“The slander’s
literary lineage,
among non-Jewish
authors, treats it
mythically, allying
Jews with Satan.

Miller
Continued From Page 5

more rarely, sanction against the lynch mobs attacking, torturing, and murdering them. Although an imperial ukase of 1817 formally prohibited criminal prosecutions on such claims, 43 Jews were indicted in 1823, Child’s research reveals. Proceedings spread over the next 12 years, only to conclude in acquittal for all “on account of the entire failure of proof.” But that was not the end of such prosecutions in Russia, as the case of Mendel Bellis shows, which prosecution Bernard Malamud used as the basis for his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Fixer.

The slander’s literary lineage, among non-Jewish authors, treats it mythically, allying Jews with Satan. Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale marks the principal literary analogue for the slander, although apparently it is easily more than 850 years old. The tale recounts how a Christian boy, on his way to and from school through the Jewish quarter, sings the “Alma Redemp-toris Mater,” apparently in the way of tuneless whistling, paying taunting homage to the Virgin. And he sings it after death, though a Jew has cut his throat.

The ballads usually have the
boy playing with his friends,
until their ball goes over the
wall of “the Jew’s” garden or
through his window. Once
tempted inside the house, the
boy is often tortured in the way
of Christ, then rolled in a “cake
of lead” and cast into a well 50
fathoms deep. The post-mortem
serenade is a sort of resurrec-
tion, but ballads collected by
Child and MacEdward Leach do
not have it, nor do they pick up
Chaucer’s especially vile detail
that the body’s dumping-ground
is a public privy.

Jeffrey Miller, a writer, free-
lance translator (French-Eng-
lish) and lawyer, teaches law
and literature at the University
of Western Ontario. His latest
book is the comic novel, Murder
on the Rebound.

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