OK--First I think you have to know the history from which I draw when reading "The Prioress' Tale".
Thus, when the Jews first began to be accused of being bloodthirsty,
this was linked only to their desire to damage and weaken Christian
society, which, on the contrary, was strengthened by the alleged martyrdom of the
young victims, who soon after their death began to have miracles attributed to
them. The sacrificed children, although apparently despised and tormented by
their executioners, thus shared the same redemptive destiny of Christ.
On one side, therefore, there was the alleged wickedness of the Jews; while on
the other the innocence and purity that diffused from the children’s bodies,
affecting the whole of Christendom, was emphasised. We have to see how, from
these premises, ideas about the crime developed, and how the portrayal of Jews as
murderously greedy people was motivated, not only as a result of their assumed
moral turpitude, but also by their supposed peculiar physiological and religious
necessities.
It was on the continent in the same century in which the Ebstorf map was
drawn, that the blood libel legend made its first vague appearance in an
accusation of ritual murder of Christians by Jews. In 1235, thirty-four Jews were
executed by the crusaders at Fulda, having been accused of killing the five sons of
a miller, whose blood they then poured into sacks sealed with wax, which they
burned as part of a magical rite (Strack 1909, 178 and 277; Trachtenberg 1983, 132;
Introvigne 2004, 21–8).We do not know anything regarding the nature of the rite,
but we can try to interpret the action, inferring that the drying up, the
consummation of the blood by fire, symbolised both destruction and
purification—an attempt to annihilate the Christian life enclosed in the fluid
without being tainted by it. As Trachtenberg has emphasised, many of the earlier
accusations against Jews were only vaguely supported and the ritual use of dead
children was not specified as something Jews engaged in, although there was
mention of the “abstraction of the blood and other parts of the body,” and
reference to the head of a Bernese boy, Rudolph, said to have been severed by Jews
in 1294 (Strack 1909 186–8; Trachtenberg 1983: 126; 135–7). It is probable that the
blood libel legend, as we understand it, began when the idea of ritual murder
became entwined with the crime of host desecration, which was first attributed to
the Jews in Belitz, a German town close to Berlin, where in 1243, all the Jews of the
community were burned at the stake. The host was believed to have been stolen
either for magical purposes or to be ritually mutilated so that it would bleed
copiously. In the fourteenth century, when the notion that Christian blood was
required by Jews for mock crucifixions during the celebration of Passover, came to
the fore, the picture was complete, the boundary had been crossed. Jews were
believed to be shedding, stealing and finally employing the substance of life to
empower themselves (Trachtenberg 1983, 114 and 134–5) (Matteoni)
That quoted, I guess it's time for my personal thoughts.
I am probably numbed out to certain forms of violence to children based on my personal history. I tend not to react as much. I do agree that the search of the mother was incredibly moving. I'm so glad people pointed it out because I totally missed it--perhaps because I had numbed out to the violence. My two most moving lines are:
"This povre widwe awaiteth al that night/After hir litel child, but he cam noght" (586-587). and
"She goth, as she were half out of hir minde" (594).
I've felt that feeling of fear, of being half out of my mind, about my own son.
I think the idea of the boy naively singing the song in the Jewish quarter was actually designed to make the Jews look bad. It assumes that they would not be forgiving towards a child. "They will kill you if you even sing a song, they are bad people." Maybe the moral is that when people use language no one understands (I don't know if the Jews spoke Latin but the boy didn't understand what he was singing), when communication is impossible, death follows.
I think I have more sympathy for Virginia because I have an easier time picturing a father killing a daughter to save her from rape than picturing Jews sacrificing a boy for singing a song. And we get to see things from the father's point of view. We never get to see the Jews as people, just as the other.
WORKS CITED
Matteoni, Francesca. "The Jew, the Blood and the Body in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe."
Folklore 119.2 (2008): 182-200. Print.
