(SIMON OF TRENT)

Simon of Trent (Simonino di Trento; born late 15th century, died ca. March 21, 1475) was a boy from the city of Trent, Italy whose disappearance was blamed upon the leaders of the city's Jewish community based on confessions extracted under torture. Subsequently, a significant blood libel resulted throughout Europe with ramifications that lasted almost five centuries. Shortly before Simon disappeared, Bernardo da Feltre, an itinerant Franciscan preacher, had delivered a series of sermons in Trent in which he vilified the local Jewish community. When Simon went missing around Easter, 1475, his father thought that he must have been kidnapped and murdered by Jews. According to his story, the Jews had drained Simon of his blood for use in baking their Passover matzohs and for occult rituals secretly adhered to by them. The leaders of the Jewish community were arrested, and seventeen of them confessed under torture. Fifteen of them, including Samuel, the head of the community, were sentenced to death and burned at the stake. Meanwhile the boy Simon, became the focus of veneration for the local Catholic Church. Over one hundred miracles were directly attributed to "Little Saint Simon" within a year of his disappearance, and his cult spread across Italy, Austria and Germany. His veneration was confirmed (equivalent to beatification) in 1588 by Pope Sixtus V who canonized the boy and approved a special Mass in his honor. In 1965, in the wake of the Second Vatican Council, the Catholic Church began to reinvestigate the story of Saint Simon and opened the trial records anew. Finally declaring the events questionable, the cult of Saint Simon was suppressed by Pope Paul VI and the shrine erected to him was dismantled, although some Catholics ignored this suppression and continued to venerate him. In February 2007 the Italian-born Israeli historian Ariel Toaff published a book in Italy entitled Pasque di Sangue (“Bloody Easter”), in which he claimed that dried blood was sometimes used at the time for medical purpose, and that a Jewish itinerant peddler from Venice connected with the Simon Trial dealt in this substance. Toaff’s colleagues accused him of deeply flawed scholarship, by crediting Inquisition confession documents which had been obtained under torture. Toaff has since withdrawn the book in order to rework aspects of clarification