Saints writings on Jews

[Rev. Rye]

As a side note, there was a Saint that was invented by Jews when in 1491, Jews being tortured by the Holy Inquisition in Spain were made to confess that they had sacrificed a Christian child in a cave near a village called La Guardia. They were burned, and all Jews in their community were murdered. The holy child of La Guardia became a religious legend—yet no such town, or sacrificed child, had existed.

Most of these stories I'm either familiar with or not surprised that they were claimed to have happened. But this story set off some alarm bells for me. That the Church would use a murder as a pretext to set off some good old-fashioned ethnic cleansing does not surprise me. That they'd make up a story out of whole cloth to justify pre-existing beliefs is well-documented. But the idea that they'd go so far as to make up a town really sets off my bullshit detector. So I looked it up. While the story does seem like a typical blood libel case, and while there isn't even any clear evidence that the Holy Child in question even existed, the town of La Guardia has existed for centuries, with documentation on it dating back to the 12th century, and to this day, it has a population of about 2329. Granted, it took a while for me to find this particular La Guardia (especially after filtering out the former New York mayor, the airport named after him, and the Basque village of more or less the same name), but the town, at least, did (and does) exist. To be fair, everything else you said is accurate,