History of the Jews in Russia and Poland (Vol. 1-3). Dubnow Simon

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СКАЧАТЬ the bodies of the preacher and elder, which had to be exhumed for this purpose (1737).

      The sentence had first to be ratified by the King, and the Jewish representatives in Warsaw and Dresden, the latter city being the second capital of the King and the residence of the papal nuncio, employed every possible means to bring about a reversal of the judgment. It was difficult to influence Augustus III., the dull-witted monarch, who, in addition, was imbued with a goodly dose of anti-Semitism. But the noise caused by the trial at Posen and the pressure upon the King on the part of the Jewish bankers of Vienna, particularly the banking-house of Wertheimer, induced him to yield. After a prolonged interval and a second revision of the case by a royal commission, the King gave orders to free the Jews, who had languished in prison for four years (August, 1740). On this occasion he went out of his way to enjoin the magistracy of Posen not to resort to tortures in similar trials, but he could not refrain at the same time from prescribing to the Jews "rules of conduct" after the medieval pattern: not to pass too frequently beyond the boundaries of their ghetto (which had been preserved in Posen), not to associate with Christians, nor caress Christian children, nor keep Christian domestics, nor attend Christian patients, etc.

The favorable issue of the Posen trial was due to the fact that it took place in a large Jewish community, whose representatives were able to arouse the public opinion of Western Europe and secure the intervention of influential persons. But in the distant corners of Poland, in the obscure Jewish communities of the country, the ritual murder trials were in the nature of ghastly nightmares. Such was the trial of Zaslav, a town in Volhynia, which originated in 1747 as the result of a fatal concatenation of events. In the springtime, when the snow was melting, the dead body of a Christian was found in a neighboring village, having been buried beneath the snow for a considerable time. It so happened that about the same time the functionaries of the Zaslav synagogue assembled in a neighboring Jewish inn, to celebrate the circumcision of the new-born son of the innkeeper. A peasant who chanced to pass by the inn informed the authorities that the Jews had been praying the whole night as well as eating and amusing themselves, and this suggested to the Bernardine monks of Zaslav that the celebration had some connection with ritual murder, the victim of which was the discovered dead body. The Jewish innkeeper, the Kahal elder, the hazan (cantor), the mohel (surgeon), and the beadle of the Zaslav synagogue, were indicted. The accused, in spite of dreadful tortures, reiterated that they had assembled to celebrate a circumcision. Only the youthful beadle Moyshe, crazed by the tortures, began to murmur something, repeating the words which were dictated to him by the accusers, though he afterwards withdrew the confession thus forced from him.156 The accused were all sentenced to a monstrous death, possible only among savages. Some of the accused were placed on an iron pale, which slowly cut into their body, and resulted in a slow, torturous death. The others were treated with equal cannibalism; their skin was torn off in strips, their hearts cut out, their hands and feet amputated and nailed to the gallows. The memorial prayer for these martyrs concludes with the Biblical words: "O earth, cover not thou their blood, and let their cry have no place, until the Lord shall look down from heaven!"

      However, the cry of the Zaslav martyrs was drowned by the shouts of the new victims of the ritual murder myth, which transformed the Christians who consciously or unconsciously allowed themselves to be infected by its poison into cannibals.

The Zaslav trial was followed by an uninterrupted succession of ritual murder accusations, which in the course of fifteen years cropped up almost annually. The most revolting among them, from the point of view of the surrounding circumstances, were the trials of Dunaigrod157 (1748), Pavolochi158 and Zhytomir (1753), Yampol159 (1756), Stupnitza, near Pshemyshl (1759), and Voislavitza160 (1760). In the Zhytomir case, twenty-four Jews were accused of having participated in the murder of the peasant boy Studzienski. Exhausted by tortures and prompted by the desire to hasten their end, they confessed to a crime which they had not committed, and were sentenced to death. Eleven were flayed alive, while the others saved themselves from death by accepting baptism. An image of the alleged martyr Studzienski, in the shape of a figure covered with pins, was spread by the clergy all over the region, to intensify the hatred against the Jews. In Voislavitza, near Lublin, the whole Kahal was charged with the murder of a Christian boy for the purpose of squeezing out his blood and mixing it with the unleavened bread. The spiritual leaders and elders of the Jewish community were brought to court. One of the accused, the rabbi, committed suicide while in jail. The remaining four were sentenced to be quartered. Before the execution the priest, holding out the promise of leniency, induced the unfortunate Jews, who had been crazed by their tortures, to embrace Christianity. The leniency consisted in their being beheaded instead of being quartered.

Terrorized by these inquisitorial trials, the Jewish communities of Poland decided, in 1758, to send Jacob Zelig (or Selek)161 to Rome as their spokesman, to obtain from Pope Benedict XIV. the promulgation of a bull forbidding these false accusations against the Jews. In the application submitted by Zelig it is pointed out that the life of the Jews of Poland had become intolerable, for "as soon as a dead body is found anywhere, at once the Jews of the neighboring localities are brought before the courts on the charge of murder for superstitious purposes." The application was turned over to Cardinal Ganganelli, subsequently Pope Clement XIV., who took up the matter very seriously, and suggested that the Papal Nuncio in Warsaw, Visconti, be instructed to submit a report of the recent ritual murder trials in Poland. When the report arrived, Ganganelli composed an elaborate memorandum, in which, as a result of his investigation of the whole history of the question, he demonstrated the falsehood of the ritual murder charges made against the Jews, which had been condemned by the popes in the Middle Ages, particularly by the bull of Innocent IV. of the year 1247.162 In the judgment of Ganganelli all the recent Polish trials were devoid of any basis in fact, and the sentences pronounced by the courts revolting miscarriages of justice.

      Ganganelli's memorandum was examined and approved by the Roman tribunal of the "Holy Inquisition," and submitted to the new Pope Clement XIII. The Pope instructed his nuncio in Warsaw to extend his protection to Zelig, the spokesman of the Jews, on his return to Poland. Subsequently the nuncio informed the Polish Prime Minister Brühl, that "the Holy See, having investigated all the foundations of this aberration, according to which the Jews need human blood for the preparation of their unleavened bread," had come to the conclusion that "there was no evidence whatsoever testifying to the correctness of that prejudice" (1763). King Augustus III. ratified in the same year the ancient charters of his predecessors, promising the Jews the protection of the law in all ritual murder cases. Yet it was not easy to eradicate the prejudices which had been implanted in the minds of the people. Even the educated classes did not escape their contamination. The contemporary writer Kitovich, in describing Polish life during the reign of Augustus III., indulges in the following remark: "Just as the liberty of the Shlakhta is impossible without the liberum veto, so is the Jewish matza impossible without Christian blood."

      7. The Massacre of Uman and the First Partition of Poland

      Undermined by social and denominational strife, the once flourishing country was hastening to its ruin. From the election of Stanislav Augustus Poniatovski to the throne of Poland in 1764, Poland was to all intents and purposes under the protectorate of Russia. Certain elements of Polish society began to realize that only by radical reforms could the country be saved from its impending doom. But it seemed as if the régime of social and religious fanaticism was too decrepit to pass its own death-sentence, and awaited its fate from another hand.

      In the first years of Stanislav Augustus' reign Polish politics ran in their accustomed groove. Instead of endeavoring to СКАЧАТЬ