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A p p e n d i x 5.
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(p. 430)
Letter of Rohling to the Court at Cleves.
To the Royal Criminal Court
at Cleves.
Your Honor!
The well-known Straßburg Professor, Dr. Nöldeke, along with the inclusion of my person
before your forum, has rendered an expert opinion concerning ritual-murder by the
Jews.
Conscience and honor force me to protest against this expert opinion. Professor Nöldeke terms
it frivolous, when over and over again it is repeated that Jews require the use of Christian
blood. He claims to be able to say "with tolerable certainty" that nothing about this is
contained in the Talmud; also, according to his opinion, nothing in the Sefer
halkutim and in the Zohar suggests it. Delitzsch, according to Herr
Nöldeke, is supposed to have most definitely disproved the blood-accusation and my old
friend Bickell to have declared it to be a hoax.
I find it strange that Professor Nöldeke charges those who think differently with
frivolity, while he himself (431) lays claim to only a
"tolerable" certainty for himself. As for Delitzsche, he, like Nöldeke himself
was refuted by the work by Victor concerning the Rohling/Bloch trial, which appeared
in two editions published by Fritsch in Leipzig in 1887, without a defense following from
those involved. As for Professor Bickell, he never stated that the
blood-accusation was a hoax, but on the contrary, he agreed with me that history fully
justifies these accusations, because it reports numerous murders which were forensically
established.
Eisenmenger also points to these facts, although rabbinical textual evidence and
documentary proofs were not available to him. Concerning some texts of this type Professor
Bickell was also of another opinion from my own, although he later withdrew an earlier
statement about the impossibility of my idea, and Professor Nöldeke would have been able to
know all of this from Victor's work, which was publicly available since 1887.
If the facts of history are not to be denied, it is well understood that despite the
expurgation of certain rabbinical works, indeed there are texts still existing here
and there, which hint at the subject, and contain allusions which, in spite of every
editorial precaution, speak very plainly in the light of historical events. But as
superfluous as texts of that sort are in the face of the historical records, and
therefore, if one desires, can be left to the academic exercises of the philologists, I
for my part find what others always say, that the Talmud even in expurgated
editions suggests the phenomenon, while the Sefer halkutim and Zohar
speak more definably, as is explained in my work Polemik und Menschenopfer des
Rabbinismus [Polemics and Human Sacrifice of the Rabbinate] (Paderborn, pub.
Schröder, 1883). This explanation is still completely convincing to me today, and if I
do not respond to private publications of the newspapers and brochures, like Strack's
Blutaberglaube [Blood-Superstition], this is because the secular
authority, to which I am subject, desires the end of the Jewish
controversy.
But after my sacred conviction was stigmatized before the Court as a frivolity, I held
it to be my duty to make known to you this, which stands before you: in the face of death and
of my eternal Judge, I cannot speak otherwise and must state:
that the blood-accusation is the truth!
With great respect
signed, Canon Doctor of Theology and Philosophy, A. Rohling, Professor of Hebrew Antiquities at the
Royal and Imperial German University in Prague.
Prague, 10 July 1892.
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