The ritual murder accusation is not an insult to the Jews, but a historical fact, since many churches in Germany, Austria and other countries are dedicated to Christian saints who were martyred for ritual purposes by the enemies of the Christian faith, the West Berlin District Court has found in acquitting Deputy Goebbels, the Hitlerist leader in Berlin, on a charge of insulting the Jews by publishing an article in the Hitlerist paper “Angriff”, of which he is the editor, where he said that Jews commit ritual murder. It had not been established, the court said, that the article was an insult to the Jewish religion, since it spoke only of fanatical adherents of the Jewish religion, and not of all who practise Judiasm.
The verdict of the court and the ground on which it is based have caused consternation and indignation among the Jewish population here.
No punishment for accusing Jews of committing ritual murder was the decision of the German Supreme Court, the Leipzig Reichsgericht, last February, when it quashed the verdict of guilty brought in by the Cologne District Court against the editor of the local Hitlerist paper, the “Westdeutscher Beobachter”, Joseph Prohe, whom it had fined 300 Marks for writing in his paper that the Jews in obedience to the Talmud practise ritual murder, fraud and perjury, and drink Christian blood in order to become reconciled to the Jewish God.
The Reichsgericht found that Prohe could not be convicted, because he did not know that the ritual murder allegation was designed to rouse enmity against a certain section of the population.
Dr. Theodor Wolf, the famous editor of the “Berliner Tageblatt”, drew attention recently to the tendency of the German courts, including the Supreme Court, to acquit antisemites, complaining that the German courts have been dangerously infected by Hitlerism, and have been encouraged by the growth of Hitlerist strength to allow their dogmatic antisemitism to overrule the principles of abstract justice, introducing definite anti-Jewish bias in their judgments.
The first case in which Jews were actually accused of having killed a Christian child for ritual purposes was that of St. William of Norwich in 1144. Similar charges were brought at Gloucester in 1168, at Bury-St. Edmunds in 1181, and at Winchester in 1192. In none of these cases was there any trial, but popular rumour was considered sufficient to establish the martyrdom of the children, and this proved a considerable source of attraction to the Cathedrals and Abbeys of these towns.
The case of little St. Hugh, of Lincoln is mentioned by Chaucer, and is perpetuated in an old English ballad.
In 1462 at Rinn, near Innsbrueck, in Austria, a boy named Andreas Oxner was said to have been murdered by Jews, his blood being carefully collected in vessels. Inscriptions in the Church of Rinn allege that the money paid for the boy to his godfather by the Jews to whom he had sold him was found to have turned into leaves and that a lily blossomed upon his grave. In 1475 occurred also the case of St. Simon of Trent.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
