A research project at the University of Würzburg shows that the history of malicious fake news goes back a long way. In the late Middle Ages, the Jews in particular were victims of slander. The early printed works disseminated alleged news about host desecration and ritual child murder in text and images, show the research results so far.
The so-called incunabula are his specialty: In his master’s thesis at the Universidade Federal Fluminense in Rio de Janeiro, Vinícius Freitas dealt with the analysis of these products of early letterpress printing. His focus was on an anti-Jewish ritual murder legend, which was reproduced in 1475 by the Augsburg master printer Günther Zainer. Freitas was able to continue his work at the University of Würzburg thanks to a grant from the German Academic Exchange Service.
As part of his doctoral thesis, he is now looking in libraries and archives for further hardly or unknown evidence of late medieval and early modern printed works with similar content. “When it comes to accusations of host sacrilege and ritual murder, the research literature almost always cites the same images – there is no study of the material on the basis of a broad source research,” explains project manager Eckhard Leuschner from the Chair of Modern and Contemporary Art History at the University of Würzburg about the background of the project .
Myths of horror and bleeding hosts
As Freitas reports, the later printed works were preceded by earlier defamations in images and handwriting: In 1290, the accusation arose in Paris for the first time that Jews were desecrating hosts. Just eight years later, Jews in Röttingen near Würzburg were also accused of having subjected a host to acts of defilement. The researcher reports that an oil painting depicting this alleged crime hung in the Röttingen parish church until the end of the 1980s. So far, he has found other works of art in connection with the accusation of the sacrifice of the host in Iphofen, Regensburg and Passau, among others.
The early legends of ritual murder were also presented in writing, in some cases in a sophisticated manner. The most famous and earliest example is according to Freitas the work “The Life and Passion of Saint William the Martyr of Norwich” by Thomas of Monmouth. In this work the Benedictine monk deals with the death of the child William. The twelve-year-old died in 1144 of unknown causes. In his work, which Monmouth wrote for more than 20 years, he claimed that Jews martyred and crucified young William. “This legend spread quickly in Europe,” says Freitas.
The power of images
Illustrations, which then also underlined the early printed works, had a particularly strong effect in spreading the wrong information, he emphasizes. Even if people had never seen with their own eyes that Jews desecrated hosts, they firmly believed in it through the sometimes drastic depictions. The images that Freitas has discovered so far show, among other things, Jews who indulge themselves in wild anger on hosts. In a book illustrated with engravings, for example, it is first reported how a Jewish man is said to have made a host available to himself. One of the pictures shows an old woman receiving communion. But she does not swallow the host, but hides it in her mouth and then sells it to the Jew.
Another picture then shows the wicked in action: the host is nailed to the wall and the man is furiously hitting it with a scourge so that it begins to bleed. These images of the wafers bleeding from the abuse were evidently typical, says Freitas. The legends of the existence of such “blood host” may even have had financial motives: the communities concerned could become places of pilgrimage.
Another interesting aspect of the research topic is the parallels between today’s conspiracy myths and historical ones, the scientists emphasize. The difference between then and now, however, is the speed at which it spreads: myths, some of which are absurd, nowadays reach the whole world on the Internet at lightning speed. Freitas is now also trying to find out how exactly and at what speed the anti-Jewish legends once spread in the late Middle Ages and early modern times thanks to the art of printing. He hopes that he will be able to have more free access to libraries and collections again in 2021, because the corona pandemic severely hampered research last year. Other institutions in Germany, Austria and Northern Italy are now on his list.