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Today, with antisemitism on the rise, it’s useful to remember that where there is smoke, there isn’t always fire. Haters of Jews today maintain that the sheer number of stories of evildoing by Jews is evidence that Jews have been up to no good. Why would so very many people, across so many centuries and such an enormous expanse of territory, claim that Jews were engaging in various kinds of evil activities if at least some of the accusations weren’t true? Why would false claims without any basis in reality persist for so very long?
The answer is actually quite clear. Jews in Europe were the objects of hatred and distrust, going back to the ancient charges against them emanating from Christian leaders. Accordingly, not only did suspicion fall on them virtually whenever the perpetrator of a crime was not obvious, but they were also vulnerable over the centuries to false charges from accusers who knew that their accusations would be believed and accepted over the word of a Jew.
As Antisemitism: History and Myth details, one notable example of unscrupulous people scapegoating and victimizing the Jews was the case of a twenty-one-year-old woman named Giuditta Castilliero, who in June 1855 vanished from her aunt’s home in Badia, a town in northern Italy that was then part of the Kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia, a client state of the Austrian Empire. Castilliero made a dramatic reappearance on June 25, eight days after her disappearance, and announced, to considerable alarm among the local people, that she had been kidnapped by Jews who had planned to sacrifice her but had managed to get away before they could carry out their nefarious plans.
The Jews, Castilliero told the rapt Badians, had transported her to Verona, where she had been prepared for sacrifice along with a poor, terrified little girl whose ultimate fate she did not know. The Jews opened a vein in one of Castilliero’s arms and collected her blood in a basin; she dramatically showed her audience six wounds in her arm. Ultimately, however, one of their servants, a Catholic, had helped her escape.
Having heard Castilliero’s story, the Badians determined that one of the local Jews, a prominent thirty-eight-year-old businessman and moneylender named Caliman Ravenna, must have been one of her kidnappers. Castilliero gave a deposition under oath. While Ravenna insisted on his innocence, the local magistrate believed Castilliero’s claims, and Ravenna, along with several other Jews who supposedly had acted as his accomplices, was duly charged with public violence. Specifically, the charge was that the Jews had kidnapped Castilliero in order to subject her to ritual murder, purportedly in accord with the “religious superstition of the Jews.”
News traveled fast, as the local press assumed the truth of Castilliero’s charges. On July 5, 1855, a local newspaper, Annotatore friulano, in nearby Udine told its readers about how a “young little peasant” had been brutalized and would have suffered worse if she had not escaped. The Jews were not mentioned, but rumors had already spread far and wide about the case, and everyone knew who the perpetrator supposedly was. Jews in northern Italy began to be verbally abused and threatened.
Then, however, the tide began to turn. Giuditta Castilliero was caught lying. On July 9, 1855, she was arrested for stealing from a family in Legnago. The family had hired her as a maid and then found that she had been purloining items from their home; the thefts took place during the eight days of her disappearance, while Ravenna and his accomplices were supposed to have been preparing her for ritual murder.
Castilliero was arrested for theft. The charges against Caliman Ravenna and the other Jews were dropped, and they were released from jail. Giuditta Castilliero confessed that she had fabricated the whole thing. She was further charged with slandering Ravenna and finally sentenced to six years in prison.
In nineteenth-century Italy, when Giuditta Castilliero had to explain away her eight-day disappearance and deflect attention from scrutiny that might uncover her theft, she also had a ready scapegoat she could falsely accuse: the most despised people in her area were the Jews. She knew that the political and ecclesiastical authorities already regarded them with distaste and that the Jewish community was essentially powerless against such charges, for judges and magistrates would not take the word of a Jew over that of a Christian.
Also, although Castilliero herself may not have been aware of the fact, there were abundant precedents in European history of Jews being persecuted on the basis of confessions exacted through torture, particularly in the case of Simon of Trent, whose widespread veneration only demonstrated how much some Europeans wanted to believe stories such as the one Castilliero told. If she had told her tale just a century earlier, she might have gotten away with it. If she had told it 170 years later, she might have become a social media star.
