The 3 Most Popular Lies of Christian Antisemitism-3

  In this tidbit we will look at the third of the three most often quoted lies used by “supposed Christians” in Medieval Europe to murder Jews. In their book ‘Why the Jews’,  Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin list the three lies as:
1.Blood Libel or ‘Ritual Murder’. Jews draw blood from children and drink it during their  celebrations, such as during Passover.
2.Jews poison Christians.
3.Jews kidnap the Communion wafer that is believed to be transubstantiated into the body of Jesus and then stick needles into it
​as a means of torturing Jesus.
 
Once again, I will allow Prager and Telushkin to instruct us, on page 86, they write: “In 1215, the fourth Lateran council accepted the doctrine of transubstantiation as official church dogma. The dogma asserted that the wafer used at the Mass was miraculously transformed into the body of the Jesus; the wafer was to be regarded not as a symbolic representation of Jesus, but as his actual body. Just how literally Christians accepted this teaching is exemplified in the writings of a leading preacher of the thirteenth century, Berthold of Regensburg. He explained that Christ, though present in the wafer, does not allow himself to be seen in it, for “who would like to bite off the little head, or the little hands, or the little feet of a little child.”
   Antisemitic usage of the doctrine of transubstantiation soon led to the torture and murder of thousands of Jews. Since Jesus becomes present through the wafer, the reasoning went, would not the Jews who had once crucified him wish to kill him again? In 1243, only twenty-eight years after the Fourth Lateran Council, the first accusation of “Host Desecration” occurred in Berlitz, near Berlin. The city’s entire Jewish community was burned alive for allegedly torturing a wafer.
Charges of “Host Desecration” spread throughout Europe. In Prague, in 1389, the Jewish community was collectively accused of attacking a monk carrying a wafer. Large mobs of Christians surrounded the Jewish neighborhood and offered the Jews the choice of baptism or death. Refusing to be baptized three thousand Jews were murdered. In Berlin, in 1510, twenty-six Jews were burned and two beheaded for reportedly “desecrating the host.”  A charge of host desecration was reported as late as 1836 in Romania.
   The “Host Desecration” libel is among the clearest examples of the Christian perception of the Jews as devils. Clearly, no one, not even a Jew, tortures wafers. If a person does “torture” one, it could mean only one thing: he, too, recognizes that the wafer is the body of Jesus, and wishes to make him suffer. Who but the people of the Devil recognize the divinity of Jesus but wish to destroy him?
   In his book, “The Anguish of the Jews” Edward Flannery, records more on this libel. On page 107, he writes: “In Rottingen to 1298 word went about that Jews had desecrated a host. Rindfleisch, a noblemen, stirred up the mob and sent the entire community to the stake. Thence he and his Judenschchters (Jew-slaughterers) marched through Germany and Austria pillaging, burning, and murdering Jews as they went. Estimates place the murdered at 100,000, and the decimated communities at 140.  The Emperor fined the cities where the atrocities occurred. The Rindfleisch massacres were, as Poliakov points out, the first attempt to hold all Jewry responsible for a crime—an aborted genocide.”
Flannery continues with still more on page 157. “Charges of ritual murder (number 1 libel) and ‘Host Desecration’ continued in this land where they seemed to have found a natural habitat, and some popular uprisings resulted.”
“It was not from within Poland, however, that finally came the “deluge” that submerged Polish Jewry and introduced into Jewish history perhaps its bloodiest decade (1648-58) since Biblical times. Again the Jews were caught in the cross-fire. In the Ukraine the Eastern Orthodox Cossacks hated not only the Polish Catholics who oppressed them but also their middlemen of alien faith, the Jews. In April of 1648, under Bogdan Chmielnicki, their hitman, they allied themselves with the Tartars and Zaporozhti and ravaged Poland in a most barbarous fashion, reserving their worst cruelties for the Jews. Margolis and Marx describe the happenings:
“Estates were devastated, manor-houses reduced to ashes, and human beings barbarously done to death. The victims were flayed and burned alive, mutilated and left to the agony of a lingering death. Infants were slit like fish or slaughtered at the breasts of their mothers or cast alive into wells. Women were ripped open and then sewed up again with live cats thrust into their bowels; many, married or unmarried, were violated before their menfolk, and those that were comely were carried away. Thousands of Jews perished in the towns east of the Dnieper.”
 
Can anything be worse!?!?! Once again, tears can be the only appropriate response!
 
Quotebit
Although we may not always be healthy, nor always prosperous, yet God is always good, and, therefore, there is always a sufficient argument for giving thanks.
-Charles Spurgeon