CHAPTER ONE

From Medieval Tales to the Challenge in Trent

AFTER YEARS of secretive preparation, Anton Koberger, a prominent printer from Nuremberg, finally published in 1493 the monumental Nuremberg Chronicle, Liber chronicarum, a chronicle of world history “from the beginning of the world to our own time by the highly learned Doctor Hartmann Schedel.”¹ The publisher’s advertisement announced that the book would “recount everything that has occurred in the passage of time.… Show the ages of the world, kingdoms in succession, all the cities that the world possesses … the acts of dukes and kings with those of scholars who reveal natural science and philosophy.”² Koberger promised readers an unprecedented experience: “nothing has hitherto appeared that can guarantee scholars and all men of learning greater and deeper pleasure than the New Book of Chronicles with its pictures of famous men and cities.” The delight was to be so great that readers would think they were “not reading a series of stories but looking at them with your own eyes.” All these stories would seem “alive.” The publisher knew that the book was like nothing ever published before, and he and the financial backers of the project, Sebald Schreyer and Sebastian Kammermaister, “the rich citizens of Nuremberg,” eagerly sought to keep it secret until it was ready to be released.³

Among the hundreds of woodcuts of kings, popes, cities, and tales are several vivid images of Jews, some of the earliest visual representations of Jews in print.⁴ Indeed, the images—a Jew desecrating a crucifix, Jews burning at the stake (repeated three times), and two images representing Jews killing Christian children: for the year 1144, William “a boy crucified by perfidious Jews” (Fig. 1.1) and for 1475, “Blessed Simon of Trent” (Fig. 1.2)⁵—do bring to life the text alongside them. Unlike the rather generic images of kings and popes, these images of Jews and the select stories they accompanied are not plain or formulaic: they served to underscore the notion of Jews’ enmity and hatred of Christianity, expressed through the desecration of objects venerated by Christians and the killing of Christian children.

The story of William, whose mutilated body was found near the English town of Norwich in 1144, is the first known tale accusing Jews of killing a Christian for ritual purposes.⁶ In Norwich, however, there was no trial, and no blood of Jews was spilled. This was not the case in Trent, where the body of a toddler named Simon was found in March 1475, when Easter and Passover converged. Simon’s death led to one of the most notorious and best-documented trials against Jews, to the proliferation of visual representations of the imagined deed, and, ultimately, to the undermining of the medieval protection of Jews against similar accusations. The stories of William of Norwich and Simon of Trent serve as bookends of the medieval accusations against Jews. The two are the most studied, but by no means the only ones that left an imprint on subsequent history.⁷ In fact, the Nuremberg Chronicle mentions another story—that of Richard of Paris, also known as Richard of Pontoise, whose death according to medieval chroniclers, and the Nuremberg Chronicle itself, led King Philip of France to expel Jews from his kingdom.⁸ And then there is the late thirteenth-century story of Werner of Oberwesel, whose cult spread through songs and poems along the Rhine Valley and in eastern France, without approval from Rome.⁹ These cases shared a common thread: the attempt to create a cult of boy martyrs. In subsequent centuries, other tales would be added, and additional attempts to make dead children into saints would take place across Europe. But not all of those tales would have a long-lasting effect. Some would fade from memory altogether; others would be brought back to light only by modern scholars, attracting attention greater than historical reality would have merited. And still some of these accusations against Jews would create a trail of evidence that would serve not only the accusers but also the defenders of Jews for centuries. But, perhaps more important, the Middle Ages were marked not only by the beginning of the ritual murder and blood libel accusations, the rise of Christian narratives, and persistent beliefs about Jews killing Christian children but also by the most explicit defense of Jews by both secular and ecclesiastical authorities against these accusations.

FIG. 1.1   William of Norwich, Hartmann Schedel, Nuremberg Chronicle, Weltchronik (Nuremberg: Anton Koberger, 1493), CCXX verso.

FIG. 1.2   Simon of Trent, Hartmann Schedel, Nuremberg Chronicle, Weltchronik (Nuremberg: Anton Koberger, 1493), CCLIIII verso.

William of Norwich, A Broken Memory Trail

In the 1140s, around the time of the Second Crusade, a new rumor began to surface in Europe: Jews kill Christians. In 1144, during a bloody civil war in England, a twelve-year-old boy named William disappeared during the Easter season; his body was found on Good Friday by a forester in the Thorpe Wood near the town of Norwich, but was left there until Monday, after the holiday.¹⁰ On that day, the forester returned to bury it on the spot. Miracles were said to have followed, and William’s body was moved to the monks’ cemetery, then to a new sarcophagus in the chapter house, and finally to the cathedral. The Jews of Norwich were never tried or harmed as a result of William’s death, though rumors apparently circulated soon thereafter. The lack of immediate action in response to the boy’s death suggests that it was not treated as a martyr’s death and that Jews were not seriously implicated. But the story is shrouded in mystery, because no contemporary record of any investigation exists.

The earliest evidence is provided by brief mentions, sometimes limited to one sentence, of Jews crucifying a Christian boy in Norwich; they were found in monastic chronicles within Cistercian circles both in England and on the continent that can be dated to the late 1140s and early 1150s.¹¹ Some years after William’s death, around 1150, a monk named Thomas of Monmouth arrived in Norwich. Soon he began to write an extensive narrative in which he blamed the Jews for William’s death. Thomas’s tale, by far the most detailed account of the story written, as he said, when the “memory of the murder had almost died out,” was not completed until sometime between 1172 and 1174.¹²

Thomas, as John McCulloh has convincingly argued, did not invent the charge that Jews killed Christians. And though the Cistercian chronicles suggest the rumor had already been in circulation, Thomas’s account, The Life and Passion of William of Norwich, is the first narrative of what Gavin Langmuir calls “ritual crucifixion,” which frames the death of a Christian boy in the language and tropes paralleling the life and passion of Jesus.¹³

Thomas himself noted the novelty of the affair.¹⁴ And this might not be surprising, given that the Jewish presence in Norwich was fairly new. Having arrived only after the Norman conquest, Jews were seen as foreigners allied with the invaders. Jeffrey Cohen has argued that the “Norman colonial context” is key to understanding both the Jews’ presence in Norwich and the reactions to William’s death.¹⁵ But there is more. The Jews’ recent arrival in Norwich and William’s death also coincided with new forms of piety increasingly focused on the humanity of Christ and his true suffering during his passion.¹⁶ In Thomas’s detailed and riveting telling, William was a stand-in for all Christians, indeed, for Christ himself, whom Jews killed out of hatred.¹⁷ In addressing the novelty of the claims, Thomas’s book is also a treatise against doubt, with tropes connecting William to Christ, serving to reassure and quiet the doubters.

From the very beginning of Thomas’s Life and Passion, the tone and the expectations to fit the story into the mold of Christ’s passion are set. Describing the conception of William, Thomas alluded to Marian imagery: “The mercy of divine piety had him conceived in the womb of a mother ignorant of what she carried and caused a fragrant rose to grow little by little among the thorns.”¹⁸ The imagery of a fragrant rose signals both Marian associations, reinforcing the parallel between the births of Jesus and William, and William’s anticipated martyrdom.

In medieval Christian theology, Mary was associated both with a lily and a rose and sometimes with a “rose garden” in which she bore Jesus.¹⁹ The image of the rose, one of the most beautiful flowers because of its fragrance and color, but with thorns that can cause bleeding, proved powerful for Christian thinkers. “Just as a rose grows surrounded by thorns but remains free from their disfiguring influence,” wrote Adrienne Nock Ambrose, summarizing a later devotional work from Germany, “Mary lived among sinful humanity while remaining free of sin.”²⁰ The rose also came to symbolize martyrdom. For Honorius Augustodunensis, the author of popular devotional works, among them Sigillum Beatae Mariae, who lived in the first half of the twelfth century and was apparently a student of Anselm of Canterbury, “the rose signifies the martyrs” because “the rose excels all other flowers in redness.”²¹ Honorius then linked the rose as a symbol of Mary to the trope of martyrdom: “she saw the Son of God born of her so innocently tortured on the cross, she endured in her soul a torment greater by far than that of all the martyrs. Thus she was greater than a martyr, for they suffered in body, but she suffered in spirit, as it is said: ‘And your own soul a sword shall pierce (Luke 2:35).’ ” That imagery of a rose would reappear in Thomas’s work as one of the miracles signaling William’s holiness: a rose bush blossomed in the midst of winter on William’s grave, its blossoms lasting from Advent until Christmas.²² Nor was the trope of the Advent accidental: Mary and the preparation for the birth of Jesus are at the center of celebrations during the season, and the trope of a rose blossoming in the middle of winter as a Marian miracle is used frequently in Christian devotion.²³

Thomas then elaborated how the Jews chose William, “who was twelve at the time and innocent indeed,” to be “mocked and sacrificed in disgrace of Lord’s Passion.”²⁴ William had frequented Jewish homes, but according to Thomas, Jews used a ruse to lure him to join them. Still, when his mother did not want to let the boy go before Easter, “the traitor,” hired by Jews to bring William to them, “swore that he would not be without him for three days, not even for thirty pieces of silver,” and offered the mother three shillings for the boy. When the boy was brought to the Jews, they received him “kindly, like an innocent lamb led to the slaughter.” But soon he was “humiliated” and tortured. The description of the torture evoked explicit elements of the passion of Christ along with a mix of what seem to be contemporary methods of torture. Thomas wrote that when William was held, some Jews “inserted into his open mouth a torture instrument known in English as a teasel.” They tied a knot to his temple and rope around his neck and chin. They then shaved the boy’s head and “wounded it with an infinite number of thorn pricks and made him bleed miserably.” While the boy was tortured, other Jews “sentenced him to be crucified,” “in mockery of the Passion of the Cross,” while saying, “Just as we have condemned Christ to a most shameful death, so we condemn a Christian, so that we punish both the Lord and his servant in the punishment of reproach; that which they ascribe to us we will inflict on them.” “They then fastened him with chains to a post, pierced his left hand and left foot with a nail.” Finally, to satisfy “their inborn hatred of the Christian name,” they “pierced his left side up into his heart.”

The parallels between Christ and William are even more explicit in a heavenly vision apparently experienced by a little girl, which shows William, sitting in the presence of Christ and of Mary the Virgin, dressed in a similar robe as Christ. A dove then announces him to be a martyr “killed by Jews in derision of the Lord’s Passion,” who “imitated Christ in the passion of death” and who therefore “deserved to be like Christ Himself in the honor of the purple robe.”²⁵

For all the noted similarities to Jesus and his passion, there were also differences. Perhaps in response to the criticism that the wounds and alleged method of killing did not resemble Christ’s passion, Thomas claimed that the differences were meant to disguise the Jews’ guilt, in hopes of shifting the blame onto Christians. Thomas took pains to assert repeatedly that no Christian would have done such a deed—a curious assertion given that England was experiencing a cruel civil war that left many people dead, some suffering tortures resembling those described by Thomas.²⁶

In Thomas’s telling, William’s torturous death was needed to assure him of the title “the glorious boy and martyr of Christ … crowned with the blood of glorious martyrdom” who “achieved the kingdom of eternal glory, alive for eternity,” his soul “exalted joyfully in heaven among the illustrious host of saints” and his body working “wonders gloriously on earth by the omnipotence of divine mercy.”²⁷ Among those “wonders” were rays of light reaching William’s head and an intact body exuding a “sweet smell” for a long time after his death.²⁸

Thomas’s Life and Passion of William of Norwich reads as an apologetic treatise rebutting doubts about William’s martyrdom and saintly status.²⁹ And doubts abounded, from the troubling neglect of William’s body after it was discovered to the alleged, and entirely implausible, conspiracy of silence protecting Jews and covering up their crime involving one Aelwerd, a rich Norwich man who was said to have encountered the Jews as they were trying to dispose of the body; the sheriff, John to whom Jews apparently confessed their crime and whom they then bribed into silence; and a Christian woman who worked as a servant in the Jews’ house.

And then there was William himself, rather questionable material for a saint. He was an apprentice with a relatively common background, had no particular achievements, and was not known for his piety and devotion. In short, he did not do anything in his life to warrant sainthood.³⁰ But Thomas nonetheless asserted, “We are confident that the glorious martyr William lives [in heaven] among their holy communities, marked by a triple stole and counted among the illustrious. He deserves the badge of a triple stole, he who already had two stoles, that is of innocence and of virginity, so that he should claim the third, painted in red by the blood of the martyr.”³¹ He continued, “The boyhood and innocence of the blessed William saves and … the purity of his virginity commends.” His wounds prove “that he was truly killed,” and because he “was young and innocent with no previous sins,” he did not deserve to be killed. The miracles that followed his death showed “that he ought to be called a saint, and indeed, he is.” To those who claimed that “William was lacking in any merit after death, … who had been but a little poor boy, insignificant in life, … [whom] they held in contempt, because they knew him to have been a poor little ragged boy, working for his living as far as he could in the art of tanning,” Thomas responded that “Christ himself was poor, not having a place to lay His head, and He called the poor—not the rich—to be His apostles; the weak, not the strong; the unlearned, not the worldly wise; innocent children, not those grown old in malice.”³²

But serious theological issues remained. Could childhood be “a reason to reject sanctification”? Could “a little, worthless, ragged, and poor boy” attain veneration? European Christian tradition had a few models of “Christ-like” adult saints, but in the tenth and eleventh centuries, as Paul A. Hayward has shown, the Anglo-Saxons developed a number of cults of boy saints, including those of St. Æthelberht and Æthelred of Ramsey, Æthelberht of Hereford, and Edward the Martyr.³³ Yet all these boys shared “an outstanding royal pedigree,” were projected to assume royal status, and “strove to live as virgins.”³⁴ This may be why Thomas’s Life and Passion of William of Norwich highlights William’s poverty and low status, as well as virginity. Thomas briefly mentioned the ancient child saints Pancras, Pantaleon, and Celsus.³⁵ And, importantly, during Thomas’s life Christian theologians began to meditate on Jesus’s adolescence. For example, Aelred of Rievaulx, an English Cistercian monk and an abbot since 1147, wrote an exegesis titled “Jesus at the Age of Twelve.”³⁶

But there was another precedent of venerated child martyrs to whom Thomas turned: the Holy Innocents, who “were not distinguished by the merits of a lifetime, but whom God’s grace alone glorified.”³⁷ The cult of the Holy Innocents, popular since the second century and based on the account from the Gospel of Matthew of the massacre ordered by King Herod of “the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under,” would prove powerful in the justification of anti-Jewish accusations.³⁸ Given that Herod was seeking to kill Jesus, the Holy Innocents were thus killed in place of Jesus, much like the accusers claimed Jews did with the Christian boys: this argument was later used to justify the veneration of Simon of Trent and Andreas Oxner.³⁹ As Patricia Healy Wasilyw has argued, “The Holy Innocents were not only innocent victims; they were also innocent by proxy. The infant Jesus did not merit death any more than the children who died in his place.”⁴⁰ The child “saints” who were said to have been killed by Jews were also seen as martyrs by proxy: they were not old enough to deserve sainthood and martyrdom, but were seen to have died at the hands of Jews in place of Jesus.

Indeed, the crown of the argument to justify William’s saintly status was that—as Thomas forcefully claimed—he was killed by Jews. This is one of Thomas’s most obvious innovations. But here too Thomas faced detractors who knew “someone to be killed cruelly, but since they are unsure by whom and why, they dare to say on that account that he is neither a saint nor a martyr.”⁴¹ To them Thomas responded by asserting that William “was surely slain by the Jews both because it is the custom of dierum [paschalium], and also by the nature of the torments, and by the sure signs of the wounds, too, as well as by the most truthful arguments we have from witnesses.”

Thomas’s fascinating and, sometimes, contradictory work grabbed scholars’ attention and led them to overstate the historical importance of William of Norwich’s story. Gavin Langmuir calls Thomas of Monmouth “an influential figure in the formation of Western culture,”⁴² but not because he “alter[ed] the course of battles, politics, or the economy,” or solved “philosophical or theological problems,” or was “noteworthy for the holiness of his life or promotion of monastic office.” He was influential because “he created a myth that affected Western mentality from the twelfth to the twentieth century, and caused, directly or indirectly, far more deaths than William’s murderer could ever have dreamt of committing.”

Still, even if some tropes appearing in Thomas’s work did enter the vocabulary of subsequent anti-Jewish libels, they cannot necessarily be attributed to his work. As John McCulloh has shown, The Life and Passion of William of Norwich remained unknown until its discovery in the nineteenth century; in contrast to its value for modern scholars, its historical influence was limited.⁴³ More likely, the tropes found in it now seem familiar and influential because they were built on “language replete with typological and liturgical resonance,” emphasizing “William’s typological relationship to Christ.”⁴⁴ Heather Blurton has persuasively argued that Thomas’s opus must be understood “as a response to liturgical expression in the long twelfth century,” because “it borrows consistently from the language of liturgy, especially in those moments when it is most at pains to make the case that William was truly a martyr and a saint.”⁴⁵ In fact, Thomas’s work not only borrows the language and tropes of liturgy for Lent and Easter but also reflects new developments in Christian liturgy at the time. According to Blurton, “twelfth-century liturgical change helped to shape the field of discourse within which the ritual murder accusation might emerge.”⁴⁶ Among these liturgical tropes, she claims, was the newly developed Planctus Mariae, which focuses on Mary’s grieving response to Christ’s death, and liturgies for other feasts, including that of the Holy Innocents. Scholars claim that early in medieval Christianity the connection “between the Massacre of the Holy Innocents and the Crucifixion of Christ was made precisely through their shared representation of Jewish violence,” and, as Teresa Tinkle has shown, “The exegetes from the eighth century to the thirteenth similarly read the scene [of the Massacre of the Innocents] as a narrative about Jewish anger and Christian suffering, wherein the Innocents witness to a violent Jewish hatred of Christ that begins with his birth and extends to the contemporary persecution of the saints.”⁴⁷ Thomas’s opus may thus be simply reflecting these liturgical developments more broadly, not inventing them. The reappearance of these tropes elsewhere in turn may speak more to the dissemination of the new cultural trends within Christianity than the power and influence of Thomas’s narrative. His work, thus, appears to be an innovative synthesis of existing tropes and precedents of martyrdom, both adult and child; the suffering of Christ; and devotional trends and liturgy.⁴⁸

The Making of a Saint

Thomas’s narrative of William’s “life and passion” was written to establish, promote, and justify a local cult, and as such, it shares much “with earlier Anglo-Saxon legends” of child saints, “murdered for political reason.”⁴⁹ When Thomas was writing, the criteria sufficient for making someone a saint were popular veneration and authorization by a local bishop, with the translation of the body from a burial site to a public space in a church or cathedral marking the formal recognition of sainthood.⁵⁰ And although evidentiary rules in canon law had begun to change already in the late eleventh century, ultimately also influencing procedures of canonization, no strict procedures for sainthood had been articulated until 1179, when Pope Alexander III issued the bull Audivimus, which affirmed the papal role in authorizing a cult. But even after Alexander III’s intervention, as André Vauchez has argued, “for the papacy, the cult of saints remained and would long remain a marginal issue, essentially regulated by custom.”⁵¹

The criteria for sainthood in Thomas’s time were still vague and subject to abuse. Two canons issued in the fifth and eighth centuries guided the procedures, and they were included in Gratian’s Decretum, composed at about the same time as Thomas arrived in Norwich in 1150.⁵² He may have known about them, because his Life and Passion of William of Norwich seems to have addressed precisely the questions about the validity of sainthood raised by these two canons. The first, Canon Fifteen issued at the Fifth Council of Carthage in 401, addressed questionable places of veneration containing no bodies or relics of the martyrs. In such cases, the bishop was required to examine and destroy such improper sites, and in the case of a public outcry the bishop should admonish people not to venerate places that have no reliable historical connection to the martyrs.⁵³ According to E. W. Kemp, the canon put the onus on the bishop, “subject to the direction of the provincial synod.”⁵⁴ The second canon came from the 813 Council of Mainz, which forbade the translation of the bodies of saints, “the principal outward sign of recognition of a saint,” without the authorization of “the bishop and synod acting with the knowledge of the secular power.” With the issuance of the bull Audivimus in 1179, the authorization for sainthood would begin to change; by the thirteenth century, when the bull was included in Pope Gregory IX’s Decretales, the authority to recognize a saint lay with the pontiff himself.

In his work, Thomas went out of his way to address the issues of episcopal recognition of William and the translation of his body. Priest Godwin, William’s uncle, went specifically to the synod to “present to the ears of the bishop and his fellow priests a mournful complaint the like of which was unheard of in present times” and to denounce the “affront recently committed against all Christians.”⁵⁵ In his address, Godwin noted that William’s body still had not been moved and was “still buried without Christian interment.” Ultimately, the participants of the synod agreed with Godwin, but Bishop Everard wavered because “he feared to confront the king and his officials openly.”⁵⁶ In the end the participants of the synod, especially Aimar, prior of St. Pancras, convinced the bishop “in favor of a cult.” The bishop then “arranged to have the body of the most blessed boy brought to the cathedral and buried in the monks’ cemetery.” The translation of William’s body implied the bishop’s recognition of William as a saint.

Still, doubts remained. Perhaps an indication of these lingering doubts is the fact that William was buried in the monks’ cemetery and not in the cathedral itself. Moreover, for their universal recognition, saints required papal approval.⁵⁷ Thomas seemed to have been aware of these debates and addressed them head-on. “Apart from the glorious Virgin Mother of God and John the Baptist and the Apostles,” he wrote,

It can be said of few saints that knowledge of them is widespread in all the lands where the religion of the Christian name flourishes. Truly, is it possible that all those whom Rome herself venerates, Gaul and Britain accept for worship too? … Is it true that the whole of Europe also is used to celebrate all those which Asia and Africa hold as famous? If it were so, or rather because it is firmly so, what sort of blame is incurred by those who celebrate with fitting veneration someone whom the Church does not know or worship universally? What they call presumption—to hold as a saint one who is not—we assert the same without a shadow of doubt and agree in attesting to it.⁵⁸

Thomas’s Life and Passion of William of Norwich thus reflects the debates over who was, or even who could be, a saint and who conformed to the process of making a saint before the procedures became more formal and subject to Rome’s approval.

Thomas’s work had very limited direct impact. Even the diligent Bollandists, seventeenth-century Jesuits dedicated to preparing an annotated scholarly edition of the lives of saints, did not seem to know about this text.⁵⁹ Instead they were aware of several mentions of William in English chronicles and the shortened narrative by John of Tynemouth, which was heavily dependent on Matthew Paris, a thirteenth-century English chronicler and Benedictine monk at St. Albans Abbey, and which they attributed to John Capgrave, a fifteenth-century English chronicler and hagiographer.⁶⁰ John of Tynemouth’s account, published in both English and Latin in 1516, was the first narrative about William to become known to the wider public. Until then only short entries, sometimes one-sentence long, found their way to printed chronicles.

The Bollandists were heavily dependent on printed works. Their Acta Sanctorum included several other tales from England and the continent of Jews killing Christian children, mostly those that inspired shrines to these children, or attempts to create new cults. Among those tales was that of Hugh of Lincoln, whose death in 1255 occasioned the first anti-Jewish accusation in England to produce an official response and sanction from the royal authorities, and the first to result in the execution of Jews there. The story was told in contemporary chronicles, including by Matthew Paris, and in an Anglo-Norman ballad. These texts, along with a shrine in Lincoln, guaranteed that Hugh’s memory was preserved. Indeed, the story entered known works of literature, most famously Chaucer’s “Prioress’s Tale.”⁶¹ Little Hugh’s story also became part of the Bollandists’ Acta Sanctorum because, like that of William of Norwich, the narrative was included in John of Tynemouth’s chronicle of England and was available to them in print.⁶²

Twelfth-century England became a hotbed of stories of Jews killing Christian children.⁶³ And although Thomas of Monmouth’s version may not have had much direct impact, the story of William’s death and his local shrine were certainly known. It seems to have circulated within the network of Benedictine houses and likely influenced other such tales, among them that of Robert of Bury St. Edmunds, who died in 1181 and whose cult appears to have developed by the 1190s.⁶⁴ But with the possible exception of Robert of Bury, the stories of Jews killing Christian boys largely appeared only after the death of Hugh of Lincoln and the affair that followed, or, perhaps even after the expulsion of Jews from England in 1290. For example, Harold of Gloucester, said to have been “crucified” in 1168, and for that reason often listed chronologically listed right after William of Norwich, was first mentioned in the Peterborough Chronicle, written between 1273–1295; another, more elaborate version was included in the late fourteenth- to early fifteenth-century Chronicle of the Monastery of St. Peter’s.⁶⁵ But in all but one of these cases, even if shrines to the purported child victims were actually, or were only sought to be, established, no Jewish blood was spilled. The only exception in England was the case of Hugh of Lincoln, whose death led to the intervention by King Henry III and the execution of nearly twenty Jews—a tragedy unprecedented, at least in England.⁶⁶ And although the story of Hugh of Lincoln would be included in Matthew Paris’s chronicle and remembered in English literature, its impact, too, was limited beyond the isle—even though its memory would be preserved to the present day.

To be sure, England has an important place in the history of anti-Jewish accusations charging Jews with killing Christian children. The first shrines and narratives devoted to these dead children emerged there, often supported by monastic, especially Benedictine, networks.⁶⁷ Yet perhaps because of the expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290, the continued impact of the English accounts was blunted, the memory trail broken.⁶⁸ England’s role in this history would reemerge in the era of print, when some of the boys were mentioned in European chronicles.

A far more lasting and influential documentary and memory trail would come from events, and sometimes even just lore, on the European continent. Indeed, even England’s only case that resulted in judicial action against Jews—the death of Little Hugh of Lincoln in 1255—took place after the first trials of Jews had taken place on the continent.

A Continental Memory Trail

The tale that Jews crucified Christian children appears to have reached the continent long before the first Jews lost their lives on its account. The story of William of Norwich reached continental Europe as early as the 1140s, no doubt because of the Anglo-Norman connection. In the mid-twelfth century, certainly before Thomas of Monmouth wrote Life and Passion of William of Norwich and perhaps even before he arrived in Norwich, a notice of William’s death had appeared in “a German martyrology” under April 17: Apud Anglos Willehelmi pueri a Iudaeis crucifixi (“a boy William was crucified by Jews in England”).⁶⁹ But it was the Blois massacre of Jews in 1171 and the story of Richard of Pontoise, whose shrine was established in the Church of the Holy Innocents in Paris (hence he is often referred to as Richard of Paris), that left a more lasting mark in European chronicles and the Jewish memory trail.⁷⁰ The two events produced, for the first time, both Hebrew and Latin accounts.⁷¹

The French chronicler Rigord, writing after 1190, noted that King Philip Augustus “had heard” as a child from boys he knew that Jews in Paris had killed a Christian “in contempt of the Christian religion.”⁷² Scholars disagree when Richard of Pontoise died: some claim in the 1160s; others in the 1170s.⁷³ Richard’s shrine in the Church of the Holy Innocents in Paris became the first continental shrine devoted to a child victim and mentioned in both Christian and Jewish sources. And yet, the full narrative of the “passion of Richard” was only produced by Robert Gaguin in 1498,⁷⁴ more than two decades after the death of Simon of Trent in 1475 and the ensuing multimedia campaign promoting Simon’s shrine, and also just a few years after the publication of the Nuremberg Chronicle with its visual representation of William of Norwich and the elaborate woodcut of Simon of Trent. It was the narrative by Robert Gaguin to which the Bollandists turned.⁷⁵

The rumors that Philip is said to have heard as a child were perhaps related to the Blois incident in 1171, in which more than thirty Jews were burned at the stake.⁷⁶ He would have been around six years old when that massacre is said to have happened. Although the event is just briefly mentioned in Christian chronicles, Hebrew sources in poetry and prose provide longer accounts, for the first time documenting the Jewish response to an accusation and to the execution of Jews.⁷⁷ These responses would provide long-lasting models for Jewish responses to other accusations.

According to the surviving sources, on Maundy Thursday in 1171, a Jew carrying untanned skins near the Loire River encountered a Christian man, a servant to a local lord. The man thought the Jew was carrying instead a body of a Christian child to be thrown into the river.⁷⁸ He denounced the Jew to his master, who informed the local Count Thibaut. The count in turn seized the opportunity to take advantage of the Jews, with whom he evidently had financial dealings through a relationship with an influential Jewish woman named Pucellina. In need of cash and embroiled in “rivalry with the crown,” the count first sought an “exorbitant” ransom from the Jews and then condemned them to flames.⁷⁹ Despite the claims of chronicler Robert de Torigni, no body was ever found, and no Christian child was ever reported missing. Still, even though there was no corpus delicti, the first victims of the emerging anti-Jewish accusation lost their lives.⁸⁰ The massacre of Jews at Blois suggests the rapid dissemination of the tale that Jews killed Christian children.

The event shocked the Jewish community both because of the scale of persecution and because it was the first instance when “a secular ruler charged with their protection had persecuted the Jews and condemned them to death.”⁸¹ It produced, as Susan Einbinder has noted, “a new kind of martyr, the victim of judicial violence.” The trauma was captured in Jewish liturgical poetry produced to memorialize the event. Seeking to make sense of this unprecedented catastrophe and to answer the question Jews seem to have faced in light of this suffering—Where is your God now?—the poems fashioned the victims of Blois as burning sacrifices of atonement for “the expiation for communal sins;” they were “burnt offerings” whose smell pleased God;⁸² the “sacrificial lamb” that, according to Einbinder, “reaffirmed the covenant between God and Israel” and served as “the agent of this collective purification.”⁸³ In that framing, the martyrs of Blois are said to have gone to the fire with joy “as if they were bringing a bride to a wedding canopy.”⁸⁴ The tropes in these poems would mark Ashkenazi literary responses to suffering, and especially to anti-Jewish accusations, for centuries to come.⁸⁵ They promote the idea of martyrdom—the sanctification of God’s name, or kiddush ha-shem.

The Hebrew prose accounts also contain motifs of burnt offering and martyrdom representing a communal sacrifice for the sins of “all Israel.” The so-called “Orleans Letter,” a carefully crafted morality tale, affirms the martyrs’ faithfulness to God in light of unjust persecution, underscored not only by the unfounded accusations but also by the shaky justice system; it also warns Jews against behaviors that may cause persecution.⁸⁶ The thirty-one “angels” burned in Blois remained steadfast in their faith, “clinging to our God, the God of Israel”; they died believing, so the “letter” reassured, that their death “may serve as atonement [kaparah] for all our sins” and for the transgressions of the community. To commemorate the tragedy, a fast was established on the 20th of Sivan. According to Israel Yuval, “in the Franco-Ashkenazi world, Jewish martyrs filled the role that Jesus played in Christianity.”⁸⁷

The function of the “Orleans Letter” as a morality tale is evident in the structure of the text: only after the description of the suffering, martyrdom, and the steadfastness of the martyrs did the narrator describe the events that had led to their martyrdom. The author implied that the accusation was concocted to take revenge on a prominent Jewess, the unnamed Pucellina, who acted haughtily and “harmed” the local lord. To buttress Jewish leaders’ concern with the perceived appearance of Jewish status, the text also described sumptuary laws.⁸⁸ (The role that Jews’ behavior played in spurring such accusations would become a prominent feature in some early modern Sephardic sources, such as Shlomo ibn Verga’s Shevet Yehudah.)

Examples included in the “Orleans Letter” served to highlight both the martyrdom of the Jews and the miscarriage of justice. For instance, two of the martyrs, both kohanim of priestly lineage, were delivered from the fire because the bonds around their hands were severed and their hands were freed. But instead of being allowed to live, as was the custom in the case of failed executions, “the enemy rose against them and smote them mightily.”⁸⁹ In another vignette, a Catholic priest advised Count Thibaut to subject one of the Jews, R. Itzhak, to an ordeal by water, which is described in Hebrew sources in an inverted way: if the Jew floats, he is innocent; if he sinks, he is guilty. In the standard medieval ordeal, the guilty were expected—contrary to natural law—to float. An ordeal was iudicium dei, God’s judgment, a miraculous intervention to reveal the truth when little evidence was available.⁹⁰ This unjust inversion of the ordeal was amplified in Hebrew by the inverted parallel pun: they “acquitted the wicked and condemned the innocent [ve-hiẓdiku et ha-rash’im, ve hirshi’u et ha-ẓadikim].”⁹¹

The inverted description of the ordeal, coupled with the description of a botched execution, was not accidental or merely “ironic.”⁹² It emphasized that what happened in Blois was clearly a miscarriage of justice, even by the standards of the law of the time. But the message of injustice was sharpened by the fact that Jews were exempted from ordeals by royal or imperial privileges, which the Jews surely would have known at the time.⁹³ Not only was the ordeal applied fraudulently but it should not have been applied to Jews at all—in Blois, justice failed. Thus the outrage was not just about the new libel (davar sheker), as Ephraim bar Jacob of Bonn called it some twenty years later, but also, perhaps even more alarmingly, about the fact that laws were not properly followed. An unreliable legal system was potentially more frightening than this new accusation.

Jews, understandably, relied on courts of justice wherever they lived, and their estimation of how just local laws were had an impact on how they perceived their neighbors. According to Jewish tradition, for non-Jews to be excluded from the category of “idolaters” and, thus, from the restriction such categorization imposed on Jewish–gentile interaction, they had to abide by the Noahide laws, which were said to have applied to humans before the revelation on Mount Sinai. One of the categories of Noahide laws concerned just laws with functioning courts of law.⁹⁴ Calling Christian laws “bad” therefore also had serious halakhic consequences for Jewish–Christian interaction.⁹⁵ It is perhaps for this reason that other accounts of the Blois affair stressed the king’s outrage at miscarried justice, as if to reassure not only that faithfulness to God was important but also that, although in Blois “a secular authority defaulted on his legal responsibility to protect his Jews,”⁹⁶ Christian authorities more generally had not abandoned them and could still be relied on for support.

Indeed, the tone of the Hebrew prose accounts of Blois is surprisingly positive, conveying, as one of the “letters” phrased it, “good tidings [basurah tovah]” to the Jewish community.⁹⁷ When Jewish leaders went to see the king, who remains unnamed, he received them generously and asked the Jews to speak openly to him. The king then condemned Count Thibaut and promised to punish him “if he acted against the law,” because even the ruler was frightened by what the count had done. Moreover, the king felt the obligation to protect the “bodies and property of the Jews” like a “pupil of the eye.” These stated concerns that laws were broken in the persecution of Jews along with the assurances of the king’s protection are striking in these Hebrew texts. They address precisely the novelty of the Blois incident and try to mollify the sense of threat and betrayal by those who were supposed to protect Jews. As if to amplify the message that Jews had not lost the protection of those in power, the Hebrew texts mention the king’s willingness to issue charters of protection that were to be disseminated across his kingdom. This optimistic picture of the monarch’s defense offered hope in moments of crisis and assurances that, after all, Jews had not been abandoned by either God or the Christian kings.

Indeed, in affirming their commitment to the safety of the Jews, secular rulers are also shown to have expressed disbelief about the charges. In one of the Hebrew accounts, the king is reported as saying that “there is no truth” to the accusation against Jews like the one in Pontoise, even though the child was made a “saint in Paris”—a reference to Richard of Pontoise, whose body was placed in the Church of the Holy Innocents in the Field in Paris.⁹⁸ The king then assured the Jews that in his kingdom they should not fear similar charges, even if the non-Jews (ha-goyim) find a body of “a non-Jew killed in the field or in a city.” Another text adds an exchange with “Count Henry, the brother of the wicked [Thibaut],” in which Henry articulates, for the first time, an argument that there is nothing in Jewish law permitting them to kill non-Jews.

Scholars have debated whether these surviving epistolary narratives were indeed letters written immediately after the events in Blois to inform other Jewish communities about the accusations or whether they were written only in the thirteenth century or even later for other purposes.⁹⁹ The presence of the arguments defending Jews against the ritual murder accusation seems to point, as Kenneth Stow has argued, to a later, post–thirteenth-century dating, when both the Holy Roman Emperor and the pope, but admittedly not a French king, provided letters defending the Jews and condemning the blood accusations against them.¹⁰⁰ If, however, we were to accept the Hebrew letters as more or less contemporaneous to Blois, that would mean that these Hebrew texts captured the existence of the first, now lost, official royal defense of Jews against anti-Jewish accusations. But another clue suggests that the letters were indeed written much later. The letter, said to have been sent by “the leaders of Paris,” notes that “now we cannot go there [Paris],” implying it was written after one of the expulsions of Jews from France, or at least after 1182, the first time Jews were expelled from the French domains.

Scholarly debates over the Hebrew accounts of Blois stem from the fact that some of these epistolary accounts come from manuscripts written as late as the fifteenth century. Two are appended to the end of Crusade chronicles—one by Shlomo bar Shimson in a manuscript relating other accounts of persecution and dated to 1453,¹⁰¹ and another by Ephraim bar Jacob of Bonn—alongside other stories of Jewish persecutions in a collection that likely served a liturgical purpose of commemorating Jewish suffering.¹⁰² Though the dates of these manuscripts have generated debates over their historical origins and significance, their precise chronology is not pertinent here, nor is it of crucial importance whether they describe what may have happened or just provide embellished accounts of the drama following the Blois affair, trying to fit the story into the liturgy commemorating Jewish suffering. What matters is that in retelling the story of Jewish martyrdom these accounts provide not simply reassurance and meaning for suffering but also a model for intercommunal communication and mobilization in the aftermath of anti-Jewish libels. They highlight the steps to be taken while seeking help from Christian authorities. Thus, even if, as Kenneth Stow has argued, these letters were in fact written or redacted a long time after the events, what they capture is a powerful story of Jewish martyrdom and communal responses. That very combination would become the core of early modern Ashkenazi songs and tales of anti-Jewish libels; the Sephardic works would lose the martyrological motif.

Fulda and Valréas—The Beginning of the Legal Trail

If the story of Blois began the memory trail in Jewish literature and martyrology in the aftermath of anti-Jewish libels, the legal trail started in the thirteenth century with two cases that generated the first reliable evidence of Christian authorities defending Jews from anti-Jewish accusations: Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II in 1236 following violence in Fulda in Hesse and Pope Innocent IV in 1247 in the aftermath of the death of a girl in Valréas in Provence.¹⁰³ Fulda and Valréas represent a new development in the history of anti-Jewish accusations. There, for the first time, not only were Jews said to kill Christian children but also to do so to obtain their blood. The Fulda accusation led to what seems to have been the first inquiry into Jewish religious practices ordered by Christian authorities, which resulted in the exculpation of Jews.

What is known about Fulda comes from the imperial decree, a bulla aurea, issued by Frederick II in July 1236, and from two monastic chronicles: Annales erphordienses, a Dominican chronicle covering 1220–1253 and written in Erfurt between the 1230s and sometime after 1253, and Annales marbecenses, a Cistercian chronicle compiled in the thirteenth century in Marbach.¹⁰⁴ Frederick II’s imperial decree, a legal document, sets the legal framework and affirms imperial power in administering justice and giving protection to his subjects, but says little about what happened beyond mentioning “the murder of certain boys by Jews,” which gave rise to a menacing new opinion about Jews’ “clandestine crimes.”¹⁰⁵ The chronicle, in contrast, captures the memory of the events.

For the year 1235, the Erfurt chronicle briefly mentions a story of eighteen Jews murdered in the village of Wolfesheim for killing a Christian.¹⁰⁶ The staggering number reportedly killed and the chronicler’s enigmatic pronouncement—“for it seems that he who thirsts for blood, his blood shall be shed”—perhaps indicate more than a charge of simple murder. Though the reported incident may be evidence of the crusade-related unrest, the statement may also imply a connection to the new belief that Jews not only killed Christians but also desired their blood. Given the chronicle’s textual context, it may set up a link between what is said to have happened in Wolfesheim and the incident in Fulda.

According to an account for the following year, on December 28, 1235 (5 Kal. Ianuarii), thirty-four Jewish men and women were killed in Fulda by Crusaders—“Christians marked with a cross”—because two of them “had killed miserably five sons of a certain miller, who lives outside of the city walls, and who, together with his wife, was attending church at the time.”¹⁰⁷ They collected the boys’ blood in waxed sacks and burned the house down, the chronicler claimed. After the crime was discovered and “confirmed” by the Jews’ confession, they were punished “as mentioned above”—attacked by the Crusaders. The chronicler’s note is confusing. On the one hand, it suggests an inquiry and the Jews’ confession, which ultimately led to punishment. On the other, it implies extrajudicial mob violence by the Crusaders, a likely reference to the unstable political situation in the region during the Sixth Crusade, which targeted not just Muslims in the Holy Land but also heretics at home.¹⁰⁸

The slightly later Cistercian chronicle of Marbach does not mention Wolfesheim, but it offers a more detailed account of Fulda that seems to corroborate the reports of mob violence against Jews.¹⁰⁹ It also refers to the blood motif and sows doubt about the emperor’s role in the affair. According to the chronicle, citizens of Fulda killed “many Jews” after they “had slain some Christian boys in a certain mill in order to draw their blood for their own remedy.” The bodies of the boys were taken to Hagenau, an imperial city about 100 miles away, and deposited in the imperial castle. More violence against Jews was then reported. “Unable to quell the violence that erupted there against Jews,” the emperor called for an inquiry to confront the “popular rumor” that Jews needed Christian blood “for the day of preparation” [in parasceve, Passover]. The emperor was assured, so the chronicler says, that “if this turned out to be true, all the Jews of his empire would be destroyed,” a language that mirrors that of the Hebrew accounts of Blois. But, the Marbach chronicler asserted, nothing certain came out of this inquiry and the emperor’s serious intentions were quickly weakened, not least on account of Jewish bribes.¹¹⁰

The chronicler’s claims contradict the imperial decree, which exculpates the Jews. He clearly did not accept either the conclusions of the imperial commission¹¹¹ or the resulting official decree. For the Marbach monk, there was no clear exoneration of the Jews, and whatever the result of the inquiry, it was determined by Jewish money. The fama communis—a term meaning public opinion, or rumors—about Jews and the Fulda murder was stronger than the 1236 imperial decree or later papal bulls condemning such anti-Jewish beliefs and accusations. Indeed, although valuable, neither the imperial decree nor the papal bulls defending Jews would prevent subsequent accusations and new tales about Jewish murders of Christian children from arising.

The imperial decree, while lacking in detail about what happened in Fulda, is unequivocal about what actions the emperor took and why, and what conclusions were reached. It was appended to and framed within the traditional protections of Jews as imperial subjects belonging to the imperial chamber, which had been granted to Jews in 1157 by Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa, and meant to affirm the emperor’s protection of Jews and assert imperial authority over them.¹¹² This is exactly what the Hebrew accounts of Blois claimed had happened in France.

Given the events at Fulda and the subsequent attacks on Jews caused by hostile rumors, the emperor, in an effort to “elucidate the truth about this crime,” decided to consult many notables, including princes, magnates, nobles, abbots, and other religious figures.¹¹³ Because these men could not reach a consensus, the emperor then sought counsel from Jewish converts to Christianity, who, having rejected Judaism, were expected not to “keep quiet” about anything they found in Jewish books. He summoned converts who were “experts in Jewish law” to conduct a diligent study of the matter and find out the truth. Their findings were conclusive: Jews do not desire to consume human blood. Indeed, according to the laws of Moses and “Jewish decrees, called in Hebrew Talmud [Talmilloht],” they guard themselves from “pollution” by blood. Even those cultures for which animal blood was permitted, human blood was not. The emperor, with the support of the princes, thus pronounced “the Jews absolved of the grave crime,” and prohibited anyone from launching such accusations against them, calling Jews the emperor’s “kind and favorable servants.” This imperial condemnation would enter the legal trail of defense against the blood libel accusations, and Jews were eager to have it registered in official records. In 1260, the decree was inscribed into the records of Worms, and in 1360 in Cologne. Though the emperor used the occasion to assert his authority, the fact that the decree would be marshaled in subsequent accusations underscores the limits of imperial protection of Jews and, as the Marbach chronicle manifests, casts doubt on the efficacy of even explicit condemnations of blood accusations.¹¹⁴

It is not clear whether Fulda was the first case in which the charge of the use of blood was levied. But this is how Pope Innocent IV understood it when he reissued the papal constitution Sicut Iudaeis on June 9, 1247.¹¹⁵ Addressing “all faithful Christians,” Innocent warned them not to “accuse [Jews] of using human blood in their religious rites since in the Old Testament they are instructed not to use blood of any kind, let alone human blood. But since at Fulda and in several other places many Jews were killed because of such a suspicion, we, by the authority of these letters strictly forbid the recurrence of such a thing in the future.”¹¹⁶ The pope threatened excommunication and loss of honor for anyone who would oppose “the tenor of this decree,” but qualified that “only those be fortified by this our protection who dare plot nothing against the Christian faith.”

Innocent IV issued this version of Sicut Iudaeis in the aftermath of an incident in the Provencal village of Valréas, thirty-seven miles north of Avignon. On March 26, 1247, during Holy Week, a two-year-old girl named Meilla disappeared; her body was found the next morning in a nearby moat.¹¹⁷ In a subsequent inquest witnesses claimed that her body “smelled good” and that miracles ensued after her body was moved to the local church.¹¹⁸ No sooner had people started claiming that the girl had last been seen on the Jewish street than two Franciscan friars, Guillem Chaste and Azemar, began to investigate, although without authorization from the local authorities. They arrested three Jews—Benedig, Burcellas, and Durand—and apparently had them tortured. The three were held for seven days, until April 4, when they finally confessed to killing Meilla. On April 9, the lord of Valréas, Dragonet de Montauban, intervened in this unauthorized investigation, and ordered his own.

During this second inquest, whose summary was written by Petrus Bernardus, the lord’s notary, Benedig implicated other Jews—Astrucus, Crescas, Burcellas, Lucius, and Durantus.¹¹⁹ He also is reported to have said that after kidnapping Meilla they extracted her blood in a hidden place inside his house; fearful of discovery and further violence committed by local Christians (propter tumultum et timorem populi), they tried to dispose of any remnants. He also reportedly showed the knife with which the girl was wounded and the glass vessel in which the blood was to have been collected. “Of the blood,” Benedig said, “they were to partake on the recent Holy Sabbath, and believed to be saved [by it].”¹²⁰ Not only that, they did this every year, especially in Spain, because of the great number of Jews there. And “when they cannot have a Christian they eat a Saracene [Muslim].”

The surviving record claims that Burcellas also said Meilla had been killed to obtain blood “for a sacrament” because in ancient time the great priest of the Temple “received the blood of a ram” and “sprinkled” it in a plaza before the Temple, according to the Law of Moses.¹²¹ Another Jew, Lucius, apparently said that the infant and its blood would be “almost like a sacrifice”: “almost” because without the Temple they could not make sacrifices. The blood was to be shared with other Jews, and the remains of “a Christian or Jewish person” killed “in place of a ram” were to be burned “according to their law.”¹²² Lucius, invoking the Christian justification of Jewish exile, is reported to have said that the child was to be crucified in place of “the prophet called Jesus on whose account we are in captivity.”

Another Jew, Durantus, denied killing Meilla. But when asked about what was supposedly done with her body, he reportedly claimed that it was to be crucified “on the holy Friday in opposition and affront to Jesus Christ.”¹²³ When asked about the blood, he claimed Jews needed it for a procession similar to that done with “the blood of the ram in the old law.” When subjected to torture, the men’s confessions contradicted each other’s. Some denied what was said; others changed their answers. In the end, many were burned at the stake, others murdered in the cruelest way, being “cut in two,” with men castrated and women’s breasts torn out; some, including children, were forced to be baptized.¹²⁴ Christians, for their part, sought to prove not just the Jews’ guilt but also the miracles following the girl’s death. But no cult seems to have emerged there.

Though Fulda seems to be the first place where the blood accusation emerged, the case in Valréas may offer its first detailed description and first claims connecting the death of a Christian child with “the law of Moses.” This is why it was imperative for Jews to demonstrate that Jewish law did not include demands to use blood of any sort. Jews promptly turned to the pope to seek help and protection, who happened to be in Lyon, 105 miles north of Valréas. On May 28, 1247, Pope Innocent IV issued two letters to Archbishop Jean de Bernin, whose bishopric included the town of Valréas. The pope enjoined the bishop to “restore” status and liberty to the Jews and protect them against future persecution. Pope Innocent IV explicitly lay the blame for the violence in Valréas on Christians, “who covetous of their possessions or thirsting for their blood, despoil, torture, and kill them without legal judgment, contrary to the clemency of the Catholic religion, which allows them to dwell in the midst of its people and has decreed tolerance to their rites.”¹²⁵ The pope objected to the process: Jews were “inhumanely burned [at the stake],” even though they “were not legally convicted, nor had they confessed,” he wrote, contradicting the summary the notary had prepared. Such actions were not to be tolerated because “divine justice has never cast the Jewish people aside so completely that it reserves no remnant of them for salvation.” Indeed, in his second letter to the archbishop, Innocent IV wrote,

If the Christian religion were to give a careful heed and rightly analyze by the use of reason, how inhuman it is and how discordant with piety for it to afflict with many kinds of molestations, and to smite with all sorts of grave injuries, the remnant of the Jews, to whom, left as witnesses of his saving passion and of His victorious death, the benignity of the Savior promised the favor of salvation, it would not only draw back its hands from harming them, but as a show of piety and solace of human kindness to those whom it holds, as it were, in tribute.¹²⁶

In this letter, it seems that the pope consciously chose to use mild language in reference to Jews. In fact, in another context, in 1244, the same pope was not shy about referring to Judaism as the “impious perfidy of the Jews” and bemoaning that “our Redeemer has not removed the veil of blindness [from their hearts] because of the enormity of their crime.”¹²⁷ But here this language was missing.

Based on a petition sent by the Jews, in the second letter, the pope offered more details about the injustice that took place in Valréas.¹²⁸ According to the pope, the Jews, accused of “having nailed to the cross a certain girl who had been found dead in a certain ditch,” complained about the process. Though they “were not convicted, nor had they confessed nor had they even been accused by anyone,” the Dragonet de Montauban

despoiled them of all their goods and cast them into a fearful prison, and without admitting the legitimate protestation and defense of their innocence, he cut some of them in two, others he burned at the stake, of others he castrated the men, and tore out the breasts of the women. He afflicted them with other diverse kinds of torture, until, as it is said, they confessed with their mouth what their conscience did not dictate, choosing to be killed in one moment of agony than to live and be afflicted with torments and tortures.

And then other lords, taking advantage of the crisis, also “threw into prison whatever Jews dwell in their lands and dominions, after having robbed these Jews of all their property.” The pope expressed concern with the process that would be voiced in response to other blood accusations over the following centuries: “No one deserves punishment unless he has first committed a crime, nor should anyone be punished for the crime of another.”

But in his first letters responding to what happened in Valréas, Innocent IV did not address the crux of the charge: that Jews murdered Christian children for cannibalistic purposes. This charge was only addressed later in the summer, in two separate statements on June 9 and July 5.¹²⁹ In the first, Innocent reissued the constitution Sicut Iudaeis, adding language that explicitly condemned what would become known as the “blood libel.” He admonished Christians not to accuse Jews “of using human blood in their religious rites, since in the Old Testament they are instructed not to use blood of any kind, let alone human blood.”¹³⁰ In his July 5 letter to the archbishops and bishops of Germany, the pope countered another kind of false accusation: that, during Passover, Jews “share the heart of a murdered child.”¹³¹ He defended Jews, stating that “the Divine Scriptures pronounces the law ‘Thou shalt not kill’ ” and asserting, somewhat mistakenly, that it was prohibited to Jews “to touch any dead body” while celebrating Passover.¹³² The bull was reissued again on August 18, 1247, this time addressed to the archbishop of Vienne, Jean de Bernin; a copy eventually found its way to Trent, as part of the dossier related to the trial of Jews there in 1475.¹³³

The narrative that emerged in Valréas seems to have been heavily influenced by the projection of Eucharistic practices and beliefs onto the Jews.¹³⁴ The blood, the records state, was said to have been extracted “to partake on the recent Holy Sabbath, and believed to be saved [by it].”¹³⁵ It was “a sacrament” consumed, like the Eucharist in the medieval period, every year. The blood, also like the Eucharist, was to be divided and shared among Jews. The victim, like Jesus in Christian theology, was a replacement for the Passover ram.¹³⁶ But, in contrast to Christian reverence for Jesus in the Eucharist during the Easter season, all this was to be done “in opposition and affront to Jesus Christ.” What supposedly happened in Valréas was represented as a Eucharistic counternarrative.

But if the storyline was heavily influenced by the Eucharistic sacrament, it may have also reflected a new awareness of Jewish texts, which had been exposed only recently to Christian eyes. The events in Valréas took place just seven years after the “trial of the Talmud” in 1240.¹³⁷ And although the consumption of blood, as the pope affirmed, was prohibited according to the Bible, blood did play an important role in Temple sacrificial rituals discussed in the books of Exodus and Leviticus and elaborated in rabbinic literature.¹³⁸ In Exodus 29, the blood of a ram and a bull is used in the consecration of the High Priest. In Leviticus, and then in more detail in Mishnah Yoma, the high priest slaughters sacrificial animals—a bull or a goat—and collects their blood.¹³⁹ The Mishnah adds information about Temple topography and instruments: a basin into which the blood is collected and a description where it was sprinkled: “He [the High Priest] slaughtered it and collected its blood in a basin, and gave it to the one who would stir it on the fourth terrace of the sanctuary so that it would not congeal.… He took the blood from the one who was stirring it, went to the place where he had entered and stood at the place where he had stood, and sprinkled from [the bowl] once up and seven times down.”¹⁴⁰ Blood, of course, also plays an important role in the Exodus story and thus in the Passover story: the Nile River turns into blood, and blood is sprinkled on the doors of the Israelites, saving their firstborn from the angel of death. Though biblical—both Hebrew and Christian—texts provided enough textual bases for inspiring charges of both ritual crucifixion and blood libels, in a new context of Jewish–Christian polemic and animosity in the High Middle Ages, it is not implausible that the interest in Jewish texts heightened the sensitivity to and awareness of other discussions of blood in Jewish texts.

Moreover, the idea of blood’s restorative and curative power was also known among Jews and Christians. Pliny’s Historia naturalis, as Efraim Shoham-Steiner has shown, contains a story of the king of Egypt bathing in blood to cure leprosy.¹⁴¹ In the legend of Saint Sylvester, Emperor Constantine, affected by leprosy, is advised to bathe in blood, but chooses baptism instead.¹⁴² And some Jewish midrashim tell a story of the pharaoh’s affliction with leprosy and his demand for the blood of the infants of Hebrews.¹⁴³ Shoham-Steiner has demonstrated that, during the Middle Ages, this last story underwent changes from the earlier version in Exodus Rabbah, in which the infants are saved, to later versions influenced by the Christian context, in which the pharaoh slaughters the infants for their blood. In the Jewish stories it is never Jews who desire blood but the pharaoh. The Christian blood piety, which emerged in the late Middle Ages in northern Europe, certainly played into the imaginary Jewish desire for blood. As Caroline Bynum has noted, the geographic overlap between Christian blood piety and anti-Jewish blood accusations was not accidental.¹⁴⁴ The beliefs in the purifying or curative attributes of blood and Christian blood piety make the charges against Jews in Christian Europe less culturally discordant; they also underscore the role of belief in the dissemination of anti-Jewish libels, despite explicit biblical prohibitions against the consumption of blood and explicit prohibitions against bringing charges of blood libels against Jews, at least after Fulda and Valréas.

Although earlier cases provided nascent narratives—some forgotten for centuries—of ritual murder or of Jewish martyrdom in the wake of murder charges, the cases in Fulda and Valréas resulted in the first legal documents in defense of Jews: they thus represent the beginning of the trail of legal documents and arguments related to anti-Jewish accusations. They also, particularly the case from Valréas, provide some of the earliest and clearest evidence of Jewish efforts at diplomacy undertaken to defend Jews (that is, if one accepts the later dating of the Hebrew letters about Blois). Paradoxically, while defending Jews and debunking the accusations, the legal protections marshaled after Fulda and Valréas also inscribed the accusations for posterity. They offered not only evidence in favor of the Jews but also a historical source to those who wished to chronicle the Jewish “crimes” and expressed disbelief in papal and imperial protection, like the Marbach chronicler.¹⁴⁵

Werner of Oberwesel—An Unapproved Popular Saint

Unlike in Norwich or Paris, in Fulda or Valréas no cult emerged as a result of the accusations.¹⁴⁶ It is unclear whether that was because of the quick intervention of both imperial and church authorities or a lack of interest on the part of local officials or, in the case of Valréas, because of the gender of the alleged victim. But when the body of an adolescent boy was found in the spring of 1287 near the town of Bacharach along the Rhine, a popular and, in contrast to the cult of William of Norwich, quite sustained cult of “S. Werner” developed in Bacharach and Oberwesel, spreading to France in the fourteenth century as “S. Vernier” or “S. Verny.”¹⁴⁷ Contemporary local chronicles briefly mention Werner’s death and name Jews as culprits.¹⁴⁸ According to one account, as the rumors about Werner’s death at the hands of the Jews spread, violence against them claimed tens of lives and some Jews were arrested.¹⁴⁹ Soon Jewish representatives approached Emperor Rudolph II to seek justice and protection, apparently while offering monetary compensation. In response, the emperor imposed fines on the communities where Jews were attacked and requested assistance from the archbishop of Mainz who, as one chronicler recounted, preached against attacking Jews. The archbishop is said to have ordered that the body of Werner, whom “some Christians of simple spirit” venerated as “almost divine,” should be “burned by flames and the ashes of his body scattered in the wind and dissipated into nothingness [ad nihilum dissipari].”¹⁵⁰ The chronicler added that a great number of Jews [quingenti], apparently armed, were present while the bishop was preaching, threatening to kill any Christian who would express opposition.¹⁵¹ Despite opposition to the cult at the higher levels of both secular and Church authorities, which was explained by the Jews’ detractors as a result of bribes, the cult of Werner—encouraged by the local clergy and spread through songs, poems, tales by performers and lower-rank preachers—attracted pilgrims; its canonical status, however, remained uncertain for centuries.¹⁵²

Over the subsequent decades, indulgences were granted by local bishops to the Chapel of S. Cunibert in Bacharach, where the body of Werner was laid, and in 1428–1429, during wars against the Hussite heresy, a formal bid for canonization was forwarded to Rome at the request of the Elector Palatine, Duke of Bavaria, Louis III.¹⁵³ Still, despite the role papal legates played in the process and the political needs of the Church in fighting heresy, Pope Martin V, who had just a few years earlier reissued Sicut Iudaeis, including a clause condemning blood accusations, ignored the request, and did not follow through with the canonization, adding to the confusion about the status of “the good Werner.”¹⁵⁴ In the end, Werner was popularly described as a “saint,” but formally he has never become one.

In the post-Reformation era, Werner’s relics were dispersed, with the effect of solidifying and expanding the cult into France. In 1548, Werner’s finger turned up in Besançon, helping popularize the cult in Franche-Comté in eastern France.¹⁵⁵ But when the cult of “S. Vernier” spread to France, where no Jews were allowed to live after the end of the fourteenth century, its anti-Jewish character was lost until modern times.¹⁵⁶ Instead, in France, S. Vernier became a patron of winemakers, with ubiquitous iconography depicting the youth with sickle and grapes. Still, the Eucharistic blood connection appears to have been retained. According to Carolyn Bynum, “grapes and the winepress are traditional Eucharistic images.”¹⁵⁷ In the seventeenth century, especially during the Thirty Years’ War, Werner’s remaining relics found their way to Belgium and Italy.¹⁵⁸

If the explicit anti-Jewish meaning of the story was lost in France, it did not disappear in the German lands, perhaps because of the blood devotion among Christians and the continuous presence of Jews there. In 1578, Laurentius Surius, a Carthusian hagiographer from Cologne, inserted the story “Werner, a Boy Cruelly Killed by Impious Jews” into the second edition of his lives of saints. Surius’s work was not the first to mention Werner. Some of the earliest printed editions of Jacques de Voragine’s lives of saints, known as the Golden Legend, included the story as well, but it was not mentioned, for example, in Hartmann Schedel’s Nuremberg Chronicle.¹⁵⁹ And in 1474, Werner Rolevinck, another Carthusian from Cologne, included a brief mention of Werner in his bestseller Fasciculus temporum, a chronicle of the world, which went through numerous editions even before 1500. If Rolevinck secured Werner a place in the history of the world, Surius’s stature and the readability of his work meant that his lives of saints left an influential mark on early modern hagiographies.¹⁶⁰ The Bollandists used it as an important source for their own opus.¹⁶¹

The Bollandists did not shy away from the controversy surrounding Werner’s status as a saint and discussed it directly: the 1665 volume of Acta Sanctorum for April illustrates the confusion surrounding his status, with various running heads: “B. Wernhero,” “blessed Werner,” and “S. Wernhero,” a saint.¹⁶² The Bollandists included a lengthy discussion of the cult, along with primary documents supporting it: more than forty pages were devoted to Werner in the Acta Sanctorum compared to only nine pages discussing the 1475 story of Simon of Trent.¹⁶³ These documents became proofs of the legitimacy of the cult and made Werner’s story accessible to much broader audiences. It entered diocesan liturgical calendars, and in 1742 it was allowed to have an office in the diocese of Trier. Still, the cult itself remained localized and was never fully embraced by the Church.¹⁶⁴ Indeed, Pope Benedict XIV, arguably the most important legal scholar of canonization, referred to him as beatus, which Werner’s nineteenth-century apologist Henri de Grèzes took to be a mistake caused by “either an error of the copyist” or inattention by the “distinguished author.”¹⁶⁵

But for all the popularity of Werner, or Venier, and the attention given to him by the Bollandists and other hagiographers, and even by historians who saw in Werner an important conflation of blood libels and host desecrations, his cult would not have much of an impact on the history of anti-Jewish accusations.¹⁶⁶ It may be because of its timing, with efforts to promote the cult limited to word of mouth and coinciding with strong imperial and papal protection of Jews, or because of the geographic direction in which the cult spread—to areas where Jews were not allowed to live, transforming Werner, as André Vauchez puts it, from “the martyr of the Jews” into “an innocent winemaker.”¹⁶⁷ To be sure, Werner has a place in the history of anti-Jewish accusations—he was seen as a victim of the Jews by Christian hagiographers, Bishop Johannes Hinderbach of Trent, who was intimately involved in the trial of Jews there in 1475, had an interest in Werner, and his story has been discussed by historians of antisemitism.¹⁶⁸ But Werner’s death, its aftermath, and the efforts to turn him into a martyr-saint are still part of the medieval story, in which Jews were able to rely on the known legal and political landscape shaped by medieval law. That landscape would change in the early modern era, when the story of Simon of Trent’s death in 1475 and its aftermath would play a key role in reshaping the legal and political framework on which Jews had relied for protection. Although the cases of Fulda and Valréas left as their legacy new legal tools for Jews to use in their defense, the story of Simon of Trent would ultimately undermine their efficacy.