Christians were led to believe that Jews were obsessed with stealing communion wafers to mutilate--http://www.askwhy.co.uk/christianheresy/0818Inquisition.php

The Treatment of Jews

Before the witches, the Jews were Christianity’s agents of Satan. The equal civil rights, which Caracalla had conferred on all free people of the empire, Constantine ended for Jews. Christianity had barely been accepted by Constantine before the state became the secular arm of the church and took action against Jews, heretics and pagans. As early as 315 AD, Constantine made conversion from Christianity to Judaism a legal offence, and made death the punishment for Jews who circumcised their Christian slaves. Christians started burning down synagogues. An early case was at Callicnicul on the Euphrates in 338 AD. Nor did the leaders of the Church at the time seek to stop it. S Jerome (340-420) could not find any disgusting phrase bad enough to describe a synagogue. Even S John Chrysostom (350-407) allowed himself to be carried away at Antioch, where he preached eight sermons in 387 AD inflaming the people against Jews.
The punitive laws were re-enacted and made more severe by Constantius, who made death the punishment for marriage between Jews and Christians. Theodosius I and Honorius put a check upon the militant zeal of the Church by prohibiting the destruction of synagogues and maintaining the old privilege that a Jew was not to be summoned before a court of justice on a sabbath. But Honorius banned them from civil and military service, leaving for their employment only the law and the decurionate—municipal posts which were privilegium odiosum because they entailed such a heavy financial burden—and they were no longer free to try cases by their own law. Cases between Jews and Christians were to be tried by Christian judges only. Theodosius II prohibited them from building new synagogues, and again enforced their ineligibility for state employment. Justinian was most hostile of all, but he was also severe against Pagans and Samaritans. He harassed the Jews by obliging them to observe Easter on the same day as the Christians.
Jews were not so harrassed in the barbarian Germanic states which arose on the ruins of the western Roman empire, except where the Catholic Church dominated as among the Spanish Visigoths, where they were cruelly oppressed. The Arian Christian Ostrogoths did not harm them, and nor did the Franks. Indeed, the Carolingians ignored the complaints of the bishops and helped Frankish Jews, allowing them to own land, but they showed no eagerness for it, leaving agriculture to the Germans. They preferred to devote themselves to trade. Commerce had anciently been followed exclusively by the Canaanite cities, and the word “Canaanite” became synonymous with “trader”. Jews were, of course, Canaanites and it passed to them, but Jews were identified with Syria, and “Syrian” replaced the older “Canaanite” in meaning trader. The market was in their hands. According to Agobardus Lugdunensis (Die Insolentia Judaeorum, De Judaicis superstitionibus), no fanatic but as learned and enlightened an ecclesiastic of the Middle Ages as you will find, they pursued the same lucrative business they had pursued in ancient times—buying and selling slaves. Christians were the end customer.
Envy and the ignorance of Christendom did not help. The Jewish culture including its food taboos, cleanliness laws and circumcision, set them apart, and ignorant Christians could not understand it. They claimed Jews smelt of sulphur. They thought they had horns and a tail. The Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 forbade Jews from owning land, and obliged them to dress in a prescribed manner. The Church made them wear special badges just as the Nazis did. Pope Gregory IX condemned the Jewish Talmud as satanic in 1236. They were accused all the time by Christians of satanic rituals, and sacrificing Christian children to Satan. Chaucer has such a story in Canterbury Tales—The Prioress’s Tale.


When miracle plays stimulated Christian imaginations, mobs would rage into the Jewish sector of the cities. Miri Rubin, Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews (1999) describes paintings by Paolo Uccello on the altarpiece of the Communion of the Apostles in the Ducal Palace in Urbino showing a Jewish family terrified by a Christian mob battering down the door to their house. The mob knew the host had been desecrated within by the flow of holy blood through the walls. One of the two Jewish children weeps in fear, while a younger one clings to its mother’s skirts. Another panel shows the family, bound together, burning at the stake.



The Jewish inhabitants had to be protected by the authorities, when they chose to, and they sometimes did because the Jews had an important financial function that the wealthy needed to be able to operate. Jews in Christendom were not allowed to practice any profession except usury. They had been debarred from almost every way of earning an income including land ownership. They could not even trade, the natural employment of Jews for centuries, because they ran such a risk of being murdered. All that remained was to be a money lender, and this is why they were tolerated to a minimal degree. Usury was, at least in theory, forbidden to Christians as sinful. In fact, wealthy Christians and churchmen were bankers, and the large Catholic cathedrals like Siena were banks lending money at interest under various guises. The Jewish money lender did the same for peasants and artisans because they could do nothing else.


Christians were led to believe that Jews were obsessed with stealing communion wafers to mutilate to the point of risking a horrific death, and the Urbino paintings show the first case of it in Paris in 1290.


The wings of an altarpiece in the Chapel of the Holy Blood (consecrated 1396), in Pulkau, Lower Austria, decorated with the paintings of Nicholas Breu (c 1520), have been withdrawn from display because they show Jews desecrating the host in 1338. For this sacrilege, Jews were robbed of their valuables, drowned, burnt, beheaded and disembowelled. Whole families were destroyed, including children in their cribs. Jews even confessed to the crime, and supplied a wealth of detail about what they did, just as the witches who were tortured by the Christians did too.
Jews had no obsession with the host. The ones who were obsessed were the medieval Catholic Christians. Gavin Langmuir (History, Religion and Antisemitism, 1990, and Toward a Definition of Antisemitism, 1990) explains that the host desecration myth grew from the imposition of the doctrine of transubstantiation, whereby the body and blood of Christ—normally thought of as the infant Jesus—is present in the sacramental bread and wine. This absurd belief offered severe problems for Christian theologians, such as the implications of digesting and excreting the body of Christ, or spewing it up. The reflexion of this disturbing idea was that Jews allegedly threw desecrated wafers in to cess pits and spoil heaps. Guilty Catholics sought to expel Jews to the edge of Christian society, if not to be rid of them entirely. The Protestant Reformation put paid to the myth.