Imagining Ritual Murder

Nineteenth Century Anti-Semitism in International Perspective /Antisemitismus im 19. Jahrhundert aus internationaler Perspektive, eds. Mareike König, Oliver Schulz, 2019

This study aims to reconstruct and analyse the anti-Semitic visual reception history of the Tiszaeszlár blood libel case from the time of the affair (1882–83) up until today. It examines images created in connection with the blood libel together with their usage and function as instruments of anti-Semitic propaganda. It underlines the power of images by highlighting their role in the establishment and institutionalisation of an anti-Semitic, pseudo-religious cult centred around the figure of the alleged victim of the ritual murder accusation. Furthermore, the study identifies the main actors, their motivations, objectives and strategies, while also exploring the economical aspect of the phenomenon: the production, circulation, multiplication and distribution of anti-Semitic imagery. The Tiszaeszlár affair occurred in Hungary, but it received immediate attention in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy as well as beyond. As for the anti-Semitic, artistic reception history of the case, it is a transnational phenomenon as it involves material and sources from a myriad of countries ranging from Russia to the United States.

Jakub Hauser, Eva Janáčová (eds.): Visual Antisemitism in Central Europe: Imagery of Hatred, Berlin, De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2021, 37–60., 2021

This study aims to show the eminent role of the imagination and its materialized forms in the creation of long lasting ‘knowledge’ of ‘Jewish ritual murder’. The two examples examined here belong to the cultural history of the Tiszaeszlár blood libel (1882–1883), which has had a long-lasting effect in Hungary. Both case studies, albeit different regarding their genre and their primary audience, attest to the significance of cultural products in the creation, dissemination and survival of antisemitic prejudices. Paintings depicting the imagined ritual murder were primarily intended for the politically active urban bourgeoisie, whereas the genre of folk songs appeared as a predominantly rural phenomenon; yet on many occasions both the actors involved and the cultural products created transcended social boundaries. The songs and the images created a tangible materiality for the alleged ritual murder; this perceived reality was crucial for the embedding of the blood libel legend into the common consciousness and the creation of a ‘solid’ knowledge of it; this largely passive knowledge was activated decades later, in the case of the blood libel accusations, against survivors of the Holocaust.

The subject of this article is the Tiszaeszlár blood libel, one of several sensational Jewish ritual murder cases to unfold in Central and Eastern Europe in the last decades of the nineteenth century. By focusing on a region far removed from Tiszaeszlár, the article underscores the rapidity with which antisemitic violence traversed Hungary in the early 1880s. In examining the causes, function, and impact of this violence, the article demonstrates the centrality of the provinces for understanding the depth and dynamism of political antisemitism in Hungary. It also argues that Tiszaeszlár acted as a formative political experience for many people in the provinces, and it explores the wider consequences of this event, both in the near and long term.

European Review of History: Revue européenne d'histoire, 2019

In late 1945 and the Summer of 1946, a series of horrific assaults against surviving Jewish communities occurred in postwar East Central Europe, particularly in Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Ukraine, Russia and Romania. The pogrom in the polish town of Kielce on 4 July 1946 is arguably the most infamous case. Roughly a month later similar atrocities occurred in the Hungarian industrial town Miskolc on 30 July and 1 August 1946 and in various localities in Slovakia between 1 and 5 August. These were preceded by pogroms in the Hungarian village Kunmadaras on 22 May 1946, in Slovakia, in Topoľčany on 24 September 1945, on 4–7 September in Kiev, Ukraine (USSR) and on 8 July Rubtsovsk, Russia (USSR). The collection of articles seek to fill in three important lacunae of current scholarship: first, it adds the so far missing in-depth socio-cultural histories of popular anti-Semitic pogroms in Slovakia, Hungary, the USSR and Romania next to the already existing work on Poland; second, it focuses on the connections between popular culture and collective violence so far largely neglected; and, third, it is the first comparative investigation into the topic. The main goal of the articles is to analyze the specific conditions of postwar popular anti-Semitism and to understand how peasants and workers distanced and excluded their neighbours during 1945 and 1946. Authors explore the genesis and consequences of collective violence committed by ordinary people in four sub-themes: 1, the idea of ‘legitimate violence’ in postwar popular cultures; 2, the public image of Jews and the Holocaust after 1945; 3, the popular memory of the war; 4, the political uses and abuses of the pogroms.

The title that I have chosen for this essay begs explanation. Let me begin by proposing that the term "discourse" describes a cognitive system, a set of logical propositions, metaphors, and symbols whose overall effect is to impose order and meaning on experience; to provide a "mapping" of reality according to which the objects of experience are applied to a discrete, limited and knowable set of (culturally specific) meanings.

European Review of History: Revue européenne d'histoire, 2019

The relationship between popular culture and collective violence has rarely been made the object of inquiry in studies concerning post-WWII anti-Semitic atrocities. For many historians, the pogroms are explained as consequences of social and economic circumstances, in particular general privation and the widespread social discontent which accompanied it. For others, the violence appears to have been the outcome of political (Nazi or communist) propaganda, and it is explained by the vulnerability of these societies to exclusionary and racist ideologies. This article links the study of post-WWII collective violence with the cultural order mobilized by the perpetrators themselves. By examining a well documented case from Hungary, the ‘lynch-law’ of 7 March 1946 in Szegvár, it explores how labourers (diggers) in a rural community perceived the difficulties and promises of post-war reconstruction programs and how they made sense of their collective actions in this context.

Sen and Wagner (2009) advance the thesis of the centrality of fundamentalist belief systems in violence. I provide further explication of their thesis by looking at the Romanian case. The explosion of violence around 1940–41, the years when Romania joined the Axis and entered the second world war cannot be understood without taking into account the historical, political, social, and cultural factors that created the radical atmosphere of xenophobia, mass psychosis, and mobilization against Others. Rumors emerge as the most powerful psychological means of spreading the official master narrative of 'domestic Jewish treason'. Reinterpretation of various cultural symbols also played an important role in excluding the Jewish Other from the national community.

Jewish History, 2012

This article focuses on the antisemitic discourse that surrounded the controversy over the provision of cadavers to medical departments in the Second Polish Republic. In the pages of the student press and at student rallies, activists argued that Jewish medical students should be barred from dissecting Christian corpses. They demanded that Jewish communities provide corpses for dissection on a regular basis as a condition for continued training of Jewish doctors. The discourse surrounding the cadaver affair combined nationalist language with religious vocabulary, suggesting that the affair was motivated as much by religious concerns as by nationalist ones. Drawing on notions of Jewish criminality and arrogance, allegations of a Jewish sense of religious superiority and disregard for Christian values, and fears of Jewish exploitation of Christians to fulfill their own collective needs, the cadaver affair played with concepts reminiscent of blood libel.

Routledge, 2019

Tab;e of Contents: The Toszegi Affair: the role of rumors Rhytm of Violence The White Terror as a reaction to the Red Terror The space of violence The forms of violence Sexual assualts Violence as social positioning The bourgeois rebels