Blood Libels between Trento and the Bodensee

1

The slander that attributes to Jews the kidnapping and ritual killing of Christian children to celebrate Passover rites – the so-called blood libel – is one of the most striking popular beliefs that shaped medieval and early modern anti-Judaism.^[1] When in Trento, a small city on the banks of the Adige, on the route that connects Italy and Germany, a toddler named Simon disappeared on Maundy Thursday of 1475, and was subsequently found dead in a canal that flowed under the house of Jewish money lender Samuel of Nurnberg, rumours started to spread insinuating that the boy had been a victim of a ritual murder.^[2] Given its magnitude and importance in the fashioning of all later occurrences of the blood libel, the story of the death of Simon of Trento is generally well known and has been studied in depth in almost all of its aspects. Nonetheless, an interesting event, the mission of Heinrich Kramer von Schlettstadt in southern Germany in November 1475 with the goal of finding reports of previous cases where Jews were convicted of ritually killing Christian children, has not yet received a thorough examination.

The purpose of this article is to analyse Heinrich Kramer’s mission. We will start with a brief summary of what was going on in Trento from March to November 1475; then we will take a closer look to the documents that Kramer brought back from Germany, and in the end, we will try to draw a balance of the mission and its significance to the case of Trento.

2

Between March 26th and 27th 1475, eighteen men of the local Jewish community were arrested;^[3] in the following weeks they were questioned under torture and, eventually, all confessed to the gruesome murder of Simon, the son of Andreas Unverdorben, a tanner who lived nearby the houses of the Jews, in the German neighbourhood of Trento.^[4] This was by no means the first time in medieval Europe that a similar accusation had been thrown against the Jews.^[5] Sometimes, the Jews had to face various forms of persecution on account of the blood libel, ranging from judicial trials, mob lynching or expulsion. To counter and prevent the violence they had to endure, Jewish communities often reached out to the authorities – both secular and ecclesiastical – to obtain protection against the slander. From the early thirteenth century onwards, we have a number of papal and imperial bulls that denounced the accusation as false and prohibited Christians from accusing Jews of performing human sacrifices upon Christian children.^[6]

Also in 1475, as the trial against the main defendants started and after rumours about legal irregularities began to circulate in the Roman Curia, the Apostolic See intervened.^[7] On August 3rd of that year, pope Sixtus IV issued a breve commanding Johannes Hinderbach,^[8] prince-bishop of Trento, to suspend the trials against the Jews; he also informed him that Battista de Giudici^[9] – a renowned theologian, canonist, and bishop of Ventimiglia – was on his way to Trento in the capacity of apostolic commissioner to enquire on the matter.^[10] On September 2nd^[11] De Giudici arrived in town, where he was confronted with hostility and suspicion from bishop Hinderbach; after twenty days, in which he managed only to obtain a copy of the trial records, fearing for his own life, the bishop of Ventimiglia moved to Rovereto, only some twenty kilometres south of Trento, but in the territory of the Republic of Venice, where Hinderbach had no political authority. In this safer environment he was able to continue his task and to speak freely with the lawyers who defended the Jews.^[12]

Why had Battista de Giudici encountered such a cold welcome in Trento? The answer resides in the fact that Hinderbach was utterly convinced that the Jews of Trento were guilty of the crime, and he was determined to have Simon acknowledged as a martyr. The bishop of Trento invested lots of effort to reach this goal, and he saw De Giudici as a potential obstacle. Hinderbach was right about that: the apostolic commissioner rapidly reached the conclusion that the Jews were innocent and that they had only confessed the ritual murder on account of tremendous torture.^[13]

This strife between Hinderbach and De Giudici is pivotal to understanding the development of the case over the next three years. The examination of the case was then transferred by the pope to a commission of cardinals in the Roman Curia that worked from spring of 1476 to summer of 1478. Eventually, in 1478, the commission found a compromise solution, declaring that the trial had been fair and conducted according to the norms („rite et recte“), but refusing to acknowledge Simon as a martyr and a saint.^[14]

As mentioned, during this time Johannes Hinderbach put remarkable effort in order to have ‚his‘ truth acknowledged, and he did so by deploying a conspicuous amount of different tactics and strategies. For instance, we know that he reached out to some important humanist poets, asking them to compose works to glorify the purported martyr,^[15] and he also extensively used the newly invented printing press to circulate devotional pictures and chapbooks that supported his version of the story.^[16]

Because of the traditional papal and imperial defence of the Jews from the ritual murder accusation, Hinderbach found himself in a sticky situation: in order to prove that in Trento a ritual murder had indeed happened, he had to demonstrate that kidnapping and killing Christian children was an established Jewish practice. It is possible that this idea was indirectly suggested to him as early as August 6th, 1475, by Bartolomeo Paiarino, a doctor of law from Vicenza. On that day, Paiarino wrote a letter addressed „civibus tridentinis“ (that is, probably, to the governors of Trento) to which he attached an extract from the „Speculum Historiale“ of Vincent de Beauvais that relates of the alleged ritual murder that prompted in 1182 King Philip Augustus to expel the Jews from the kingdom of France.^[17]

By the end of October 1475, the relations between Battista de Giudici and the authorities of Trento were irreparably compromised: all his diplomatic efforts to obtain the release of the Jewish women and children incarcerated had not yielded any result. Therefore, the bishop of Ventimiglia decided to return to Rome, where he arrived on December 1st, bringing with him a witness that could possibly exonerate the Jews.^[18]

In this context Johannes Hinderbach decided to send Heinrich Kramer in southern Germany on a quest for precedents.

3

There are many doubts and gaps in the biography of Heinrich Kramer, a Dominican friar from Schlettstadt, in Alsace. He is mostly known for the publication, in 1486, of his notorious „Malleus Maleficarum“, which was to become the most important manual for witch-hunters.^[19] In 1478 he was conferred the title of inquisitor of Tyrol and in the subsequent years he conducted the persecution of witchcraft in the region. But in 1475 Kramer had not yet become famous, although he already bore the title of professor of theology.^[20]

In the extensive documentation concerning the blood libel of Trento,^[21] we don’t have any written instructions that Johannes Hinderbach might have given to Heinrich Kramer, but all the documents that he collected during his journey^[22] report that he had some letters of instruction („litterae commissoriales“) from the bishop of Trento.^[23]

When the Dominican returned from his mission, he brought with him six manuscripts, through which we can reconstruct the itinerary that he followed. On November 3rd and the next day, he was in Ravensburg, where he got three notarial acts;^[24] the following week, on November 12th he made a stop in the nearby village of Pfullendorf^[25] and five days later in Überlingen; in Überlingen he was not able to obtain a written testimony, but we are informed of his passage by an annotation in the Ratsprotokolle of the city.^[26] The last stop of his journey, November 21st, was the town of Endingen where an important trial for ritual murder was held in 1470.^[27] Finally, we know that by January 16th, 1476, he was back in Trento, since on that day he baptised Jof and Moses, two of the convicted Jews in the trial for the death of Simon, before they were executed.^[28]

Since this documentation has been often overlooked by historians,^[29] it is worth taking a closer look at the stories they contain, so that we might better understand Hinderbach’s strategy and uncover what role it played in the construction of the narrative he tried to promote about what happened in Trento.

The documents relate about four different alleged Jewish ritual murders, of which three are also known from other surviving sources,^[30] while concerning the case of Pfullendorf 1470 the only existing source is the manuscript written for Heinrich Kramer.^[31] As we should see below, when it is possible to compare the manuscripts crafted for the Dominican with other sources, some important differences emerge. We will analyse these cases one by one before drawing our conclusions.

The first document that Kramer was able to get (ASTn, APV, s. l., capsa 69, nr. 44) is also the longest one. It is a five pages long notarial document that contains the summary of some trial records („quendam libellum iudiciarium“) against a poor Christian family, the Samins, accused of having helped a Jew named Jacob^[32] to kidnap and murder a boy, Little John („Johanninus“), son of a certain Conrad Schmidt („Conradus Faber“, sometimes „Cunradus Smit“). It starts with a letter of Friedrich III, at the time king of the Romans, to the prefect of Schwaben Jakob Truchsess von Waldburg in which the former entrusts the latter with the task of enquiring about the alleged murder of Little John Schmidt „a iudeis, ut asseritur, occisus“.^[33] Then, it contains the confessions of the Samins: Heinrich, his wife Margaretha and their son Jacob.^[34] The story they tell in their depositions is that one day, in the marketplace of Meersburg, Margaretha was approached by Jacob the Jew (in the manuscript „Jacob Judeus“^[35]) who offered her some twelve florins in exchange for help in the kidnapping of Little John. She told her husband about the deal, and they agreed to assist Jacob the Jew. On May 1st, 1443, while they were shepherding cattle, Jacob the Jew arrived and lured Little John behind a bush, where he and the Samin adults circumcised, repeatedly stabbed the boy, and collected his blood in a bottle. Heinrich Samin declares that he was so horrified that he left the scene when Jacob started to stab Little John, so that he did not know whether the child had died or not.^[36]

After the Samins’ confessions, we have the transcript of fifteen brief depositions of witnesses dated May 31st, 1444.^[37] It would be too long to dwell on every one of them; all fifteen revolve around the same theme: the witness says to have seen Margaretha Samin and Jacob the Jew talk together in the marketplace of Meersburg, and therefore they are absolutely sure that Jacob killed the boy, with only minor variations.^[38] However, some of the witnesses are quite interesting for reasons of their own. For instance, although we do not get to read what Jacob may have said in his defence directly, some of the accusers give us a hint that, at some point, he must have protested his innocence, declaring that he had never seen Little John.^[39] Some others declare in their testimony that they only heard rumours: „Iohannes Boler hocdem asseruit medio iuramento … quod ipse audivit a pluribus quod iudeus ipse puerum interemit“; „Iohannes Villici … asseruit quod ipse tanta audivisse a fidedignis, et ex litteris percepisset, quod sibi certissimum esset quod iudeus Iacobus puerum occidisset“.^[40] Such assertions in what is supposed to be the summary of a trial record are quite odd. Hearsay testimony (de auditu), in fact, could not be admitted as evidence in a medieval trial: witnesses were bound to refer only on facts of which they had direct knowledge.^[41] Nonetheless, we should note that also in the trial against the Jews of Trento in 1475 the magistrates resorted to the same tactic and decided to admit the testimony of one Giovanni da Feltre, a Jewish apostate who at the time was incarcerated for unspecified crimes.^[42]

In the final part of the document, the judges and the prefect of Schwaben, return the matter in the hands of Friedrich III, because they feel that the pronouncement of the verdict exceeds their powers.^[43] This document does not contain the final sentence, and we may presume that it was omitted for a pretty compelling reason: eventually, Jacob the Jew was acquitted of all charges in 1448.^[44] To admit the final acquittal of the main suspect would have been embarrassing for the magistrates of Trento, since this would have proven that, once again, the imperial authority had taken a stance against the blood libel.

The following group of documents contains three manuscripts^[45] which bear testimony about the alleged ritual murder of Ravensburg of 1429–1430.^[46] Given the number of notarial acts that he was able to get, and his probable acquaintance with a notary in Ravensburg named Franz Sproll,^[47] it is possible to suggest that Heinrich Kramer’s original intent was to gather information about this specific case and possibly Endingen, which is not far from his native Schlettstadt (he might have had direct knowledge of what happened in Endingen in 1470), and only later, once in Ravensburg, he might have eventually come to know about other cases of ritual murders in the same region; but we must admit that we do not have quantity of evidence to confirm this hypothesis.

Anyways, Kramer got the testimonies he wanted in Ravensburg. Two of them are very brief and do not tell much; one is a deposition of the magister civium^[48] and the other one is the transcript of a letter from Johann Truchsess von Waldburg (the son of Jakob, former prefect of Schwaben) who recalls facts that happened when he was a child and in which his father had played a role.^[49] The third document is a deposition of the notary Franz Sproll himself, which tells the story more in detail. According to Sproll, in 1430 the Jews of Ravensburg celebrated a wedding and many of their coreligionists came to the city from the neighbouring towns. A young student named Ludwig, around fifteen years of age, served as a waiter during the feast and slept that night in the Jews’ house, where he was killed. The following day, since he did not come back home, rumours started to spread that he had been the victim of a ritual murder; therefore, the Jews tried to dispose of the corpse by paying a carter named Knoll to ditch the body in a stream near the city. As the horses stood still for what seemed like supernatural intervention, they decided to hang Ludwig’s cadaver to a pine tree in the forest, which was then discovered by some bird hunters a few days later. In the final passages, Sproll says that Jakob Truchsess ordered the body to be brought to the chapel of his castle, where a miracle started to manifest. Eventually, „non post multum tempus“, emperor Sigismund entered the city of Ravensburg, and ordered to tear down the pine tree from which Ludwig was hanged, „ne minima frequentatio populi in preiudicium aliorum ecclesiarum et sacrorum locorum insurgeret“, and that the body should be kept in the chapel of the castle where it could be shown to pilgrims.^[50]

Also this time, when we compare the narrative given by Heinrich Kramer’s documents with other sources about the same event, we find out that the picture that emerges is quite different and more nuanced. For instance, while Sproll is quick to inform that the wounds in Ludwig’s corpse, including a wound on his foreskin,^[51] confirmed the suspicion that a ritual murder had occurred, he doesn’t mention that many people thought that the boy had hanged himself, including some physicians who did an autopsy.^[52] The role of emperor Sigismund in the matter is not wholly clear, especially concerning the devotion they started to develop about Ludwig. What Franz Sproll says about this, for instance, does not quite square with what is reported by a contemporary chronicler, Andreas of Regensburg, who wrote shortly after the facts, namely that Sigismund burned down the pine and some sort of shrine that was built around it with the clear purpose of interrupting the flow of pilgrims – it seems also because the clergy and the bishop of Konstanz did not like the developing devotion.^[53]

With the case of Pfullendorf we are confronted by a different set of problems since, as mentioned above, this manuscript constitutes the only source about this alleged ritual murder. In the document,^[54] the magister civium (whose name is not given) of the town of Pfullendorf introduces five witnesses who had seen the dead body of fifteen years old Johannes Fuchs („Johannes Vulpis“) in the year 1471.^[55] The testimonies do not illuminate too much on what might have happened; they only say that they have seen scalpel wounds on the boy’s corpse;^[56] none of them reports having seen some Jews interact with Johannes Fuchs – only the last one says that a few days before he had seen some generic Jews „circa illum locum ambulantes et perlustrantes ubi iuvenis ille boves patris pascebat in campis, et quod ad quatuor miliaria prope eundem locum iudei in certis terris morabantur“.^[57]

It is apparent that the witnesses already believed that Jews kill and extract blood from Christian children,^[58] and when they found the wounded corpse of a young boy, the stereotype immediately rang a bell in their mind and imagination. We see a similar dynamic in place in Endingen in 1470, which was Heinrich Kramer’s last stop before making his way back to Trento. This blood libel is particularly important since it is the first instance in which we have the transcriptions of the Jews’ confessions.^[59] Three documents – kept in Freiburg im Breisgau, Strasbourg and Frankfurt am Main respectively^[60] – contain the depositions, to which we shall add the document penned on Heinrich Kramer’s request,^[61] which seems to be highly dependent on the Freiburg transcript.^[62]

In Endingen around Easter 1470 the charnel of the local parish church had to be renewed; during the works, four bodies were found – a man, a woman and two headless children, male and female. Some unspecified inhabitants of the hamlet then recalled that eight years back, in 1462, a family of wandering beggars was hosted by a Jew named Elias and they were never seen again. Eight years later, after the gruesome discovery, the Jew Elias and his two brothers Eberlin and Mercklin were arrested and charged with the murder of the poor family.^[63] Once again in this case, the vox populi is the only thing that pinpoints the whole investigation, which in typical inquisitorial fashion,^[64] is only aimed to confirm the inquisitors’ hypothesis; being unable to find any other form of evidence, and, most likely, unwilling, since confession was considered the most compelling type of evidence,^[65] the magistrates would then seek to obtain a full admission of culpability, often resorting to torture. In the end, Elias and his brothers confessed to partaking in the slaughtering of the family, alongside with other Jews.

Since the blood libel of Endingen has already been studied in depth and the contents of the document copied by Bonelli does not seem to have meaningful differences with the other sources of the Endinger affaire, we will limit our examination to a quick overview of the confession of Mercklin,^[66] the last of the three brothers interrogated, which will allow us to showcase some characteristics of inquisitorial questioning.

After Elias and Eberlin had confessed the murder, the magistrates turned to Mercklin; at first, he says that, since his brothers have already confessed, there is no need for him to repeat what happened.^[67] Since the judges insist, Mercklin goes on to confess that he killed the woman slitting her throat using a „Sechmesser“^[68] in his brother’s barn while an unspecified foreign Jew killed the man; then, he goes on describing the killing and beheading of the children and the concealment of the corpses in the charnel.^[69] The most interesting part is when, towards the end of the interrogation, Mercklin is asked about what do the Jews use the blood for. It’s worth to quote the passage at length:

„Et cum finaliter interrogaretur ad quem usum puerorum sanguinem verterent, respondit primo quod pro quadam medicinam ipsorum, quoniam multum medicinalis eis existeret. Et cum sibi obiiceretur quod frater suus Eberli alium usum exprimisset, respondit quod uterentur illo sanguine contra lepram. Et cum iterum sibi fuisset obiectum cur filius suus effectus fuisset leprosus, respondit quod illo sanguine uterentur contra fetorem ipsorum, sicut judei fetorem quendam retinent. Cum autem fuit sibi obiiceretur quod frater suus alium usum expressisset, respondit: modo dicam vobis veritatem, cerno quod aliter fieri non potest. Utimur illo sanguine in nostra circumcisione pro crismate. Et cum obiiceretur cur talis in eis pertinacia perseverarent, cognoscentes sanguinem cristianum tam salutiferum, respondit quod diabolus ita operaretur.“^[70]

As we can see, the judges are not satisfied with Mercklin’s answers, therefore they keep insisting in order to have the defendant confirm their version and make his confession match his brother’s – although, it should be noted, in the documents that we have Elias and Eberlin do not say what do they need the blood for. We do not have the exact wording of the questions, but it would not be too implausible to assume that they in some way oriented what Mercklin said. It is also noteworthy that the ‚wrong‘ answers cover almost the whole spectrum of the possible uses of the blood that crop up in the traditional blood libels, namely some form of medicament, especially for the treatment of leprosy, a cure for the foetor judaicus (Jews’ stench),^[71] as well as a form of unguent employed to stop the bleeding of the circumcision.^[72]

In its very last lines, the document informs us that Sigismund, the duke of Austria, ordered the margrave Karl von Baden to carry out the sentence against the Jews, who were then burned at the stake.^[73] As we could expect, our source makes no mention whatsoever of the following intervention of emperor Friedrich III, who disavowed Karl von Baden’s actions and fined him.^[74]

Now that we have shown the contents of the documents that Heinrich Kramer brought to Trento from Germany in November 1475, we will attempt to see what role they played in the case of Little Simon and what prince-bishop Johannes Hinderbach hoped to achieve with their aid.

4

Being able to demonstrate that killing Christian children for ritual purposes was, in effect, somehow crucial to Johannes Hinderbach in order to have his version of what happened in Trento widely accepted.^[75] We know for a fact that the shrewd bishop sent the documents to his agents and representatives in Rome to be shown to the commission of cardinals that was put in charge of examining the trial records of Trent: on the back of each of our documents Hinderbach’s secretary Johannes Menichen wrote „XXI marcii productus“^[76] (we do not know for sure of what year, but possibly 1477), referring to the day they were shown to the cardinals. Unfortunately, we have no records of the proceedings of the commission established by Sixtus IV, therefore we are unable to ascertain what role they might have played in its decision to declare the formal correctness of the trials against the Jews of 1475.

On the other hand, however, we have hints that these cases from southern Germany might have been in some form popularized by the homilies of the Observant Franciscan Michele Carcano da Milano. This zealous preacher was vigorously engaged in contemporary anti-Jewish polemic, especially concerning usury; he was also a staunch proponent of the so-called Monti di Pietà, that is, charitable financial institutions where poor people could borrow money at little interest rate which were conceived as an alternative to Jewish credit.^[77] In the years 1476–1478 Carcano and Hinderbach exchanged letters which testify the Franciscan’s involvement in the preaching of the devotion to the ‚blessed‘ Simon.^[78] While Carcano’s letters are usually very concise, Hinderbach wrote more extensively, in such a fashion that seems to provide his correspondent the blueprint for a possible homily. On April 11th, 1477, the bishop of Trento wrote a long epistle to the preacher where at one point he starts to enumerate other cases in which Jews were said to have committed ritual murders of Christian children, among them

„in Alemania et in partibus Svevie super Rheno multi scholares et pueri occisi memorantur …, et novissime, etate nostra in oppidis Ravensporg et Uberling, Constantinensis diocesis, tempore quondam felicis recordationis Martini pape quinti et Sigismundi imperatoris, et aliis pluribus locis, ut in processu constat, ac novissime, infra paucos annos, in opido Endingen et Phorzheim sub marchione Karolo Badensi, quamplures iudei utriusque sexus pro simili necatione duorum coniugum christianorum ac duorum filiorum ultimo supplicio puniti fuerunt et alia multu similia homicida in pluribus partibus facta fore constat, que nimis longum esset omnia commemorare“.^[79]

Every case about which Heinrich Kramer gathered documents (with the exception of the case of Pfullendorf) is included by Johannes Hinderbach in the narrative that he wanted Michele Carcano to foster. This shows the extrajudicial strategy of the bishop: given that he had no direct control about what was happening in the cardinal commission in Rome, he tried to control the narrative and defend the historical ‚truth‘ and reality of Jewish ritual murders. If this was his goal, he eventually achieved it. Later polemicists like Benedetto Bonelli in his influential^[80] „Dissertazione apologetica“, a book that was written to rebut those who had questioned the reality of such crimes, also made use of these sources to affirm that Simon had indeed been murdered by the Jews, and that this was not an isolated incident.^[81]

We shall note, however, that the narrative that emerges from the confession of the tortured Jews in Trento and the one portrayed in the manuscripts that Heinrich Kramer got from the Bodensee region often contradict. For example, let’s consider one aspect to which the judges of Trento paid great attention: the age of the purported victim. This detail was considered of great importance, since the model of sanctity of the victims of alleged Jewish ritual murders entails a close relation with the „Innocent saints“, that is, the children massacred by order of Herod in his attempt to kill baby Jesus.^[82] Therefore, a boy in his teenage years could impair the parallel.^[83] In Trento on June 10th, 1475, after he had been tortured to the point that, according to the physician’s evaluation, he could not bear any longer without risk for his own life, Moses the Old („Moses antiquus“) started to deliver a long and detailed confession about the murder of Little Simon.^[84] The podestà of Trento Giovanni de Salis, who was in charge of the interrogations, wanted also to know about more general aspects of Jewish ritual murder; one of them concerned age and gender of the victim. Moses is explicit in his confession to say that the child should be male and not older than seven years of age.^[85] It is true that, in Endingen, Mercklin affirms that the Jews only use the blood of children and not of adults^[86] – although in that case the children were one male and one female and he does not express any explicit preference for the boy’s blood –, but the age of the young victim is not specified. In the other cases the victim is significantly older: Johannes Fuchs was said to have been „XV annorum vel circiter“,^[87] the same age of Ludwig, the student allegedly murdered by the Jews of Ravensburg.^[88] The age of Little John Schmidt is not explicitly given, but it is said that he was helping Jacob Samin in shepherding the cattle,^[89] therefore we might assume that he was not an infant anymore.

Another striking difference is the involvement of Christians as participants in the crimes of the Jews. As we have shown, the longest document of our bunch contains the trial against a family of alleged Christian accomplices of Jacob the Jew, and in the case of Ravensburg an important role is played by the carter Knoll. We do not have anything like that in the case of Trento, where the physician Tobias was suspected of having carried out the kidnapping due to his familiarity with the other residents of the neighbourhood.^[90]

Although it is important to point out the differences between the stories contained in the documents provided by Heinrich Kramer and the narrative that was formed around the case of Simon of Trento, a purely narratological approach to this kind of sources would be highly misleading. In many cases, and the one we have dealt with in this study is one of them; although those who wrote about the Jews killing Christian children did not doubt that what they were writing was somehow the historical truth, they did not shy from eliding details that could impair their narrative. Therefore, it seems more pertinent to ask whether the accusers did care at all about the little divergences that we notice in the stories, and the answer might well be that they simply did not care. Up to 1475, it seems that existed a general belief that Jews killed Christian children for ritual purposes, and only later, also with the contribution provided by the birth of a distinct hagiographic model, the puer a judaeis necatus, the details and minutiae in the tale gained more and more importance and tended to converge.^[91]

The history of the blood libel stretches across a long period of time, during which the accusations of this kind thrown against the Jews are so many that historians struggle to count them.^[92] Since its first appearances in its modern form around the half of the Thirteenth century up to recent times, the „legend of the killer Jew“^[93] has gone through many changes and has seen many variations surface in the narrative pattern. As we have mentioned in the beginning, it was only after the case of Trento 1475 that the narrative consolidated, in large part due to the introduction of printed pictures and accounts of the story of Simon.

The group of documents we have examined in this study is a testimony of some of the possible variants that were circulating in the years immediately preceding the great affaire of Trento. But to Johannes Hinderbach and his supporters these manuscripts did not contain mere stories, but facts, and this is why they put so much effort in the cause and why to them the discrepancies in the narratives and procedural flaws (of which Hinderbach was well aware^[94]) were ultimately of secondary importance.