March 26 -- The Feast of the Blood Libel Martyrs

Somebody murdered the little boys.  Someone abducted them, tortured them, killed them, and then discarded their mutilated bodies.  And rather than discover the murderers or live with the uncomfortable truth that the crimes would remain unsolved, local mobs across Europe compounded the horror with more torture and murder.  And theft and ostracism.

The blood libel in action

The root of the back story is this: when the mutilated corpse of a child turned up somewhere, the story would surface that Jews practiced ritual human sacrifice.  Sometimes, the story was told that Jews re-enacted the Crucifixion before bleeding the child to death.  Below, I note the proximity of the deaths to Easter.  Often, the story included the belief that the blood of a Christian child was a necessary (or at least desirable) ingredient in matzoh for Passover.  Mobs then called for justice revenge the blood of Jews. Individual circumstances of blood libel varied, and some variations are worth noting, but that's the general pattern.

Little William on the Cross

 Case I:  William of Norwich --  The monk Thomas of Monmouth recorded this story in excruciating detail -- pun intended, since he said poor little William was hung on a cross with a crown of thorns and everything.  A Court was convened in the Norwich Cathedral, but the King's Sheriff reminded the Bishop that the Church had no legal authority over the Jews.  The Sheriff's intervention saved dozens, perhaps hundreds, of lives and if anybody ought to be a saint, it is the unnamed sheriff.  One guy who deserves no praise is Theobald of Cambridge, a former Jew who joined the monastery at Monmouth after accepting Christian baptism.  He told of a Jewish belief that to recover Israel they would need to sacrifice one Christian child every year.  A lottery was held at a secret annual Jewish meeting in Narbonne to determine which country had to offer that year's sacrifice; England was selected for 1144, the year William died.  His death was an extended process, by the way, lasting through most of Holy Week (the seven days before Easter).

Case II: Harold of Gloucester -- Not many details, except that he was killed in 1168 and Jews were blamed.  I don't doubt that the resulting frenzy was brutal.  His feast is on March 25; Easter fell on March 31 in 1168.

Case III:   Robert of Bury St. Edmunds -- The death of a child named Robert in 1181, again coincident with the Easter season, occasioned another spike in anti-Semitic violence.  Not many details of the immediate fallout are recorded, but a Palm Sunday massacre of Jews in 1190 killed fifty-seven people, and within a decade, all Jews were expelled from Bury St. Edmunds.   

Little Hugh

Case IV: Little Saint Hugh of Lincoln -- How are you not going to be moved by the murder of Little Saint Hugh, right?  Doesn't he sound like the most cherubic little victim ever? Even though his death did not occur around Easter (he disappeared on July 31, 1255 and the corpse was discovered on August 29 of that year), it was still an opportunity for blood libel.  A Jewish man named Copin was arrested, tortured, and executed after confessing.  But King Henry III, who had sold the tax revenues from Jews to his brother Richard, saw an opportunity to make a few extra pounds sterling in the case.  Property confiscations belong to the Crown so if he could get more confessions from Jews, he could grab their wealth after killing them.  He rounded up ninety and started the torture.  Eighteen confessed and were executed before his brother Richard complained that it was just an attempt to swindle him out of the tax revenue he had bought.  Henry shrugged and sent the other seventy-two home, but kept the property of the eighteen he had already killed. 

Simon and his killers

Case V:  Simon of Trent -- In 1247, eight years before Henry III was racking Jews for the murder of Little Saint Hugh, Pope Innocent IV had forbidden ritual murder trials, noting all the abuse and anti-Semitic violence.  [I guess King Hank hadn't gotten the memo.]  But when the corpse of a two-year old Jewish boy turned up in the cellar of a Jewish family's home on Easter Sunday in 1475, the local Prince-Bishop, Johannes von Hinderbach, wasn't letting a two hundred year old papal decretum get in the way of justice.  Twenty-three arrests resulted in eight executions, one jailhouse suicide, and innumerable abrasions, contusions, burns, dislocated joints, and broken bones.  Pope Sixtus IV ordered the trials suspended and then sent a Dominican bishop named Baptista Dei Giudici to investigate the interrogations.  Prince-Bishop von Hinderbach, governing a conquered Italian city on behalf of the German Emperor, wasn't afraid of a pope.  He kept a fire under the kettle of public opinion, angling to get little Simon canonized.  The two bishops got into a real pissing match when Herr von Hinderbach ordered another six Jews put to death in January 1476, prompting Dei Guidici to play the Pope card.  A Commission of Cardinals was assembled, and with more diplomacy than honesty, they found no fault with what had been done, but they forbade any further violence or extortion against Jews.

Case VI:  Christopher of Toledo -- In 1491, a Spanish Jew named Yuce confessed to the murder of a Christian boy named Christopher.  The following year, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella issued an edict, expelling all Jews from Spain on penalty of death.   'Nuff said.

Case VII:  Gavriil Bialystoksky --  In the Orthodox calendar, Easter fell on April 30, 1690.   Little Gavriil, whose feasts seem to be celebrated on April 20 and May 3, was killed over the course of nine days of blood-letting.  That's a lot of matzoh to make, but perhaps there were a lot of Jews to be fed in Bialystok, a town that was in Belarus and is now in Poland.  A Jew named Shutko (every source seems to lack details about him and his fate) was accused, but the focus in all accounts remains of the little martyred Orthodox saint whose body lies in Bialystok Cathedral, where pilgrims still venerate it.

Jesse Pomeroy -- not a Jew

I am pleased to say that little Horace Millin is not Case VIII.  Although his mutilated corpse was discovered in Dorchester Bay (Boston), no Jews were blamed and no cannibalistic recipes for matzoh were published.  Instead, a "mentally deficient" fourteen-year-old boy named Jesse Pomeroy,  who had already done time for assaulting young children, was arrested.  He was also charged with the murder of Katie Curran, whose body was found in the basement of Pomeroy's mother's dress shop.  I focus on little Horace, because my great-grandmother was a Millin, and apparently Grampy (or his brother, Alfred) testified at a clemency hearing that if Pomeroy were ever released, my ancestors would kill him.  Lived to be seventy-three years old and was never released.

My point may have been lost in this voluminous post, so allow me to recap.  Deranged people have been torturing and killing children for centuries, perhaps for millennia.  The victims in these murders are not just the children, but also those who were wrongly accused, tortured, dispossessed, and even murdered.  Sometimes these retaliatory murders were committed out of fear, ignorance, and mob fervor.  Other times, it was sheer exploitation of the situation for personal gain.  There have been martyrs and sinners and the occasional saint, like the unnamed sheriff of Norwich and Baptista Dei Guidici, but mostly there are just people who don't understand how to make bad things stop happening.