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92 SHOFAR Summer 1994 Vol. 12, No.4 BOOK REVIEWS Trent 1475: Stories of a Ritual Murder Trial, by R. Po-Chia Hsia. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992. 173 pp. $22.50. In 1475, the city of Trent, at the intersection of the German and Italian worlds in the Tyrol, contained a tiny Jewish community: just three extended households, a synagogue, and a house of study. On the Seder night that year an event occurred which shattered the festive mood of the participants and ultimately destroyed their lives. Someone had planted the corpse of a young Christian boy in the cellar of the central Jewish house. The outlines of this scenario had become all too common in medieval Europe, and the particularly notorious case of Simon of Trent is a well documented example. When Yeshiva University Library acquired a German-language manuscript of the proceedings of the trial against the Jews of Trent, R. Po-Chia Hsia was chosen to tell its stories. With meticulous care, he has unravelled not only the history of the creation and transmission of the manuscript itself, but the many different ingredients that went into creating the blood libel and its dreadful consequences. In order to convey what was lost, Hsia first evokes the medieval microcosm that was Trent in the late fifteenth century, the Prince-Bishop who combined both secular and ecclesiastical authority and the colorful characters who lived and worked in Trent, many recent immigrants from other parts of Germany. The Jewish community, with fewer than twenty adult males, is fully realized, with detailed family and social structure, in its routine interaction with Christian neighbors. Hsia pays particular attention to the distinct role and voices of the Jewish women. Into this world burst an outside agitator, the itinerant preacher Bernardino da Feltre, preaching against Jewish usury and predicting calamity in the near future, magnifying latent anxieties into deadly hostility. The more proximate agents of disaster included the local commonfolk, such as the husband of the Christian midwife whose history of blackmailing his wife's Jewish clients goes a long way toward explaining his sordid motives. In a world in which torture was a Widespread and legal means of producing evidence, not only for Jewish suspects, the outcome of the trial was determined before it began. Book Reviews 93 Several themes emerge from the tales, and larger historical patterns are illuminated in their specificity. As an unprotected religiOUS minority the Jews were utterly vulnerable, and they responded by depending on historic patterns. When faced with the choice of flight or reliance on local justice, Samuel, the most important Jewish householder, decided to stay put and follow correct procedures. He reported the presence of the corpse because flight might have confirmed suspicions of guilt. He forbade even the sojourners to flee, which resulted in a tragic irony. Jewish hospitality, an innocent invitation to a Jewish traveller to spend the holidays, became the death warrant for the hapless guest, guilty of being a Jew in the wrong place and the wrong time. The Jews ofTrent had coreligionists contact the highest authorities, but a Papal emissary charged with investigating the case was ultimately blocked by the local bishop. Long after the Jews had been permanently banned from Trent, the shrine to the martyred child brought traffic and big revenues to the local coffers. The most telling turn in the manuscript comes when it is no longer concerned with the particulars of Jewish guilt, but with documenting the case for Simon's sainthood. Hsia's conclusion of the chapter on the trial of the women, that loyalty meant little "in the face of authorities who were convinced of the guilt, not of one or two families but of the entire Jewish people," are prefigured by Joselman of Rosheim, who wrote, after securing the freedom of most of the accused Jews in a blood libel case in Silesia, in 1533, "I spent over six hundred in order to prove to the margrave George that we, and all Israel, ace innocent of this libel." As Hsia has shown in his previous, broader work The Myth ofRitual Murder (Yale, 1988), the trials themselves became the historical "reality" which perpetuated...

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