IN the year 1472, when the Jews of Trent (famous for the last general
council held there) met in their synagogue on Tuesday in Holy Week, to
deliberate on the preparations for the approaching festival of the
Passover, which fell that year on the Thursday following, they came to a
resolution of sacrificing to their inveterate hatred of the Christian
name, some Christian infant on the Friday following, or Good Friday. A
Jewish physician undertook to procure such an infant for the horrid
purpose. And while the Christians were at the office of Tenebrae on
Wednesday evening, he found a child called Simon, about two years old,
whom, by caresses, and by showing him a piece of money, he decoyed from
the door of a house, the master and mistress whereof were gone to
church, and carried him off. On Thursday evening the principal Jews shut
themselves up in a chamber adjoining to their synagogue, and at midnight
began their cruel butchery of this innocent victim. Having stopped his
mouth with an apron, to prevent his crying out, they made several
incisions in his body, gathering his blood in a basin. Some, all this
while, held his arms stretched out in the form of a cross: others held
his legs. The child being half dead, they raised him on his feet, and
while two of them held him by the arms, the rest pierced his body on all
sides with their awls and bodkins. When they saw the child had expired,
they sung round it: "In the same manner did we treat Jesus, the God of
the Christians: thus may our enemies be confounded forever." The
magistrates and parents making strict search after the lost child, the
Jews hid it first in a barn of hay, then in a cellar, and at last threw
it into the river. But God confounded all their endeavors to prevent the
discovery of the fact, which being fully proved upon them, with its
several circumstances, they were put to death: the principal actors in
the tragedy being broke upon the wheel and burnt. The synagogue was
destroyed, and a chapel was erected on the spot where the child was
martyred. God honored this innocent victim with many miracles. The
relics lie in a stately tomb in St. Peter's church at Trent: and his
name occurs in the Roman Martyrology. See the authentic account of
Tiberinus, the physician who inspected the child's body; and the
juridical acts in Surius and the Bollandists, with Henschenius's notes
on this day: also Martenne, Ampl. Collectio Vet. t. 2, p. 1516, and
Bened. XIV. de Canoniz. l. 1, c. 14, p. 105.