Anti-semitism: Myth and Hate from Antiquity to the Present

68 ANTISEMITISM
house, “fell on his knees, made the sign of the cross, and wept like a child. ‘Mr.
Beilis,’ he said after a while, ‘you know that my action puts me in some danger.
My conscience would not let me do otherwise. I came to ask forgiveness in the
name of my people.’ He kissed my hand.” 47 Beilis received many letters of
sympathy, but the radical Right persisted in maintaining his guilt, and their
ominous threats to him and his family were one reason why he left the country.
And antisemites in other lands remained unconvinced. In an article entitled
“Ritual Murder among the Jews,” published in the respectable Catholic
Bulletin and Book Review (Dublin), the writer praised the “calm, deliberate, disinterested,
and expert testimony [for the prosecution] of highly conscientious
men” and attributed the verdict to “world-wide ... powerful and unscrupulous
intimidation” engaged in by Jewish communities. 48
As a rule, the European Catholic press, including several publications
with close ties to the Vatican, presented ritual murder as an uncontestable fact
and a religious obligation required by the Jewish faith. In numerous articles
that amounted to a campaign, they propagated, often in the crudest terms, this
calumny that several medieval popes had condemned. Thus in 1895 the Jesuit
journal Civiltà Cattolica published “Jewish Morality and the Mystery of
Blood,” by the Jesuit priest Saverio Rondina, who wrote: “All the veils have
now been lifted, and the Judaic secret has been revealed in all its horrors. Up
until now, we have known from centuries-long experience that the Jew sucked
Christian blood, but for the most part people did not realize that this was
something they did out of principle, in obedience to their law.” 49 This revival
and propagation of the blood libel met no resistance from popes and leading
prelates, who generally believed in the truth of the accusation. At the end of
the nineteenth century, three eminent English Catholics, led by the Cardinal-
Archbishop of Westminster, petitioned Pope Leo XIII to condemn ritual murder
as some of his medieval predecessors had done; the formal rejection
explained that “ritual murder is a historical certainty,” that the Vatican could
not act in behalf of “a few dupes in England,” to do so would cause “scandal.”
50 Similar inaction on the part of the Vatican prevailed at the time of the
Beilis case.
POSTSCRIPT
After the Beilis case there were still outbreaks of the ancient calumny. In 1927
and 1928 ritual murder charges were leveled against Jews in Zaklikow, Poland;
Petrovo Selo, Yugoslavia; Cologne, Germany; and Salonika, Greece. In its attempt
to demonize the Jewish people, Der Stürmer, the Nazi weekly paper ed-