The tale told in the spring of 1900 by Gustav Hoffmann, a butcher in the West Prussian hamlet of Konitz, "was based," Helmut Walser Smith writes, "on a story even older than the poetry of Chaucer."

It "drew from the ancient blood libel: that every year at Passover, Jews ritually slaughter Christian children and use their blood to bake matzo." It is a "tenacious tale," first documented in 1150, that was told for centuries, its "major motifs" being as follows: "that Jews killed Christian boys before Easter; that because they hate Christians, the Jews tortured the boys; that the killing was in imitation of the killing of Christ; that Jews were not only a timeless menace but also a present threat; and that the murdered boy, as a martyr for the Christian community, performed miracles."

The murdered boy in this instance was Ernst Winter, "a tall, strong, robust 18-year-old, a swimmer, a gymnast, a dancer, and a bicycle rider." In the second week of March 1900, various severed parts of his body were discovered in a lake in Konitz, carefully wrapped in paper packages and sewn shut. As time passed and the crime remained unsolved, "the people became restless, and bewilderment soon gave way to suspicion." One county official expressed concern that "nearly the whole population of the town of Konitz as well as its hinterlands is convinced that Winter was a victim of a Jewish ritual murder."

Soon the rumors got out of hand. With nothing more than anti-Semitism and idle speculation by way of evidence, suspicion focused on the town's Jewish butcher, Adolph Lewy, a "cantankerous recluse" whom many people disliked. His Christian competitor issued a public accusation against Lewy - exactly who wrote it is unclear - in an anti-Semitic newspaper. This "Petition of the Konitz Butcher Gustav Hoffmann Pertaining to the Matter of Winter's Murder" was "published both in the newspapers and as a pamphlet with a print run of 50,000 copies, making it perhaps the most widely read piece of writing in all of West Prussia that summer." It was almost entirely a work of fiction, but it played directly to the troubled mood of the local populace.

Konitz and vicinity became a hotbed of rumor and storytelling; "by July, there had already been four hundred separate incriminations by people coming to the police and to the newspapers with stories of what they saw, heard, smelled, even dreamed."

That this uproar occurred at this time and place was peculiar. The turn of the 20th century was "a time of optimism, if not uncritical satisfaction, and contemporaries had a general sense that through reason they could overcome obstacles, conquer prejudice, and slay superstition." Many believed with Thomas Masaryk that ritual-murder suspicions "belonged to a 'dying century.' " German Jews were "perhaps the most integrated Jewish minority in all of Europe," and "German patriotism permeated the Jewish community." In Konitz the Jewish population had shrunk because Jews left for big cities.

All things considered, Konitz in 1900 would have seemed to most an unlikely place for an outbreak of virulent anti-Semitism, yet that is exactly what it underwent. Smith, in his careful recapitulation of the murder and its aftermath, sees it as an instance of the "process" of anti-Semitism, of "what makes latent anti-Semitism manifest, transforming private enmity and neighborly disputes into the blood-stained canvases of persecutory landscapes." He writes:

"In one context, the whispers of rumor and the wages of private malice fall on heedless ears; in another, they unleash a murderous dynamic . . . Looking at the process, we see historical forces converging: how local enmities become potent symbols resonating with larger antagonisms; how spiteful stories and tavern tales are elevated to public spectacle; . . . how people caught up in the resulting dynamic come to believe in the objective truth of their own lies."

At least three elements combined to build a wave of anti-Semitism in Konitz that summer: the old tradition of ritual-murder suspicions; a general shift within Germany "away from the liberalism of the 1870s" and a concurrent rise of politically inspired anti-Semitism; and the murder of Ernst Winter. Had the representatives of the anti-Semitic press not descended upon the town, the case might have been treated as an ordinary (if unduly vicious) murder devoid of larger social import.

Smith argues that what happened in Konitz was that the bonds of community were broken. Not merely did Christians turn against Jews, there was a sharp division between "the world of popular religiosity, steeped in the lore of medieval accusation, and the rational reaction of public officials." The educated class believed that "by decree [it] could mold a less superstitious, more informed public sphere," but this proved an illusion, or delusion.

The summer of 1900 in Konitz petered out rather than exploded. There were riots, "but they did not descend into a tempest of destruction." The "symbolic ritual of violence, not an actual massacre," seems to have been enough to slake the anti-Semitic appetite in Konitz, but Smith declines to let the rioters and those who sympathized with them off the hook. The community may have returned to an approximation of normal, but anti-Semitism had burrowed itself into the fabric of the town, to fester there for years to come and then to explode in the late 1930s, as it did throughout Germany.

The summer of 1900, it turns out, was a tiny prologue, unrecognizable as such at the time, to unspeakable things to come.

The Washington Post