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The speaker revisits the notion of Jewish involvement in human sacrifice, challenging the common assumption that the Abraham-and-Isaac episode ended all such practices for Jews. The argument presented is that evidence suggests human sacrifice was sometimes practiced by Jews in ancient and medieval times, including children burned in pits called toffet, with drums used to muffle cries, particularly among Jews in Carthage around three hundred years before Christ who worshipped Baal. The speaker notes that similar reports persist in various periods and places, including assertions that during a battle in Syracuse nearly five hundred children were thrown into a burning toffet as an offering to Baal, and that children were placed in the arms of a bronze bull with a furnace below and then burned.
The term holocaust is invoked as describing the act, with the speaker claiming that, in older dictionaries, holocaust referred to the burning of children as sacrifice to deities, though modern usage has shifted. Ancient historians such as Apion, Democritus, and Poseidonius are cited as describing Jewish ritual murder. Appian allegedly reported in 168 BCE that an intended victim, an adult, was found at a Jewish temple and that a ritual was enacted annually involving kidnapping a Greek foreigner, slaying him, consuming his flesh, and swearing hostility against the Greeks, with remains cast into a pit. Flavius Josephus is contrasted with Appian; Thackeray’s translation of Josephus recounts a Greek man abducted and brought to the temple, who explains a “one unutterable law of the Jews” involving kidnapping, ritual slaughter, and blood use.
The account claims numerous later authorities described ritual murder of Christians during Purim, including Socrates Scholasticus and Baronius. It mentions a Gentile child crucified or slain by Jews in various chronicles (Imistar, Kiev, Treviso, Magdeburg, and England), with specific cases: a boy named William in England (documented by Thomas of Monmouth), whose blood supposedly produced miraculous effects; the boy’s murder was cited as a crusading cause against Jewish communities, culminating in William’s canonization as a saint. The speaker cites Thomas’s Latin account, later translated, of abduction, torture, and the bribes given to sheriffs, and claims William’s case helped alert English parents.
The narrative continues with the notion that a converted Jew, Theobald of Cambridge, confessed that Jews took blood annually from Christians to obtain freedom and return to Palestine, with lots drawn to determine the blood source. Other cases cited include a December incident in Kissingen, Bavaria; Hugh in London; Isaac de Pouley in Oxford; Trent in 1475 (Simon), where children were punctured with marks, circumcision mentioned, and a saintly martyrdom recorded by Beatus Andreas. Luther’s remarks on “the Jews and their lies” are cited, noting accusations of poisoning wells and mutilation.
Additional episodes include Christopher in 1492 Spain and Isabella I’s edict expelling Jews (with later reconsideration in 1967), Prague in 1502, Pona in Lithuania 1574, Lublin and Kutnia in 1598, and broader counts by Montague Summers and others of hundreds of alleged historic ritual murders and the use of blood for magical purposes. The speaker ties these anecdotes to a pattern of medieval and early modern allegations of ritual murder against Jews, asserted across multiple cities and centuries.