Journal Article

The Lord’s Justice

MURPHY, CURTIS G.

2021

Overview

This article discusses a series of investigations from 1729 to 1730 into an alleged ritual murder in the town of present-day Niasvizh. In the eighteenth century, Niasvizh, then called Nieśwież, belonged to the Radziwiłłs, one of the wealthiest and most powerful families of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Unlike similar cases during this period, this ritual murder investigation did not follow the standard script of interrogation by torture and public execution, in part because the private town lord fostered a culture of legality and predictability that allowed the Jewish community the opportunity to organize an effective defense. The multiple investigations carried out by the town magistracy and the lord’s hand-picked officials also revealed a dense network of socioeconomic and neighborly relations between Catholic elites and Jews of both genders, a relationship that excluded non-Catholics and noncitizen residents of the town. In such an environment, blood libel served as a weapon of resentment and revenge for the disenfranchised and the excluded in order to destabilize the class oligarchy. The failure of the accusation to fundamentally alter relations between Catholics and Jews underscores the extraordinary significance of the supposedly “feudal” private town lord in enforcing cooperation and upholding legality, creating a framework in which the Jewish community had greater room to maneuver to combat a blood libel accusation than in royal towns or in even more “modern” states.

• Publisher: Springer Science + Business Media,Springer Netherlands,Springer Nature B.V
• Subject: History / Jewish life & ethics / Jewish people / Methodology of the Social Sciences / Religious Studies