Class Notes 1/24

In class this week we talked mostly about Jews and how before witches they had been the group that the Christian population placed its fears on.
1475 was the Trail of Simon of Trent who was a young boy that was supposedly killed in a blood libel.  The blood libel was a fear of Christians that Jewish people were killing Christian children in order to mimic the death of Jesus Christ.  They also believed that they could accomplish the task of hurting Jesus again by stabbing the Eucharist which supposedly bled until it could find Christians to come avenge it.  Christians thought that they did these things because Jews needed blood for matza and to stop the mentration of their men.  I really do not understand where they got these ideas from.  They seem extremely outlandish to me to say the least.  I can understand them using the Jews as scapegoats for their fears but these fears just seem so out there that I really can not understand what they would have orginated in.
The first instance of a blood libel was in 1180 in England and it later spread to Europe where is increased in the 1300's.  These trails though fizzled out when the witch hunt started in the 1550s and 1560s.  After witch craft emerged as the predominate threat to Christians, Jews sort of fell into the background.  This makes a lot of sense to me because it seems like a natural progression.  The Jews and the witches both had the same place in European socities, which helped Christians to have someone that they could blame for all of the terrible things that they could not explain.  And when the witches started to become the enemy a lot of the terrible things that Jews were believed to do were then passed onto witches.
The Nazi's were not the first people to mark the Jews so that they would be easily recognizable.  this actually started in the early Middle Ages.  In pictures depicting Jews in this time theyw ere always shown as wearing these identifiable markers.  However, they were also portrayed with the things that they rejected in order to wound them even more.  This was a very effective techinque in order to mentally harm the Jewish people.  Especially by placing them in pictures in which they were wearing pictures of pigs or eating a pigs bowel movements or milk.  These images became quite common motifs for artists to use and they often became daily objects.
The markers that Jews had to wear made them easily identifiable to Christians so that they knew who to avoid and who to blame.  With witches however, this was differnt.  There were no visable markers so people could only guess at who was a supposed threat to them.