Beggars, Jews, and Witches, Oh MY!

The Reformation allowed many deep prejudices to rise to the surface of popular culture. The movements of witchcraft and ritual murder trials had profound significance on a culture faced with the question of defining the line between piety and sinfulness. Ascending from a culture challenged by both religious and political warfare, these movements emerged from deep-rooted prejudice and intense superstition. Both Hsia’s book, The Myth of Ritual Murder and Klaits’ book, Servants of Satan provide the means to analyze the rise of a paranoid population and tremendous acts of prejudice surrounding the accusations of witchcraft and ritual murder in Europe.

Even before the Reformation, the concept of evil was deeply saturated into society. Many things were associated with the Devil that were merely natural occurrences. Klaits explains that the fundamental words in Romance languages “for misfortune, illness, and mishap stem from the same root, meaning evil or malign, that is the base of the word for the devil” (13). He further points out that almost all Europeans during this time believed that demonic influences caused all misfortunes and misery (13). However, combating that fear was Christianity. Symbolizing the triumph of Christ over evil, the emphasizing of the crucifixion provided European society with the image of the Church as a sword against the Devil. It was a though a combined effort of the clergy and society to define what and who to wield this sword against.

The motivation to eradicate sinfulness from the community was more than evident. People believed that every natural disaster, be it thunderstorm, famine, or the death of a child, was God’s wrath against a community with sin on their doorstep. Therefore, society targeted those on the fringes of their definition of a Christian. Unfortunately, “Jews shared with witches and Christian heretics the roles of dreaded outsiders and enemies of society” (Klaits, 29). Consequently, the persecutions began. It was not difficult to find the cultural context to pin these victims with heinous crimes, one only had to look at the preconceived stereotypes that would only be continually reinforced with every trial.

The stereotype of the witch as a poor, female widow was not a stretch of the imagination for contemporary communities. Since before Roman times, women were seen as second-class citizens, often placed even below her own children on the scale of power and importance. Women without male influence, such as widows or those who never married, were considered extremely low class and were often left with no money and no property. Thus developed the image of a beggar-woman, knocking from door-to-door, depending on the charity of her neighbors in order to survive. It was in this context that “[h]er knock at the door frequently evoked a dangerous mixture of resentment and guilt in the mind of the slightly better off neighbor” (Klaits, 5). Klaits also discusses Keith Thomas’s viewpoint that “The overwhelming majority of fully documented witch cases fall into this simple pattern. The 'witch' is sent away empty-handed, perhaps mumbling a malediction; and in due course something goes wrong with the household, for which she is immediately held responsible” (87). The poor beggar woman would then be accused of witchcraft. The accuser most likely felt guilty for the misfortune that befell him or her, believing that it was a direct result of his or her negligence toward the beggar that caused it. Therefore, the trial would offer an easy solution because the ‘witch’ was a scapegoat and could be executed. The accuser would then feel that they were just doing their Christian duty to eradicate evil from within their midst. However, unlike these poor beggar women, condemning Jews was more profitable.

In many cities and towns in Europe, there was a present Jewish community. Withheld from many job opportunities and taking advantage of Christian law, many Jews practiced usury, the lucrative business of money lending that was illegal for Christians to practice. Through the differences in religious beliefs, economic jealousy, and the undercurrent of blaming the Jews for persecuting and crucifying Jesus Christ, the stereotype of Jews being the enemies of Christianity “was nourished by the many children’s rhymes and stories that represented the Jews as horrifying creatures of the Devil” (Hsia, 1-2). Cast into this malevolent role, Jews were immediately held suspect when a corpse would be found or a Christian had gone missing. Thus the emergence of the persecutions began.

To understand what charges were brought against the Jews, one must look at the attribution of magic to human blood. Hsia explains that “[i]n Judaic, Christian, and Germanic folklore immense power was ascribed to blood, especially human blood” (8). Blood was thought to contain the power of the soul, therefore, it was against Mosaic laws for Jews to taste blood. So potent was this conviction that it was believed that a contract with the Devil could only be signed in blood and was painted on entrances to ward off evil. However, blood-magic only really emerged “at the end of the twelfth century, when the church prompted the doctrine of transubstantiation—whereby bread and wine, consecrated by a priest during Mass, were transformed into the body and blood of Christ while retaining their outward appearance” (Hsia, 9). This concept allowed the devout population to believe in miraculous attributes associated with not only Christ’s blood, but of that of a Christian as well. Therefore, when accusations of Host desecrations and murders of Christians for the acquiring of their blood arose, it “reflected the very success of the doctrine of transubstantiation” (Hsia, 11). Blood-magic was then seen in the light of the struggle between good and evil.

Through many towns, especially in Germany, Jews were finding themselves pitted against a community that believed them guilty of the worst monstrosities of devil-worship and child-murder. Jews were blamed for collecting Christian blood or stealing consecrated Host in order to harness its powers for evil-doing and curses on the Christian community. These trials amounted to ‘evidence’ of a conceived continent-wide Jewish conspiracy that echoed the very fears of the Church and its pious parishioners.

Riding on the curtails of this belief, stereotypes about the magic of witches emerged into a society all too willing to condemn any outsiders to the Devil. Until the end of the Middle Ages, it was not uncommon for villagers to believe that magic could do good and evil. In fact, the concept of ‘white magic’ was prevalent not only in local wizards, but “[m]iraculous curative abilities were also ascribed to Christian figures whom religious tradition endowed with divine grace” (Klaits, 14). Even the authority of Christianity “rested in part on the supernatural attributed popularly attached to their symbols” such as relics and shrines (Klaits, 15). However, when the elite, educated society connected magic, white and dark, with heretical activities and the Devil, all magic became suspect and magicians and witches became a public enemy.

Both of the accusations against Jews and ‘witches’ stemmed from the divine power placed behind Christian ideas. Witches were charged with using magic that had previously been attributed with saints. Jews were accused of harnessing the power of blood which in itself lends its credibility to the belief in transubstantiation. It is ironic that these outcasts of society were condemned for being suspect of acquiring the divine and magical powers that were the very core of the Christian society that was accusing them. Through subjugating these ‘undesirables’ to vicious torture and damnation, European society believed that it was proving the triumph of Christ over evil.

Many of the trials for both ritual murder and witches implemented horrible torture upon its suspects in order to arrive at the ‘truth’. Innocent or not, “torture and suggestion were potent forces few prisoners could resist” (Klaits, 5). Enough gut-wrenching agony would make the accused do or say anything in order to please their tormentors. One could argue, as Klaits does, that eventually the suffering would make the very captives themselves believe in their guilt, even admitting to such stereotypes as having intercourse with the Devil (5). It was not hard to believe that through this, magistrates and authorities alike were convinced that they were uncovering the grim reality of a world seeping with evil and that their acts would vanquish the Devil himself from their midst.

The accusers themselves believed in their good works. Klaits points out that “Secular writers’ adoption of traditional Christian ideas about women and sex suggests the considerable degree to which religiously based notions were absorbed into lay culture” (72). This explains that the stereotypes of witches were not only in the minds of the clergy or religious zealots. These ideas of women being evil was not only in contemporary writings it was also in the medium of the illiterate: art. Klaits explains at length stating:

Changes in the visual arts also appear to indicate that distaste for women … the many representations of the Virgin Mary served only to draw contrast between idealized femininity and the defects of real women. But the contrast became explicit in French engravings made during the second half of the sixteenth century… in these engravings women frequently personify all or nearly all of the seven deadly sins… an artist drew a woman engaged in some vice or crime, she was clothed in contemporary garb, thereby associating the sinful woman with the females of everyday garb. (72)

Sources such as these solidify Klaits’ theories about the deeply engraved prejudices and stereotypes surrounding the witch trials. Compared to the Virgin Mary, the poor beggars and midwives that were accused seemed to fail against this idolization. Neither of these groups fit in the mold that society “insisted that only the status of virginity and the role of motherhood could glorify the female condition” (Klaits, 66). The use of the printing press as a means of mass-producing replications of these mediums allowed for the misconceptions of witches and Jews to spread throughout Europe.

The leader of the great Reformation only added to the religious fervor. Hsia points out that “For Luther, the essence of magic is in the words: witches, Turks, Catholics and Jews all practice it ‘ and thus the devil fills the whole world with magic, idolatry, and swindle” (135). He made both Catholics and Jews enemies that he urged society to eradicate. Witches were an obvious choice to persecute as well. All forms of ‘magic’, be it folk magic, Jewish mysticism, or even transubstantiation were seen as works of the Devil in the eyes of the Protestant church.

The persecution of countless women and Jews had many parallels during the Renaissance and Reformation eras in Europe. Fears of these groups emerged from a rise in Christian piety. They faced similar methods of torture to produce confessions that provided the ‘evidence’ of the rumored atrocities committed to become part of a deeply mythical history. Similar uses of propaganda such as woodcuts and pamphlets were used against them to spread the ideas of their alleged conspiracies. These stereotypes did not begin or end in this time period, but were exploited to no end in a society conflicted with the question of the true face of evil.