Author Turns Detective in Probing Anti-Semitic Riots

THE BUTCHER’S TALE

Murder and Anti-Semitism

in a German Town

By Helmut Walser Smith

W.W. Norton

288 pages, $25.95

*

In the spring of 1900, in a small town called Konitz, then part of Germany, now part of Poland, an 18-year-old youth was murdered and chopped into pieces. Before long, a story began going around that the victim had been ritually slaughtered by Konitz’s Jews in order to obtain Christian blood for the making of matzos. When the German authorities (who knew better) did not pursue this line of investigation, but started questioning a local Christian butcher whose daughter might have been having an affair with the deceased youth, there were increasing outbreaks of violence against the town’s Jews.

This culminated in a series of anti-Semitic riots so fierce that the Prussian army had to be called in to restore order and protect the Jews.

“Forty years after the rioters of Konitz shouted ‘Beat the Jews to death,’ ” reflects Helmut Walser Smith, “a modern government, supported by a cast of willing executioners and ordinary men, did precisely that.” But Smith, a German-born, American-educated historian currently teaching at Vanderbilt University, draws conclusions somewhat different from those in Daniel Goldhagen’s “Hitler’s Willing Executioners.”

In Smith’s view, the anti-Semitism that repeatedly manifested itself in such violence was not so much a specifically German phenomenon as a more general and insidious one pervasive throughout much of Europe during the entire second millennium. By 1900, this virulent brand of anti-Semitism seemed to be confined to fringe groups. There was good reason to think--as many people did--that sporadic outbreaks, although distressing, were vestiges of a fading past rather than omens of an unimaginable future. “[I]n the final analysis,” Smith contends, “Hitler came from the fringe, not the center.” But how do these “fringe” ideas find their way from the margins to the center?

To help answer this question, Smith undertakes an investigation of what happened in the case of one particular town: a microhistory. Studies of German anti-Semitism, he notes, have usually focused on “the ideas of prominent anti-Semites, on the anti-Semitism of a particular group or institution, or on anti-Semitic politics.” What Smith hopes to accomplish by investigating at the local level is a picture of “how anti-Semitism became part of the warp and woof of everyday life”: how rumors spread, how neighbors became feared enemies and how some people perhaps came to believe their own lies.

Piecing together evidence culled from newspapers, police and court records, and other documents, Smith not only creates a painfully detailed portrait of a backward, economically depressed small town, but also adopts the role of latter-day detective, reopening an unsolved case and coming up with a plausible solution. Smith’s crisp writing, his analytical mind and his skill as a storyteller make his book as absorbing as a mystery novel.

But there’s more to “The Butcher’s Tale” than its “small-scale, high-resolution” microhistory of a small-town crime and the ensuing crisis. Smith also pans back to give us the larger picture. In his third chapter, he discusses the long history of the ritual-murder myth while his fifth chapter examines the behavior of the Konitz witch-hunters through the lens of anthropology.

Over the centuries, the Vatican issued condemnations of this specious and dangerous libel against the Jews. Martin Luther also denounced the charge as utterly unfounded. Secular authorities, such as the 13th century Emperor Frederick II, who investigated the matter, came to the same conclusion. But the myth was not so easily eradicated among the populace. Smith sees the myth as fed by several streams in Christian tradition, particularly during its second millennium: the construction of a “persecuting society” in the wake of the Crusades and the new 12th century church doctrine of transubstantiation, which insisted that Christian worshipers were actually eating the body of Christ when consuming the wafer.

Smith proposes that many worshipers were so disturbed by this idea, they might have dealt with their anxieties about cannibalism by projecting them onto members of an oppressed group.

If there is such a thing as ritual murder, Smith finds it in the anti-Semitic riots that broke out in the wake of such accusations. In his fifth chapter, he suggests that people who stoned houses, brandished weapons and shouted death threats at their Jewish neighbors were enacting what anthropologists like Victor Turner might characterize as a kind of community-binding rite: a ritual that played at murder but stopped short of it. (As with so many anthropological--or socio-biological--explanations of human behavior, this seems to lead us in the dangerous direction of substituting mores for morality. Not that Smith himself makes the argument that this kind of “community binding” is healthy or desirable.)

One need not, in any case, be convinced by all of Smith’s various hypotheses to find this a stimulating, thoughtfully argued, informative and eye-opening book. In the 19th century, Smith tells us, there were numerous works on the topic of ritual murder. Sadly, many of the best-researched ones, which proved the speciousness of the charges, were too dry and scholarly to win the attention of the average reader. Fortunately for today’s readers, Smith knows how to combine sound research with pellucid prose and a spellbinding story.