‘The Accusation’ Review: Hysteria on Main Street
By David Margolick
The Wall Street Journal
September 20, 2019
Sometimes history gushes from a few places, and the historian has to sort and sift. Sometimes it’s more dispersed, and one’s principal job is tracking it down. And sometimes it’s lost or seems so, either because it was never recorded or preserved or died with the people who lived it.
In that last instance, the historian can either move on to something else, or pad, or speculate, or drill down even more deeply and resolutely, confident that there’s usually more out there. What happened 91 years ago this weekend to the small Jewish community of Massena, N.Y., falls into this third category.
In the late afternoon of Sept. 22, 1928, 4-year-old Barbara Griffiths wandered into the woods outside Massena and did not return. Some 300 people, led by local volunteer firemen, quickly set out to find her but did not.
Meanwhile someone—it was never clear who—floated the idea that the young girl had been kidnapped and murdered by local Jews seeking the blood from a Christian child to make matzo or for one of their other arcane religious rituals. The infamous “blood libel,” which had menaced European Jews for seven centuries, had finally made its way to America.
Searchers shone their flashlights into the windows and basements of Jewish shops to look for Barbara’s body. And, with the encouragement of Massena Mayor W. Gilbert Hawes, State Police Corp. H.M. (Mickey) McCann questioned three Jews— Willie Shulkin, son of the local synagogue president; Morris Goldberg, who worked at the local Alcoa plant; and Rabbi Berel Brennglass —about the particulars of Jewish ritual sacrifices.
The first two, either mentally impaired or confused, gave rambling, incoherent answers, only further feeding local conspiracies. It fit a pattern: “European ritual murder cases often gained strength from renegade or outcast Jews or from those with intellectual disabilities,” Edward Berenson writes in his new book, “The Accusation.”
But Brennglass, a Lithuanian immigrant, complained that the question was “foolish, ridiculous, and contemptible,” especially coming from an officer of the law in “the most enlightened and civilized country in the world.” He then made his way through the mob milling outside the town hall and walked toward the synagogue: It was the eve of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. Along with contemplating their sins the previous year, the Jews of Massena huddled there against a possible pogrom, one that failed to happen at least in part because the young girl, dazed but intact, reappeared the next day.
Neither before nor since had such a thing ever occurred in the United States. So why did it happen in Massena, a small (approximately 10,000 people at the time) manufacturing town just south of the Canadian border, and what did it look like, and how deep a mark did it leave on the community? They’re questions that Mr. Berenson, a professor of history at New York University who was born and raised in the town—his great-grandparents settled there in 1898, and later opened a department store—is uniquely suited to address.
The author is one of the dwindling band of small-town Jews (I’m another) who grew up in the sticks and fled to the big city. In his town, like mine and many others, Jews—Eastern European immigrants and their progeny—were both sparse and conspicuous, usually running businesses on modest main streets. We’ve forsaken many of these places, as dozens of abandoned synagogues (including Massena’s) attest, but they’ve never left us. Their very intimacy left us feeling both insulated and exposed. Writing about them, we explore not just our own roots, but a neglected facet of the American Jewish experience.
For Mr. Berenson, this meant making his first visit to Massena in 40 years, but editorially at least, he never lingers long. Repeatedly, events in the town yield to a broader history of the blood libel, taking us from 12th-century England to 13th-century Germany to 14th-century Strasbourg to 15th-century Trent to Hungary, Poland, Russia. The story then turns to America, with additional digressions into the Ku Klux Klan, Prohibition, Henry Ford and the 1928 presidential election.
For a variety of reasons, Mr. Berenson notes, charges of Jewish ritual murder never took root here. Others—blacks, the Chinese, the Irish, Catholics generally—were more numerous, and more vilified. American Jews had undergone a “Protestantization,” making them less conspicuous than their European counterparts. Even the most notorious example of anti-Semitic violence—the 1915 lynching of Leo Frank, accused of murdering a young girl in Atlanta—never triggered the blood libel, probably because those responsible had never heard of it.
So when the vile lie surfaced in Massena, the thinking goes, it had to have originated from somewhere else. Nearly a third of local residents were foreign-born, but that was true of factory towns everywhere. So what made Massena different?
First, Mr. Berenson suggests, its immigrants frequently returned home, where old prejudices could be refreshed. Second, many came from nearby Quebec, to which a particularly virulent strain of anti-Semitism had migrated from ancestral France. And third, the area had an active chapter of the Klan, some of whose members were the very firemen scouring the woods.
Alarmed by his son’s interrogation, local synagogue president Jake Shulkin immediately called Louis Marshall, president of the American Jewish Committee. Even after Barbara Griffiths resurfaced (her Jewish kidnappers had had second thoughts, some speculated), Shulkin remained sufficiently fearful to contact Rabbi Stephen Wise of the American Jewish Congress, too. As the world watched (the episode was widely covered), the rival Jewish leaders competed over who could extract the most abject apology from Mayor Hawes and Corp. McCann. Caught in the cross-fire were Massena’s Jews, who only wanted tensions to subside, which they soon did, at least superficially.
Lynchings linger—a century later, one can feel them looming over the communities in which they occurred—and so too, Mr. Berenson suggests, did the stigmatization of Massena’s Jews. That Barbara’s father regularly asked one local Jewish woman whether she bore him or his fellow Gentiles generally any ill will suggests that this feeling must have been profound.
This is a fascinating story, but Mr. Berenson’s rendition feels shallow. (Sure, Jewish kids in Massena were called “Christ Killers” afterward, but that happened lots of other places, too.) One wishes he’d drilled down deeper or, to put it terms that struggling upstate communities have come to know, done some genuine historic fracking. He spoke to a few eyewitnesses, but even at this late date, a more ambitious canvass (an ad in the local paper?) could probably have produced more. He ignores New York City’s four Yiddish dailies, which, manned by people who’d fled this very thing, would surely have had something to say.
How about more from Boris Smolar, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reporter who, at Louis Marshall’s request, went up to Massena to investigate? Or from Mr. Berenson’s compatriots in Massena’s Jewish diaspora—25 families generate lots of offspring—who might have furnished additional morsels of historical memory? We learn of a previous historian who, for all his copious faults (which Mr. Berenson enumerates), tracked down and interviewed some bona fide eyewitnesses 40-plus years ago. Was nothing they said salvageable?
One person Mr. Berenson did reach was Barbara Griffiths Klemens, still living in the vicinity and going strong at 94. Alas, this particular witness, who died last month, remembered little about what she detonated in Massena nearly a century ago. But when Mr. Berenson does stay close to home, he begins to bring the horrifying events taking place there back to life.
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