Trent 1475: Stories of a Ritual Murder Trial [Paperback]

R. Po-chia Hsia (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 25, 1996 | ISBN-10: 0300068727 | ISBN-13: 978-0300068726

On Easter Sunday, 1475, the dead body of a two-year-old boy named Simon was found in the cellar of a Jewish family's house in Trent, Italy. Town magistrates arrested all eighteen Jewish men and one Jewish woman living in Trent on the charge of ritual murder - the killing of a Christian child in order to use his blood in Jewish religious rites. Under judicial torture and imprisonment, the men confessed and were condemned to death; their women-folk, who had been kept under house arrest with their children, denounced the men under torture and eventually converted to Christianity. A papal hearing in Rome about possible judicial misconduct in Trent made the trial widely known and led to a wave of anti-Jewish propaganda and other accusations of ritual murder against the Jews. In this engrossing book, R. Pochia Hsia reconstructs the events of this tragic persecution, drawing principally on the Yeshiva Manuscript, a detailed trial record made by authorities in Trent to justify their execution of the Jews and to bolster the case for the canonization of "little Martyr Simon." Hsia depicts the Jewish victims (whose testimonies contain fragmentary stories of their tragic lives as well as forced confessions of kidnap, torture, and murder), the prosecuting magistrates, the hostile witnesses, and the few Christian neighbors who tried in vain to help the Jews. Setting the trial and its documents in the historical context of medieval blood libel, Hsia vividly portrays how fact and fiction can be blurred, how judicial torture can be couched in icy orderliness and impersonality, and how religious rites can be interpreted as ceremonies of barbarism.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Hsia, author of The Myth of Ritual Murder ( LJ 10/1/88), uses original sources to examine an infamous ritual murder case. In 1475 three Jewish families of Trent were charged with the murder of a Christian child. Judicial torture was used to force the accused to sign confessions fabricated by the prosecution. This victimization of the Jewish community did not go unchallenged. The account of the conflict between Trent's prince-bishop, who wanted the canonization of the alleged child martyr, and the papal commissioner sent to investigate irregularities in the judicial procedures highlights the fraudulent nature of the charges. Informed lay readers as well as scholars and specialists will welcome this addition to the literature on the history of anti-Semitism. For academic libraries and large public libraries with strong reader interest in this area.
- Robert Andrews, Duluth P.L., Minn.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 204 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press (September 25, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300068727
• ISBN-13: 978-0300068726
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.4 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #164,477 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Genocide and Murder, December 30, 2002

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Sebastien Pharand (Orléans, Ontario, Canada) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Trent 1475: Stories of a Ritual Murder Trial (Paperback)

The 475 trials of Trent mark a very important chapter in Jewish history. The history of genocide and murder dates back to the early days of Europe. Here, in Trent, three Jewish families were accused of murdering a young Christian boy through ritual practices. The now-infamous trial lasted more than three years, during which many Jewish men and women were tortured during brutal interrogations and forced to confess to a crime they had not committed.

The book is a good read that never boggles down in too much details. Hsia gives all the necessary information for the reader to understand the time and place as well as the events surrounding the death of little Simon. His study of 15th century Italy is visually appealing to the reader, as the facts are written down to be easily understood by anyone.

Thought-provoking, precise and well written, Trent 1475 brings you back to a time and place where torture was the popular recourse during judicial interrogations, where the Jewish population was misunderstood and badly treated, where torture was so brutal that people would lie and condem themselves just to avoid being brutalized.

This book will appeal to historians, but also to the curious and inquisitive minds. Trent 1475: Stories of a Ritual Murder Trial is an important book that teaches us about our past and about our violent history.

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a fascinating case study of a ritual murder "trial", July 27, 2004

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Michael Lewyn (Forest Hills, NY) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Trent 1475: Stories of a Ritual Murder Trial (Paperback)

This book is a case study of a ritual murder trial that destroyed a small Jewish community. I learned a lot from this book, including:

1. The amazingly small size of medieval Jewish communities. Trent contained 30 Jews in three households; even Rome contained only a couple of thousand Jews at the end of the 15th century.

2. That ritual murder cases weren't just against Jews. The Catholic Church also used ritual murder accusations against heretics and in witchcraft cases.

3. That ritual murder cases involved judicial proceedings as well as mob justice. In the Trent case, the local government relied on 3 witnesses before arresting Jews: an ex-Jew who claimed to have been told 15 years earlier that Jews used blood in preparing matzos, a Christian woman whose son got lost in a Jewish defendant's shed 14 years earlier, and another Christian woman who heard a boy crying near a Jew's house. The authorities had no interest in the fact that the Jewish defendants voluntarily came forward with the corpse of the alleged victim.

3. The heavy use of torture. The Christian authorities recognized that these three witnesses' testimony was not adequate to prove guilt. So they tortured the Jews (mostly using the strappado, for which the victim had his or her hands tied behind his back with a long rope and was then hoisted up in the air by a pulley) until they confessed. After enough pain, the prisoner would confess to anything. Even after the Jews confessed, the authorities continued to torture them in order to ensure that they told roughly identical stories, and to ensure that their stories included certain details that the authorities imagined would be present. By coercing confessions, the strappado had the added advantage of stripping the Jews of the dignity of martyrdom.

4. Local authorities' use of public pressure and semi-idolatrous cults to make the ritual murder case popular and discourage the papal bureaucracy (which at the time was far more enlightened than local bishops) from cracking down on anti-Semitic murders. In the Trent case, the local bishop started a semi-idolatrous cult around the two year old boy who was allegedly murdered, starting a shrine to the Blessed Simon Martyr of Trent, encouraging poetry and paintings in his honor, and spreading rumors about miracles created by the boy. (The author does not seem sure about the boy's actual fate; he seems to think that the boy either drowned accidentally or was murdered by someone else who then placed the body in a Jew's cellar).

5. The quasi-pornographic nature of anti-Semitic propaganda; the bishop encouraged woodcuts with anatomically correct pictures of Simon's alleged circumcision by the Jewish defendants.

5.0 out of 5 stars The Ugliest Frame-up in History, August 18, 2008

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Giordano Bruno - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Trent 1475: Stories of a Ritual Murder Trial (Paperback)

Interrogation by torture is NOT an invention of the CIA. All the elements of the CIA-funded research into brutal interrogation by psychiatrist Ewen Cameron - extreme prolonged isolation and sensory deprivation, depersonalization, recurring torture, threats of death - were well if not scientifically understood in 15th Century Italy. Instead of electric prods and water-boarding, the authorities in the Papal and Hapsburg states used the "strappado." The victim's hands were tied behind his lower back and he was hoisted into the air until his feet dangled. If the pain didn't produce immediate "confession", the victim might be hoisted higher, dropped suddenly and jerked sharply aloft again. Obviously his shoulders were dislocated. To vary the pain, hot boiled eggs would be put in his armpits. Then, when any bit of submission was yielded, the victim would be isolated again for a few days before a resumption of torture. Such practices were in a sense already illegal - condemned by canon law - but they were wide-spread, and favored by the Holy Office of the Inquisition. Few indeed were the victims of such torture who weren't broken and who didn't "learn" the scripted confession expected of them. Giordano Bruno withstood several years of torture in the dungeons of Rome before he was burned alive, with his jaw nailed shut to prevent him from declaring innocence, in the Campo dei Fiori. His statue is visible from my apartment window in Rome.

In the Tirolean city of Trent in 1475, the three Jewish heads of families and their several male dependents accused of the "ritual murder" of a Christian child withstood the strappado to varying degrees, denying guilt anywhere from one session to dozens of sessions. In the end, however, they all agreed to confess... and then essentially had to be instructed under torture as to what precisely they would need to confess before they would be granted the relief of death. The show-trial in Trent was far from the only such horrible charade of justice in the history of European anti-Semitism, and the three-family Jewish community of Trent was not the largest to be exterminated under the leadership of the Franciscans and other Preaching Observants, but the Prince-Bishop of Trent, Johanes Hinderbach, had strong motives for publicizing and justifying his persecution of the ritual murder charges. The outcome was the foundation and dissemination of a cult of miracles performed by the "child martyr" Simon of Trent, a cult which persisted and served its vicious anti-Semitic purpose until 1965, when it was abolished by the Vatican! Actually, the Pope in 1475, the Sixtus whose Vatican chapel we all admire as a triumph of humanism, was more than a little suspicious, both of the Jewish guilt and of the subsequent miracle tales, but he didn't have time or care enough to intervene effectively, though the bishop he commissioned to investigate, Baptista dei Giudici, concluded that the trial was a malevolent sham and the miracles bogus.

Simon Unferdorben was a two-and-a-half year-old boy child of a German-speaking peasant in Trent, a semi-autonomous city-state under Hapsburg rule. The boy fell in a ditch and drowned. His body was found after several days in the ditch that drained into the bath of Samuel the Jew. There is a good possibility that it was deliberately dumped there by persons with grudges against the Jews; two such suspects were widely identified at the time.

Nothing about the "confessions" extracted by torture from the Jews of Trent is plausible. Their confessions were not at all consistent until they had been fully "instructed" by the torturers. The wounds first observed on the child's body were not consistent with the accounts of the ritual slaying to which the Jews were compelled to confess. Not everyone even in Trent believed the accusation; surrounding communities, especially in the Veneto, were highly critical of the judicial procedures. Nonetheless, the entire male Jewish population of Trent, including mere commercial visitors who happened to be there at the wrong time, were executed by burning or decapitation. The latter was considered merciful. The women were forced to accept Christian baptism; they and their children quickly disappeared from the records.

Po-chia Hsia, professor of European history at New York University, tells this whole story with a good deal more circumspection than I have -- and of course with a good deal more supporting evidence - but there is no doubt that he considers the charges of Jewish ritual murder universally false and vicious, as do all reasonable people ever since. This small book is a tight narration, an evening's reading. If you have any reservations about the Christian and specifically Catholic burden of responsibility for crimes of hatred against the Jewish people, you owe your own conscience the task of reading Trent 1475.