Brussels massacre

The Brussels massacre was an anti-Semitic episode in Brussels in 1370 in connection with an alleged host desecration at the Brussels synagogue. A number of Jews, variously given as six or about twenty, were executed or otherwise killed, while the rest of the small community was banished. The event was commemorated by local Christians as the Sacrament of Miracle, as it was said that the desecrated hosts stabbed by a Jew had miraculously shed blood and been otherwise unharmed. The cult of the putative miracle survived until after the Second World War.

Black Death Jewish persecutions had previously destroyed Brussels' community in 1350. Host desecration was a common anti-Semitic canard in medieval Europe, and the wafers the Jews were supposed to have tried to profane were often said to have been miraculously spared from harm. In 1369, two priests in Brussels were arrested for usury and turned over to the ecclesiastical tribunal of the Church of Saints Michael and Gudula (now the cathedral) for investigation: it transpired that they had attempted to circumvent usury prohibitions by lending money to a Jew named Mesterman who in turn lent it out at interest. The clerical usury scandal in Brussels was the immediate context of the accusations of host desecration. According to Premonstratensian historian Placide Lefèvre, contemporary treasury records indicate that there were eight Jewish households in Brussels and two in Leuven.

The version of the allegations attested from 1403 was that a rich Jew from Enghien wanted to obtain some consecrated hosts to profane, and bribed a male Jewish convert to Christianity from Louvain to steal some. Shortly thereafter, the Enghien merchant was murdered. His widow passed the stolen hosts to the Jews of Brussels, where in the synagogue on Good Friday 1370 some tried to stab the wafers with their daggers, causing blood to pour forth. A female Jewish convert to Christianity was paid to take the hosts to Cologne's Jews, but remorsefully told the story to the parson of Notre-Dame de la Chapelle in Brussels, who took possession of the hosts. The Duke of Brabant, on the woman's testimony, ordered the stabbers burnt at the stake and the remaining Jews banished, with their property confiscated.

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