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.

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Page 2
(p. 23)

A Bohemian chronicle reports from the same year (see
Dr. E. Bischoff in Juden und Christenblut, Berlin, Dewald) [Jews
and Christian Blood]: "After the envoys of Otto had withdrawn from
Prague, the Jews resolved to commit a horrible crime at the holy Easter
celebration against a Christian man; they dragged him to a concealed
area, hanged him naked up on a tree, and while they stood around, some
would spit on him, others struck him blows with their fists, and still
others did to him (24) everything which Christ
once had suffered from that hideous and infamous people."

Two years
later, in 1305, Prague Jews again at Easter nailed a youth,
who had been forced through poverty to become their servant, naked upon a
cross and flogged him so long that he bled to death. The aroused people
did not wait for the return of the King, Wenceles II, but fell upon
the Jewish Quarter and "applied a radical remedy, in that they slew the
entire Jewish population of Prague" (G.v.Ónody, p. 81, as well as Tentzel,
Monatl. Unterr., 1693, p. 556).

In 1306 -- therefore
during the reign of Philipp IV, all the Jews of France were driven out --
"for all time." But already in 1315 a royal ordinance of Louis X of
28 July proclaimed their recall: soon afterward the Baille
([royal]official) of Tours had to bring charges against a Jewish
ritual-murderer of Chinon, and two of the murderers were hanged
(Caro, p. 104); in 1321 the Jews at Annecy murdered a
young cleric for ritual purposes and in consequence were expelled from the
city by a decree of Philipp V (Denis de Saint-Martin, Gallia
christ. II, 723); a year later they were expelled from all of
France -- again "for all time. . ." "But the Jews are like the flies, one
chases them away and soon there they are again. . ." maintained the
honorable Frankfurt vice-headmaster of Classics Schudt in his
Jüdischen Merkwürdigkeiten [Jewish Oddities](I, p. 115), who
was by no means hostile to the Jews per se but was resigned [to
this] as being their racial peculiarity!

In the County of
Savoy several children disappeared, again at Easter time,
and so also at Geneva, Rumilly, Annecy and elsewhere.
A Christian, Jaquet of Aiguebelle, confessed that he had sold the
children by arrangement with the Jew Acelin from Tresselve
to other Jews. Acelin, for his part, admitted that he resold the
children to his religious comrades. The latter had killed the children and
from their brains and bowels had prepared a salve or aharace dish
(i.e., charoseth, a sauce in which the bitter herbs are dipped on
the first evening of the Passover) and given of it to all the Jews (H.L.
Strack: Das Blut in Glauben und Aberglauben der Menscheit
[Blood in the Religion and the Superstition of Humanity], Munich
1900, p. 144).

In 1331 the Jews of Überlingen (Baden)
threw the son of a (25) citizen named
Frey into a well. The countless incisions which were later
discovered on the corpse allowed the determination to be made of the
occurrence of a preceding withdrawal of the blood. Without first first
waiting for the approval of the Emperor, known to be a friend of the Jews,
the judges of the region executed sentence of death upon the authors of
the crime (Chronik des Joh. Vitoduran).

According to the
same chronicle of Vitoduran (covering the years 1215-1348 and
preserved in its original textual form at the monastery of St. Gall in
Switzerland and cited by Sigismund Hosmann in his
Judenherz[Jewish Heart]), in 1346 in Munich a
small child was murdered by Jews and [the body] deposited outside of the
city. The body displayed more than 60 piercing wounds! Emperor Ludwig IV
(1314-1347) gruffly rebuffed the parents of the child and forbid
even the pilgrimage of the populace to the place where the body was found;
"bombarded by their gilded arrows and blinded and corrupted by Jewish
money. . .there was no lack of people who looked out for the interests of
the Jews. . ." (Hosmann, p. 109)

Around the same time, in the
region of Cologne, a small boy -- "Hänschen" [This is the diminutive and
affectionate form of the name "Hans"] -- was taken by Jews on the way to
his monastery school of St. Sigbert and in a "secret location" cut to
pieces with knives until he expired (Acta sanct., März III,
502).

On Good Friday of the year 1347 the Jews of
Messina crucified a child (H. Desp.: Le myst. du sang, p.
73).

On 2 March 1349 Jews stole the four-year-old son of a
Zurich shoemaker and cut up his body; the blood was collected. The
body was thrown into the so-called Wolfsbach [literally: Wolf's Creek]
where it was soon discovered in the mud. An altar was erected in Münster,
"through which devotion increased by the day, until the city renounced the
old Catholic faith; thereby the devotion of all their old forebears
vanished and was entirely extinguished. . ." (H. Murer, Helvetia
sancta, p. 312).

In 1380 at Hagenbach in Swabia
some Jews were caught in the act at the moment when they were slaughtering
a child kidnapped from his parents. They were burned (M. Crusius,
Jahrbücher von Schwaben Teil III, Buch 5) [Yearbooks of
Swabia, Part III, Book 5)].

According to the decree of 15 July
1394 the Jews under the government of Charles VI were expelled from
France because of repeated ritual-murders of children (26) and other intrigues injurious to the community;
in the actual Kingdom of France, there was no longer one single Jew for a
span of a century; only in the enclave of Avignon belonging to the
Pope did a Jewish community maintain itself.(12)

In
1401 in Diesenhof in Württemberg, the four-year-old
Konrad Lory was slaughtered; his blood was supposed to be delivered
to the Jew Vitelmann by a groom [i.e., stable hand] for three
Gulden; the former was burned and the latter broken on the wheel (Acta
sanct., 2nd Volume of April, p. 838).

The Acta sanctorum
[Deeds of the Saints] (II, April, p. 838) and H. Desportes (p. 74)
list further ritual-murders -- all at Easter time -- for the year
1407 in Crakow, 1413 in Thuringia and for
1420 in Tongern in Limburg. The Judenbüchlein
of Johann Eck of the year 1541 reports that in the year 1420
Archduke Albrecht of Austria had 300 Jews burned at
Vienna, because these men had murdered three children.

In
Ravensburg in the year 1429 between Easter and
Whitsunday [=Pentecost] the Swiss student Ludwig van Bruck
was tortured to death by three Jews with many torments and a horrible
sexual violation (Acta sanct., 3rd Volume of April, p.
978/980).

On Good Friday (!) of the year 1442 or
1443 -- due to difficult external circumstances the date given
varies -- the four-year-old girl Ursula Pöck disappeared in
Lienz (in the Tyrol). After "a search was carried out for her on
land and in the water over many days with diligence and industry with no
success, the body was found in a creek: it was covered all over with
piercing wounds and totally emptied of blood (Corpusculum
punctis ubique confossum, sanguis ex corpusculo elicitus et
effusus). On the basis of further inquiries the Jews of Lienz were
brought in as suspects in the murder. At first they denied [involvement]
persistently; but when faced with the body and as a result of strong
admonitions -- of torture or the coercing of confessions there is not the
slightest suggestion -- they unanimously admitted the crime. A Christian
woman, Margareta Praitschedlin, had decoyed the child into their
hands (27) in return for gifts of money! She,
too, confessed her crime in full compass. "She has told how she had found
the child at a place and had picked her up kindly with sweet words and
matched the aforesaid Jews in her violence." The Jew Samuel, "who was
first to put his hands on the child and had committed the greatest
unchristian murder and torture" was, as emerges from the documents
published by George Tinkhauser in Number 10 of the Katholischen
Blätter aus Tirol [Catholic Paper of the Tyrol], broken on the
wheel and with him a dog. Another Jew, Joseph, was condemned to the
gallows and hanged with a dog at his feet. Praitschedlin was tied together
with two old Jewesses at her back and burned. Five Jewish children were
baptized! To all Jews entry to the city remained forbidden. At last, in
the year 1494 the nobles of Kärnten repeatedly requested of
the Emperor the expulsion of all Jews from their lands. The Emperor
Maximilian I finally ordered this in the well-known Edict of
Schwäbischwerd of 1496 (on the Wednesday after the fourth
Sunday before Easter). As reason for the expulsion was given, among other
things, "that they (the Jews) have pitifully tortured even Christian
children and used their blood for their damnable substance" -- "There
is almost no land, and in each land, hardly one region to be found, in
which the Jewish cruelty has not washed its murderous hands in the blood
of innocent Christian children. . ." wrote Jacob Schmid in his
Ehrenglanze der gefürsteten Grafschaft Tirol [Honorable Glory of
the Princely County of the Tyrol] (II, p. 141, new edition of
Innsbruck 1843).

The devotion to this slaughtered child is not yet
extinguished today [i.e., 1943; and now ?] in Lienz. The
father of the child had a tablet erected in 1452 at the grave of
the little martyr, originally to be found at the cemetary of the city
parish church with the inscription: "Thomas Pöck had this made to
the memory of his daughter Ursula, whom the Jews tortured on Good Friday
and who lies buried here." (According to Dr. Jos. Deckert: Vier
Tiroler Kinder, Opfer des chassidischen Fanatismus, 1893 [Four
Tyrolean Children, Victims of the Hassidim Fanaticism]).

In
1452 several Jews at Savona (near Genoa) killed a
two-year-old child; they perforated the body in every direction, caught
the blood in the vessels in customary use at the circumcision of their
sons, and cast the blood-emptied corpse into a (28) cesspool. The blood, mingled with pieces of
fruit, was eaten in ritual Form (A. Spina, de bello Judaeorum III,
7) [Concerning the War of the Jews]. The young son of the physician
Salomon of Genoa stated the following as an eye-witness of this bestial
murder: "They led in a Christian child of two years: one Jew took him by
the right arm, the other by the left arm, the third by the head -- thus
cross-like -- the fourth had a sharp and long needle or graving
tool and he pierced the child in the belly and then the heart, quickly
drew it out and then quickly stabbed again, the blood flowed out copiously
into the basin until the child died, and they threw [the body] into a
hidden room, and they dipped berries, apples and other fruits into the
blood and ate them."

The witness had also eaten of this "and such a
horror at this came over him, that he wasn't able to eat for two days and
it was all the same to him, if they wanted to pull out his bowels and
guts" (from the Judenbüchlain of Dr. Joh. Eck).

In
1453 Breslau Jews enticed a child to them, fattened him for some
time and then stuck him [inside] a barrel with nails, which they rolled
back and forth until the blood was withdrawn from the victim in this
manner. (H. Desportes, le myst. d. s., p. 76).

In
July of the year 1462 ten Jewish merchants, returning from the
market in Bozen which in earlier times had four markets, passed
through the Inn valley. They had already "come to terms" [i.e., in a
business agreement] in advance a month before with the farmer Hans
Mair from the village of Rinn near Innsbruck: he, the godfather and
uncle of the three-year-old Andreas Oxner, who had been entrusted
to the protection of his uncle after the early death of his father,
resolved to deliver his ward to the Jewish gang without the knowledge of
the boy's mother in return for a hatful of Jewish gold pieces. "The mother
of little Andreas had hired herself out as a harvester at Amras
which was about two miles distant, but wasn't able to take her child along
that far away. That is what the betrayer had counted on. Thus she gave the
child over to the protection of his godfather and urgently recommended him
to his protection. It was not without misgiving that she took leave of her
child.

When
the mother had gone some distance, the farmer gave the Jews an agreed-upon
signal from his house. . .Two of the Jews now secretly entered the house
of the farmer, filled his hat with the agreed-upon quantity of gold pieces
(400-600 Ducats) (29) at which he led them up
the wooden stairs to the room where the child still softly slept. He
awakened the child, dressed him in his clothes and handed him over to the
strange men. . ." (from Dr. Jos. Deckert: Vier Tiroler
Kinder, etc.). As a precaution, the Jews had brought along a Rabbi. In
a birch forest not far from the village of Rinn, the child was
slaughtered: the rabbi placed his sacrificial victim on a stone block,
which survives in historical tradition today [and now?] as the
"Jew-stone" in the pilgrim church under the same name, founded by Emperor
Maximilian I; on this the child was circumcised according to Jewish
rite. The veins in his arms were opened and the blood carefully collected
in copper bowls. Every single one of the Jews committed exceptional
atrocities on the victim, even the dead body was further profaned and then
hung up on a tree, which was supposed to represent a cross. The murderers
got away unpunished. The farmer Mair of Rinn, the guardian of
"Anderl [diminutive of Andreas] of Rinn" succumbed to madness and
had to be restrained in chains in his own house. The victim of the
ritual-sacrifice was buried at first at the cemetary of Rinn, but
later buried in a special niche. Around this niche the story of the martyr
is immortalized in image and inscription. Pope Benedict XIV in the
Bull Beatus Andreas [Blessed Andreas] took the occasion of
February 22, 1755 to deal with the Jewish ritual-murder at some
length. Further, before this, there were the notes of the Bollandists
(Acta sanct., II, July, p. 462) as well as the Beschreibung der
Marter des heiligen Andreas von Rinn of Ignatius Zach (Augsburg, 1724)
[Description of the Torture of Saint Andreas of Rinn]. The cult of
the child martyr has lasted up until our own day; The Diocese of Brixen on
July 12th celebrates the feast of the blessed Andreas of Rinn, its
diocesan patron. Dr. Jos. Deckert writes in addition (Vienna, 1893): "The
child of Rinn was thus really the victim of fanatical Jewish hatred and is
rightly revered as a martyr by the Catholic Church." The church in the
Diocese of Brixen has, among others, a prayer which says that "the blessed
Andreas was killed by disloyal Jews in the cruelest
fashion".

Around Easter time of the year 1468 the
Jews in the small Spanish city of Sepulveda, at the behest of their
Rabbi (30) Salomon Pecho, nailed a young girl
to a cross and pierced her all over. By order of the Bishop Juan Arias
de Avila, the convicted Jews were brought to Segovia. Following
the judicial process the main perpetrators were condemned to death at the
stake, the remaining Jews who had taken part in the torture were, for one
group, condemned to the gallows and the wheel, while those of the other
group were strangled in prison. The rest were expelled from the city
(Colmenares in Historia de la insigne ciudad de Segovia and
Synopsis episcoporum Segoviensium, p. 650).

A
comprehensive literature treats the infamous case of the Trent boy-murder
of the year 1475, which in its time aroused the greatest sensation
in the entire cultural world of the West. This ritual-murder and its
accompanying circumstances are even in our day extraordinarily informative
in more than one respect.

Probably the first person who was able to
report this crime to his countrymen authentically and in detail was the
first Saxon Landrentmeister [Master of Revenues for Saxony],
Johann von Mergenthal, who in the year 1476 under the
leadership of Duke Albrecht of Saxony undertook a pilgrimage to Jerusalem
in the retinue of the latter. This journey led him also through
Trent, "where Germany ends and Italy begins." Here the populace
still was feeling the impression of the wicked deed one year after the
bestial murder, and Mergenthal was able to set down his written
report, as it were, "on the scene," in his travel book which was later
published by a D. Hieronymus Weller at
Leipzig.

Because the objection to this record could be made
of [being] a belated account -- inexact because the report did not provide
documentary evidence -- we will not base our own account on it, any more
than upon the pictorial representations of this murder made by
contemporaries, such as (for example) the extremely instructive woodcuts
in the Judentum [Judaism] of Georg Lieb (Volume II of
the Monographien zur deutschen Kulturgeschichte [Monographs for
German Cultural History], p. 17/20.)

In the Vienna
Hofbibliothek [Court Library] however, there still today is
incontrovertible evidence: the comprehensive trial documents composed in
medieval judicial Latin of the Trent child-murder from the year
1475! These are not disputable. The 613 folio pages of the Vienna
Codex come from the hand (31) of the recorder
of the Trent trial, Johann v. Fatis Furthermore, the library of the
Vatican at Rome possesses a Latin handwritten codex from the years
1476-78, composed following the Trent ritual-murder trial from the
year 1475/76. Pope Sixtus IV charged a commission of six
cardinals and outstanding jurists in Rome with the task of re-checking
once again the trial documents. The most important Italian legal scholar
of his time, Franz Panvino of Padua, held the chairmanship of this
commission. This was the context in which the codex was composed. This
interesting manuscript was made use of on many occasions, as emerges from
the frequent marginalia, but was then missing again for centuries. In a
special Bull of 20 July 1478, Sixtus IV had declared the
court procedure to be faultless and bestowed the highest praise upon the
conscientiousness of the judges -- and Pope Benedict XIV designated
the codex as authentic. In 1881 this old manuscript was
rediscovered and published in excerpt form in the Italian newspaper
Civilità cattolica. In the governorship archive at Innsbruck
the Catholic vicar Dr. Jos. Deckert was in charge of over 200
document files (interrogation protocols), letters and drafts relating to
Simon of Trent, originally preserved in the Consistorial Archive of Trent
and originating in the year 1475; Deckert published the result of
this in the framework of his 1893 treatise : Vier Tiroler
Kinder, Opfer des chassideischen Fanatismus, which had as consequence,
that today there still exists but one copy of this "dangerous" work in one
single public library of Greater Germany! [and
today??]

In 1588 [the year of the Spanish Armada] and
in 1593 a so-called Relatio italica was printed at Trent.
The historiographers already mentioned several times, the
Bollandists (Acta sanct., Martii, tom. III, p. 494 etc.)
worked from it and, what is of most significance for us, they included in
their report a detailed letter of the famous physician Hans Mathias
Tiberinus, who had to examine the body as expert witness and already
14 days later communicated his findings to the city council at
Brixen. In addition, the indisputable and fully objective findings
from the examination of the body, determined by three Trent physicians
still before the arrest of the villains, have been handed down to
us! They convey to us in the most precise way the horrible (32) manner of death of the 28 month-old, who was
later beatified by the Church.

The confessions of the eight main
accused, held in solitary confinement and also separately questioned,
which coincided in the smallest details, however, yield the following
shocking picture: In the first days of Holy Week of the year
1475, in which the Passover feast fell on Holy Thursday, the
heads of the Jewish families of Trent arrived at the house of the most
respected of them, by the name of Samuel, on whose property the
local meeting place of the Jews, the synagogue, as well as the Jewish
school were situated. They were complaining about the fact that the Easter
baking of the matzos could not be prepared because the blood from a
Christian child was lacking. Samuel offered a "prize" of 100 gold Ducats
for the procurement of the sacrificial victim. The Jew Tobias
betook himself into the streets which were nearly empty of human traffic
around the time of the evening Mass on Holy Thursday. Before the house of
his parents a 28-month-old child was at play, Simon Gerber. He was
lured away with games to the house of Samuel and there locked within until
full darkness.

The eldest of the Jews, an old man of 80 years,
Moses "the Old One," began the slaughtering by ripping out a piece of
flesh from the child's right cheek with pincers; the other Jews followed
suit. The down-flowing blood was caught in a tin platter. In a similar
manner the right leg was mutilated. The remaining parts of the body were
punctured with long, thick needles (acum a pomedello), in order to
obtain the last of the blood. Finally the circumcision was performed. At
the conclusion, the executioners imitated the crucifixion, in that they
held the convulsively jerking creature stretched in the four directions
with the feet extended uppermost (in modum crucis), as the rest of
the Jews again pierced him with needles and sharp instruments. The
murderers screeched: "That is what we did with Jesus, to [such an end] may
all our enemies come forever." The still weakly breathing child was killed
by smashing his skull bones; at this, the Jews joined in a hymn of praise
to Yahweh. The child's blood was collected into a pot and divided among
the individual Jewish families. The Easter banquet could be
prepared.

(33)The child's corpse,
displayed upon the Almenor (altar) of the synagogue on Good Friday and
befouled, mocked and profaned by all of the Jews residing in Trent,
was -- after it had temporarily been hidden under the straw of a
storehouse -- finally thrown into a watery ditch which flowed past in the
vicinity of the house. In order to divert from themselves the suspicion
which was growing ever stronger, the Jewish criminals believed themselves
to be especially cunning when they were first to give report to the Bishop
of Trent of the horrifying discovery of a mutilated child body, after the
parents, supported by numerous inhabitants, had vainly searched and the
city gates had been closed as a precaution. Yet they thereby delivered
themselves up [to justice]. The type of wounds, never before seen, and the
tender age of the victim brought the authors and instigators [of the
crime] before the court. Here they finally admitted -- separately
questioned from one another -- all details of the shameful crime. The
wives of two of the main accused gave the informative statement that
already, in earlier years, similar child-murders had been performed
which had all, however, remained undiscovered.

During the trial
three attested documents were presented concerning four Jewish
child-murders, which all occurred in the Diocese of Constance, and
two blood-murders in Endingen, another in Ravensburg
(1430) and one in Pfullendorf (1461). Moreover, two
of the accused admitted to the Protocol their complicity in the
child-murders in Padua, where in earlier centuries several children
were slaughtered, and at Regensburg, where a child had been bled to
death.

The trial, conducted by the Trent authorities with
extraordinary thoroughness, extended over three full years; just under the
date 7 July 1478 there appears in the documents the note (Rome):
causa contra Judaeos finita! There were good reasons for this long
duration of the proceedings!

The rich Jews of Italy, although in
their social standing still held within certain limits, exercised a great
influence already at that time by means of their money and their
physicians at the courts of Italian princes and even at the papal court.
Supported by their well-off racial comrades living abroad, particularly in
the commercial regions (34) of South Germany,
they set heaven and hell in motion to suppress the Trent trial or at least
to salvage what was still to be salvaged -- "for the golden calf bestirred
itself: and the Jews from all nations pooled much money and accomplished
much with it." (Judenbüchlein of D. Joh Eck!)

The uprisings
against the Jews of Italy up until then had been caused, as in other
nations, mostly by their inhuman usury, which even many princes favored
for various reasons -- "loans" at 80-100% [interest rates] and more were
the rule. Now however, through Trent, "things were coming to light which
the Jews wished to be covered by eternal night" (Deckert). A thirst for
blood, a satanic fanaticism was revealed which surpassed any capacity of
the imagination; rumors which till then had been constantly nourished by
bad experiences, had found their confirmation, that in human society
racially alien individuals, with complete consciousness, murder and
slaughter in order to obtain blood for ritual purposes, and that all this
is grounded in tradition kept with strict secrecy! What wonder, that no
means was left untried -- from gold to poison. . . According to Deckert,
one passage (p. 15) in the documents reads exactly: "The people of Trent
would like to preserve the honor of their paternal city according
to their powers against the Jews, who would have set heaven and hell into
motion in order to obtain in Rome (!) one commissioner favorable to
their case. They procured many patrons for themselves with money. .
."

We begin with the prince in charge, Duke Sigismund of
Austria: he had the trial stop for the first time, just a few weeks
after its start, during the interrogations. The second interruption
was caused by Pope Sixtus IV, who gave the curt justification that
the arrival of his authorized Legate, whom he had advised
beforehand, should be awaited; Bishop Hinderbach of Trent,
who was conducting the investigation, received a papal letter, according
to which he might not further proceed against the Jews, because some
princes disapproved of the whole case!

The announced Papal
Legate then made his appearance in the person of the "Commissar" Bishop
Baptista dei Giudici (35)von
Ventimiglia, referred to in the documents in the abbreviated form of
his place of birth. He was a favorite of the Pope, his countryman and most
intimate confidante. In the letter already cited, he is most
enthusiastically recommended by the Pope as "Professor of Theology," as
"vir doctrina ac integritate praeditus" [i.e., "a man gifted in
doctrine and with integrity"], and therefore a man "outstanding" in
scholarship and honesty. If we have the right, considering "our
mental disposition" (Paul Nathan), to doubt the first quality, then it is
all the more worthwhile to examine more closely the second when it comes
to the matter of excerpts from the documents!

On his way from Rome
to Trent, he appeared in Venice in the company of three Jews, but
had to "withdraw from there unwelcomed" due to the prevailing mood of the
populace, which was hostile to Jews. "There can be no doubt that the Jews,
through their influence at the Papal Court" -- so wrote the
Catholic Vicar Deckert -- "managed to get Ventimiglia [appointed]
as Legate, as a man favorable to their interests."

In
Trent the Legate was -- as he himself admits in a letter --
received in the friendliest fashion by Bishop Hinderbach; the
latter put at his disposal his magnificent castle as living quarters and
supported him in the most willing way in the investigation of the entire
affair. But shortly after his arrival, Ventimiglia -- who had
openly shown his friendliness to Jews -- entered into close relations with
the Jewish spy "Wolfgang." After barely three weeks he found his quarters
in the bishop's palace too damp and unsuitable, complained about his
affected health and withdrew to Roveredo -- in truth,
Hinderbach would have been able to keep too close an eye on him:
"In Trent no one could have come to him without jeopardy (that is,
unseen!) for fear of the bishop (Hinderbach) and the people; but
there [Roveredo] he would have a more secure place." There, in
Roveredo, in the Jewish headquarters, the wealthy Jews had
assembled with their lawyers; already on the 24th of September,
Ventimiglia could report to Hinderbach that "the advocates
of the Jews have appeared before him, in order to defend their case. . ."
Moreover, they put forward the proposal that the trial documents be turned
over to them; they, the Jews, had given him to understand at the same time
that they would procure the remedies for the restoration of his,
the Legate's, health!

(36) On the 1st of
October 1475 Hinterbach complained that he has seen through
"the intrigues of the faithless Jews and bad Christians," who "having been
bought by money and presents, win over the minds of the princes and of
some prelates and draw them to their side. . .The Jews and some
doctors [= university scholars] sit at Roveredo where the Legate
also is staying under the pretext of poor health. They are seeking
to diminish the documents and make them disdained
(extenuare et floccipendere). They consult on a daily basis in
Roveredo. . .they seek to win influence with the Doge (Mocenigo
of Venice - we will yet have occasion to return to his machinations!),
so that he will intervene for the release of the Jews still imprisoned.
The Jews were looking to bribe all, and already, so one hears, they
had managed to obtain much from the Pope and some cardinals at Rome; but
one could hardly believe it. . ."

The priest (!) Paul de
Novaria, a Jewish spy, had slipped into the Bishop's castle and for
two months copied the trial documents, since Hinderbach had not
delivered these to the Jewish attorneys. In a trial convened in connection
with this [i.e., the copying of the documents by de Novaria], this
"priest" admitted to having been in negotiation with the Jews of
Novarra, Modena, Brescia, Venice,
Bassano and Roveredo for the freeing of the imprisoned Jews.
He had advised removing the grating from the ditch so that the witnesses
could say that little Simon had fallen into the ditch and been swept away.
. .He had received funds from the Jews with which to bribe the valet of
the Bishop, so that the former would poison the Bishop; 400 Ducats
had been promised to him, should his plan succeed.

The Bishop's
Secretary, Gregor, had been assigned the leadership of this part of
the trial. At the beginning of the trial the accused priest refused to
confess orally, he would only do so in writing. In an unguarded
moment, he cut off his tongue "scaplro liberario -- thus, with a
pen-knife -- and threw it into the toilet. . .The same priest Paul
had still been hired to poison the city magistrate of Trent, Hans v.
Salis.

To give the trial against the ritual-murderers yet
another twist, through a shameful maneuver (37)
(promises of money, a hoax involving a letter of safe-conduct) a
completely unsuspecting incorruptible Trent citizen by the name of
Anzelin was lured to Roveredo, held prisoner in his quarters
by Ventimiglia against all law and tortured daily so that he
would accuse a Trent couple (Zanesus Schweizer) of the child's
murder! Later, this unfortunate man stated that the Papal Legate inflicted
upon him a "painful interrogation" (= torture) so that he would say
what he knew nothing about. . .For the most part he was hidden
under a bed; only when Jewish visitors had come was he allowed to
emerge. Every evening Jews came to them to consult with the Legate. The
Jews had often counted out money. Finally, because nothing could be
gotten from him, he was released on condition that he would say nothing
about the incident!

Since this scandal, too, had proven
ineffective, Ventimiglia grasped at a final remedy: on the basis of
forged instructions ostensibly from the Pope, he attempted to pull
the entire trial illegally into his own hands with the removal of the
Trent authorities, indeed, his presumption went so far as to forbid
the Trent Bishop any further proceedings against the Jews, under
the threat of excommunication and being denied entry to the church;
Ventimiglia encouraged the Jews to admit nothing, and told them
that they would soon all be at liberty!

But "in these long,
hard struggles for truth and justice" (Deckert) Hinderbach, who was
surrounded by German men who were impervious to Jewish bribery,
finally came off the victor. Through his energy a trial procedure had been
made possible, which can stand as a laudable exception before history and
its research and which can still, centuries later, supply us with the most
valuable material.

At the end of October 1475,
Hinderbach gave a report about the exact investigation, the capture
of the guilty, their consistent confessions, and their just conviction to
all eligible princes. He possessed the courage to designate the
"investigation" which the Papal Legate had begun, concisely as well
devastatingly in his accounting, as curruptam
inquisitionem.

(38)Ventimiglia had finally dug his own grave:
his "mission" had taken on such a scandalous shape that the Pope had to
leave him to his fate, good or bad. The populace had risen against the
Legate and mocked him in derisive songs as Caiaphas [i.e., the High Priest
who plotted Christ's death] and as "pseudoantistes Judaeorum"
[antistes, the Latin term for a temple overseer or priest; thus: a
pretended high priest of the Jews] much to the anger of the Pope. "But it
has displeased the Pope that his Legate has been everywhere convicted
[i.e., in the judgement of the people] of injustice, that
satires and epigrams have been published against him and that he has also
been mocked pictorially. Hinderbach would like to put a stop
to this in his diocese" (documents). At the end of 1477 in an
energetic letter, Hinderbach asked the Pope "to make an end to this
scandal at last. . .all are rebelling against this, and he (the Pope)
might want to appoint another man Commissar, who would be a friend of
the truth."

"Rarely has a Legate so deeply damaged the papal
prestige in Germany..." (Deckert).

Baptista dei Giudici von
Ventimiglia withdrew grudgingly to Benevento. In order that
their valuable ally not completely drop from their sight, the Jews leased
a garden behind his house, "to have easy access to him," according to a
letter of 23 March 1481. No successor was named; apparently
Rome had no one whom it could hold as immune to Jewish attempts at
bribery.

Hinderbach, born in Hesse (born 1418 at
Rauschenberg in Hesse) in observance of his governmental duties conducted
the trial to its just conclusion despite indescribable difficulties. He
had spurned at repeated intervals high sums of money from Jewish
bribery (as can be concluded from his own letters), which was all the more
to his credit since he often had to struggle with financial embarrassment.
He did not even fear death by poison, which had been threatened for
him.

"With him stood courageously in the battle the German men,
Podestà of Trent, Hans v. Salis, and the city chief Jacob v.
Spaur, who bowed neither to Jewish nor to Italian intrigues, as is
provable from repeated documentary protestations"
(Deckert).

Because of the threatening danger of plague, the
approbation of the trial documents in Rome was delayed. (39)Finally, on the 20th of June 1478, the
Bull of Pope Sixtus IV to Bishop Hinderbach confirmed that
the trial against the Jews had been conducted ad normam veri juris
[= to the standard of true or valid law]. The children of the executed
Jews were supposed to be baptized.

According to the
Judenbüchlein of D. Eck, Trent cost the Jews 120,000 Gulden. "For
the Jews, according to their practice, have exerted themselves with
gold and money so that [their] misdeeds be suppressed; they offered Duke
Sigismund many thousand Gulden if he would let the Jews off; they
wanted to build a new castle for Bishop Johann v. Hinderbach. .
."

Those who had been convicted of the crime of child-murder had
died the most shameful sort of death: after having been broken on the
wheel they were next tortured and burned. Moses "the Old One," the head of
the Jewish community, had already killed himself in prison. Four of those
who were complicit or accomplices were baptized and pardoned.

The
synagogue-house of Samuel was torn down and Hinderbach had a chapel
for the victim erected on the site, which was enlarged in 1647
through donations of the citizens of Trent. Since attacks by Jewish rabble
were feared, Emperor Maximilian gave orders for the guarding of the
grave of the martyr, whose name was accepted into the Roman Martyrology
under Gregory XIII. In 1480, Hinderbach had to
address the bishops of Italy in a circular due to misuse by mendicant
friars of the collection for the holy martyr Simon! To the present day,
Simon of Trent is the patron saint of the Diocese of Trent and his
feast day is celebrated on the fourth Sunday after Easter. In the 19th
century, no Jew dared to spend a single night in the city of
Trent (13). A
special brotherhood had [instituted] a watch over it, so that the old
edict of banishment against the Jews was upheld and executed.

On
the altar of the church of San Pietro of Trent stands the
sarcophagus of the child, which holds the still extraordinarily
well-preserved body in a crystal casket. The body rests naked on a pillow
and the countless wounds, according to the report (1893) of (40)Deckert, for whom it was made possible to view
the relics of the "santo bambino," are still clearly recognizable:
"Whoever, though, expects today to see in the relics of the child merely a
mummified skeleton, is totally mistaken. The body is still completely
well-preserved. . .Held to the light, I even saw the fine hair of the
head. The wound of the right cheek is clear to see; similar to it are
numerous piercing wounds over the whole body. . .Over 400 years
have elapsed since the death of the child, and that's how well the relics
are preserved. . ." Even the tools of torture, the pincers, knife, needles
and a cup in which the blood was caught, are preserved in this
chapel.

The Trent trial documents(14) from
the year 1475 found a late so-called "revision" by the Jew
Moritz Stern, in the Jewish sense of course, faithful to the
principle: what is not deniable must be at least subsequently falsified
and distorted, so that in the end someone not initiated must receive a
totally distorted picture. Upon this irresponsible type of portrayal, a
German researcher of world reputation, Dr. Erich Bischoff, whom no
one could bring under the embarrassing suspicion of "anti-Semitism,"
passed a devastating judgment in his foundation-making work in this
subject of 1929, Das Blut in jüdischem Schriftum und Brauch
[Blood in Jewish Scripture and Custom]. It may be taken as evidence
of bad conscience that Moritz Stern occupied himself merely with
the the already widely available, allegedly coerced-by-torture statements
of his racial comrades -- but simply held back the most important thing,
the Protocol of the three physicians which was received before the
interrogation! That Stern finally accuses the Trent Bishop
Hinderbach, presiding at the time of the murder, without any
indication of reason and proof, of "preparing" the trial documents after
[the trial], serves only as a rounding out of what has already been said
about these "researches" by competent experts.

The Trent
pronouncement of sentence took drastic measures; one could almost have
promised a lasting effect from it. Yet already, five years later, in
1480, in the (41) Portobuffole
region, belonging to the Republic of Venice, the seven year-old boy
Sebastian Novello of Bergamo is slaughtered by several Jews. Here
too the case against the Jews could be made and their guilt proved beyond
doubt in interminable hearings. On St. Mark's Place in Venice, in
front of the Doge's Palace, the criminals were publicly
burned.

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Copyright 2001 by R. Belser.
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