The affair around the 1899 trial against the Jew Leopold Hilsner, who was accused of ritual murder, represented the culmination of the wave of antisemitism in Bohemia and the rest of Austria at the end of the 19th century. During the affair, also known as the also known as the Hilsner Trial, Hilsner Case or Polná Affair, Tomáš G. Masaryk, later the first president of Czechoslovakia, advocated the reversal of the verdict, and took a decisive stance against the antisemitic tendency in Czech society.

On Easter, April 1, 1899, the corpse of a young woman was found in a forest…