Woodcut Depicting the Blood Libel in Trent, Italy Illustration by Michael Wolgemut and Wilhelm Pleydenwurff, from the Nuremberg Chronicle
Nuremberg, Germany, 1493
Wood carving, watercolor on paper (late coloring)
This page depicts the blood libel of 1475 in which the Jews of the Trent were accused of killing a Christian child named Simon, who went missing just before Good Friday. According to the story, the Jews of the city needed Christian blood for making the Passover matzoth. The entire Jewish community, and converted Jews, were arrested, tired and convicted. Some were executed.
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Must Know
The date was March 1475. The place was Trento, Northern Italy.
A few days before the eve of Passover, Simon, a two-year-old Christian toddler, went missing. A few days later, the boy’s body was found by a Jew in a water canal near the house of a Jewish moneylender named Samuel.
Although it was Jews who found the body and reported it, the local bishop accused the Jewish community of having killed the child and used his blood for ritual purposes. Blood libels such as this were linked to the Jewish festival of Passover.
All members of the tiny Jewish community in Trento were arrested and interrogated, and many confessed — under torture — to having participated in the gruesome ritual murder of Simon. Many were burnt at the stake; only one escaped death by converting to Christianity.
Ever since then, local Christians mark March 24, the day the body was found, as a holiday. Little Simon was recognized by the church as a martyr and a saint.
One of the many platforms that originally circulated the story of Little Simon of Trent was Harman Schedel’s Nuremberg World Chronicle, printed in Germany in 1493.
This early printed book depicts human history since biblical creation and provides a glimpse of the crooked figure of Jews as perceived by the Christian elite.
In the original woodcut from the Nuremberg Chronicle displayed here, the diabolic figures of the Jews supposedly involved in Simon’s ritual murder can be seen wearing hoods, bearing hooked noses, and using sharp tools to bleed the helpless baby Simon.
In 1965 the Vatican formally declared that Saint Simon rites had no legal nor historical justification. 500 years after the Trento blood libel, the accusation was rescinded and the innocent Jews were finally acquitted.
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