Tutajosok

On 1 April 1882, a 14-year-old girl disappeared from a village in north-eastern Hungary. Wild rumours arose that she had fallen victim to a Jewish ritual murder on the occasion of the Passover festival, which was to begin two days later. Although the girl, who had clearly drowned, was found in the Tisza in mid-June 1882, a defamatory trial began against 15 members of the local Jewish community. Although it ended in acquittals, like the Dreyfus trial a few years later in France, it was an expression of the growing anti-Semitism in the second half of the 19th century in the face of the successful ‘Jewish emancipation’ in the decades before.