In the 19th century several accusations of this type reported in cities of Moldova (Iasi, Roman, Galati, Bacau, Piatra Neamt etc.) brought about serious consequences. The violent events that took place in Galati (Easter 1859) are typical: dead and wounded people were reported, synagogues were destroyed, rolls of the Law were burnt, houses were destroyed, shops were pillaged and the authorities, instead of punishing the instigators, arrested the Jews. The banker Rothschild himself pleaded with prince Cuza Voda asking that the Jews of Galati be protected.

Terrified by these events and not knowing whom to defend first, “the Jews massacred on Romanian soil or Romanians’ honour itself”, the scholar Ion Heliade-Radulescu wrote in an article entitled “Massacre in Galati”: “The people found fault in order to pillage, kill and commit the most cruel crimes; many Jews were murdered and more still were assaulted and beaten; their houses were broken into and pillaged. Two synagogues were broken into and looted, the holy pots, the Law or Torah were vandalized. The Jews don’t eat children in England, France, Germany, nor in any other places where people are the least bit civilized. Where else in this world are they accused of such a cruel deed? Where people are still barbarians or semi-barbarians. It is my most intimate belief that Jews are not and never have been known to eat people or children of any race or religion; their faith does not prescribe such an inhuman and barbaric principle; since the very beginning, their race was anything but a race of savages and cannibals.”

“Not even in Russia do Jews eat children”, wrote Ion Heliade-Radulescu in 1859. The Romanian scholar was wrong because in Russia, in the 19th century and even in the first decades of the 20th century, it was believed that Jews performed ritual child-killing. This was, in fact, the cause of the 1903 pogrom in Chisinau (a Russian city at the time) and of Mendel Beilis’ trial in Kiev (1911-1913).”