[THE ANTI-JEWISH BRUSSELS MASSACRE AND THE “SACRAMENT OF MIRACLE”] Brusselsche Eer-Triumphen, dat is Eene waerachtighe beschrijvinge van alle de Hertoghlijcke huldinghen [...] Vreugde-feesten en Tournoyspelen, gheschiet binnen [...] Brussel [...] eyndende met de [...] beschrijvinghe van de groote feeste van het dry hondert jarigh Jubile van het [...] H. Sacrament van Mirakelen [...] [Brussels triumphs of honour, that is, a true description of all the ducal acts of homage … festivities and tournaments that took place in Brussels … concluding with the … description of the great celebration of the three-hundred-year jubilee of the Holy Sacrament of Miracles ...]. — BOUND WITH: Petrus de Cafmeyer. Hooghweerdighe Historie Van Het Alder-Heylighste Sacrament Van Mirakel [High-worthy history of the most holy sacrament of the miracle]. Three parts (all published).
Brussels: Peeter de Dobbeleer, 1670. Folio (37 × 24 cm). Eighteenth-century full calf with gilt tooling and labels on the spine; [12], 127, [5] pp. with copper title page by J[an] Trojen and 10 copper plates (2 of them folded), engraved by Gaspar Bouttats. – Brussels: Georgius de Backer (and Nicolaus Stryckwant, Ægidius Stryckwant, Carolus de Vos, Joannes Baptista de Vos), 1720(–1735). [12], 48; [2], 70; [6], 38, [2], 39–64 pp. with woodcut frontispiece, 2 folded woodcut plates, and 50 copperplate engravings (4 of which are folded), some engraved by J[acques] Harrewyn, F[rançois] Harrewijn and [Jan Lauwryn] Krafft; a few copperplate engravings feature woodcut cartouches. One plate with very minor loss at the fold, restored; another with a small marginal tear, likewise restored; one plate folded several times, with two tears along the folds; lightly fox-stained in places, a few leaves slightly toned; binding with an old handwritten number label, rubbed with age; else very good. Item #54457
First editions of the elaborately illustrated festival books produced on the occasion of the processions held annually for many centuries for the Feast of the “Holy Sacrament of Miracles.” The works primarily document the numerous Baroque triumphal arches through which the processions passed. The complex iconographic programs of the Baroque festival architectures can be traced through these engravings. In addition, the paintings and carvings are explained by the accompanying texts. Some engravings depict the long-transmitted anti-Jewish legend of the “Host Miracle” as well as the burning of the Jews of Brussels tied to stakes. After the pogroms during the plague in the mid-fourteenth century, the accusations led to the persecution of the few Jews who had again settled in Brussels.
According to the legend, which circulated for centuries, Jews allegedly pierced consecrated hosts with daggers in a synagogue on Good Friday in 1370, after the hosts had been stolen from a church. That year, Passover fell on the same day as Good Friday. A miracle then allegedly occurred in which the hosts began to bleed profusely from the places where they had been pierced. The thief was said to have been a Jew who had converted to Christianity, who had stolen the hosts in exchange for an agreed sum and handed them over to the head of the Jewish community. It was, in turn, allegedly a Jewish woman who had converted who then reported the events to the priest of her community. The Jews of the city were then arrested and tortured in the marketplace with red-hot tongs. Later, they were tied to stakes and burned alive on the Vigil of the Ascension of Christ. Scholarship notes, among other things, that the Brussels legend corresponds in numerous details to the account of an alleged host desecration said to have occurred in Paris some eighty years earlier. In some cases, the protagonists even bear the same names. In the Middle Ages, numerous such accounts circulated, repeatedly becoming the occasion for persecutions of Jews and pogroms. The nearly identical Parisian and Brussels legends became anti-Jewish and ultimately antisemitic model narratives in the late Middle Ages, which also served as subjects for works of art. For example, the Florentine Renaissance painter Paolo Uccello produced a predella for an altar in Urbino that depicts the Parisian legend in six panels, culminating in the burning of those accused. The work is now in the Galleria Nazionale delle Marche, Urbino. While Uccello’s depiction is still free of antisemitic physiognomies, Cafmeyer employs a wide range of those defamatory iconographic formulas, such as the hooked nose and humpback, which continued into the propagandistic imagery of the National Socialists. (Cf. Philippe Pierret, La profanation des hosties de Bruxelles de 1370: présence, récurrence et persistance d’un mythe, in: Muséon: Revue d’art et d’histoire du Musée Juif de Belgique, no. 4, 2012, pp. 151–164; Christoph Cluse, Studien zur Geschichte der Juden in den mittelalterlichen Niederlanden, Hannover, 2000, pp. 284ff).
Stroobant: Cat. Berlin, Ornamentstichsammlung 2951. – Cafmeyer: Cf. Brunet VI, 22339 (French edition).
As of August 2026, OCLC lists only one copy of Stroobant in North America and five copies of Cafmeyer.
Price: €2,750.00