The Butcher's Tale: Murder and Anti-Semitism in a German Town, and: Exclusionary Violence: Antisemitic Riots in Modern German History (review)

On the night of March 11, 1900, in the eastern German town of Konitz (today Chojnice, Poland), an eighteen-year-old boy was killed. His unsolved murder led to the most severe outbreak of antisemitic violence in the empire of Kaiser Wilhelm II. In The Butcher's Tale, written for both an academic and a popular audience, Helmut Walser Smith investigates the nature of antisemitism in imperial Germany. His study looks beyond large cities and purely political antisemitism to elucidate a more traditional antisemitism in the provinces, a world, as Smith notes, characterized by prejudice, ignorance, rumor, and vindictiveness.

Over several days parts of Ernst Winter's body were found; however, solid clues to the murder were few, and potential witnesses gave contradictory testimony about the victim's final hours. Moreover, medical examiners gleaned little conclusive evidence from the autopsy, hampered by the mediocrity of local medicine and the incompleteness of Winter's remains. Popular opinion fixated on the fact that the body had been expertly dissected and seemingly drained of blood only a few weeks before Easter. Some locals claimed to have heard a scream or to have smelled something foul near the synagogue on the night of the murder. With these "facts" circulating and little evidence produced by investigators, townspeople progressed to the conclusion that Winter's death was a Jewish ritual murder. Hysteria gripped the town and antisemitic sentiments rose to the surface. Soon Jewish residents of Konitz could scarcely walk the streets without harassment. After Winter's head turned up in a rural drainage ditch, a witness claimed to have seen a local Jew carrying a large sack in the vicinity. The Jew's ensuing arrest set off a wave of riots in which synagogues and individual Jews all over the region were attacked.

Local and regional officials did their best to combat the hysteria. When violence broke out, police requested assistance from the army. The county commissioner's letters to Berlin reflect his embarrassment at what was transpiring. Pressured by a citizens' committee, however, police investigators took outlandish allegations seriously and followed even the most dubious leads. The greatest suspicion fell on Salomon Lewy, the local Jewish butcher. Less than six weeks after the murder, with no end to the investigation in sight, the reward for clues leading to an arrest reached 20,000 marks, the largest ever offered in Prussia, a sum many times the annual salary of a civil servant. Antisemitic outside agitators flocked to Konitz. The investigation only became more serious with the arrival of a special detective from Berlin, but his arrests of perjuring Christian witnesses further inflamed the antisemites.

Gustav Hoffmann, the town's leading Christian butcher and himself a suspect, formally accused the Jewish butcher of the murder,¹ drafting a statement with the help of the antisemitic Berlin journalist Wilhelm Bruhn. He focused on the dissection of Winter's body, which conformed to Hoffmann's largely erroneous conception of kosher butchery. Moreover he accused the entire Jewish community of Konitz of aritual murder conspiracy. This tale, in various guises and amended by fresh rumors, assumed the status of fact in the eyes of most Konitzers.

As Smith shows, blood libel—the charge that prior to Easter, Jews would kidnap and murder Christians in a manner similar to Christ's own execution, or use the blood of Christian children to make Passover matzos—persisted despite the efforts of rational officials to eradicate medieval superstition. The spread of antisemitic calumny profited from the confluence of rural oral tradition and urban print culture. Local newspapers and Berlin publications disseminated the fabricated accounts and allowed for their reintegration into popular culture. Wilhelm Bruhn and his colleagues distilled preexisting...