Index Letter A (anti-dhimmī measures - anti-Jewish violence/agitation: blood libel cases; persecution, of Jews; terrorist attacks)

2014 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Terrorist Attacks ◽  
Blood Libel ◽  
Anti Jewish

Medieval Roots of the Myth of Jewish Male Menses

2000 ◽  
Vol 93 (3) ◽  
pp. 241-263 ◽  
Author(s):  
Irven M. Resnick
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Historical Fiction ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
Cultural Attitudes ◽  
Ritual Murder ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
Blood Libel ◽  
Anti Jewish ◽  
The Middle Ages

Good historical fiction reveals not only the realities of a particular epoch, but also its cultural attitudes. An excellent example is Bernard Malamud's The Fixer, which succeeds in disclosing the nature of Russian anti-semitism by artfully weaving together enduring themes of anti-Jewish Christian mythology—the blood libel and accusations of ritual murder—to illustrate the fabric of Jewish life in early modern Russia. Perhaps almost unnoticed in his work, however, are references to the myth of Jewish male menses. Consider the following passages from The Fixer, in which the Jewish defendant, Yakov Bok, is confronted by this bizarre contention:“You saw the blood?” the Prosecuting Attorney said sarcastically. “Did that have some religious meaning to you as a Jew? Do you know that in the Middle Ages Jewish men were said to menstruate?” Yakov looked at him in surprise and fright. “I don't know anything about that, your honor, although I don't see how it could be.”

Catholic Anti-Judaism in Reformation Germany: The Case of Johann Eck

1992 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 253-263
Author(s):  
David Bagchi
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Ritual Murder ◽  
Strong Case ◽  
Blood Libel ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Anti Jewish ◽  
Systematic Formulation ◽  
The Devil

In any inquiry into Christian attitudes to Judaism in sixteenth-century Germany, exhibit A would undoubtedly be the later writings of Martin Luther against the Jews. The choice for exhibit B presents more of a problem, but a strong case can be made out for an almost contemporary anti-Jewish treatise from the pen of Luther’s staunchest Catholic opponent, Johann Eck. His Refutation of a Jew Pamphlet tends to attract superlatives—‘the most abusive to have been written against the Jews’, ‘the most massive and systematic formulation of the blood libel… the summa of learned discourse on ritual murder’, ‘the absolute nadir of anti-Jewish polemic in the early-modern period’—and something of its unpleasantness can be gauged from the fact that Trachtenberg cited it so often in his disturbing book, The Devil and the Jews. The year in which our Society has chosen to take for its theme ‘Christianity and Judaism’ is also the 450th anniversary of the publication of Eck’s remarkable treatise. It is perhaps an appropriate occasion on which to explore, in rather more detail than has been done before, the context and nature of Eck’s anti-Jewish polemic.

How the Ritual Murder Accusation Persisted in the Soviet Landscape

2019 ◽  
pp. 88-106
Author(s):  
Elissa Bemporad
Keyword(s):  
Women's Empowerment ◽  
Women’S Empowerment ◽  
Soviet Society ◽  
Jewish Women ◽  
Ritual Murder ◽  
Blood Libel ◽  
Anti Jewish ◽  
Socioeconomic Structures

Chapter 4 explains the endurance and permutation of the ritual murder accusation in the Soviet landscape of the interwar years. The occurrence of the blood libel epitomizes some aspects of the nature of the Bolshevik experiment, and becomes an indicator of the limits (and triumphs) of the Soviet attempt to modernize society. Ritual murder accusations grew out of the power of slander and denunciatory frenzy that enveloped Soviet society. But the accusation also resulted from the encounter between Jews and peasants in the context of a system that violently promoted urbanization and new socioeconomic structures. The intensity of the anti-religious propaganda inadvertently played a role in maintaining this powerful anti-Jewish myth, as the attack on circumcision and kosher slaughtering reinforced anti-Jewish stereotypes. Finally, the transformation of ritual murder echoes the process of Jewish women’s empowerment: only in Soviet society could Jewish women become perpetrators of ritual murder.

Cries of the Mob in the Pogroms in Rzeszów (June 1945), Cracow (August 1945), and Kielce (July 1946) as a Source for the State of Mind of the Participants

2011 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 553-574 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanna Tokarska-Bakir
Keyword(s):  
National Socialism ◽  
National Party ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
Blood Libel ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
State Of Mind ◽  
Polish Society ◽  
Anti Jewish ◽  
Intensive Search ◽  
Made In

Although the starting point for all the Polish postwar pogroms (save for one) was a blood libel, this particular motif did not attract the historians’ attention until recently. Theories on plots devised by “Soviet advisors” or “Zionists” enjoyed an incomparably greater popularity. This article, based upon the documentation of the Rzeszów and Kielce pogroms, the most recent ethnographic resources (2005—2009), the documentation used in Marcel Łoziński’s documentary Świadkowie ( The Witnesses; made in 1980s), and an intensive search at the National Remembrance Institute (IPN), reveals a uniform social-mental formation of those partaking in the pogroms—the attackers and militiamen disciplining them, public prosecutors, and judges. All of them—including militiamen and Security Service officers—were subject to a blood libel suggestion. Traces of this thread have survived till this day in some segments of Polish society—not only in the countryside population, despite any appearances. This article aims at showing how an anti-Jewish alliance was getting formed in the first years after the liberation, on the grounds of a gradually strengthening “Polish national socialism,” and along with it, a synthesis of religious anti-Semitism (Jew as a “kidnapper/bloodsucker”) and a modern anti-Semitism (Jew as a “capitalist/bloodsucker” and “Judeo-communists” contaminating a sound national/party organism).

scholarly journals “Do not kill them, lest my people forget”: Changes in Attitudes Towards Jews in Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century England

Elements ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Colleen Reilly
Keyword(s):  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Economic Status ◽  
Social Divisions ◽  
Blood Libel ◽  
Economic Reasoning ◽  
Identity Consolidation ◽  
English Identity ◽  
Norman Invasion ◽  
Anti Jewish

This essay supports Paul Hyams’ thesis that while attitudes toward Jews over the twelfth and thirteenth centuries certainly cooled, they did so less dramatically or inevitably than the 1290 expulsion might suggest if imagined as a culmination of policy. Chronicled hostility, alongside which the Jewish ‘blood libel’ myth developed as justification, appears to have increased with perceived Jewish economic status. Their status after their impoverishment decreased as royal policy perpetuated longstanding social divisions that largely originated from neither religious nor economic cleavages, only cultural ones. The treatment of the Jews in the period may simultaneously be understood as one of English identity consolidation in the post-Conquest period, as Jews first coexisted with Anglo-Saxons after the Norman invasion. Since economic reasoning alone does not explain the treatment of the Jews in the latter half of the thirteenth century, this essay also examines instances of anti-Jewish violence and successive Plantagenet king’s policies targeting the Jews and understands them as indicators or constructions of religious and national alterity.

Simon of Trent

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Bowd
Keyword(s):  
Jewish History ◽  
The Body ◽  
Ritual Murder ◽  
Blood Libel ◽  
Vatican Council ◽  
The Social ◽  
Subsequent Conversion ◽  
Early Expression ◽  
Anti Jewish ◽  
The Church

In 1475 the death of the Christian child Simon (b. 1472–d. 1475) in the prince-bishopric of Trent led to the interrogation of members of the small local Jewish community and their subsequent conversion, expulsion, or execution as they confessed under torture to abducting the child and attacking his body with pincers before strangling him and dumping the corpse in a ditch. These confessions conformed to Christian narratives about the supposed ritual Jewish use of Christian blood and the supposed propensity of Jews to re-enact the sacrifice of Christ by means of the murder of Christian children or by attacking the Host. This particular incident of “blood libel” received considerable attention, which was both reflected in and driven by the activities of the nascent printing presses in Italian and German lands (see the Oxford Bibliographies article “Printing and the Book”). The composition of lurid Christian tales from Trent was encouraged by the local prince-bishop Johannes Hinderbach, who sought to promote the cult of Simon as a Christian martyr (see the Oxford Bibliographies article “Saints and Mystics: Before Trent). The body of Simon, displayed in the church of St. Peter, was imbued with miraculous power and attracted many pilgrims, who left donations for the reconstruction and embellishment of the church. Many images and objects associated with Simon proliferated and circulated despite warnings from the neighboring republic of Venice about the social and religious tensions provoked by such representations, and by hostile Franciscan preaching on the subject. At first, the papacy was suspicious of the cult of Simon and investigated accusations of judicial misconduct made against Hinderbach, as well as the claims of miraculous power associated with the body. Hinderbach was eventually cleared of wrongdoing and during the remainder of the century both the cult and accusations of ritual murder spread in northern Italy. The cult received papal support in 1588 and again in 1758 before being removed from the list of martyrs in 1965 at the time of the Declaration on the Relation of the Church with Non-Christian Religions (Nostra Aetate) of the Second Vatican Council. The incident is significant as an example of the “blood libel” of Jewish ritual use of Christian blood (although it was far from the first of its kind in European history), and as a notoriously harmful episode in Jewish history. It is also notable as an early expression of the power of the printing press, as an example of the role of humanists in anti-Jewish writing and the construction of a saint (see the Oxford Bibliographies article “Humanism”), and for the abundance of objects and images it stimulated.

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