Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History(36)

This laid-back attitude, however, was definitely not present in the years that followed the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215. Backed by a pope who decreed that their communion bread was the actual body of Jesus, church officials began persecuting those whom they suspected of abusing it. Beginning some 30 years after Pope Innocent’s decree concerning transubstantiation, faithful Catholics started rounding up and executing Jews for the crime of “torturing the host.”

How, you might ask, did the accusers know that their hosts were being desecrated? Apparently, unimpeachable witnesses came forward, claiming to have seen the communion bread bleeding. I’ll get back to that one, but first up is the question of why the Jews were being blamed for these awful crimes. The answer appears to be that while there wasn’t a shred of evidence that they were involved in unspeakable, host-related acts, at the time everyone did seem to agree that the Jews hated Jesus—in fact they had been responsible for his death, hadn’t they? Maybe, the accusers reasoned, the Jews were reenacting the Messiah’s crucifixion or using the host as part of their own nefarious rituals. Rumors had begun circulating that Jews were applying the blood that flowed from the host to their faces, to give their cheeks a rosy appearance. Other host-conspiracy buffs suggested that the villains were using the Savior’s blood to rid themselves of the foetor Judaicus (“Jewish stink”).



Adapted from a 15th-century German woodcut depicting host desecration by the Jews of the Bavarian town ofPassau in 1477. The hosts are stolen and brought to a temple where they are pierced with a dagger during some unspecified Jewish ritual carried out in the presence of a Torah. Eventually, the hosts are rescued in a commando-like raid and the communion wafers are shown to be holy. The guilty Jews are arrested. Some are beheaded, others tortured with hot pincers. Next, the entire Jewish community has their feet put to the fire before being driven out of town (or to their death). In the end, the good Christians kneel and pray.

And so it came to pass that, in the complete absence of anything resembling evidence, Jews were rounded up, coerced, and tortured—after which many of them fessed up to the crimes they hadn’t really committed. But whether they confessed or not, those found guilty of defiling the sacrament were subjected to additional torture before being burnt at the stake, beheaded, or dispatched in some equally gruesome manner. Additionally, their families, as well as any neighbors brazen enough to have committed the crime of “living nearby” often accompanied them to their deaths. These ghastly practices continued for nearly 400 years in Jewish communities all across Europe, with massacres taking place in Germany, France, Austria, Poland, Spain, and Romania.

At some point the execution of Jews for crimes against baked goods ended. Unfortunately, the reason for the cessation of these pogroms had nothing to do with Christians coming to their senses about just how badly they had been acting. Instead, it had everything to do with finding a new group—witches—to persecute for similar crimes. So before you could say, “Got a match?” witches were being burned alive for having a weird mole, or trying to procure red hosts for their Black Mass, or associating with communists. (All right, that last one didn’t happen until the 1950s.)

But what about those bleeding hosts? Were medieval witnesses just making that stuff up as an excuse to get rid of a group they despised? Or maybe these folks had simply imagined the ruby-stained bread? There is, however, an intriguing alternative hypothesis. In 1994, Dr. Johanna Cullen, at George Mason University in Virginia, came up with an explanation for bleeding hosts that was neither mystical nor mental. It was instead, microbiological. Serratia marcescens is a rod-shaped bacterium and common human pathogen frequently linked to both urinary tract and catheter-associated infections. The ubiquitous microbe can also be found growing on food like stale bread that has been stored in warm, damp environments. For this story, the key characteristic of S. marcescens is that it produces and exudes a reddish-orange pigment called prodigiosin, a substance that can cause the bacterial colonies to resemble drops of blood. Clinically, prodigiosin has been shown to be an immunosuppressant with antimicrobial and anti-cancer properties and it’s likely that these germ-killing properties protect Serratia colonies from attack by bacteria, protozoa, and fungi, in much the same way that the Penicillium mold produces an antibacterial agent that has been co-opted for use by humans. In the 15th century, though, Serratia colonies growing on the host may very well have been mistaken for blood.

The work of another researcher, Dr. Luigi Garlaschelli, backed up Dr. Cullen’s findings. The renowned organic chemist and part-time debunker of reputed miracles like weeping or bleeding statues examined various food items that were said to have bled spontaneously. To determine whether the “blood” was real or not, Garlaschelli tested the items for the presence of hemoglobin, the oxygen-carrying pigment that gives vertebrate blood its red color. In the end, the tests revealed no hemoglobin but plenty of contamination by S. marcescens, and the Italian chemist further demonstrated the likely origin of the bleeding hosts by culturing the bacterium on slices of ordinary white bread.

Quite possibly, then, a common microbe contaminated the bleeding hosts of the Middle Ages, which is actually kind of amusing until you realize how many thousands of innocent people were murdered because of this tragic bit of ignorance and misinterpretation.

A final word on the relationship between transubstantiation and cannibalism concerns the Uruguayan survivors of the Old Christians Rugby Club, who employed what became known as the “communion defense” to justify the incidents of cannibalism that took place after their 1972 plane crash in the Andes. Soon after the 16 survivors returned to civilization, positive public opinion over their plight took a nosedive after it was revealed that the men had remained alive for 72 days by consuming the bodies of the dead. Not long after their rescue, and with their hero status now on shaky footing, a press conference was held. Survivor Pablo Delgado (who was studying to become a lawyer) told reporters that Christ’s Last Supper had inspired him and the other survivors. Basically, Delgado explained, since Jesus had shared his own body with his disciples, it was okay that they had done the same with their deceased comrades. After hearing this explanation, even the skeptics were won over, and soon after, the Archbishop of Montevideo made it official by absolving the young men of their cannibalism-related sins.