The Butcher's Tale Quotes

“The general education of the population also gave cause for optimism. In 1900, Germans counted among the most literate people in the world, with literacy rates in the range, of those found in the United States today.”
― Helmut Walser Smith, The Butcher's Tale: Murder and Anti-Semitism in a German Town

“How do we understand prejudice, hatred, and violence in the context of modern societies, like our own, among people much like ourselves, among men and women who lived, not in dark times, but in an era when the balance of opinion was against the all-too-open expression of hatred?”
― Helmut Walser Smith, The Butcher's Tale: Murder and Anti-Semitism in a German Town

“As the army arrived in the region, the otherwise obedient West Prussian citizens stoned the troops, denouncing the men in spiked helmets as a “Jewish defense force.”
― Helmut Walser Smith, The Butcher's Tale: Murder and Anti-Semitism in a German Town

“they called in the Prussian army to restore order and protect the Jews, who numbered just over three hundred men, women, and children in a town of ten thousand.”
― Helmut Walser Smith, The Butcher's Tale: Murder and Anti-Semitism in a German Town

“the ancient blood libel: that every year at Passover, Jews ritually slaughter Christian children and use their blood to bake matzo.”
― Helmut Walser Smith, The Butcher's Tale: Murder and Anti-Semitism in a German Town

“The greater part of historical and natural phenomena
are not simple, or not simple in the way we would like. —PRIMO LEVI”
― Helmut Walser Smith, The Butcher's Tale: Murder and Anti-Semitism in a German Town

“When all is said and done, a single word,
“understanding,” is the beacon light of our studies —MARC BLOCH”
― Helmut Walser Smith, The Butcher's Tale: Murder and Anti-Semitism in a German Town

“Spoken in the context of the riots, the words did not kill but they enacted and performed, and what they performed was a murder: a ritual murder. Not the Jews but their Christian accusers performed the ritual murder.”
― Helmut Walser Smith, The Butcher's Tale: Murder and Anti-Semitism in a German Town

“these instances bore none of the harrowing features of racially motivated torture, mutilation, and cruelty endemic to Euro-American lynching of African Americans. In Germany, the ritual did not culminate as it did in roughly five thousand cases in the United States between the end of the American Civil War and 1968—in actual human sacrifice.”
― Helmut Walser Smith, The Butcher's Tale: Murder and Anti-Semitism in a German Town

“In 1900, imperial Germany safeguarded the rule of law and ensured the protection of its citizens, including Jews. Four decades later, the Third Reich attempted to annihilate the Jews and, as an occupying power in the Polish village of Jedwabne, encouraged violence. In this Hobbesian perspective, the state remains the only barrier between us and the hatchets of our neighbors, and, as a corollary, in 1900 only the Prussian army saved the Jews of Konitz from the clubs and axes of “ordinary Germans.”
― Helmut Walser Smith, The Butcher's Tale: Murder and Anti-Semitism in a German Town

“For it was the rejection of the possibility of human solidarity with strangers—the critical as well as moral presupposition of civil society—that the National Socialist regime made into the foundation for its existence.”
― Helmut Walser Smith, The Butcher's Tale: Murder and Anti-Semitism in a German Town

“But if initial accusations were sparse, this all changed in April, after the first journalists arrived in town.”
― Helmut Walser Smith, The Butcher's Tale: Murder and Anti-Semitism in a German Town

“It was a modern massacre: urban in origin, driven by ideology, fueled by the press, and abetted by politicians from afar.”
― Helmut Walser Smith, The Butcher's Tale: Murder and Anti-Semitism in a German Town

“Ippolit Liutostanskii, a Polish-born, defrocked Catholic priest, who, after being tried for rape, turned to anti-Semitic polemics in order to earn money.”
― Helmut Walser Smith, The Butcher's Tale: Murder and Anti-Semitism in a German Town

“Frank showed that the accusations had almost always been fabricated and that in almost all cases the church, as well as many learned men, had opposed them.”
― Helmut Walser Smith, The Butcher's Tale: Murder and Anti-Semitism in a German Town

“Moritz Stern’s Source Contributions to the Position of the Popes on the Jews, which gathered together the medieval papacy’s impressive record denouncing the ritual-murder accusation”
― Helmut Walser Smith, The Butcher's Tale: Murder and Anti-Semitism in a German Town

“Efes Damim (No Blood), was originally published in Wilna in 1837 and included text in Hebrew, Latin, Russian, and Polish. The book was subsequently translated into German, French, and English. But on the other side of the debate, the scribblings of August Rohling, a fraudulent professor of Catholic theology who had taught in Milwaukee, Münster, and Prague, were also translated.”
― Helmut Walser Smith, The Butcher's Tale: Murder and Anti-Semitism in a German Town

“Print could be wielded by the purveyors of prejudice as well as by the combatants for civilization”
― Helmut Walser Smith, The Butcher's Tale: Murder and Anti-Semitism in a German Town

“Staatsbürgerzeitung, an anti-Semitic newspaper that mixed news and prejudice so thoroughly as to render them indistinguishable.”
― Helmut Walser Smith, The Butcher's Tale: Murder and Anti-Semitism in a German Town

“Rather than demand the assimilation of Jews, he rejected them; and instead of trying to convert Jews, he declared them an implacable enemy, not of Christendom, but of Germandom. He thus turned anti-Semitism into hatred based on race, not religion”
― Helmut Walser Smith, The Butcher's Tale: Murder and Anti-Semitism in a German Town

“The murder of Ernst Winter and the violence that followed provided the struggling anti-Semitic parties with an opportunity to revitalize their movement.”
― Helmut Walser Smith, The Butcher's Tale: Murder and Anti-Semitism in a German Town

“He even pursued the story of a four-year-old girl who bragged that her father, a Jewish merchant of herculean physical stature, had thrown Winter to the ground, killed him, and cut and carved him up; the family, the girl said, then sat around the dinner table and ate him.57”
― Helmut Walser Smith, The Butcher's Tale: Murder and Anti-Semitism in a German Town