The Host Desecration Project Finale: The Introduction

Note: This is a draft introduction for the Host desecration piece I've been working on. It is to appear in a source reader on pilgrimage, which is why it is mentioned in the final paragraph.

The twelfth and thirteenth centuries were a time of increasing anxiety concerning the presence of Jews in Christian Europe. Beginning with the massacres attending the summons to the First Crusade in 1099, Jews in Europe found themselves more and more alienated from their Christian neighbors and more the target of polemical attack from Church authorities. In around 1150, the monk Thomas of Monmouth, seeking increased pilgrim traffic to the local shrine of William of Norwich, wrote an account of the Child-saint's life that introduced the fantasy of Jewish ritual murder into the arsenal of anti-Judaic invective.

When, in 1215, it was decreed at the Fourth Lateran Council that underneath the bread and wine of the Eucharist were the actual, historical body and blood of Christ, a new source of anxiety appeared, this one concerning the proximity of Jews and the Eucharist. These concerns would find full expression in accounts of host desecration, the capture and torment of the consecrated bread by Jews, like the one presented here. Though composed of tropes that began circulating in the mid-thirteenth century, this incident, which took place in 1290 in Paris, is generally considered to be the first fully-articulated account of Host desecration. Like the accusations of ritual murder that preceded it, this was also an anti-Judaic fantasy, an expression of Christian angst about the Eucharist.

All of the elements are here: the doubting Jewish merchant, the Christian woman ensnared by debt, the family of the Jew, the tortured host that bleeds, the execution of the Jew and the conversion of his family to Christianity as he burns. This account adds the twist that the knife used and some of the blood become venerated as relics which the people can come to see with their own eyes. Thus the perfidy of Jews led to an opportunity for pilgrimage, and a possibility for the same redemption achieved by the unnamed merchant's wife and children.