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Tiszaeszlár, the Blood Libel
Leslie Rübner
[Written in 2011]
“When a wet nurse talks about blood libel, we call it a fairy-tale, from the mouth of the ignorant, superstition, from the educated, nothing less then a smear in bad faith.”
Károly Eötvös
Politician, Solicitor, Poet and Publicist
Springtime is when Jews celebrate Pesach (Passover), the holiday commemorating freedom and the exodus of the Jewish people from Egypt during the reign of the Pharaoh Ramses II. This holiday is about family celebration, sitting around the Seder table discussing the Exodus. Pesach also falls around Easter time, when the Christian community, all over the world, commemorates the Crucifixion. This is the time when priests would tell their flock about Jewish responsibility for the killing of their deity, encouraging many to loot and murder their Jewish neighbours. Springtime in Europe was the time of pogroms and blood libels. There were financial and economic incentives to commit these crimes. This was a good way to acquire goods and property for free. Should your creditors be dead, suddenly your debts are annulled. And of course, there was a political agenda to divert attention from the misrule over of the people and from the misery of the masses. Jews were the scapegoats!
By the way, the word anti-Semitism was coined by a Wilhelm Marr in Hamburg in 1879. Marr had written a pamphlet called “The Victory of Judaism Over Germandom”, this being the first non-Christianity-based Jew-hating literary work, thus turning Judeophobia from religious to racial hatred. Curiously, the first recorded blood libel in European History took place here in England. On the 20th of March 1144 (on Pesach, of course), Jews of Norwich were accused of ritual murder after a boy had been found dead with stab wounds (he was sainted and even today he is referred to as St William of Norwich). Geoffrey Chaucer (author of the “Canterbury Tales”) accused the “cursed Jewes” of infanticide in his manuscripts, “The Prioress’s Tale”. This ridiculous smear continued right up to the 20th Century and beyond.
Menachem Beilis, a Ukrainian Jew, was accused of ritual murder in the 1913 trial, known as the “Beilis trial” or “Beilis affair”. On erev Yom Kippur (eve of the Day of Atonement), the New York State police brought in Rabbi Berel Brennglass of Massena’s Orthodox congregation Adath Israel, for questioning. Four-year-old Barbara Griffiths of Massena had disappeared and Albert Comnas, an immigrant from Greece, charged that, as the highest of Jewish holidays were upon them, the Jews of Massena had kidnapped little Barbara and murdered her for her blood. The police interrogated Rabbi Brennglass for some time about Jewish practises in respect to human sacrifice and the use of blood in kosher food. Fortunately, during the interrogation, Barbara emerged from the woods where, having become lost, she had spent the night in the open. This happened in 1928 in the United States!
Even more recently, in the pogrom on the 4th of July 1946 (!), in the Polish town of Kielce, 39 Polish Jews were massacred and 82 out of about 200 Holocaust survivors were wounded. They had returned home after World War Two.
I could go on and on.
Wikipedia describes blood libels as follows: unfounded allegations that a particular group kills people as a form of human sacrifice, and uses their blood in various rituals. The alleged victims are often children. Jews are the most common target of blood libels, but many other groups have been accused.
In the 1867 Compromise with Austria, the Jewish Community of Hungary was totally emancipated:
“The Jewish population in the country has the same civil and political rights as her Christian inhabitants. All terms of the law which is contradictory herewith rescinded” (Act XVII 1867).
Europeans reacted to the emancipation of Jews in France in 1791, and in Germany in 1871, and I have already mentioned Hungary. Anti-liberal, anti-democratic and reactionary elements started a wave of mass anti-Semitism.
In 1882, 11 years after the emancipation in Germany, the First International Anti-Jewish Congress convened in Dresden, Germany. In the same year, a series of “temporary laws” were confirmed by Czar Alexander III of Russia, which adopted a systematic policy of discrimination, with the object of removing the Jews from their economic and public positions. 1885 saw the expulsion of about 10,000 Russian Jews (Russia’s Jews did not see their emancipation until 1917 in the Communist Revolution), refugees of the 1881-1884 pogroms, from Germany. In 1891, there was a blood libel in Xanten, also in Germany. 1893 saw the establishment of the anti-Semitic Christian Social Party by a Karl Lueger in Vienna, and he became mayor in 1897. The culmination of this wave of anti-Semitism was the Dreyfus case in France in 1894.
All of this madness was the follow up to the events in the small village of Tiszaeszlár in Hungary. There is a history of blood libels in Hungary. For instance, in the case at Nagyszombat (today Trnava, central-western Slovakia), the absurdity and impossibility of the statements forced by torture from women and children shows that the accused preferred death as a means of escape from torture and admitted everything that was asked of them. They even said that Jewish men menstruated, and were drinking Christian blood as a cure for it. And there was the case in Bazin (today in South Western Slovakia, but then in Hungary). In 1529, the charge was made that a nine-year-old boy had been bled to death under cruel circumstances. Thirty Jews, under torture, confessed to the crime and were burned at the stake. The child was later found alive and well in Vienna. The accuser, Count Wolf of Bazin, kidnapped the boy in order to accuse the Jews, to whom he owed large sums of money.
On Saturday, 1st of April 1882, Eszter Solymosi, a 14-year-old domestic maid residing in Tiszaeszlár, was sent to buy paint at the local general store by her employer. She had made her purchase, but instead of returning home, vanished. Trusting their age-old prejudice and superstition, rumours were started that the Jews murdered her for her blood. In Parliament, the “honourable” member for Tiszaeszlár, and the leader of a new anti-Semitic party, proposed as a punishment, the expulsion of the Jews. Propaganda whipped up high passions resulting in acts of violence. As Pesach was approaching (4th of April in that year), according to rumours, her blood was needed for the making of the matza.
On the 4th of May, her mother formally accused the local Jewry of having murdered her daughter and demanded a thorough investigation, which was granted. The county court of Nyiregyháza sent a notary to act as examining judge. After having placed the suspects under surveillance, he cross-examined Sámuel, the five-year-old son of the Shamash (salaried sexton in a synagogue), József Scharf. By means of gifting presents and sweets, women had managed to get a statement from him saying that his father had called Eszter Solymosi into his house. In the interview, the boy stated that in the presence of his father and other men, a shochet (slaughterer) had made an incision in the girl's neck, and bled her in a vessel held by him and his brother Móric. In addition, he said that he had known nothing about the missing girl. The Shamash, his son Móric, (who was nearly 14 years old) and the other suspects denied any knowledge of the disappearance and murder. On 19th of May, Mr and Mrs Scharf were arrested and imprisoned. On the evening of the same day, Móric was handed to a policeman, who took him to a house in a nearby village, where the court clerk was ordered to watch over the boy. The clerk and the police officer apparently connived to make Móric the instrument of a blood libel. After considerable intimidation, persuasion, threats and beatings, the boy confessed that after the Sabbath morning service, his father, needing a Shabbat Goy (non-Jew), had called Esther to his house to remove some candlesticks from the table, and that a Jewish beggar staying in their house, had led the girl to the entrance hall of the synagogue and attacked her there; after having her undressed, two shochets had held her while a third slit her throat and emptied the blood into a dish (by coincidence, three strangers, applicants for the position of reader and shochet, had come to Tiszaeszlár to be tried out on that Sabbath, and had remained in the synagogue after morning service). All this, according to his confession, Móric had observed through the keyhole of the synagogue door. He also saw that after the operation, a rag was tied around the girl’s neck and her body dressed again in the presence of four congregants. The police officer and the court clerk immediately sent for the examining judge, before whom the same night Móric repeated everything he had said, adding that after the perpetrators had left the scene of their crime, he cleaned up and locked the synagogue, and therefore no blood marks were to be found. With great zeal the Judge continued his investigations everywhere he could think of: in the synagogue, in the houses and among the graves, but there were no traces of the girl. Twelve Jews were arrested on suspicion of murder. Móric Scharf was put in charge of the jailer.
On the 18th of June, a body was pulled out of the river Tisza, which the district physician declared to be that of a fourteen-year-old girl. People recognised it to be Esther Solymosi, the missing girl. Her mother, however, emphatically denied that it was her daughter, although she afterwards recognised the clothes, which were found to be hers. Contrary to the district physician, two new physicians and a surgeon were then engaged, who declared that the corpse was that of a girl, 18 to 20 years of age, who had died eight or ten days before. Therefore it could not be the body of Esther.
The girl was buried in the Catholic cemetery of Tiszaeszlár. Anti-Semitic agitators, chief among them the Catholic priest of the town, insinuated that the body had been smuggled in by the Jews and clothed in the garments of Esther Solymosi in order to conceal the crime of a ritual murder. Several of the rafts men, who had found the body, were induced by promises and threats to revoke their former testimony and to declare that they had carried the body to the river and that an unknown Jewess had furnished them with the clothes in which they had dressed it. New arrests of Jews were made. On 29th of July, 15 people were accused: 4 of them of premeditated murder, 6 were blamed for helping to commit murder, and 5 for being accessories to a crime and body smuggling. Arbitrary acts by the examining Judge, without the aid of the state attorney, caused delays. He recorded the minutes of the proceedings without witnesses, and tortured the suspects. Removed from contact with the other defendants and other Jews, Móric was entirely under the influence of their adversaries and was well tutored.
The defender was Károly Eötvös (1862-1916), a scion of a Transdanubian landowning, aristocratic family. He was a leading Hungarian poet and was a brilliant parliamentary orator, a witty journalist and a great lawyer. No one else could have put up a better defence. Two Budapest solicitors helped Eötvös and a third from Nyiregyháza, the seat of the county court before which this case was tried. In a petition to the Minister of Justice, Eötvös protested against torture practised in Tiszaeszlár, to no effect. The affair was so long drawn out that the State Attorney of Budapest had to go to Nyíregyháza in September in order to speed up proceedings. The case generated a lot of attention by the newspapers. Anti-Semitic articles attempted to establish Jewish guilt.
Lajos Kossuth (1802-1894), the leader of the 1848 uprising against Austrian rule, who had been living in exile at Turin, came down against the authorities and the stirring up of anti-Semitism. “The representation as a racial crime or as a ritual crime a murder that at the worst was an individual one, was unworthy of a modern civilisation,” said Kossuth. Despite his high standing, he could do nothing to influence the furious persecution of Jews that raged throughout Hungary as a result of the proceedings. And for once, Parliament was at one with the people, but the attorney general was of a different opinion. He found that, contrary to the official declaration of the examining judge, the accused had not had a single hearing. At his insistence, the examining judge released some prisoners. Realising that he was hampered by powerful influences in his endeavour, the examining judge offered his resignation, which was readily accepted.
In mid-November, Mrs Scharf was set free, while her husband and the other prisoners were still being detained. At the request of the defending lawyers, the body found in the River was exhumed and re-examined by three professors of medicine at the University of Budapest. They found that the opinion of the members of the previous examining committee had no scientific basis, and later, before the court, they accused them of ignorance. The body was too decayed to allow a positive identification. Despite the fact that no one claimed the corpse, there was no doubt in their minds that the body was that of Eszter Solymosi, and since the neck was not cut, no ritual murder could have been committed.
On 17th of June 1883, the last part of this case was opened before the court of Nyíregyháza. A new judge presided with a new prosecutor. Although the testimony of Móric Scharf was the only basis of the accusation, the court held 30 sessions to examine the case in all its details. Many witnesses were heard. The glaring contradictions of the boy, despite the careful training he had received, and the falsity of his accusation, as exposed by a local inspection of the alleged murder scene made by the court in Tiszaeszlár on the 16th of July, resulted in the unanimous acquittal of all the accused. The solicitor for the widow Solymosi, Eszter’s mother, in a speech full of bitterness, appealed against the verdict, but the Supreme Court rejected it.
Móric Scharf, who had been alienated from his faith and his family, and whose filial love they had suppressed, returned to his parents, and was received with affection.
Do not think for a moment that these absurd accusations are consigned to the annals of history. The Syrian Defence Minister in 1983, Mustafa Tlass, wrote “The Matza of Zion”. This book concentrates on two issues: the alleged murder of Father Toma in Damascus in 1840 (another famous blood libel), and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. On 21st of October 2002, Al Hayyat, the London-based Arabic language newspaper, reported that the book had eight reprints and was about to be translated into French, Spanish and Italian. A Syrian delegate cited the book at a UN conference, in 1991. “Horseman without a Horse”, a well-known anti-Semitic Egyptian film produced in 2001, is partly based on Tlass’s book. As you see, we cannot afford to be complacent. History does repeat itself.
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