The Myth Of Ritual Murder

Author : R. Po-chia Hsia
Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780300047462
Total Pages : 260 pages
Book Rating : 4.60/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Myth of Ritual Murder written by R. Po-chia Hsia and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1988-01-01 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the mid-fifteenth century to the early seventeenth, German Jews were persecuted and tried for the alleged ritual murders of Christian children, whose blood purportedly played a crucial part in Jewish magical rites. In this engrossing book R. Po-Chia Hsia traces the rise and decline of ritual murder trials during that period. Using sources ranging from Christian and Kabbalistic treatises to judicial records and popular pamphlets, Hsia examines the religious sources of the idea of child sacrifice and blood symbolism and reconstructs the political context of ritual murder trials against the Jews. "This volume combines clarity of thinking, elegance of style, and exemplary scholarly attention to detail with intellectual sobriety and human compassion."--Jerome Friedman, Sixteenth Century Journal "Hsia has... succeeded in turning established knowledge to illuminatingly new purposes."--G.R. Elton, New York Review of Books "This meticulously researched and unusually perceptive book is social and intellectual history at its best."--Library Journal "A fresh perspective on an old problem by a major new talent."--Steven Ozment, Harvard University R. Po-chia Hsia, professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, is also the author of Society and Religion in Münster, 1535-1618

Author :
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780300161915
Total Pages : 248 pages
Book Rating : 4.13/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Myth of Ritual Murder written by and published by . This book was released on 1988 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Hannah Johnson
Publisher : University of Michigan Press
ISBN 13 : 0472902547
Total Pages : 342 pages
Book Rating : 4.45/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Blood Libel written by Hannah Johnson and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2021-03-11 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The ritual murder accusation is one of a series of myths that fall under the label blood libel, and describes the medieval legend that Jews require Christian blood for obscure religious purposes and are capable of committing murder to obtain it. This malicious myth continues to have an explosive afterlife in the public sphere, where Sarah Palin's 2011 gaffe is only the latest reminder of its power to excite controversy. Blood Libel is the first book-length study to analyze the recent historiography of the ritual murder accusation and to consider these debates in the context of intellectual and cultural history as well as methodology. Hannah R. Johnson articulates how ethics shapes methodological decisions in the study of the accusation and how questions about methodology, in turn, pose ethical problems of interpretation and understanding. Examining recent debates over the scholarship of historians such as Gavin Langmuir, Israel Yuval, and Ariel Toaff, Johnson argues that these discussions highlight an ongoing paradigm shift that seeks to reimagine questions of responsibility by deliberately refraining from a discourse of moral judgment and blame in favor of an emphasis on historical contingencies and hostile intergroup dynamics.

Author : R. Po-chia Hsia
Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 0300051069
Total Pages : 203 pages
Book Rating : 4.63/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Trent 1475 written by R. Po-chia Hsia and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1992-01-01 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "On Easter Sunday, 1475, the dead body of a two-year-old boy named Simon was found in the cellar of a Jewish family's house in Trent, Italy. Town magistrates arrested all eighteen Jewish men and one Jewish woman living in Trent on the charge of ritual murder - the killing of a Christian child in order to use his blood in Jewish religious rites. Under judicial torture and imprisonment, the men confessed and were condemned to death; their women-folk, who had been kept under house arrest with their children, denounced the men under torture and eventually converted to Christianity. A papal hearing in Rome about possible judicial misconduct in Trent made the trial widely known and led to a wave of anti-Jewish propaganda and other accusations of ritual murder against the Jews." "In this engrossing book, R. Pochia Hsia reconstructs the events of this tragic persecution, drawing principally on the Yeshiva Manuscript, a detailed trial record made by authorities in Trent to justify their execution of the Jews and to bolster the case for the canonization of "little Martyr Simon." Hsia depicts the Jewish victims (whose testimonies contain fragmentary stories of their tragic lives as well as forced confessions of kidnap, torture, and murder), the prosecuting magistrates, the hostile witnesses, and the few Christian neighbors who tried in vain to help the Jews. Setting the trial and its documents in the historical context of medieval blood libel, Hsia vividly portrays how fact and fiction can be blurred, how judicial torture can be couched in icy orderliness and impersonality, and how religious rites can be interpreted as ceremonies of barbarism."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Author : Pierre Birnbaum
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780804774048
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.48/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A Tale of Ritual Murder in the Age of Louis XIV written by Pierre Birnbaum and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the tale of an accusation of blood libel during a period when France prided itself on its rationality.

Author : Thomas of Monmouth
Publisher : e-artnow
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 236 pages
Book Rating : 4.60/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Life and Miracles of St. William of Norwich written by Thomas of Monmouth and published by e-artnow. This book was released on 2021-11-25 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Life and Miracles of St. William of Norwich is the medieval hagiography written in 1173. It tells the life story of a real personality, known as William of Norwich, that was supposedly tortured and killed by the Jewish community in the Medieval city of Norwich. The author of the scripture heard and recorded the story from a former Jew, Theobald of Cambridge. The story tells the life of William in the Jewish community that treated him well, at first. But later, they tortured him, mocking the Bible scenes of the crucifixion. This story by Monmouth had a significant effect. It started the intense discrimination against the Jewish community and eventually led to expelling Jews from England by King Edward I order.

Author : Elissa Bemporad
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN 13 : 0190466456
Total Pages : 253 pages
Book Rating : 4.59/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Legacy of Blood written by Elissa Bemporad and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2019 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Pogroms and blood libels constitute the two classical and most extreme manifestations of tsarist antisemitism. They were often closely intertwined in history and memory, not least because the accusation of blood libel, the allegation that Jews murder Christian children to use their blood for ritual purposes, frequently triggered anti-Jewish violence. Such events were and are considered central to the Jewish experience in late tsarist Russia, the only country on earth with large scale anti-Jewish violence in the early twentieth century. Boasting its break from the tsarist period, the Soviet regime proudly claimed to have eradicated these forms of antisemitism. But, alas, life was much more complicated. The phenomenon and the memory of pogroms and blood libels in different areas of interwar Soviet Union-including Ukraine, Belorussia, Russia and Central Asia-as well as, after World War II, in the newly annexed territories of Lithuania, Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia are a reminder of continuities in the midst of revolutionary ruptures. The persistence, the permutation, and the responses to anti-Jewish violence and memories of violence suggest that Soviet Jews (and non-Jews alike) cohabited with a legacy of blood that did not vanish. This book traces the "afterlife" of these extreme manifestations of antisemitism in the USSR, and in doing so sheds light on the broader question of the changing position of Jews in Soviet society. One notable rupture in manifestations of antisemitism from tsarist to Soviet times included the virtual disappearance-at least during the interwar period-of the tight link between pogroms and blood allegations, indeed a common feature in the waves of anti-Jewish violence that erupted during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries." --

Author : Robert Weinberg
Publisher : Indiana University Press
ISBN 13 : 0253011140
Total Pages : 204 pages
Book Rating : 4.45/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Blood Libel in Late Imperial Russia written by Robert Weinberg and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2013-11-20 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This “riveting history . . . brings us face to face with this notorious trial” of a Russian Jew who was framed for ritual murder in 1913 (Jewish Book World). On Sunday, March 20, 1911, children playing in a cave near Kiev made a gruesome discovery: the blood-soaked body of a partially clad boy. After right-wing groups asserted that the killing was a ritual murder, the police, with no direct evidence, arrested Menachem Mendel Beilis, a thirty-nine-year-old Jewish manager at a factory near the site of the crime. Beilis’s trial in 1913 quickly became an international cause célèbre. The jury ultimately acquitted Beilis but held that the crime had the hallmarks of a ritual murder. Robert Weinberg’s account of the Beilis Affair explores the reasons why the tsarist government framed Beilis, shedding light on the excesses of antisemitism in late Imperial Russia. It is a gripping narrative culled from trial transcripts, newspaper articles, Beilis’s memoirs, and archival sources, many appearing in English for the first time.

Author : E.M. Rose
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0190219645
Total Pages : 416 pages
Book Rating : 4.42/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Murder of William of Norwich written by E.M. Rose and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015-06-01 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1144, the mutilated body of William of Norwich, a young apprentice leatherworker, was found abandoned outside the city's walls. The boy bore disturbing signs of torture, and a story spread that it was a ritual murder, performed by Jews in imitation of the Crucifixion as a mockery of Christianity. The outline of William's tale eventually gained currency far beyond Norwich, and the idea that Jews engaged in ritual murder became firmly rooted in the European imagination. E.M. Rose's engaging book delves into the story of William's murder and the notorious trial that followed to uncover the origin of the ritual murder accusation - known as the "blood libel" - in western Europe in the Middle Ages. Focusing on the specific historical context - 12th-century ecclesiastical politics, the position of Jews in England, the Second Crusade, and the cult of saints - and suspensefully unraveling the facts of the case, Rose makes a powerful argument for why the Norwich Jews (and particularly one Jewish banker) were accused of killing the youth, and how the malevolent blood libel accusation managed to take hold. She also considers four "copycat" cases, in which Jews were similarly blamed for the death of young Christians, and traces the adaptations of the story over time. In the centuries after its appearance, the ritual murder accusation provoked instances of torture, death and expulsion of thousands of Jews and the extermination of hundreds of communities. Although no charge of ritual murder has withstood historical scrutiny, the concept of the blood libel is so emotionally charged and deeply rooted in cultural memory that it endures even today. Rose's groundbreaking work, driven by fascinating characters, a gripping narrative, and impressive scholarship, provides clear answers as to why the blood libel emerged when it did and how it was able to gain such widespread acceptance, laying the foundations for enduring antisemitic myths that continue to the present.

Author : Hillel J. Kieval
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN 13 : 0812298381
Total Pages : 309 pages
Book Rating : 4.83/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Blood Inscriptions written by Hillel J. Kieval and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2022-02-15 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although the Enlightenment had seemed to bring an end to the widely held belief that Jews murdered Christian children for ritual purposes, charges of the so-called blood libel were surprisingly widespread in central and eastern Europe on either side of the turn to the twentieth century. Well over one hundred accusations were made against Jews in this period, and prosecutors and government officials in Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia broke with long established precedent to bring six of these cases forward in sensational public trials. In Blood Inscriptions Hillel J. Kieval examines four cases—the prosecutions that took place at Tiszaeszlár in Hungary (1882-83), Xanten in Germany (1891-92), Polná in Austrian Bohemia (1899-1900), and Konitz, then Germany, now in Poland (1900-1902)—to consider the means by which discredited beliefs came to seem once again plausible. Kieval explores how educated elites took up the accusations of Jewish ritual murder and considers the roles played by government bureaucracies, the journalistic establishment, forensic medicine, and advanced legal practices in structuring the investigations and trials. The prosecutors, judges, forensic scientists, criminologists, and academic scholars of Judaism and other expert witnesses all worked hard to establish their epistemological authority as rationalists, Kieval contends. Far from being a throwback to the Middle Ages, these ritual murder trials were in all respects a product of post-Enlightenment politics and culture. Harnessed to and disciplined by the rhetoric of modernity, they were able to proceed precisely because they were framed by the idioms of scientific discourse and rationality.