Prologue to Annihilation: Ordinary American and British Jews Challenge the Third Reich by Stephen H. Norwood

Author:Stephen H. Norwood [Norwood, Stephen H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780253053619
Google: _Y1ZzQEACAAJ
Amazon: 0253053617
Published: 2021-08-03T00:00:00+00:00

COMBATTING THE NAZI BLOOD LIBEL AND DEICIDE ACCUSATION

Hanfstaengl’s use of blood libel images occurred close on the heels of Julius Streicher’s publication in May 1934 of a special issue of Der Stürmer devoted to “documenting” that since ancient times Jews had engaged in the kidnapping of Christian children to extract their blood to mix with Passover matzo. Pierre van Paassen warned that Der Stürmer’s special issue was “the opening signal” for pogroms, concluding, “the German Jews are doomed.”63 Reacting immediately to Streicher’s special issue, Jewish defense organizations, in particular the AJC and the Board of Deputies of British Jews (BoD), labeled the blood libel vicious and baseless. AJC president Cyrus Adler and secretary Morris Waldman planned to discuss the issue with officers of the BoD and Alliance Israélite Universelle at an upcoming meeting of the three organizations in Paris. Adler proposed that the Philadelphia-based Jewish Publication Society, of which he was a trustee, issue an English translation of Aleksandr Semonovich Tager’s book on the trial of Mendel Beilis, a Jewish brick factory manager in Kiev who had been framed for ritual murder in 1911 and whose plight had produced an outpouring of sympathy and outrage in Britain and the United States. Adler also advised reissuing Professor Hermann Strack’s The Jew and Human Sacrifice: Human Blood and Jewish Ritual, An Historical and Sociological Inquiry.64 Originally published in German in 1891 and in English in 1909, Strack’s study fully exonerated the Jews of the blood libel accusation.

Using the mass protests in England in 1912 and 1913 against Beilis’s arrest, imprisonment, and trial for ritual murder as precedent, the BoD attempted to enlist prominent Christian religious leaders in Britain to discredit the accusation. On May 11, only days after the ritual-murder issue of Der Stürmer appeared, England’s chief rabbi, Dr. J. H. Hertz, referred in the London Times to “the protest, signed by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, and others, that appeared on May 6, 1912.” Rabbi Hertz noted that these prominent clergymen had denounced the ritual murder accusation as “a relic of the days of witchcraft and ‘black magic,’ a cruel and utterly baseless libel on Judaism.” Rabbi Hertz drew attention to their warning that “this unscrupulous fiction, spread among the people, has from the Middle Ages until recent times . . . incited the ignorant masses to outrage and massacre.” It had “driven misguided crowds to pollute themselves with the innocent blood” of Jews. In 1912 the Christian clergymen had emphasized, “not a shadow of proof has ever been adduced to justify this crazy belief” that Jews commit ritual murder.65

Rabbi Hertz persuaded the archbishop of Canterbury, Cosmo Cantuar, to send a letter to the London Times denouncing Der Stürmer’s ritual murder issue. Cantuar wrote that the issue “rakes up legends and lies about the alleged custom of ritual murder by the Jews which have been over and over again exposed.” Its illustrations were “gruesome and disgusting.” Cantuar found it “almost incredible that such a publication

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