In Zaragoza, Spain, there is a street dedicated to Santo Domingo del Val, in the old Jewish quarter, whose figure involves a gruesome biography. The anonymous author – surely a fundamentalist canon – of a grotesque booklet published in Buenos Aires (Librería Editorial Santa Catalina, 1943), dating back to the 13th century, tells how the warriors of the Cross advance over Moorish land. It was the year 1247. Jaume I el Conquistador extended his borders in Aragon.

On the banks of the Ebro River, a Teutonic-looking child is born showing premonitory marks on his white skin: a crown on his forehead and a cross on his back. Dominguito’s father, from Zaragoza by birth and of Breton blood, was a noble vassal of the king. The large Jewish population “was dedicated to exploiting Christians as it had previously done with Muslims.” The streets of Collizos, Sartén, Angulo, Graneros (already disappeared) and Verónica – located next to the ruins of the Roman theater – “were stained by the presence of those gutless people.”

Knowing the tricks of the Hebrews, Dominguito’s father “had undone many of their intrigues and speculations; that is why in the Jewish neighborhoods he was hated to death.” The boy got to know that neighborhood well; He sometimes passed through it when he returned from the cathedral, where he served as an altar boy, and observed the Jews “engaged in their rites and ablutions and heard the guttural sounds of their prayers.” Then, he began to sing hymns to the Virgen del Pilar. The residents of the neighborhood took it as a challenge. “Threatening hands, inflamed looks and cries of revenge came out of the narrow windows.”

One day, Mossé Albayucet (it refers to doctor Alassé Albayluz) with “a haggard and serious face and a nose that gave him the appearance of a bird of prey, a usurer of the worst kind”, pounced on him and dragged him to the house of a rabbi, forcing him to step on a crucifix if he wanted to be free. As he refused, the boy was nailed to a door frame and stripped of his clothes. “They opened his veins, collecting the blood that fell in cups. The vessels were full of young and vigorous blood. And the little blonde head hung inertly on the child’s chest like a cut rose. Albayucet unnailed the stiff corpse and mutilated it. He kept his hands and head and handed the trunk to his companions.

The parents began the agonizing search. When crossing the river, guided by a light, they found the body decapitated and without hands. In a nearby well, the head crowned with thorns and the two drilled hands appeared. Albayucet was arrested and executed, but not before converting to Christianity (“Conferences of Father Félix”, Barcelona 1868).

The aforementioned pamphlet had come from Juan Francisco Andrés de Uztárroz from Zaragoza, who submitted it for publication in 1643 under the title “History of Santo Domingo de Val, martyr Cesar-Augustano”. Later, in 1806, another panegyric about Santo Dominguito appeared, written by the rector of the Pious Schools of Zaragoza, Camilo Foncillas de Santa Teresa.

Due to the distances and slowness of the media of the time, events that occurred in a remote place always ended up being known elsewhere, inevitably altered. The story of the child-saint Dominguito comes from England. A century earlier, in 1144, a boy named William disappeared from the city of Norwich who, according to the testimony of a convert, had been murdered to perform the blood ritual of the Jewish Passover. Shortly afterwards, amidst the clamor of the population, the body was found without any sign of violence, despite which the boy was sanctified and his memory preserved in the local church and in the book “The Life and Miracles of William of Norwich” (original in Latin, later translated into Old English with the referent “Seynt Wyllyam the cylde” or “Saint Wyllyam of Norwyche”), by the anti-Semitic Benedictine Thomas Monemutensis (Thomas of Monmouth, died 1172), published for the first time in Cambridge U. Press, 1896. Thomas relied on another 5th-century story, apparently written in Greek by one Socrates Scholasticus and published in Constantinople, which described the martyrdom of a Christian boy in the hands of the Jews of Inmestar (Syria). It was then believed that William the Conqueror of Normandy, when he occupied England, brought with him part of the Rouen Jewry, which was established in London.

A case similar to that of William of Norwich and that of Dominguito de Val was the famous crime, apparently historical, although doubtfully accurate in all its facts, of Juan de Pasamontes, known as the Niño de la Guardia, who died in 1489 in La Guardia (Toledo), crucified by some Jewish converts in revenge after witnessing an Auto-da-Fe (V. Juan Yñiguez de Lequerica. Madrid, San Hieronymo el Real, 1583 – 1584).

This transversal interpretation of the life and exploits of the Jews responds to a secular process, whose main axis was the creation of a suffocating atmosphere that culminated in accusations before the Holy Office. The ultimate goal was the extermination of the Jews. At first the Christian kings of the Iberian Peninsula attacked the Moors and the Jews with the same impartiality, believing because of their way of dressing that they were all equal. The economic strength achieved by the latter awakened the ambition of many. But its severe and systematic persecution began in the 11th century after the alleged commission of ritual atrocities, desecration of blessed hosts, religious disputes and conspiracy against Christian society. The confessional rivalry was aggravated by the practice of circumcision, to which Christian children were not subjected, unlike Muslims and Jews. There were cases in which the authorities, faced with such an accusation, ordered the foreskins of the recasts to be provided as evidence. Martin Luther dedicated a treatise to the Jews – “Von den Juden und ihren Lügen” (On the Jews and their lies), Wittenberg 1543 – resentful of finding himself unable to convert to the Christian faith “this miserable, blind and insensitive people” whose Pride as a chosen people was based on the ceremony of “perfect and complete circumcision” on the eighth day, according to the doctrine of the Torah, becoming beloved children of God.

As for the superstitious belief that at Easter the Jews killed a child to pour its blood on unleavened bread, one only has to follow the moment of consecration in the Catholic mass to see the reproduction, as a residue of ancient uncivilized sacrifices, of a symbolic act of cannibalism supported by the doctrine of transubstantiation, by which the flesh is eaten and the blood of a god is drunk. Everyone at the same time – clerics, believers, apostates and necromancers – for this reason attributed magical powers to the consecrated Host. Since the Bible was not translated into vernacular languages until the Renaissance, it is logical that the people received a confusing version of the Old Testament. The Exodus speaks of the fury of Yahweh, announcing the death of the first-born male children of Egypt, to force the Pharaoh to let go of the people of Israel, whom he kept subjugated. Moses ordered the Hebrews to take a bunch of hyssop and, dipping it in the blood of the Passover lamb reserved for the sacrifice, anoint the doors of their houses with it, as a sign for the exterminator to pass by on his vengeful itinerary. Next they had to eat the meat roasted over the fire, with unleavened bread and wild lettuce. It is surprising that Jews were prohibited from consuming animal blood, while Christians have always included blood sausages in their diet. The strange story of the Jews immolating innocent children would later extend to the Freemasons, in whose secret ceremonies they worked with Bibles, oaths, swords, skulls and sarcophagi, although not with creatures.

In the Middle Ages, numerous religious contests took place, in the form of dialectical tournaments, between Jewish converts, well-versed in the Talmud, and Christians versed in the Holy Scriptures. If the Christians’ arguments won, the entire community of Jews would be forced to embrace the new faith; If the Jews triumphed, their own end was the stake, by hanging or stoning. One of the most famous disputes was witnessed in 1263 in Barcelona by James I of Aragon, who, despite seeing the argument of a Jewish scholar called Rabí-Moseh-ben-Najman (or Naijmanides) lost before the convert Pablo Christiá, He gave some money saying that “he had never heard a defense of an unjust cause so nobly defended”, which was not an obstacle for him to later be expelled from the country (Max Dimont, “Jews, God, and History”, 1962, Menéndez Pelayo, Historia de los Heterodoxos Españoles -HHE-, 1876). Also in Tortosa, in the years 1413-14, another debate was held between the convert Jerónimo de Santa Fe and the Jewish philosopher José Albo who, more than seeking the truth, sought to theologically refute the Jews in order to convert them (Hans Küng, “Judaism”, 1991).

The myth of the desecration of the host by the Jews arose from the same Christian ritual, which symbolically translates the wine into blood and the wafer into the body of Christ. In the Middle Ages, there were many who saw blood stains in it, attributing to this fact a miraculous character when possibly; according to Reay Tannahill (“Food in History”, 1973), it was a phenomenon of putrefaction due to the action of a bacillus. The Jews would be repeatedly accused of trying to imitate this ceremony by puncturing the host so that blood would flow. In 1410, in Segovia, the Hebrews apparently conspired to outrage a consecrated host by burning it. Berceo (“Miracles of Our Lady”, c. 1246) describes the episode of a Jewish boy being baked by his own parents when he confessed to them that he had been hearing mass and communing with Christians. Through the intervention of Santa María, the Judezno was unharmed.

There are numerous stories, more or less historical, in which the Jews were involved. Around the year 1456, the Jews of Salamanca were accused of kidnapping, robbing and murdering the son of a merchant, although it was later shown that others were guilty (Joseph ha-Kohen, “The Valley of Crying”, 1895, 93). In Cuenca, the legend circulates of the love of a Christian knight, Fernando Sánchez de Jaraba, and a beautiful Hebrew woman, Isabel. Willing to marry, the girl adopted Christianity, arousing the jealousy of a Jewish suitor. The Hebrew community secretly gathered to judge her betrayal; the young Ella disappeared, word spreading that she had been crucified and buried. The Christians, inflamed by the rumor that the Jews sacrificed children and maidens during their rites, attacked the Jewish quarter, causing a massacre that has gone down in the annals of the city. A similar legend is collected by the Romantic Spanish poet Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer in “The Rose of Passion” (1862).

In Zaragoza, in September 1485, a recently appointed inquisitor, Don Pedro de Arbués, was stabbed to death in front of the chapel of the Holy Sacrament of the metropolitan church known as La Seo. The Court, meeting in the Aljafería palace, accused several Jewish converts of plotting against the installation of the Holy Office in the city and of having executed its representative. One of them was declared a “consummate and circumcised Jew”; He immediately had his hands amputated, which were nailed to the door of the Palace of the Provincial Council, and taken to the Market Square, where he was beheaded, torn to pieces, and his remains thrown into a dunghill.

As for the other conspirators, one fled the country and was burned in effigy; a second committed suicide by jumping from the prison tower, and a third died at the stake. After the edict of expulsion of the Jews, the main synagogue of Zaragoza was used as a pigsty. In view of his repeated miracles, Pedro de Arbués was canonized four centuries later.

In Toledo, another Jew, seeing that Christians were coming to kiss the feet of a Christ, sprayed them with poison. An old woman who came to fulfill his devotion observed with horror that the Christ removed one foot from the tree; the enraged Jew tore the Christ from the wall and hid it underground. The next day, the Christians found the burial site guided by a trail of blood and the flash of light. Shortly after, the Hebrew paid for the sacrilege with his life. The legend of the Christ of the Light (Martín Gamero, 1867) dates back to the times of the Visigoth king Atanagildo (year 555) and describes the discovery of an image of Christ atrociously beaten and buried by the Jews. The blood was collected in vials and preserved to work miracles of all kinds. In Agreda (Soria), during the Corpus Christi procession of 1527, the Virgin of Miracles herself betrayed a converted Jew for not keeping the festival. As the pedestal passed in front of her house, the image tilted to point out the sinner, whom the Inquisition took charge of. In Burgos, according to Felipe Torroba (Madrid, Sucursal de Rivadeneyra, 1957), Jews could not on Saturday, without receiving punishment for it, “sit on a mast, wall or place with their legs hanging, nor ride any animal of any kind, nor hang clothes outside the house at night”, being expressly prohibited, under penalty of life imprisonment, from renouncing Judaism to embrace Islam (we must not forget that for the Inquisition the Jews were Christians and apostasy was severely punished by submitting prisoners to hateful ordeals).

It should not be underestimated that the Jews played an important role in the governance of the different kingdoms. In 1391, Juan I of Aragon severely condemned the massacres of Huesca, because the Jews “are our royalties and treasure” (Baer, I, 686, in Américo Castro, “Spain in its history. Christians, Moors and Jews.” Losada: Buenos Aires, 1948). Although the count of Judaizers killed for one reason or another usually comes from the same authors, to cite some figures that seem exaggerated, 10,000 Israelites were put to the sword at the beginning of the 14th century by the so-called shepherds of the French Pyrenees and by the Navarrese themselves in the aljamas of Tudela, Pamplona, Estella, Viana, Nájera and Miranda de Ebro. In 1391, 4,000 were executed in Seville; in Valencia, according to Menéndez Pelayo (“Historia de los Heterodoxos Españoles” -HHE-, 1965), several thousand were freed from iron and fire by the eloquence of Saint Vicente Ferrer, who, at least apparently, was able to Christianize them. The pogroms of Córdoba and Barcelona in 1391 were especially violent (Ramírez d Arellano, 1901). Most of the Judaizers subjected to serious criminal trials were as lapsed as the Christian martyrs executed by the Romans or the barbarians, incapable of adopting a new doctrine or decidedly reluctant to renounce their faith. The events in Lisbon in April 1506 ended with the death of 2,000 Jews at the hands of mobs, as described by the Portuguese bishop Jerónimo Osorio in his work “De rebus Emmanuelis gestis” (1571) (V. Juan Ignacio Pulido Serrano, “Carolus . Tribute to Friedrich Edelmayer.” First Congress, 2016).

At the Third Lateran Council (1179) “the natives of Brabant, the Aragonese, Navarrese and Basques” were expressly condemned for not respecting Christian worship (Canon 27). Neither Jews nor Muslims could have Christians in their service. At the Fourth Council (1215), seven hundred years anticipating the measures taken in Nazi Germany, it was decreed that Jews wear a colored badge that identified them. In the processes of the future Inquisition, the convicts had to wear the sambenito, a yellow tunic with a red cross. Alfonso the Wise introduced the prohibition, reminiscent of the segregation of blacks and whites in the United States or South Africa until recently, on Christians and Jews bathing separately, at the same time restrictively regulating mixed marriages of Christians with Jews and Moors. , or of Moors with Jews. In 1411, San Vicente Ferrer obtained from the Council of Valladolid to prohibit the Jews from leaving his aljama.

On March 31, 1492, the Catholic Monarchs Isabel and Fernando signed an edict ordering all Jews to leave “our kingdoms” and not dare to return, so that “if any Jew were found in these domains” they would be condemned to death and his property confiscated. The measure had serious social and economic consequences throughout the country. 100,000 left their homes and spread across North Africa, Italy, Greece, Turkey and other parts of the Mediterranean, where they were able to preserve their trades, customs, beliefs and the Judeo-Spanish language, Ladino, made up of various Romance dialects. and Hebrew. Another 200,000 converted to Christianity to avoid expulsion and the loss of their possessions.

In 1515 Venetian leaders created the first ghetto to isolate the Jews; Forty years later the Jews of Rome were legally confined to their own neighborhood by order of the pope. The word ghetto (Spanish gueto), incorporated into many languages, comes from borghetto, small neighborhood in Italian. The ghetto, rather than preventing the social confluence of Jews and Christians, contributed to strengthening ties of solidarity, endogamy and the monopoly of certain professions among Jews, with the consequent effect on the country’s economy. At the beginning of the 17th century, the Jews of Prague were essentially doctors, goldsmiths, booksellers, tailors, shoemakers, tanners, leatherworkers, butchers and barbers, but over time the list of trades would be reduced to the lowest trades due to restrictions that the authorities of numerous countries imposed on them.

One of the darkest legends that have been created around the Jews is their ability to conspire against the Gentile or Christian state. Édouard Drumont, author of “La France juïve” (1886), made many people believe that they were more intelligent than they thought and that the moment was right for them to dominate the country and transform it into a Jewish state. The Dreyfus affair, which broke out in France at the end of the last century, was a representation of Drumont’s work in which an influential Jew, an army captain, accused of espionage, had tried to conspire against the state. The final outcome was that the French state, unable to come to terms with its own infamy, became a conspirator against Dreyfus.

In 1903, a monk named Sergi Nilus, at the request of Tsar Nicholas II, collected a series of apocryphal documents and put them together in a book “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” – which some unwary people continue to read (remember that Franco had had a copy on his nightstand). In it the conspiracy of the Jews to conquer the world was denounced. The alleged author declared in the introduction of the copy kept in the library of the British Museum that it was a copy of the original papers, stolen by a woman from a high official in the Grand Orient of France, and that they constituted “a strategic plan for the conquest of the world in order to place the universe under the yoke of Israel.” The papers turned out to be a crude forgery that anti-Semitic movements continue to blatantly use to alleviate their paranoia. 21st century society continues to harbor the specter of hatred of Jews.

Those who wish to expand their knowledge about the Hebrew people can consult online the very extensive Bibliotheca Sefarad or the publication of the Sefarad Association “Aki Yerushalayim – Revista Kulturala Djudeo-Espanyola”, with texts in Ladino.