The accusation of ritual murder levelled against the Jews of Tisza-Eszlár was an ancient antisemitic calumny, destitute of any foundation in the Jewish faith as in the material facts of the case. It nevertheless assumed the formidable momentum of a judicial rumour following the disappearance of Ester Solymosi, a Christian servant girl of fourteen or fifteen years, in the spring of 1882. In August 1883, the defendants were acquitted. Between those two dates, a riparian village was transformed into a theatre of inquest, trial, and persecution.
Ester was employed as a maidservant in the household of Frau Huri. On 1 April, her mistress sent her to purchase paint in another quarter of the village. Witnesses observed her at the shop of Joseph Kohlmayer; her sister encountered her upon her return journey. Thereafter, she vanished. Her mother searched for her, reported her absence to the authorities, and waited. The trial record relates that Jewish neighbours offered consolation, recalling that a child who had disappeared in a neighbouring hamlet had returned unharmed. Nothing, at this juncture, permitted any conclusion as to what had befallen Ester.
This uncertainty was soon submerged beneath a ready-made narrative: that Jews had enticed the maiden into the synagogue and slain her in a rite. The rumour coursed throughout the land. The chronicle of 1884 records acts of violence committed against Jews, pillaged dwellings, Christian domestics abandoning their Jewish masters, and tumultuous debates in the Diet. On 19 May 1882, the examining magistrate, Bary, arrived in Tisza-Eszlár. Jewish inhabitants were placed under surveillance and subsequently arrested. A collective suspicion had usurped the questions which the inquest was bound to resolve: where was Ester, was she dead, and who possessed knowledge of her fate?
The prosecution rested chiefly upon Moritz Scharf, the adolescent son of the synagogue beadle. In his initial examination, he had professed complete ignorance. On 21 May, having been committed into the custody of the clerk Peczely and Commissioner Recsky, he related that Ester had entered his home, that a mendicant had conducted her into the synagogue, and that several men had slain her there. He claimed to have witnessed the scene through the keyhole. This account underwent successive alterations in the course of subsequent interrogations: which accused were present, who had restrained the girl, what Moritz had seen, and what he merely conjectured. His deposition became the linchpin of the indictment, yet no material evidence existed connecting any murder to the synagogue.
The manner in which this statement had been elicited formed one of the principal debates of the trial. Peczely informed the court that he had told Moritz that by speaking he might “deliver” his father from the weight of guilt. Recsky maintained that no one had threatened the lad, while admitting it had been said he would be sent to the prison at Nyíregyháza if he held his peace. A maidservant and a coachman in Recsky’s service reported pressing interrogations, ears pulled, and blows to the face; Recsky denied these assertions. Detective Barcza testified that Moritz had privately confided to him that he had seen nothing and had incriminated the others under instruction; the warden Henter disputed this phrasing. The accounts were diametrically opposed, yet the youth’s complete dependence upon the authorities and the absence of any regular, recorded interrogation rendered it impossible to treat his initial narrative as free and steadfast speech.
At the trial, Moritz repeated his accusations before the very men he incriminated. His father, Joseph Scharf, cried aloud that they were false; other defendants called out to him, and the tribunal was obliged to restore order. Counsel for the defence inquired whether the boy had been threatened or coached. His replies wavered upon crucial particulars, such as the position of the man alleged to have held Ester. He could not explain why he had remained peering through the keyhole during a scene he described as protracted, nor how he had endured to keep silent. Subsequently, the presiding judge announced that the court would not administer the oath to him: his tender years, his avowed hatred for his father and his community, inspired grave doubts as to his reliability. While this decision did not in itself establish what had occurred, it diminished the weight of the prosecution’s cardinal piece of evidence.
A discovery in the waters of the Tisza appeared at first to revive the proceedings. On 18 June, the corpse of a woman was retrieved, clad in the garments worn by Ester on the day of her disappearance, holding a packet of paint in one hand. Her mother recognised the apparel, yet insisted the body was not that of her daughter. The local physicians determined that the deceased was an adult, perhaps upwards of twenty years of age, and observed no marks of violence. In December, the defence obtained leave from the public prosecutor to exhume the remains; the court took no part in this measure and subsequently pronounced it irregular, excluding the evidence derived therefrom. One must distinguish this initial expert opinion, dismissed for procedural defect, from the depositions heard at the trial: three professors from Budapest censured the local post-mortem as deficient and deemed it probable that the body was indeed Ester’s, without establishing her identity with certainty. The Crown prosecutor relied upon their findings to argue that no homicide had taken place; the tribunal acquitted the defendants, without definitively resolving the identity of the corpse.
The prosecution also pursued an alleged “traffic in corpses,” intended to demonstrate that the accused had substituted another dead woman for Ester to mislead the public. Several raftsmen, among them Jankel Smilovics and David Hershko, had initially confessed to having transported a body and dressed it in the missing girl’s clothes. At trial, they recanted. Smilovics declared he had fabricated details under the duress of the preliminary examination. Hershko swore he had been beaten, bound, and forced to drink water before having answers dictated to him in a tongue he did not understand. The testimony of the pandour Kasimir corroborated at least part of these allegations: he stated he had beaten the raftsman Mathej upon the soles of his feet until he spoke. The officials denied all ill-treatment, and the confessions remained irreconcilable; the dossier did not permit these early statements to be converted into established facts.
The defence likewise demonstrated how the search for “proof” had been contaminated by rumour. Anonymous denunciations claimed that severed limbs lay in a cellar, that a child was immured within a synagogue, or that other Jewish communities harboured corpses. The investigators pursued several of these leads to no avail. A forged document describing a recipe for blood was placed in the record and taken seriously by the authorities. Meanwhile, Jews were arrested or placed under watch simply because they could furnish no alibi. Counsel Eötvös contended that the preliminary inquiry had pursued an antecedent hypothesis rather than examining the facts capable of refuting it.
The hearings lasted from 19 June to 3 August 1883. Witnesses contradicted one another regarding the cries allegedly heard near the synagogue and Ester’s movements. Several had seen her at the shop and upon her return path; no reliable testimony placed her within the temple after those purchases. The chronicler presents the inspection of the keyhole as inconclusive; this account is therefore insufficient to corroborate what Moritz claimed to have seen through it. The case could not be resolved by merely choosing between a youthful accuser and denying adults. It was necessary to weigh shifting narratives, disputed confessions, a deficient autopsy, and an indictment forged by religious hatred.
The public prosecutor, Szeiffert, ultimately moved himself for the acquittal of all the accused. He declared that the charge of ritual murder rested upon nothing, and that Ester was probably the woman recovered from the river: if such were the case, there was no murder to be judged. The advocate representing Ester’s mother persisted in sustaining the slander and demanding a conviction; his pleading laid bare the virulent antisemitism surrounding the proceedings. On 3 August, the tribunal acquitted all the defendants, and the superior jurisdictions subsequently confirmed the verdict.
The acquittal brought an end to the judicial process, but not to the violence. Riots and assaults against Jews erupted in several counties and in Budapest; the former defendants required protection. Moritz was returned to the custody of his family, while the chronicler professed ignorance as to what became of him. Of Ester’s ultimate fate, the trial yielded no entirely certain answer. Yet it established that which the prosecution had refused to concede: an antisemitic rumour possesses no evidentiary worth, and no faith may be held culpable for an imagined crime.