Anderl (Andreas) Oxner von Rinn, also known as Andreas Oxner, ( 1459 â 12 July 1462) is a Blessed of the Roman Catholic Church. The three-year-old boy was said to have been ritually murdered by the Jews in the village of Rinn (Northern Tyrol, currently part of Austria).
Anderl was supposedly the child of day laborers Simon and Maria Oxner. After his father's death, his mother allegedly entrusted the child to his uncle, Johann Meyer, an innkeeper. On 12 July 1462, Anderl disappeared, and his mother found his body hanging from a tree in a nearby forest. The uncle claimed that he had sold the child to people described in one source as 'travelling merchants' and in multiple as Jews. According to Hyppolyte Guarinoni, the story didn't take on the blood libel superstition that Jews had murdered the boy until 1475, thirteen years after the death.
The tale of the Anderl's ritual murder, known as Der Judenstein (The Jews' Stone), is largely part of a Tyrolian oral tradition and only a few written versions exist. It was recorded by the Grimm Brothers in Deutsche Sagen (1816/1818). In 1619, Hyppolyte Guarinoni claimed to have heard a story about a little boy buried in Rinn who had been murdered by Jews, and dreamt that his year of death was 1462. While research suggests that a child named Andreas Oxner might have never actually existed, celebrations of the cult began in 1621 and, by the late 17th century, they occurred in all the Tyrol region.
Around 1677âÂÂ85, the inhabitants of Rinn solemnly transferred Andrew's body to Rinn, imitating the cult of Simon of Trent. The alleged scene of the crime, known as the "Judenstein" (or Jews' Stone), became a place of pilgrimage and locus of antisemitism in area.
In 1752, Pope Benedict XIV beatified Andreas, but in 1755 refused to canonize him and stated that the Roman Church did not formally venerate him.
Popular theatrical performances based on the writings of Guarinoni were performed until 1954 and facilitated the spread of the blood libel legend. The Brothers Grimm revived the tale in 1816 when they published the first volume of their German legends. In 1893, a book appeared, Four Tyrolian Child Victims of Hassidic Fanaticism by Viennese priest Josef Deckert.
The cult of Anderl von Rinn persisted in Austria until the 1990s. In 1985, Bishop of Innsbruck Reinhold Stecher ordered the body transferred from the church to the churchyard of Judenstein, and forbade his cult in 1994. Some ultra-conservative Christians still make a procession to his grave every year.
Other children whose deaths in medieval times gave rise to the persecution of the Jews: