Ritual Murder

Ritual Murder PDF Author: S. T. Haymon
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
ISBN: 1447225074
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 275

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Book Description
A blasphemous inscription spray-pointed on its ancient, hallowed walls was the first sign that something was amiss at Angleby Cathedral. Then came the body in Little St. Ulf’s tomb: a murdered and mutilated choirboy, his wounds forming the Star of David, in grotesque parody of Little St. Ulf’s himself, a child murdered 840 years before. Already the malignant strains of anti-Semitism are stirring in the tiny town of Angleby. “Ritual murder!” trumpets the rabble, into the media maw. Pressed by explosive circumstance, Detective Inspector Ben Jurnet first looks to the victim for answers: a quiet boy with a paper route and secrets to burn. Even the cathedral’s august Dean seems more concerned with the holy sanctuary than with the devil’s work below. And the choirmaster himself does not believe in the reality of evil. But within these sacred precincts, evil has indeed found purchase. And Jurnet must act quickly—before murder stains the cathedral again . . . Winner of the CWA Silver Dagger Award in 1982, Ritual Murder is S T Haymon at her best. ‘Shrewdly psychological, elegantly layered, yet unflagging in suspense and wit: a quiet triumph.’ Kirkus Reviews ‘Ritual Murder is a brilliantly crafted novel.’ Washington Post Book World ‘The author doesn’t put a foot wrong . . . Solidly put together and elegantly written, at the same time it achieves – without pomposity – a degree of seriousness beyond most examples of the genre.’ Times Literary Supplement

Ritual Murder

Ritual Murder PDF Author: S. T. Haymon
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
ISBN: 1447225074
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 275

Get Book Here

Book Description
A blasphemous inscription spray-pointed on its ancient, hallowed walls was the first sign that something was amiss at Angleby Cathedral. Then came the body in Little St. Ulf’s tomb: a murdered and mutilated choirboy, his wounds forming the Star of David, in grotesque parody of Little St. Ulf’s himself, a child murdered 840 years before. Already the malignant strains of anti-Semitism are stirring in the tiny town of Angleby. “Ritual murder!” trumpets the rabble, into the media maw. Pressed by explosive circumstance, Detective Inspector Ben Jurnet first looks to the victim for answers: a quiet boy with a paper route and secrets to burn. Even the cathedral’s august Dean seems more concerned with the holy sanctuary than with the devil’s work below. And the choirmaster himself does not believe in the reality of evil. But within these sacred precincts, evil has indeed found purchase. And Jurnet must act quickly—before murder stains the cathedral again . . . Winner of the CWA Silver Dagger Award in 1982, Ritual Murder is S T Haymon at her best. ‘Shrewdly psychological, elegantly layered, yet unflagging in suspense and wit: a quiet triumph.’ Kirkus Reviews ‘Ritual Murder is a brilliantly crafted novel.’ Washington Post Book World ‘The author doesn’t put a foot wrong . . . Solidly put together and elegantly written, at the same time it achieves – without pomposity – a degree of seriousness beyond most examples of the genre.’ Times Literary Supplement

The Myth of Ritual Murder

The Myth of Ritual Murder PDF Author: R. Po-chia Hsia
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300047462
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
From the mid-fifteenth century to the early seventeenth, German Jews were persecuted and tried for the alleged ritual murders of Christian children, whose blood purportedly played a crucial part in Jewish magical rites. In this engrossing book R. Po-Chia Hsia traces the rise and decline of ritual murder trials during that period. Using sources ranging from Christian and Kabbalistic treatises to judicial records and popular pamphlets, Hsia examines the religious sources of the idea of child sacrifice and blood symbolism and reconstructs the political context of ritual murder trials against the Jews. "This volume combines clarity of thinking, elegance of style, and exemplary scholarly attention to detail with intellectual sobriety and human compassion."--Jerome Friedman, Sixteenth Century Journal "Hsia has... succeeded in turning established knowledge to illuminatingly new purposes."--G.R. Elton, New York Review of Books "This meticulously researched and unusually perceptive book is social and intellectual history at its best."--Library Journal "A fresh perspective on an old problem by a major new talent."--Steven Ozment, Harvard University R. Po-chia Hsia, professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, is also the author of Society and Religion in Münster, 1535-1618

Trent 1475

Trent 1475 PDF Author: R. Po-chia Hsia
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300051069
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 203

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Book Description
"On Easter Sunday, 1475, the dead body of a two-year-old boy named Simon was found in the cellar of a Jewish family's house in Trent, Italy. Town magistrates arrested all eighteen Jewish men and one Jewish woman living in Trent on the charge of ritual murder - the killing of a Christian child in order to use his blood in Jewish religious rites. Under judicial torture and imprisonment, the men confessed and were condemned to death; their women-folk, who had been kept under house arrest with their children, denounced the men under torture and eventually converted to Christianity. A papal hearing in Rome about possible judicial misconduct in Trent made the trial widely known and led to a wave of anti-Jewish propaganda and other accusations of ritual murder against the Jews." "In this engrossing book, R. Pochia Hsia reconstructs the events of this tragic persecution, drawing principally on the Yeshiva Manuscript, a detailed trial record made by authorities in Trent to justify their execution of the Jews and to bolster the case for the canonization of "little Martyr Simon." Hsia depicts the Jewish victims (whose testimonies contain fragmentary stories of their tragic lives as well as forced confessions of kidnap, torture, and murder), the prosecuting magistrates, the hostile witnesses, and the few Christian neighbors who tried in vain to help the Jews. Setting the trial and its documents in the historical context of medieval blood libel, Hsia vividly portrays how fact and fiction can be blurred, how judicial torture can be couched in icy orderliness and impersonality, and how religious rites can be interpreted as ceremonies of barbarism."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Ritual Murder in Russia, Eastern Europe, and Beyond

Ritual Murder in Russia, Eastern Europe, and Beyond PDF Author: Eugene M. Avrutin
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253026408
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This innovative reassessment of ritual murder accusations brings together scholars working in history, folklore, ethnography, and literature. Favoring dynamic explanations of the mechanisms, evolution, popular appeal, and responses to the blood libel, the essays rigorously engage with the larger social and cultural worlds that made these phenomena possible. In doing so, the book helps to explain why blood libel accusations continued to spread in Europe even after modernization seemingly made them obsolete. Drawing on untapped and unconventional historical sources, the collection explores a range of intriguing topics: popular belief and scientific knowledge; the connections between antisemitism, prejudice, and violence; the rule of law versus the power of rumors; the politics of memory; and humanitarian intervention on a global scale.

Human Sacrifice

Human Sacrifice PDF Author: Jimmy Lee Shreeve
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1629149985
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
Welcome to the terrifying world of ritual sacrifice. Around the world, humans are being trafficked, kidnapped, sold, and enslaved for the specific purpose of sacrifice. Mass-scale migration has seen these gruesome techniques exported from the land of the Aztecs and finding their way to the United States, Britain, and many other locations worldwide. Voodoo priests in London have been linked to ritual murders, and not long ago a Palo Mayombe priestess’s New York City apartment yielded its grisly secrets. One New Jersey investigator says that sacrificial rites are not only going on today, but can be traced back ninety years in the States alone. Jimmy Lee Shreeve takes us on a nightmare journey, following the initial investigations of Scotland Yard into the murder of a five-year-old boy whose torso was found floating in the Thames in 2001, and traveling to Africa to unveil a grim trade of exporting humans for sacrifice. He uncovers the dark side of voodoo and muti magic, linked with a score of sacrifices and murders, and in Mexico, finds a devotee of Palo Mayombe responsible for torturing his victims and boiling them in a cauldron. Along the way, Shreeve brings his own brand of offbeat detective skills to the fore, providing startling conclusions to some of the world’s most horrific murders. Brutal and disturbing, Human Sacrifice takes us into the dark world of twenty-first-century ritual murder.

Blood Libel

Blood Libel PDF Author: Hannah Johnson
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472902547
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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Book Description
The ritual murder accusation is one of a series of myths that fall under the label blood libel, and describes the medieval legend that Jews require Christian blood for obscure religious purposes and are capable of committing murder to obtain it. This malicious myth continues to have an explosive afterlife in the public sphere, where Sarah Palin's 2011 gaffe is only the latest reminder of its power to excite controversy. Blood Libel is the first book-length study to analyze the recent historiography of the ritual murder accusation and to consider these debates in the context of intellectual and cultural history as well as methodology. Hannah R. Johnson articulates how ethics shapes methodological decisions in the study of the accusation and how questions about methodology, in turn, pose ethical problems of interpretation and understanding. Examining recent debates over the scholarship of historians such as Gavin Langmuir, Israel Yuval, and Ariel Toaff, Johnson argues that these discussions highlight an ongoing paradigm shift that seeks to reimagine questions of responsibility by deliberately refraining from a discourse of moral judgment and blame in favor of an emphasis on historical contingencies and hostile intergroup dynamics.

Mortal Remains

Mortal Remains PDF Author: Henry Scammell
Publisher: Harpercollins
ISBN: 9780061099588
Category : Murder
Languages : en
Pages : 415

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Book Description
An account of the organized underworld of ritualistic terror operating in a picturesque Massachusetts town discusses the work of police, forensic scientists, and anthropologists to piece together a series of crimes. Reprint.

Blood Libel in Late Imperial Russia

Blood Libel in Late Imperial Russia PDF Author: Robert Weinberg
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253011140
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
This “riveting history . . . brings us face to face with this notorious trial” of a Russian Jew who was framed for ritual murder in 1913 (Jewish Book World). On Sunday, March 20, 1911, children playing in a cave near Kiev made a gruesome discovery: the blood-soaked body of a partially clad boy. After right-wing groups asserted that the killing was a ritual murder, the police, with no direct evidence, arrested Menachem Mendel Beilis, a thirty-nine-year-old Jewish manager at a factory near the site of the crime. Beilis’s trial in 1913 quickly became an international cause célèbre. The jury ultimately acquitted Beilis but held that the crime had the hallmarks of a ritual murder. Robert Weinberg’s account of the Beilis Affair explores the reasons why the tsarist government framed Beilis, shedding light on the excesses of antisemitism in late Imperial Russia. It is a gripping narrative culled from trial transcripts, newspaper articles, Beilis’s memoirs, and archival sources, many appearing in English for the first time.

Conversion, Circumcision, and Ritual Murder in Medieval Europe

Conversion, Circumcision, and Ritual Murder in Medieval Europe PDF Author: Paola Tartakoff
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812251873
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
A investigation into the thirteenth-century Norwich circumcision case and its meaning for Christians and Jews In 1230, Jews in the English city of Norwich were accused of having seized and circumcised a five-year-old Christian boy named Edward because they "wanted to make him a Jew." Contemporaneous accounts of the "Norwich circumcision case," as it came to be called, recast this episode as an attempted ritual murder. Contextualizing and analyzing accounts of this event and others, with special attention to the roles of children, Paola Tartakoff sheds new light on medieval Christian views of circumcision. She shows that Christian characterizations of Jews as sinister agents of Christian apostasy belonged to the same constellation of anti-Jewish libels as the notorious charge of ritual murder. Drawing on a wide variety of Jewish and Christian sources, Tartakoff investigates the elusive backstory of the Norwich circumcision case and exposes the thirteenth-century resurgence of Christian concerns about formal Christian conversion to Judaism. In the process, she elucidates little-known cases of movement out of Christianity and into Judaism, as well as Christian anxieties about the instability of religious identity. Conversion, Circumcision, and Ritual Murder in Medieval Europe recovers the complexity of medieval Jewish-Christian conversion and reveals the links between religious conversion and mounting Jewish-Christian tensions. At the same time, Tartakoff does not lose sight of the mystery surrounding the events that spurred the Norwich circumcision case, and she concludes the book by offering a solution of her own: Christians and Jews, she posits, understood these events in fundamentally irreconcilable ways, illustrating the chasm that separated Christians and Jews in a world in which some Christians and Jews knew each other intimately.

The Value of a Human Life

The Value of a Human Life PDF Author: Karel Innemée
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789464260571
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 160

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Book Description
Experts from different disciplines present new insights into the subject of ritual homicide in various regions of the ancient world.