The Butcher's Tale

By Helmut Walser Smith. This is what historians call "post hole history." To say that is a very deep dive is an understatement. The sources are interrogations, court transcripts, and census records associated with Konitz, a small town in what was then German East Prussia. 

The crime was horrendous: an 18-year-old boy was suffocated or strangled and then dismembered expertly and wrapped and tied as though he was coming from a butcher. Bad enough, but rapidly this turned in the popular imagination of the town into a Jewish sacrifice of a Christian for blood to make matzohs. Antisemitic journalists soon arrived to throw liquid oxygen on a gasoline fire. 

This book examines not only the crime itself but how the assumptions of the locals spun this positively medieval blood libel into a widely believed story. While some local prosecutors pursued the blood libel idea, responsible aristocrats and bureaucrats recognized it as an absurd claim and provided troops to protect Konitz's Jewish community when local police were overwhelmed by numbers. Amazingly enough, it did not turn into a pogrom.

He examines in detail the underlying questions of how neighbors turn against neighbors and why the blood libel persisted into remarkably recent times in Europe, in spite of strong papal opposition.  Much of this discussion is not spectacularly interesting to me, but as detective story, it works well. 

Fortunately, Democrats are looking for other ways to demonize the Jews; blood libel is even too much for MSNOW.