Hillel Kieval's cogent new book examines the sudden spate of trials propelled by ritual murder accusations between 1882 and 1902 in Central Europe. This work, the culmination of two decades of research, draws upon interrogation protocols, medical examination reports, trial records, press accounts, polemical tracts, apologetic responses, contemporary reappraisals, and other Czech, German, Hebrew, and Hungarian documents in archives across Europe, Israel, and the United States. Kieval devotes individual chapters to the four accusations in which formal investigations resulted in judicial prosecutions: Tiszaeszlàr (Hungary, 1882–1883), Xanten (Prussian Rheinland, 1891–1892), Polnà (Bohemia, 1899–1900), and Konitz (West Prussia, 1900–1902). Brief discussions of the two other accusations in Imperial Russia during this period that went to trial frame those analyses textually (Kutaisi in the introduction; Kiev in the conclusion) as well as chronologically (1879; 1911–1913). A chapter assessing the cultural, historical, and social contexts—local, regional, and national—and populations (Jews and Gentiles) of each case precedes the analyses of the trials.
The introduction summarizes the preceding history of ritual murder accusations in its three aspects of ritual desecration, host desecration, and blood libel: emerging in Norwich in 1144, it reached a high point in West and Central Europe in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Even as they virtually disappeared there, with change in the symbolic universe sparked by the Reformation, accusations began to thrive further east, e.g., in Poland-Lithuania, where the Counterreformation held sway—until torture-generated confessions became inadmissible as evidence in the 1770s—only to return to European public awareness with the 1840 Damascus affair. Though Kieval notes that hundreds of accusations entered the Central European public sphere (criminal complaints, newspaper reports, parliamentary speeches) during the late nineteenth century, his focus is less on why ritual murder accusations re-emerged then, than on the seemingly “astonish[ing]” and “outrageous” (17) happenstance that in modern Central European states the charges in these four instances were not simply dismissed as products of superstition, religious intolerance, and ignorance, but resulted in trials. More astonishing, the cases took place within legal systems that were structured by modern criminal codes and rules of procedure, where most participants recognized the operative epistemological rules of modern forensic science and criminology, and where scientific, medical, and academic expert testimony played an outsized role.
Rather than endeavor to characterize these four accusations and their subsequent investigations and trials as instances of a single underlying phenomenon, Kieval situates each in the specificity of its locality. These cases did not readily correlate to national or regional histories of antisemitism or local patterns of antagonistic Jewish-Gentile interactions. Indeed, in these four towns Jewish residents were rooted in their communities, had a strong sense of belonging, and felt entitled to the protection of the state. Further, explanations that focus on the accusation as cultural atavism, or on the appeal of irrationality as a return of the repressed in a disenchanted world, or in reaction to the social disruptions caused by modernization, do not jibe with how the legal process itself unfolded.
Kieval first analyzes how each of these accusations emerged from local systems of knowledge and social interactions, and then turns to what made these accusations reputable to social elites and self-consciously “modern” individuals, such that they “would expend so much time, energy, and prestige” (6). While recognizing how these local narratives gained momentum through their exploitation by antisemitic and nationalist journalists and politicians, Kieval details how the tensions, especially between the local, quasi-rural communities and the major urban, national, or academic centers over matters of authority/expertise (political, juridical, medical, forensic) and prestige, and, often, between the investigating judge and the public prosecutor played out in the ensuing, competing forensic and medical investigations. As a consequence of these competing forces, delays in definitive official determinations of the nature of the crime allowed the narrative of ritual murder to become tenable. While judges and prosecutors attempted to frame the trials within the modern juridical order and therefore to keep the “ritual murder accusation” out of the proceeding, the charge nevertheless seeped in through the forensic judgments presented as evidence—such as the possibility of multiple perpetrators, the alleged ritualized “butcher's cut” of the victim, and claims of exsanguination as cause of death—as well as in witness testimonies, antisemitic press reports, and in comments by attorneys representing the victim's family.
Kieval also delineates how each trial shaped the narratives and increasing plausibility of its successors; he implies a tipping point had not yet been reached when the rumors surrounding the 1884 murder of a Skurz, West Prussia youth did not impede the Prussian Interior Department investigator from putting on trial the chief promulgator of the ritual murder accusation and not the suspected Jews. He then addresses what contributed to the apparent end to staging such trials: the internal contradictions of the trial process itself. Kieval traces the eventual incompatibility of certain narratives of Jewish criminality—local (social) knowledges about Jewish difference that drew upon Christian texts and traditions and that were then mobilized to serve political ends—with “discourses of modern legal procedure, scientific method, and the self-consciousness of political and social elites” (223). While those narratives facilitated the initiation of the process, the attempts to appropriate the authority of scientific culture and expertise to sustain the accusations ultimately ran into the inability of the evidence, repeatedly subjected to forensic examination, to confirm them. Drawing upon Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann's concept of sociology of knowledge, Kieval concludes that while the narrative of ritual murder could still serve as a clarion call of Jewish danger and immutable Jewish difference, it had to accommodate the new rules of the juridical order to confront that danger and difference. Once the narrative of Jews’ alleged need to murder non-Jews became naturalized, severed from its salvific meaning, the accusation became a “most impoverished vessel” (228) to explain the world the accusers inhabited and, by implication, to mobilize a counter-worldview to the rule of the scientific and bureaucratic order. Blood Inscriptions is a worthy addition to the extensive scholarship on these trials specifically and on ritual murder accusations more generally.
