CHAPTER TEN

Calculated Pragmatism and the Waning of Accusations

THE LETTERS of recommendation that Jacob Eliyakim Zelig received in Rome in 1760 and the behind-the-scenes efforts by Cardinal Lorenzo Ganganelli and others were not exactly what the Jews hoped to achieve, at such great expense, in Rome. Still these measures surely had an effect, albeit at times rather delayed and not strong enough to prevent future accusations, which sometimes were openly supported by the Polish Catholic clergy. Not all the trials were deadly, but those with violent consequences continued into the late years of the Polish state, forcing Jews to employ ruses to achieve what officially they could not—a public condemnation of the charges. The trials did eventually wane at the time of civil war and the first partitions of Poland, but their end was more a result of political circumstances and legal reforms in the collapsing country than of the efficacy of Church interventions.

Soon after Zelig returned from Rome, the effectiveness of his expensive mission was tested again. In January 1761, Jews in the small village of Józefów sued a Christian man, Franciszek Rozmarynowski, for falsely accusing them of buying an infant from a vagabond Christian woman, Catharina Jakóbowa Woyciechowska.¹ In this case Jews were found innocent not because of anyone’s intervention, but simply because the child was found alive and well in another village; apparently the mother had left it behind after she became drunk. The court fined Rozmarynowski for making the false accusation against Jews and ordered him to make donations of tallow to local churches and to repay the court expenses that the Jews had incurred as a result of the libel. But Jews were not satisfied with the court decree. By suing the Christian man they wanted him criminally charged for false accusations and punished in accordance with the law, which in some instances mandated death for false accusations.² Given the gravity of the accusation against Jews and its potential consequences, the sentence Rozmarynowski received was too mild. The Jews decided to appeal the verdict, but the outcome of their appeal remains unknown.

But it was the trial of Wojsławice in the diocese of Chełm that stirred up the country again.³ On March 27, 1761, five days after Easter, the body of an infant boy named Nicolas was found with multiple wounds. Right away Jews were suspected of murdering him. Many were arrested, and five were formally charged and imprisoned, among them the local rabbi and prominent community officials. They were kept in isolation, except for visits from clergy, especially the Jesuits, who sought their conversion. Because one of the arrested was said to know how to read Polish, he was given Catholic books and “read [them] daily.” Still these efforts bore no fruit until the prisoners were subjected to torture, during which they confessed to this and many other crimes and “softened,” with two of the imprisoned men promising to convert. But when they heard that despite their willingness to convert, they would be still be sentenced to death by quartering, they wavered until the Jesuits warned them of eternal damnation and encouraged them to be steadfast in their earlier decision. They were to receive baptism at the site of execution, a ploy to make their conversion and baptism a public event witnessed by “some thousands of people.” Still, according to a pamphlet published in Polish narrating the affair, two Jews remained “obstinate” in Judaism, staunchly refusing to convert, while the rabbi hanged himself in prison.

In June, the four prisoners were taken to the place of execution. When they arrived, the two potential converts, accompanied by the Jesuits, received some “good news”: after accepting baptism, they would be decapitated instead of quartered alive. After the converts’ baptism and execution by sword, the clergy turned to the two “obstinate” Jews. Having witnessed the swift death of the first two, one also accepted baptism. The other, “elderly” and “obstinate,” seemed “unmoved.” But priests continued to try to convert him, even if their efforts seemed to “have hit a deaf rock.” The elderly Jew let himself be taken by the executioner, screaming, “Take me.” When he was stretched on the board in preparation for quartering, and everybody fell to their knees and began to pray, one priest called out, “God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, have mercy on me, and in your goodness, give me light!” Hearing these words, “the guilty man looked at the sky, and asked to be lifted” from the board, whereupon he accepted baptism. Then he, too, was decapitated. After this public ceremony, the four bodies, placed in coffins, were taken to a small church where they lay until morning. On the bishop’s orders, they were then taken in a solemn procession to the cathedral church, where funeral services were held. Finally their bodies were transported to the Jesuit church, where funeral rites were performed, and they were buried in the presence of the bishop. In the meantime, “the abominable body of the rabbi,” who had committed suicide in prison, was dragged through the city and then burned at the stake, “his ashes cast into the wind,” while the Jewish community of Wojsławice was ordered to pay fines, including reparations to the parents of the dead child.

The Wojsławice affair embodied exactly what Ganganelli condemned: it terrorized and persecuted Jews in order to convert them. But Polish Jewish leaders blamed the Wojsławice affair on the publication, Złość żydowska (Jewish Malice), by the Bernardine theologian Gaudenty Pikulski, which recounted the Frankist affair and ambivalently though sympathetically described the “Counter-Talmudists” while vilifying rabbinic Jews.⁴ After the book was published, Jewish leaders mobilized once more, writing a damning letter to the nuncio about the impact of the book.⁵ They argued that it presented Jews as “ungodly beasts” who were “worse than tigers.” They defended their religion and their lives as decent hard-working human beings who supported their brethren in need. The book, they stressed, was contemptuous of the Jewish faith and harmful not only because of its words but also because it was printed and disseminated. Pikulski’s opus was a product of vanity, a money-making endeavor, defying the vow against “pride, vain glory, envy, greed, … aspersion, and gossip” that its author as a monk must have taken.

Pikulski’s work was indeed a massive—more than 800 pages long—compendium of information about Jewish religious texts and customs, and as Paweł Maciejko has noted, it was “the most comprehensive Christian account of early Frankism.”⁶ To be sure the book was definitely hostile to Jews, but it was not always inaccurate. In fact, it was written at a much more sophisticated level than any other work touching on Jewish ritual and custom published in Poland until that time, much more than the small anonymous book, Błedy Talmutowe (The Errors of the Talmud), issued not long before Pikulski’s work.⁷ Błędy Talmutowe was either an earlier version of Pikulski’s work or at the very least served as a source for significant portions of it. But though some passages were quoted verbatim and others paraphrased in it, Pikulski’s 1760 work elaborated on Jewish texts and gave Jews a voice, even if it was to be discounted and ridiculed.⁸

Where Gaudenty Pikulski did not differ from his predecessors was in his fixation on host desecrations and blood accusations, for which he offered detailed descriptions and which he placed squarely on the Jewish religious calendar.⁹ Pikulski used Hebrew verses and cited Hebrew sources to the point that he was deemed expert in Hebrew, which compelled him to deny it in his introduction to the reader, as if knowledge of Hebrew were something shameful. No doubt some of the information Pikulski included had been fed to him by the “Counter-Talmudists,” but some was the fruit of his own research in printed books by Christian authors. Pikulski’s book was more dangerous than others precisely because it appeared to be and, to some extent, was indeed so well informed.

The impact of printing was felt elsewhere as well. A pamphlet, Processus judiciarius, containing court decrees of the Wojsławice affair was also printed and disseminated in 1761.¹⁰ Although mostly in Latin, it contained a detailed description in Polish of the wounds on the child’s body along with a “short description” summarizing the trial and the execution of the Jews. Copies, with the Polish sections translated into Latin, were forwarded to Rome to the Secretary of State and the Holy Office of the Inquisition. The Wojsławice documents would later be included, along with Kajetan Sołtyk’s letter written in the aftermath of the Żytomierz trial and several court decrees related to recent trials of Jews accused of murdering Christian children, in a booklet with the same title as Pikulski’s massive work, Złość żydowska. Republished in 1774, the second expanded edition of this booklet coincided with one of the last trials of the Jews, in Grabie.¹¹

The Wojsławice affair was, as many scholars have noted, linked to the Frankists, living in that town under the protection of the noblewoman Katarzyna Kossakowska of the Potocki family.¹² That much could be inferred from the lengthy report printed in Latin that alluded to “pseudodogmata called the Talmud (Talmuty).” More explicitly this connection with Frankism was noted in a summary of the interrogation of Szloma Pliskowski, one of the implicated Jews, who alleged that Moszko, the Jew who read Catholic books in prison, would often invite “Counter-Talmudists” to debate with them in the presence of Jesuits, thus revealing a longer relationship with the Catholic clergy.¹³ Jewish leaders of the Council of Four Lands also mentioned the “Counter-Talmudists” in their supplication to papal nuncio Antonio Visconti sent within days of the trial, in which they again protested the accusations and reiterated that Jews did not need “Catholic blood” as the “Counter-Talmudists” falsely claimed “in the town named Wojsławice, [owned by] Lord Potocki, the castellan of Słońsk, in whose estate a child of one of his men disappeared.”¹⁴ It is perhaps precisely because of the link with the Frankists that the trial received so much attention from both Jews and Church officials.

Nuncio Visconti responded immediately to the Jews’ supplication. On April 5, 1761, a week or so after the accusations were first hurled at the Jews of Wojsławice, the nuncio wrote to Feliks Wincenty Potocki, owner of the town, drafting the text of his letter in Italian on the very letter the Jewish leaders had sent him.¹⁵ Visconti’s letter was then translated into French and sent to Potocki.¹⁶ “I find myself obligated,” Visconti wrote, “by my position and by the charge received from Rome on this matter to inform Your Excellency that after a recent examination by the Holy See [of] all the foundations on which is based the opinion that Jews need human blood to make their unleavened bread, and that because of that they are guilty of killing Christian children, it has been established that there are no proofs sufficiently clear and certain that would be enough to validate” such accusations, and declare them guilty of such crimes. “Therefore,” the nuncio continued, “I beg Your Excellency” not to base his judgment on these opinions, “but rather on legal proofs that would establish for sure the crime imputed to them.”

Four days later, on April 9, 1761, Visconti apprised Cardinal Corsini, the prefect of the Holy Office in Rome, on the situation in Poland.¹⁷ He began by pedantically recapping that the decree of the Holy Office from January 10, 1760, “regarding the appeal made by Jews of Poland to the Holy See regarding the harm they receive from Christians as perpetrators of homicide based on the belief that they mix human blood, particularly Christian, in their unleavened bread” had been communicated to him before his departure from Rome. After that, when he moved to Warsaw, the Jewish emissary Jacob Eliyakim Zelig presented him a letter from Corsini himself, dated February 9, 1760, specifically requesting that Visconti offer assistance to Zelig. The nuncio obeyed the directives, furnishing Zelig with several letters of recommendation “to the Grand Treasurer of Poland [Karol Józef Sedlnicki at the time], and other prominent persons.” But when it came to the “principal point” of the common belief that Jews used Christian blood in their matzah, the nuncio could do no more than only attempt to persuade both secular and ecclesiastical judges not to “permit any harm to the Jewish Nation by condemning them without valid foundations.” In fact, recently, the nuncio wrote, one of the prominent noblemen in Poland, Feliks Wincenty Potocki, the castellan of Słońsk, “imprisoned seven Jews” [sic] because of a disappearance of a child in his village. The nobleman threatened “to make them die if he did not obtain from me a proof [attestato] that the Holy See had deemed false the common belief in their crime.” But because the Ganganelli report was to remain private, the nuncio felt he “could not grant such a proof” and so he decided to write a letter to Potocki himself. The nuncio included the final text in Italian with his dispatch to Corsini. “I do not know what effect my letter will have,” the nuncio confessed, “since I have not yet received a response.” But he expected that “each year, around the time when Jews celebrate Passover I will find myself in similar circumstances,” having to “save the lives and property of these [Jews] always accused of this crime.” Visconti then asked Corsini to present his response to the Congregation of the Holy Office for approval and give him further guidance whether he should stick to this form of intervention or instead present “something more forceful.” He concluded the letter with an update on Jacob Frank, imprisoned at the time, and his followers.

Nuncio Visconti also wrote to Bishop Walenty Wężyk of Chełm, in whose diocese the village of Wojsławice was located. Although the original letter seems lost, on April 30 that year, Visconti wrote a second, rather apologetic yet assertive letter defending his efforts to protect Jews.¹⁸ He did not send the first letter to cast doubt on the judgment of the courts, even less did he demand the Jews should be released if they were found guilty. “On the contrary,” the nuncio desired that “they be severely punished according to the laws” if they indeed had committed such an act. “All I desired was that one proceed against them according to legal proofs, and solid foundations, and not according to the opinion that may be false and [based] on the accusations that may have been calumnies against Jews from another region.”

In the meantime, the nuncio’s report of April 9 to the Holy Office reached its destination, and on May 6, 1761, the Congregation of the Holy Office discussed the dispatch. Ten days later, they sent their response, in which they commended the nuncio profusely for his efforts to save Jews from harm done to them by “Christians of this Kingdom,” who most tenaciously held “the opinion that [Jews] collected human blood for their unleavened bread.”¹⁹ Visconti was also commended for the “spirit” of his “decrees.” Addressing the second point of the nuncio’s letter—the arrest and trial of Jacob Frank in “a secular court”—the Holy Office noted that if the case were to come to Rome, the matter would be given the necessary consideration. In the meantime, the Congregation stressed, Frank should not be released from prison; in fact, he should be kept in “strict custody,” so that “no one should have contact with him; not even any letters should be passed between him and the neophytes.”

By the end of June, the Wojsławice trial was over, the Jews executed. On July 7, Nuncio Visconti wrote another letter to Bishop Wężyk, once more reiterating that his initial intervention was not to “protect the Jews if they were found guilty based on legal proofs.”²⁰ Indeed, he had desired that they should be “severely punished according to the law if they committed such a crime.” And it is “with the same sentiments” that the nuncio was writing again, this time understanding that the Jews had already been executed. Now, however, Visconti demanded the bishop “kindly” provide “all the grounds” used “to arrive to this execution,” so that according to “his duties,” the nuncio could “instruct the Holy See on this point.” After all, the Holy See had given him “precise instructions” to do what he could to prevent harm done to the Jews on the basis of the belief that they “needed human blood to make their unleavened bread.” Not only did Visconti demand details of what led to the execution but he also wanted the bishop to provide information that innocent people were not “confused with the guilty.” Because the Congregation of the Holy Inquisition in Rome found no proof sufficient to support the prejudice against Jews, “it is up to you as bishop,” Visconti wrote, “to use all means in your diocese so that these poor Jews are not persecuted.” And if they were indeed found guilty, it was important to know whether there was enough legal evidence to support such a verdict or if, under torture, they admitted to a crime they had not committed. “Sir,” Visconti added, “we need to prevent such injustice as much as we can.” The nuncio closed on an angry note—“I will be sorry to be obliged to write to Rome that I could not succeed on account of people who could help me but did not want to”—and expressed his hope that the bishop would offer his assistance so he could fulfill “the orders of the Holy See.” That same day, Visconti also wrote to Janusz Aleksander Sanguszko, the court marshal of Lithuania, beseeching him to use his authority to prevent judgments based on anything other than “legal proofs.”²¹ But the letter to Sanguszko may have been related not to the Wojsławice affair but to a new accusation that had just been made in June in the town of Bazalia (Bazylia in the text) in the diocese of Łuck: there, several Jews were accused of murdering a young Christian woman (virginem) and incarcerated, resulting in another Jewish intervention with the nuncio and a supplication to intercede with the bishop of Łuck.²²

The anti-Jewish accusations and the Frank affair, along with matters of the status of converts that interested the Holy Office, did take up a lot of the nuncio’s energy.²³ But they were not the only issues the nuncio had to work on. Many dispatches from that period report on the conflict between Russia and Prussia during the Seven Years’ War and other matters concerning international politics, as well as on matters relating to the “immunity of church land” from taxation and to other religious groups, such as “the heretics” or Protestants, whose power seemed to be increasing, and Eastern Orthodox Christians.²⁴ In fact, two weeks after writing his angry letter to Bishop Wężyk, Visconti wrote again, this time about “the Greeks.”²⁵ “After so many letters regarding Jews,” the bishop now needed “exact and very secret information about the conduct of Monsignor Philip Felician Wolodkowicz, the bishop of Wladimir.” Still, despite so many other issues, those related to Jews did not go away.

On August 25, 1762, Nuncio Visconti wrote once more directly to Cardinal Corsini, sending him a lengthy, detailed letter describing his futile attempts to save the Jews. Although the nuncio had obeyed the orders of the Holy Office to do what he could to save Jewish lives and property, his efforts did not always bring the desired results.²⁶ First, his letters “were not always sufficient to save the miserable Jews from death.” Second, there were still “in this Kingdom so many clergy and laymen” who accepted the validity of the accusation that Jews killed Christian children and that Jewish law “obligated them to do it.”²⁷ Third, there were indeed “many documents here in Poland that seem to excuse them from this great crime.” Finally, the Jews, knowing well of the nuncio’s efforts on their behalf to spare them from “the most haughty persecution,” had again petitioned him to “obtain an authentic certificate” from his office that could be officially submitted in a secular court (grod) or other public office to stronger effect. Visconti then went on to elaborate on each point.

Wojsławice was the example par excellence of the inefficacy of the nuncio’s earnest behind-the-scenes efforts. After he wrote to Count Potocki and the bishop of Chełm, both responded in a spirit affirming, as Potocki put it, “that in such an affair one would have proceeded with judicial and legal proofs.”²⁸ Bishop Wężyk even referred to past cases tried before the Crown Tribunal as evidence. In fact, the nuncio wrote, “They sent me, though long after the fact, printed text of the trial, which I have the honor to forward to Your Eminency.”²⁹ Like the papal envoy during the Trent trial in 1475, the nuncio was not satisfied with the version of trial records offered; he “would have wanted to have in hand transcripts of the interrogations of the Jews to see on what basis they were convicted.” But despite “all the diligence” to obtain them, he never got those transcripts. In fact, he was told that “such interrogations are not preserved in Poland, but they are burned as soon as a trial is finished.” This, of course, was not true. The nuncio seems to have been duped. The decree from Wojsławice explicitly stated that the texts of the confessions and interrogations were sealed and given to the prosecution.³⁰ Many courts in Poland did retain at least summaries of the interrogations. But they would not have met the legal standards adhered to in the Italian courts. Moreover, courts in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth did not have established procedures for archiving the documents, especially in criminal cases. This, too, was in stark contrast with the judicial practices on the Italian peninsula. Concerned with buon governo, courts on the peninsula preserved their records for future reference to assure “equity and good procedure.” After all, good procedures depended on good records.³¹ Visconti’s comment reveals his expectations of what documentation should have been preserved in a criminal trial and underscores the differences in legal cultures between Poland and Italy.

As for the second point in his letter of August 25, 1762—that clergy and laypersons accepted anti-Jewish accusations—Visconti’s explanation shows not just the pernicious nature of the Frankist claims but also the impact of Benedict XIV’s 1755 bull Beatus Andreas. Not only were the bishops of Chełm and Łuck asserting that Jews were guilty of “this crime,” the nuncio wrote, but also other persons of “first rank” wanted to persuade him that “truly the Jewish nation is guilty of this offense,” because Jews were many times convicted in Poland of such murders.³² Visconti pushed back: “Immediately, I said that in the Talmud there is no law that obliges them to seek Christian blood.” But “they responded that there were some fourteen [versions] of the Talmud in the Kingdom,” and “moreover, even if no Talmud made mention of it, it would be necessary to know how this was commented upon by the rabbis.” “They cite,” the nuncio reported, “the seventh article of the converted anti-Talmudists, which I attach here.” Finally, “they say that even if one could not prove the use of Christian blood in the unleavened bread, still it could be certain that the Jews killed Christian children either because of hatred, or another motive. That was believed by most worthy authors, and it was once more noted by the Bull of Benedict XIV from February 22, 1755, about the canonization of children killed in hatred of Christ.” That the nuncio’s interlocutors had referred to Beatus Andreas demonstrates that the bull was known in Poland and understood to apply broadly, not just to Andreas of Rinn. That fact did not escape the nuncio either. “This, I did not ignore,” he declared.

As for point number three regarding documents favorable to Jews, Visconti reported that Jews had brought him “a decree from Sigismund August, the King of Poland, from 1557, in which he ordered that [Jews] accused of murdering children or stealing the most holy Eucharist” were to be judged by the king alone in order to prevent “injustice committed by private judges who condemned [Jews] based on the opinion that [Jews’] laws forced them to obtain blood of Christians and the most holy Eucharist, even though it is opposed by the statutes and decrees of Pope Innocent that say that one should proceed with caution in accusing the Jewish nation of this grave crime.” Moreover, “to validate this prohibition” Jews also “cited a bull granted by Paul III to the Jewish nation on May 12, 1540.”

In addition to these efforts, Nuncio Visconti seems to have truly wanted to understand the level of support for the accusations against Jews in Poland, including “the sentiment of the most learned and enlightened persons in this State.”³³ He thus approached Piotr Hiacynt Śliwicki, father superior of the brothers of the Congregation of the Mission. Śliwicki pleased the nuncio by passing on “the opinion of Lord L’advocat, the librarian and professor of Hebrew language at the Sorbonne,” a copy of which the nuncio decided to include “again” in his dispatch to the prefect.³⁴

The opinion of Jean-Baptiste de Ladvocat had been solicited to examine the claims made by the “counter-Talmudists” about the requirement for Christian blood they alleged was found in the Talmud.³⁵ The extensive report from the Sorbonne arrived in Poland in March 1760, a few months after Ganganelli finished his own text; it fully refuted the allegations, denying any trace of such teachings in Jewish texts. Ladvocat explained, “It was true that in the centuries of ignorance, and until today, one has frequently mounted such horrible accusations against Jews, both rabbinic and Karaite, without distinction.”³⁶ In fact Christians who knew the Hebrew language and the Talmud could not find anything of which “the Karaites,” he wrote referring thus to the Frankist “contra-Talmudists,” accused the Jews. “No evident proof of the bloody maxim is there.” In fact, “the Karaite Jews proved nothing regarding this allegation.” Ladvocat’s lengthy report was perhaps the most detailed and unequivocal rebuttal and condemnation of the “barbaric” accusations against Jews, its tone and content far stronger than that of the Ganganelli report. But that may have been because Ladvocat was answering a simple academic question; he was not charged with advising on policy and dealing with delicate political realities and past papal decrees, as Ganganelli had to.

Visconti’s last point about Jewish supplications for a formal public pronouncement on their behalf touched on a delicate matter. Because the pontiff and the Holy Office had refused to issue a statement or a new bull, or even renew an old one condemning accusations against Jews, the nuncio’s hands were tied, his intervention limited to behind-the-scenes operations. As a result, his efforts were, as the nuncio himself pointed out, rather ineffective: Jews continued to be accused and continued to appeal to him seeking to obtain a firmer declaration “that there were no laws among [Jews] that forced them to use blood of Christian children for the unleavened bread.” But because Jews understood that the nuncio was not willing to “go beyond the limits” of what he was commanded to do from Rome, they turned to the Royal Court and its main ministers to obtain something more official. Given the situation, Visconti once more asked whether the Roman Curia would provide a firmer public statement.

On September 20, 1762, the Holy Office discussed the nuncio’s lengthy letter and decided to uphold the decisions previously made by the Congregation on January 10, 1760, and on May 16, 1761, mandating the nuncio to intervene on behalf of Jews, but only—as he had done so far—behind the scenes by reaching out to local lay and ecclesiastical officials. The Holy Office voted on the measure two days later.³⁷ Three days after the vote, Cardinal Corsini drafted a response on behalf of the Holy Office.³⁸ He noted that the nuncio’s long letter was read both by Pope Clement XIII and the Congregation of the Holy Office. It was clear from the attached documents that the belief that Jews committed these crimes was “so deeply rooted in that Kingdom, it was not easy to eradicate.” This was not only because of the false conviction that Jews used Christian blood but also because of the notion they did so on account of “eternal hatred that the Jewish perfidy holds for the Christian name.” The fact that the nuncio was unable to obtain copies of the interrogations of Jews “gives reason to fear” that Jews were often unjustly “oppressed.” But Visconti was right to acknowledge that “the Holy See did not want to, nor could, define anything; therefore, His Holiness, along [with] the Holy Congregation, has strongly recommended that in anticipation of future news [about anti-Jewish libels] you should remain firm and unfailing in rejecting appeals for the noted decree.” Indeed, Visconti should apply “the same method” he had done thus far in making sure that “no penalty is imposed on these miserable [Jews], let alone capital punishment, unless there are clear, convincing proofs of the crime that exclude any possible doubt.”

The letter from Corsini is probably the most explicit articulation of Rome’s unwillingness to intervene openly in anti-Jewish accusations. Thus, if the fact that Ganganelli report was never translated into Latin and published with an imprimatur of the Holy See might have been only circumstantial evidence of this reluctance, Corsini left no doubt that this issue had to be threaded on gently. In a country like the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth where accusations had the effect of rallying popular support for the Church, especially in religiously mixed areas with large numbers of Jews, the political costs of defending the Jews openly would have been too high. Moreover, how could the papacy condemn such accusations against Jews so soon after Benedict XIV allowed for the possibility that Jews had indeed killed Christian children “in hatred of Christ and his followers”? Benedict’s legacy had an enduring effect. And so, by choosing to limit their intervention to behind the scenes, Church authorities believed they were acting both for “the good of the Church” and against the disturbing accusations that Jews killed Christian children for blood. This balance was unsatisfying and ineffective but very much in the spirit of Ganganelli’s report, condemning the accusations but simultaneously affirming Church hierarchy and structure.

Making the Condemnations Public

It is possible that after receiving Corsini’s response, Nuncio Visconti informed the Jews that there would be no official statement from the Church. But it is clear even from Visconti’s letter to the Holy Office that Jews must have already felt frustrated by the futility of his restrained interventions. They understood that, to be effective, a condemnation of accusations against them had to be public, which is why they turned not only to the royal court and its ministers but eventually also to print.

Although the Jews seem to have reached out to the royal court already in 1761, apparently passing on to Count Heinrich von Brühl a copy of the letter Jacob Eliyakim Zelig had received from Cardinal Corsini in 1760, they must have doubled their efforts in late 1762 and 1763. In March 1763, Count von Brühl wrote to the nuncio asking for information about the Holy See’s position on the accusation—evidence that he was unaware of the existence of the Ganganelli report.³⁹ Von Brühl acknowledged knowing about the Jews’ “recourse to the Holy See to seek protection against persecution they suffer over the supposed crime in relation to Christian blood.” Jews also turned for protection to the king, but before acting on their behalf he asked to know “the intentions of His Holiness in this matter.” Von Brühl had established relationships with some prominent members of the Jewish community. For example, Barukh Mi-Ereẓ Yavan had “carried out a number of secret missions on behalf of von Brühl and the king.”⁴⁰ Von Brühl, therefore, might have been behind some of the Jewish efforts to obtain from the papal representative in Warsaw a more explicit condemnation of accusations against them.

Visconti’s response to von Brühl followed instructions he had received from Rome almost to the letter. It was largely a word-for-word copy of what he had written to Potocki and others in 1761 following the Wojsławice affair.⁴¹ The nuncio confirmed that Jews had turned for protection to the Apostolic See and that he himself “had received orders relating to this matter from His Holiness” and had done what he could to obey them. As to “the intention of the Holy Father,” the nuncio added, he was happy to say the pontiff “desired everyone to know that the Holy See had examined all evidence, on which is based the belief that Jews needed human blood for their unleavened matzah,” the reason they were “considered killers of children.” The investigation revealed there were “no clear and sufficient proofs” to sustain this accusation and consider Jews guilty. And, as he had done in other places, the nuncio urged that criminal convictions be based on legally sound evidence alone.

Although Visconti was unequivocal in saying the matter had been examined in Rome and that no evidence had been found to support such accusations, the letter was, like all the previous letters, a personal response, not a broad official statement that Jews had hoped to obtain when they sent Zelig to Rome. If Jews may have been encouraged when Zelig returned with letters of recommendation, it soon became clear that aside from personal interventions no public condemnation of the trials was forthcoming. So they took matters into their own hands and tried to make Visconti’s statements “official.”

Visconti’s letter to von Brühl reached Jewish hands, undoubtedly because of von Brühl’s connections with the Jews; but given that, Visconti appeared sympathetic to the Jews’ cause, perhaps even with the nuncio’s approval. This letter, along with the letters Zelig had received in Rome, were translated from French and Italian into formal Latin and then into vernacular Polish. That done, they were registered along with other royal documents supporting the Jews’ innocence against such charges in the official royal registry, which helped bolster their authenticity. Jews then requested official extracts of the now lawfully certified documents and had them published in 1763 as Documenta judaeos in Polonia concernentia: Ad acta Metrices Regni suscepta et ex iis fideliter iterum descripta et extradita (Documents concerning the Jews in Poland: Inscribed in the Acts of the Royal Registry and from Them Faithfully Copied and Extracted).⁴² These convoluted actions of translating, inscribing in royal records, obtaining official transcripts, and publishing them made for an expensive endeavor. The funds of 2,400 zloty were laid out by the leader—the parnas—of the Council of Four Lands, Meir of Dubno, with the expectation that they would be repaid. But they were not. A year later, in 1764, the Council of Four Lands ceased to exist, at least formally, for the purposes of collecting taxes and funds, and Meir had to appeal for reimbursement as late as 1765.⁴³

Soon after Documenta was published, on June 25, 1763, Friar Stanislaus Kleczkowski of Lwów wrote to “Reverend Father Benedicto a Cavalesio” in Italy about the events in Poland, in particular about the recent publication of “Documents concerning the Jews in Poland.”⁴⁴ Kleczkowski reported that Jews “so often convicted of infanticides” were seeking to conceal their crimes and to oppose the authority of the Holy See. They thus published this little book, in which they inserted the letter of Cardinal Corsini to Nuncio Visconti, and the nuncio’s letter to Count von Brühl, “dated March 21, 1763.” Both letters, Kleczkowski wrote, stated that Pope Clement XIII expressed that Jews should not be troubled on account of infanticides, “because after a diligent examination done in Rome it was revealed that they never used Christian blood.” Moreover, “Jews boast that they have obtained some breve” protecting them. “This,” the friar added, “is not accepted (as I know) in any diocese.” He also bemoaned that Jews, “the most hostile nation,” were supported by the avarice of the magnates, who for their part dared neither to deal with what the Jews did nor to enforce the 1751 bull A quo primum issued by Pope Benedict XIV. Because the Jews were spreading “tales,” deceiving even Rome about their faith, Kleczewski decided to write to “friends closer to Rome” to find out the truth of the matter. Once the answer was “communicated” to him, Kleczewski would in turn pass it on to others in Poland.

Kleczkowski’s choice of “Reverend Father Benedicto a Cavalesio” was not accidental. Benedicto a Cavalesio was none other than Benedetto Bonelli, the author of Dissertazione apologetica sul martirio del beato Simone da Trento nell’anno 1475 dagli ebrei ucciso (An Apologetic Dissertation on the Martyrdom of the Blessed Simon of Trent Killed by Jews in the Year 1475); published anonymously in 1747, it sought to demonstrate the truth of Jewish murders of Christian children, and was used by Pope Benedict XIV when he addressed the question of child martyrs. Bonelli promptly forwarded this letter to the Holy Office in Rome, and on August 16 that year, the officers of the Holy Office discussed the matter, voting the next day to send a copy of Kleczewski’s letter and of the Documenta to Nuncio Visconti and requesting more information about this matter. By August 20, the dispatch was on its way to Warsaw.⁴⁵ The Holy Office was not pleased with this turn of events, not least because they learned about them not from the nuncio himself but through remote connections.

The fact that Rome was informed about the publication of the documents in such a roundabout way may suggest the nuncio did not find that publication to be objectionable and felt no need to inform the Holy See about it. Perhaps in his own frustration, so well expressed in his long letter to Corsini at the Holy Office, he colluded with von Brühl to provide Jews with something they might find more useful in their efforts to stop the accusations.

In the meantime, in Poland, in July and August, another trial took place in Kalisz, about seventy-four miles from Poznań. Given the timing in the summer, it appeared not to be linked to the need for blood for Passover matzah, though blood was still central to the accusation. Several Jews, including women, from a number of surrounding towns were charged with brutally killing a Christian girl, Regina, “in order to procure Christian-Catholic blood” because of “superstition and impious hatred of the Christian people.”⁴⁶ Having drained the girl’s blood, the court document said, to satisfy “their blood-thirsty appetite [cruentum appetitum],” they dumped the body in a deserted field and carried the blood to other towns with Jewish communities. Finally, it was said, they gave it to a rabbi from the town of Krotoszyn, who had promised to pay for it the hefty sum of thirty Hungarian ducats. Soon after a shepherd found Regina’s body, rumors started circulating implicating the Jews. They were promptly arrested and interrogated, including under torture, and most were sentenced to death.

The Kalisz trial laid bare the limits of the effectiveness of the booklet published by Jews at great expense a few months before. A copy of the court decree from Kalisz was sent to Rome, perhaps together with the booklet printed by Jews that the Holy Office had requested on August 20, since both are now held in the Vatican Secret Archive.⁴⁷ Little more is known about the repercussions of Jews’ attempts to broadcast the Holy See’s conclusions by printing documents—on their own—exculpating them from blood accusations. This may not be because “the pamphlet virtually closed ‘the frenzy of blood accusations’ in Poland,”⁴⁸ but because far more pressing matters took center stage. On October 5, 1763, King August III died. After almost a year of turmoil, civil war, and intrigue, Stanisław August Poniatowski, a former lover of Catherine the Great, was elected king of Poland under military pressure from Russia. During this tumultuous period, the nuncio’s dispatches from Warsaw were dominated by the politics of the royal election.⁴⁹ At the time Nuncio Visconti’s prime task was to do everything in his power to rally support behind a Catholic candidate and a strong supporter of the Church, and to protect the interests of the Church.⁵⁰

The Decrease in Accusations in Times of Turmoil and Reform

Once matters settled a bit following the election of Poniatowski in 1764, new reports about infanticides reappeared in dispatches sent to the nuncio and Rome. On May 6, 1766, Walenty Wężyk, now the bishop of Przemyśl, wrote to Nuncio Visconti informing him about another “cruel martyrdom” of a boy near the town of Tyczyn in his diocese.⁵¹ Wężyk attached two color illustrations of the child’s decomposing body, along with court documents relating to the trial (Fig. 10.1).

Directly below one of the images was a brief list of injuries and a description of the incident: “The Martyrdom of the child named Nicolas, son of the laborious Ignacy Paszka, Budzywoj peasant, three years and three months and six days old, kidnapped on March 15 of the current 1766 year, found stabbed on April 7 of the same year.” A more detailed list of injuries, attached on a separate sheet, ended with a statement implicating Jews: “No sooner than Jews had come to see this body during the official review, did the blood (in all improbability) begin to flow from the right ear, so beautiful and red as if he was alive and simply injured.” The trope of blood flowing from the body in the presence of the alleged murderers was, of course not new, having appeared since the thirteenth century, but it had most recently resurfaced in Poland as evidence against Jews in the trials in Zasław in 1747 and Żytomierz in 1753—both widely known because the court summaries of these trials were published as small pamphlets.⁵² The mention of the miraculous flow of blood from the corpse in official court records of postmortems and the bishop’s letter again underscored what Visconti had reported earlier to Rome—old stereotypes and beliefs were still deeply rooted in Poland. Indeed, the belief that blood flowing from a corpse was evidence pointing to the murderer had been long rejected in Italy. In 1668, in his strongly anti-Jewish book about Simon of Trent, Michelangelo Mariani explicitly noted that this type of evidence was not used in Italy, “much less in Rome.”⁵³ Evidently, the nuncio’s efforts following Cardinal Ganganelli’s report and even the Jews’ somewhat sly publication of the documents exculpating them from the accusation of killing Christian children in 1763 had a limited impact.

FIG. 10.1   Illustrations accompanying forensic description of a decomposing body found near Tyczyn in 1766, forwarded to the Vatican by the papal nuncio Visconti. ASV Acta Nunziatura Varsavia 94, 100v–101r.

Poland meanwhile was going through major transformations; the newly elected king introduced a number of reforms, ranging from relatively minor changes—opening a school for knights in Warsaw to train young noblemen in statecraft—to major ones, such as tax reform; restrictions on the use of the liberum veto, the disastrous practice whereby one member of the parliament could veto any legislation; and reluctantly, under pressure from Russia, the removal of legal disabilities from non-Catholic Christians: the Protestants and Eastern Orthodox. On October 11, 1766, Cardinal Ludovico Maria Torrigiani, the secretary of state in Rome, wrote in a panic, ordering Visconti to try to convince Poles that “the plan now promoted by the Dissidents [Protestants] is incongruous with the peace of the Kingdom.”⁵⁴ The Catholics had to oppose this reform. It was already not a small thing that the dissidents, Torrigiani complained, were now “tolerated in so many parts of the Kingdom.” If “this present toleration,” the cardinal warned, were to be “sanctioned and even advanced more, one would take a great step toward first obtaining equality with the Catholics, and eventually also their exclusion.” The nuncio was ordered to “exhort the bishops and other zealous persons in this Kingdom to champion the cause of God and his Church.”

Subsequent letters sounded even more alarmed about how little effort was being made by the bishops in support of “the Religion and the Holy See.”⁵⁵ The nuncio’s job was to “ignite in any possible way their zeal.” No compromise was to be accepted, even the possibility of permitting the “dissidents” to practice their religion privately, because it was difficult to know “what baleful consequences could arise from this step.”

But most importantly, the Church was concerned with legal reforms proposed by the Sejm, the bicameral parliament of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth; some of those reforms, it was feared, would curtail the Church’s “jurisdiction and ecclesiastical immunity,” possibly undermining the authority of the bishops in the Senate.⁵⁶ It was of grave importance that the Church not be burdened with more taxes than the laity. Torrigiani reminded the now outgoing nuncio Visconti that ecclesiastical immunity was of crucial importance because the Church had its “own rules dependent on canonical dispositions.” Thus, Visconti was to do everything possible to influence the bishops to prevail.

The reforms also had an impact on the Jewish community. The restructuring of the taxation system in 1764 meant the official end, at least from the perspective of the Polish state, of the Council of Four Lands, the celebrated supracommunity governing Jews in Poland and responsible for collecting taxes and managing community affairs. When it came to the repayment of communal debts, the abolition of the Council created serious problems. Not only did Meir of Dubno have a claim against the Council for expenses incurred in relation to the publication of the Documenta in 1763 but also Jacob Eliyakim Zelig and his creditor in Italy, Neta of Mantua, had not yet been reimbursed for the expenses incurred during Zelig’s stay in Italy in 1758–1760—a massive sum of 3,046 red złoty, or golden coins.⁵⁷ The whopping debt was to have been repaid by levying a special tax, because the Council did not have such an enormous amount of funds at their disposal. But the question of the repayment of Zelig’s bills languished with other communal debts and was then included among matters to be resolved by the Commission on Jewish Debts of the Royal Treasury in 1767. Despite the fiscal reforms, the removal of the responsibility for tax collection from the Council, and the resulting debt crisis, letters written after 1764 from “the elders and the entire Jewish community” to high officials suggest that some form of Jewish self-government and representation continued. The legal reforms of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, with their complex ramifications for both the Jewish community and the Church, were also to play a major role in ending the trials against Jews in premodern Poland.⁵⁸

The political chaos in Poland, including the Bar Confederation of 1768 that opposed reforms beneficial to non-Catholics, followed by the first partition of Poland by Russia, Prussia, and Austria in 1772, seems to have brought about a short hiatus in anti-Jewish accusations. That lasted until 1774, when another shocking trial took place in the village of Grabie, belonging to a Benedictine monastery, thirty-eight miles north of Warsaw.⁵⁹ On Wednesday, March 30, four days before Easter, a three-year-old girl named Marianna went missing. According to a Christian account sent to Rome, she was apparently last seen near a brewery run by a Jew, Jakub Nodkowicz. When Hieronym Kamieński, the abbot of the Benedictine monastery, arrived in the village the following day, he found it in an uproar and ordered a thorough investigation. Jews soon became suspects. And rumors began to circulate about Jews from nearby towns who were traveling through the village, and about a cry of a child heard among Jews as well as “other great suspicious signs.”⁶⁰ Abbot Kamieński ordered that Jews connected to the brewery be brought before him. Three adults—Jakub Nodkowicz, his wife, and Jakub Józefowicz, a Jewish brewer from the nearby village of Sadków—and two children, Jacob Nodkowicz’s twelve-year-old daughter and his fourteen-year-old Jewish servant, were arrested. (Jewish reports recounted lower ages—eleven years for the girl and twelve for the boy. These discrepancies were likely purposeful: their ages in the Christian document would allow them to be seen as “adults” responsible for their words, whereas the ages noted in the Jewish supplication would make them “children.”⁶¹)

The two children were interrogated separately.⁶² Nodkowicz’s daughter said her parents would have prohibited her from saying “in front of the abbot and a servant of Rev. Thomas Jankowski, as well as others” that her father found the child and “brought her to the brewery. He then gave her to a Jew, the brewer from Sadków [Jakub Józefowicz].” Józefowicz, she continued, in turn took the infant and passed her on to a Jew from another town. After her testimony the brewer’s daughter pled with the abbot not to tell her parents what she had just said. The boy told the interrogators a “similar” story and also pleaded with them not to inform his employer about his testimony.

The following day, the abbot sent a letter to a royal official in a nearby town and to a canon in the Cathedral of Płock with Easter wishes and a report about “the unhappy case.”⁶³ More interrogations followed. Jakub Nodkowicz, the brewer from Grabie, denied even being in the village the day the child went missing and insisted he had not committed this crime. But with the testimony of his daughter and of an administrator of the monastery’s lands who claimed to have seen him in the village, he eventually relented, saying he would confess. Two days after Easter, and a full week after Marianna went missing, on April 5, her body, covered with “more or less 50 wounds,” was found near a ditch (circa fossas).⁶⁴

The Jewish children once more confirmed their previous accusation of the adults, and the abbot ordered four more Jews from the area imprisoned in chains, among them an adult son of Jakub Nodkowicz. They were, like the prisoners in Wojsławice, held in isolation. Each was interrogated in the “presence of many.”⁶⁵ The son, who had moved to another village, was asked if he had visited his father for Passover, which started on March 26 and ended on Sunday, April 3, coinciding with Easter, and if he had seen his father take the child from the ditch and pass her on to the Jew from Sadków, as his sister had testified. The son did not say much. Jakub Józefowicz, the Jew from Sadków, however, did confess: “Yes, I took the child, but I passed her on to a Jew from the village Kocerany, and what was done with her, I do not know.” Another prisoner, a brewer from nearby Jeziorko, implicated still other Jews, and when asked “if many Jews knew about it, he responded, ‘they all know.’ ” The abbot then ordered the arrest of additional Jews whom he thought might have been involved. In the end twelve were arrested and held in prison for months. The matter was transferred to Warsaw, where on April 10, the child’s body was examined by doctors who found “no wounds caused by nails before or after death.”⁶⁶

The next day, the Jews appealed to the king.⁶⁷ They recounted the events briefly and offered defenses against blood libels—Jews do not consume any blood, human or animal, because it was prohibited by the Law of Moses. Experts, Catholic and Protestant alike, had “cleared Jews of the calumny that they needed Christian blood.” Nowhere were Jews accused of such matters—not in “Germany, France, Spain, Italy, not even in Rome, Holland, and Turkey.… Only in Poland they experience such calumny.” There were numerous reasons for that, but the most important one was the way interrogations were done: with an executor using “fire, breaking bones, and applying other tortures.” True, the Jews conceded, no nation in the world is utterly pure, without evil among them. But the Jewish religion does not, they stressed, support such superstitions. They appealed to the king’s wisdom and mercy for justice and the opportunity to prove their innocence.

Just two weeks later, on April 24, Colonel Lucas de Toux de Salvert, a learned Frenchman residing in Poland, sent to the king, at the Jews’ request, a treatise in their defense.⁶⁸ Citing western scholars such as Johann Christian Bodeschatz, Jean Leusden’s 1663 book Philologus Hebraeo-Mixtus, and converts like Caspar Joseph Fridenheim, who published in 1769 a conversionary work, Mikve Israel-Die Hoffnung Israel (Hope of Israel), he argued that there was no evidence Jews “use[d] Christian blood to celebrate their ceremonies.”

On April 28, 1774, Jewish leaders appealed to the papal nuncio in Warsaw, Giuseppe Garampi. In a long and elaborate letter they complained about “the sad case” in Grabie. Surely, news about it “had already reached Your Excellency’s ears,” they wrote.⁶⁹ The Jews stressed that much of the case was based on confessions extracted under torture and fear, including those of two children, a girl of eleven years and a boy of twelve. The boy was “tied in ropes and beaten with sticks and rods.” The girl was also persuaded to confess “with coaxing and terror.” Other Jews were tied, suspended, and tortured for many hours “so they may confess.” But confessions so extorted, the Jews complained, “hardly have a shadow of truth.” If this mode of extorting confessions “by beating, incarceration, suspension, and coaxing, and other ways” seemed just and sufficient to “prudent men and magistrates, whom GOD appointed to administer justice and who must examine such crime,” then there was little justice for Jews accused “without any probability.” “We are sure,” the letter continued, “that prudent and learned men in other regions would be astonished to hear that only in Poland so many Jews perish with violent deaths because of this criminal charge that has no basis,” but was grounded “in wrong confessions an executioner extorts through inhuman torments.” The “learned” nuncio would certainly know that when “a hand of the executor extorts confession, it does not find out the truth according to true judicial prudence.” In real life, this trial demonstrated yet again that, unlike in the Jewish songs and tales, under torture Jews confessed to crimes imputed to them. In their letters to the king and the nuncio, thus, the Jewish leaders ignored the message found in Yiddish literary works valuing torture as a means for martyrdom. Or, perhaps, the argument of their supplication was a sign of changing times.

This appeal to jurisprudence that questioned the value of torture represented not just a shift from Yiddish songs and tales but also a new defense strategy on the part of Jews. For centuries, their supplications and appeals had focused on Jewish law and its prohibitions against consuming blood. Certainly their appeal to Nuncio Garampi also stressed that Jewish law prohibited Jews from consuming blood and even provided him with a short summary of the requirements for making meat kosher, from which blood had to be “diligently” removed and the meat “washed and sprinkled in salt.”⁷⁰ These were not hidden precepts—all this could be found in “Jewish history, our Talmud, commentaries to the Holy Scriptures written by rabbis, in [our] teachings and ceremonies.” Jews “never, certainly not during Passover” had the need for Christian blood. The Jewish leaders “trusted” that the “learned” nuncio agreed. In 1774, however, Jews, clearly highly attuned to the debates about legal reforms and the use of torture in judicial proceedings, not only in Poland but also throughout Europe, used this new approach for their own ends.

Playing into the notion of Poland as a backward country, which nuncio Garampi certainly shared, the Jewish leaders noted that even learned Catholic men elsewhere in Europe had in fact “declared that although Jews in Poland are accused of this crime, they, nevertheless, never commit it.”⁷¹ Indeed, from “ancient times” learned Christian men who knew Hebrew examined Jewish books, and “none of them ever” found that Jews killed Christian children. “Only in Poland,” where educated men and clerics were “ignorant of the Holy Tongue,” did they embrace printed books filled with “calumnies” against Jews. This was only possible with “men who can neither read nor understand our books.” Since the destruction by the Romans of “the Holy City of Jerusalem, because of our sins,” the letter continued, “God angry at us” left Jews “without Kingdom, without a priest, without the Temple, without sacrifices” and scattered them across the world. But when Jews made their home “in Rome, in France, in Spain, in Italy, in Holland, in Germany, and other kingdoms, indeed even in the Turkish Empire, no nation among whom we lived has held us suspects of such crimes.”⁷² This happened “only in Poland.” And yet, all Jews, everywhere, “with the exception of the Karaites,” shared the same religion.

To further bolster their argument, the authors of the letter noted past privileges and letters of protection granted to Jews denouncing such accusations. Among them was a 1671 privilege from Sigismund III, letters from the pontiffs, and most recently from Rome in 1760, one written by “Cardinal Corsini in the name of the Pontiff Clement XIII to nuncio Visconti” and the two letters from Corsini to Visconti and from Visconti to Count von Brühl that were published in 1763. But the authors of the petition to nuncio Garampi said not a word about Ganganelli’s report, an indication they knew nothing of its contents. Once more, the Jews “beseeched” the nuncio to publish a formal decree declaring Jews’ innocence. They were “sure” that after examining the basis for the accusations, especially the confessions of two children, the nuncio would be able to bring “the truth to light” and accelerate justice to free the “the people” from this “wrong prejudice.”⁷³ All this said, the Jews were not trying to avoid justice: “this we never flee.” They asked for “nothing more” but assurance that the case be tried in a competent forum, not by the abbot, and that the confessions extorted under torture not be approved.

It is unclear if Garampi did anything in response. The nuncio had a full plate of other concerns. The trial took place during a tumultuous period: during the pivotal Sejm of 1773–1775 ratifying the partition of Poland, when the nuncio had to be particularly vigilant in protecting the interests of the Church, and in the aftermath of the papal order suppressing the Jesuit order, which was so negatively received that, combined with the crisis of the partitions, it threatened the already weak position of the pope.⁷⁴ On August 23, the Jews sent Garampi another letter, pleading “with tears” for help in the Grabie case, where twelve Jews “of both sexes” remained incarcerated.⁷⁵ With or without Garampi’s intercession, at the end of the year, the Grabie case reached the country’s highest court, and became part of a broader debate about torture and the death penalty.

At the end of the year, a pamphlet Replika na powództwo instygatora sądowego i jego donosicielów (A Response to the Complaint by the Court Prosecutor and His Informants) was published in Warsaw in the Jews’ defense.⁷⁶ Though responding to the case in Grabie, the pamphlet was also a legal treatise on court procedure, evidence, and proof. Like the Jews’ letter to Nuncio Garampi, it challenged the premodern reliance on confession, especially under torture, and focused on undisputable hard “judicial proofs.”

The Jews’ defender challenged the very foundations of the accusation—the belief that Jews killed Christian children—and focused on the evidence or lack thereof. The question, the defender argued, was not a historical question whether Jews ever committed such crimes, but “whether or not this infanticide was committed by those imprisoned.”⁷⁷ To answer that question it was necessary to examine the circumstances related to “persons [involved], time, and place.” When examined, the conclusions would “serve to exculpate the prisoners from the accusation of infanticide.” Thus the alleged past cases were not to be used as evidence in court. This argument was a striking departure from almost three centuries of reliance on “facts” described in books and chronicles as court evidence.

First, the accusers claimed that Jakub Nodkowicz of Grabie and Jakub Józefowicz of Sadków collaborated in kidnapping the child. Nodkowicz was said to have kidnapped Marianna and given her to Józefowicz, who was passing through the village. But the “prisoners ask the accusers if anyone saw the kidnapping of the child by the first [of the accused] … or the capturing of her by the other.” If so, why did not anyone do anything or notify anyone? Why did not anyone rescue the child? If no one saw anything, then “how can they accuse the prisoners? There is no proof.” In fact, there were witnesses to Józefowicz’s presence in the town—he passed through Grabie in the morning together with carpenters working in his brewery on his way to the nearby village of Cichrowo. But he did not stop at the Grabie brewery and thus did not see Nodkowicz. And so “if he did not meet with the brewer in Grabie, how can one say that one picked up the kidnapped child from the other?” This is not, the author asserted with a snark, “possible in nature.”⁷⁸ Thus, if the two main accusers “were far from committing the crime,” those who were imprisoned later were even farther. They were imprisoned randomly; some had not lived in Grabie for several years, and others had never lived there. Jews in nearby villages were arrested, some “picked up on their way to Warsaw” without “any evidence.” They were indicted of the crime because they “kept silent” without confessing to anything.

Detailed examination of the alleged timeline of the crime also supported the innocence of the accused Jews. If the prosecution argued that Jews killed Christian children because they needed “children’s blood for their matzah,” then it was important to point out that the day Marianna disappeared, March 30, was the Wednesday before Easter, but Passover had begun four days before on March 26. The child “disappeared after the Jewish festival [had begun],” the author argued. The timing thus proved that “the child could not have been kidnapped because of the alleged Jewish need for children’s blood, because Jews prepare matzah, or the unleavened bread, before the holidays; they prepare if for the holidays, not during or after the holidays.”⁷⁹ Of course, in reality, Passover, a weeklong holiday, did not end until April 3, but it was the rituals of the first night, the seder, that were of greatest importance. Or, rather, at the heart of the accusation was the afikomen, the three pieces of matzah used by Jews during Passover seder, on which Christians fixated during blood libels.⁸⁰ Indeed, Gaudenty Pikulski had just recently asserted that blood was used in the “matzah called afikomen, which Jews consume during Passover. And this matzah hangs in their homes and in synagogues for the whole year.”⁸¹ This was, he falsely claimed, just in case “they could not obtain Christian blood the next year, they could then soak this matzah in water and smear the blood on a Christian door.” Jews did indeed store a piece of matzah, the unleavened bread made with just flour and water, for the whole year in synagogues but this was to expand the boundaries of households through an eruv that would allow Jews to carry items otherwise prohibited outside the house on the Sabbath and Jewish holidays.⁸²

The very sources of the accusations also needed to be challenged. The prosecution in Grabie apparently used the decades-old “testimony of Serafinowicz,” the converted Jew who provided ammunition to Stefan Żuchowski, the canon of the Sandomierz cathedral, during his prosecution of Jews for murdering a Christian child in 1710–1713. But Serafinowicz’s “simple” writings, clearly still in circulation, could not be treated as “legitimate and authentic evidence.”⁸³ Furthermore, the court needed to examine critically the character of the very man who incited violence and turmoil against Jews following the disappearance of the girl—Andrzej Tryndoch, a serf from Grabie who was apparently a murderer. How could one believe a man who “once committed murder” of a Jew, whom he hanged in a forest, and then “boasted about it among the people”? “One cannot believe him at all,” especially since the examination of circumstances related to “persons, time, and place” did not provide hard evidence that the crime had been committed by the accused Jews.⁸⁴

The Jews’ defender then turned to disproving the very foundation of the accusation: that Jews needed Christian blood. He offered an overview of all passages in the Hebrew Bible that dealt with blood and murder, quoting directly those most explicitly prohibiting the consumption of blood. Repeating almost verbatim passages from the long letter Jews sent to Garampi, the author wrote that Jews lived in many states, “German, French, Spanish, Italian, and even in Rome itself, in Holland, and Turkey for so many years,” where they were not accused of “this crime.” Why should they be accused of it in Poland, if they, as Jews, “are governed by the same law, same teachings, and same scriptures.”⁸⁵

But more importantly, there existed “authentic documents exculpating the Jews [niewiernych] of this hideous charge” issued by both secular and ecclesiastical authorities. Most recently, following the mission of “Jakub Jelek” to Rome in 1758, with Pope Benedict XIV still alive, the Apostolic See examined the matter, “as always, with great diligence.”⁸⁶ Indeed, the author added, “It was important to note that it is a custom of Roman authorities and tribunals to examine closely and exactingly each matter.” There should therefore be no doubt that the conclusion reached in Rome, which exculpated Jews from the accusations, was based on solid evidence. Quoting extensively from the now publicly known letter from Cardinal Corsini to nuncio Visconti, the author ramped up its significance: “this opinion of the Holy Father and the Apostolic See,” he wrote, “has the power of a firm verdict,” and as such it was communicated by the nuncio to the royal court officials.⁸⁷ This bold statement was, of course, not quite true. Even if the text of Corsini’s letter was authentic, it was not issued “as a firm verdict.” But it no longer mattered; Church authorities were unlikely to dispute this point now. Still, the assertion suggests either that when the Jews were providing evidence to their defenders and offered the collection of documents published in 1763, they insisted that these statements represented the official position of the Church that had been clearly communicated in Poland, or simply that by 1774 the politics of the letters and their behind-the-scenes nature, as well as the frustration at the lack of forceful official condemnation of anti-Jewish accusations from Rome, were no longer significant. After all, these letters were officially registered in the royal registry and had appeared in print. They became official evidence. The 1763 ruse of publishing what had not been intended for publication finally bore fruit in 1774. Based on the position of the Holy See expressed in the 1763 publication, and a long list of royal decrees and Polish legal statutes, Jews were not to be accused of such crimes.

But the prosecution objected. They argued, as did Bishop Kajetan Sołtyk in his response to the nuncio in 1758 and as had Stefan Żuchowski at the beginning of the century, that there existed many decrees issued by courts that condemned Jews of such crimes. The defender stood firm. Even if one were to allow that “Jews killed some child, since murders happen,” and were tried and convicted of the crime as murderers, “as was the case in Sandomierz,” still, these past decrees could not be used as evidence “today.”⁸⁸ One could not conclude, the author argued, that “if Jews killed a child [somewhere], that they did it based on their [religious] teachings, and thus must kill now too.” The evidence of crime in the past should not be used as evidence for the specific crime tried today. This was an epistemic departure from previous reasoning used in trials against Jews, at least since Trent if not before.

Seeing their case crumble under the defense’s effective challenge, the prosecution suggested the court should “unearth the truth through torture, as is allowed by law.”⁸⁹ This was a miscalculated move at a time when the question of torture was itself a subject of judicial reform. And the defense would have none of it. Torture was “a lamentable mode of first discovery,” but in “our enlightened era it is coming to an end.” Using torture was “dangerous,” because it served more “to impair than to expose the truth.” Torture was all about endurance. If someone “can endure, he will not tell the truth, but if he cannot, he will confess untruth; even though he may be innocent, he will come up with a crime.” This was not a new argument; Hugo Grotius made it in the seventeenth century, and even in Poland, the sixteenth-century court clerk and author of popular judicial manuals, Bartłomiej Groicki, urged court officials not to rush to torture but rather to examine the case so that “there would be just and adequate evidence [dostateczne znaki]” against the suspect, because “[it is] not always that the guilty person is [the one] who is accused and charged.”⁹⁰ Confessions under torture, Groicki warned, should not necessarily be accepted unconditionally: “And so one must not believe [confessions under] torture immediately, but neither should it be that [the confessions under torture] be disbelieved on the account that they are an uncertain, erroneous and dangerous matter. Because it happens numerous times that one is so resilient [cierpliwy] and tough that he can suffer the torture and will not tell the truth even if he were tortured most heavily. And others are not as resilient and, fearing torture, confess against themselves and others, and they repeat many times what had never happened.”⁹¹ But while Groicki still allowed for a cautious use of torture and in Poland, more broadly, torture had been liberally applied; in the Grabie case its use was presented by the defense as tantamount to the prosecution’s admission that it lacked evidence strong enough to convict.⁹² The death penalty was a serious matter, and it should only be meted out when strong evidence was in place. The Jews’ defender appealed to the court: “Make judgment and do justice, and do not shed innocent blood in this place.”

In early 1775, Jews again appealed to nuncio Garampi for help. Whether he intervened is unclear, but in April 1775, “in order to accelerate justice” for those imprisoned for more than a year, the case was transferred to a commission under the chairmanship of Bishop Andrzej Stanisław Młodziejowski of Poznań, the same bishop who in 1774 was charged with executing the papal decree to suppress the Jesuit order and confiscate Jesuit property in Poland.⁹³ The members of the commission took an oath to judge “according to God, conscience, justice, written documents, and objections, and depositions of witnesses” and not to accept any “rewards and promises” in order to “suppress justice.” The commission was asked to examine both the incarcerated and the evidence provided by the medical examiners, who had performed a postmortem on Marianna’s body when the case was transferred to Warsaw. If it were to find this evidence insufficient, the commission could then question the two Jewish children, Dina (or Binia) and Berko, both of whom were now Christians named Barbara and Michael. The commission’s charge was to condemn to death those found guilty and release from prison those found innocent.

The commission found that in regard to the accusation that Jews killed Christians to obtain their blood, both the Holy See and royal authorities had spoken and found no substance to support this accusation.⁹⁴ And yet, despite this, the accusers illegally arrested, prosecuted, abused, and tormented Jews after the body of a Christian had been discovered. The commission questioned the whole trial and its procedures, which were checkered with violence and intimidation and grounded in testimonies of children who “innocently accused” their parents because of “fear and pain.” Moreover, the medical examiner in Warsaw found no wounds on the body of the child to indicate foul play. As a result, on June 12, 1775, the commission, fulfilling its charge, ordered the release of the imprisoned Jews. A month later, on July 12, the newly established Warsaw Gazette (Gazeta Warszawska) reported the conclusion of the trial on its front page.⁹⁵

In the 1774–1775 trial of the Jews for the infanticide in Grabie two judicial worlds clashed—the old, where confession was “the crown of evidence,” and the “enlightened,” where material evidence was demanded and where confession, especially that under torture, became unacceptable.⁹⁶ Under the old system, the trial was not limited to the specific crime of which a suspect was accused, but also included, and made the suspect liable for, other crimes to which he or she may have confessed during interrogations.⁹⁷ Books and chronicles recounting past tales and stories were informally seen as having evidentiary power. In the old judicial world, Polish courts, whose practice and procedures were strongly rooted in medieval Saxon law, the sixteenth-century Carolina, and Polish legal manuals based on them, considered several kinds of proof: testimony of the accuser, confession of the accused, witness testimonies, and an oath.⁹⁸ Legal manuals used through the eighteenth century, among them those by Bartłomiej Groicki, provided specific guidelines as to who could be considered a witness fit to “give the testimony of truth in court under oath.”⁹⁹ Age was one factor. In most cases witnesses could not be younger than fourteen, but in “ignominious” cases in which the death penalty was considered they could not be younger than twenty. People older than seventy were also disqualified from serving as witnesses. (The Grabie trial appeared not quite legal even under the old law, but that kind of arbitrariness of courts was indeed one aspect of judicial practice the reformers wanted to eliminate.) In Polish courts, torture was applied in criminal court proceedings extensively. And although certain rules existed to which most courts seemed to adhere, there was also the unsystematic use of torture during the early modern period that paralleled the centrifugal and fragmented nature of the court system in the Polish state. In some cases torture was even applied to those who were considered witnesses, although the line between a witness and a suspect was often a thin one.

Bartłomiej Groicki advocated the careful investigation of criminal cases, stressing the need to consider all kinds of circumstances, such as the reputation of both the accused and his accusers, the location of the crime and the presence or absence of the accused there, times of the crime and the ages of those involved, as well as the reasons for the accusation “whether out of enmity, envy, past threats, or … profit.”¹⁰⁰ He counseled court officials to seek expert advice if there was any doubt about the confession and urged them not to rush to execution even if the accused had actually confessed.

Following the imperial Carolina, Groicki had set up specific procedures to be used during criminal trials: (1) The accused should be examined in front of the court without torture “so that he should confess and tell the truth voluntarily without torture.”¹⁰¹ During that time the accused should be warned about the “severity [srogość] of torture, to which he will be subjected if he does not confess voluntarily to that of which he is accused.” (2) The accused should be allowed to prove he was not involved in the crime by demonstrating “that he either was not in the place where something like that happened or that he was doing something else at that time.”¹⁰² The court was not allowed to prohibit the accused from bringing witnesses to testify on his or her behalf (Groicki used only the masculine form, but women were often suspects as well.) (3) If after such presentation the court was not convinced of the suspect’s innocence, it had the right to send the accused to be interrogated under torture in the presence of the judge, two jurors, and the court clerk. But even under torture the suspect should still be allowed to claim his innocence. Should he or she confess to the crime, the clerk “is to write his words, without omitting or adding the smallest [single] word.”¹⁰³ (4) The confession under torture had to be confirmed “voluntarily” after torture, and the court had the right to ask follow-up questions about the circumstances of the crime and accomplices. Should there be discrepancies between the confession under torture and this stage of interrogation, the suspect could be sent to torture again.¹⁰⁴ As Joanna Pilaszek has noted, the courts distrusted voluntary confessions—“If the accused admitted so easily to all the deeds of which he was accused, he will recall more when led to torture.”¹⁰⁵

Groicki’s sixteenth-century manuals were republished as late as 1760.¹⁰⁶ But by the second half of the eighteenth century, some courts became reluctant to execute offenders and struggled to justify noncapital punishment, since according to the legal manuals available to them, capital punishment was required not only for heresy or lese majeste but also for thefts, raids and robberies, sexual crimes (in Groicki’s manual that included bestiality and male homosexuality, but not lesbian sex, even though it did appear in the Carolina itself), bigamy and adultery, pimping, abortion, infanticide, and poisoning, as well as many other offenses. Indeed, until the latter half of the eighteenth century the death penalty was quite commonly applied in Polish criminal courts. Moreover, in the old system, an accused was not, as in modern law, presumed innocent until proven guilty, but quite the opposite.¹⁰⁷ Legal reformers of the Enlightenment era began to call not only for a shift away from this paradigm but also for the accused’s right of defense.¹⁰⁸ The essay by the defender of the Jews in the Grabie case demonstrated the new legal thinking and made the case part of broader debates over criminal law in Poland.

The reforms in Poland were influenced by similar developments in Europe. Although formal calls for legal reforms came only during the second half of the eighteenth century, on the Italian peninsula, for example, some of the principles of those reforms were already practiced by the courts, which were urged to use “moderation and circumspection,” use torture more judiciously, and make punishment, even for murder, much lighter.¹⁰⁹ Works by European legal scholars who called for legal reforms began to infiltrate legal thinking in Poland in the 1770s. Cesare Beccaria’s 1764 essay On Crimes and Punishments, published as a response to the Jean Calas affair in France in 1762, was translated into Polish and published in 1772, spurring earnest legal debates. (Jean Calas, a French merchant from Toulouse, was accused of killing his son, who apparently had committed suicide. Calas was tortured and, despite maintaining his innocence, executed. The affair shook European Enlightenment thinkers, many of whom began calling for judicial reforms.) The reformers, in Poland, like in the rest of Europe, argued for the abolition of torture, the end of the death penalty, except in cases of treason and premeditated murder, and for proportionality of punishment to the crimes. And so, the Grabie case came at the very moment when judicial reforms were hotly debated and in the very venue in which they were being considered, with the use of torture and death penalty at the center of both.¹¹⁰

The death penalty was a particularly pressing issue in Poland at the time. Russia and Prussia demanded an end to capital punishment in cases of apostasy from Catholicism, with it being replaced, if necessary, with exile—something the Holy See and nuncio Garampi strongly opposed.¹¹¹ But, even more importantly, since many noblemen who opposed King Stanisław Poniatowski and took part in his kidnapping in 1771 could have faced the death penalty for treason, many lords became its most vigorous opponents. Although the ban on torture and the partial abolishment of the death penalty (for example, in cases that were considered “witchcraft”) did not come until two years later, the trial of the Jews and its ultimate outcome thus became both subject to and a product of these debates and the legal reforms that followed.

Although the Grabie case was not the last accusation of Jews in Poland in the premodern period, those that came after were considered more cautiously. In 1779, for example, in Izbica Kujawska it was the accusers who were convicted. In Olkusz in 1787, a Jewish tailor accused of killing a Christian girl was convicted but not simply on the basis of his confession, but also of material evidence found on him—a knife—that allegedly tied him to the crime. Still, the Jews whom he implicated were freed, and the king, visiting nearby Cracow, condemned the accusation as “medieval superstition” and scolded one of the instigators, Stanisław Wodzicki, for believing “in such medieval tales that Jews needed Christian blood for Passover [święta wielkanocne].” The king said, “Despite the fact that all nations mention such trials, and severe punishments were meted out at those accused of this crime, enlightened education of our times has convinced us about the innocence of these victims of prejudice and superstition.”¹¹² Although Wodzicki did not agree with the monarch, and years later reaffirmed his belief in the Jewish need for Christian blood and the resulting murders, he complied with the king’s request to end the trial. By the time the Olkusz case took place in 1787, a gap had developed between popular beliefs embraced locally by local instigators and positions embraced by intellectual elites, exposed to Enlightenment ideas, who rejected both the old tales and the old criminal procedures.

And although trials of the Jews largely ended in premodern Poland, they did not end because of the Ganganelli report or papal intervention, as some scholars continue to maintain.¹¹³ They ended, in their lethal effects, partly because of legal and cultural transformations in the state and partly because the state eventually ceased to exist in 1795. In the modern period other parts of Europe saw a resurgence of the accusation in a new guise.¹¹⁴ After the Damascus affair in 1840, and even more during the wave of modern accusations beginning in the 1880s, Jewish intellectuals and community leaders, along with some Christian supporters—forced again to demonstrate the fallacy of blood libels—turned to the archives to show, like their premodern predecessors, that Christian authorities had already declared Jews innocent, publishing known papal bulls and breves on the subject.¹¹⁵ It was then that the text of the Ganganelli report was discovered, first in the archives of the Jewish community in Mantua and then in Rome. It is unclear how the report found its way into Jewish archives, because it had not been shared with anyone except the highest Church officials in Rome. Perhaps Jews got a copy after Napoleon seized documents in the Vatican archives, especially those housed in the Holy Office. That “papers certainly disappeared in times of the revolution” was in fact the explanation the Holy Office offered in 1900 to explain why Jews had possession of “certain documents in their defense” they had recently published. The official was referring to the Ganganelli report.¹¹⁶

Whatever the history of its acquisition, the report by Cardinal Ganganelli soon received a new lease on life. In 1862 its existence was discussed in the Italian Jewish journal L’Educatore Israelita by Marco Mortara, the rabbi of Mantua; in the 1880s, in the aftermath of a number of trials of Jews, including in Tiszaeszlar, the report was published several times in the original Italian and in translations.¹¹⁷ The report came to be championed as the most extensive condemnation of anti-Jewish accusations and became relevant again during the Beilis affair that started in Kiev in July 1911 and lasted for more than two years, ending with a four-week trial in September and October 1913. When the Beilis trial began, the Jewish community in western Europe mobilized to intervene in Kiev, and Baron Nathaniel Mayer Rothschild, a British banker and politician, requested that the Holy See authenticate the published versions of the report so it could be submitted as defense evidence in Kiev. This move was a response to the fact that one of the supporting witnesses in the trial, Justinius Elisejevitch Pranaitis, a Roman Catholic theologian, testified in support of the accusation and cast doubt on the existence of papal condemnations.

The Ganganelli report’s reputation and importance were thus built not at the time of its creation but by later generations. It had a relatively limited impact when first written, with Church officials conscious of the power of public symbolic gestures but still reluctant to make overt statements condemning blood libels against Jews. To be sure, Rome was explicit about instructing nuncios to help Jews avoid persecution and unjust trials, but it was pragmatically reluctant to make a public stand. The papal responses, along with Ganganelli’s report, exemplify the tension between such a pragmatic approach rooted in the Church’s desires to protect its own corporate interests and the demand to act based on what might be considered moral principles to condemn what is unjust and reprehensible, as the tortures of the Jews were to many Church officials in Italy. Yet the trials and tribulations of Jews in premodern Poland demonstrate that sometimes a symbolic but public statement can be worth more than even most elaborate behind-the-scenes interventions.