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The Color of
Wine
by Larry
Domnitch |
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Have you
ever taken a really close look at the wine on the table
at the Passover Seder table? It doesn't speak volumes
it's ordinary Kosher holiday wine very common to
Passover. To the
Jews of Medieval and modern era Europe,
the presence of ordinary red Passover wine in Jewish
homes could bring grave consequences. |
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The
Jews
once celebrated
Passover in an environment of absolute
terror. It was a season when forces of violence could be
unleashed against
Jews in an instant on the pretext of
the most absurd accusations. In an instant, a Jewish
community could be immersed in holiday celebration, the
next, amidst a horrid living nightmare. The time of
Passover often coincides with the Easter season when
Christians commemorate the crucifixion. Too often, the
Jews, who were blamed for the crucifixion and bitterly
resented for their rejection of Christian beliefs,
became targets of hatred and superstitions. Often, it
was their use of wine on
Passover that triggered those
attacks.
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| On, or
around the time of
Passover, blood libel accusations
where often leveled against the
Jews. These accusations
often led to violent attacks against Jewish communities.
There were hundreds of blood libels throughout history
resulting in countless deaths. The blood libel theme
rarely deviated.
A child –always a young
boy – somehow was lost. Accusations soon arose that the
Jews murdered the boy and used his blood for ritual
purposes. Often those issuing the accusations murdered
the child themselves in order to level the charges.
Sometimes the child was a victim of an accident or later
found unharmed. The cruelest methods of torture were
often used to force confessions and the fabricated
charges would serve as a pretext to slander and attack
Jewish communities. |
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NOW only $9.99
Printed in Israel
Price Soft Cover: $17
The
Cantonists: The Jewish Children's Army of
the Tsar
by Larry Domnitch
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By the fourteenth century,
ritual murder charges became common at
Passover time. The
fact that human sacrifice and the use of animal blood for
any purpose is strictly forbidden according to Jewish law,
did not matter to the perpetrators and believers of lies.
Reason is abandoned when hatred and ignorance rules.
Repudiations of blood libels by many popes throughout the
ages occasionally helped to protect some communities but by
and large did little to stop them.
The first case of a ritual murder accusation in history
against the
Jews goes back to Egypt about 40 BCE when an
anti-Semitic grammarian and propagandist named Apion, intent
upon fomenting the masses against the
Jews of Alexandria,
publicized a blood libel accusation. Josephus Flavious
records that Apion accused the
Jews of slaughtering a
gentile boy in order to use the remains for ritual purposes
and cannibalism.
Over one thousand years later, the accusation resurfaced. On
Passover 1144, in Norwich, England a young man named
William, a tanner's apprentice, disappeared during the week
of Easter. Charges immediately arose that the
Jews killed
him as part of a ritual murder. According to the accusation,
the
Jews "bought a Christian child before Easter and
tortured him and on Long Friday hanged him on a rod" Since
no body was found, the Sheriff of Norwich ignored the
charges and granted the
Jews protection. But the story was
not forgotten and the missing boy, William, became a martyr
among the town's people. A short time later, the
Jews of
Norwich were attacked by mobs seeking vengeance and were
forced to flee.
Eleven years later, the blood libel resurfaced in England
bringing horrific consequences to a group of
Jews attending
a wedding in the city of Lincoln. A Christian boy named Hugh
was found in a cesspool in which he apparently had fallen.
After subsequent forced tortured confessions, nineteen
Jews
were hanged. Soon, the anti-Semites of England accused all
of England's
Jews of participating in ritual murder.
On May 26, 1171, two months after
Passover, the blood libel
reached France. In the city of Blois, rumors spread that
Jews
committed a murder in order to extract blood for
Passover Matzot. The Blois Jewish community of thirty-three,
which included seventeen women, were burned at the stake
after they refused the chance to save themselves by
accepting Christianity. French Jewry was shocked and
horrified. The rabbinical scholar Rabbeinu Jacob Tam
proclaimed the day of the massacre, the 20th of Sivan, a
fast day to commemorate the tragedy. Tragically, many more
such horrors would follow. Ten years later the accusation
reached Spain at Sargasso. The blood-libel spread like a
wildfire in Europe.
Catastrophe struck Polish Jewry in the mid-seventeenth
century as Cossack troops under the leadership of Bogdan
Chmielnicki attacked Jewish communities. During three years
of horrific attacks, a significant portion of Polish Jewry
was wiped out. Rabbi David Halevy Siegel, lived during that
era and authored a commentary on the Shulchan Aruch (Code of
Jewish Law) entitled the Turei Zahav, (Taz) issued a ruling
intended to protect
Jews from the blood libel.
He ruled that the traditional red wine used at the Seder
should be substituted with white wine in lands of
persecution in order not to arouse suspicion, "In lands
where false accusations are made, we refrain from using red
wine." On
Passover night thereafter, white wine was used. In
his own life, Rabbi Siegel managed to flee the horrors of
the Chmielnicki massacres, but was not spared great personal
suffering when two of his sons were murdered in a Pogrom in
Lvov, Poland in 1654.
Over the next three hundred years, as the modern era
approached, blood libels continued, still used as a pretext
for incitement. In 1840 the Damascus blood libel drew
protests from
Jews worldwide, and signified the entry of
blood libels in the Middle East. The infamous Kishinev
pogrom of 1903 began on the last day of
Passover as the
result of a blood libel. In 1911, the well-publicized case
of the blood libel against Mendel Beilis in Russia set
opposing camps in Russia between his supporters and
detractors.
Over time, the rhetoric of blood libels helped to set the
stage for new conspiracy theories. With the approach of the
era of modernization and the industrial revolution,
accusations arose of the 'Jewish conspiracy' for world
domination, which became the new theme for the hate
propagandists. The weekly publication of Nazi Germany 'Der
Sturmer' made frequent use of the blood libel as part of its
propaganda.
As
Jews celebrated
Passover in bygone eras, they were aware
of the risks. At the
Passover Seder, they drank the four
cups of wine that symbolized freedom, but not in the
traditional color. When they gazed at the white wine, which
adorned their holiday tables, they were reminded of their
own sufferings and of their precarious existence.
They lived in hostile environments and they suffered, but
celebrated the freedom experienced by their ancestors as
they had exited Egypt and they could nonetheless sit and
recline in the manner of nobility and drink white wine and
celebrate their legacy as
Jews. Today,
Jews no longer facing
blood libels, can sit at their Seders and drink red wine,
and ponder the plight of their ancestors of Europe as well
as Egypt, and their trials and triumphs.
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