The blood libel as an extreme case of antisemitic accusations attracted disproportionally great attention in scholarly research. Most of the literature dealing with eastern Europe, which became a central stage of the blood libel cases in the early modern age, are written in Polish, Russian, and Hebrew, and thus are unavailable to the English-speaking reader. Teter's study has an advantage over the previous publications in bringing the broad volume of the existing research in these languages into English. Teter's book examines the trail of blood libel accusations from the case of Simon of Trent in 1475 in Southern Tirol to the Grabie trial in 1774–75 in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
Teter emphasizes the “legal trail” starting from 1236 in Fulda in Hesse and 1247 in Valréas in Provence and continuing to the end of the eighteenth century (32). The author rightly distinguishes the judicial and literary aspects of the blood libel, which not always coincided: many literary descriptions of the blood libel left no real evidence and never reached courts, and vice versa many judicial cases were never discussed in literature. Throughout the book the author consistently shows the complicated interaction between these two aspects. Thus, dealing with the Jewish response to the blood libel accusations, Teter presents the paradoxical situation when the main victims of the blood libel were Ashkenazi Jews, but the literary compositions confronting this accusation were written mainly by Sephardic Jews.
As a culmination of this idea, the author treats the story of Simon of Trent and the spread of his cult throughout Germany, Poland, and Italy as a turning point in the connection between judicial and ideological aspects of the blood libel, following Hanna Węgrzynek (“Czyrna legenda” Żydów, 1995, 98), Joop van Banning (Mord rytualny, 2003, 57–78), and Anna Esposito (Mord rytualny, 2003, 119–56). The author challenges the widespread view that “Catholic obscurantism of the Counter-Reformation” is responsible for the change in the Holy See's attitude toward the blood libel after 1540, when the last papal bull defending the Jews from this accusation was issued by Paul III, and claims that the cult of Simon of Trent, and especially his formal beatification in 1588, caused this (379).
The author discards Benedict XIV's reputation as an “Enlightenment Pope” on various grounds, but especially citing his letter Beatus Andreas dedicated to the question of “children cruelly killed by Jews in hatred of the Christian faith” (313). Teter also denies that “the new spirit of the Enlightenment” brought a renewal of the explicit condemnation of blood libels profoundly expressed in the report of Cardinal Giovanni Ganganelli (future pope Clement XIV) in 1759, since this “report was explicitly prohibited from being made public” and “had little impact on the defense of Jews in late eighteenth-century Poland and even later” (11).
Generally speaking, the book is preoccupied with the Church's reaction to the blood libel, while the Church paradoxically never played a central role in this typically Christian accusation. Clerics rarely initiated the blood libel trials until the mid-eighteenth century, and the Church never officially approved blood libel accusations. Many other factors, such as tense relations between Jews and burghers and the changing economic position of Jews, which played far more important role in the spread of the blood libel, are not discussed in the book at all.
The lack of bibliography is a serious shortcoming in a book of a synthetic character. The list of archival and printed sources is somewhat misleading, since many of the manuscripts listed as “archival sources” were discussed and even printed in previous publications, which is not indicated. Bibliographical references in the notes are sometimes inadequate, since most of the Hebrew bibliography is missing. Thus, for example, dealing with blood libel in Wohyń in 1663 (249–50, 458n73) the author ignores Mordechai Nadav's article dedicated to this case (Bein Israel LeUmot, 1988, 53–70).
All the above, of course, does not diminish from the value of this important and useful volume, which certainly enriches the scholarly discussion on the subject, putting numerous judicial cases mainly in Italy and Poland into the general European perspective.
