It was the Easter season, 1899. A nineteen-year-old Christian girl was found murdered outside the little Czech town of Polna, her corpse, it was said, suspiciously drained of blood. The Jews had done it, people surmised, just as they had in Tisza-Eszlar, Hungary, seven years before. The trial of a local Jew named Leopold Hilsner was a sensation that filled newspapers and dominated conversation. “All pretexts are to no avail,” declared Dr. Karel Baxa, future mayor of Prague, as he appealed to the most primitive anti-Semitism with the assertion that a blood sacrifice had occurred. “This motive for murder really existed. The world has been made aware of the fact that there are people who try to kill their neighbors in order to get hold of their blood. That is ghastly and terrible.” Hilsner was convicted and sentenced to hang. It fell to Tomáš G. Masaryk, founder and first president of Czechoslovakia, to plead for justice and reason. “People [like Dr. Baxa] who pretend to save the Czech nation actually poison it with base, incongruent lies and ignorance,” Masaryk wrote. “Shame!”
Source:
Farquhar, Michael. “The Deadliest Lies Ever Told.” A Treasury of Deception: Liars, Misleaders, Hoodwinkers, and the Extraordinary True Stories of History's Greatest Hoaxes, Fakes and Frauds. Penguin, 2005. 176. Print.
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