Sinners on Trial: Jews and Sacrilege after the Reformation
In post-Reformation Poland--the largest state in Europe and home to the largest Jewish population in the world--the Catholic Church suffered profound anxiety about its power after the Protestant threat. Magda Teter reveals how criminal law became a key tool in the manipulation of the meaning of the sacred and in the effort to legitimize Church authority. The mishandling of sacred symbols was transformed from a sin that could be absolved into a crime that resulted in harsh sentences of mutilation, hanging, decapitation, and, principally, burning at the stake. Teter casts new light on the most infamous type of sacrilege, the accusation against Jews for desecrating the eucharistic wafer. These sacrilege trials were part of a broader struggle over the meaning of the sacred and of sacred space at a time of religious and political uncertainty, with the eucharist at its center. But host desecration--defined in the law as sacrilege--went beyond anti-Jewish hatred to reflect Catholic-Protestant conflict, changing conditions of ecclesiastic authority and jurisdiction, and competition in the economic marketplace. Recounting dramatic stories of torture, trial, and punishment, this is the first book to consider the sacrilege accusations of the early modern period within the broader context of politics and common crime. Teter draws on previously unexamined trial records to bring out the real-life relationships among Catholics, Jews, and Protestants and challenges the commonly held view that following the Reformation, Poland was a "state without stakes"--uniquely a country without religious persecution.
Blood Libel in Late Imperial Russia: The Ritual Murder Trial of Mendel Beilis
I n the fall of 1913, a hundred newspaper reporters packed the Kiev courtroom where for ve weeks Mendel Beilis was tried for the murder of a 12-year-old whose body had been found, in the spring of 1911, in a cave near the brick factory where Beilis worked. He was accused of having murdered the boy in order to use his blood to make matza. at anksgiving, in New York, no fewer than six Yiddish-language theaters staged plays about him. Mendel Beilis' fame was lavish, if bitter and short-lived. Nearly all of the journalists covering the proceedings , including most of those representing Rus-sia's anti-Semitic press, saw the prosecution's eorts as corrupt, the by-product of mendacity at the highest governmental levels, a terrible, stupid tale of a Jew caught in the vise of dark medievalism. Beilis suered more than two years of imprisonment before being exonerated by a jury that decided that, while he was innocent, a ritual murder had actually occurred. Yet here, as is so oen the case, life's protagonists disappoint, a reminder that their brush with history was an accident, a stumble. In art, certainly in lm, those caught up in history's sagas tend to look like Robert Redford (or at least Alan Bates, who played the Beilis character in the adaptation of Bernard Malamud's novel e Fixer), but more oen than not, they look like the stooped, chinless Beilis. And his is a tale, arguably, still more confounding than most. " e greatest handicap. .. is its improbability, " observed Maurice Samuel on the diculty of writing Blood Accusation: e Strange History of the Beiliss Case, " and by this I mean not only the inanity of the attempt to prove the Blood Accusation but also the entire structure of the conspiracy. A bare recital of the facts, however strongly documented, would leave the reader incredulous. " First of all, Beilis himself was miscast: e poster-child victim of anti-Semitism in the last years of the Romanovs was a Russian military veteran with stalwart Russian friends and warm supporters even among the regime's vocal anti-Semites. Beilis yearned for the companionship of Russian prisoners to share his cell because he found them, on the whole, kind and sympathetic. Once his trial concluded, he was so sought aer in Kiev by non-Jews and Jews alike that tram conductors would call out, " Take Number 16 to Beilis'. " en …
The Pharisaic-Sadducean Controversies about Purity and the Qumran Texts
I n his recent publication of the Temple Scroll (llQ Temple), Yadin cites G. Alon's discernment in rabbinic sources of two conflicting tendencies with regard to the applicability of the laws of ritual purity: (1) the approach which limited ritual purity primarily to the sphere of the Temple and the priesthood, taken as characteristic of the Sadducees; (2) the pervasive concept of purity as applicable to the laity as well as the priesthood and embracing all facets of life, espoused by the Essenes. ' The Qumran literature, which a considerable body of scholarly opinion ascribes to the Essenes, offers ample illustrations of the centrality of ritual purity in the life of the sect, despite the religious conflicts which separated it from the Jerusalem temple. This fact is further underlined by llQ Temple which broadens the restrictions applicable to the sanctuary to include the entire "city of the sanctuary" and ordains elaborate purity rules for all of Israel. Nevertheless, while the Essenes may be viewed as antithetical to the Sadducees with regard to the scope of ritual purity, this need not necessarily hold true for their interpretation of the laws governing it. Our knowledge of the Qumran law of tohorah, till now limited to the legislative section of the Damascus Document and hampered by the unavailability of the related texts from Cave 4,2 has been considerably augmented by JlQTemple. We should particularly like to inquire whether it may now be possible to determine the position of the sect on those halakhic aspects of purity concerning which controversies between Pharisees and Sadducees are recorded in tannaitic sources.