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The story of the blood accusation against Leopold Hilsner, translated into Yiddish by Y. Yaffa. The blood libel trial held in Bohemia at the beginning of the 20th century. When on April 1, 1899, the corpse of a murdered seamstress, Anezka Hrfza, was found in a wood near Polna, Bohemia, with a deep cut on the neck, the blood libel spread immediately and was taken up by the Czech, German-National, and Christian-Social anti-Semitic press. Leopold Hilsner of Polna, a 22-year-old Jewish vagabond of ill repute and low intelligence, was arrested. The basis of the accusation was the statement of the investigating physicians that only a minute quantity of blood was found in and around the body. Both investigation and trial at the Kutna Hora court were conducted with a strong bias against Hilsner—though suspicion was voiced against Hrfza's brother, who emigrated to the United States—and many measures requested by his counsel were not admitted, for instance a test of the chief witness's eyesight. The jury condemned Hilsner to death. As the medical faculty had doubted the first medical statement, Hilsner was retried in Pisek. On this occasion he was also charged with the murder of Mary Klima, who had been missing since July 1898, because her corpse was found covered with branches like that of Hrfza. Hilsner named two Jewish accomplices in the murder, but both had unassailable alibis. He was once more condemned to death.
The central anti-Semitic personality in both trials was Karel Baxa (1862–1938), counsel for the Hrfza family, who was financed by a joint German-Czech committee and whose invective was spread by the anti-Semitic press, which named him the "savior of Christendom." (He was later to refute his opinions, and in 1923 was elected mayor of Prague for Bene2' National Socialist Party with the support of the CidovskF Strana (Jewish Party); his attitude in all Jewish matters was correct.) Of importance was the intervention of T. G. Masaryk, later first president of Czechoslovakia, who published two pamphlets demanding a revision of the trial "not to defend Hilsner, but to defend the Christians against superstition." Because of this action Masaryk became the object of mob demonstrations and his lectures at the university were suspended. However, the popularity he acquired by his stand was to help his cause during World War I, mainly in the United States. Hilsner's sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. Repeated endeavors to renew the trial were unsuccessful, but Hilsner was pardoned when Charles I succeeded to the Hapsburg throne (1916). Until his death in 1927, he traveled as a beggar through the successor states of the Hapsburg monarchy under the name of Heller. When Masaryk, as president, declined to grant him an audience, he reproached him with ingratitude, as he considered that he had made Masaryk famous.
The affair was accompanied by an anti-Semitic campaign throughout Europe, conducted by the Vienna blood libel "specialist," Ernst Schneider. It led to riots in several towns in Bohemia and Moravia and was one of the main factors contributing to the increase of anti-Semitism in the Bohemian countryside and to the exodus of many small rural Jewish communities. Its repercussions were felt for many years. After the German invasion (1939), a Czech Nazi-sponsored Fascist organization opened an appeal for funds to erect a monument on the site where Hrfza's body had been found, but it met with no response.
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