CHAPTER V

A RELIC OF THE DAYS OF WITCHCRAFT AND BLACK MAGIC

ON 6th May, 1912, The Times published a letter, signed by many men of authority, protesting against what they called the revival of "the hideous charge of Ritual Murder" which was being brought against a Jew at Kiev. "The Blood Accusation," they said, "is a relic of the days of Witchcraft and Black Magic."

Unfortunately for the signatories of this letter, who numbered among them the Archbishops of Canterbury, York and Armagh, the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, Bishops galore, Dukes, Earls, Justices, Masters of Colleges and Editors, of that period, the Blood Accusation has nothing medieval about it at all; it was more rife in the 19th century than it was in medieval times!

Unfortunately also, Black Magic is in the same category. It is not medieval either; there never was a wider cult of Black Magic than there is in the year of Our Lord 1938!

How extraordinary it is that influential men can be induced to sign such a statement as I have quoted! And how strange it is that, where Jewish interests are at stake, these same influential Christian men will see nothing improper in attempting to prejudice the course of the criminal trial of the Jew Beiliss at Kiev, a course which they would never pursue in any other cause!

Let us confound the signatories of The Times letter out of the mouths of Jews themselves. The Jewish Encyclopedia, 1903, Vol. III, pp. 266-7, gives a list of Accusations of Ritual Murder made against the Jews through the centuries; 122 cases are listed in chronological order, and no less than 39 of them were made in the 19th century! There were far more than double the number of Blood Accusations made in the 19th century than in any previous century, according to this authoritative Jewish list.

Let us examine the list of Ritual Murder Accusations made by a converted Jew, Cesare Algranati, in 1913, and published in Cahiers Romains; here are listed 101 accusations, of which 28 were made in the 19th century and only 73 for all the eight preceding centuries! Even the Jew Roth gives the argument away, for he says (p. 16 of his Ritual Murder Libel and the Jew, 1935), "The nineteenth century proved little less credulous than those which preceded it."

"Anti-semitic" authors' lists of Blood Accusations agree in this respect with the lists made by Jews; Der Sturmer, the paper of Julius Streicher, in a special Ritual Murder issue published in 1934, shows that in the 19th century 32 charges of ritual murder were made, which is ten more than in any other century in European history recorded by it.

The fact that the charges increase in number as the age becomes more and more enlightened is particularly significant, because the Jewish Money Power and its silencing activities are more developed than ever before and might have been expected to reduce the number of charges.

Sufficient has now been said to expose the absurdity of any attempt to consign the Blood Accusation to any medieval limbo.

It lives today; I may say with the great Sir Richard Burton (The Jew, the Gypsy and El Islam, 1898, P. 129): "At any rate, sufficient has been advanced in these pages to open the eyes of the student and the ethnographer; it will stand on record until Elijah."