2i 4 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



or any single individual, by bestowing perhaps a piece of land or an 

 office upon him, a papal letter soon appeared warning and threatening 

 with punishment, and reminding the prince that a son of the hand- 

 maid should never be preferred to a son of the free-woman.* Car- 

 dinal legates of the Pope had it decided at councils (as at Vienna, in 

 1267) that no Jew should be permitted in a bath-house or drinking- 

 saloon or an inn ; that no Christian should dare buy meat of a Jew, 

 since he might thus be treacherously poisoned. The Synod of Sala- 

 manca, of the year 1335, declared that physicians of the Mosaic faith 

 offered their services only because they wished to destroy, as far as 

 they could, the Christian people, and so, in effect, the population of 

 all Europe. 



In this way the seeds of hate and detestation were sown, and whole- 

 sale murder was the harvest. Accustomed to the view that every Jew 

 is a born enemy and debtor to the Christians, the nations, in a time 

 when what was cruel and unnatural was credulously laid hold of with 

 a kind of predilection and even eagerness, held the Jews to be capable 

 of every crime, even the most improbable and impossible. After the 

 twelfth century, the story went about that the Jews craved Christian 

 blood, some imagined for their festival of the passover, others as a 

 remedy against a secret hereditary disease ; and, to get it, that they 

 put a boy to death every year. In addition, a pretense was made of 

 knowing that they crucified a Christian every year in mockery of the 

 Redeemer. 



If a corpse, on which there were signs of violence, or a dead child, 

 was found anywhere, a Jew must have been the murderer ; generally, 

 the crime was supposed to have been committed by a number jointly, 

 and torture was continued till it extorted confessions. Then followed 

 horrible executions, and in many cases a general butchering of the 

 whole Jewish population in town and country. An orderly, unpreju- 

 diced judicial procedure was not to be thought of. The judges and 

 magistrates trembled themselves before the rage of the populace, which 

 had its mind made up from the start, and held fast to the presumption 

 that the most infamous deeds might be expected of every member of 

 this murderous people. Occasionally, it was an image of Christ, which 

 a Jew was said to have pierced with a knife or mutilated, that gave 

 the signal for a massacre. After the year 1290, rumors of maltreated 

 and miraculously bleeding Hosts were added. From Paris, where the 

 first case had happened, the news spread to the neighboring countries. 

 Very soon the possession of a similar miraculous treasure was coveted 

 elsewhere; and now it appeared as if the Jews, seized by a demoniacal 

 frenzy, at once believed and disbelieved an ecclesiastical dogma, and 

 had an irrepressible desire for an agonizing death so frequently were 

 these ostensible outrages revenged upon them. 



In London the Jews were murdered because they were suspected 



* Cf. Paul's Epistle to the Galatians, iv, 22-31. (Translator.) 



