Christian Antisemitism by William Nicholls

Author:William Nicholls
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Published: 1993-10-23T16:00:00+00:00

CHARGES OF DESECRATION OF THE HOST

A little later, after the definition of the dogma of transubstantiation by the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, a new libel surfaced, known as host desecration. According to this calumny, the Jews obtained a consecrated host from the mass, with the assistance of a Christian who retained it from the administration of communion, took it to their synagogue or homes and subjected it to every indignity, including trampling on it and sticking pins into it. Their object was supposed to be revenge on Christ, symbolically repeating their original crime of crucifying him. In many cases, it was believed, the victim responded in a miraculous way by bleeding, bringing about the conversion to Christ of a number of his tormentors. The accusation was made for the first time at Belitz, near Berlin; all the Jews of the town were burned. One hundred instances of the charge have been recorded, in many cases leading to massacres.

This accusation is particularly bizarre, because it assumes that Jews themselves actually believe not only the doctrine of transubstantiation but also a particularly materialistic, and strictly speaking heretical, popular version of it. Of course, no Jew believes such a doctrine in any form. To a Jew, the host is simply a piece of bread; he could not suppose that doing anything whatever to it could have any effect on Christ, even if he wished to harm him. This is neither the first nor the last instance of the Christian supposition that Jews actually believe Christian doctrines and are therefore not sinning in ignorance.

The classic case is the original myth of Christ-killing, from which these medieval libels appear to be more or less remotely derived. The Church not only believed that the Jews crucified Christ but also that they knew quite well whom they were crucifying, and thus were fully guilty of deicide.

By the high point of the Middle Ages, the Jews were being accused, by a Christian population that believed its own accusations, of indescribable crimes, bloodlust, insatiable hatred of Christ, and infanticidal acts, while at the same time they were supposed to believe in Christian dogmas.

Flannery comments that these charges “indicate[s] the course the Jewish image was taking. Unbeliever and usurer; now ritual murderer. Gradually stripped of his human features, the Jew assumes a satanic guise.”27

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