In the large Jewish community of Posen, the slanderous accusations against the Jews were the reflection of the inveterate hostility of the local Christian population. Towards the end of the seventeenth century the Carmelite order in Posen contrived a curious lawsuit against the Jews, alleging that following upon the desecration of the hosts in 1399154 the Jews had, by way of penance for their sacrilege, obligated themselves to accompany the Christian processions. The Jews denied the allegation, and the case dragged on for a number of years in various courts of law, with the result that, in 1724, the Jews had to pledge themselves to furnish the Carmelites with two pails of oil annually to supply the lamp burning in front of the three hosts in the church.
But the fanaticism of the Church was on the lookout for new victims, and it manifested itself in 1736 in another ritual murder trial, which lasted for four years. Everything was pre-arranged in accordance with the "rites" of the Church fanatics. The dead body of a Christian child was found in the neighborhood of the city. There was also found a Polish beggar-woman, who, under torture, confessed that she had sold the child to the elders of the Posen community. Arrests followed. The first victims were the preacher, or darshan, Arie-Leib Calahora, a descendant of the martyr Mattathiah Calahora,155 an elder (parnas, or syndic) of the Jewish community, by the name of Jacob Pinkasevich (son of Phineas), and several other members of the Kahal administration. Further wholesale arrests were imminent, but many Jews fled from Posen, to save themselves from the fury of the inquisitors.
On the eve of his arrest, Calahora chose for the text of his Sabbath discourse the Biblical verse, "Who can count the dust of Jacob and the number of the fourth part (or quarter) of Israel? Let me die the death of the righteous!" (Numbers xxiii. 10). As if anticipating his end, the preacher explained the text as follows: "Who can count the dust and ashes of those that were burned and quartered for the faith of Israel?" While being led to jail, he addressed the crowd of Jews surrounding him with the following words: "At the hour of my death I shall not have around me ten Jews for prayer (minyan). Therefore recite with me for the last time the prayer Borkhu ('Praise the Lord of Praise!')." The forebodings of the preacher were justified. Neither he nor the elder survived the fiendish tortures of the cross-examination. While the preacher was tortured, his bones being broken and his body roasted on fire, the elder was compelled to hold a lamp in his hand to give light to the executioner. Covered with wounds and blood, in the stage of mortal agony, they were carried to their homes, where they died in the autumn of 1736.
The deputies of the Jewish community of Posen appealed to King Augustus III. against the cruelty and partiality of the municipal court, and succeeded in having the case transferred to a special judicial commission consisting of royal officials. Although the commission resorted equally to tortures during the cross-examination, it was not able to wrest a confession from the innocent Jewish prisoners. Nevertheless, being convinced in advance of the correctness of the ritual libel, the judges sentenced them to be burned at the stake, together with the bodies of the preacher and elder, which had to be exhumed for this purpose (1737).
The sentence had first to be ratified by the King, and the Jewish representatives in Warsaw and Dresden, the latter city being the second capital of the King and the residence of the papal nuncio, employed every possible means to bring about a reversal of the judgment. It was difficult to influence Augustus III., the dull-witted monarch, who, in addition, was imbued with a goodly dose of anti-Semitism. But the noise caused by the trial at Posen and the pressure upon the King on the part of the Jewish bankers of Vienna, particularly the banking-house of Wertheimer, induced him to yield. After a prolonged interval and a second revision of the case by a royal commission, the King gave orders to free the Jews, who had languished in prison for four years (August, 1740). On this occasion he went out of his way to enjoin the magistracy of Posen not to resort to tortures in similar trials, but he could not refrain at the same time from prescribing to the Jews "rules of conduct" after the medieval pattern: not to pass too frequently beyond the boundaries of their ghetto (which had been preserved in Posen), not to associate with Christians, nor caress Christian children, nor keep Christian domestics, nor attend Christian patients, etc.
The favorable issue of the Posen trial was due to the fact that it took place in a large Jewish community, whose representatives were able to arouse the public opinion of Western Europe and secure the intervention of influential persons. But in the distant corners of Poland, in the obscure Jewish communities of the country, the ritual murder trials were in the nature of ghastly nightmares. Such was the trial of Zaslav, a town in Volhynia, which originated in 1747 as the result of a fatal concatenation of events. In the springtime, when the snow was melting, the dead body of a Christian was found in a neighboring village, having been buried beneath the snow for a considerable time. It so happened that about the same time the functionaries of the Zaslav synagogue assembled in a neighboring Jewish inn, to celebrate the circumcision of the new-born son of the innkeeper. A peasant who chanced to pass by the inn informed the authorities that the Jews had been praying the whole night as well as eating and amusing themselves, and this suggested to the Bernardine monks of Zaslav that the celebration had some connection with ritual murder, the victim of which was the discovered dead body. The Jewish innkeeper, the Kahal elder, the hazan (cantor), the mohel (surgeon), and the beadle of the Zaslav synagogue, were indicted. The accused, in spite of dreadful tortures, reiterated that they had assembled to celebrate a circumcision. Only the youthful beadle Moyshe, crazed by the tortures, began to murmur something, repeating the words which were dictated to him by the accusers, though he afterwards withdrew the confession thus forced from him.156 The accused were all sentenced to a monstrous death, possible only among savages. Some of the accused were placed on an iron pale, which slowly cut into their body, and resulted in a slow, torturous death. The others were treated with equal cannibalism; their skin was torn off in strips, their hearts cut out, their hands and feet amputated and nailed to the gallows. The memorial prayer for these martyrs concludes with the Biblical words: "O earth, cover not thou their blood, and let their cry have no place, until the Lord shall look down from heaven!"
However, the cry of the Zaslav martyrs was drowned by the shouts of the new victims of the ritual murder myth, which transformed the Christians who consciously or unconsciously allowed themselves to be infected by its poison into cannibals.
The Zaslav trial was followed by an uninterrupted succession of ritual murder accusations, which in the course of fifteen years cropped up almost annually. The most revolting among them, from the point of view of the surrounding circumstances, were the trials of Dunaigrod157 (1748), Pavolochi158 and Zhytomir (1753), Yampol159 (1756), Stupnitza, near Pshemyshl (1759), and Voislavitza160 (1760). In the Zhytomir case, twenty-four Jews were accused of having participated in the murder of the peasant boy Studzienski. Exhausted by tortures and prompted by the desire to hasten their end, they confessed to a crime which they had not committed, and were sentenced to death. Eleven were flayed alive, while the others saved themselves from death by accepting baptism. An image of the alleged martyr Studzienski, in the shape of a figure covered with pins, was spread by the clergy all over the region, to intensify the hatred against the Jews. In Voislavitza, near Lublin, the whole Kahal was charged with the murder of a Christian boy for the purpose of squeezing out his blood and mixing it with the unleavened bread. The spiritual leaders and elders of the Jewish community were brought to court. One of the accused, the rabbi, committed suicide while in jail. The remaining four were sentenced to be quartered. Before the execution the priest, holding out the promise of leniency, induced the unfortunate Jews, who had been crazed by their tortures, to embrace Christianity. The