Böcker av Magda Teter

Stories from Hostile Archives: Reclaiming Interrupted Jewish Lives explores anti-Jewish libels and their long-term legacies in Trent, northern Italy, and Sandomierz in eastern Poland. In both these cities, extensive archives survive, detailing the persecution, and neither town currently has a Jewish population. The author investigates the means by which the Jewish past can be recovered from hostile archives, specifically by reading against the grain and the imprint these libels left in each town.

Drawing on sources in eight countries and ten languages, Magda Teter tells the history of the antisemitic blood libel myth, whose long shadow extends from premodern monastic chronicles to Facebook. The vocabulary and images that crystallized and spread with the invention of the printing press are still with us, as are their pernicious consequences.

Criminal law became a key tool in the effort to legitimize Church authority in post-Reformation Poland. Recounting dramatic stories of torture, trial, and punishment involving Christians and Jews, this is the first book to consider the sacrilege accusations of the early modern period within the broader context of politics and common crime.