The Myth of Ritual Murder: Jews and Magic in Reformation Germany

by R. Po-chia Hsia

Book Overview

From the mid-fifteenth century to the early seventeenth, German Jews were persecuted and tried for the alleged ritual murders of Christian children, whose blood purportedly played a crucial part in Jewish magical rites. In this engrossing book R. Po-Chia Hsia traces the rise and decline of ritual murder trials during that period. Using sources ranging from Christian and Kabbalistic treatises to judicial records and popular pamphlets, Hsia examines...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0300047460
• ISBN13: 9780300047462
• Release Date: September 1990
• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.94 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.1" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

A Reference, not a Review

It's hard to believe nobody has yet reviewed this very powerful study by Po-chia Hsia of the extent of and basis for the "blood libel" against Jewish communities in the Reformation era. I read it many years ago and my memory of details is not fresh enough to review the book in detail. I merely want to call readers' attention to it in supplementation of my recent review of David Kertzer's very significant study of papal and clerical contributions to anti-Semitism in the 19th and early 20th Centuries, titled The Popes Against the Jews. From the age of the first Crusade until the age of the Holocaust, Christian communities in all parts of Europe, Catholic and Protestant, believed in and acted upon the notion that Jews were secretly required by the Talmud to murder Christians, and particularly to gruesomely torture and murder Christian children, drain their blood, and use it for the making of ritual matzohs for Passover. Horrendous acts of violence, pogroms, and judicial processes using torture to justify executions, all against Jews, occurred again and again in reaction to rumors of Jewish kidnap/murders. The Catholic Church certainly accepted these beliefs as valid, as evidenced by the designation of "sainthood" to a number of children who vanished or were found dead, and who were declared teh victims of Jewish malice. Hsia's book is about the dissemination of the blood libel in early modern Europe. Kertzer's book is about the unconscionable exploitation of the ritual murder myth by high-placed Catholics, including particularly two Popes, Leo IX and Pius XII, in modern times to foment and exploit anti-Semitism. If it seems incredible that pious Christians - from villagers to cardinals and including no doubt a goodly number of my own ancestors - could have so viciously and irrationally slandered and oppressed their Jewish neighbors for so many centuries, you owe it to your conscience and your intelligence to read this book.