ABSTRACT
It is characteristic of the period that a miscarriage of justice could arouse such political passions and inspire such an endless succession of trials and retrials, not to speak of duels and fisticuffs. In Corfu, the charge lead to riots that decimated the Jewish community; in the Austro-Hungarian Empire to sensationalistic trials that were the talk of everyone in Prague. The trials that often resulted from these charges were widely covered and intensively debated throughout the German-speaking world, and especially in Prague. Kafka responded deeply to the implications of the blood libel trials, seeing them in terms of the charges of the exploitation of Aryan women by Jewish men. The blood libel trials have all the elements of the Dreyfus trial: an innocent man suddenly accused of a heinous crime, a trial, and, more often than not, a conviction and false imprisonment.
