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The Jew on Trial Shylock: What judgment shall I dread, (William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, (Act 4, Scene 1)
Of course the records notarized from the courtroom have to be treated cautiously. The players whose questions, answers and testimonies are recorded, ie, the prosecuting and defense lawyers, the accuser, the defendants and the witnesses - all have personal agendas to some degree, and, even though they may be under oath, much of the testimony of witnesses, accuser and defendant will have stretched the bounds of “truth”. If, however, a historian can take these problems into account and achieve a level of professional decoding, the trial becomes a mechanism by which the many facets of the population are rendered accessible. The notarial record of the trial, which purports to record testimony verbatim, provides us with extraordinarily rich images of daily life. The transcript records behaviour - not just the obviously central deeds of accusers and Jewish suspects - but the behaviour of witnesses, neighbours, family, supporters and enemies. The trial is often the only source a historian has to inform him or her that a particular form of offence has taken place. Legal courts usually held private interrogations; the judges’ professional sense of secrecy and loyalty was maintained and court notaries were not allowed to comment on their work. These documents provide important information of the authority these tribunals held over a local community. In my course, “The Jew on Trial,” we will study a selection of trials where Jews are the accused, (other than the final trial of Adolf Eichmann). The course begins with the trial of Jesus (as recorded in the Gospels) in the first century moving to the ritual murder case of Adam of Bristol in 1280 and then over to Spain to study the records of Ramban’s disputation with Pablo Cristiani in 1282. A shorter trip to Guadalupe will allow us to grasp a typical Inquisitional trial against a Jewish conversa in 1485, and then the medical practices of a converted doctor in Amsterdam in 1560, as we investigate the court records of Doctor Solomon versus Berëndrecht. We will then turn to an Inquisitional trial in Modena, Italy, where Jews were accused in 1604 of creating noisy disturbances during Holy Week. An exercise in informal “micro-history” this session will attempt to decode the sense within the disturbance. Moving to Rome, we will study the trial against a Jew for killing a Christian miller in 1621 and then to Syria in 1840, where Jews were falsely accused of murdering a Catholic monk. Back to Italy for the nineteenth century, we will examine the fascinating case of the 1858 kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, a six-year-old Jewish boy who had been secretly “baptized” by a family servant. The trial records reveal the rhythms of daily life in a Jewish ghetto against the emergence of Italy as a modern, national state. After this, two trials will be studied that echo the ritual murder charge of Adam of Bristol in the medieval period - first the trial of Leopold Hilsner in Bohemia in 1899 and second that of Mendal Beilis in 1911. We will study the Beilis trial in the light of Bernard Malamud’s novel The Fixer. Malamud’s work will enrich our understanding of what it meant to an emancipated Jew to stand wrongfully accused before a secular court in Russia. Two last trial documents to be studied are those of Alfred Dreyfus and Adolf Eichmann. The trial documents of Eichmann are a good place to conclude our course, since they are so entirely opposite to our earlier sessions where the Jew played the role of suspect as opposed to prosecutor. The trial questions the legitimacy of the Jewish state, kidnapping, bringing to trial and finally executing one of the Nazi perpetrators of the Final Solution. The course will suggest ways in which historians can discover mentalities from trial records – patterns of cognition, motivation and behaviour vis-a-vis Jews – which the passage of time sometimes conceals from view. We will also try to understand the trial from the Jew’s perspective, discussing in particular his choice of action in a particular circumstance. We will then be able to catch, behind the smooth surface of the text, the subtle interplay of threats and fears, of attacks and withdrawals, which form the textual fabric of these types of dialogues. |
From the 1960s historians began to study trial records in various archives by using sophisticated methods of historical and anthropological analysis. Many of these records provide compelling insights into the behaviour and mindset of ordinary people during the periods in which the trials took place.