On the ninth of December 1754, between the hours of ten and eleven at night, a widow of Houssen declared that she and her maidservant had suffered grievous violence, and that nearly three thousand livres in silver, bullion, and diverse effects had been carried off. Within hours, three Jewish merchants were denounced: Hirtzel Lévy, Menehek Lévy, and Moïse Lang. By the end of that month, one of their number lay dead upon the wheel at Colmar. Nine months later, a superior court would pronounce the accusation expunged, restoring the two surviving men to their liberty.
The account of these events published by J.-B.-J. Champagnac in 1833 bore an unvarnished title: “Rehabilitation of a Jew Dead Innocent upon the Wheel.” He took up his pen more than seventy years after the tragedy, in a work that omits, for this chapter, the archival pressmarks of the interrogatories or the roll of witnesses upon whom he leaned. It is thus necessary to sever the judicial stages he records from the dramatic color and moralizing judgments in which he clothes them. A biographical notice from the Federation of Historical and Archaeological Societies of Alsace confirms the broad outlines: Hirtzel Lévy, a native of Wettolsheim, stood accused with Menkeh Lévy and Moïse Lang; an alibi placed him elsewhere; the proceedings were annulled, and the executed man’s memory was rehabilitated.
The formal information concerned acts of violence committed against the provost’s widow and her maidservant, together with a burglary. In Champagnac’s version, an initial deposition named all three men, while the maid maintained she had recognized none save Hirtzel. A second official return, he continues, reduced the accusation to mere presumption: the complainant declared she merely believed these men to be the thieves. Robert Weyl, in the Alsatian notice, likewise summarizes a retraction by the widow following her initial accusation. These formulations are not interchangeable. A vacillation in a complaint does not, in itself, constitute proof of innocence; yet it renders all the more imperative the examination of the exculpatory facts the prisoners sought to tender.
Hirtzel Lévy was not, according to the ancient narrative, within the house at Houssen when the assault occurred. He had departed his hearth on December 8 to attend the obsequies following a death in a village where his niece resided. Champagnac transcribes the place-name as “Scireutz”; Robert Weyl’s notice identifies it as Sierentz. The distance was ample enough to render his alibi verifiable, and the accused prayed to produce his witnesses. According to the Alsatian Federation, the seigneur of Sierentz himself attested to his presence in the village. The discrepancy of toponymy across the examined sources leaves the essential truth unshaken: the alibi was formally tendered prior to sentence, subsequently confirmed by witnesses, yet proved powerless to avert the scaffold.
Champagnac assigns the sentence of the bailiff of Ribeaupierre to the twenty-third of December 1754: the three accused, he writes, were condemned to the wheel, preceded by the question ordinary and extraordinary to extort the names of their confederates. The chronicler adds that the bailiff lodged and took his meat at the house of the complainant’s son throughout the investigation, though he prefaces the claim with the qualification “it is said.” Lacking recourse to the original record of trial, it would be reckless to adopt this rumor as demonstrated fact. The decisive recorded circumstance remains that the defense lodged an appeal. The Sovereign Council of Alsace, sitting at Colmar, confirmed Hirtzel’s capital sentence without admitting his alibi into evidence; it nonetheless stayed the judgment of the two other prisoners pending Hirtzel’s examination under torture. Their fate, at this juncture, was no longer bound to his.
According to Champagnac, an ordeal was yet to precede the disposal of the other two captives: Hirtzel was to be put to the question. He describes a device wherein an iron fillet compressed the temples, and asserts that the executioner deliberately diminished the circumference of the wheel so the condemned man could find no resting place for his head. He attributes this refinement of cruelty to a hatred of the Jews. These particulars are harrowing, yet the 1833 text provides no citations permitting their independent verification. One may record what the author alleges without elevating his prose into an official record. What he places in the foreground is the sufferer’s unyielding silence: Hirtzel, he writes, uttered not a single syllable that might awaken suspicion, protesting his innocence until his final breath.
Champagnac’s chapter does not explicitly name the day of the execution. The study by Émilie Leromain, examining the case against the Alsatian criminal archives, confirms that Hirtzel was broken on the wheel in December 1754. Following his death, writes Champagnac, the Council ordered Menehek Lévy and Moïse Lang put to the question; a ministerial rescript stayed the execution of that decree. The King subsequently commanded the transfer of the docket to Metz. The two men languished in their cells, alongside a certain Gresmard, who is mentioned as remaining detained despite having obtained an acquittal in his own cause. A notice in the Departmental Archives of Haut-Rhin attests to a lawsuit in 1757 between Madeleine Kopp and Catherine Strauman on the one hand, and Hirtzel’s heirs and the two survivors on the other, concerning damages claimed in the wake of the judicial error. The inventory specifies neither who entered the suit nor against whom the claims were laid. The affair had outgrown the destiny of a single man: the courts were now forced to consider what portion of such an atrocity might yet be repaired.
Leromain’s scholarship also draws attention to the manner in which the administrative records preserved the case. A general roll of crimes in Alsace for the years 1753–1755 records the matter under the rubric of capital convictions, yet completely fails to reflect the subsequent exoneration. The archival records demonstrate that while all three men were initially doomed by the decree, only one suffered death; procedural delays and the removal to Metz preserved the other two. The discrepancy between an administrative ledger and the ultimate course of justice serves as a sober reminder of why a capital cause can never be comprehended by the first line of a register.
The plea for revision was carried to the foot of the throne. The notice of the Alsatian Federation names Aaron Mayer of Mutzig and Lehmann Netter of Rosheim among the Jewish elders who journeyed to Paris, importuned the ministers, and sought a royal audience; other notables soon joined their train. Champagnac summarizes this intervention through the King’s orders: the proceedings were to be evoked from the Sovereign Council of Alsace and remitted to the Parlement of Metz. He depicts this royal decree as the fruit of the documentary proofs and intercessions made on the prisoners’ behalf. He does not, however, reproduce the letters patent in full; one must not attribute to him more than he actually set down.
On July 26, 1755, the Parlement of Metz formally admitted Hirtzel’s heirs and the two surviving prisoners as appellants, authorized the proof of their exculpatory facts, and ordered an entirely new instruction. This was not yet the decree of deliverance. The proofs had to be heard and the allegations weighed anew in a fresh inquest. Champagnac asserts that this supplementary investigation established the prisoners’ innocence beyond all doubt. The Alsatian historical notice corroborates the final outcome: on September 24, the Parlement declared the bailiff’s sentence null and ill-judged, quashed the conviction, and decreed the liberation of the survivors.
To Hirtzel, the decree could not restore life. Champagnac records that his memory was cleared and his mortal remains delivered unto his children, that they might lay him to rest according to the rites of the Jewish faith. The notice from the Departmental Archives confirms that in 1757 the aforementioned parties were embroiled in litigation regarding the indemnities demanded for this miscarriage of justice; the archival summary alone permits neither the identification of the claimant nor the designation of the parties sued. The decree of 1755 opened the door to temporal redress, yet grief could not be transformed into restitution. It ensured, at the least, that the infamy of the scaffold should no longer stain the name of the dead man, nor burden the lives of his children.
The title chosen by Champagnac thus unites a torture, a judicial blindness, and a belated reparation. He denounces the headlong haste of the magistrates, opening his chapter with the axiom that it is far better to acquit a hundred guilty souls than to condemn one innocent man. That moral belongs to the nineteenth-century writer; the historian must also attend to the precise stages he records: an unsteady accusation, an alibi pleaded and spurned, a capital sentence upheld, and finally a revision that overthrows the judgment and opens the prison gates for the living. In the rolls of the court, this correction took the form of a decree. For Hirtzel’s kindred, it arrived only after the executioner had done his work. The Parlement could restore his good name; it could never unmake that day at Colmar.