Raphaël Lévy, a cattle trader from a town in Lorraine, set out for Metz on 25 September 1669 –340 years ago– to buy some provisions to celebrate the Jewish New Year.
The same day, three-year-old Didier Le Moyne disappeared in the early afternoon. He was never seen again, and his body was never found.
But witnesses swore that they saw the child bound to Lévy’s horse.
An investigation was carried out. Lévy was incarcerated in the Metz prison in October and put on trial in January. The court promptly found Lévy guilty of murder and sentenced him to death. After being tortured –the justice system placed much importance on a confession, although Lévy maintained his innocence until the end– Lévy was burned at the stake.
In this history, political scientist Pierre Birnbaum (whom I’d met more than 20 years ago, when researching French administrative law) meticulously traces the miscarriage of justice –Lévy’s actual innocence seems certain today– and the environment in which it occurred.
The history has all the elements of a police procedural, and is a good detective story. Of course, the story told is a botched investigation and a procedurally warped trial.
The broader themes of the Raphaël Levy affair captured my imagination. Birnbaum’s interested in anti-semitic accusations of “ritual murder”, but his work makes clear that this affair was neither a Russian-style pogrom nor ordinary anti-semitism.
The Raphaël Lévy affair is noteworthy, in part, because it was exceptional. There hadn’t been a case like the Raphaël Lévy affair in France for more than a century. Jewish subjects under Louis XIV enjoyed the crown’s protection. And Louis XIV (“l’Etat, c’est moi”) hardly counts as a weak king.
At the time of the Raphaël Lévy affair, Lorraine was on the French periphery, the edge of the kingdom. If I follow Birnbaum, the relative novelty of royal authority left considerable power in the hands of the clergy, which in the midst of the Counter-Reformation was militant, and quick to sound anti-semetic themes.
This may be true, but I see another theme, and a parallel. Birnbaum shows us that people in the Lorraine harbored intense fears of sorcery. Witchcraft trials were common, more so than in other parts of France. There’s an argument to be made that Raphaël Lévy was a scapegoat –a convenient suspect–that reveals a deeper question: what were the people of Lorraine so afraid of?  Here, I see a stunning parallel with the Salem witch trials in colonial New England (in 1692).
I’m posting on this French-language academic history in the hope of inciting some interest from an English-language publisher or filmmaker.