( Jewish smell) reflected the association of Jews with the supernatural realm of
evil. The thirteenth-century Austrian poet Seifried Helbling claimed, “There
was never a state so large that a mere thirty Jews would not saturate it with
stench and unbelief.” Some Christians believed that even if a Jew accepted
baptism, he could not shed the stench. Some historians have argued, some-
what anachronistically, that the belief in a Jewish stench marked the
beginnings of biological or proto-racial Jew-hatred.
Once Jews were seen as allies of the devil or as the Antichrist, it was possible
to accuse them of iniquitous crimes such as Host desecration, ritual murder, and
well poisoning. Host desecration referred to Jews being accused of stabbing
Communion wafers and defiling sacramental wine, thereby reenacting the
Crucifixion again and again. In retrospect, this accusation was absurd: Jews did
not believe in the doctrine of transsubstantiation. Yet in the odd logic of the
medieval Christendom, once the church propounded some dogma, it was
regarded as necessarily true, and all Christians were required to believe it.
More devastating was the accusation of ritual murder, also known as the
blood libel. Jews were accused of killing a Christian child in order to use the
blood of the victim for sacramental purposes, such as making Passover mat-
zoth. This accusation derived from a medieval notion that blood had certain
power; it was also used in sorcery, witchcraft, and healing rituals. Recently,
some historians have suggested that the Christian belief in the blood libel
originated during the First Crusade, when rumors abounded about Jewish
parents killing their own children in a fit of piety. Once the possibility of
Jews killing their own children was introduced, the argument goes, it was not
especially far-fetched to presume that Jews would kill a Christian child for
sacramental purposes. Originally, these accusations were not associated with
Passover, but they often coincided with Passion Week. The belief was that
Jews killed a Christian child in order to mock the Christian commemoration
of the Crucifixion.
The earliest recorded blood libel took place in Norwich, England, in
- Subsequent blood libels took place in Gloucester in 1168, in Blois in
1171, and in Saragossa in 1182. During the thirteenth century, one of the
more notorious incidents took place in Lincoln in 1255. The day after a
local wedding, the body of a boy named Hugh of Lincoln, who had been
missing for over three weeks, was found in a cesspool. According to an
alleged eyewitness, Matthew Paris, the child had first been fattened for ten
days with white bread and milk, and then Jews from all over England were
invited to attend a mock crucifixion. Subsequently, a Jew named Copin was
forced to confess that the boy had been mock-crucified to injure Christ
before being killed. One hundred Jews were arrested, including Copin, and
nineteen were hanged without trial. The rest were saved when Richard of
Cornwall, to whom most Jews in England at the time paid taxes, interceded
to protect his property.
The Jews of medieval Christendom 91