For hundreds of years Jews in Europe approached Passover with mixed feelings. Positively, they looked forward to celebrating their ancestors’ liberation from slavery in Egypt; an annual reminder that however hard their lives might be at that moment, freedom was not an impossible dream. More ominously, they dreaded the fact that in most years Passover would fall during the same week as Easter, the anniversary of the Crucifixion, an event for which their Christian neighbours blamed them.
1144 was the year when Easter first became the season for persecuting Jews. A child had been found murdered in woodland near Norwich in England. Nobody knew who had killed him but the Jews were blamed. The fallout from the death of William of Norwich was the first occurrence of the blood libel; the charge that Jews slaughtered Christian children to use their blood for ritual purposes.
A hundred years later the accusation grew even more sinister. It was alleged that a child’s blood was needed in order to make matzah, the unleavened bread eaten at Passover, the festival during which Easter often fell. From that moment on, no Easter could pass without some preachers reminding their congregations of the role that Jews were alleged to have played in the Crucifixion, the role they were believed to be re-enacting through their supposed slaughter of Christian children. In the cities of Europe, Jews entered Holy Week, the days leading up to Easter, in a state of fear and trepidation.
In 1243, a second charge was levelled at them. The Catholic church’s Lateran Council had recently confirmed the doctrine of Transubstantiation, the idea that when the wafer, or Host, is eaten at the Eucharist, it is miraculously transformed into the body of Christ. The new charge against the Jews was that they desecrated the Host by stabbing the wafer with a sharp object to make it bleed. The historian, Cecil Roth, suggested that the idea came from a scarlet, blood-like bacteria that occasionally grew on dry, stale wafers. It is just as likely though that an imagination, so fertile as to believe that a wafer had been stabbed, might just as easily believe that it issued drops of blood.
By 1247, Holy Week attacks on the Jews had become so common that Pope Innocent IV wrote in protest to a French Archbishop . He complained about a pogrom that had broken out following the discovery of the body of a young girl. The attack, said the Pope, was nothing more than an excuse to steal Jewish property; there was no evidence that the girl had been murdered and no reason to tie her death to the Jews. He ordered the release from prison of those few Jews who had not yet been killed.
A few days later he sent a similar letter to bishops in Germany, after a pogrom there. Although the Popes had little love for Jews, they regarded it as their Christian duty to protect them and it became church policy to condemn the Blood Libels and accusations of Host desecration. During the middle ages they frequently issued Papal Bulls to protect the Jews. Known as sicut Judaeis, the decrees began by stating that although Jews “prefer to continue in their hardness of heart rather than be guided by the hidden meaning of the prophets to a knowledge of the Christian faith . . .. , since they invoke our protection and aid, following in the footsteps of our predecessors and out of the mildness of Christian piety, [we] extend to them the shield of our protection”.
Ordinary people paid little attention to the papal decrees. The repeated attacks even led Jewish families to change the way in which they read the Haggadah (the liturgy read during the Passover Seder meal). The change they introduced is still in place today.
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