text:
José María Perceval
Este artículo está publicado en una versión en castellano.
Imagen del Santo Niño de La Guardia que sale en procesión cada 27 de septiembre en este pueblo toledano.
centuries there had been tales that during Holy Week the Jews crucified a
Christian child in the same way that they had crucified Christ. This time
it was believed - not by the inquisitors, whom it was difficult to deceive,
but by the people. The story of the Holy Child of La Guardia was the
pretext with which those who were demanding the expulsion of the Jews
extorted the consent of Isabel:", Pierre Chaunu, 1492. 1'année de 1'Espagne, L'Histoire
each side of the gateway to the cloisters of Toledo Cathedral Francisco
Bayeu (1734-95) painted a fresco that is more or less incomprehensible to
the tourists buying their postcards nearby at the stall by the entrance.
On the right an evil‑looking man is dragging a boy away, presumably
kidnapping him. On the left his captors gloat at the crucifixion of the
same child. The most ancient and widely‑established of all folktales
is that of the bogeyman, the ogre who eats children, the vampire that
sucks the blood of the innocent (a myth found from China to America),
whether he is Saturn or, popular with us in Spain, King Herod. This
nightmare is the basis of our most morbid lullabies.
is it that since the Middle Ages, 1171 to be precise, Jews have been the
main victims of such accusations, which have led to the massacre of their
ghettos in revenge? What aim could these periodic thefts of children have
had? And who was this Holy Child of La Guardia a small town near Toledo,
who has been the subject of one of the largest subgroups of the works on
this disagreeable topic.
Long History
his list of the eighteen most common accusations against the Jews, Amador
de los Rios (1818‑78) put at number six: "in memory of the
death they inflicted on Jesus, they
sacrifice Christian children or youths on Good Friday by crucifying them
and drinking their blood.".
researchers such as Salomon Reinach attributed such accusations to mere
popular credulity, pointing out that such charges were frequently brought
against the Christians during the period of the early church by pagans who
did not understand the communion rite. The Jews had simply inherited a pre‑existing
delusion. Gaetz tells us that the first charge of ritual murder was made
at Blois during a quarrel between Isabelle the rejected wife of Count
Theobald of Champagne 1, and Pulceline, his Jewish mistress. The accused
was put in a boat on the River Loire to submit the truth of the charge to
the judgement of God but, unfortunately, the boat failed to sink, so 34
men and 17 women were burnt alive on 20th Sivan (26th May 1171).
I. Langmuir comments that the charge has been repeated ever since 1144 and
mentions the famous English case of Hugh of Lincoln in 1255. Alain Boureau
speaks of a reign of terror after the Third Crusade, when the charge
spread beyond France, entering the Holy Roman Empire where it led to 27
deaths in Mainz in 1283. In 1285 the charge of ritual murder was
responsible for the slaughter of 127 victims in Munich. In 1286 the murder
of a man called "good Werner" sparked off massacres in Boppard
and Oberwesel near Bacharach. Emperor Rudolph I, frightened by the extent
of this collective hysteria, tried to halt the flight of Jews with the
laws of 1286, which temporarily restrained the wave of terror.
Three children were drowned at Vienna in Austria in 1420, which, in conjunction with the rumoured sale of a consecrated host to a rich Jew by the verger of Ems, unleashed a fresh catastrophe. In 1421 Archduke Albert arrested all the Jews of Vienna and, to calm things down, burnt a hundred of them. The same thing happened in Trent when Simon, a boy of three, drowned in the River Adige in 1475. After the resulting massacre a statue of the child was erected in Frankfurt am Main on the Saxenhausen Bridge. The problem spread to Passau in 1478 and Regensburg in 1480 following other supposed thefts of the consecrated host.
So it went on for centuries, with a progressive reduction in bloodshed, although there was always a latent threat of massacre whenever a Christian child disappeared or died in strange circumstances, especially during the days following Maundy Thursday and Good Friday. At the end of the last century L'Osservatore Catolico, an Italian magazine, collected 150 recorded cases of Jewish ritual crimes, all of them "scientifically proved"! Even at the beginning of the twentieth century Thomas Masaryk, later President of Czechoslovakia, had to act as counsel in the defence of a Jew accused of ritual murder. Nazism of course pounced on this Catholic delusion, filling books ad nauseam with such propaganda.
about Spain?
we hear it said that in some places Jews have celebrated and do celebrate
Good Friday by mocking the Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ, stealing
children and crucifying them or, when it is impossible to obtain children,
making wax images and crucifying them, we command that, if henceforth it
come to light that any such act be done in any place in our dominions and
the same be proved, all those persons who were present at such an act
shall be taken, guarded well, and brought before the King, who, having
confirmed the truth of the matter, shall put them all to a most
humiliating death.", Alfonso X the Wise, Siete Partidas, VII,
XXIV, law 2
Juan Antonio Llorente (1756‑1823) explains: "The unbaptized Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492, Torquemada and all the members of the Holy Office playing an important part in this decision. They quoted the legal code, the Siete Partidas, issued by Alfonso X in 1255, which said that the Jews had a custom of stealing Christian children to crucify them on Good Friday in imitation of the events in Jerusalem. They went on to list examples: the case of St. Domingo de Val, a Saragossan child crucified in 1250; the theft and desacration of a consecrated host in Segovia in 1406; the conspiracy in Toledo in 1445 to dig a mine and fill it with gunpowder under the streets through which the Corpus Christi procession was to pass; that at Tabara, a place between Zamora and Benavente, to scatter caltrops in the streets where the Christians were planning to pass barefoot and nail up the doors and set fire to the houses where they lived; the kidnapping and crucifixion of a Christian child in Valladolid in 1452; an identical case in a village of the Marquess of Almarza's lordship near Zamora in 1454; the sacrilegious vandalism of a cross at Puerto del Gamo in the open countryside between El Casar and Granadilla in the diocese of Coria in 1488; the kidnapping in 1489 of the child of La Guardia and his crucifixion in 1490; the attempt to commit a similar crime frustrated by the authorities in Valencia, and other similar cases; together with the numerous deaths of Christians blamed on Jewish physicians, surgeons and pharmacists who abused their trust, in particular the murder of Henry III of Castile by his doctor Don Mair."
astounding rigmarole of accusations had been foreshadowed in a book by a
New Christian 2 friar, Alonso de la Espina Fortalitium Fidei. Against Jews,
Saracens and Other Enemies of the Christian Faith (1459), a
horrifying catalogue of charges, listing events in Tabara, Toro, Avila,
Segovia and other places, supporting with specific cases his belief that
the Jews ritually slaughtered innocent children on Good Friday and
desecrated the consecrated host. He included certain events of his own
time which, he said, he had witnessed while collecting material to write
the Fortalitium between 1454 and 1457.
atmosphere was tense. Colmenares in his Historia de Segovia (1637)
relates: "Christmas was being celebrated peacefully by the Christians
in 1468 when their tranquillity was disturbed by the infuriating news that
the Jews of the ghetto of Sepulveda, counselled by their rabbi, Salomon
Picho, had taken a Christian child, conveyed him to an extremely secluded
place, submitted him to all sorts of humiliations and brutalities and,
finally, killed him by crucifixion in the same way as their ancestors had
done with Our Saviour. When these facts became
known, they came to the attention of the Bishop of Segovia, Don Juan Arias
Dávila ‑ a New Christian and
son of Henry IV of Castile's Accountant General. Don Juan, following the
usual policy of the converts, insisted on the punishment of the accused
when they were brought to Segovia, so as many as sixteen of them were
burnt alive, while the rest were hanged after being dragged through the
streets. This harsh punishment did not however appease the people of
Sepulveda. On learning that their bishop had been satisfied with so little,
they took up arms and made a surprise attack on the Jewish quarter,
slaughtering the majority of its inhabitants in their own houses. Some
saved themselves by flight but, when they sought refuge in the
neighbouring towns and villages, they found that news of their crime had
preceded them, causing similar suspicions and accusations everywhere."
Given such examples, it is not surprising that Friar Tomas de Torquemada
should have organized the affair of the Holy Child of La Guardia twenty
years later in order to eliminate the Jews from Spain for ever.
the sixteenth century, when there was no longer any Jewish community, the
accusations against them, including that of ritual murder, were
transferred to the Moriscos. The rumour spread that, in order to avoid
baptism, the Moriscos would select one baby from among those of their
religion, thus avoiding the admission of the others to the Christian faith.
The consequence seemed logical: when the selected child reached "the
age of reason" and could no longer serve for a repeat baptism, he
would be eliminated in a monstrous ritual for being a multiple Christian.
a hysterical report sent by Arias Gallego, Inquisitor of Saragossa, to th
Inquisitor‑General, Diego Tavera, he added to the usual charges
against the Moriscos (keeping Ramadan, circumcision, praying and, least
frequent of them, proselytising) a novel one: "besides this, there have been some who killed an Old Christian 3 child out in the
country as a sacrifice to Mohammed."
Trial of 1491 and the Expulsion of 1492
of us who were in the cave crucified the boy on a cross we made of stakes."
Confession of Yuce Franco, Avila, interrogation of 19th July 1491,
Inquisition functioned according to a fixed programme, which subsequent
investigations and discoveries had to conform to. Arrests and sentences
were the result of the lists of sins to be ferreted out, just as in any
other old‑style police operations. The preliminaries of the case of
the Holy Child of La Guardia are very complicated, but it seems that it
all began with the disappearance of a child in Toledo during the Corpus
Christi procession or that of the Assumption of the Virgin. The confusion
about the start of the inquiry is so great that, though the child
is said to have been baptized in the church of San Andres de Toledo, his
origin was Aragonese, causing several historians to confuse La Guardia
with a town of the same name in the Rioja (Alava), while some mention the
one in Jaen Province and others the one in the Province of Toledo. The
child was called Juan according to the earliest documents but later the
more Christ‑like name of Christobal was preferred. So as not
to get in a muddle, the chroniclers therefore chose to call him the Holy
Child of La Guardia, a generic name for a child who may have never existed,
either dead or alive.
to confessions extracted under torture, the Holy Child was three or four
years old when kidnapped at the Puerta del Perdon in Toledo, but some
preferred the age of seven as marking the boundary between the age of
childish innocence and that of reason.
events had purportedly taken place in 1489 and the trial began on 17th
December 1490. It was between 6th June and 19th July 1490 that Tomas de
Torquemada ordered the arrest of Yuce Franco and his alleged accomplices,
whose cases he intended to judge "in person or by
such person or persons as are properly informed about them to whom we may
entrust the hearing of the cases." The accused persons were of varied
origin, a fact that reveals the inquisitors' desire to implicate
the various ghettos and Jewish groups of Castile in a single network of
could have inspired this abduction and the subsequent murder? According to
the record of the trial the accused believed that, by mingling the blood
of the child with a consecrated host, they could poison the wells, thus
causing the death of the inquisitors. They had been recommended to do this
by the Grand Rabbinate of France! All the participants were Jews and New
Christians of Jewish origin fearful of justice for having "lapsed
into their former religion". Despite exhaustive search no body was
ever found in the cave where the boy was supposed to have been tortured to
death, and the reason most frequently given for this failure on the part
of the authorities is that the Holy Child had, of course, ascended to
Heaven after his martyrdom.
detained Jews and New Christians confessed that they had taken the child
to La Guardia because of the town's similarity to the landscape of
Palestine. This, though it may seem weird to us, was the principal
evidence in the trial: "Since the place was geographically like, and
had geologically similar surroundings to, those places in Asia that saw
the birth and death of the incarnate Son of God when He made His
pilgrimage to redeem humanity, the rite would there have more similarity
to, and would gain more realistic force from, that great event which lives
for ever in the memory of every generation and epoch."
similarity of this district to Judea was defended by Friar Antonio de Guzmán
using maps and the irrefutable evidence provided by divine revelations
granted to his saintly colleague, Simon de Roxas. To confirm the
verisimilitude of the crime, were that necessary, each of the butchers
played the role of one of the personages in the gospel story of the
Passion (Judas, Pilate, the High Priest, etc.), while the unhappy child
took the main part, Jesus Christ.
recent historian, Luis Suarez Fernandez, tells us: "The Inquisition
proceedings began on 17th December 1490 and ended on 16th November of the
following year with the execution of all the accused men: two Jews ‑
Yuce Franco of Tembleque, and Moshe Abenamias of Zamora; and six New
Christians ‑ Alonso, Lope, Garcia and Juan Franco, Juan Ocaña and
Benito Garcia, all of them residents of La Guardia in the diocese of
Toledo. The declarations of the condemned men, both under torture and when
free from it, seem to show that in fact two crimes were committed at La
Guardia: desecration of a consecrated host, which the New Christians
bought so as to practice magic that would save them from the Inquisition,
and the ritual murder of a child crucified on Good Friday."
an interesting mixture of ingenuousness and brutality Anton Gonzalez,
notary of the town of Avila, described the execution of Benito Garcia de
las Mesuras from La Guardia on 17th November 1491: "Thanks be to God,
I can inform you that he died a Christian and a Catholic, and I had him
strangled (at the stake before he was burnt). Juan de Ocana and Juan
Franco also showed much faith and penitence. They died professing their
belief in God and acknowledging their crimes, and I hope that God may have
mercy on their souls. The others died as good Jews, tortured with
red‑hot pincers (and burnt alive over a slow fire). They denied
their cruel crimes and called neither on God nor on the Virgin Mary, not
even making the sign of the Cross. Do not intercede with God for them,
since their sepulchre is in Hell."
notary, Anton Gonzalez, who participated in the proceedings, taking down
the depositions of the Franco brothers at E1 Brasero de la Dehesa, wrote
also on 17th November 1491 to the magistrates of La Guardia, telling them
not to allow the dogwood field at Santa Maria de Pera to be ploughed,
since it was there that Juan Franco had, at the very last, indicated that
the child was buried and "this is something that must be seen by
Their Majesties and by the Lord Cardinal and by
all the world." But the body did not appear.
Expulsion of 1492
Fita, the principal and most intelligent of those wise investigators who
have accepted as gospel truth this catalogue of witchcraft and purported
necromancy, showed in 1887 that the decree of 31st March 1492 expelling
the Jews was influenced by the trial of those condemned for the alleged
murder of the Holy Child of La Guardia. In the first place, the convicted
men were not all New Christians, but an alliance of Jews, baptized and
unbaptized, thus supporting a fundamental idea of Torquemada, cited also
in the expulsion decree: the Jews could pervert their New Christian
relatives. Relying on his trump card ‑ the murder of an innocent
child ‑ Torquemada broke all legal bounds on his jurisdiction to
obtain the decree, arguing that he should concern himself only with the
spiritual health of the baptized.
in opposition to another group of historians that included Menendez Pelayo
(1856‑1912), Father Fita showed that the date of the sentence (16th
November 1491) was not later than, or simultaneous with, the edict of the
Catholic Monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabel, but four months and fifteen days
before it. In the following month they had to give a charter of royal
protection to the Jews of Avila, who were terrified by the danger to their
lives and property as soon as the reputed murderers of the Holy Child had
been condemned by the Inquisition (16th December 1491).
of the property of the condemned men, confiscated and held in Segovia part
of the construction of the Church and Royal Monastery of Santo Tomas of
Avila was paid for and it was here that it was for the first time laid
down ‑ in a papal brief granted to Torquemada on 12th November 1496
‑ that monks descended from Jews were not to be admitted. Building
began on 11th April 1482 and was completed on 3rd
August 1493. Torquemada, having lived to see his work completed, died in
La Guardia the houses of Juan Franco were demolished and a chapel built on
the site. Pictures were painted at his birthplace and others in the
Trinitarian convents in La Guardia and Toledo, as well as in La Guardia
parish church. Fita describes an oil painting from the Toledo Inquisition
that was deposited in the Historical Archive at Madrid: "The only one
that exists, doubtless brought here with the case records and other
documents of the Toledo Inquisition, is a small painting on wood, in very
poor condition, which shows the crucifixion of the Holy Child. He is shown
on the Cross, surrounded by his butchers, one of whom is amusing himself
by pulling out his bowels or putting his hand into a deep wound in the
child's side. Although the painting is bad, it may very well be
contemporary with the events or from a period shortly after."
for the Frame‑up
"From Quintanar and Tembleque
eight Jews set out,
with evil hearts intent
the hunt for the Holy Child." Sebastian de Orozco
crime is explained in such a way in the confessions of the convicted men
that it is clear from reading the record that only a Christian could have
dreamt up such a script. It is a passion play, similar to the theatrical
performances put on at the present day in Olesa, Esparriguera or Chinchón.
The difference is the supposed presence of the live child, crucified and
murdered, and therefore representing the person of Christ to perfection.
The rest is a masterly production: the buffets, the bearing of the cross,
the Sanhedrin, the condemnation, Veronica and Pilate are all included. The
account could not fail to impress anyone who heard it during the annual
sermons on Maundy Thursday. For the benefit of who
in particular were these judicial records cooked up?
concern was to demonstrate to the Queen the danger to the New Christians
that the presence of members of their former religion represented,
especially as many of these were relatives or old friends of the converts.
That is why the convicted men belonged to two groups: Jews by religion,
and Jews by descent who had converted to Christianity. Torquemada was also
eager to dispatch the condemnation of Benito Garcia all over the country,
as is shown by the Catalan translation that the Barcelona inquisitors had
printed, which is to be found in the Coleccion
de Documentos Ineditos in
the Archive of the Crown of Aragon.
the sixteenth century the affair of the Holy Child of La Guardia was used
in the internal disputes of the chapter of Toledo Cathedral, as can be
seen from Cardinal Siliceo's letter of 23rd July 1547 against the section
of his chapter at Toledo who, obviously because of their Jewish
connections, were opposing the Statute of Purity of Blood, which excluded
Christians of Jewish ancestry from obtaining or enjoying any of the
cathedral benefices. He based his argument on the Memoria de 1544
del licenciado Damian de Vegas acerca del Nino de La Guardia (Memorial of
1544 by the learned Damian de Vegas regarding the Child of La Guardia),
which Orozco used as the preface to his report accompanying the
archbishop's decree. This led to a series of letters from the Emperor
Charles V between 13th September 1547 and 11th February 1548, until Paul
III settled the matter by papal provision on 28th May 1548. The Child of
La Guardia thus continued to assist those who championed his cause.
holy child has served the most varied purposes, even helping an American
Hispanic scholar who, after the Civil War, used the surnames of the
supposed criminals to argue the possible Jewish origin of General Franco.
his play The Innocent Child or the Second Christ Lope de
Vega‑(1562‑1635) combined the fairy story of the chocolate
house, in which the child is carried off by ogres, with the Passion story
of the
Bible. The story of Christ is brought to Spain, which is converted into
the new promised land, the new Jerusalem freed from unbelief, as shown by
the exact similarity of La Guardia to Judea:
thousand times blessed is Spain
have merited such a martyr,
son and father of your Fatherland.
de Canizares (1676‑1750) reached the nadir of racialism in his
dramatized version of the crime, La viva imagen de Cristo (The
Living Image of Christ); in it the comic characters are called
significantly Requeson (an evil‑smelling cheese) and Churrusca (singed
toast). The heroine, Esther, is never called by her real name by her
Christian lover, who always addresses her instead as Beatrice, a canonized
name. In the end she turns out to be a foundling and, therefore, free of
Jewish blood and also free to denounce her father/foster‑father and
marry the stool pigeon with the approval of the Catholic Monarchs.
Defenders of the Holy Child
were enthusiastic contemporary propagators of the story, starting with
Francisco de Zepeda and his Resunta Historial del año 1491 (Historical
Summary of the Year 1491). Friar Francisco de Arcos told the story in his
biography of Father Simon de Roxas; Friar Rodrigo de Yepes in his lengthy Historia
del Nino Inocente (1583); it was repeated by Friar Juan de
Cantabrana; and by Francisco de Quevedo (1580‑1645) when running out
of arguments for his Memorial por el patronato de Santiago (Reasons
why St. James should be Patron Saint of Spain). The most important of
these popularisations was that of Friar Antonio de Guzman entitled Historia
del inocente trinitario, el Santo Nino de La Guardia, retrato de Christo
nuestro redemptor (The History of the Innocent Catholic, the Holy
Child of La Guardia, Representative of Christ Our Redeemer).
the nineteenth century the subject was taken up again by Alonso de Castro,
who wrote Vidas de niños celebres (Lives of Famous Children),
published in Cadiz in 1865. Father Fita wrote his articles
in reply to Isidore Loeb in 1887, and his facts were repeated by Fun and
by Llorca in their ecclesiastical histories. Sabatini and Baer 4 came to
the conclusion by scientific methods that the Child of La Guardia had not
been the victim of ritual murder, but of black magic connected with the
reputation for inverted folk healing that the Jews had naturally acquired.
In 1926 Revd. Martin Martinez Moreno used the trials of the convicted men,
the evidence in the Inquisition records, and other documents in the parish
archive at La Guardia.
the present defenders of this long tradition we find Nicolas Lopez
Martinez writing in favour of the truth of the story in 1950: "This
hatred of the person of Jesus, almost innate in persons of that race,
shows itself particularly in their loathing for the sacraments. The child
murders at Sepulveda, Segovia, Avila, La Guardia... such criminally
realistic desecration as, in the specific case of La Guardia, took place
at the end at Casar de Palomero, which we restrict ourselves to listing,
do not give a very favourable impression of that race, not so much for the
number of such crimes as for the manner of their performance. The murder
of the Holy Child of La Guardia, for example, as it is recorded in the
case against Juce Franco of Avila, reveals satanic premeditation, sadism, and minds tortured by age‑old hatreds."
motive discovered by Revd. Father Llorca to give some probability to the
crime seems to us about the best: "It is also the fashion! among the
enemies of the Inquisition flatly to deny the truth of the actions
attributed to the Jews that most contributed to excite people against them.
But in the majority of cases the proof is only too plain: in some the
original records of the trials are extant; as for the rest, just as
religious enthusiasm caused the Christians to lynch and murder Jews and
New Christians, it is equally understandable that the same enthusiasm and
fanaticism would inspire the New Christians to take such sacrilegious
revenge on the Christians."
de Castilla goes as far as to say: "Among all the Inquisition trials
concluding in sentences inspired by the purest desire for complete justice,
there was no case that was treated, because of its motivations and far‑reaching
importance, with such seriousness and care as regards procedure as that
required to investigate such an extensive and intricate conspiracy, whose
limits extended beyond the usual in its effort to infiltrate and replace
all national authority and power, as the confessions of the Jews who took
part in the crucifixion of the Holy Child of La Guardia in 1489 revealed."
with the trial of the ritual murder of the Holy Child of La Guardia one
can only take one of two positions: either one accepts the possibility
that Jews committed ritual murders ‑ and, unfortunately, a large
number of Spanish historians have left this possibility open; or one
flatly denies it, consigning all the Inquisition documents, including the
confessions, to the rubbish heap where Christians keep their guilty
consciences. Then they reveal their real nature: a sample of the fears and
wishes of the inquisitors themselves, from whose nightmares sprang these
imaginary crimes. The condemned had no reality except to prove the truth
of the inquisitor's thoughts. Benito Garcia and Juan Franco were not even
heroic victims though they tried to be. Their resistance was to be taken
as obstinate persistence in crime, and their confessions under torture as
finally accepting repentance. Whatever they did, they just played one role
in a play written for them.
Explanation of the Phenomenon
Rabbi: Because his heart is needed
for a particular sublime sacrifice in our religion. Lope de Vega, E1 niño
inocente o el segundo Cristo
complicated web behind the accusations of ritual murder was woven of
threads from different traditions, both learned and popular. From the
start of Christiantiy it was a problem to explain the mystery of
transubstantiation and, when told in a hostile way, it could make
people believe in cannibalistic rites, as several pagan Roman courts
converse cases to the one under consideration (those in which, instead of
a child disappearing to be sacrificed, a child appears when the
consecrated host is desecrated) illustrate this question. The obvious
connection between these two kinds of event explain why books on the
Eucharist always treat them together. In the first case, the child is
kidnapped to be consecrated before his blood is drunk in a satanic ritual,
which is the mirror image of the Christian mass; and in the second, it is
the consecrated host that pours out its blood to convince the incredulous
of the mystery of transubstantiation. The Jews are in the majority of
cases responsible for buying the hosts from vergers or women ‑ the
weakest sheep in the Christian flock in the imagination of the defenders
of the mass ‑ or for demanding them as interest payments on their
usurious loans, as in the Deggendorf case in Bavaria in 1337, as described
by Friar Antonio Serpa.
to Friar Roque Fuci and Friar Jaime Baron, it was a Mohammedan who, in
Saragossa in 1427, to cast a magic spell required a host, which eventually
turned into a child, who ended up on a golden paten and was swallowed by
the archbishop of the city. Pictures of all this are to be seen in the
Chapel of San Dominguito de Val. The subject of sacrilege and desecration
committed by one or more Jews against the consecrated host was regularly
on the agenda in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. At the height of
the anti‑Jewish wave Catalan and Valencian artists illustrated it on
altars, particularly those dedicated to the Trinity and the Eucharist.
Apart from the sections of the altarpiece of the chapel of San Bartolome
at Villahermosa (Castellon), those of Vallbona de les Monges, now kept in
Barcelona, also dating from the fourteenth century and commemorating a
seven‑stage miracle, are very interesting.
ill‑understood cannibal aspect of transubstantiation is reflected
rather ingenuously in a miracle by Friar Juan Ejido in 1406,
recorded by Father Manuel Traval y Roset in Prodigios
a Eucaristicos (Miracles
of the Mass), Barcelona 1900. in which one can read: "one day a boy
standing beside the celebrant at the solemn moment of the elevation
of the host saw a most beautiful child in the hands of the priest, who
during the communion service, to the boy's astonishment, gobbled him up.
The boy fled in terror looking for somewhere to hide. At the end of the
mass they looked for him without success. He did not want to come anywhere
near the monk and, on sighting him, began to howl: 'Save me! Save me! He
wants to eat me just as he ate up a child today while he was saying mass.'
The special grace granted to such innocence and angelic purity was the
cause of such an extraordinary shock and fear."
the Revue des etudes Juives (1889) Strack reviewed this
chaotic muddle of Western fantasies about blood from the mythical banquet
of Thyestes, through the human sacrifices of the druids, stories of ogres
and of vampires, of "lamies, goules et striges", wine which
turns into blood and the consecrated bread that sweats blood, the stigmata
of the saints, enchanted arrows and bullets, the story of the Merchant of
Venice, various pacts with the Devil, or simply with friends, signed in
blood, and the power that witches and inquisitors both attributed to the
blood of the tortured. "Those who accuse the Jews accuse themselves
in this conflict that simultaneously attracts and horrifies them."
are faced with a combination of a deep current of popular belief, the
bogeyman myth, with the confusing explanation of an excessively
complicated dogma, transubstantiation. All this is then joined by another
great current in Western society, the great value given to inheritance
‑ and therefore blood ‑ since the thirteenth century, first in
obsession with genealogy, than in primitive biological theories. These
contradictory preocccupations of Western society were in each case to
select the Jew as the customary fall guy.
fundamental root of the myth of ritual crime is the conception of time
that Christendom had: everything happens in a short
period of time during an annual cycle of agricultural and ritual renewal. It is difficult to imagine a world in which the individual
did not remember the year of his birth but only the patron saint under
whose protection he had been born; a world whose time was not organized
numerically but in cycles of harvests, experienced always with anxiety
that they might be interrupted and confidence that, thanks to the approval
of a divinity both marvellous and terrible, the customary seasons would be
was such dramatic anxiety introduced into that world of recurring seasons
and how was such apocalyptic anguish resolved? The Passion of Christ
provides the key. The Jew is the witness of the death of Jesus Christ
because only one of them exists in all the world ‑ the Wandering Jew,
who condemned Christ by preferring Barabbas. Like the harvests and like
the seasons, the dramatic event was repeated every year.
using the Child of La Guardia as his strategy Torquemada employed a
sentimental factor which the powerful groups opposed to the expulsion
found hard to answer. As we have seen since the days of Alfonso X's Siete
Partidas the political e1ites had not disputed the existence of ritual
crimes, which fitted so perfectly both with traditional lore and with
intellectual, or rather clerical, culture, especially in a social group
that was beginning to construct noble genealogies that gave so much
importance to blood. The Queen was the perfect target for such a double‑bladed
argument. Five months after the unfortunates responsible for the crime
were condemned, Isabel the Catholic signed the expulsion decree, which did
not stop the persecution of those of Jewish origin but unleashed even
more, as the obsession with statutes of purity of blood shows. Blood once
crime without a corpse of the Holy Child of La Guardia, like the immense
series of accusations of Jewish ritual crimes, shows that the dividing
line between the learned and the popular, the cultured and
the ideas of ordinary people, is difficult to fix, if such a boundary
exists at all. We must, therefore, abandon exclusively positivist research
that only leads us to note the existence of a cascade of accusations,
which, in the end, might even make us accept the possible existence of
such crimes, as so many serious researchers have done. To do so would be
to fall into the police trap of 'no smoke without fire' that Torquemada
was so good at using. Reality is discovered by inverting the problem and
asking why Christian society needed for six centuries to have a ritual
murder of an innocent child carried out annually by the Jews in order to
confirm its own identity. We hope to have suggested some clues as to the
solution of this tangle.
Translator's Notes
1. Some may note that
Theobald IV of Champagne and Blois died in 1152. There was a Count
Theobald V of Blois in 1171 but his wife was Alix, daughter of Louis VII
of France, not Isabelle. Werner Keller Und Wurden Zerstreut unter alle
Volker suggests that the man referred to by Gaetz was Theobald "Landgraf"
(Viscount?) of Chartres.
2. I have used the term
'New Christian' to translate Spanish 'converso' wherever it appears. In
some cases they were what English‑speakers would call 'converts' but
usually they were descendents of forced converts. Anyone converted from
Judaism during or after the great pogrom of 1391 was regarded, often
correctly, as doubtfully Christian. Thus Mendizabel, who briefly became
Prime Minister of Spain in the 1830s, is referred to in many history books
as a "Jew" though all his ancestors had been Christians for a
dozen generations.
3. Old Christians
conversely means those like, for example, the Spanish Royal Family whose
Jewish ancestors changed to the correct religion in the early fourteenth
century. Jewish and Mohammedan ancestors of this date or earlier do not
4. This Baer is surely not the well‑known Yitzhak Baer, author of Toledot ha‑yehudim bi‑Safarad ha‑nosrit (History of the Jews in Christian Spain), 1945, 1959.
Tortures and Charges
trial or, more correctly, trials resulting from the case of the Holy Child
of La Guardia have a common element in the inquisitorial procedure. The
summary, made in the Supreme Council of the Inquisition in 1569 by Pedro
Tapia, Alonso de Doriga and Mateo Vazquez, and published in the work of
Martinez Moreno (1866) together with a text of the learned Villegas. From
this material was to come books with a double child: Cristobalico, seven
years old, or, if one prefers, Juan the son of Alonso de Pasamontes and
Juana la Guindera, three years old, who disappeared at the Puerta del
Perdbn in the Cathedral of Toledo.
de los Rios (1845) used the trials in the General Archive at Alcala and
Father Fita transcribed the trial of Yuce Franco for the Revista de la
Academia de la Historia in 1887 from papers provided for him by the
head of the Municipal Archive in Madrid, Timoteo Domingo y Palacio. Father
Fita was able to disentangle seven trials from these documents: that of
Yuce Franco of Tembleque in Avila; of Benito Garcia de las Mesuras in
Astorga on 6th June 1490; of Mose Abenamias of Zamora; of the six
residents of La Guardia, all of them New Christians ‑ Alonso Franco,
Lope Franco, Garcia Franco, Juan Franco, Juan de Ocana and, once again,
Benito Garcia. They also tried Mose Franco, father of Yuce Franco, in
Avila; and Benito Garcia, Juan Franco and his brothers, Alonso, Garcia and
Lope, together with the verger of Santa Maria de La Guardia and three
deceased Jews ‑ Master Yuqa Tazarte, Mose Franco (Yuce's brother)
and David de Perejon.
complicated patchwork could only have been made with materials provided
from outside by plans and decisions of the judges, which had been fixed
early on in the charges brought by the prosecutor against Yuce Franco on
17th December 1490. These were set down in order of seriousness:
propagating the Mosaic Law; crucifying a Christian child on Good
Friday; and entering into a contract for the theft of a consecrated host.
group of Jews and New Christians were arrested over a period of two or
three years, detained for differing reasons: the Jews for incitement to
judaize; the New Christians for lapsing into Mosaic practices. Thus far it
was a normal legal process, though the Inquisition's legal powers did not
extend to unbaptized Jews. This time, however, the judges set about
creating and implicating a network of Jewish communities, using the
reciprocal denunciations of the two groups. After the criminals had denied
the charges, they were left to rot in the dungeons for a while, which
brought them round to denounce other Jewish communities, other groups (New
Christians against Jews and vice versa), and the dead. The inquisitors
themselves helped widen the number of abettors by suggesting the names of
people involved in other cases or already imprisoned in the Inquisition's
own cells. The conspiracy theory having been invented like this, its
extent in the end astonished the judges themselves. Soon these delaying
tactics changed to forcing admission of the charges, which were by now
case of Yuce Franco, a Jew from Tembleque, is most instructive. When he
denied the charges in December 1490, a series of interrogations followed
with disappointing results. On 10th January 1491 he confirmed an account
that he had given on the previous 27th October about looking for
unleavened bread for the Passover, which had made him travel from
Tembleque to La Guardia and meet some New Christians, with whom he talked
about circumcision. On 10th April he added to his account references to a
consecrated host, for the moment only in connection with the Franco family,
who were New Christians. On 7th May he had already found the perfect place
for their criminal conclaves, some caves on the Cuesta de la Horca, a hill
on the way to Ocana between La Guardia and two outlying suburbs; and some
accomplices had appeared, who were of course already dead, Moises Franco
and Yuga Tazarte.
and the position taken up by other detainees facing similar charges
brought into the story Benito Garcia, who, in the hope of
not being burnt , dreamt up the idea of cutting off his own penis so they
should not see he had been circumcised. Benito confessed that "he was
in for it because what with the torture he'd said more than he knew".
The story then centred on the reciprocal accusations of one New Christian,
Benito Garcia, and one Jew, Yuce Franco, fastened together by the
9th June the depositions already mention the heart of a Christian child
and a consecrated host in connection with the deceased Yuga Tazarte. The
Francos of La Guardia were implicated as New Christians, since the aim of
the conspirators had been to free themselves from possible persecution by
the inquisitors. During the summer of 1491 the story was completed. The
charges were agreed in Salamanca on 25th October and a preliminary verdict
by the panel of judges was recorded. On 26th October 1491 Yuce Franco was
put to torture and a confession obtained, which was completed after
further torments on 12th November; here for the first time we hear about a
child kidnapped in Toledo. On 4th November sentence was confirmed, and on
5th November the key to the whole affair was obtained: "the Jews
could not carry out witchcraft without Christians". The essential aim
had been achieved: in order to perform any magic spell the Jews needed a
consecrated host, a Christian child, and even the participation of New
Christians with the (evilly perverted) spiritual force imparted by baptism.
The religious justification, underlying every auto‑da‑fé, had
been obtained and everything was ready for the actual
auto‑da‑fé on 16th November.
María Perceval
Materiales de historia es una web de investigación en ciencias sociales basada en trabajos de José María Perceval


text:
The Australian must stick to propaganda
1 June 2007
I'm not sure that I'm comfortable with the tack that many of the Australian's commentators have taken lately toward GW Bush and the Iraq war.
I come to the Australian to read propaganda - how vested interests and their paid employees are thinking (and told to think, respectively). I do not come to it to read nuanced analyses, or to engage with fact.
The Australian is my window into the mind of the forces which are destroying the world. That it remains unadulterated by fairness and balance is important to me.
You have started to blur the line between yourselves and factual, balanced media outlets, which I find disappointing.
I trust the lapse is temporary.
Visitor's : Add Comment

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Ian was an experienced climber and was emerging as a talented Alpinist. He had a bright future ahead of him and was about to start a Geography degree at Bangor University this September.
His eternal optimism and complete lack of ego will be a great loss to the climbing community.
Ian will be deeply missed by his family and friends.
Thanks Ian for the last two weeks of great climbing and company out in Cham.
Franco, Will, Luke, Tom, Tom, Felix, Big Ian and Moe
Ian Jackson was a valued member of the UKC community. His loss will be felt. We at UKC offer our condolences to his family and friends in this difficult time.


text:
Through games, songs, stories and interesting props we will introduce the observation and imagination, at their own level. The syllabus will be planned in accordance with the EYFS Early Years Learning Goals so will include listening, speaking, moving, self-confidence and awareness, managing feelings and emotional development.
Parents are welcome to stay and play.
Tuesdays 1.30pm-2.15pm
£5.00 per week.
Term dates: 1st November - 29th November
Half term Tuesday 25th October: No Classes
Using games, songs, stories and interesting props we will introduce different elements of theatre and guide children through improvisation, observation and imagination at their own level.
Those with older children may find that they are not needed once their child feels settled.
Mondays 4.30pm-5.15pm
£5.00 per week, or £45.00 for term in advance.
Term dates: 19th September - 28th November
Half term Monday 24th October: No Classes
Through games and theatre exercises our professional tutors enable our students to develop self-confidence, communication and performance skills while having a great time with new friends. Classes Full – waiting list only


text:
"Bankrobber" is a song by The Clash. The song was not released on any of their studio albums, instead appearing on their compilation Super Black Market Clash. Upon its 1980 release as a single (initially available in the UK on import only) it peaked at number 12 on the UK Singles Chart, and at number 14 on both the Irish Singles Chart and the New Zealand Singles Chart.
Young Ian Brown and Pete Garner — later of The Stone Roses — were in attendance at the studio recording session of this single. The full account of this incident is inJohn Robb's Stone Roses and the Resurrection of British Pop.
The Clash filmed a low-budget video for the song, depicting members of the band recording the song in the studio, interspersed with Clash roadies Baker and Johnny Green wearing bandanas over their faces, performing a bank heist in Lewisham. During the filming, Baker and Green were stopped and questioned by the police, who thought they were genuine.
Contents Edit
- 1 Track listing
- 1.1 Side one
- 1.2 Side two
- 2 Personnel
- 3 Robber Dub
- 4 Rockers Galore... UK Tour
- 5 Appearances
- 6 Cover versions
- 7 Charts
- 8 Notes
- 9 References
- 9.1 Sources
- 10 External links
Track listing[edit] Edit
Side one[edit] Edit
- "Bankrobber"
Side two[edit] Edit
- "Rockers Galore... UK Tour" (Mikey Dread)
Personnel[edit] Edit
- Joe Strummer - lead vocal, piano, guitars
- Mick Jones - sound effects
- Paul Simonon - bass
- Topper Headon - drums
- Mikey Dread - backing vocal
Robber Dub[edit] Edit
"Robber Dub" is the dub version of "Bankrobber". It was to be included in the 12" single for "Bankrobber", but the label ended up refusing to release the 12" single.[6][n 2] The song can be found on their 1980 compilation album Black Market Clash, combined with "Bankrobber" as a 6:16 track, and on the 1994 compilation album Super Black Market Clash, as a 4:42 stand alone track.
Rockers Galore... UK Tour[edit] Edit
"Rockers Galore... UK Tour" is a reworking of "Bankrobber" with Mikey Dread singing new lyrics about touring with the Clash. It is not "Robber Dub" which lacks the Dread vocal and lyrics.[7][n 3] "Rockers Galore" is also featured on their 2006 compilation album Singles Box.
Appearances[edit] Edit
"Bankrobber" features in the episode "Freddie" of E4's Skins, in the programme's third season.
Also, "Bankrobber" is featured in Guy Ritchie's 2008 film, Rocknrolla. It is sung alternately by the older 'Johnny Quid', portrayed by British actor Toby Kebbell, in his dingy flat, and by the younger 'John Cole' in the company of his cruel stepfather, the London mob boss Lenny Cole.
In the first episode of North Square the barristers start singing the song in the robing room after a hearing. The opening words ("My daddy was a bankrobber but he never hurt nobody") are recited as if part of the dialogue. In a subsequent episode of the same series one of the barristers faces a disciplinary hearing as a result of punching someone at the time of the robing room scene in the first episode. There is cctv footage of the incident but no sound recording. In order to explain the context of the blow (a racist comment made by the victim) the barrister calls a lip reader, who has been profoundly deaf from birth, to explain to the tribunal what everyone was saying at the time. In his evidence the witness is also asked to lip read one of the characters singing "Bankrobber" which he does, obviously unaware that these are the words of a song.
Cover versions[edit] Edit
The Norwegian hardcore band So Much Hate released a live version of the song on the It's Your Choice, a 2x10" live compilation released in 1991 through Your Choice Records. It was also covered by Hot Tuna, with Jorma Kaukonen on lead guitar, vocals, dobro and table steel guitar, Jack Casady on bass, and Michael Falzarano on rhythm guitar, vocals, mandolin and harmonica, on their live album, Live at Sweetwater, recorded in January 1992 at Sweetwater Station in Mill Valley, California and released through Relix Records that same year. Audioweb recorded a rock/reggae cover in 1996 that reached number 19 in the UK Singles Chart.[8][9]
The Pistoleers covered the song in 2002 for This Is Rockabilly Clash. Hawksley Workman recorded a version, which was available on a free CD in the UK magazine UNCUT in 2003. The CD was titled White Riot Vol. 1: A Tribute to The Clash. Greg MacPherson covered it on his 2004 album Maintenance. Chumbawamba's 2005 album, A Singsong and a Scrap featured an a cappella cover version of the song. OPM recorded a cover for the In the OPMDEN EP released in 2006. The song was covered by the Polish group Kult in 2008. John Brown's Body covered it for the 2009 album Shatter the Hotel: A Dub Inspired Tribute to Joe Strummer. Australian singer Dave Favours covered the song on his 2012 EP One Hand on the Wheel.
Charts[edit] Edit
|The Clash
|UK Singles (Official Charts Company)[1]
|Ireland (IRMA)[2]
|New Zealand (Recorded Music NZ)[3]
|UK Singles (Official Charts Company)[9]


text:
Get wide area networking (WAN) that works harder for you
We work closely and effectively with a wholesaler; as a result, we purchase highly competitive WAN connections. We are able to offer a wide range of connectivity options to improve operational and budgetary performance; helping you select the one that best suits your organisation and its needs.
Options include
- standard Digital Subscriber Lines (DSL).
- fibre DSL.
- Ethernet in the First Mile (EFM).
- leased lines.
For multi-site operations we can also offer
- Internet Protocol Virtual Private Network (IP VPN).
- Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS).
- Virtual Private LAN Service (VPLS).
This can be a complex arena with a confusing array of choices. So let us ensure you utilise the solution that bests suits your business, operations, budgets and future plans.
Our expertise starts at the network and we have an in-depth understanding of the interconnectivity requirements of today's marketplace to add real value to your thinking.
To find out more about how your business could benefit from our WAN expertise – Contact us.
Find out more about how your business could benefit from moving forward with Wireless Technology.


text:
My sister celebrated her birthday this week. As a gift I made her these dishtowels. They match her kitchen and the apron I made for her last year. I used flour sack dishtowels and this tutorial from Chronicles of a Mommy. It's a great project for all those scraps you have lying around, and it's pretty quick too!
Here are a few close-ups. (My sister's daughter was the one who decided to put a worm in the apple. What a great idea!)
For the embroidery, I used a blanket stitch, a backstitch, and a french knot (for the worm's eye).


text:
i have taking this med(3 caps. of 75mg ) for about 2yr. the side effects are blurred vision, constipation and a few others that are minor to manageable. the rash however started a few days ago in an area about 4-5 sq inches,and seems to spread a little outside the main area. the itch is intense. the rash seems to be an insignificant side affect in the big picture of things. your input would be welcome.
Why the concern with rash from venlafaxine?
- Asked
- 2 Nov 2014 by james-09
- Updated
- 2 November 2014
- Topics
- depression, constipation, generalized anxiety disorder, skin rash, venlafaxine, side effect, vision
Responses (2)
Get emergency medical help if you have any of these signs of an allergic reaction to venlafaxine: skin rash or hives; difficulty breathing; swelling of your face, lips, tongue, or throat.
Further Information
- Venlafaxine Information for Consumers
- Venlafaxine Information for Healthcare Professionals (includes dosage details)
- Side Effects of Venlafaxine (detailed)
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text:
Home » Posts tagged 'UCSD'
Tag Archives: UCSD
Reputation managment: your identity, your story
Unless you are a CIA operative or completely off the grid, you are very likely to have some sort of digital footprint beyond your published articles and departmental faculty profile. This can be a good thing if, for example, you are:
- entering the job market or looking for collaborators in interdisciplinary research;
- applying for a major research grant;
- hoping the media will call you for an expert opinion in your field of study;
- trying to reach the public and/or policy makers who are misunderstanding (and defunding) the research being done in your field.
Having a digital presence beyond your formal academic work can be immensely beneficial. The trick is to take control of that digital presence and ensure that it works to your benefit. Luckily, there is help to be found; publishers, universities, and academic libraries all provide resources to help their academic communities effectively curate a professional, online scholarly identity. (more…)
Check out all the great activities UC libraries are hosting for Open Access Week
October 24-30, 2016 is international Open Access Week. This year's theme is "Open in Action," which was chosen to "focus on the small steps everyone can take to make openness in research a reality," said Heather Joseph, Executive Director of SPARC. "This year's theme will help showcase these actions, the individuals who are leading by example, and the ways this openness advances science and scholarship."
The University of California Libraries have a planned a greater number and wider variety of events this year than ever before in order to explore and celebrate issues related to open access. (more…)
UC linguistics faculty pledge support for Glossa, call for cancellation of Lingua
In November 2015, the editorial board of Lingua, a linguistics journal published by Elsevier, resigned en masse to begin a new open access journal, Glossa. The decision followed a series of disagreements with the publisher which are discussed in this post on Language Log. Several UC linguistics faculty have now issued a statement declaring their support for the new journal and urging their colleagues and the UC libraries to no longer support Lingua. In response, the UC libraries have informed Elsevier that they wish to cancel their subscription to Lingua.
"The UC Linguistics faculty statement of support for Glossa reflects our conviction that the value of a journal lies in the efforts of the authors, reviewers, and editors responsible for creating and vetting the content that the journal publishes," says Eric Bakovic, UC San Diego linguistics professor and chair of the Academic Senate's University Committee on Library and Scholarly Communication (UCOLASC). "In the move from Lingua to Glossa, all of these critical elements remain the same — therefore, Glossa is what Lingua was, except now better because it is now a fair open access journal. Elsevier insists on keeping the Lingua name for what is effectively a brand-new journal, with none of the same critical elements, which means that they believe that the value of a journal lies in its name and its publisher. Our aim is to prove them wrong." (more…)


text:
My prayer is to
stay open.
I feel you
like a flame in my belly.
Swirling in the atoms, rising to meet the world.
The fragrance of honeysuckle tickles my nose.
You are uniquely You, just like everyone else.
As ships rest on water,
I rest in you.
We'll all float on…
You came to me in a dream
allowing me to shoulder the weight of your soul.
To feel leaving.
To smell the sweetness
that holds your favorite memory, one last time.
What a gift it is to know you,
even in death.