Trent 1475
Trent 1475: Stories of a Ritual MurderTrial, by Hsia
The details of the Trent Jewish Ritual Murder Trial finally made me understand the different mindset of the people in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period. History Professors have said that the people of those times thought very differently from us but it wasn’t until reading this account that I finally understood what they meant; namely, the almost universal belief in judicial torture as the correct way to get a confession in a trial.
The theme of the trail was the interrogations where “the logic of the torture chamber was contested until the bitter end,” (pg. 92). All the arrested Jews originally claimed completely innocent and were slowly coerced with months of torture session into admitting a fantastical tail of ritual murder. It’s easy to understand that the “bad guys” would use this kind of method to get the truth they wanted out of their victims but we see the same procedure used by those trying to save the Jews from execution. The commissioner sent from Rome got a confession out of Simon’s father by using a similar method of interrogation. “Put under judicial torture, Anzelino accused the Scheweizer of killing Simon and framing the Jews,” (pg. 77). The fact that both sides of the conflict used torture to prove their point shows that society accepted torture as a valid tool for gathering evidence during a trial. What’s fascinating is that both sides accused the other of using torture to force their prisoners into confession. This is where I start to lose the thread of their logic. However, there are plenty of governments today, including our own, who still use torture to get information. After reading this book, it shocks me that anyone would still use torture. Putting the morality of it aside, clearly torture doesn’t lead to accurate testimonies.
Another aspect of the book that resonated with me was the gathering of evidence for the trial. All that the Trent government chose to include in the proceedings was the body of Simon. The original inspection by a Jewish physician showed that the little boy had drowned and sustained cuts from being thrown around in the ditch (pg. 28). The Christian physician examined the boy a few days later and came to the opposite conclusion, stating that Simon had been thrown into the water postmortem (pg. 30). Both sides had their biases but it feels like the later Jewish confessions could have been easily proved impossible by the body still in the possession of the investigators. Surely any doctor would have seen that the boy didn’t suffer multiple stab wounds and other horrible injuries that were described during the trial. On the same note, the magistrate originally assumed that the Jews were guilty when he came to collect the body of the child because “people who are killed bleed openly in the presence of evil men or murders,” (pg.29). This urban myth could have surely been proven wrong on the spot because the body of the boy wasn’t bleeding a full day after it was found in the ditch where it had apparently been drifting for two days. The people in charge of the trial were blinded by their own bias. They found in the evidence only what they wished to find. Here again we see a mindset that is very different from that of the judicial system today. I like to think that modern courts attempt to let the evidence speak for itself where as in the times of the Trent trial, the evidence was tailored to fit an existing narrative with no care.
The question remains as to why the people of Trent wanted the ritual murder trial. The explanation can be seen in the interactions between the local government and the commissioner Dei Giudici who was sent to investigate the trial from Rome. The commissioner was met with such hostility that he left town and conducted all further investigation from a distant city. The incident lays bare the relationship between the King and Pope, who were generally in favor of the Jews, and the local government who wanted to exercise their independence from an absent ruler of a divided Holy Roman Empire and a distant religious figure. The method of rebelling was to start a trial against generally disliked minority under the protection of the ruling powers. On top of that, the cult of Simon must have brought in revenue for the town as well as the confiscated property of the executed Jews. However, this exercise in local power around the Holy Roman Empire at this time lead to the deaths of many Jews and destroying countless lives.
