The Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion, first published in 1903, purports to reveal an international Jewish plot to achieve world domination. Jews have all too often been the target of malign lies. The case of Simon of Trent was still being quoted as an example of supposed Jewish infamy by Nazi propagandists in the 1930s. Jews were tortured into confessions and burned at the stake. He probably drowned accidentally, but the city authorities decided he was a victim of ritual murder. Tidd focuses on the case of two-year-old Simon of Trent (now Trento in Italy) who was found dead in 1475. It became a witch- hunter’s bible and, Tidd argues, played a part in the deaths of 50,000 supposed witches, mainly women.Įqually malevolent in its impact was the lie known as the ‘blood libel’ - the idea that Christian children were killed by Jews, and their blood used in sacrificial rituals. The Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer Of Witches) was a book by Heinrich Kramer, a 15th-century German priest with a reputation for embezzlement and theft, and a paranoid belief that witches were everywhere. The most dangerous resulted in huge loss of life. Not many of the 50 lies in Tidd’s book provided such harmless entertainment. Even Christopher Columbus used it as a reference work. However, it was widely read for centuries. Most of it was nonsense, of course, and the likelihood is there was no such person as Sir John Mandeville. Her words could equally apply to the 14th-century book Travels Of Sir John Mandeville, which describes its author’s visits to ‘fantastical lands where griffins fly … and men have hooves for feet and heads for torsos’. She was thus inarguably revealed as a cross-dressing Englishwoman. She is referring to the myth that a 9th-century pontiff, later to be known as Pope Joan, gave birth in a crowded Roman street. If anything, the story added to the gaiety of nations, although Tidd argues that the Sun’s journalists had invented a new genre - fake news.Īuthor Natasha Tidd tells us of the medieval chronicler, Gerald of Wales, who claimed he knew a man on whom tiny devils appeared every time he was confronted with lies (stock photo)Įarlier legends also gained traction because, as Tidd admits, ‘Sometimes in history, it doesn’t matter if a story is a lie, if that story is entertaining’. They were, he said, half-men, half-bats, and had built great temples and mammoth monuments. It’s hard to see much harm in the 1835 newspaper reports, published in the New York Sun, that the famous astronomer and inventor Sir John Herschel, using a giant telescope, had discovered ‘a whole society of sophisticated beings’ on the Moon. Not all the lies Tidd examines were life-threatening. She ranges from Julius Caesar’s claim that victims of a massacre in Gaul were not killed by his troops but committed mass suicide, to the evasions surrounding the nuclear accident at Chernobyl in 1986. Well, Gerald’s devils would be kept busy through any reading of Tidd’s lively survey of 2,000 years of outrageous untruths. A Short History Of The World In 50 Lies by Natasha Tidd (Michael O’Mara £12.99, 288pp)Īuthor Natasha Tidd tells us of the medieval chronicler, Gerald of Wales, who claimed he knew a man on whom tiny devils appeared every time he was confronted with lies.
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