The Butcher's Tale Analysis

On March 13, 1900, the severed body parts of Ernst Winter were found, neatly packaged and distributed around the small Polish town of Konitz. Two days earlier, Ernst Winter was brutally murdered; his blood was drained from his body while each of his limbs were cut with a sawblade. The townspeople quickly made two assumptions about the murder: the murderer must’ve been Jewish because of the drained blood and the murderer must’ve been a butcher because of the incredibly precise incisions. This presumptuous criterion led directly to Adolph Lewy, the only Jewish butcher in Konitz. Staying true to their inherent prejudice, the common-people of Konitz associated the murder with a blood libel, which was a barbaric Jewish practice of ritually slaughtering Christian children and baking matzo with their blood. The news of the murder soon ignited anti-Semitic sentiments across Germany and, more specifically, propagated violent actions against the Jews of Konitz. In The Butcher’s Tale, H.W. Smith contended that anti-Semitism’s transformation from an ignorant belief …show more content…
Smith put emphasis on primary sources which he believed to have displayed vehement biases, such as the anti-Semitic newspaper and journal articles written about the murder. Moreover, A Butcher’s Tale maintained a balancing act between crime investigation and historical analysis through Smith’s inclusion of police interviews and a general history of Christian-Jewish conflict, respectively. The sources that were chosen reflected Smith’s opinion that a proper investigation was crippled by assumptions and incompetence. While similar crimes had occurred before, Smith proved that none before the murder in Konitz had as great of an impact on the collective attitudes of