A landmark history of the antisemitic blood libel myth—how it took root in Europe, spread with the invention of the printing press, and persists today. Accusations that Jews ritually killed Christian children emerged in the mid-twelfth century, following the death of twelve-year-old William of Norwich, England, in 1144. Later, continental Europeans added a destructive twist: Jews murdered Christian children to use their blood. While charges that Jews poisoned wells and desecrated the communion host waned over the years, the blood libel survived. Initially blood libel stories were confined to monastic chronicles and local lore. But the development of the printing press in the mid-fifteenth century expanded the audience and crystallized the vocabulary, images, and “facts” of the blood libel, providing a lasting template for hate. Tales of Jews killing Christians—notably Simon of Trent, a toddler whose body was found under a Jewish house in 1475—were widely disseminated using the new technology. Following the paper trail across Europe, from England to Italy to Poland, Magda Teter shows how the blood libel was internalized and how Jews and Christians dealt with the repercussions. The pattern established in early modern Europe still plays out today. In 2014 the Anti-Defamation League appealed to Facebook to take down a page titled “Jewish Ritual Murder.” The following year white supremacists gathered in England to honor Little Hugh of Lincoln as a sacrificial victim of the Jews. Based on sources in eight countries and ten languages, Blood Libel captures the long shadow of a pernicious myth.

The first book investigating the recent historiography of the ritual murder accusation

Alan Dundes, in this casebook of an anti-Semitic legend, demonstrates the power of folklore to influence thought and history. According to the blood libel legend, Jews murdered Christian infants to obtain blood to make matzah. Dundes has gathered here the work of leading scholars who examine the varied sources and elaborations of the legend. Collectively, their essays constitute a forceful statement against this false accusation. The legend is traced from the murder of William of Norwich in 1144, one of the first reported cases of ritualized murder attributed to Jews, through nineteenth-century Egyptian reports, Spanish examples, Catholic periodicals, modern English instances, and twentieth-century American cases. The essays deal not only with historical cases and surveys of blood libel in different locales, but also with literary renditions of the legend, including the ballad “Sir Hugh, or, the Jew’s Daughter” and Chaucer’s “The Prioress’s Tale.” These case studies provide a comprehensive view of the complex nature of the blood libel legend. The concluding section of the volume includes an analysis of the legend that focuses on Christian misunderstanding of the Jewish feast of Purim and the child abuse component of the legend and that attempts to bring psychoanalytic theory to bear on the content of the blood libel legend. The final essay by Alan Dundes takes a distinctly folkloristic approach, examining the legend as part of the belief system that Christians developed about Jews. This study of the blood libel legend will interest folklorists, scholars of Catholicism and Judaism, and many general readers, for it is both the literature and the history of anti-Semitism.

At the doorstep of the twenty-first century, one would expect that medieval concepts such as blood libel—the accusation that Jews kill children to use their blood in religious ritual—would have been discarded by any civilized human being. Certainly in the Christian world, where the story originated and endured for centuries, modern attitudes have nearly erased these barbaric accusations. But in Arab and Islamic worlds, where enmity towards Israel and Zionism has conditioned beliefs, attitudes, positions, and fantasies, blood libel and similar charges are still part of life. Most people are unaware of the history of blood libel and do not perceive links between it and many of the false accusations currently hurled against the state of Israel. Raphael Israeli argues that individuals and organizations guilty of human rights crimes project crimes onto Israel to avoid awareness of their own guilt. Certainly when countries ruled by dictators set the agenda of the UN Council for human rights, Israel is consistently censured and condemned. Accusations of "apartheid" and charges of discrimination against Muslims are frequently made. Israel is accused of plots against Muslims in order to harm their productive sectors, of using weapons of mass destruction to commit "genocide" against Arabs, of injecting poisonous substances into Palestinian children, of poisoning Arab lands under the guise of "agricultural aid," and of laying siege to peaceful citizens. All of these charges are derivatives of blood libel and have been adopted by Middle East Jihadists in their struggle against Israel. This volume aims to explain the origins of the charge of blood libel and define the ways its derivatives have achieved acceptance in certain parts of the world today.

The Rhodes blood libel of 1840, an outbreak of anti-Jewish violence, was initiated by the island’s governor in collusion with Levantine merchants, who charged the local Jewish community with murdering a Christian boy for ritual purposes. An episode in the shared histories of Ottomans and Jews, it was forgotten by the former and, even if remembered, misunderstood by the latter. The 1840 Rhodes Blood Libel aims to restore the place of this event in Sephardi and Ottoman history. Based on newly discovered Ottoman and Jewish sources it argues that the acquittal of Rhodian Jews is adequately understood only in the context of the Tanzimat and the Sublime Porte’s foreign relations. Contrary to the common view that Ottoman Jews did not experience the impact of the Tanzimat reforms until the mid-1850s, this study shows that their effects were felt as early as 1840. Furthermore, this book offers a window onto life and intercommunal relations in the Eastern Mediterranean during the late Ottoman era.

A chilling investigation of America’s only alleged case of blood libel, and what it reveals about antisemitism in the United States and Europe. On Saturday, September 22, 1928, Barbara Griffiths, age four, strayed into the woods surrounding the upstate village of Massena, New York. Hundreds of people looked everywhere for the child but could not find her. At one point, someone suggested that Barbara had been kidnapped and killed by Jews, and as the search continued, policemen and townspeople alike gave credence to the quickly spreading rumors. The allegation of ritual murder, known to Jews as “blood libel,” took hold. To believe in the accusation seems bizarre at first glance—blood libel was essentially unknown in the United States. But a great many of Massena’s inhabitants, both Christians and Jews, had emigrated recently from Central and Eastern Europe, where it was all too common. Historian Edward Berenson, himself a native of Massena, sheds light on the cross-cultural forces that ignited America’s only known instance of blood libel, and traces its roots in Old World prejudice, homegrown antisemitism, and the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. Residues of all three have persisted until the present day. More than just the disturbing story of one town’s embrace of an insidious anti-Jewish myth, The Accusation is a shocking and perceptive exploration of American and European responses to antisemitism.

Blood contains extraordinary symbolic power in both Judaism and Christianity—as the blood of sacrifice, of Jesus, of the Jewish martyrs, of menstruation, and more. Yet, though they share the same literary, cultural, and religious origins, on the question of blood the two religions have followed quite different trajectories. For instance, while Judaism rejects the eating or drinking of blood, Christianity mandates its symbolic consumption as a central sacrament. How did these two traditions, both originating in the Hebrew Bible's cult of blood sacrifices, veer off in such different directions? With his characteristic wit and erudition, David Biale traces the continuing, changing, and often clashing roles of blood as both symbol and substance through the entire sweep of Jewish and Christian history from Biblical times to the present.

Toward a Definition of Antisemitism offers new contributions by Gavin I. Langmuir to the history of antisemitism, together with some that have been published separately. The collection makes Langmuir's innovative work on the subject available to scholars in medieval and Jewish history and religious studies. The underlying question that unites the book is: what is antisemitism, where and when did it emerge, and why? After two chapters that highlight the failure of historians until recently to depict Jews and attitudes toward them fairly, the majority of the chapters are historical studies of crucial developments in the legal status of Jews and in beliefs about them during the Middle Ages. Two concluding chapters provide an overview. In the first, the author summarizes the historical developments, indicating concretely when and where antisemitism as he defines it emerged. In the second, Langmuir criticizes recent theories about prejudice and racism and develops his own general theory about the nature and dynamics of antisemitism.

This outstanding volume of 26 essays represents a cross-section of the writings of Arnold Band on Jewish literature. Band, a renowned Jewish studies and humanities scholar, writes on such topics as: literature in historic context, interpretations of Hasidic tales and other traditional texts, Zionism, S.Y. Agnon and other important Israeli writers, anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, Jewish studies, and the Jewish community. Scholars and students of Jewish studies and literature -- particularly Jewish literature -- won't want to miss this remarkable collection.

This book traces the legacies of the two most extreme manifestations of tsarist antisemitism-pogroms and blood libels-in the Soviet Union, from 1917 to the early 1960s. Closely intertwined in history and memory, pogroms and blood libels were and are considered central to the Jewish experience in late Tsarist Russia, the only country on earth with large scale anti-Jewish violence in the early twentieth century. But their persistence and memory under the Bolsheviks-a chapter that is largely overlooked by the existing scholarship-significantly shaped the Soviet Jewish experience. By exploring the phenomenon and the memory of pogroms and blood libels in the Soviet territories of the interwar period as well as, after World War II, in the newly annexed territories, Bemporad studies the social realities of everyday antisemitism through the emergence of communities of violence and memories of violence. The fifty-year-span from the Bolshevik Revolution to the early years of Krushchev included a living generation of Jews, and non-Jews alike, who remembered the Beilis Affair, the pogroms of the civil war and in some cases even the violence of the prerevolutionary years. Bemporad also examines the ways in which Jews reacted to and remembered the unprecedented violence of the pogroms of the Russian Civil War, and how they responded to and which strategies they adopted to confront accusations of ritual murder. By tracing the "afterlife" of pogroms and blood libels in the USSR, Legacy of Blood sheds light on the broader question of the changing position of Jews in Soviet society. And by doing so it tells the story of the solid yet ever changing and at times ambivalent relationship between the Soviet state and the Jewish minority group.