Back to Medieval Source Book | ORB Main Page | Links to Other Medieval Sites |

Medieval Sourcebook: 
A Blood Libel Cult: 
Anderl von Rinn, d. 1462


The Image 

The illustration on the right, located at the cult-church of Anderl von Rinn until recently, portrays the "martyrdom" of Anderl, a three year-old boy who became the focus of a blood-libel cult in the seventeenth-century. Anderl is the child being held down and having his throat slit. The killers are clearly marked as Jews by their clothes and turbans (one form of the "special mark" Jews were forced to carry by Church decree). 

 The third, lower, figure is collecting the child's blood in a bowl. The myth of the blood libel was that the blood of a Christian child was used to make Passover matzohs. 

 Note that, as Prof. Schafer recounts below, this cult was allowed to continue in Austria until the 1990s, when Bishop Reinhold Stecher had the images removed. 

 The text of the motto reads: "Sie schneiden dem Marterer, die Gurgl ab und nemen alles Blut von Ihm", literally "they cut throat of the martyr and take all blood from him" or in other words, "They cut the martyr's throat and drain all his blood." 


The Origins of the Story

[Adapted from a note by Veronika Schoennegger, <Veronika.Schoenegger@uibk.ac.at> of the University of Innsbruck, Austria]

The cult of Anderl von Rinn (the name "Anderl" is a diminuative of "Andrew", like Gretel for Greta) had its origins in the fifteenth century, but only became really popular in the 17th century.

In 1619 a Dr. Hippolyt Guarinoni (1571-1654) heard a story about little boy who was buried in Rinn and had been murdered by Jews. Guarinoni dreamed that the year of death of this boy was 1462. The modern celebration of the the cult of Anderl began in 1621 and by the late 17th century the cult of Anderl was established throughout the Tyrol, together with other boys who had supposedly been killed by Jews (e.g. Simon of Trent). In 1642 Guarinoni himself wrote a book Triumph Cron Marter Vnd Grabschrift des Heilig Unschuldigen Kindts [Triumph, Crown(?), Martyrdom and Epitaph of the Holy Innocent Child].

Some years ago, the bishop of Innsbruck [Bishop Stecher] tried to forbid the anti-Semitic cult and the body of Anderl was transferred from the church to the churchyard of Judenstein in 1985. And in 1994 the cult was officially forbidden and Anderl was supposed to becomea symbol of antisemitism and of crimes against little children. Nevertheless, some very conservative people make a procession to his grave every year.

There aren't many written sources for the story, it is more a part of Tyrolean oral tradition.

[Kathy Rabenstein adds:] In lists of saints, Anderl appears as "Blessed Andrew of Rinn" (b. 1459; d. 1462) - "a boy allegedly put to death by Jews out of hatred for Christ at Rinn near Innsbruck, Austria. The facts are doubtful. Pope Benedict XIV (1740-58) [who also wrote the anti-Semitic encyclical A Quo Primum 1751] allowed the continuation of the local cultus but refused to proceed to Andrew's canonization."

 

The Judenstein [Jewry-Stone]
[Translation by Paul Halsall]:

The story connected to the above picture was recorded by the German folklorists, the Grimm brothers, in the early nineteenth century. What follows is my translation of the story. [The German text is given at the end of this file].

In 1462 it so happened that in the Tyrol, in the village of Rinn, several Jews persuaded a poor farmer give up his little child, by paying him a lot of money. They took the child out into the forest and in the most horrible manner, martyred him there on a big stone, which is ever since called the "Judenstein" ["the Jewry-stone"]. The dead corpse they hung on a birch tree standing near a bridge. Now, the mother of the child was working in a field as the murder happened, and at once her thoughts turned to her child and without knowing why she became very afraid, and then, one after another, three fresh drops of blood fell on her hand. Full of anxiousness she hurried home and sought after her child. Her husband led her into the room and confessed what he had done. He wanted to show her the money which had released them from poverty, but it had all transformed into leaves. Then the father lost his mind and died of grief, but the mother went out to look for their little-child, and when she found it hanged on a tree, took it down with hot tears and carried it into the church in Rinn. And still the child lies there and is viewed by the people as a sacred child. The Judenstein was also brought there. It is said that a shepherd chopped down the tree on which the child had hanged, but when he wanted to take it to his home, he broke a leg and had to die.

Blood Libel Saints: Names and  Links:

This is only a selection of possible material: The ritual murder accusation became epidemic throughout Europe. The old Jewish Encyclopedia, Vol. III, 266, lists the following cases, beginning with William of Norwich: 5 other cases given for the twelfth century, 15 for the thirteenth, 10 for the fourteenth, 16 for the fifteenth, 13 for the sixteenth, 8 for the seventeenth, 15 for the eighteenth, and 39 for the nineteenth, going right up to the year 1900 [total 113]. There have been many more cases in the 20th century.

Other Information in the Medieval Sourcebook

Other Medieval Blood Libel Saints

There were many other such "killed by Jews" Saints. Here is the list by date from André Vauchez, La Saintete en Occident (1981), pp. 176-77.  [Vauchez does name all Medieval cases - e.g. he does not include Robert of St. Edmundsbury.] What follows is Vauchez's list, with extra comments by Kathy Rubenstein on the extent of the Roman/ecclesiastical approval of the cults.

Other Medieval Blood Libel Links

Bibliography


Commentary

By Ingrid H. Shafer, Ph.D.
[Adapted, with permission, from the ARCC Web Page http://astro.temple.edu/~arcc/]

 


Modern Persistence of The Blood Libel

Subject: Why I Believe In Jewish Ritual Murder 
From: nswpp@ix.netcom.com(NSWPP) 
Date: 1997/09/29 
Newsgroups: triangle.politics,alt.nswpp,alt.politics.white-power,alt.skinheads.  WHY I BELIEVE IN JEWISH RITUAL MURDER 

Yes, I do believe that the Jews have practiced ritual murder as part of their religious ceremonies in the past, and that they almost certainly do so today, with the following qualifiers: 

 *I do not believe this practice is or ever has been widespread, but has always been restricted to a small number of the most hard-core rabbis and Jewish cabalistic mystic sects; 

 *I am perfectly willing to accept the likelihood that individual Jews down through history have been falsely accused of this practice, just as I believe that on the other hand it has often been carried out undetected and/or unpunished. The Beiliss case in 1913 Russia is a good case in point: Mendel Beiliss himself was probably innocent of the actual commission of murder although he may have been peripherally involved in covering up the act on the part of his co-religionists; 

 *I am willing to accept that the overwhelming majority of Jews are unaware that the "blood libel" has at least a partial grounding in fact and genuinely believe it to be a slander, just as most Jews probably believe that the Holocaust occurred more or less as advertised despite mounting evidence to the contrary. 

 My belief in the preceding is based on two foundations: 

 extensive study of the historical, cultural, and religious aspects of Judaism, and my own personal observation, dealings, and experience with the Jews as individual people over a period of 25 years. I don't want this e-mail to get too prolix, since this isn't really my area of enthusiasm---the Jews' public and political crimes are far worse than their private religious ones---but briefly summarized: 

 1. There is an immense amount of anecdotal and circumstantial evidence that these sacrificial homicides took place in the past, back in times when concealment was harder and Aryans far more aware and wary of the Jew than they are today. 

It is significant that ever since the days of Babylon, a period of almost four thousand years, this accusation (like many others) has been leveled against the Jews EVERYWHERE THEY HAVE EVER RESIDED in the world. Time and again down through the ages the Jews have been caught literally red-handed, in some cases toting the dead body of the child whose blood they have drained away to dispose of it in sacks or wagons, sometimes with the corpse being found in the synagogue cellars, etc. 

The Jews' response to this is "ve is beink poisecute!" They maintain that down through forty centuries of history, there has been a mammoth conspiracy to frame them for ritual murder. According to this theory, in places as far apart as Cochin China, medieval Germany, 1913 Kiev and 1970 Montreal, and among peoples as diverse as knightly Crusaders, Turkish sultans, twelfth-century Yorkshire Saxons, Argentinians, Cossacks, British historians, Renaissance Italian popes, assorted saints and sinners, the burgomeisters of Prague, and modern-day Arabs, there exists one big long, continuous plot periodically to murder small children, drain them of blood, and plant the bodies on Jewish premises or in Jewish vehicles, etc. 

That's one hell of a conspiracy! 

 There are other similar complaints always leveled against the Jews wherever and whenever they have gone---economic trickery and despoliation, refusal to assimilate, disloyalty to their host country, arrogant behavior and hatred against their hosts, etc. The Jewish response is always the same---for four thousand years, everybody in the world has been engaged in a collossal conspiracy to "get" them. Nowadays most people believe that, not suprising in view of the Jewish control of the media of communications which has existed in varying strengths in the Western world since the late nineteenth century. But in the old days it didn't wash. 

 Our medieval ancestors were not fools. They lived with the Jews side by side in close-packed urban communities, very small by modern standards, and knew the Jews far more intimately than we do today. Just like people today, they cared about their children and when a child was slain the entire community interested itself not only for purposes of revenge, but to ensure the safety of everyone's kids. We are asked to believe that time and again, insular communities who discovered they had a child-killer in their midst stubbornly refused to apprehend the alleged Gentile "real killers" and blamed the Jews out of religious bigotry. What possible interest could any community, medieval or otherwise, have in lynching an innocent scapegoat and allowing a real killer of children to go free? Why would everyone in Trier or Lincoln or Spoleto or Kiev go along with such a miscarriage of justice when doing so put other children at risk? Why (so far as we know) did the child-killings cease once the Jews had been punished and (usually) driven from the community? 

2. The Jewish religion allows for and practices animal sacrifice, per the Old Testament or Torah as they call it, although these customs have long been held in abeyance and in theory apply only to the Temple in Jerusalem. There is an entire sect of "Kohanim" in Israel who practice and train successive generations of rabbis in the techniques of sacrifice in anticipation of the day when Israel succeeds in wresting the Al Aqsa mosque away from the Muslims who have held it for 1400 years and rebuilds the Temple. The Talmud teaches that non-Jews are *goyim*, beasts without souls. To a religious Jew there is no difference between a German or an American or an African and a cow or a horse or a fish; all lesser non-Jewish forms of life, humanoid or otherwise, were put here by God to serve and pleasure the Jew. When the Jews claim that they do not practice "human" sacrifice they are by their own weird lights telling the truth. They do not consider Gentiles to be human. 

 3. For the past 25 years I have been in a unique position to observe Jewish behavior and the Jewish character at first hand, since being a National Socialist they don't bother to keep their usual variety of masks on with me and they let all that Talmudic hatred hang out. Anyone who has ever done night duty in a National Socialist headquarters and lifted the telephone for call after call, hour after hour, to hear the crazed screaming Brooklynese of a Jew driven mad by hatred, spewing a string of profanity and terms of excrement, raving like some demented parrot or monkey, totally out of all human control---thus begins wisdom. Anyone who wants to understand the true nature of this "Light Unto The Nations" need only oppose them in public, and he will soon find out what utterly loathsome beings the Jews are, what vicious and contemptible cowards they are, what potentially deadly serpents they are. 

 But don't take my word for it. Check out the Nizkor playgroups and see for yourself. See a Revisionist post a calm, serious, well-researched comment on some aspect of the Holocaust and then see the literally HUNDREDS of hysterical, malicious, hateful, filthy and abusive posts which follow from the little cadre of about two dozen kikes and kike wannabes who go berserk attacking, vilifying, insulting, and threatening anyone who dares to contradict the self-proclaimed Chosen People of God. 

I won't belabor this further, but I will close with two points: 

First off, the Jewish people are entirely capable of practicing ritual murder, and there is an immense amount of historical evidence that they did so. I cannot imagine why they would stop now in this day and age, when they have the power to conceal their misdeeds and the captive media falsely to portray them as victims. How many of those little children you see on milk cartons have fallen victim to the knives of the rabbis and lie buried in some remote wasteland or were ground up into dog food in some Jewish-owned processing plant? I am convinced that at least some of them met that fate. 

 Secondly, the Jews deserve everything that has happened to them in the past and everything that is coming to them in the future, especially when the Palestinians get their state as a toehold and America finally runs out of money and the New Yahk-Tel Aviv lifeline collapses. I do not question that innocent individuals of Jewish extraction have suffered down through the ages for crimes which they as individuals did not commit---but my people and all the peoples of the world have suffered far more at the hands of the Chosen Ones. 

The Jews are great survivors, got to give them that. Like rats and cockroaches, and like rats and cockroaches I doubt we'll ever get rid of them entirely. But the world is a much smaller place now, global village and all that. It used to be they could just move on to the next "Goldeneh Medina" when they wore out their welcome somewhere else---but they can't to that any more. Everybody knows about them now, from Uganda to Honolulu, from Rome to Regina. They've run out of trap doors to dodge through and run out of places to run and hide. Their much-vaunted Israel is going to end up nothing but a death trap. 

There is a reckoning coming, a reckoning between humanity and the Jewish people which will cause the very heavens to darken and the very devils in hell to hide their faces in shock and terror. You might say we owe them a Holocaust. We've been paying their bill for fifty years, and at some point we're finally going to get what we've paid for. 

 And when that day comes, who knows? Even I might pity them..... 

Naaaaah! 

 -Winston Smith 

Comments on Above Text

by Gabriel, 

The "blood libel" is of course very famous (infamous) in Jewish history, and one can find a lot more on it in the Encyclopaedia Judaica. The "saint" described on this page fits a common pattern: Jews were supposed to be looking always for a child, always for the blood, to be used in making matzah. [One of the points I usually make is that pariah groups are always supposed to be a threat to the most helpless members of the major society: Gays, Jews, and Gypsies to children, and Blacks to "the flower of Southern womanhood."] One result is that Jewish communities in dangerous places and times are instructed by our authorities not to use red wine at Passover.

There was an interesting case brought during World War I by a Greek community (Christian) against the Jews of one of the Aegean coastal towns of Turkey. The (Muslim) judge ruled (correctly) that, since human flesh is not kosher, and that blood of *any* animal is specifically unkosher, the charge was preposterous. Still, as in the neo-Nazi quote above, and also as shows up in interviews with modern Poles in Lanzmann's film Shoah, people are still willing to believe that Jews did or do these things!

The neo-Nazi makes a very clever comment in that, since he is willing to acknowledge that the vast majority of Jews have no knowledge of such a practice, he makes it essentially impossible to disprove. I could as easily claim that there is a small clique of Catholics, or Hindus, or you-name-it, who worship UFOs and make animal sacrifices to them; none of the other Catholics or Hindus or whatever know about this, of course, so you can't disprove it just because you don't happen to be in on the it.

I always wonder, too, what Jews were supposed to have done before Christians came along, or for that matter why this supposed ritual should suddenly be "observed" (or claimed to be observed) during the Middle Ages, when the Passover itself had already been 2000 years old at that time!


German Version of the Judenstein Story

[DEUTSCHE SAGEN, herausgegeben von Jacob und Wilhelm Grimm ]

Grimm's Tales, No. 353.
From http://gutenberg.aol.de/maerchen/grimm/sagen/g353.htm

Der Judenstein

Im Jahre 1462 ist es zu Tirol im Dorfe Rinn geschehen, daß etliche Juden einen armen Bauer durch eine große Menge Geld dahin brachten, ihnen sein kleines Kind hinzugeben. Sie nahmen es mit hinaus in den Wald und marterten es dort auf einem großen Stein, seitdem der Judenstein genannt, auf die entsetzlichste Weise zu Tod. Den zerstochenen Leichnam hingen sie darnach an einen unfern einer Brücke stehenden Birkenbaum. Die Mutter des Kindes arbeitete gerade im Feld, als der Mord geschah; auf einmal kamen ihr Gedanken an ihr Kind, und ihr wurde, ohne daß sie wußte warum, so angst; indem fielen auch drei frische Blutstropfen nacheinander auf ihre Hand. Voll Herzensbangigkeit eilte sie heim und begehrte nach ihrem Kind. Der Mann zog sie in die Kammer, gestand, was er getan, und wollte ihr nun das schöne Geld zeigen, das sie aus aller Armut befreie, aber es war all in Laub verwandelt. Da ward der Vater wahnsinnig und grämte sich tot, aber die Mutter ging aus und suchte ihr Kindlein, und als sie es an dem Baum hängend gefunden, nahm sie es unter heißen Tränen herab und trug es in die Kirche nach Rinn. Noch jetzt liegt es dort und wird vom Volk als ein heiliges Kind betrachtet. Auch der Judenstein ist dorthin gebracht. Der Sage nach hieb ein Hirt den Baum ab, an dem das Kindlein gehangen, aber als er ihn nach Haus tragen wollte, brach er ein Bein und mußte daran sterben.
 


This text is part of the Internet Medieval Source Book. The Sourcebook is a collection of public domain and copy-permitted texts related to medieval and Byzantine history.

Unless otherwise indicated the specific electronic form of the document is copyright. Permission is granted for electronic copying, distribution in print form for educational purposes and personal use. If you do reduplicate the document, indicate the source. No permission is granted for commercial use.

© Paul Halsall November 1997 , updated March 1998, January 1999.
halsall@fordham.edu