Legend of Anderl, executions

A child from the hamlet of Rinn, in Tyrol, was said to have died at the hands of passing Jewish merchants. No contemporary document attests to the affair: the account appears nearly two centuries later in the writing of a local scholar, complete with a name — Andreas, "Anderl" — and a setting.

The cult then took hold: a chapel, a pilgrimage, a painting depicting the scene, a feast entered in the diocesan calendar. It persisted until the Bishop of Innsbruck prohibited its celebration in the final years of the twentieth century and had the relics removed, against the opposition of a portion of the inhabitants.

Rinn is not a documented massacre but the fabrication of a martyrdom — and it is on that basis that the catalogue includes it: for centuries, the legend served to justify real violence elsewhere.