Blood libel in Tisaeslar

The Jewish community in the Hungarian village of Tiszaeszlár , located on the Tisza River, comprised 25 families (5% of the total population of Tisaeslar). On April 1, 1882 , before Passover , the 14-year-old Christian girl Esther Shoimoshi, who served in the house of Andras Khuri, disappeared. She was sent on an errand and did not return. After an unsuccessful search, a rumor was spread that the girl was the victim of religious Jewish fanatics. The functionaries, led by the representative of Tisaeslar in the Hungarian parliament, Geza Onodi, and the member of parliament, Deso Ishtoci, who later founded the anti-Semitic party, made a proposal to expel Jews from the House of Deputies, set the population against local Jews, which led to a series of violent actions and pogroms. They accused the Jews of killing the girl and using her blood in Passover, which took place on April 4. On May 4, the girl’s mother asked a local judge to investigate the disappearance of her daughter, focusing on the guilt of the Jews in the “ ritual murder ”.

On May 19, a district court in the city of Nyiregyhaza sent bailiff Jozsef Bari to Tisaeslar to investigate a case instituted by a judge. After detaining the suspected Jews and placing them under police surveillance, Bari began to question him. Some women and girls, seduced by money and sweets, showed that the synagogue guard Jozsef Scharf called Esther into his house and the carver (“ shokhet ”) beheaded her. The five-year-old son of Sharf testified that in the presence of his father, older brother, 14-year-old Moritz, and several other men, Shoheet made an incision on the girl’s neck and with the help of Moritz collected her blood in the dishes. All suspects, including Scarf and Moritz, denied any involvement or awareness of the girl’s disappearance and her alleged murder. On May 19, Scarf and his wife were arrested. On the evening of the same day, Moritz was handed over to the River Commissar for Security. He placed him in his office in Tisanadfalu, where the court clerk Petsey was to monitor the safety of the boy. Petsey, a large man who had served 12 years in prison for murder, apparently helped Rechka make Moritz a tool for the classic accusation of blood libel.

The frightened boy confessed that after Saturday morning service, his father lured Esther into his house with a request to remove the candlesticks, although any work was forbidden to Jews on Saturdays, and the impoverished Jew who lived with him Hermann Wollner led the girl into the lobby of the synagogue, where he attacked her. After she was undressed, two carvers, Abraham Buxbaum and Leopold Brown, led her to the third carver, Salamon Schwartz, who made a cut with a large knife on her neck and collected her blood in a large pot. These three, applicants for the vacant position of mentor and shocker , arrived in Tisaeslar to perform Saturday rituals and, according to the boy, were detained in the synagogue after morning service. All this, Moritz, by his “confession,” was observing through a keyhole in the door of the synagogue. In 45 minutes of such observation, he also saw how the girls were wrapped in a rag and dressed on her body. At the same time, according to him, Samuel Lustig, Abraham Brown, Lazar Weinstein and Adolf Junger were present. Having received such a “confession,” Rechki and Petsey immediately sent for Jozsef Bari, to whom Moritz repeated his testimony, adding that after they left the scene of the crime, he locked the synagogue so that they would not find a corpse or bloody traces. With a zeal, Bari continued his search in the synagogue and Jewish houses, as well as among the graves, but nowhere did he find any traces of the disappeared girl. Twelve Jews were arrested on suspicion of involvement in the murder, and Moritz was imprisoned.

On June 18, a body was removed from the Tisza River near the village of Dada, which, according to the district doctor, could belong to a 14-year-old girl. In her left hand, the deceased clutched a scarf with light blue paint, the same one that Esther bought on the day of disappearance ^[1] . Many recognized her as Esther Shoymoshi. Nevertheless, her mother strongly denied that it was Esther’s corpse, although afterwards she recognized her daughter’s clothes. A group of experts, which included two physicians - surgeons Treitler and Kish, as well as a candidate for medical position Horvath, said that the corpse belongs to a woman from 18 to 20 years old, who died from eight to ten days ago, according to the degree of genital distension sex with men, and never engaged in hard work, since the skin and nails of the deceased are surprisingly gentle and well-groomed. ^[1] All these provisions did not correspond to the fact that Esther was a deceased. ^[1] The body was buried in a Catholic cemetery in Tisaeslar. After that, a group of anti-Semites, among whom was a city Catholic priest, spread the allegation that this body was brought by Jews and clothed in Esther Shoymoshi's clothes to hide the ritual murder. The several rafts who found the body were persuaded by promises and threats to abandon their previous testimonies and declare instead that the unknown Jewess gave them these clothes that they put on this body. New arrests were carried out - raftsmen Yankel Smilovich and David Gershko, as well as Amzel Vogel, and the case, which had gained fame by that time, had gained a new dimension.

On July 29, 15 people were formally charged. Salamon Schwartz, Abraham Buxbaum, Leopold Brown and Hermann Wollner were charged with murder, Jozsef Scharf, Adolph Junger, Abraham Brown, Samuel Lustig, Lazar Weinstein and Emanuel Taub - in the voluntary assistance to the crime, Anselm Vogel, Yankel Grosshilovich Davit and Ignaz Klein - in incitement to kill and steal the body. The delay in the proceedings was mainly caused by the fact that a number of acts drawn up by Bari were found to be incorrect, by the fact that he conducted investigations without a state legal entity, recorded evidence without witnesses, and tortured the accused and suspects. On government orders, Moritz Scharf was placed under the supervision of a district bailiff, who placed him under guardianship of overseer Hunter and thus isolated from contacts with lawyers and other Jews. Moritz was under the absolute influence of the prosecutors, preparing him for the confessions that he should have made in court.

The defendants were defended by Károly Eötvös, a journalist and member of the Chamber of Deputies, with lawyers B. Friedmann, Sandor Funtak, Max Szekey from Budapest and Ignaz Hoimann from Nyiregyhaza . In a petition to the Minister of Jurisprudence, Pauler, Atövös protested against the torture system practiced by Bari, Rechka and Pecey, but this protest did not have the desired effect. The case dragged on for so long that the state executor Kozhma from Budapest went to Nyiregyhaza in September to expedite it.

The protracted process attracted general attention. A mass campaign with pamphlets was underway in the country, trying to incline public opinion towards the guilt of the accused. Former Hungarian President Lajos Kossuth , who was in exile in Turin at that time, raised his voice to condemn the arbitrariness of the authorities and protested the inflated bias against the Jews. He said that suspicion of ritual killings is a shame for Hungary, that to imagine a murder that could be done in the worst case by one person as a racial or ritual crime is not worthy of modern civilization. This voice of indignation of the recognized leader of the liberation movement contrasted with the fierce prejudice and persecution that swept across the country and had echoes in the Chamber of Deputies. The appeals of the deputy Erné Mezei to the Minister of Justice in November 1882 had consequences. Attorney General Havash was sent to Nyiregyhaz, who found out that despite the official report of the judge, the defendants had never been heard. He ordered the release of some of the prisoners, but, sensing powerful obstacles to his attempts to expedite the matter, he resigned, which was readily accepted.

In mid-November, Jozsef Scharf's wife was released, while her husband and other accused were in custody. The body found in Tisza was exhumed at the request of lawyers on December 7 and re-examined by three professors of medicine at the University of Budapest ( Hungarian Eötvös Loránd Tudományegyetem ) - Schönthauer, Squirrel and Mikhalkovich. They considered the opinion of the previous group of experts devoid of a scientific basis, and later, before the court, accused them of primeval ignorance, refuting all the main points of their conclusion: about the age of the deceased, about the possible time of death, about the condition of organs, nails and skin. ^[1] The fact that the body was not claimed by anyone left no doubt that it belonged to Esther Shoimoshi, and since the neck of the corpse was not damaged, the charges of ritual murder were unfounded. However, not one of the charges against the Jews was dropped.

On June 17, 1883, the last part of the hearing began in Nyiregyhaz . The chairman was Judge Ferenc Cornish, the state attorney - Eduard Seifert. Although Moritz Scharf's testimony was the sole basis of the charge, the court held 30 hearings to investigate the case in full detail and heard many testimonies. A Vienna professor of forensic medicine, one of its founders as a scientific researcher, Eduard von Hoffmann , gave a review of forensic medical examinations for the process, confirming the results of the second examination and pointing out the blatant lack of special forensic knowledge from the authors of the first. ^{[1] The} apparent contradictions in the boy’s testimony, despite his thorough briefing, and the falsity of his charges, revealed during the investigative experiment in Tisaeslar on July 16, led to the unanimous acquittal of the defendants on August 3. Salai, the lawyer of the widow of Shoimoshi, in his speech, full of bitterness and abuse, opposed the decision, but the Supreme Court rejected his appeal and upheld the decision of the district court.

The involuntary young prosecutor Moritz, whose testimony was manipulated by anti-Semites, returned to his parents, who joyfully accepted him and completely forgave him. He helped his father until his death in 1905.

The acquittal and release of prisoners, most of whom were in prison for 15 months, served as a signal for riots in Presburg (Bratislava) , Budapest and other cities in Hungary. Speculators, crowding around and shouting around the courthouse during the meetings, most notably Onodi, the representative of Tisaeslar in the Chamber of Deputies, insulted prisoners and threatened witnesses and lawyers.

The blood libel in Tisaeslar was one of the most notable in Europe at the end of the 19th century . It served as an excuse for the bloody pogroms in Hungary in 1919-1921. In the 1920s - 1940s, it was used by Hungarian and German Nazis.

The German writer Arnold Zweig wrote the drama "Ritual Murder in Hungary" (1914).

• Damascus (1840)
• Blood libel in Rhodes (1840)
• The Dreyfus Case (1894-1904)
• Shiraz pogrom (1910)
• The Beilis Case (1911)

• Tissa-Eslar affair // Jewish Encyclopedia of Brockhaus and Efron . - SPb. , 1908-1913.
• Bibliography: Allg. Zeit. des Jud. 1882-83, 1884, p. 248;
• Die Neuzeit, 1882-83; * Der Blutprozess von Tisza-Eszlar, New York, 1883;
• Paul Nathan, Der Prozess von Tisza-Eszlar, Berlin, 1892. SS Man.
• Eötvös Károly : A nagy per, Budapest, 1904.
• Gyula Krudi : A tiszaeszlári Solymosi Eszter, Budapest, 1975. (2nd ed.)
• Electronic Jewish Encyclopedia. Tisaeslar