THERE WAS notably little interest among Jews in responding to anti-Jewish accusations in print, but the surviving Jewish literary responses to blood accusations seem to underscore the known, though debated, cultural differences between Sephardic, Italian, and Ashkenazi Jews, each grounded in their own epistemic realities. The responses also reveal that blood accusations affected both Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews in the early modern period, albeit in different ways. Sephardic Jews were not victims of real-life blood accusations—Ashkenazi Jews were—but the persistence of these beliefs in Christian culture had a direct impact on the Sephardic Jews’ ability to establish themselves in their new European homes, and they engaged more explicitly in challenging anti-Jewish accusations. Their works, written not only in Hebrew but also in languages accessible to non-Jews, such as Latin, Italian, English, Portuguese, and Spanish, engaged with non-Jewish authors and offered polemical arguments rebutting the slanderous charges.1 Some of those rebuttals had been known to and even used by Christian authorities before these Jewish works were published, but some offered new defenses that were later used to protect Jews from similar libels and were even deployed by Christians writing in defense of Jews.
Among Ashkenazi Jews, who were the main victims of the accusations, literary responses were rare.2 In contrast to the Sephardic Jews who offered polemical refutations of the accusations written in the languages read and spoken by non-Jews, the Ashkenazi Jews preferred to turn to songs and tales in Yiddish, such as the book Sefer geulat Israel (Seyfer geules Isroel, The Book of Jewish Redemption), recounting among others a story of blood libel in Poznań and published in the waning years of the seventeenth century.3 To quote Max Weinreich, the songs and tales became a means to “inform the world about different events,” since at the time “people did not write telegrams” about the news, such as fires, expulsions, or libels, but “a song to be sung to a melody.”4
These historical Yiddish songs commemorate the “martyrdom” of the accused Jews and emphasize their fidelity to God and the Jewish community, despite experiencing horrifying suffering and persecution. These rhymed songs and tales built on Ashkenazi medieval martyrological imagery. They also fulfilled communal needs, providing reassurance and affirmation of faith and loyalty to the community, when faith, loyalty, and life itself were challenged. But these songs, insular as they might seem, were also deeply embedded in local Christian cultures and traditions.
In contrast to premodern Christian writers, who produced chronicles, histories, and anthologies of the lives of saints, kings, and other prominent historical figures, Jews were not keen on writing chronicles and histories, and few works by Jewish writers qualify as such.5 Premodern Jews remembered historical events through commemorative annual liturgy, not through the many genres of historical writings common among Christians.6 The few existing Jewish chronicles can be divided into histories of the rabbis and their works, the shalshelet ha-kabbalah (chain of tradition), or chronicles of calamities that befell Jews.7 Samuel Usque’s Consolation for the Tribulation of Israel, published in 1553 in the vernacular of Portuguese Jews and conversos, was explicitly written as a reflection on persecutions endured by Jews throughout history; and Joseph Ha-Kohen’s Emek ha-bakha (The Vale of Tears), a sixteenth-century chronicle disseminated in manuscript form until the nineteenth century, was intended to commemorate the suffering of Jews since the destruction of the Second Temple, perhaps as part of the observance of Tisha be-Av, a day of mourning in Judaism.8
A hallmark of Sephardic and Italian Jewish historical and polemical works was their use of non-Jewish works, even those explicitly anti-Jewish, as sources for their histories of Jewish suffering. One of the earliest Sephardic works of this type, Samuel Usque’s Consolation, known to and used by other Jewish writers, including Joseph Ha-Kohen and Isaac Cardoso, the seventeenth-century Jewish physician and polemicist,9 relied heavily on the fifteenth-century work by Alfonso de Espina, Fortalitium fidei (The Fortress of Faith), an exceedingly popular polemical work aimed at providing preachers with arguments against heretics, Jews, and Saracens—“the enemies of Christian religion”—and other anti-Jewish writers with examples of “the crimes of Jews.”10 Jewish writers, among them Usque and Cardoso, appropriated de Espina’s scurrilous work not as evidence of “Jewish cruelties,” of course, but as a source documenting the persecution of Jews by Christians. Cardoso explained that Christian anti-Jewish works represented “the fiction of history,” for “they impute cruelty to the Jews in order to conceal their own. Let [these] histories be read,” he implored, “and one will see the tyrannies and cruelties they inflicted upon [the Jews] throughout centuries.”11
In reappropriating stories from anti-Jewish works, Jewish writers offered their own interpretations of events.12 This is evident in one of the shortest stories included in Usque’s Consolations, an account of an event said to have taken place in France, in which eighty-four Jews were sent to the stake. Usque wrote, “Because the Christians in France hated the Jewish usurers, the poor Israelite people living in Paris were charged with having killed a Christian in order to celebrate the Passover with his blood.”13 Hearing the news about the alleged murder, the king, who was away from Paris “on a hunt,” immediately turned back and “angrily condemned to the stake eighty-four Jews, who were allegedly accomplices in the crime.” This story, found in Fortalitium fidei, had been included in Vincent de Beauvais’s popular Speculum historiae, a bestseller among early printed books in Europe.14 For Usque providence played a role in Jewish persecutions (and revenge for them): the execution of “the oppressed lambs,” who although “innocent” were “charged with what was prohibited by their Holy Law and contrary to its precepts,” was fulfillment of the prophecy, “You shall be fuel for the fire” (Ezekiel 21:37). Prophecy notwithstanding, the reason behind the existence of anti-Jewish libels was, Usque argued, Jews’ money-lending activities, or usury, because the supposed basis for the accusations—the alleged need for Christian blood—was absurd due to precepts of “the Holy Law,” a clear reference to the prohibition against consumption of blood in Jewish law.
Usque cited Jewish law explicitly in defense of Jews in another story; in this Spanish tale, Jews accused of needing blood were actually saved by the king.15 “See, brothers,” wrote Usque through his Jewish character Ycabo, “how my iniquities blind the world when the time for my punishment comes.… For though the very people who accuse me know that there is no such cruel precept in my Law, they claim that I want to offer sacrifices of human limbs.”16 Ycabo, mirroring the argument made by Pope Innocent IV in response to the 1247 accusation in Valréas, exclaims that if “in order for us to slaughter even a hen, we must do it mercifully according to the precept …, [h]ow much more unnatural would it be to kill human beings to hold divine services with their blood, which is an abominable and forbidden thing.” Usque ended the tale here, attributing the reason for these persecutions to divine providence: “Since my sins may roll on until Moses’s prophecies are somehow fulfilled, ‘The Lord will send a discomfiture against you because of evil of your thoughts’ [Deuteronomy 28.20].”
Elements of Usque’s work, including the stories from de Espina’s Fortalitium fidei, were integrated into Joseph Ha-Kohen’s Emek ha-bakha, sometimes with the same errors Usque had introduced.17 Though the repetition of Usque’s errors suggests that Ha-Kohen did not use de Espina’s magnum opus as a direct source, it is abundantly clear that in other instances Ha-Kohen did turn to non-Jewish works for Jewish history. This is evident in his earlier but much larger published work, Sefer divrei ha-yamim, from which came many of the stories included in Emek ha-bakha. Most prominently, Ha-Kohen used Sebastian Münster’s popular Cosmographia, first printed in German in 1544, translated into five languages, and published nearly forty times between 1544 and 1628.18 Ha-Kohen appropriated almost all the events pertaining to Jews found in Cosmographia, from stories of imperial protection of the Jews, as in Bern following a blood accusation in 1287,19 to the most ridiculous tales, such as one in 1270 about a Jew who fell into a privy on the Sabbath and was refused help by other Jews. In response to this incident, according to Ha-Kohen, the pope—in Münster’s Cosmographia it was the bishop of Magdeburg—ordered that all Jews had to observe, under penalty of death, all the precepts of the Sabbath also on Sunday.20
If in Christian eyes these histories denoted “Jewish crimes,” for Jewish writers they chronicled Jewish suffering. Jewish authors, of course, did not use the stories uncritically; they edited and reworked them, omitting the most controversial material. For instance, in reporting violence erupting in 1348, Ha-Kohen first quoted Usque (“the Portugese”) and then paraphrased Münster (“Sebastianus”):
Many Jews gathered in their houses and locked the door behind them, and set themselves on fire, when they saw that destruction is upon them [ki-kalta aleihem ha-ra’ah; play on Esther 7:7]. And the fire burned their houses and their families. And in the city of Mainz, a large church bell melted because of the blaze. And they saw what happened: in the imperial cities they tore the Jews’ houses to the ground, and with the stones from them and from the tombstones they built walls and towers. And they expelled many at the time.21
In paraphrasing Münster, Ha-Kohen chose to omit the section about Jews poisoning wells and Münster’s rather explicit statement that “many Jews of both sexes were baptized, less out of love of God but more out of fear of punishment.”22 Ha-Kohen’s selectivity shifted the emphasis onto Jewish suffering and avoided tainting the memory of the persecuted Jews.
Far more sophisticated and detailed were Ha-Kohen’s versions of more recent events, some of which he or his family may have experienced or had access to better information about. The expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492; the violence in Lisbon in 1506; the adventures of Shlomo Molkho, a messianic figure active in the sixteenth century; and the story of Simon of Trent were all marked by insightful analysis. Though Münster did discuss the Trent case, devoting to him a lengthy paragraph,23 Ha-Kohen seemed to have eschewed Münster’s account and presented his own longer, more detailed interpretation of what may have happened in 1475. According to the Jewish chronicler, “an evil man” (ish ha-beli’al; 1 Samuel 25:25) murdered a boy named Simon in Trent; unseen, he put the body in a cistern near the house of a Jew, Samuel, whereupon Christians “accused the Jews, as it is their custom,” of killing the boy.24 At first they did not find the child, but when the child’s body was found—Ha-Kohen did not make clear that it was the Jews who found the body in Samuel’s house and reported the finding to the bishop—“all the Jews were to be seized. Their lives were then embittered. They were tortured with the cord, so that they confessed to what they had not plotted. One very old man named Moshe, and he alone, did not admit to this great lie.”25 The remaining Jews were sentenced to a painful death, “pinched with [hot] pincers, and burned” at the stake; “their pure souls rose up to heaven.”
If Ha-Kohen’s recounting of the Trent events and Jewish suffering seems formulaic, his description of the political complexity of the case is not. He demonstrated an uncommon knowledge of details and an acute awareness of the dynamic driving the long trial and its aftermath. Jews sought help, Ha-Kohen reported, from two Christians from Padua “learned in religion and law,” but the men were ultimately chased away from Trent. In the meantime, “it was said that the child was holy” and performed miracles, and people began to flock to Trent “not empty handed,” insightfully added the chronicler to draw attention to the material benefits of veneration sites. Motivated by the popularity of Simon’s shrine, the bishop beseeched the pope to “make the boy a saint, for he is holy [kadesh et ha-yeled ki kadosh].” But the pope demurred and sent a cardinal, “a legate,” as Ha-Kohen called him, to investigate the affair thoroughly. He saw that “the whole affair was delusions and nonsense [ta’atu’im ve-hevel],” for “he discovered [the boy’s body] had been embalmed in spices and perfumes, as is done to the dead. And then he chided them [the bishop of Trent and his entourage], saying publicly that it was all a lie. This infuriated the people, and the legate had to flee.” Despite the bishop’s relentless efforts—“in fact, over and over, almost daily,” Ha-Kohen asserted—“the pope did not canonize the boy.”
Joseph Ha-Kohen seems to have had a sophisticated understanding of the status of Simon, being aware of the difference between Simon’s appellation as beatus and as a saint: “They called him Beato Simone, but saint he is not called to this very day.” Ha-Kohen’s terminus ad quem was 1575, the year he is said to have made the last changes to his chronicle. By then, Simon’s story had entered at least one comprehensive collection of the lives of saints (Laurentius Surius’s De Probatis Sanctorum Historiis published in 1571), but, as Ha-Kohen astutely noted, the cult had not yet been officially recognized by the pope. Simon of Trent would earn a short description in the newly updated liturgical calendar Martyrologium romanum in 1583, eight years after Ha-Kohen’s death, and his cult would be officially recognized in 1588 with a liturgy and indulgences, which added to confusion about the boy’s status. Still, for Ha-Kohen, the lack of papal recognition at the time seems to have been vindication for the unjust trial and persecution of Jews, and proof of the falsity of the accusation. So too were other examples he cited such as an accusation in Novi (now Novi Ligure), near Alessandria in 1513, where the city’s mayor explicitly defended Jews and assured them he did not believe such accusations.26
Some aspects of Ha-Kohen’s account of Simon’s story were certainly known in Italy from the works celebrating Simon’s martyrdom and defending the actions of the bishop. In Ubertino Pusculo’s Symonidos, for example, Jews were said to have “hired doctors of law” from Padua. And though, according to Pusculo, their intervention was in vain, the Jews did manage to gain the support of some lords and kings. This, in turn, emboldened them to seek help from the pope himself, who sent his envoy to Trent.27 In Pusculo’s words, the envoy was “a paid employee, completely at the Hebrews’ expense”; he “challenged the little boy’s miracles” and “laughed at them.” But some details, like the mention of embalming spices and perfumes, suggest that Ha-Kohen may also have had access to unpublished sources about Simon, such as Battista de’ Giudici’s account, Apologia iudaeorum and Invectiva contra Platinam, or other sources not publically known; or perhaps Ha-Kohen recorded oral counterstories circulating during his life.28
In Jewish polemical literature, Simon of Trent would appear one more time—in the last section devoted to refuting calumnies against the Jews that “they kill Christian children in order to use their blood in their rituals” of Isaac Cardoso’s opus Las excelencias de los hebreos, published in Amsterdam in 1679.29 Cardoso offered arguments demonstrating the absurdity of the accusation and recounted several stories he found in Christian anti-Jewish works, including de Espina’s Fortalitium fidei, Laurentius Surius’s De probatis sanctorum historiis, and Jacob Philip Foresti’s extremely popular Supplementum chronicarum.30 One of these stories is about Simon of Trent.
The story of Simon of Trent was for Cardoso a “baleful tragedy fabricated against Jews.”31 After briefly recounting the narrative from Trent based on the accounts by Surius and Foresti, Cardoso, who at the time lived in Verona, 62 miles from Trent, noted almost in passing that “they dedicated a shrine to the child, where one can still see [the boy’s] black and disfigured corpse.”32 This side comment was a direct polemical jab at the Christian story of Simon, which emphasized the incorruptibility of Simon’s body as evidence of his saintly nature. Just in 1668, eleven years before Cardoso’s book was published, this point was explicitly emphasized in Michelangelo Mariani’s Il infante glorioso S. Simone, written to “revive the memory of the memory of his martyrdom” because this “glorious innocent … deserved to be canonized by the Church.”33 Indeed, the task was to declare Simon a saint, not just beatus; to make him not just “innocent” but “a martyr killed in hatred of Christ.”34 Mariani devoted a significant section of his book to the state of Simon’s body, given that it was written after the body was reexamined by medical experts who confirmed its “incorruptibility.”35
Still, with Cardoso’s work an exception, after Simon’s cult was officially recognized, his story could no longer be invoked as proof of papal disbelief in blood accusations. In fact, papal recognition of the cult had the opposite effect: it made it easier for anti-Jewish accusers to legitimize their claims and more difficult for church officials to dismiss the charges altogether.
Few works of this sort—historical or polemical—were published by Ashkenazi writers north of the Alps. The best-known work describing historical events is David Gans’s Tsemaḥ David (Sprout of David), published in Hebrew in 1592. Its section devoted to Jewish history resembles a list of rabbis and their works, peppered with short descriptions of other events from Jewish history, but it has little to say about blood libels.
With the exception of the Yudisher teryok (A Jewish Theriac) by Solomon Zevi Hirsch of Aufhausen—an apologetic response, or “an antidote,” to an anti-Jewish work by a German Jewish convert, Samuel Friedrich Brenz—Ashkenazi works, mostly songs and tales, were markedly different from the elaborate accounts produced by Sephardic writers, who developed what Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi called a Sephardic tradition of Jewish apologia that was deeply embedded in Christian works about Jews.36 This cultural difference was on display in the remarkable Sephardic work Shevet Yehudah (The Scepter of Judah) by Solomon ibn Verga, which provided one of the most extensive discussions of blood libels in early modern Jewish literature, and its Yiddish translation.37 The Yiddish Shevet Yehudah was subjected to what Michael Stanislawski called “Ashkenization,” highlighting in the process the differences between Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews.38
In contrast to Samuel Usque’s often circumscribed, brief explanations for the accusations against Jews, Solomon ibn Verga’s Shevet Yehudah, a book of “the widest popularity” in the early modern period, discussed the subject more extensively and more assertively.39 Of seventy-six tales in sixty-four chapters, eight concerned ritual murder.40 The first and longest is the seventh, which recounts a fictional encounter between King Alfonso of Spain and Thomas, a wise and learned man.
Ibn Verga’s King Alfonso faced a dilemma and needed advice. A certain bishop, the king said, preached to large audiences that “Jews could not celebrate the festival called in the Hebrew language Passover without blood from a Christian.”41 Although the king was skeptical about the bishop’s accusations, he was worried that so many people believed them and did not know how to handle the situation; if he defended the Jews, the king feared, he would lose the respect of his subjects, who, in turn, would see him as “a stranger or a Jew for not taking revenge on Jews.”42 He hoped that Thomas, a Christian known for his knowledge of Jewish religion, customs, and tradition, would advise him on how to “respond to these fools” and clarify whether there was any foundation in Jewish books to support such claims. If Thomas showed that the bishop’s claims could be substantiated, the king said, he was ready to expel Jews from his kingdom. If not, he would do everything he could to protect them.43 In response Thomas offered sophisticated arguments grounded in logic and reason, as well as his knowledge of Jewish tradition and customs, to demonstrate the baselessness of the bishop’s claims. His refutation was so compelling that at one point the king appeared a bit incensed when he realized Thomas might have thought that the king himself embraced the bishop’s accusations.44
First of all, Thomas said, God did not want to harm Jews, because God did not want to harm anything he created, not a fly, let alone Jews who “had received the law.”45 As for the accusation that Jews needed blood to celebrate Passover—that was “far from reason.” People, after all, were naturally disposed to abhorring things they were not used to eating. One should only ask a Christian to eat a dog or a cat, and he will run away like a Jew runs away from pork! The Jew flees from pork because he is not accustomed to it due to God’s commandments. Thus, if Jews do not consume pork, which is more agreeable to human “temperament and nature,” they would certainly not consume human blood. In fact, if Jews “do not eat blood of any animal, or, according to rabbis (talmudiim), not even fish, how much more would they abhor human blood, which is not consumed by any people!46 Jews carefully drained blood of the slaughtered animals to fulfill the biblical commandment of not consuming any blood. As for human blood, Thomas gave an example of what happened when a Jew bit bread and his gums bled—he was not allowed to consume it unless he cleaned the bread.47
But the conversation and the king’s questions soon expanded beyond the blood accusation. The king was also disturbed by the distinction Jews made between themselves and non-Jews and the claims that apparently the Talmud allowed them to harm gentiles. To rebut them, Thomas first had to explain the difference between the Hebrew terms nokhri, noẓri, and goy—a stranger, a Christian, and a gentile—then he asserted that the Talmud considered robbing and harming a gentile worse than harming a fellow Jew.48
As the tale progressed, the discussion, whose purpose was to debunk reasons for the anti-Jewish accusations, shifted from Jewish customs and beliefs to the Jews’ economic and social status.49 As Jews gained status and visibility, Thomas argued, envy and hatred against them increased. When the Jews arrived in the kingdom, they arrived as “poor slaves,” and for many years they lived humbly and did not wear ostentatious clothes. And then no one accused them of drinking blood! But now Jews were rich and Christians poor. And as Jews became more prominent, and wealthy, openly wearing luxurious clothing of silk, these accusations emerged, as did calls for their expulsion.
But the principal reason for the hatred of Jews, Thomas argued, was that they became rich through usury. They now possessed hereditary properties, houses, and fields of the Christians. Thomas’s advice was to prohibit Jews from practicing usury and to issue restrictions that would remove them from positions of power and curb their display of luxurious clothing and lifestyles—a policy recommendation that corresponded to already known Christian Jewry laws, including those summarized in de Espina’s Fortalitium fidei.50 Thus, while condemning the blood libel, Thomas’s advice helped the king solve his uncomfortable dilemma.
While Thomas and the king were talking, some Christians came before the king saying that a dead Christian was found in a house of a Jew, who must have killed him to extract blood.51 Exasperated, the king asked Thomas to respond to “these fools.” Thus Thomas repeated what he had just explained to the king, saying that the king now understood that what bothered Christians about Jews was their usury and possession of Christian properties and lands. The king promised that what was taken from Christians through usury was to be returned to his subjects.52 And while the men praised the ruler for his justice and wisdom, the king forced them to admit that the Jew did not kill the Christian man. Conceding, the men said that they felt exploited; they “worked the land,” but had nothing left from it. Their goal was to have the Jews expelled, and so they concocted this plot. The king pressed on, “According to what you said, the Jew did not kill the Christian, but you killed him.” The men protested, saying that when they found the man, he was already dead, and they planned to take the body to the cemetery, but then decided to dump him in the house of the Jew. The king was happy he saw through the falsity of the accusation against Jews, and he let the men free, and ordered that the incident be recorded in the chronicles. Thus in Tale Seven, ibn Verga laid bare the anatomy of blood accusations against Jews, and debunked them, while providing explanations of Jewish rituals and highlighting the real and rational reasons for the hatred of Jews—money and envy. Blood libels, went the story’s take-home point, were often concocted to engineer the expulsion of Jews.
A similar message is reiterated in the next tale, in which representatives of the Jewish community came to plead for the king’s support and protection following an accusation of blood libel and a slew of attacks on Jews around Passover.53 Though the king admitted that “the Jews have no guilt in this [crime],” he saw them as guilty of “other kinds of sins” that were the true reasons why people rose against Jews every day. Once more ibn Verga’s king connected the Jews’ increased social status to the rise of animosity against them. “You arrived,” the king said, “to our kingdom poor and hungry, and Christians received you with love, but you paid back with evil for the good.” Once more, usury was the source of many evils. If Jews were slaves and exiles (avadim ve-golim), why, the king wanted to know, “do you wear garments of the princes?” In response, the Jews offered only vague apologetic and gendered explanations. Though like most of ibn Verga’s tales, the story ends well and the Jews are saved, there is no doubt that in ibn Verga’s mind Jews shared some of the blame for their misfortunes. To be sure, they were innocent of the crime of which Christians, wishing to expel Jews, accused them, but their life in luxury at the expense of Christians was a source of their tribulations.54
Ibn Verga’s anatomy of blood accusations was so powerful it was embraced and appropriated by other Jewish apologists. A century later, in 1656, after more than ten editions of Shevet Yehudah had appeared in Hebrew, Yiddish, and even Latin, Menasseh ben Israel, the prominent Sephardic rabbi and community leader, published his Vindiciae judaeorum; it was an apologetic work written in response to the 1655 publication A Short Demurrer to the Jewes Long Discontinued Remitter into England by William Prynne—a vocal opponent of the readmission of Jews to England on the grounds that Jews “had been formerly great Clippers and Forgers of Mony, and had crucified three or four Children in England at least.”55
In his rebuttal of Prynne, Menasseh followed ibn Verga’s Thomas almost to the letter.56 Christian “calumniators” sometimes themselves “cruelly butchered” their victims or after finding a corpse they “cast [it] as if it had been murdered by the Iewes, into their houses or yards,” only to “accuse innocent Iewes as the committers of this most execrable fact.” All this was false, Menasseh wrote, for “it is utterly forbid the Iewes to eat any manner of bloud whatsoever, Levit. Chapter 7. 26 and Deuter. 12 where it is expressly said וכל דם [ve-khol dam], And ye shall eat no manner of bloud, and in obedience to this command the Iewes eat not the bloud of any animal.” Menasseh then discussed what Jews did when they found a drop of blood in an egg and the case of blood from the gums left on bread. Like ibn Verga’s Thomas, Menasseh exclaimed, “Since then it is thus, how can it enter into any man’s heart to believe that [Jews] should eat humane bloud, which is yet more detestable, there being scarce any nation now remaining upon earth so barbarous, as to commit such wickednesse?”
Menasseh also retold, almost verbatim, ibn Verga’s Tale Eight of the king (“King of Portugal” in Vindiciae judaeorum) who could not sleep:
He went up into the balcony in the palace from whence he could discover the whole city, and from thence (the moon shining clear) he espied two men carrying a dead corps, which they cast into the Iew’s yard. He presently dispatches a couple of servants, and commands them, yet with a seeming carelessnesse, they should trace and follow those men, and take notice of their house; which they accordingly did. The next day there is a hurly burly and a tumult in the city, accusing the Iewes of murder. Thereupon the King apprehended these rogues and they confesse the truth; and considering that this businesse was guided by a particular divine providence, calls some of the wise men of the Iewes, and asks them how they translate the 4. Verse of the 121 Psalm, and they answered, Behold, he that keepeth Israel will neither slumber, nor sleep. The King replied, if he will not slumber, then much lesse will he sleep, you do not say well, for the true translation is, Behold, the Lord doth not slumber, neither will he suffer him that keepeth Israel to sleep. God who hath yet a care over you, hath taken away my sleep, that I might be an eye witnesse of that wickednesse which is this day laid to your charge.57
To underscore further the ludicrous nature of the blood accusation, Menasseh, citing among others Tertullian, the early Christian writer not particularly friendly to Jews, noted that “the very same accusation and horrid wickednesse of killing children and eating their bloud, was of old by the ancient heathens charg’d upon the Christians.”58 But the example of ancient accusations against Christians focused on the “blood accusation.” In response to Prynne, Menasseh ben Israel also had to address the accusation of “Christian homicide” in “hatred and detestation of Jesus of Nazareth.”59 Blood libel, associated with consumption of blood, could be easily discredited by demonstrating its absurdity and obvious violation of biblical laws; the accusation of killing Christians in “hatred of Jesus” required a different strategy. Of course, murder was in violation of the biblical prohibition, “Thou shalt not kill.” But the Christian chronicles told of many examples of such murders. Menasseh’s strategy was to discredit the sources of these stories, a task of particular importance because Prynne’s book emphasized the quality of the historical sources he consulted to support his attacks against Jews.
On the title page of A Short Demurrer, Prynne promised to offer “an Exact Chronological Relation of Their First Admission into, Their Ill Deportment, Misdemeanors, Condition, Sufferings, Oppressions, Slaughters, Plunders, by Popular Insurrections, and Regal Exactions in; and Their Total, Final Banishment by Judgment and Edict of Parliament, out of England, Never to Return Again: Collected out of the Best Historians.” One of these “best historians” was Matthew Paris, known for including in his chronicle several stories of Jews murdering Christian children in England, which for Prynne were “the principal causes of [the Jews’] banishment” from England. Prynne paraphrased the medieval chronicler almost verbatim, copying even his mistakes; for example, placing the story of Jews crucifying a boy in Norwich in 1240, perhaps an erroneous reference to William of Norwich. “In the year of our Lord 1240,” Prynne begins his story, “the Jews circumcised a Christian child at Norwich, and being circumcised, they called him Jurninus, but reserved him to be crucified in contumely of Jesus Christ crucified.”60 To counter Prynne’s attack, Menasseh ben Israel, playing shrewdly on English anti-Catholic sentiments and the black legend, immediately discounted the account as “popish” and challenged its logic:
He was first circumcised, and this perfectly constitutes him a Iew. Now for a Iew to embrace a Christian in his armes and foster him in his bosome, is a testimony of great love and affection. But if it was intended that shortly after this child should be crucified, to what end was he first circumcised? If it shall be said it was out of hatred to the Christians, it appears rather to the contrary, that it proceeded from detestation of the Iewes, or of them who had newly become proselytes, to embrace the Iewes religion. Surely this supposed pranck (stories to be done in popish times) looks more like a piece of the reall scene of the Popish Spaniards piety, who first baptiz’d the poor Indians, and afterwards out of cruel pity to their souls, inhumanely butchered them; then of strict-law-observing Iewes, who dare not make a sport of one of the seales of their covenant.61
Then, paraphrasing the Dutch theologian and polemicist Johannes Hoornbeek, Menasseh reinforced the notion that such accusations were based “either upon uncertain report of the vulgar, or else upon the secret accusation of the Monks belonging to the inquisition, not to mention the avarice of the informers, wickedly hanquering after the Iewes wealth, and so with ease forging any wickednesse.”62 The history books so praised by Prynne, among them Thomas of Canterbury, could be given “no more credit than his other fictions and lies where with he hath stuffed his book.”63 The chronicles were “popish,” their authors “too much addicted and given unto fables and figments.”64 (The chronicles may have been “popish,” but Menasseh’s own arguments against blood libels had been articulated explicitly in two separate letters by Pope Innocent IV in 1247.65)
As if to fortify his polemic with an anti-Catholic tone, Menasseh recounted several recent cases of accusations against Jews, all from Catholic domains—for example, Ragusa, Lisbon, and Madrid—and almost all involving torture.66 Menasseh’s emphasis on torture to discredit the anti-Jewish accusations was likely purposeful: although on the continent torture was accepted as a legitimate judicial procedure, in England it was not.67 Evoking anti-Catholic sentiments would have strengthened his appeal in England, where King Charles I was executed just a few years earlier. So too was the use of Hoornbeek a good strategy, because the Protestant polemicist was no particular friend of the Jews. His extensive book sought to convert Jews, even if along the way it conveyed serious doubts about the frequent accusations against them.68 Through a careful choice of his sources and sophisticatedly tailored arguments against anti-Jewish accusations, Menasseh was able to demonstrate that such charges against Jews had no grounds—they were based on fables, popish fables at that—and thus Jews deserved to be formally readmitted to England.
Whereas Menasseh ben Israel’s refutation of Prynne’s accusations was forceful and clearly effective in ultimately securing permission for Jews to live in England, another seventeenth-century Jewish polemicist, Isaac Cardoso, chose to add to his polemical response legal documents that could be used in defending Jews accused of ritual murder or blood libels. And used they were—published and republished in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, these documents became legal tools for Jews as blood accusations continued to plague them in the early modern era.
The last chapter of Cardoso’s wide-ranging polemical and apologetic work Las excellencias de los hebreos, “The Tenth Calumny against Jews that They Kill Christian Children to Use Their Blood in Their Rituals,” was a powerful retort to blood accusations. It condemned Christian historical accounts of supposed Jewish murders of Christian children as “fictions of history,” bemoaning the fact that enemies of Jews did not accept any evidence debunking the accusations.69 Even “breves of the Pontiffs, decrees of the emperors, and orders of the princes” condemning such accusations were not enough to discourage the blood accusations, because many considered those documents false, Cardoso claimed.70 Indeed, though some Christians knew well that these accusations were fabricated and found them “abominable,” the commoners did not believe these learned men and were unwilling to “obey Princes when hatred dominates reason and the fury closes the door to acquittals.”
Frustrated by this disbelief, Cardoso listed key documents by Church and secular authorities condemning blood accusations, along with those he found in the archives in Padua and Verona, where he lived.71 The documents included the 1236 papal decree defending Jews more generally, the 1247 decree by Pope Innocent IV explicitly condemning the blood accusations, and the decree by Emperor Frederick III issued in the aftermath of the 1470 accusation in Endingen that was reissued in 1544 by Charles V and reconfirmed in 1566 by Maximilian II. Cardoso also published the Spanish translation of documents from local archives in Verona and Padua: the 1479 decree by Bona and Giovanni Galeazzo Sforza of Milan, mistakenly dated 1470; the 1475 condemnation of similar accusations by Venice’s Pietro Mocenigo issued in the aftermath of the Simon of Trent trial; and a 1603 decree from Verona issued during the trial of Giuseppe Abramino, accused by a certain Bernardino Bretorio of abducting his son, which cited all the previous documents in defense of the Jews.
Although Cardoso may have come across the list of these documents in the 1603 Verona decree, they were first mentioned by the French Catholic polemicist Richard Simon, who wrote a treatise in defense of Jews following the trial of Raphaël Lévy of Boulay, accused of killing a Christian child in 1669 in Metz.72 Simon also challenged the historical examples brought by the accusers to bolster their charges against Jews and demonstrated that there was “a great number of stories in favor of Jews.” Crucially, he cited in defense of Jews exactly the documents Cardoso singled out in his book.73
Richard Simon and Isaac Cardoso began a chain of transmission that would shape Jewish legal strategies for at least a century, if not longer. In 1681, two years after the publication of Cardoso’s Las excellencias de los hebreos, an Italian Jew, Isaac Viva Cantarini, republished these documents in Latin in his Vindex sanguinis, a booklet written as a rejoinder to a work by Jacobus Geusius about human sacrifice.74 In 1705, in the aftermath of a trial of Jews in Viterbo, Rome’s Rabbi Tranquillo Vita Corcos reprinted those documents in his materials defending the accused Jews before the papal courts.75 These documents then made their way in the second half of the eighteenth century into the now famous but at the time secret report written in response to the pleas of the Jews from Poland by the Consultor of the Holy Office, Lorenzo Ganganelli, who would become Pope Clement XIV. This chain thus connected France, Italy, and Poland (one could also add England, because Vindex sanguinis also reveals influences of Menasseh ben Israel’s Vindiciae judaeorum) in the transmission of Jews’ political and legal strategies.
Isaac Cardoso’s outrage over accusations against Jews may have been inspired by the 1669 trial of Raphaël Levy of Boulay in Metz. Levy, as Cardoso noted, was tortured. He did not confess to the crime he was accused of, nor did he implicate anyone in the community; he is said to have prayed Shem’a Israel, “Hear O Israel,” during his torments.76 The slanderous accusations against Jews gave Cardoso an opportunity to reflect on questions of justice and judicial procedure. Lamenting the injustice done to Jews and stressing that “the Divine and Holy Law” did not condemn on the basis of “signs and conjectures,” but rather on the basis of “true and faithful testimonies,” Cardoso also invoked Ulpian, the third-century Roman jurist whom Cardoso called “one of the Princes of Jurisprudence,” who expressed reservations about torture.77 Though “torment and corporeal suffering,” according to Ulpian, “were employed to extract truth,” torture was nonetheless “weak and dangerous, and inimical for the truth.” Cardoso paraphrased Ulpian’s cautionary statement, noting that some people were able to endure torture so much that it was impossible to extract any certain information from them. Similarly, some had so little ability to endure the pain that they preferred to die, and they “not only confess[ed] to incriminate themselves but also accuse[ed] others of [crimes] they had never committed.” In his 1681 Vindex sanguinis, Isaac Viva, citing Johannes Hoornbeek, echoed Cardoso’s words: “Some Jews, confined to prison, confessed to this crime, either because of the fear of suffering torments, or, in fear, hoping for the grace of a quick death sentence.”78 These comments by Cardoso and Viva illustrate the unambiguous condemnations of the efficacy of torture found in many Sephardic works. Menasseh ben Israel also discussed torture, if briefly, in Vindiciae judaeorum, and it is quite explicit in Solomon ibn Verga’s Shevet Yehudah.
Between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, torture increasingly became integral to European jurisprudence, as it entered official codes of law, including the Carolina of Charles V, which became law in 1531.79 However, the use of torture did not go unchallenged. European debates over torture date back to the Roman period, when it was used to extract evidence from slaves. The premise behind torture was to obtain confession, the “crown of proof,” because, as Roman law had it, “pain was the primary channel of truth.”80 In addition to Ulpian, Augustine in City of God warned about the use of torture, especially in dealing with witnesses. Augustine saw torture as the punishment of innocent people “for a crime that is still doubtful” just to “discover whether [the accused] is guilty.” The crime was doubtful because “it is not ascertained that he did not commit it.” Thus, Augustine argued, “the ignorance of the judge frequently involves an innocent person in suffering.”81 Indeed, sometimes “an innocent person is tortured to discover his innocence” or, worse, is “put to death without discovering it.” Torture could not secure certainty because people often lied. In his commentary on Augustine’s City of God, Juan Luis Vives, a sixteenth-century Spaniard whose parents are said to have fallen victim to the Inquisition and who was a contemporary of Solomon ibn Verga, noted that “neither the man who can endure reveals truth, nor the man who cannot.”82 In fact, Vives argued, quoting Publilius Syrus, “Pain compels even the innocent to lie.” (Montaigne later embraced Vives’s views.83)
Stories in Solomon ibn Verga’s Shevet Yehudah embody the legal reservations expressed by Ulpian, Augustine, and Vives. At times, it seems that ibn Verga knew these works, because the ideas and sometimes even the wording echoed earlier writers.84 Ibn Verga provided convincing and sophisticated illustrations of the worthlessness of judicial torture and confessions extracted through it. In Tale Eight, after discussing the ills Jews supposedly cause in society through their usury and wealth, the king received a letter from the judges investigating an accusation of ritual murder against a Jewish man; his viceroy wanted to order the Jew to “hard” torture to make him confess.85 But the Jewish envoys immediately protested, saying that during torture the man would surely say that “he killed him and ate his blood.” The king then recalled an incident in the early days of his reign, when two golden spoons were stolen while there were two Jews “coming and going” in his palace, and “all people in his court said that Jews stole them as it is their custom.” The two Jews were tortured and indeed confessed to the theft, whereupon the king ordered them hanged. But three days later the spoons were found in the possession of one of the king’s own servants. As the story about the theft was being told, the king’s advisor recalled that in earlier days torture was never used to condemn people. The next day, a boy came to court with information about the murder: his master had lost his inheritance to the Jew in whose house the body of the Christian was found, and he had offered the boy a reward if he killed the Jew, but the boy did not want to do it, so the master devised a plan to accuse the Jew of ritual murder. The Jew was saved, but the moral of the tale was clear: Jews were accused of ritual murder because of their usury, and torture never produced reliable testimonies.
The dynamic of Tale Eight reveals a king caught between popular hatred and his disbelief of accusations. In fact, as Jeremy Cohen has noted, “In almost every instance the king knows the accusations to be groundless and, frequently, with the help of a beneficent prelate or counselor, he too seeks to dismiss them. Yet conspirators characteristically persist, accusing the king of favoring the Jews over the Christian faithful.”86 In Tale Seventeen, too, this dynamic is played out to reveal not only the groundlessness of anti-Jewish accusations but also the unreliability of torture. Though the king “in the Kingdom of France” saw through the lies of accusers claiming that a Jew killed a Christian before Passover, they brought false witnesses who said they saw the Christian enter but not exit the Jew’s house, and they managed to gain the support of the king’s advisors. They also began to spread rumors that the king favored “those who despised Christian faith” over the Christian faithful, forcing the monarch to order the accused Jew to be tortured.87 The Jew subsequently confessed and implicated fifty other Jews. The pleading Jews tried to remind the king that torture was not reliable and that, according to old statutes, only confessions regarding the accused himself could be accepted, but not if they implicated others.
At the court was a Moorish ambassador, and the king asked him if similar accusations against Jews took place in his kingdom.88 The ambassador was aghast that Christians believed such absurd accusations against Jews, because they were “contrary to reason.” In fact, no nation on earth, not even one inclined to do abhorrent things, did what the Jews were accused of in Christian kingdoms. The ambassador then proceeded to offer a scathing critique of the use of torture: “In our kingdom, confession under torture is a mere conjecture,” needing to be supported by other evidence and unable to serve as a basis for conviction (din ve-mishpat). One advisor interjected, saying Jews did not hold such hatred against Muslims as they did against Christians on account of Jesus: “They take a Christian, name him Jesus, eat his blood in order to take revenge on him.” The ambassador then pointed out the difference in beliefs between Christians and Muslims, which explained why such accusations emerged among one but not the other—it was Christians who believed Jews had subjected Jesus to many sufferings and killed him. This story, he continued, is shown in images in many churches, reinforcing these beliefs. Muslims, by contrast, did not believe that Jews killed and tortured Jesus, but that he ascended to heaven alive.
The debate continued, angering the Christians. Feeling humiliated by the Moorish ambassador and pressured by the common people, the king ordered the Jews punished.89 They were to be put in barrels with nails protruding inside and, in a manner known from Roman antiquity, rolled down a hill.90 Just as the king was about to push the barrels, he was felled by an invisible force. Sensing divine intervention, he freed the Jews. This was a just move, because it was later revealed that, as in other tales in the book, a Christian had planted the body in the Jew’s home and accused him falsely. The Christian slanderer was then punished.
But perhaps the most explicit example of the argument against the use of torture is Tale Twenty-Nine.91 “During the reign of the just and old king Alfonso,” people came before judges claiming they had seen on the eve of Passover “a Christian man enter a house of a Jewish man, and after that they heard him scream, ‘Christians help me!’ ” The investigators sent to examine the Jew’s house found nothing there. “Last year,” they said, “in this matter, they also accused [Jews] but it turned out to be a lie.” Seeing the judges’ reluctance to prosecute Jews, the people rebelled and approached the king, who summoned the accused Jew. The Jew denied that a Christian had entered his house. The king then challenged the accusers: “If you heard [the Christian man] scream, ‘Help me!’ … why didn’t you break the door in the Jew’s house, and save the abused man from his abuse?” They did nothing, because they feared the judges would punish them for breaking the door, the accusers responded. Hearing this, the king called them liars; skeptical that the Jew had attacked the Christian man, he pointed out the Jew’s old age.
The following day the accusers brought more witnesses, among them the disappeared man’s wife Beatrice and his friends, who claimed that the man had gone to the Jew to retrieve his pledge.92 In light of these new allegations, the king ordered the Jew to be examined under torture. The accused Jew confessed to having killed the Christian man and was sentenced to death by fire. But as the verdict was being announced, a bishop arrived, who asked if the case concerned the husband of a certain Beatrice Guzman, one of the bishop’s serfs. It turned out that the bishop had seen the man the day before in a village nearby; he was very much alive. As the king realized the Jew had confessed to a crime he had not committed, the bishop warned against trusting any testimony or confession extracted under torture. The Jew then explained that while being subjected to horrible tortures he had lost his mind, and to avoid more suffering, he “chose death,” confessing to the murder. As the king expressed his gratitude to the bishop for saving him from spilling “innocent blood,” the bishop reiterated that one should not place any “confidence and certainty in what a man would say under blows and torments.”
As these tales show, in ibn Verga’s Shevet Yehudah, in the end everything ends well, and justice is done. The stories presented logical arguments against blood libels, with some practical advice on how to approach royal officials and the king himself. Shevet Yehudah quickly became popular and highly influential, reaching broader Jewish and Christian audiences as it appeared in multiple Hebrew editions and in translations in Latin, Spanish, and Yiddish. It was used by other sixteenth-century Jewish writers, including Samuel Usque in his Consolations for the Tribulations of Israel (1553, Ferrara) and Josef Ha-Kohen in Emek ha-bakha, and his history of the kingdom of France and the Ottoman Empire. In the seventeenth century, Menasseh ben Israel used these stories in Vindiciae judaeorum to refute the scurrilous work by William Prynne opposing the readmission of Jews to England on the grounds that they killed Christian children.93
These Sephardic works can be contrasted with the Yiddish works addressing blood libels.94 The Yiddish editions of Shevet Yehudah, beginning with the first one, published in Cracow in 1591, changed some motifs to conform to Ashkenazi sensibilities. The translator, as Michael Stanislawski has put it, “slyly but substantially transformed a classic of Spanish-Jewish historiography and the Sephardic weltanschauung into a radically different sort of work.”95 The Yiddish versions, for example, amplify the role of God, which is only occasionally implied in the Hebrew original (for example, in Tales Sixteen and Seventeen).
They also display a discomfort with details about blood accusations. The short introduction before Tale Seven in Yiddish, absent from the Hebrew, mentions the claim that Jews used Christian blood for Passover, and notes a bishop as the source of the accusation.96 Other tales are less explicit about blood and tend to talk about “gentiles” dropping bodies in Jews’ houses, as in Tales Eight or Eleven (Twelve in the Hebrew original) in the 1724 Fürth edition.97 In Tale Eight of the Hebrew original, as Stanislawski has noted, the accusers expect that under torture the Jew “will confess and we will learn the truth, for the Jew will say that he killed [the Christian] and ate his blood.” The reference to confessing to eating blood is notably removed from the Yiddish version.98
If in Shevet Yehudah all ends well, though in the Yiddish version with God’s explicit help, the outcomes in Yiddish songs and tales are nearly the exact opposite. To be sure, the Yiddish songs and tales too offer practical advice on approaching Christian authorities, pleading with and bribing them, but they almost always end, despite the Jews’ intercessions, with the martyr’s death of the accused Jews. The surviving songs and tales celebrate martyrdom, heroic death, and affirmation of Jewish beliefs in the face of persecution and torments from the gentiles. In contrast to the Jewish protagonists in the Sephardic Shevet Yehudah, the heroes and martyrs of the Yiddish tales almost never confess under torture, never convert, and certainly never implicate anyone else in false crimes. And the rare exceptions serve to underscore the dominant message.
Yiddish songs and tales about anti-Jewish accusations—both ritual murder and host desecrations—share a similar structure. When an accusation is made against Jews, they are arrested and sent to be tortured, where they are pressured to confess and, almost always, to convert. Yet despite these pressures and pain, they do not break under torture, remaining steadfast in their faith and loyal to their community.
This is the message of the song devoted to “three martyrs from Vilne [Wilno].”99 When R. Yehezkel, one of the three heroes of the song, is asked to incriminate the community leaders, he steadfastly refuses, defiantly saying to the executioner, “Until now you have been my lord, but today I will be free from you, I want to go to my higher lord. He will help me endure the kiddush ha-shem.” Yehezkel is executed along with his companions, dying a martyr’s death in the presence of multitudes.
But if ibn Verga’s Jews who confess to crimes they did not commit provide polemical arguments against torture and blood accusations, the premise behind the Yiddish tales was not as explicitly polemical. Here, torture serves to create the image of the holy martyr, a kadosh, whose steadfastness is glorified and presented as a model to be followed by all.100 Although Jews in these tales try to muster political support to prevent the deaths of the accused and plead with God for mercy by prayers and fasting, the accusations are gzeyres, decrees from heaven; they are not human inventions requiring logical arguments in defense of Jews as they are presented in the Sephardic works. In these Yiddish historical songs and tales, as in much of the medieval Hebrew martyrological poetry, most connections with the highest authorities usually fail; instead, prayer and atonement, faithfulness to God and to the community are praised while the martyrs die painful deaths.101 Jewish martyrs become “sacrifices prepared on a sacrificial altar” “for our many sins;” an ‘akedah reminiscent of the binding of biblical Isaac, and sometimes kapparot, or kapoyres, redemptive sacrifices on whose account the sins of the community (kol isroel) would be forgiven.102 This rhetoric seems to be an inversion, perhaps even a displacement, of the Christian ethos of martyrdom and of Christ’s redemptive sacrifice for the sins of humanity.
This message is retained even in songs that are not about anti-Jewish libels. One song tells the story of the martyrdom of R. Shlomo Zanvil of Krzeszów. The crime of which Shlomo Zanvil was accused is unclear. Though the texts calls the affair ‘alilat sheker (a libel), the punishment he received—hanging, with his right hand cut off—suggests he must have been accused of some sort of theft, though definitely not sacrilege, because then the punishment would have likely been burning at the stake.103 The cultural weight of the song is amplified by the fact that it was to be sung to the tune of El Male Raḥamim, a chant performed during funerals and in some Ashkenazi communities also during Yom Kippur.104 The drama of Shlomo Zanvil’s death is set over the last days of the High Holidays, the climax taking place on Hoshana Rabbah, a day Jews considered the last day to seek forgiveness for sins of the previous year.
On Hoshana Rabbah, Shlomo was tortured, and the priests pressured him to convert. But predictably for such songs, Shlomo managed to withstand both, willing “to go like a sacrifice to the [ritual] slaughter.”105 Like the medieval Jewish martyrs, he affirmed he “was born a Jew and will remain a Jew,” and is said to have died with Shem’a Israel on his lips. Though Shlomo stood accused of a crime other than an anti-Jewish libel, he attained martyr status by being pressured to convert. It was on the merit of the death and suffering of such “holy and pure” martyrs, the Yiddish songs asserted, that “the sins of Israel” would be forgiven.106
The story of Adil Kikinesh of Drohobycz, a rare example of an accused Jew (incidentally a woman) to confess, illustrates the point that pain and suffering were endured for the sake of the community.107 According to the story, recorded by ethnographers in the nineteenth century and told for generations, Adil Kikinesh, whose beauty, wisdom, voice, and “clear pronunciation” were said to have besotted “princes and priests” alike, was accused in 1718 of convincing her Christian maid to kill a Christian boy to obtain blood for Passover matzah.108 The accusation was concocted out of envy by some priests seeking to destroy “the beautiful Adil.” Imprisoned, she realized that the whole Jewish community was now in danger. To save it, she took the full blame and was sentenced to death. Although Adil’s Christian maid eventually revealed the secret plot against Jews, the court did not reverse the sentence; instead, Adil was offered life if she converted to Christianity. Like all other Ashkenazi martyrs, Adil remained steadfast in her faith and decided to die. With her execution scheduled in the public square in Lwów, a major city in Poland, Adil requested pins to attach her skirt to the skin of her legs so her body would not be exposed to onlookers as she was dragged through the streets. She was said to have died on the seventh of Elul, 5478 (September 2, 1718).109 On her tombstone, Adil was remembered as “the holy and pure woman” who “sanctified the great name, and gave her soul for all Israel.”110 In contrast to ibn Verga’s Shevet Yehudah, where the false confession of accused Jews serves to prove the unreliability of torture, Adil Kikinesh’s false confession serves to save the Jewish community and turns her into a martyr.111 In effect, through her death Adil Kikinesh, like the male martyrs from earlier songs, became the community’s redemptive sacrifice.
The early modern Yiddish historical songs are deeply rooted in the Ashkenazi ethos of martyrdom, kiddush ha-shem, which dates back to the Crusades and the 1171 Blois, and from which also emerges the notion of Jewish martyrs as redemptive sacrifices.112 Their deaths, as Susan Einbinder has shown, served “as expiation for communal sins.”113 There are rare exceptions to this pattern of martyrdom. One is the story of the accusation in Poznań in 1696 (still unverifiable in the archives), published in Sefer geulat Israel (Seyfer geules Isroel; Prague, ca. 1696) and in Sefer ma’aseh ha-shem (Seyfer mayse ha-shem).114 According to this story, in 1696 Itzḥak bar Ḥayim Meshorer went to a fair and was killed by a Christian (ain orel, from Hebrew, ‘aral, uncircumcised), but the Christian was not held accountable for the Jew’s death, because his friends helped him escape to a monastery or a church (unter galuḥes).115 The Jews demanded the murderer be handed over, but he was not. Then on Isru Hag, following the festival of Shavuot, the naked, mutilated body of a Christian student was found in the fields—his feet and hands chopped off, his heart and tongue cut out, and his face slashed. A Christian man immediately began to spread rumors that three Jews killed the young man, and soon people began saying the student was killed to avenge the death of Itzḥak bar Ḥayim Meshorer. As the Christians became riled up for an attack on Jews in the city, the Jewish community leaders sought help from the authorities, who ordered the gates to the city locked. But the lords, facing a dilemma similar to those of the kings in ibn Verga’s stories, feared the multitude of the mob and were less eager to protect the Jews. The frightened Jews thus went to the priests to seek protection from attack.
In the meantime, a Christian woman came to Poznań, trying to sell bloodied clothes that, it turned out, had belonged to the dead Christian student. The woman claimed she had found the clothes, and people immediately began to say that Jews must have killed the student and hid his clothes, which the woman then discovered. To further incite the public, “enemies” of the Jews also sought to bring the father of the slain student to see his son’s mutilated body. But when the father arrived in Poznań, he recognized that Jews had not committed the crime and asked for the body of his son to be buried. Immediately, some Christians, outraged, claimed the Jews must have bribed the father.
With this turn of events, the Jews took matters into their own hands. When the woman caught selling bloodied clothes turned out to be from Rogoźno (ragoshny), about 25 miles north of Poznań, Jews activated their networks, sending information about her to the Jews in her town.116 They immediately located the house where the woman lived with her son and daughter, and once inside, they saw a bloodied shirt. Asked where the shirt came from, the woman’s daughter answered that her brother brought it home and asked her to wash it. Jews then began to search for the brother, finding him in a tavern. They surrounded him so he could not escape and notified the local official. Sympathetic to the Jews’ pleas, he arrested the “murderer” and took him to “a room” (a shtibl), where he subjected him to torment (tut im abisl payn). Pleading with the official not to beat him, the young man confessed to the murder.
Hearing about the man’s confession, the Jews immediately sent a messenger to Poznań to inform the authorities about the new developments in the case, who then ordered the man to be sent to Poznań for further investigation. But when the man arrived, the Jews’ enemies (reshoim) urged him to blame the murder on the Jews, to say that Jews had given him money to kill the student. He did so under torture, but then kept changing his testimony. Jewish religious leaders, meanwhile, ordered a fast and prayers. The community held a day of atonement (yom kipurim) to plead with God for deliverance from this libel. Jews from many communities, old and young, men and women, participated in the prayers.
Meanwhile the reshoim tried to bribe the executioner to torture the Christian man lightly so he would not confess to the murder, but would continue to implicate the Jews and consequently be let off. This plot came to naught; it was discovered by a Jew who immediately reported it to the authorities, whereupon the accused man was sent to receive “proper” torture. After the third round of torture, the man finally confessed to the murder. His previous testimonies were lies, he said, for he had been asked by the Jews’ enemies to implicate Jews in the murder. But now, knowing he would surely die, he did not want to lose his soul and decided to take back his accusation. Although he exculpated the Jews, he did implicate his own mother in witchcraft. Subjected to the last round of torture, he remained steadfast, continuing to exculpate the Jews. The murderer was sentenced to death by quartering, as “he did himself” to the student, and the Jews were saved—by their own ingenuity in finding the murderer, by prayers, and by the effectiveness of torture, which in the end led to the confession of truth.
As the Poznań story demonstrates, the Yiddish tales have a strikingly different take from the Sephardic works on the use of torture. Whereas ibn Verga, along with other Sephardic writers, explicitly questioned the validity of torture already in the first half of the sixteenth century, the much later Ashkenazi works accepted torture as a valid, if terrifying, part of judicial proceedings. Not only did Jews in the Yiddish stories not break under torture but also, as in the Poznań story, the actual murderer’s confession under “proper” torture was touted as truth and credited with saving the Jews. The plot to ease the torture of the Christian murderer suggests that under light torture he would lie, but under heavy torture he would tell the truth, further implying that torture was accepted as a reliable means of investigation. In the Yiddish tales, the innocent never confess to anything they did not do, but the guilty eventually do—the exact opposite of the famous dictum etiam innocentes cogit mentiri dolor, “pain compels even the innocent to lie.”117
On the surface, the Yiddish songs seem insular, and on some level they were, because their purpose was to speak to other Jews to glorify the martyrs. But, like the works of their medieval Hebrew predecessors, they are also evidence of Jews’ acculturation and their deep embeddedness in early modern Christian Europe.118 The authors display a detailed knowledge of the law and legal procedures, reflecting the legal thinking and practices of the time. They seem to have accepted the legitimacy of torture, which in the seventeenth century in Poland and the German lands was not only an accepted procedure of the judicial process but also one performed, at least in Germany, by increasingly professionalized executioners who, as Joel Harrington has shown, were seen as important servants of the state performing necessary tasks.119 Thus, if the early decades of the Spanish Inquisition gave torture a bad name in Sephardic circles and in regions that embraced the Spanish black legend, in the Ashkenazi world, torture was part of the law—the imperial or royal law—that Jews also used for their own protection. And that is what is on display in these Yiddish tales.
But there is more. Sephardic Jews have frequently been seen as interlocutors with Christian cultures and contrasted with Ashkenazi Jews’ supposed insularity, but the Yiddish tales, despite their inward orientation, closely reflect the surrounding Christian values and culture. European Christians saw pain as “the primary channel of truth” and valued its salvific meaning. For Christians, suffering was a means of drawing “closer to God,” an ethos based in the figure of Christ who chose “suffering and death for the redemption of humanity.”120 The trope of martyrdom is also present in German witch trials in which the accused women compared themselves to true Christian martyrs. For example, one Anna Murschel, tried in 1599–1601 in Lutheran Württemberg for witchcraft, claimed, as Laura Kounine has shown, that she was able to endure “such suffering pain and martyrdom” during torture thanks to “help and assistance of God’s mercy.” She “could confess nothing,” because she knew her “innocent in [herself] and before God the Almighty.”121 In another case from 1603, one woman accused of witchcraft wished “to God that she was [a witch], so that she would like to abandon martyrdom … [and] die for that.”122
Indeed, the imagery found in both medieval Jewish poems and early modern Yiddish songs is boldly Christological, perhaps aimed at contesting Christian motifs of sacrifice, piety, and redemption. In some, the bodies of the medieval martyrs are not destructible by fire,123 a motif that appeared in early Christian literature and would be later shared by the Eucharistic wafer.124 Perhaps the most explicit example of the reappropriation of these Christological motifs in Jewish poetry is Solomon Simḥah’s poem “Shaḥar avi todah” (At Dawn I Shall Bring an Offering), commemorating the death of thirteen Jews of Troyes in 1288.125 Solomon Simḥah, placing the words in the mouth of the Jewish martyr Samson, evokes motifs closely associated with Christ:
Behold me here
God, to worship you—may my sacrifice be acceptable!
Among these saints, who surpasses me?
From my own blood pouring down I shall make a libation of wine
On the fiery altar wine and tears will go up.
Later in the poem, the martyr tells how “for the sake of his Holy Name [he was] burned, beaten, and tortured” and became “the double-portion of bread / His hands, his feet, his head—for behold it is the Sabbath.” These passages adapt the motifs closely associated with Jesus’s own sacrifice, even echoing Eucharistic themes, for a Jewish use: the blood of the Jewish martyr becomes the libation of wine; his body becomes the bread. The “double-portion of bread” was not the Eucharistic bread, of course, but rather the manna. In this medieval Jewish poem it was set to contrast with or perhaps contest the Christian interpretation that manna was a prefiguration of the Eucharist, as expressed by Jesus in the Gospel of John: “I am the bread of life … I am the bread that came down from heaven.… Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. This is the bread that came down from heaven so that one may eat of it and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever, and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh” (John 6: 35, 41, 45–51). The rhetorical question “Among these saints, who surpasses me?” manifestly gestures toward Jesus who “surpasses” all the saints in heaven. The references to being “burned, beaten, and tortured” and to the martyr’s hands and feet also seem to echo the beaten and tortured Jesus as he spoke to his followers after his resurrection: “Look at my hands and my feet, see that it is I myself” (Luke 24: 39–40). Jesus’s suffering and his injured body, hands, feet, and head bloodied by the crown of thorns were increasingly prominently portrayed in Christian art.126
The prominence of the imagery of suffering in Christian society, the role of pain and suffering in the stories of Christian martyrdom, and instances of Jewish suffering and martyrdom prompted late medieval Ashkenazi rabbis to debate the question of martyrdom and pain, with some even arguing that a person committing an act of martyrdom did not suffer pain.127 Yet, in the popular early modern Yiddish songs and tales, the role pain plays in the description of martyrdom is stark—it reifies the martyr’s sacrifice.
As Brad Gregory has noted discussing early modern Christian martyrdom, “the impact of martyrdom helped solidify group identities.”128 The Yiddish tales sought to reassure Jews about their faith by featuring Jewish martyrs who never convert, despite persistent efforts on the part of Christians. The Jews’ faithfulness to their God had (or was at least portrayed as having) a powerful impact on the onlookers. If in the Christian context, to return to Brad Gregory, “from the perspective of civil and ecclesiastical authorities, the condemned ought to have begged for forgiveness and reconciliation,” in the case of Jewish executions the offer to convert should have been attractive, because it offered either an easier death, which was the option more frequently encountered in real trials, or life, an option given in the stories.129 The Jews’ conversion would have provided Christians with a story of victory, but the Jews’ martyrdom reaffirmed Judaism instead.
In the song about “the three martyrs from Vilne,” one of the martyrs, R. Moshe, was told that not only would his life be saved but also he would be “made rich” and “equal to the greatest lords” if he converted.130 He did not succumb to the priests’ “stupid speech,” choosing painful martyrdom instead. In another story the Jewish writer conveyed the impact all martyrs hoped to have on the onlookers, witnessing “the sight of men and women going to their deaths willingly,” even, as many early modern Jewish and Christian sources put it, “with a joy like to a wedding” and “bearing extreme pain with extraordinary patience.”131 The non-Jews, witnessing the painful execution of R. Abraham, “trembled tearfully,” hearing the holy man’s pious and moving speech.132
Ashkenazi Jews, of course, did not have a monopoly on martyrdom. By the late Middle Ages and certainly by the 1391 persecutions in Spain, aspects of the medieval Ashkenazi ethos of martyrdom began to appear among Sephardic Jews.133 For example, as Miriam Bodian has shown, the Spanish rabbinic scholar and community leader Hasdai Crescas described the death of his son in 1391 as “a burnt offering.” But despite Crescas’s comparison, in contrast to Ashkenazi Jews among whom “the image of the martyr as a ‘burnt offering’ … became a key element in the idealized self-image of Ashkenazi Jewry for generations to come,” such an image “never became a part of the idealized self-image prevalent among Spanish Jews.”134 In the early modern era, Spanish and Portuguese conversos celebrated, if rather cautiously, those willing to die defiantly and publicly “in the Law of Moses.” Menasseh ben Israel noted them in Hope of Israel; Isaac Cardoso discussed them in Las excelencias de los hebreos.135 But for Sephardic Jews, adjusting to openly Jewish life, as Bodian has persuasively shown, the defiant tropes of martyrdom were “unhelpful and indeed a liability.”136 And for Ashkenazi Jews, who faced real-life accusations, the Yiddish tales of martyrdom, grounded in deep and potent tradition, provided models for how and why to survive torture and how to avoid implicating other Jews.
If as scholars have shown the real-life acts of martyrdom occurred among both Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews, the Ashkenazi and Sephardic literary responses to blood libels are marked by sharper cultural differences, grounded in longer cultural traditions and practical needs, both of which informed the choice of genre and contents. Ashkenazi works tended to focus on martyrdom, atonement, and offerings; they sought to sustain hope, make sense of the suffering Jews periodically experienced as a result of anti-Jewish libels, and to prevent their conversion, a choice always offered during criminal trials in Poland and the German lands. The Yiddish songs became musar literature that called for piety and repentance in the Jewish community to prevent the gzeyres God sent upon Jews in the form of accusations “for our many sins.”137 If the anti-Jewish accusations were in fact gzeyres from God, for which some Jews were chosen to become sacrifices, then blaming the gentiles and polemicizing against these accusations would undermine the meaning assigned to these deaths. Gentile accusations played a crucial role in making effective the Ashkenazi narratives of punishment, repentance, and redemption. As the Yiddish songs relished in the descriptions of suffering and torture, they mirrored the paradoxical need for Jewish “crimes” in Christian narratives that served to underscore Christian “truths.”138 But the Yiddish songs also imparted values and provided concrete models on how and why to withstand torture in the face of similar accusations. For the rest of the community, they also offered guidance on how to respond practically to such libels by organizing financial and political support, or, as in the story about an accusation in 1696 in Poznań, how to take matters into their own hands and find the true perpetrators of the crimes.
The Sephardic works, in contrast, preserved the polemical character of the responses, reflecting a long Iberian tradition of Jewish–Christian polemic that was much stronger than among Ashkenazi Jews, while muting actual acts of martyrdom known to have been committed by conversos. But the Sephardic writers also responded to practical needs. Although not subjected to accusations themselves, they were forced to prove the baselessness of such accusations as they sought to reestablish their lives in Italy, England, or the Netherlands. Their literary responses, thus, reach out to Christian readers as well.