http://www.americanthinker.com/2007/02/the_blood_libel_returns.html
Criminal trials based on the blood accusation more or less died out in Western Europe as the Middle Ages drew to a close around 1500. But it continued to flourish as a part of popular anti-Semitic literature and folklore, and was given some limited sanction and encouragement by the Catholic Church, which declared some of the children who had supposedly been murdered by Jews "blessed," and allowed them to be venerated by the faithful. In Eastern Europe, however, the allegation underwent a big revival in the eighteenth century, when numerous trials of Jews on ritual murder charges took place in Poland. Such trials continued to occur sporadically throughout Eastern Europe in the nineteenth century, and there was also one in Damascus, Syria, in 1840, in which over twenty local Jews were tortured and put to death in response to blood accusations from a Catholic priest.
Finally, there was at least one more blood libel trial in the twentieth century. In 1911 a young and respected Jewish businessman, Mendel Beilis, was charged with ritual murder in Kiev by the Russian Tsar's Ministry of "Justice." After two years in prison, Beilis was finally acquitted in a widely publicized trial that helped to discredit the Tsarist regime in Russia in the eyes of all enlightened, educated Russian opinion. Surely now the ancient lie had been put to rest!
Yet the poison resurfaced once more with deadly results in the Polish town of Kielce in July 1946, after the Holocaust had supposedly ended. A mob that included Polish policemen and soldiers, incited by false rumors of Jewish ritual murders of Polish children, massacred over forty of the pathetic remnant of 200 Kielce Jews who had somehow survived the German extermination campaign. This was the last time, as far as I have been able to learn, that the blood libel led to Jewish deaths in Europe. But a documentary film about the Kielce massacre made in the 1990's by American researchers contains interviews with several contemporary Poles, including a priest, who admitted that they still believed in the ritual murder myth.
The publication by the Second Vatican Council of the Catholic Church of a policy statement called Notre Aetate in 1965, which repudiated many of the anti-Jewish attitudes that had flourished in the church for centuries, has gone a long way towards putting the blood libel to rest in the Western world.
--- Chris Doss <lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Another question for all you polimaths:
>
> When was the last person tried/executed for
> witchcraft
> in Europe? I've been trying to find this info for
> Russia but haven't been able to dig it up -- it must
> have happened, since Sholokhov describes the
> attempted
> lynching of a suspected witch "after the war with
> Turkey" in the first chapter of "Quiet Flows the
> Don."
>
> Relatedly, when was the last European Blood Libel
> trial of a Jew for allegedly killing a Christian
> child
> for religious purposes? (Outside Russia, I mean. The
> last one here was in 1913.)
>
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