This is the day in the Calendar for recounting stories of non-specified Jews and “their inveterate hatred of the Christian name” that led them to slaughter innocent babies and tender youths, re-enacting on those bodies, in a spirit of sadistic mockery, the crucifixion of Jesus. Upon reading Butler’s accounts, I had to look up that word, “inveterate.” Merriam-Webster goes for “firmly established by long persistence,” whereas the Cambridge Dictionary defines “inveterate” as “done as a habit and not likely to change.” And, like the Gospel of John, Butler’s accounts speak in a global, undifferentiated way of “the Jews”–as a bloc, as inveterate, as haters, as sadists, and as those seeking to not only reject the Christian gospel but to give full vent to a murderous hatred that began with Jesus and that knows no bounds.

Butler passes on a story of an infant named Simon who was kidnapped by “the Jews” of Trento (in Italy) while his parents were at Christian Holy Week worship (the year, 1472). Simon was two years old, and the “principal Jews” took the child into a room immediately adjoining their synagogue and waited until midnight whereupon they “began their cruel butchery of this innocent victim.” This included gagging the child as they sliced open his body, gathering his blood in a basin; placing the child in the classic crucifixion position of arms outstretched and legs together, held upright so that they could pierce his sides with awls; and causing the child to eventually bleed out. The cruelty of “the Jews” did not stop there–they then encircled the butchered baby and sang this song:

In the same manner did we treat Jesus the God of the Christians: thus may our enemies be confounded forever.

Butler then reports that the efforts of these Jews to hide their deeds were confounded by God, they were all tortured and subsequently (and rightfully!) put to death, their synagogue was destroyed, and a Christian church was built upon its ruins (this being Divine Justice). Oh, by the way: the child was actually found in a river and not at the synagogue.

This is a horrific example of the kinds of stories used to inflame Christians against Jews and give free rein to mob violence, to official pogroms and, last century, to the Holocaust. Let’s work backwards with Butler’s tale (of what others had been saying for the centuries preceding his own writing): this is a story that was used to explain the torture and murder of Jews and the destruction of their synagogue in Trento. Therefore, for this to be in any way justifiable, then ALL Jews had to deserve it, and they must have done something abjectly horrific.

I presume that there may well have been a two-year-old child who was tortured and killed in a vicious and bloody fashion, even that it might have occurred during the times of Passover and Holy Week. And the child’s body quite possibly was discovered in the Adige River.

Was a Jew responsible? Who was it to give this seeming eye- and ear-witness account of what happened? There were no trials, no confessions, no contemporaneous testimonies. And what Jews would sing a song in which they (1) identified Jesus as a God of anyone, let alone (2) celebrated the label plastered upon them as “Jesus killers” (when even the New Testament speaks of the execution being carried out under Roman orders and by Romans)?

NO. This story is a like so many of the lies used to target minorities and incite violence against them, and/or to justify such violence after the fact. Undifferentiated Mexicans in the United States are rapists and criminals. All Muslims are liklely terrorists.

“Let them call you racists. Let them call you xenophobes. Let them call you nativists. Wear it as a badge of honor”–Steve Bannon, 2018.