Tiszaeszlár Affair

The Tiszaeszlár Affair was a blood libel which led to a trial that set off anti-semitic agitation in Austria-Hungary in 1882 and 1883. After the disappearance of a local girl, Eszter Solymosi, Jews were accused of ritually murdering and beheading her. After her body was found some time later in a river, she having apparently drowned, it was claimed that the body was not that of Eszter, but had been dressed in her clothes. A lengthy trial followed, eventually resulting in the acquittal of all the accused.

On April 1, 1882, Eszter Solymosi, a 14-year-old Christian peasant girl who was a servant in the home of András Huri in Tiszaeszlár, a Hungarian village situated on the Tisza river, was sent on an errand from which she did not return. After a fruitless search, a rumor was circulated that the girl had become a victim of Jewish religious fanaticism. Hungarian agitators, whose leaders, Géza Ónody, representative of Tiszaeszlár in the Hungarian Parliament, and Győző Istóczy, MP, proposed the expulsion of the Jews in the House of Deputies, excited the public against the local Jews, resulting in a number of violent acts and pogroms. They spread the charge that the Jews killed the girl in order to use her blood at the approaching Passover (April 4). On May 4 her mother accused the Jews before the local judge of having murdered her daughter, and urged him to make an investigation.

On May 19 the county court of Nyíregyháza sent the notary József Bary to act as examining judge at Tiszaeszlár. After having placed the suspected Jews under police surveillance, Bary met the five-year-old son of the synagogue sexton József Scharf, Samuel, to begin an inquiry. Earlier, by means of monetary presents and pieces of sugar, some women and girls got Samuel to say that József Scharf called Eszter into his house, and the slaughterer ("shoḥeṭ") cut off her head. In Bary's interview, the boy stated that in the presence of his father and other men the slaughterer had made an incision in the girl's neck, and he and his brother Móric had received the blood in a plate. The father and Móric (who was nearly 14 years old) and the other suspected persons denied any knowledge of the disappearance of the girl and of her conjectured murder. On May 19 Scharf and his wife were arrested; Móric repeated his statement and said in addition he had not known anything about the missing girl, not even from hearsay. On the evening of that day Móric was given to Recsky, the commissar of safety, who took him to his country house in Tiszanagyfalu, where the court clerk, Péczely, received orders to watch over the boy's safety. Péczely, a large man who had served twelve years in jail for murder, apparently connived with Recsky to make Móric the instrument of a classic blood accusation.

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