When I began this project in 2011, the book idea was more contained—it was to be a comparative study of blood libels in Poland and Italy. But as I followed the paper trail, I ended up on a tour of Europe, learning about each region’s intellectual, religious, cultural, and legal histories. For that reason, Blood Libel is indebted to scholars before me who studied and wrote about some of the aspects of that long and complicated story. I also would not have been able to complete the work without the effort of many librarians, archivists, and IT professionals who have digitized holdings and made them available on their own digital platforms, Hathi Trust, and through Google Books. Their efforts make it easier for scholars to compare different copies and different editions without having to travel to different countries.
But even in this digital era, there is nothing like working in libraries and archives. In fact, this book would have been very different without the systematic work with physical books that I was able to do at the New York Public Library (NYPL) as a fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. This allowed me to examine methodically books published in Europe from the late fifteenth century on, one after another, page by page, and experience what contemporary readers might have felt when reading these books. I am grateful to the NYPL and the Cullman Center for giving me this opportunity and thereby making this book so much richer, as well as to the staff at the Dorot Jewish Division and the Rare Book Division of the NYPL for their assistance and patience.
Blood Libel is based on archival materials from archives in eight countries, including the Vatican City. It was these sometimes hitherto unknown documents that helped illuminate processes not visible and known in printed records. I thank the staff at the Archivio Segreto Vaticano in the Vatican City for giving me access to hundreds of volumes of diplomatic correspondence between Rome and the papal nuncios residing in Poland covering more than two centuries. I am also grateful to Monsignor Alejandro Cifres and Dr. Daniel Ponziani of the Archivio della Congregazione per la Dottrina della Fede (Archive of the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith; ACDF). Their holdings were fundamental in clarifying the events surrounding the wave of accusations experienced by Jews in the eighteenth century. And I am grateful to the late Anne Jacobson Schutte and Adriano Prosperi for helping me with access, and Stefania Pastore for advice on the holdings.
Equally fundamental were the materials in Archiwum Kapituły Kolegiackiej i Katedralnej w Sandomierzu. I am enormously grateful to Bishop Krzysztof Nitkiewicz and Rev. Dr. Piotr Tylec for permitting me to work in the archive and for welcoming me to Sandomierz. Indeed, my work with Bishop Nitkiewicz has had a profound impact on this project, especially my exploration of the blood libel iconography in Sandomierz and tracing it back to Trent. The Sandomierz paintings have often raised controversy, but until 2013 they had never been examined fully from a broader historical perspective. I am grateful to Bishop Nitkiewicz for creating an opportunity to see Sandomierz as a stop made by this story along a long European path.
Staff at other archives were also incredibly helpful. Robert Godding of the Société des Bollandistes provided scans of specific documents and assistance in identifying the location of others. Staff members at the Archivio di Stato di Trento scanned the crucial body of archival documents related to the trial at Trent (APV s.l. capsa 69), making this massive body available to me remotely. Staff at the Archives departementales de la Moselle (ADMM in Metz, France), Bibliothèque royale de Belgique (Brussels), and Trinity College (TCD) in Dublin also scanned archival materials relevant for this book. I am grateful to Yeshiva University Museum (New York) for allowing me to examine some of their holdings physically. Robert Danieluk and especially Mauro Brunello from the Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu (Roman Archive of the Society of Jesus; ARSI) made it a pleasure for me to work at the archive and to obtain specific documents, when I could not make it there. Dr. Elzbieta Knapek of the Polska Akademia Umiejętności (Polish Academy of Sciences, PAU) was helpful in her capacity both at the PAU and previously at the Archiwum Kurii Metropolitalnej w Krakowie. The staff members at the Bayerische Staadtsbibliothek were most helpful in providing scans of books not available elsewhere.
Research at these many libraries and archives would not have been possible without generous fellowships and grants I received. My deepest gratitude to the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation for their support of this book at an early stage.
As I look back at the community of friends and scholars who helped in this process and have left their own imprints on it in one way or another, I am thankful for the wisdom and, more importantly, the friendship of Debra Kaplan, Sara Lipton, and Josh Teplitsky: they not only read significant parts of the book but also gave me their ears and their minds while I was trying to answer big and small questions that emerged from the research. Brainstorming sessions about titles were a lot of fun, because they forced me to think about the essence of the book.
I am also grateful to everyone who read chapters and proposals, invited me to give talks on early versions of the book, and wrote letters of recommendation for me as I was applying for grants and fellowships that allowed me to travel and take time off from teaching to write. Hence my gratitude to David Biale, Miriam Bodian, Judith Brown, Hillel Kieval, Brian Porter-Szűcs, and Larry Wolff. I am particularly grateful to Elisheva Carlebach for all of the above and also for being a partner in making the Early Modern Workshop (EMW) a vibrant community in New York. Indeed, our discussions about archives during the EMW 2016–2017 were critical for understanding and rethinking the Trent trial and other court and archival records. And in 2017–2018, my fellow Cullmanites at the NYPL’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers made that year unforgettable. I want to particularly thank Blake Gopnik for listening to and giving me suggestions and advice on sixteenth-century Italian art; Ava Chin and Joan Acocella for great conversations; Salvatore Scibona, Lauren Goldman, and Paul Delaverdac for making “the Cullman year” so meaningful; and Georgi Gospodinov and Nellie Herman for their books, which took me off my path but enriched my mind.
My gratitude also to Andrzej Kamiński, Peter Kracht, and Kathleen McDermott for including me in a book manuscript workshop in June 2017 in Warsaw. I thank Waldemar Kowalski and Hanna Węgrzynek for reading and commenting on several chapters of the manuscript in progress.
I want to thank my former institutional home, Wesleyan University, for the generous sabbatical policy that allowed me to jumpstart the project, as well as former colleagues who were also supportive and helpful, especially by critiquing the early proposals and reading early chapters: Ruth Nisse, Laurie Nussdorfer, and Victoria Smolkin. And big thanks to Jennifer Tucker for suggestions of books I would have not considered and for good cheer, and to Jeremy and Vicky Zwelling, whose friendship and support over my fifteen years at Wesleyan and beyond are some of the most valuable treasures of my life. I was very proud to hold the Jeremy Zwelling Chair in Jewish Studies at Wesleyan.
I am grateful to my new intellectual home, Fordham University, for welcoming me as a colleague. I am happy to have such a wonderful community of scholars and friends in the History Department and in Jewish Studies, especially Orit Avishai, Doron Ben-Atar, Ayala Fader, Emanuel Fiano, Sarit Kattan Gribetz, Anne Hoffman, David Myers, Nicholas Paul, Daniel Soyer, Kirsten Swinth, and Ebru Turan. Fordham’s terrific undergraduate students in two seminars on the history of antisemitism have read and discussed chapters of this book in progress. I am thankful to them for serving as an early sounding board.
And there are others who make me grateful for being at Fordham. I want to thank Eva Badovska, Jonathan Crystal, Ellen Fahey-Smith, and the Reverend Joseph McShane, SJ, for their support of me as a scholar and of Jewish Studies at Fordham. Fordham’s Jewish Studies community, which has nourished me in the last few years, has been made possible thanks to the foresight and generosity of Eugene Shvidler; it has flourished thanks to the trust and belief in us by Henry Miller, Joel Pickett, and Bruce Taragin. I am grateful to all.
The question “Have you finished?” that my parents, Alina and Zdzisław Teter, would ask each time I called kept me wanting to reach the finish line. As did the love and support of Shawn Hill, my best friend and life partner, who has contributed even more to this project than to my previous books. His love and patience have steadied me for decades, but his professional trajectory as a specialist in digital humanities helped me see my stories in a new way. Without him there would be no maps and no website, www
As I was following the paper trail that these anti-Jewish accusations produced, I realized my intellectual debt to the late Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi. His scholarship on Isaac Cardoso and a graduate seminar decades ago on Solomon ibn Verga’s Shevet Yehudah proved invaluable. The late Jeannette Hopkins suggested I embark on this trail; I only hope she would be proud of where it ended. As I was writing I found myself missing her incisive criticisms and tried to imagine what she would have said. I also wish I could have shared the joy of finishing this book and seeing it in print with Stephen Freedman, the late provost of Fordham University and a good friend, who was instrumental in bringing me to Fordham and whose cheer and encouragement I truly miss.