the town.

Thomas never doubted Theobold’s story, even though it required believing that thousands of people throughout England and the rest of Europe and the Middle East had kept, and continued to keep, a lifelong secret. It did not strike him as surprising that no one had ever revealed that secret—with the single exception of Theobold. Why would Jews risk their lives to commit such a murder? Theobold claimed that they did it to show their contempt for Christianity and to take revenge for their exile from their homeland.

Thomas added his own twist to Theobold’s tale. He insisted that Jews did more than just kill their victims; they reenacted the crucifixion of Jesus. In his book, he described the scene as he imagined it:

[The Jews] laid their blood-stained hands upon the innocent victim, and having lifted him from the ground and having fastened him upon the cross, they vied with one another in their efforts to make an end of him…. [I]n doing these things they were adding pang to pang and wound to wound, and yet were not able to satisfy their heartless cruelty and their inborn hatred of the Christian name, lo! after these many and great tortures, they inflicted a frightful wound in his left
side, reaching even to his heart, and as though to make an end of all they extinguished his mortal life so far as it was in their power. And since many streams of blood were running down from all parts of his body, then, to stop the blood and to wash and close the wounds, they poured boiling water over him.
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Accusations of ritual murder were not new. In the first century of the Common Era, Apion, a Greek lawyer in Alexandria, Egypt, claimed that once a year Jews kidnapped a Greek and fattened him up so that he could be sacrificed to their deity. However, Apion never cited a specific example of such a murder; he wrote in vague, general terms, and his accusation was one of many wild charges that people from various ethnic groups at that time made against others. A few generations later, the Romans would make similar accusations against Christians. Once again, few people at the time paid attention to such charges; they were seen as too outrageous to be true.

In the twelfth century, however, accusations of ritual murder did not seem so outrageous; instead, they seemed to confirm what many people already believed about Jews and Judaism. When William died, the Crusades had been going on for 50 years, and the speeches and sermons that persuaded people to join the crusaders’ armies blamed Jews as well as Muslims for the “loss” of Jerusalem and for any attack on Christians or their beliefs.

Changing attitudes toward Jews were reflected in images found in churches. At a time when few people could read and write, churchgoers “read” the story of Jesus’s life and the founding of the Christian church in stained-glass windows, murals, and altar paintings.

A popular image in many churches showed two women standing next to the cross; one woman represented the church, and the other woman, the synagogue. In the tenth and eleventh centuries, the two women looked much the same, though the artists clearly favored the one who represented the church. By the twelfth century, however, the synagogue was no longer shown as an attractive woman who was simply unable to see the truth of Christianity. Increasingly, she was portrayed as both blind and depraved—a woman with ties to the devil. The shift in the image of the synagogue mirrored the way Christians came to view real Jews in their communities, while also reinforcing negative feelings about them.

We do not know for sure why Thomas of Monmouth put together the web of false accusations about William’s death or why the others involved told lies about how the boy lost his life. Were they making themselves feel important by sharing their fears and suspicions? Were they protecting someone else who might have killed William? Did they truly believe the stories they told, or did they make them up for reasons we will never know? Whatever motives these people had, the story that Thomas of Monmouth told about William’s murder spread like wildfire.

Images that showed the church as superior to the synagogue appeared not only in sculptures, stained-glass windows, and tapestries but also in the artwork that adorned books and manuscripts.

By 1150, crowds of pilgrims were visiting William’s tomb each year, and some were claiming that he performed miracles. Such claims inspired even more people to visit the boy’s tomb in the hope of obtaining miracles of their own. The pilgrims who flocked to Norwich are proof of the success of Thomas’s campaign to win sainthood for young William and fame for his own monastery. But the myth he created and spread had other long-term consequences. His invented tale further reinforced the image of Jews as evil and depraved—people who hated Christians so much that they would stop at nothing.

Thomas of Monmouth’s accusations of ritual murder were not the last made against the Jews. In 1147, Christians in Würzburg, Germany, also accused Jews of murdering a Christian. In 1168, similar charges were made
in Gloucester, England, and the same happened a few years later in Paris. By the end of the twelfth century, the lie had spread throughout Europe.

The Jews of Blois, a town in France, were among those specifically accused of ritual murder. Their experience reveals the power of the myth Thomas of Monmouth created.

On a spring day in 1171, a Jewish tanner was walking along the banks of the Loire River. He was carrying a bundle of raw animal hides when he encountered the servant of a town official. As the two men passed one another, one of the skins dropped out of the tanner’s bundle and fell into the river. The servant immediately assumed it was a corpse and ran to tell his master the news.

It seems that neither the servant’s master nor any other Christian in town doubted the story, even though they had no evidence that any crime had been committed, let alone a ritual murder. After all, the tale was in keeping with what many already believed. The count of Blois also accepted the story as fact; he imprisoned all Jewish adults in the city and ordered their children baptized as Christians.

Blois was not, of course, the first place where a Jew was accused of ritual murder. It was, however, the first known place where Jews were punished for a crime that had not even occurred. Jewish leaders pointed out that there was absolutely no evidence of a crime; no one was missing and no body had been found. The count refused to reconsider his position. In exchange for a payment of 1,000 pounds, however—a fortune in those days—he did promise not to arrest Jews who lived in the area around the city.

On May 26, the Jews held in prison were given a choice: conversion or death. Eight or nine chose to be baptized. Most of the rest were herded into a hut and burned alive. When a few men managed to escape, the executioners killed them with swords and then pushed their bodies back into the fire. Almost all of the Jews of Blois—more than 30 men and women in all—died that day.

While little is known about the way Jews in most European cities reacted to news of an accusation of ritual murder, Blois is an exception. Historians have found several letters that Jews in neighboring towns wrote in 1171. The first were from Jews in Orléans, the city closest to Blois. After hearing two eyewitness accounts, they wrote letters to Jews in communities throughout northern France and what is now Germany. The letters described the events in Blois and asked for help in protecting Jews from
similar libels. In Paris, a group of influential Jewish leaders persuaded King Louis VII to publicly condemn the actions of the count of Blois. In addition, Louis ordered his own officials to provide his Jewish subjects with better protection.

Jews also appealed to the count of Champagne, a brother of the count of Blois. The count of Champagne responded by saying publicly, “We find nowhere in Jewish law that it is permissible to kill a Christian.” His statement was intended to deny the accusation that Judaism encourages the murder of Christians. When charges of ritual murder were made in the lands he ruled, he refused to act on those charges.

In the meantime, Jews continued to negotiate with the count of Blois. Although most of the Jews in Blois had been burned alive in May, a few remained in prison. A number of Jewish negotiators tried to win their release and secure permission for converts to return to Judaism. They worked mainly through another of the count’s brothers, the bishop of Sens. Nathan ben Meshullam, one of the negotiators, wrote of those efforts:

Yesterday I came before the bishop of Sens, to attempt to release those imprisoned by his brother, the wicked count, and those forcibly converted. I paid the bishop… 120 pounds, with a promise of 100 pounds for the count, for which I have already given guarantees. The count then signed an agreement to release the prisoners from confinement. Concerning the young people forcibly converted, he asked that they be permitted to return to [Judaism]…. He also signed an agreement that there would be no further groundless accusations.
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This letter reveals how the count was able to manipulate the situation to his own financial advantage. It also reveals how precarious life was for Jews. The best that the Jews of northern France could hope for was to save the lives of a handful of survivors in Blois and ask that nothing comparable happen again. They were unable to secure justice.

By the end of the twelfth century, Christians in eight cities had accused Jews of ritual murder—two each in England, France, and the German-speaking countries, and one each in Bohemia and Spain. By the end of the thirteenth century, the number of known accusations had more than tripled. And by the sixteenth century, such charges had spread south to what is now Italy and as far to the east as Poland and Hungary.

As accusations spread, so did the false belief that Jews routinely engaged in the practice of ritual murder. An accusation made repeatedly tends to be believed, no matter how illogical and false it is. Where there is smoke, people fear, there is fire.

In 1255, a five-year-old boy was found dead in a well in Lincoln, England. Many historians today believe that young Hugh accidentally fell into the well. But in 1255, Christians in Lincoln were absolutely certain that “the Jews” had murdered him and had then thrown his body into the well. Unlike officials in Norwich, those in Lincoln immediately charged an individual, a Jew known as Copin who lived nearby. They tortured him until he “confessed” to ritual murder, and they then arrested all the other Jews in the city.

This time, no king or emperor stepped in to save the Jewish community. Indeed, King Henry III traveled to Lincoln to order Copin ‘s execution. Henry also imprisoned all of the other Jews in Lincoln in the Tower of London. Sources suggest that as many as 100 Jews were held there and at least 18 were hanged.