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impious Mayr s fate was signed, more by God than by men. "The perfidious peasant who sold the child was condemned to perpetual
imprisonment in his own house, linked with chains, where he lived imprisoned and mad for a good two whole years" (28). Thus recites the
implausible hagriography of Andrea of Rinn, which is full of gaps and for which there is no convincing contemporary documentation. The
report remains inextricably linked to local traditions whose relationship to reality can only leave one perplexed and dubious.
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Nevertheless, the cardinal Lorenzo Ganganelli, later Pope Clement XIV, in his famous report of 19 January 1760, presented to the
Congregation of the Holy Office, with which he intended in general to absolve the Jews from the accusation of ritual infanticide, made an
exception, in addition to for the martyrdom of Simon of Trent, also for that of Andreas of Rinn. The two cases were to be considered
exceptional events, not to be generalized, but were nevertheless concrete and real (29):
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"I therefore admit as true the fact of the sainted Simon, the boy of three years of age killed by Jews in hatred of the faith of Jesus Christ in
Trent in the year 1475 [...] I accept as true another crime, committed in the village of Rinn, diocese of Bressanone, in 1462, against the
sainted Andrea, a boy barbarously killed by the Jews in hatred of the faith of Jesus Christ [...] I do not, however, believe, even admitting as
true the true facts of Bressanone and Trent, that one can justifiably deduce that this is a maxim, either theoretical or practical, of the Hebrew
nation, since two events alone are insufficient to establish a certain and common axiom" (30).
The accused in the Trent trial in 1475, under torture, supplied ample testimony of ritual homicides committed, according to them, in the
preceding years in the German-speaking lands from which they came, and in the centers of northern Italy where communities of Ashkenazi
Jews had formed more or less recently. The defendants were alleged to have assisted or participated in these murders directly; in some cases,
they had only heard about them from others. Sometimes they were able to remember the names of the other Jews who had taken part.
Isacco da Gridel, near Vedera, immigrated from Voitsberg, a village near Cleburg, was employed as a cook by Angelo of Verona, one of the
principle defendants in the trial for the death of Simonino. In 1460, Isacco attended the lower courses of a Talmudic school at Worms, in the
territory of the Rhineland, and it was there that he participated in a ritual murder, a little before Passover. A Jew by the name of Hozelpocher
is said to have purchased a two-year old child from a Christian beggar at a very high price and to have taken the child to his dwelling in the
Jewish quarter. The murder is said to have been committed here, in the spacious "stufa" [parlor] of the house, in a collective ritual, with the
participation of about forty local Jews. The blood is said to have been gathered in a glass receptacle, but is not said to have reached the
quantity of liquid contained in two egg shells (31).
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Joav of Ansbach in Franconia was a domestic servant in the house of the Maestro Tobias da Magdeburg, the occulist physician of Trent. Joav
had recently immigrated from the city of Prince Bishop Hinderbach, and had previously rendered service in the house of a Jew named Mohar
(Meir) at Würzburg for over fifteen years. During this period, Joav testified to having seen the Christian servant, Elisabeth Baumgartner,
assigned to housework, which was forbidden to Jews on Sabbath days, introduce Christian children into the dwelling, in secrecy and during
the night, on at least three occasions. The murders were said to have been committed in the wood-shed, in a collective ritual which then
concluded in the chapel-synagogue, in a ceremony with the participation of numerous local Jews. The blood was gathered in a silver chalice,
while the children s bodies were buried at night in a terrain owned by Mohar, outside the city (32). Mosè of Ansbach, the young teacher of
Maestro Tobias s children, for his part, informed the judges that, in 1472, while he was working at Nuremberg, he had learned that a ritual
murder had been committed approximately eight years beforehand, in the dwelling of a certain Mayer Pilmon, in the presence of and with the
participation of all the males of the family (33).
Mosè da Bamberg was a poor traveler who, having left Bayreuth with his son on his way to Pavia, had stopped for a brief stay in the city of
Trent, as a guest in money lender Samuele da Nuremberg s house, and had, to his disgrace, been present during the tragic days of the murder,
confessing his knowledge of the murders to the judges. In 1466, on the road from Frankfurt on the Oder, in the Marca of Brandenburg, while
transporting some goods to be sold in that city, he had stumbled across some professional child hunters. While traveling through a thick
forest, Mosè had, in fact, encountered two Jews, remembering only the their first names, Salamone and Giacobbe, in the act of preparing to
hurl into a nearby river the bodies of two boys, massacred by them previously. Their prey had been captured in a small peasant village at the
foot of the forest (34). The two hunters showed the appalled Mosè their tin-plated iron bottles, filled with red liquid, and were satisfied at the
thought that they were going to rake in a tidy sum through the sale of that liquid. But they needed the money to live (35).
Whether or not this was all simply a Grimm's Brothers fairy tale, which might well be told at the right time and place to frighten children and
give them sleepless nights, we don't know. It is certain that the poor Mosè da Bamberg could not precisely remember the identity of the two
hunters and was unable to locate the
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forest in which the crimes had been committed; nor did he know the names of the two victims or the village from which they had been
abducted, or the name of the river into which they were said to have been thrown. He recited this fantastic confession before his attentive
inquisitors, oscillating, suspended by a rope tied around his feet and his head downwards (36).
Israel of Brandenburg, the strange young painter, later baptized under the name of Wolfgang, knew how to be loquacious when he had to be,
and had heaps of picturesque ritual murder tales to tell, tales which had reached his ears more or less directly, with which to regale his avid
and powerful interlocutors. He had allegedly gathered this information for several months, moving from the Rhineland to the Tyrol, then
down to Venice, traveling through the cities of the Veneto. He claimed to possess first hand information on the ritual murders of Christian
children committed at Güzenhausen in 1461 and Wending ten years afterwards. At Piove di Sacco and Feltre, Jews from his native country
had told him of the ritual murders recently committed at Padua and at Mestre (37).
The women in the trial were no less prominent and their report of the child murders committed by their men, husbands, parents, friends and
friends, were precise and detailed. Bona, Angelo da Verona s sister, was a survivor of family and marital problems. She had lived with her
stepfather, Chaim, from the time she was a little girl, first at Conegliano del Friuli and then at Mestre. When she was little over fourteen
years old, she had been married off, against her will, to Madio (Meir), a Jew from Borgomanero in the Novara region. Madio had a
reputation as a madman and a thoroughly bad egg, who, after wasting the already scanty family fortune in gambling, had abandoned her,
moving elsewhere. As a result, Bona had returned to her mother's house at Conegliano del Friuli, and was then taken to Trent with her
mother Brunetta (Brünnlein), also an unhappy and frustrated woman, as the more or less welcome guests of her brother, Angelo da Verona, [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]