Host desecration accusation, executions

An accusation of host desecration was brought against the community of Poznań: it was claimed that a servant had stolen consecrated hosts from the Dominican church to sell them to the Jews, who had allegedly pierced them.

The rabbi and the elders were arrested, tried, and executed; the community was struck with an annual fine payable to the church for generations. The so-called miraculous host was placed in a chapel that became the Corpus Christi church, built in the following century, and the pilgrimage drew crowds from Greater Poland.

The Kingdom of Poland had, since the charters of Boleslas the Pious and Casimir the Great, a protective regime for its Jews — and it was to this regime that those expelled from the West turned. Poznań shows that the protection of the prince stopped at the city gates.