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Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late-Medieval Jews

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In the year 1290 in Paris, a poor Christian woman was tempted by a Jew to whom she owed money. The debt would be canceled if she would merely bring him from Easter communion the host, the sanctified bread. She may have simply kept the host in her mouth and removed it secretly. The Jew, once he had the host, applied to it various tests to see of what it was made. He knew that Christians of the time believed that it had quite literally transubstantiated into the body of Christ, but he wished to see "whether the insane things which Christians prattle about are true." He stabbed at it with his knife, but it remained uncut. Even so, it began to bleed. He tortured it in various ways, nailing it to a board, throwing it into a fire, and boiling it. The host remained whole and bleeding, until the boiling, when it turned into a crucifix above the pot. The Jew may have been amazed, but he was stubbornly unconvinced, although seeing such a spectacle immediately converted his wife and children.

This is a legend told repeatedly with many variations in _Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews_ (Yale University Press) by Miri Rubin. Such stories were widespread throughout medieval Europe as a part of accepted folklore, and were held as true by even the educated in the priesthood. Not only were the stories believed, but they formed the incitement to action against Jews, resulting in torture, death, forfeiture of lands and goods, and banishment. The picture of Jews given in the various versions of the tales were of unredeemable brutality and greed, at least on the part of the male Jews; the females were less vicious and more tractable. Jews insisted on kidnapping little Christian children, for instance, to drink their blood in grotesque ceremonies in the synagogues. The stories reinforced themselves and made clear to medieval Christians what sort of people they were dealing with.

It is perplexing to try to make sense of such things eight centuries later. Sometimes investigations of bleeding hosts did discover simple fraud; a priest could sprinkle a host with blood and hide it in the house of Jews he wished to betray. Usually, of course, no such fraud would be found, the wrath of Christians in a village would turn into a riot, and pious mobs would extract what they saw as justice. A mob in 1306 in St. Polten, near Vienna, was so violent and indignant, that it trampled some of its own members. Rubin shows how the story from Paris traveled around Europe like a spark lighting a series of fires, making trouble for Jews wherever it went.

_Gentile Tales_ shows the horror stories from contemporary plays and poems, but does special service in reproducing illustrations of the nasty Jews torturing the host from illustrated manuscripts, altar pictures, oil paintings, and stained glass windows, as a show of how nearly universal such tales were. The illustrations would be lovely, if they weren't so grotesque, but even so, Yale University Press has put out a good looking volume on glossy paper with many color plates. It is a good book for anyone with an interest in medieval times, but ought to be required reading for those who wish to see one of the lamentable foundations for the relations between Christians and Jews.