Note 11 — Chapter I

Till quite recently it had been almost forgotten that one of the commonest manifestations of fanaticism against the Jews, especially in Eastern Europe, was to charge them with the murder of Christian children for the use of some horrid religious rite, and that scarcely ever was the dead body of a child found in the neighbourhood of a Jewish community without some outburst of this cruel suspicion, ending in an indiscriminate massacre of the Jews by the infuriated mob. It is a singularly creditable proof of the liberal government of Stephen Batory,—one of the ablest monarchs who ever sat on the throne of Poland,—that, so long ago as 1576, he issued an edict prohibiting the imputation of this crime to the Jews, as being utterly inconsistent with the principles of their religion. Yet, in spite of this enactment, the fanatical suspicion continued to display itself at frequent intervals. Milman supposed it had been finally quelled by the ukase of the Russian Government in 1835, which went in the same direction as the earlier prohibition of the Polish king (History of the Jews, vol. iii., p. 389). What would have been his astonishment, had he lived to learn that, half a century after he thought it extinguished, this ancient delusion was to revive, that an Hungarian court was to spend thirty one days in the solemn trial of a Jewish family on the charge of sacrificing a Christian girl in their synagogue, that a learned professor in the Imperial and Royal University of Prague was to write in defence of the charge, and that the trial was to form the subject of an extensive controversial literature in the language of the most learned nation in the world! An interesting account of this famous trial at Tisza Eszlar, as well as of the literature connected with it, will be found in an article by Dr. Wright, on The Jews and the Malicious Charge of Human Sacrifice in the Nineteenth Century, for November, 1883.—Trans.