J e w i s h  R i t u a l -
M u r d e r :   a   H i s t o r i c a l   I n v e s t i g a
t i o n
Der jüdische Ritualmord: Eine historische Untersuchung
von Hellmut Schramm, Ph. D.

T i s z a - E s z l á r   1 8 8
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Page 1
(p.135)

In the year 1882 there occurred in the little
secluded Hungarian village of Tisza-Eszlár a ritual crime which so closely
corresponded to the one committed in Damascus in 1840, that it was as if a
witness to that crime had been present who was able to observe the
horrifying event of that ritual-slaughter of a human being from beginning
to end and gave an account of it again to the protocol. At the time,
Tisza-Eszlár was described as the great turning point in the Jewish
Question of Hungary and of Europe in general -- that it did not become so
is attributable to a not insignificant degree to the methods of the AIU
(Alliance Israélite Universelle), which had relatively simple work
in the already vastly Judaized Hungary.

In the second half of the
past [19th] century, Hungary was glutted with a flood of the worst type of
Jewish sub-humanity, the fanatically Orthodox Chassidim (2), who were
immigrating from the "European mass-warehouse of Jewry(1),"
Galicia. Political upheaval made an inconspicuous penetration
possible for this riff-raff; how these circumstances affected that village
on the Theiß, is still to be dealt with.

On 8 April 1875,
the Representative Victor Istóczy put an Interpellation to the
Ministry [i.e., an objection on question of policy, etc.] in the Hungarian
House of Representatives, the gist of which was that in all of Europe no
State existed in which the Jewish element possessed a greater influence
and a greater power than in Hungary. Istóczy asked the following
question: "Has the government the intention of putting a dam in the path
of the flood of Jews immigrating to Hungary? Would it put obstacles
in the path of a peaceful movement on the part of the native population
for self-defense? Is the government even thinking of taking a
position on the Jewish Question (136) at all,
or of persisting in its politics of complete neutrality and
indifference?"

The Hungarian Minister-President Baron Bela
Wenkheim thereupon replied: "The government is no opponent of any
sort of movement which pursues a constructive trend; but it would be
compelled to adopt a hostile position toward any movement which aims at
disturbing the peaceful understanding between the churches and [religious]
denominations existing in the nation or the citizens who belong to them
and the mutual respect for civil rights. Since the law of 1867
declares the equality of rights of the Israelites with all other
citizens of the nation, the government recognizes no such thing as
a Jewish Question and is unable to recognize such a thing, and thus
takes no position toward it whatsoever. . ."(3)

President
Koloman v. Tisza, his successor who came into his own in this year,
adopted the way of thinking of his predecessor, to the complete
satisfaction of World Jewry.

First of all, the facts should be
established that an entire chain of similarly featured crimes
preceded the blood-sacrifice of the year 1882 in that region --
crimes which came off as secretly and unpunished as the general and nearly
hopeless Judafication of Hungary which was beginning already in this
period. According to the report of Ónody, the following blood-murders
preceded the ritual-murder of Tisza-Eszlár:

1. On the eve of
the Jewish Feast of Atonement (15 September) of the year 1875,
there were numerous, mostly foreign Jews assembled on the property of
their racial comrade Horowitz at Zboró (in the Sároser Comitat), and the
ritual slaughterer was already called in. They fell upon the unsuspecting
sixteen-year-old serving maid Hanna Zamba, threw her to the ground,
undressed her and began, under the murmuring of Hebrew "prayers," the rite
of butchering. (137) At this moment, a carter
stopped before the house of the Jew and demanded admittance in order to
conclude a delayed transaction. The Jews scattered. The girl, nearly
frightened to death, escaped by wading through a highly swollen stream and
thus shook off her pursuers. At her cries for help two women rushed to her
side, who later affirmed under oath the statements of the girl. As a
result of the fear of death she had endured, the girl became critically
ill and in April 1876 this victim of an attempted ritual-crime
succumbed to her suffering. On her deathbed the girl took an oath once
more to the statement she had given earlier, before her father, the
mother-in-law, the Catholic sacristan and several inhabitants of the
place, that on the eve of the Jewish Festival of Atonement in the year
1875 in the house Number 165C at Zboró, the ritual-slaughterer of the
Jewish religious congregation there wanted to slaughter her in the
presence of several Jews.

The complaint was presented at the
judicial bureau. The sitting judge Winkler, who had full
responsibility but who was friendly to the Jews and had already been
either bribed or intimidated, tried at first to appease the complainants
with fine words and to keep them from any further steps to go forward with
the proceedings; since this attempt failed, he moved on to threats that he
would have the "slanderers" locked up because they weren't able to prove
their accusations. In this simple manner, the investigation petered out.
As the Hungarian parliamentary representative v. Ónody determined, this
famous lord did not think it at all necessary to give the documents to the
district court at Szwidnik, as it should have been his duty to
do.

2. Two years later, in 1877, in the village of
Szalacs in the immediate vicinity of the Pér region, where in
1791 a ritual-crime likewise occurred (4), there
was a double ritual-murder of two children. In the registry of deaths of
the Szalacs Roman Catholic church, one reads under the date of 13 June
1877, on page 70 of Volume II: "Emerich, son of the late Peter
Szabó and his spouse Rosalie Keleman, nine years old, was murdered and on
15 June 1877 laid to eternal rest by the priest Franz Kubowitz.
(138) Therese, child of the same parents, six
years old, was murdered and and buried by the same pastor. .
."

Behind these matter-of-fact words no one expects a ritual-crime,
yet that is the case: The foster-parents had to work at their fields on 13
June and left both children with their Jewish brother-in-law Josef
Klee until their return. The latter presented the children with a few
Kreuzer with the instructions to buy something sweet for themselves at the
small store of the shopkeeper Jew Ehrenfeld. Toward evening the
siblings set out for the Jew's, and from thence onward, despite desperate
searches, they remained missing.

When the sexton of the place
walked to church the next morning, he noticed at the house of the Jew
Alexander Ehrenfeld conspicuous traces of blood in the sand, which
extended along the wall of the yard to a wagon shed perhaps 50 steps
distant. Furthermore, the coachman of Ehrenfeld stated that on the evening
before (13 June) he had seen the two children playing together as they sat
in the archway of the door of his master; at the same time he related that
on the same evening and all through the night approximately forty
strange Jews were making quite a spectacle of themselves and
unceasingly went in and out. After three days a penetrating odor was
spreading from the coach-house. The bodies of both missing children were
discovered jammed into a large equipment case, no longer in use, for a
fire-engine. The Jews managed, through some sort of subversion, that the
autopsy was performed not by the physician of the region, von Székely-Hid,
but by a Jewish doctor. The children's bodies had gaping stab
wounds on the neck and all blood had been withdrawn from the bodies.
When the foster-mother, Anna Szabó, was led to the bodies, she was seized
by convulsions and later died insane. The brother-in-law Josef Klee
said to his wife on the night after the bestial crime: "I pity the poor
children; the girl did die right away, but the boy had a long
death-struggle." These words were heard by the stable hand sitting on a
bench under the opened window of the Klee residence. Josef Klee was
arrested but soon set free again without the judicial authorities
making further inquiries. (139)The Protocol
composed by the Jewish doctor was kept secret; yet the judge said quite
openly to anyone who wished to hear it, that the necks of both children
had been cut through leaving gaping wounds and all blood had been
withdrawn from the bodies.

3. Not fewer than three
similar cases occurred with the same role of the Jewish doctor in
1879 at Tállya in the Zempliner Comitat, in 1880 at Komorn,
and in 1881 at Kaschau, where the daughter of the master binder
Josef Kocsis suddenly disappeared under mysterious circumstances and was
found after two weeks ritually butchered in a well and without
any volume of blood. Géza v. Ónody determined that: "Striking and at
the same time characteristic is the fact that all the children who were
lost had belonged to the lower classes of the people, were the
children of poor people from whom the Jews could presume that their
disappearance would excite no particular attention. In no single
case did the children of well-off families disappear, from whom it was to
be expected that they -- in case a child of theirs became missing -- would
institute the most zealous official investigations."

Thus in the
years 1878, 1879, 1880, and 1881, in the
western Hungarian city Steinamanger, four girls disappeared, one
after the other in regular fashion before the Jewish feast days or
before the Passover festival, namely, two girls, in service with
the Jews to do cleaning, whose parents lived in the country, the daughter
of a poor shoemaker and the small eight-year-old daughter of a coachman
working as servant to Jews, all of whom no trace was ever found. In all
four cases the judicial investigation was immediately initiated,
well-founded suspicion directed against the Jews, but the
investigations were just as quickly dropped again as
"groundless"!

4. In the year 1879 the following
case was reported from Piros in the Bátsch-Bodrogher Comitat: The Jewish
owner of a large estate, Herman Großmann attempted (as could be
proved) for months to lure the fifteen-year-old and strikingly pretty and
robust daughter of the farmhand Peter Sipos into his employ with
every kind of suspicious promises, but the parents flatly refused. Since
(140) Großmann, with Jewish obtrusiveness
brought up his request over and over again, and the parents of the girl
feared the vengeance of the Jew, they finally consented under the
condition that their daughter Lidi at first should join the Jewish
household as a maid only for one month. That was on 11 October
1879. Four days later, the parents learned by chance that their
daughter had disappeared. When cornered, the Jew Großmann suddenly
declared that the body of the girl was "possibly" to be looked for
in a branch of the Franzen-Canal, the Türr-Canal; on 21 October,
thus a week after the disappearance, the girl was actually pulled from the
designated section of the canal by means of a long iron rake. The body was
clothed only in a short slip. The findings of the autopsy yielded the
information that the body could not possibly have lain in the water for
six days and death by drowning was excluded. Those present came to the
conclusion that Lidi Sipos had died an unnatural death. Thereupon the
conducting of the investigation was proposed for district judge Peák at
Neusalz, which the latter flatly declined! Further, the issuing of a
copy of the physician's autopsy results to the parents was denied
.

The coachman of the Jew stated before witnesses that his
master had ordered him, on the day in question (15 October), to Neusalz on
a flimsy pretext. When he was about to harness the horse in the stall the
night after his return, he heard suspicious noises and rumbling in the
cellar underneath the stable building. When he communicated his
perceptions to Großman that same night, the latter was startled and
instructed him to go to his sleeping place immediately. A few days later
the coachman was discharged from service. The country doctors who
had performed the post mortem examination, stated the following
concerning the death of the girl: Above the navel was a taler-sized
circular wound, under the nose a wound which went very deep was
discernable; the victim had probably been hung up on a hook which had been
driven into the flesh at the latter place [i.e., the nose] and the blood
had been siphoned off from the strange wound at the navel

(141) No sort of slaughtering cut could be discovered
-- that this was again a ritual-crime nevertheless, was confirmed by the
case of a Budapest girl, from whom blood had been tapped off, still before
the Tisza-Eszlár case had become known; the only difference was that this
victim got away with her life. The girl, employed as a servant by a Jew in
the Budapest Jewish Quarter, Theresienstadt, reported that directly before
the Purim festival (14 February) she had been drugged unconscious (5), so that
she first reawakened after an entire day. After she came to, she felt so
"smashed" that she could barely stand up, and felt strange pains in her
limbs. When she inspected her body, she found on her right upper arm, on
her left thigh, and above her navel similar round, blood-red spots,
in the middle of each of which was a small opening. She assumed that the
Jews had sucked out a large quantity of blood during her death-like sleep
and she left their service because of this.

The hair of the corpse
of Lidi was disheveled and tangled and so mixed with straw from bedding,
that the two female attendants [preparing the body for burial] had
difficulty arranging her hair in order. All of this led to the conclusion
of a desperate struggle of the girl, attacked in her bed by a band of
Jewish murderers. The district judge Peák prevented a judicial
investigation.

The report issued by the authorities, concerning
the disappearance and the discovery of the body of Lidi Sipos reads: "The
undersigned authorities hereby officially attest: that the
fifteen-year-old daughter, Lidi, of the local resident Peter Sipos, after
she had entered on 11 October 1879 the service of Jew Hermann
Großmann, a resident here, disappeared on 15 October of the same year and
that the body of the girl was found, after a long search, on 21 October on
the ground of the so-called Türr-Canal. -- Piros, 31 May 1882.
Johann Fehér m.p. Judge, Julius Zsigmond m.p. Notary, Georg Mayer m.p.
Sworn Witness."

5. Directly before the Jewish Easter of the
year 1882, (142) the Jew Leopold
Grünwald, who lived in the Kovácsi Comitat in Barser, sent the
seventeen-year-old Barbara Kleeman, a Zipser Saxon girl who was in
service to him, late in the evening to the neighboring village of Peszér,
on the pretext that she might fetch back home a bag of money he had left
there in the inn. In the taproom of this remotely situated house, there
were only two guests present: the brother of Grünwald and the local ritual
slaughterer. The girl, who sensed a trap, made to turn around to leave,
but her master, who had followed right behind her, blocked her exit. The
three Jews threw the girl to the floor, undressed her and bound her. Yet
before they could stick a gag in her mouth, the girl gave out a piercing
shout for help. Her elder sister, who was in service at this inn, pushed
the door in and tried to set the unfortunate girl free. During the
scuffle, the victim dragged herself out into the street, where she was
found by the inhabitants running up; the rescuers immediately fell upon
the Jews, who were beaten within an inch of their lives.

The
district court at Aranyos-Maróth acquitted the gang, since the accused
Jews had all stated under oath that they had only wanted to subject
the girl Barbara to a body-search, since she had pilfered the money bag
from her master!

Four days after this failed attempted murder, the
ritual-murder sacrifice in Tisza-Eszlár occurred.

In Tisza-Eszlár
was the wealthy Hungarian Reichstag representative, Géza von Ónody; it is
to him we owe the precise notes which he was able to make right on the
spot. But the work of Ónody is especially valuable for still another
reason: in his capacity as representative it was possible for him to be
able to inspect the documents of the preliminary examination. He
did, indeed, make generous use of it, so that he was able to utilize the
protocols in their complete text, even with indication of the reference
numbers. His writing, which brought to light irrefutable material, should
have called the attention of the entire civilized world to the monstrous
Jewish danger. It appeared in the Hungarian language in December
1882 under the title: (143)Tisza-Eszlár in the Past and Present --
and in the shortest time was bought up by Jews and disappeared. The same
fate befell the German translation, which was taken in hand by his
personal friend and liaison officer to German comrades-in-arms, the knight
Georg von Marcziányi and already in 1883 appeared in
Budapest. In fact, only a few copies remain of even this translation,
which possess the cultural-historical value of rarities. Incidentally,
Georg von Marcziányi himself published in the summer of 1883,
during the judicial preliminary examination, a treatise about this
blood-murder: Esther Solymosi. This publication had the task of
uncovering the Jewish machinations and intrigues, in order to bring about
orderly judicial proceedings; this broadside has also been translated into
German (M. Schulze, Berlin, 1882). The Jews were not able to do anything
against the publications of both the Hungarians -- thus the Jewish press
worked all the more intensively to weaken their effect.

Exactly 50
years later, in 1932, the then judge of the investigation, Dr.
Josef Bary, who later became President of the Hungarian Supreme Court,
published in Budapest his recollections of this trial in a volume of 612
pages. Unfortunately his Tisza-Eszlár Criminal Trial could not be
included in the composition of this chapter, since the notes of Bary are
only available in Hungarian ("a tiszaeszlári bünper" -- Budapest,
1933). A German translation would be very desirable, since without a doubt
there would be very informative material there!

The Jewish
smoke-screen artist, Paul Nathan(6) -- we
have (144) have already introduced him in the
foreword and will still have to deal with him in detail -- disposed of
this "case" too -- to be on the safe side, though, some ten years
afterward. He counted on the memory of non-Jewish humanity, insofar as it
pertained to its own most innate interests, being a bad one, for the
accounts of Ónody and Marcziányi were pushed aside -- and the articles of
a veritable forest of Jewish newspapers overgrew and smothered every
national impulse opposed to the Jews.

In 1892 there appeared
in Berlin Der Prozeß von Tisza-Eszlár [The Trial of
Tisza-Eszlár] of this Paul Nathan. This concoction, numbering
400-pages, is a sophisticated Talmudic master-performance; one cannot
suppress a smile now and then, at how this young Talmudist, who moreover
had been distinguished with the highest dignity by a German university
(Heidelberg), begins to additionally adulterate the impact of the
documentary and factual material and at the end has gone so far with this
that the honest reader, who has no notion of these disgraceful intentions
and, after all, is not even able to have any such notion, can take note of
one more example of how the poor and innocent "fellow-citizens of the
Mosaic persuasion," of whose restless urge toward activity he could
convince himself daily, had to suffer under the suspicions of
"anti-Semitic hotspurs." Thus does Paul Nathan bluster, also -- one sees
him, speaking almost with his hands: "But an entire book would have to be
written, in order to demonstrate in all its details the repulsive
corruption, the limitless dishonesty, the blind hatred, the tower-high
frivolity, which have been employed without hesitation by the
anti-Semites, in order not to have to give up their accusations of
ritual-murder."

But we will keep to the judicially and historically
certified facts of the case, even if we run the danger, in so doing, of
being by no means convinced of Jewish innocence, because our (145) "mental disposition prevents this" (Nathan in
his "Preface," p. vi!).

Tisza-Eszlár, a modest little village of
the Szabolcser Comitat situated on the upper Theiß, had hardly a dozen
Jews to show before the year 1848, but a few decades later there
were already 200, most of them elements fleeing from military service and
smuggled across the Russian border with the aid of the Jewish secret
organizations (Kahal) -- elements which now "work with tireless
industry and never-slackening perseverance at the labor of exploitation
and for the material as well as moral ruination of their non-Jewish
fellow-citizens" (Géza v. Ónody).

As already mentioned, the region
of Hungary lying between the Danube and the Theiß and including the
nation's capital (7), had been
flooded with the most disgusting sort of kaftan-draped Galician Jews. J.G.
Bogrow, himself a Jew, describes in his Memoiren eines Juden
[Memoirs of a Jew] (8), which
appeared in 1880 in St. Petersburg, his own view of this type as follows
(p. 313): "In the gloomy, filthy antechamber. . .stood a ragged Jew of low
stature with a puffy, wrinkled face, with a red beard mixed with gray, and
long, glued-together red peyes (earlocks). The folds of his
over-sized kaftan, with holes and tears of every size and shape, were
bordered with a broad crust of dried excrement from the streets,
which formed an entirely unique fringe and tassel on the torn edges [of
his garment]. At first glance one would take this man for a beggar of the
basest type" -- but he was a person distinguished with positions of
confidence!

(146)Tisza-Lök, which is
located in the direct vicinity of Tisza-Eszlár, had developed into a kind
of Little Jerusalem, in which the non-Jewish portion of the populace was
menaced -- in the full meaning of the word -- in its physical as well as
mental existence. The Jews of Tisza-Lök had the reputation among their
co-religionists of "holiness" and maintained continuous and very active
ties with the Polish- Galician Chassidim. But the threads of all
ritual-crimes in that region stretch beyond the Carpathians, toward
Galicia, and just as the command-posts of the Polna (1898/99) and
Konitz (1900) blood-murders are also certifiably to be sought in
that dark and horrible ghetto of Europe, one can indeed simply speak of an
organized Jewish secret service, which determines the time and location
for the ritual slaughter of a human being, puts together a detachment of
Jews, instructs the ritual-slaughterers of various Jewish communities and
arranges for the murder gang to vanish again without a trace. If, due to
unforseen circumstances, this plan does not go off without problems, as,
for example, at Tisza-Eszlár, then the World organization of Jewry, the
AIU, whose specialty became the quashing of trials, steps forward into
action all the more successfully. In any event, the carrying out of the
murder and the non-punishment of the murderers seem to be sufficiently
secured.

After the failure at Kovácsi in the Barser Comitat,
Tisza-Eszlár had been designated to furnish the blood-toll.

Esther Solymosi

On 1 April 1882, in the early afternoon, the peasant
woman Andreas Huri was hurrying through the long stretch of the village
street and turned in every direction, as if she were looking for
something. She had sent the fourteen-year-old Esther Solymosi
(whose mother, a widow, lived in her immediate neighborhood) to a shop
located at the opposite end of the village, between eleven and twelve
o'clock, to buy paint. The road to the store-keeper Kohlmayer led the girl
past an uncultivated, larger area, the village meadow, on whose western
side, near the dam of the Theiß, rose the synagogue, a spacious building
which stood isolated. This Jewish temple was not located, therefore, (147) within the enclosed row of village
properties, but stood on open country and was thus never closely
observable from the direct neighborhood. This circumstance is important
and was one of the determining factors in the selection of Tisza-Eszlár
for the slaughtering-place.

The girl made use of the street for her
path home, until the point of the dam turn-off; from there onward she used
a field path, which led hard by the back of the synagogue -- probably so
she could reach home faster. She paid for this with her young
life.

According to the statement of the Christian shop-keeper
Josef Kohlmayer, Esther very much urged him to hurry while she was
making her purchases, "because she had to get back home quickly, for the
house must be given a fresh coat of whitewash before evening." The girl
packed up her paints and immediately set out on the road home. Shortly
before the branch-off, Esther met her seventeen-year-old sister Sofie and
happily told her that Frau Huri, her god-mother, had promised to buy her a
new dress and give her five Gulden, so that she might be able to still buy
herself a pair of shoes for the Easter holidays. . . Then she greeted the
local magistrate, Josef Papp, who was standing in front of his mill and
exchanged a few friendly words with him; he was still watching the girl as
she made the turn onto the path.

The synagogue in the village of
Tisza-Eszlár

These named here, and a few other witnesses besides, gave
their accounts later under oath.

Esther had disappeared as if gone
from the surface of the earth -- and stayed that way. Frau Huri started to
worry, she assumed at first that Esther was still on her way to the store
and then stopped in at her mother's. The old lady Solymosi reported to the
court on this point: "Toward two in the afternoon Frau Huri came and said:
'Has her god-mother had anything brought from the vault (of the store) by
the girl?' The mother was taken aback: 'Is she gone?' Frau Huri: 'She's
gone! I sent her to fetch paint. . ." (protocol statements). With that,
began the tragedy of a mother who was crushed by the horrible end of her
daughter.

The Murderers

The mother, sobbing loudly, searched for her daughter. Her
sister, Frau Gabriel Solymosi, helped her; they searched until sunset. .
.(148) In the direct vicinity of the synagogue
the wife of the temple servant Scharf addressed them
hypocritically: "What's wrong with you?" and without waiting for an answer
continued: "Has Esther become lost? She isn't lost. Possibly a fever took
hold of her and she's lying about, somewhere." Now Scharf himself
put in an appearance and got involved in the conversation. The mother of
Esther made the following declaration about this on the second day of the
hearings: "Scharf, the temple servant, asked me what was wrong with
me; I couldn't speak a word, but my sister, Frau Gabriel Solymosi, told
him that Frau Huri had sent the girl into the village and that no one
could find her since then; to that he replied there was no reason to be so
sad, and there was a similar case in Nánás when he was still a child, and
that then, too, the Jews were suspected, even their ovens were
searched. . ." But these Jewish "words of comfort" -- one can still
picture the cunning Jewish faces today -- had the opposite effect: the
women became increasingly alarmed, and a terrible suspicion tormented
them. The Jew Nathan also knew quite well that the Scharf
couple had committed a major piece of stupidity with their thoughtless
chattering. That's why, when he comes to this part in his book about
Tisza-Eszlár, he becomes downright sentimental, which has always been an
effective means of fooling one's fellow-man, in this case the non-Jewish
reader: "This scene, which played itself out at twilight so
peacefully in front of the house of the temple servant
Scharf, was the was the kernel for the most dreadful
conflicts, conflicts which were supposed to disturb the
peace of thousands. Both Solymosi women went homeward; what was
going on in their souls, we know. . ."

Indeed, this Jew, all Jews knew it, only one entity did not know -- the
Hungarian state, which let many precious weeks go by until the judicial
investigation, as time unused! But this intermission was exploited all the
more zealously by the Jews, to take defensive measures -- i.e., to
disseminate slanders to the effect that Esther, who (they said) was a
flighty creature(9), just
took off on this day. Consciously or unconsciously, Nathan (149) grasped at this "valuable" line of thought and
wrote further: "Finally, the disappearance of Esther was not a rare event;
it happened frequently, that Hungarian girls secretly went off for even
years. . ."(10)

Later,
Jewry became more aggressive; the customary tactic was employed of turning
the accusers into the accused, and efforts were supposed to be made to
bring suit against the widow Solymosi and the spreaders of the news of the
murder of Esther, on the grounds of "offense against honor"! But it
remained only a threat; something else happened: to wit, when strangers
unexpectedly came into the village, as for example in one case imperial
officers, to carry out administrative tasks, the Jews immediately took
violent fright, put their heads together, whispered among one another in
Hebrew, fearfully looked over the new arrivals and ran to the community
office in order to discover there the reason for the arrival of the
strangers. On their faces fear and panic were clearly evident!
(Géza v. Ónody in his book about Tisza-Eszlár.) Finally, Nathan called the
mother of the victim, in public, "bought" for the purpose of "making
ill-feeling against the not insignificant" Jewish portion of the
population: "The woman had been poor, anemic. When a sad fate had
overtaken her daughter and anti-Semitism with happy heart made the
mother's cause its own, then the destiny of its valuable protégée
also changed. Charitableness and party interests brought about
collections for the poor widow. . .From somewhere or other,
certain benefits flowed in to the old Solymosi
women."

The mother, questioned about this before the court, at
first did not understand what was wanted of her, but then she spurned
these infamous slanders with outrage -- Nathan knows better,
however: "These statements (of the mother) do not correspond to the facts.
In truth, the living situation of Frau Solymosi has improved considerably.
She no longer needs to work for her daily support. . .She was
well-dressed, far better than a Tisza-Eszlár peasant woman otherwise
usually dresses; in her pot meat is no longer absent and as the surest
symptom of (150) a change in her circumstances,
the envy of the other peasant women of the Theiß village has
already begun to be directed toward her. . .thus one sees how even the
reasons of external advantage captivate the peasant women -- thus
does worldly advantage triumph!"

Only a Jew can write like
that! A widow, whose fourteen year-old daughter was literally butchered,
experiences "a visible change in her exterior circumstances" -- the death
of of one's own child was therefore turned into a "business," to "external
advantages" for those left behind! That comports fully with the "offer,"
composed as a business letter, made to the father of the likewise
ritually-slaughtered Ernst Winter of Prechlau- Konitz(11), who was
supposed to be "compensated" for the blood of his son with 20,000 Marks --
the death of a child as business!

On 3 April, two days after the
disappearance of Esther, the mother reported to the community judge Fárkas
at Tisza-Eszlár; she asked that the synagogue be searched. Fárkas declined
-- which no longer surprises us -- with the argument that he was not
empowered to do anything like that and referred the mother to the sitting
judge Eugen Jármy. The latter again answered Frau Solymosi, when she
repeated her suspicion about the Jews: "Good woman, how can you think such
a thing? That sort of thing can no longer happen in this day and age!" (12) He
finally issued a circular letter in which the following appears: "On 1
April, between 10 and 11 o'clock, Frau Solymosi's 14 year-old daughter
disappeared, whose further description is given below." That was all at
first! The family of the temple servant Scharf, however, became in
the following period the enfant terrible of the Jewish community. A
few days after the disappearance of Esther, the six year-old son of the
temple servant, Samu Scharf, told his playing companions of a special
murder case which he had heard about from his older brother. The
eleven year-old Elisabeth Soós repeated in a protocol this tale as follows
(Samu said to the children he was playing with): "Father called the
Christian girl into the temple and had her sit down in an easy chair;
Moritz seized her hand, (151) father seized her
head, the schächter [ritual-slaughterer] cut into her feet and then
they carried her there, where the large tree stands." With that, Samu
pointed toward the cemetary! The mother of little Elisabeth Soós, Frau
Andreas Soós, a few days later than her daughter, heard from Samu himself
the following (protocol): "Papa called the Hungarian girl to him, he tied
her up, washed her, and then right away the schächter -- Bácsi --
cut her neck" and also in this version: "Papa called the Hungarian girl in
from the street, mother washed her feet, and the schächter cut
her across the neck. Bácsi also has slaughtered a hen that way at our
place."

That was a few days after Esther Solymosi had disappeared.
Later, the Scharf couple came to hear of the chattering of their
offspring. they cautioned him. On 2 May (1882) Samu called out:
"Now I'm saying nothing about what my father did with the girl."
(13)

Concerning this 2nd of May, the 23 year-old Elisabeth
Tanyi also spoke in the public hearing (14): "I was
driving the geese home toward evening, when the little Samu, out of the
temple, set himself down in front of us. I said to him: 'Get out of my
way, else you'll catch a smack!' Then Samu said: 'Then I definitely won't
tell you what Father did with the Hungarian girl!' I asked him, what it
was, then? He said to me: 'Now I won't tell you at all'" --

On 4
May, therefore over one month after the loss of her child, the mother
again spoke before the community judge of Tisza-Eszlár, Gabriel Fárkas.
"On the 4th of May, the Solymosi woman came again to me and said that she
had no peace of mind. . ." (15) She
made reference to the statements of Samu Scharf. Fárkas again declined to
do anything. He was [he said] not responsible. Finally, the sitting judge
instructed the local magistrate to question the witnesses once more.
Thus, a full 36 days after the disappearance of Esther, the first
authorized investigation was begun!

The protocols were sent to
the state prosecutor's office at Nyiregyháza; In mid-May, this office made
application for introduction of (152)the
investigation; the entire documentary material up to this point was sent
to the Court of Examination. The Notary of the Nyiregyháza Court of
Justice, Josef Bary, was entrusted with the conducting of the
criminal investigation, after the examining judge originally appointed for
this task, who found himself in financial embarrassment and had Jews as
his chief creditors, had come under disciplinary investigation and had
taken his own life.

On the 19th of May, Bary arrived at the scene
of the crime. Preventive detention was imposed upon the Scharf
family. On the same day, the six year-old son Samu blabbed away before the
examining judge (protocol): "Father called Esther inside, and she came
into the place. Father stuck a white piece of linen in her mouth, then
they washed her in the trough and a large Jew cut her in the neck with a
long knife, so that her head fell away. He had made just one single
cut on her. . .they they grabbed Esther and carried her through the
hallway to the temple. They had hold of her by her hands, her feet, and
her head, and they were: Abraham Braun and his son, Samuel Lustig and his
son, and Moritz. There were many there. . . !

On 20
May, Bary took up the first interrogation with the sixteen year-old
Moritz, the brother named by Samu. Moritz Scharf declared by way of
an introductory statement, that on the Sunday evening before the Jewish
Easter, on 1 April, an election of the new ritual- slaughterers had taken
place at the house of Jacob Süßmann. He did not want to admit
knowing Esther by name; his performance appeared, in this first
interrogation protocol, to be so artificial and contradictory, that he was
held in custody. The examining judge had a number of Jews arrested besides
[Moritz Scharf]. Since the space of the modest community house did not
suffice for a separate accommodation for the arrested persons, the
security commissar Andreas Recsky declared himself prepared to
temporarily lodge the youngest, Mortiz Scharf, in his office space at
Nagyfalu. Separated from his co-religionists, Moritz suddenly broke
down in the surroundings which were foreign to him, and stated that he was
ready, still on that very evening, to make a full confession; He gave an
account of the ritual-crime and the murderers in every single detail; on
the basis (153) of his testimony, four Jews
could be charged with the murder and five others with complicity. The
confession of Moritz Scharf, which was made on the evening of the
21st of May before Commissar Recsky and the protocol chief of the
examining judge, Koloman Péczely, reads exactly(16):

"On
Saturday toward twelve o'clock in the afternoon, Esther Solymosi,
who was on her way home from the old-village section of Eszlár, came into
our house at my father's invitation. My father called her in with the
remark that she should take the candlestick from the table. When she came
into our house with my father, Esther Solymosi had on a shabby
white cloth on her head, a red-colored cloth around her neck, and wore a
kind of white coat and a -- if I remember this correctly -- blue-colored
skirt. That the girl was called Esther, I knew that because my father
addressed her by that name. The mistress of the girl was Frau Andreas
Huri, for Mother had asked her with whom she was living, and she
said, mentioning her name, that she was living with Frau Andreas
Huri. Esther's face looked like her sister Sophie. At the behest of
my father, Esther placed the candlestick, just as she had taken it from
our table, upon the chest of drawers. When the girl climbed down from the
chair [apparently used to reach the top of the chest of drawers], a Jewish
beggar(17) was sent
in from the temple for the girl. The Jewish beggar caught the girl by the
hand and lured her in with him to the temple. There, in the corridor of
the temple, the tall, brown Jewish beggar took hold of the girl and threw
her to the ground. The girl began to moan and scream then, but the
already present ritual-slaughterers from Téglás and
Tarczal quickly pressed the girl back down on the floor and the
ritual-slaughterer Salomon Schwarz, who had arrived from Tisza-Lök,
cut the girl's neck through and let the blood flow into a red earthenware
plate; when the plate had become filled with blood, he poured the blood
into a pot.

I wasn't in the temple at this event, but I looked in
on it from outside through the keyhole of the temple doors. My father
wasn't there, but was inside our house. When the girl was (154) led into the temple, they barred the temple
door from within. Aside from those mentioned above, there were present in
the temple: Samuel Lustig, Abraham Braun, Lazar
Weißstein, and Abraham Junger. They had previously undressed
the girl down to her slip and then the schächter [ritual-
slaughterer] inflicted the cut; the girl was barefoot. When she was no
longer moving, they bound her neck together with rags and dressed her
again. The ritual-slaughterers took hold of the girl, the Jewish beggar
undressed her; when she was dead, the Jewish beggar likewise dressed her
again. After this happened, I went to my father and to my mother into our
room and told them that the girl had been killed; then my mother
forbade me from speaking to anyone at all of this." -- To Recsky's
question: "Did your father know that they'd killed the girl?" he answered:
"He knew it, for I told it to him, that they had slain the girl!" -- "I
have made this statement without any coercion." -- Moritz Scharf m.p."

This protocol, which had been concluded toward ten o'clock in the
evening, was delivered to the examining judge Bary still that
night, by means of a messenger on horseback; shortly after midnight
Bary entered the rooms of Recsky in Nagyfalu. Mortiz
Scharf was questioned for a second time. Since the Jewish press wants to
take note of contradictions in the protocols and from them construe the
statements of Moritz Scharf as baseless, the second protocol, taken
by the examining judge himself in the same night, also ought to be
published in its complete text again(18).

On the 22nd of May, Moritz Scharf, as witness before the
examining judge in Tisza-Eszlár, stated the following in addition: "About
1 o'clock the foreign beggar (Wollner) came and said to me that I should
close the synagogue. When I was about to do this, I saw the three foreign
ritual-slaughterers Lustig, Braun, and Weißstein walking to the house just
then. Then the body was no longer in the entrance hall, also there was no
trace of blood to be seen. I don't know where they concealed the girl. It
wasn't in the synagogue, (155) because they
would only have been able to hide it by the Torah. But when I
looked for it in the cabinet in the afternoon, there was nothing there to
see. They would not have been able to bury it in the courtyard, because
there I would have had to see it, so they could only have carried it into
the Theiß. During the afternoon and the evening I saw no wagon near the
synagogue, perhaps there was one nearby after 10 o'clock at night, when I
lay down to sleep. Then there were, still in the synagogue: Lichtman,
Rosenberg, Süßmann, Romer, Einhorn, and my father. When they went away I
don't know. I believe that the corpse was carried out, not through the
door, because geese are herded in the vicinity, but through the window of
the entrance hall (19)."

Finally,
in the protocol taken on the 23rd of May 1882 before the
Nyiregyházar Court of Justice for authentication of the confession,
after his attention had been drawn by the President of the Court to the
consequences of a false statement by a witness, Scharf declared
that he upheld, in their full compass the confessions made on the
night of 21/22 May in Nagyfalu and on the same day (22 May) before the
examining judge Bary in Tisza-Eszlár, that he confirmed them and
stood ready to take an oath on them. His confessions [he said] he had made
without any psychological or moral force, and the fact that he had not so
stated the facts on 20 May before the examining judge, or had denied them,
was out of fear of the members [of the Jewish
congregation].

If we examine the grave statements of Scharf, whose
plainly monstrous significance Bary immediately had realized -- for
not only this blood-murder, but countless others of that region finally
found their solution -- the following aspects, with which the public court
hearings then had to deal, emerge:
1. On the day of the murder
of Esther, the schächter-election took place.
2. The girl
was lured into the house of the temple servant next to the synagogue, as
she was returning from her shopping at about twelve o'clock in the
afternoon.
3. The child was led out of the house by a Jewish
beggar into the synagogue situated in the direct vicinity.(156)
4. Several ritual-slaughterers who
were already present there overpowered the girl.
5. The
schächter from Tisza-Eszlár, Salomon Schwarz, slaughtered
Esther.
6. In the synagogue still several other Jews were
present.
7. The parents of the witness Scharf were
accessories.
8. After the crime, still numerous other
Jews appeared toward five o'clock in the afternoon.
9. The
body of the girl was removed without leaving a trace, and probably sunk in
the Theiß.
10. Three foreign Jews were had come to Tisza-Eszlár
already on the day before the crime and had found a hiding place in
the house of the temple servant.
So far we are taken by the
observations of the young Scharf. We must now determine what the
court did with this.

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Copyright 2001 by R. Belser.
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