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A popular Marian tale, which adumbrated the later host desecration stories, had circulated since at least the sixth century. The tale opens with a Jewish boy receiving the Eucharist. When his father learns that his son has partaken, he flies into a rage and, Nebuchadnezzar-like, throws the son into an oven. Mary swoops into the oven to shield the boy from the oven's flames. This Marian miracle converts the son and his mother to Christianity, and angry Christians push the stiff-necked father into the oven to burn.
We find "the first complete telling of the accusation story" in Paris in 1290 (though, Rubin is quick to point out, that telling "could have occurred in any number of German towns, and indeed soon did"). A Jew coerced a poor Christian woman— either a debtor or a servant—into bringing him Easter communion. Desiring to know "whether the insane things which Christians prattle about this are true," the Jew set about hacking the host with a knife. The host, of course, stayed in one piece, bleeding. The Jew drove nails through the host, tried to burn it, and tossed it into a pot of boiling water. The host withstood the nails and fire, and its blood turned the water red. The host then morphed into a crucifix that floated above the pot. The Jewish mother and children were moved by the Eucharistic miracles, but the Jewish man remained obdurate. Ultimately, the wife and children converted, the man was burned, his house was confiscated and sold, and a chapel was built in its place.
After Paris, the host desecration narrative spread throughout Europe. Violence was the host desecration narrative's companion. One example, drawn from late fourteenth-century Brussels, will suffice. A number of Jews lived in Brabant. An accusation of host desecration was made against Jonathan of Enghein, a wealthy Jewish financier. According to the tale that was told, Jonathan asked a Jewish convert, John of Louvain, to procure hosts from a nearby chapel. The convert did so, delivering sixteen Eucharistic wafers. Jonathan and some other Jews took the wafers to the synagogue and pierced them with knives. Two weeks later, after a band of men killed Jonathan as he strolled in his garden, Jonathan's wife decided to get rid of the wafers. She asked another convert, Katherine, to take the hosts to Cologne. Katherine agreed, but instead delivered them to the local priest. Eventually, the Duke and Duchess of Brabant learned of the happenings. They interrogated Katherine and ordered that all the Jews from Brussels and Louvain should be put in prison. On Ascension Day, the Jews were marched through the streets of Brussels and executed in front of the chapel from which John of Louvain had stolen the hosts.
The host desecration narrative made possible the torture of Jews, for it made Jews culpable. It transformed Christian torture of Jews from an outlandish lashing out against a powerless people to a reasonable response to the seemingly powerful Jews who steal the host and try to destroy it—an act that, of course, echoes Jews' destroying the body of Christ in the deicide.
The holocaust casts a long shadow over the historiography of medieval Jewry, with scholars being quick to read the Middle Ages through Holocaust lenses. Too many historians have been interested in medieval Judaism only insofar as it sheds light on Auschwitz, concluding, like Norman Cohn in Warrant for Genocide, that at the heart of Shoah "lies the belief that the Jews—all Jews everywhere—form a conspiratorial body set on ruining and then dominating the rest of mankind. And this belief is simply a modernized, secularized version of the popular medieval view."
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