The Annals of Marbach, referring to the same events, explained that the Jews had committed the horrendous crime "to use the blood to cure themselves" [372].
Based on this unusual annotation, some people have identified the crime at Fulda as involving the birth of a new motive, intended to explain and characterize these religious child murders: so-called "ritual cannibalism". If, previous to this time, the Jews had been accused of crucifying Christians, at least during the Passover period, "in contempt of the passion of Christ", without the blood of the victims being attributed any particular significance, starting in Fulda in 1235, the blood
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presumably consumed by the Jews for ritual, magical or curative purposes, are said to have assumed a decisive and almost exclusive significance. The myth of the crucifixion of the Christian children is said to have arisen from the fertile imagination of Thomas of Monmouth, as a result of the murder of little William of Norwich in 1144. The myth of ritual cannibalism on the other hand, is said to have originated in the Fulda murder in 1235, tendentiously interpreted in this direction by clerical bodies headed by Conrad of Marburg, abbey of the imperial monastery of Fulda [373]. In support of this interpretation, broadly accepted today, people stress that hardly one year afterwards, Kaiser Friedrich II created a commission of inquiry to verify whether or not the Jews had really nourished themselves on the blood of Christian children [374].
To this theory a few objections may be raised, which appear of little importance. Precisely in the motivation adopted upon the creation of the Annals of Marbach, it is stated that its members were called upon to investigate "whether the Jews considered the consumption of blood to be necessary during the Passover period". We now know that the presumed ritual murder at Fulda was committed during the Christmas period and not at Easter, a sign that the German Emperor, although unaware of these recent facts, was thinking of the supposed ritual murders committed in the localities of Germany around on Passover eve, when the ritual use of the blood was presumed, even if unverified.
Secondarily, the allegation that the Jews of Fulda collected their victim’s blood "to cure themselves" (ad suum remedium) does not necessarily indicate oral ingestion, and, therefore, a form of ritual cannibalism. We have in fact seen that, according to the prosecutors, and sometimes even according to the defendants themselves, the Jews used blood, reduced to powder, to heal wounds, such as the circumcision wound, to staunch hemorrhages of various kinds, and to spread upon the body and face for purposes of exorcism. If these considerations are of any value, then the specific relevance of Fulda as the birthplace of supposed ritual cannibalism should certainly be revised, without prejudice to the fact that the ingestion of blood in the Passover celebrations was thereafter to become an increasingly recurrent and explicit motif in the accusations and trials.
It was Thomas de Cantimpré (1201-1272), who supplied his theological interpretation of the significance of attributing the value placed upon p. 121]
Christian blood by the Jews as the result of some prodigious and infallible medication. According to the friar of the monastery of Cantimpré, in the outskirts of Cambray, the Jews were the heirs of the curse falling upon their ancestors, guilty of crucifying the Redeemer. Jewish blood was irremediably polluted and an inextinguishable source of physical and moral suffering. The only infallible therapy for such horrors and painful infirmities lay in Christian blood, which was transfused into their bodies in order to cleanse them [375]. The confirmation of this unexceptionable truth, Thomas found, as might have been foreseen, in the zealous confessions of a learned Jew, recently purified by the sacred waters of baptism. This Jews is identified by some as the famous convert Nicholas Donin, responsible for the great bonfire of the Talmud in Paris in 1242, and perhaps linked to the anti-Jewish polemics following the ritual homicide at Fulda [376]. Donin is supposed to have informed Thomas that a Jewish wise man, esteemed by all for his prophetical gifts, was said to have bared his soul on his deathbed to confirm that the torments suffered by the Jews in body and soul could find certain remedy only through to the beneficial ingestion of Christian blood [377]. Whether in liquid form or powder, dried or in curdles, fresh or boiled -- blood, this magical fluid with the ambiguous and mysterious fascination, made its arrogant presence known through stories of child sacrifice, in the folds of which it lay concealed, perhaps less successfully than often supposed, until then.
Ritual murder accusations became more widespread: from Pforzheim in Baden in 1261, to Bacharach in 1283 and Magonza in the same year, to Troyes in France in 1288. These crimes generally involved child murders, in which the method was not emphasized; at times, they still involved crucifixions, as in the Northampton cases of 1279 (apud Northamptonam die Crucis adorate puer quidam a Judaeis crucifixus est ) and Prague in 1305, and perhaps that of Chinon, in Thüringen, in 1317. The sellers of Christian children to Jews to enable them to carry out their horrendous sacrifices were generally beggars, both men and women, who had few scruples when it came to earning a few coins; or unscrupulous nannies and wet nurses or unnatural parents. When the market supply was insufficient, the Jews were constrained to take direct action to abduct children for crucifixion, running not inconsiderable risks in such cases. Inquiries and trials generally concluded with the confession and the pitiless condemnation of the defendants, who were at all times considered a priori to be guilty. Justice was often administered
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in a summary manner, in which case massacres and burnings at the stake were inflicted upon the entire Jewish community, such as Monaco in 1285, where two hundred Jews were burnt alive in the synagogue, accused by a stinking old woman of bribing her to abduct a boy for them. Another supposed ritual murder was recorded in that same Bavarian city in 1345 [378].
The use of blood by Jews for ritual purposes was explicitly mentioned in many cases, but not always in connection with Passover. The Klosterchronik of Zwettl refers, in the year 1293, to a ritual murder accusation brought against the Jewish communities of southern Austria, on the banks of the Danube, and mentions blood as the motive for the crime. “The Jews of Krems had obtained a Christian (boy) from those of Brünn; they therefore killed him in the cruelest manner to obtain his blood" [379]. Thus, in the analogous case reported at Ueberlingen in Baden in 1332, the chronicler John of Winterthur revealed that the victim’s parents had observed "signs of incisions in the internal organs and veins" of the body [380].
In the Passover period of 1442, a blood accusation struck the small Jewish community of Lienz in the val Pusteria, a city located on the confines between Kärnten and the Tyrol. The martyred body of a three-year-old girl named Orsa, a baker’s daughter, was found in a canal.
Wounds and punctures observed on the body led people to believe that they had been inflicted to drain the victim’s blood. It was therefore foreseeable that popular rumor would immediately conclude that the crime was one of ritual child murder, committed by the enemies of Christ. The Jews, arrested without delay and interrogated with the usual coercive methods, admitted the crime, which is said to have taken place among the wine kegs in the cellar of Samuele’s house on Good Friday. The child had been purchased by the Jews from a beggar, a certain Margarita Praitsschedlin, who was arrested and taken to jail; she quickly confessed. The trial was summary. Samuele, the principal defendant accused of ritual murder, was suspended from the wheel and burnt; Giuseppe "the Old Man", the probable spiritual head of the small Jewish community, was hanged; finally, the beggar woman, guilty of the abduction of little Orsa, was burnt on the wheel together with two former Jewesses, obviously considered accomplices in the crime. These tragic events had however a happy and comforting conclusion; consisting of the baptism of five Jewish girls, four women and one male, to be exact [381].
372
373
Hermann L. Strack was the first author to note that the first to notice that the belief in the ritual use of blood by the Jews, although widespread in Germany even beforehand, was mentioned explicitly for the first time in 1255, on the occasion of the Fulda case (cfr. Strack,
374
"Utrum, sicut fama communis habet, Judaei christianum sanguinem in parasceve necessarium habeant". In this regard, see Strack,
375
"Quod ex maledictione parentum currat adhuc in filios venam facinoris per maculam sanguinis, importune fluidam proles impia inexpiabiliter crucietur, quosque se ream sanguinis Christi recognoscat poenitens et sanetur" (Tommaso da Cantimpré,
376
For the identification of Donin with the converted Jew mentioned in Thomas de Cantimpré, see Strack,
377
"Certissime vos scitote nullo modo sanari vos posse ab illo, quo punimini verecundissimo cruciatu nisi solo sanguine Christiano" (Thomas da Cantimpré,
378
Cfr. Strack,
381
"Circiter anno quadregesimo secundo, vel tertio proxime elapso, hic in dicto oppido Leontio aliqui Hebraei, in duabus aedibus habitationem habuerint [...] cum illi Judaei dictae puellae (Ursulae) ut ex sequenti eorum inquisitione patet compotes facti, eandem dicto anno, die Parasceves martyrio affecerunt et occiderunt, et postea hic in aqua proiecerunt, ut tam enormem caedem et facinus occultarent [...] quod sanguis eius ex eodem corpusculo elicitus ac effusa fuerit [...] et ita Judaeos omnes sanguis eius ex eodem corpusculo elicitus ac effusus fuerit [...] et ita Judaeos omnes unanimiter fuisse confessos et effatos, quomodo dictam infantem die Parsceves anno praefato enecassent et martyrio affecissent (in cella vinaria)".