Magda Teter's Sinners on Trial: Jews and Sacrilege after the Reformation aims to discuss the trials for sacrilege that took place in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries. The book gives detailed account of several cases, in which Christians or Jews were charged with stealing, mishandling, or abusing Christian ritual objects. Particular attention is given to the charge of the Host desecration, whereby the Jews were accused of performing rituals defiling the consecrated wafer. The charge, first launched in Western Europe in the Middle Ages, did not appear in Poland-Lithuania until the sixteenth century. Teter persuasively shows that its appearance in the Commonwealth was spurred not so much by anti-Judaism, as it was by the “Catholic-Protestant conflict, changing conditions of ecclesiastical authority and jurisdiction, and competition in the economic marketplace” (2). Thus, the accusation against the Jews in the event sought to provide “arguments” against the Protestant critique of the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation. Various miraculous occurrences (such as the Host's bleeding) accompanying, according to the accusers, its desecration by the Jews, were meant to offer “proof” of the real presence of Jesus' body in the Eucharistic wafer. A great merit of Teter's work consists in placing the accusation of sacrilege within the context of the history of Poland and the history of religious controversies in early-modern Europe.

Teter's comparative perspective is as rare as it is welcomed. However, the execution of her project begs several hard questions. Are the dozen or so cases meticulously analyzed by Teter all the cases pertinent to the subject of her study? If not, on what basis were they selected? If the book is meant to offer an overview of the charges of sacrilege in Poland-Lithuania, why is there no discussion of a single case from Lithuania? (Teter's focus only on Polish cases is particularly puzzling, given that the records of the Lithuanian Royal Tribunal are fully extant, whereas most of the records of its Polish counterpart are lost). Is it possible to formulate generalizations about religious controversies in Poland-Lithuania without even mentioning Eastern Christianity? (Roughly 40% of the Commonwealth's population was either Greek-Orthodox or Greek-Catholic; the Jews and Protestants together constituted no more than 20%). Is it proper to treat cases from the mid-sixteenth and the late eighteenth centuries as responding to the same stimuli, ignoring the changes in legal and political systems that took place during the span of 200 years?

Teter's main argument is that Poland's legislation purporting to protect religious freedoms backfired terribly: “[t]he legal reform of the mid-sixteenth century that was intended to decrease the influence of the Church on the state resulted in a close entanglement of secular courts in religious matters… By the seventeenth century, the secular courts were deciding what was sacred and what was not” (7). “The Polish law prohibiting the use of the secular arm in enforcing Church laws … was intended to shield religious dissenters from the authority of the Catholic Church's courts, but it effectively turned the religious sins… into ‘crimes’” (64). Interesting as it is, this argument is, in my opinion, deeply flawed. First, in contrast to what Teter claims, “the legal reform of the mid-sixteenth century” was not “intended to decrease the influence of the Church on the state.” (I am not aware of any law avowing such intentions prior to the modern period). Rather, it was intended to safeguard basic freedoms within the religious sphere and to separate recognized religious denominations from those who were considered heretics by both Catholics and Protestants. Second, the law's restrictions on the enforcement of ecclesiastical verdicts by the state were always limited. The case in point was the enforcement of bans of excommunication by the Commonwealth's authorities. Such enforcement took place both before and after the Reformation and was by no means restricted to the excommunications issued by the Catholic Church: both Protestant consistories and rabbinic batei din routinely called on the secular arm to enforce their bans and collaborated with local authorities in apprehending and punishing the excommunicated. Finally, and most importantly, Teter's assumption that the dichotomies of the “church” and the “state,” “sin” and “crime,” and the “secular” and “religious” were evident and clearly delineated in the early modern period is, at best, highly dubious, and it might be outright anachronistic. Teter believes that, for example, heresy, desecration of religious objects, or blasphemy are, in themselves purely religious matters; “sins,” which after the Reformation were hijacked by secular authorities or wrongly subsumed under the rubric of criminal law. Yet, in most of the cases discussed in her book, neither the accusers nor the accused shared this belief. For the pre-modern consciousness, all “criminals” were sinners in the first place. Most of the “heretics” and “sacrilegers” discussed by Teter denied the specific allegations raised against them. Virtually none denied that heresy or sacrileges in themselves were in fact simultaneously “sins” and “crimes.”