41845358-Antisemitism

62 ANTISEMITISM
by the Jews during the Catholic Middle Ages was deserved; it was simply the
result of their barbarous practices and fossil religion. Thus Univers, a French
Catholic paper, declared: “The affair ... is of incontestable importance. It has
recalled the accusations so often repeated by our forefathers against the Jewish
population dispersed among them, avid for their money ... and at times
stained with their blood. This is what explains those persecutions that some
try to turn into a historical scandal, but which, in fact, only constituted legitimate
self-defense.” 35 In the decades after the Damascus case, the Univers continued
to engage in vociferous attacks on the Jewish people.
In Britain the Tablet, a new Catholic weekly that dissented from prevailing
Catholic opinion, attacked the Univers for lending “its countenance to those
monstrous charges” and chided it for ignoring the fact that confessions had
been exacted by torture. It drew a compelling comparison: “We confess that
we feel warmly on this matter. We too know what it is to be a minority. ...
Men now alive can remember that, in the cities of this very empire, poor deluded
Protestants believed that on Good Friday innocent children were murdered
for the purpose of Catholic worship. ... Is it for us to be the ready
receivers, on no evidence at all, of wholesale calumnies against others?” 36
Appeals from several Western governments and a delegation of Jews,
headed by Adolphe Crémieux, a prominent French lawyer, and Sir Moses
Montefiore, an English dignitary, which met with Muslim authorities in Cairo
and Constantinople led to the release of the imprisoned Jews. The European
Catholic press expressed outrage at the Jews’ release, and for many decades
the Catholics of Damascus told tourists the tale of “poor saint Thomas,” a victim
of Jewish inhumanity, and how the plotting of powerful foreign Jews enabled
his murderers to escape justice.
In the nineteenth century the Habsburg Empire witnessed several accusations
of ritual murder. Between 1829 and 1844, three separate instances of missing
children produced blood libels. In two instances the children were murdered
by their mothers; in the third, the young boy fled mistreatment. On April 1,
1882, a fourteen-year-old girl disappeared in the small Hungarian town of
Tiszaeszlar. (It was later learned that she had committed suicide by drowning.)
Rumors circulated that she was a victim of ritual murder. Among the accusers
were town officials and the local priest; antisemitic deputies in the Hungarian
parliament supported the charge. In the trial held the following year, the fifteen
accused Jews were exonerated, but attacks on Jews that followed the acquittal
compelled the government to proclaim a state of emergency.
Among those testifying for the prosecution was August Rohling, an unfrocked
priest. In 1871 Rohling had published Der Talmudjude (The Talmud