History · 1593–1772 · Case study

The 1757 Dzików Blood Libel

A false ritual-murder accusation led to torture and executions, and the victims were remembered for generations as the martyrs of Dzików.

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A ritual-murder accusation in Dzików

In 1757 a Christian youth from nearby Miechocin disappeared, and Jews of Dzików were accused of having murdered him for ritual purposes. The accusation belonged to the long European history of the blood libel—the false claim that Jews killed Christians, especially children, for religious purposes. Such accusations had no basis in Jewish practice, but they could be used to turn a disappearance or unexplained death into a criminal prosecution of an entire Jewish community.1

The Dzików case became particularly destructive because the defendants were subjected to torture and several were executed. Later Jewish memory preserved them as kedoshim, martyrs who died because they were Jews.

The prosecution and its aftermath

The surviving accounts do not all agree on every name, sequence, or circumstance. The Tarnobrzeg–Dzików memorial book preserves a detailed communal tradition, while Polish scholarship on ritual-murder accusations places the episode within the legal practices of the eighteenth-century Commonwealth. A later Polish legal brief written in 1774 cited the Dzików case as an example of wrongful prosecution and stated that the allegedly murdered youth was subsequently found alive.2

That later reference is important because it shows that criticism of the prosecution did not originate only in Jewish memory. Within a generation, Polish legal argument could point to the case as evidence of the danger of convictions based on ritual-murder accusations and coerced testimony.

The martyrs in communal memory

For the Jews of Dzików, the case did not end with the court proceedings. The executed men entered local memory as the kedoshim. The memorial book describes traditions connected with their graves and with annual remembrance. As happens with many events transmitted for generations, later retellings also accumulated details that are difficult to verify from contemporary records.

The distinction matters without diminishing the memory itself. The prosecution and executions are historical events; the later traditions show how the community understood those deaths and kept them present in local religious memory.

Sources cited on this page

  1. Magda Teter, Blood Libel: On the Trail of an Antisemitic Myth (2020), for the wider history of ritual-murder accusations.
  2. Zenon Guldon and Jacek Wijaczka, “The Accusation of Ritual Murder in Poland, 1500–1800,” Polin 10 (1997); Kehilat Tarnobrzeg-Dzikow (1973), early-history and martyrs sections.
  3. Rabbi David Schlissel, Bet David (1911), as an early Jewish transmission of the local tradition.