blood libel

blood libel, the antisemitic accusation that Jews ritually sacrifice Christian children at Passover to obtain blood for unleavened bread. The earliest distinct instance of the blood libel emerged in medieval Europe in the 12th century with the case of a murdered English boy, William of Norwich. Despite the fundamental absurdity of the accusation—it ignores, for instance, the explicit prohibition in Judaism against the consumption of blood—it was revived sporadically in eastern and central Europe throughout the medieval and modern periods, often leading to the persecution of Jews.

Antisemitism before the blood libel

The malicious allegation that Jews engage in human sacrifice predates the original blood libel by more than a millennium. In his treatise Against Apion, the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus (flourished 1st century) recounts and refutes a slanderous claim propagated by Apion, a Greek Sophist of Alexandria, of a Greek child being prepared for ritual sacrifice at the Temple of Jerusalem. The fabrication appears to originate in earlier Hellenistic sources, possibly from the 2nd century bce, when intense conflict was taking place between the Seleucid empire and the Hasmonean (Maccabean) dynasty. Although the resemblance between this myth and the blood libel is striking, allegations of human sacrifice were a common rhetorical weapon in Hellenistic literature and there is no direct line of transmission linking Apion’s tale with the later medieval notion of blood libel.

When Christianity emerged and spread in the first centuries ce, it portrayed itself as superseding Judaism. Most Jews rejected the new religion’s assertion, however, and by the 4th century, Christians tended to regard Jews as an alien people. Enmity toward the Jews was expressed most acutely in the church’s teaching of contempt. From St. Augustine in the 4th century to Martin Luther in the 16th, some of the most eloquent and persuasive Christian theologians excoriated the Jews as rebels against God and murderers of the Lord. They were described as companions of the Devil and a race of vipers. Church liturgy, particularly the scriptural readings for the Good Friday commemoration of the Crucifixion, contributed to this enmity. Such views were eventually renounced by the Roman Catholic Church with the Vatican II declaration of Nostra aetate (Latin: “In Our Era”) in 1965, but the prejudices laid out in early Christian polemics had for centuries set the stage for such cruel and pervasive tropes as the blood libel.

Emergence of the blood libel

About the year 1000, Christian society began a process of reorganization that exacerbated the marginalization of Jews as well as of other groups. In 1096 knights of the First Crusade unleashed a wave of antisemitic violence in France and the Holy Roman Empire, including massacres in Worms, Trier (both now in Germany), and Metz (now in France). Unfounded accusations against Jews of such gruesome actions as ritual murder and host desecration began to spread.

The earliest blood libel took place in 12th-century Norwich, England, where Thomas of Monmouth, a monk at the city’s brand new cathedral, began promoting pilgrimage to the burial site of William of Norwich, a young boy who was found dead in 1144 on Holy Saturday. According to Thomas’s hagiographical account of William’s life, the boy was brutally murdered with strange wounds to his head, arms, and torso. The boy’s uncle, a priest, accused local Jews of the murder, and a rumor spread that Jews crucified a Christian child every year at Passover. A century later an investigation into the death of another boy, Hugh of Lincoln (died 1255), sparked anti-Jewish fervor that resulted in the execution of 19 English Jews. The story of “Little Saint Hugh” soon became part of popular literature and song, and he was widely venerated as a martyr.

The blood libel reemerged in Damascus in 1840 and in Tiszaeszlár, Hungary, in 1882. In both cases, torture was used to obtain false confessions, though the accused were ultimately cleared. The most infamous occurrence of the blood libel in modern times was the case of Mendel Beilis, a Jewish factory manager in Kyiv (now in Ukraine), who was accused of ritual murder by the tsarist government in 1911. Imprisoned for more than two years, he was eventually acquitted by an all-Christian jury. In the 1930s the blood libel became part of Nazi propaganda. It was subsequently a staple of antisemitic propaganda in parts of Europe and the Arab world.