blood libel

History

The earliest versions of the accusations involving Jews supposedly crucifying Christian children on Easter/Passover is said to be because of a prophecy. There is no reference to the use of blood in unleavened matzo bread at this time yet, which develops later as a major motivation for the crime.

Possible precursors

The earliest known antecedent is from the tenth century, from Damocritus (not Democritus the philosopher), mentioned in the Suda, who alleged that "every seven years the Jews captured a stranger, brought him to the temple in Jerusalem, and sacrificed him, cutting his flesh into bits." The Greco-Egyptian author Apion claimed that the Jews sacrificed Greek victims in their temple. Here, the writer states that when Antiochus Epiphanes entered the temple in Jerusalem, he discovered a Greek captive, who told him that he was being fattened for sacrifice. Every year, Apion claimed, the Jews would sacrifice a Greek and consume his flesh, at the same time swearing eternal hatred towards the Greeks. Apion's claim likely reflects already circulating attitudes towards Jews as similar claims are made by Posidonius and Apollonius Molon in the 1st century BCE. This idea is exampled later in history, when Socrates Scholasticus (fl. 5th century) reported that in a drunken frolic, a group of Jews bound a Christian child to a cross in mockery of the death of Christ and scourged him until he died.

Medieval context

The blood libels emerged at a time when the church and particularly the Crusades were driving increasingly anti-Judaic discourses. These were later reinforced through the Church council Lateran IV which mandated the segregation of Christian and Jewish society, and built an apparatus of enforcement across Europe. At a local context, many of the English examples may have included an element of church competition for saintly cults, with the income that veneration produced.

Israel Yuval proposed that the blood libel may have originated in the 12th century due to Christian views on Jewish behavior during the First Crusade. Some Jews committed suicide and killed their own children rather than exposing them to forced conversion to Christianity. Yuval wrote that Christians may have argued that if Jews could kill their own children, they could also kill Christian children.

Origins in England

In England, in 1144, the Jews of Norwich were falsely accused of ritual murder after a boy, William of Norwich, was found dead in the woods with stab wounds. William's hagiographer, Thomas of Monmouth, falsely claimed that every year there is an international council of Jews at which they choose the country in which a child will be killed during Easter, because of a Jewish prophecy that states that the killing of a Christian child each year will ensure that the Jews will be restored to the Holy Land. According to Monmouth, England was chosen in 1144, and the leaders of the Jewish community delegated the Jews of Norwich to perform the killing, after which they abducted and crucified William. The legend was turned into a cult, with William acquiring the status of a martyr and pilgrims bringing offerings to the local church.

This was followed by similar accusations in Gloucester (1168), Bury St Edmunds (1181) and Bristol (1183). In 1189, the Jewish deputation attending the coronation of Richard the Lionheart was attacked by the crowd. Massacres of Jews at London and York soon followed. In 1190, on 16 March, 150 Jews were attacked in York and then massacred when they took refuge in the royal castle, where Clifford's Tower now stands, with some committing suicide rather than being taken by the mob. The remains of 17 bodies thrown in a well in Norwich between the 12th and 13th century (five that were shown by DNA testing to likely be members of a single Jewish family) were very possibly killed as part of one of these pogroms.

After the death of Little Saint Hugh of Lincoln, there were trials and executions of Jews. The case was described by Matthew Paris and later by Chaucer, and formed the basis of the Sir Hugh ballads which have circulated to the present day. Its notoriety sprang from the intervention of the Crown, the first time an accusation of ritual killing had been given royal credibility.

The eight-year-old Hugh disappeared at Lincoln on 31 July 1255. His body was probably discovered on 29 August, in a well. A Jew named Copin or Koppin confessed to involvement. He confessed to John of Lexington, a servant of the crown, and relative of the Bishop of Lincoln. He confessed that the boy had been crucified by the Jews, who had assembled at Lincoln for that purpose. King Henry III, who had reached Lincoln at the beginning of October, had Copin executed and 91 of the Jews of Lincoln seized and sent up to London, where 18 of them were executed. The rest were pardoned at the intercession of the Franciscans or Dominicans.

Continental Europe

Much like the blood libel of England, the history of blood libel in continental Europe consists of unsubstantiated claims made about the corpses of Christian children. There were frequently associated supernatural events speculated about these discoveries and corpses, events which were often attributed by contemporaries to miracles. Also, just as in England, these accusations in continental Europe typically resulted in the execution of numerous Jews – sometimes even all, or close to all, the Jews in one town. These accusations and their effects also, in some cases, led to royal interference on behalf of the Jews.

Thomas of Monmouth's story of the annual Jewish meeting to decide which local community would kill a Christian child also quickly spread to the continent. An early version appears in Bonum Universale de Apibus ii. 29, § 23, by Thomas of Cantimpré (a monastery near Cambray). Thomas wrote, in around 1260, "It is quite certain that the Jews of every province annually decide by lot which congregation or city is to send Christian blood to the other congregations." Thomas of Cantimpré also believed that since the time when the Jews called out to Pontius Pilate, "His blood be on us, and on our children" (Matthew 27:25), they have been afflicted with hemorrhages, a condition equated with male menstruation:

A very learned Jew, who in our day has been converted to the (Christian) faith, informs us that one enjoying the reputation of a prophet among them, toward the close of his life, made the following prediction: 'Be assured that relief from this secret ailment, to which you are exposed, can only be obtained through Christian blood ("solo sanguine Christiano").' This suggestion was followed by the ever-blind and impious Jews, who instituted the custom of annually shedding Christian blood in every province, in order that they might recover from their malady.

Thomas added that the Jews had misunderstood the words of their prophet, who by his expression "solo sanguine Christiano" had meant not the blood of any Christian, but that of Jesus – the only true remedy for all physical and spiritual suffering. Thomas did not mention the name of the "very learned" proselyte, but it may have been Nicholas Donin of La Rochelle, who, in 1240, had a disputation on the Talmud with Yechiel of Paris, and who in 1242 caused the burning of numerous Talmudic manuscripts in Paris. It is known that Thomas was personally acquainted with Nicholas. Nicholas Donin and another Jewish convert, Theobald of Cambridge, are greatly credited with the adoption and the belief of the blood libel myth in Europe.

Renaissance and Baroque

In Ravensburg in 1430, a blood libel saw most of the city's Jewish community burned after being charged with the ritual murder of a 13-year-old Christian boy called Ludwig Ettelin. Ettelin's body was found hanging from a tree in the Haßlach forest, heavily scavenged post-mortem. Popular suspicion quickly alighted on a wealthy Jewish merchant named Eleazarus who was alleged to have conspired with two other prominent Jewish townspeople to murder the boy at his daughter's wedding some three months earlier. Under severe torture, Eleazarus confessed to the accusations against him. The town's remaining Jews were burned alive as co-conspirators on 3 July. Their property was confiscated by the civic officials and handed over to Sigismund, the Holy Roman Emperor. The following year, the town decreed that Jews never again be permitted into the town. The decree stood until the early nineteenth century.

In 1475, Simon of Trent, aged two, disappeared and his father alleged that he had been kidnapped and murdered by the local Jewish community. Fifteen local Jews were sentenced to death and burned. Simon was regarded locally as a saint, although he was never canonised by the church of Rome. He was removed from the Roman Martyrology in 1965 by Pope Paul VI.

In 1490, a four-year-old Christian boy named Christopher of Toledo, also known as Christopher of La Guardia or "the Holy Child of La Guardia", was supposedly murdered by two Jews and three conversos (converts to Christianity). In total, eight men were executed. It is now believed that this case was constructed by the Spanish Inquisition to facilitate the expulsion of Jews from Spain.

In 1494 a case at Trnava, Slovakia, the impossible forced confessions from women and children shows that the accused preferred death as a means of escape from the torture, and admitted everything that was asked of them. They even said that Jewish men menstruated and practiced the drinking of Christian blood as a remedy.

At Pezinok, Slovakia in 1529, it was charged that a nine-year-old boy had been bled to death, suffering cruel torture; thirty Jews confessed to the crime and were publicly burned. The true facts of the case were disclosed later when the child was found alive in Vienna. He had been taken there by the accuser, Count Wolf of Bazin, as a means of ridding himself of his Jewish creditors at Bazin.

19th century

One of the child-saints in the Russian Orthodox Church is the six-year-old boy Gavriil Belostoksky from the village Zverki. According to the legend supported by the church, the boy was kidnapped from his home during the holiday of Passover while his parents were away. Shutko, who was a Jew from Białystok, was accused of bringing the boy to Białystok, piercing him with sharp objects and draining his blood for nine days, then bringing the body back to Zverki and dumping it at a local field. A cult developed, and the boy was canonized in 1820. His relics are still the object of pilgrimage. On All Saints Day, 27 July 1997, the Belarusian state TV showed a film alleging the story is true. The revival of the cult in Belarus was cited as a dangerous expression of antisemitism in international reports on human rights and religious freedoms which were passed to the UNHCR.

1821 Odessa pogroms: in the aftermath of the Greek War of Independence and killing of Gregory V of Constantinople by the Ottomans, Jews were blamed and accused of using Christian blood for ritual purposes and again in 1859, of ritually murdering a Christian child. Ritual murder accusations appeared again around the 1881 pogrom after the assassination of Alexander II of Russia.

1823–35 Velizh blood libel: After a Christian child was found murdered outside of this small Russian town in 1823, accusations by a drunk prostitute led to the imprisonment of many local Jews. Some were not released until 1835.

1840 Damascus affair: In February, at Damascus, a Catholic monk named Father Thomas and his servant disappeared. The accusation of ritual murder was brought against members of the Jewish community of Damascus.

1840 Rhodes blood libel: The Jews of Rhodes, under the Ottoman Empire, were accused of murdering a Greek Christian boy. The libel was supported by the local governor and the European consuls posted to Rhodes. Several Jews were arrested and tortured, and the entire Jewish quarter was blockaded for twelve days. An investigation carried out by the central Ottoman government found the Jews to be innocent.

In 1844, David Paul Drach, the son of the Head Rabbi of Paris and a convert to Christianity, wrote in his book De L'harmonie Entre L'eglise et la Synagogue, that a Catholic priest in Damascus had been ritually killed and the murder covered up by powerful Jews in Europe; referring to the 1840 Damascus affair [See above]

20th and 21st centuries

The 1903 Kishinev pogrom, an anti-Jewish revolt, started when an antisemitic newspaper wrote that a Christian Russian boy, Mikhail Rybachenko, was found murdered in the town of Dubossary, alleging that the Jews killed him in order to use the blood in preparation of matzo. Around 49 Jews were killed and hundreds were wounded, with over 700 houses being looted and destroyed.

In the 1910 Shiraz blood libel, the Jews of Shiraz, Iran, were falsely accused of murdering a Muslim girl. The entire Jewish quarter was pillaged; the pogrom left 12 Jews dead and about 50 injured.

In Kiev, a Jewish factory manager, Menahem Mendel Beilis, was accused of murdering 13-year-old Andriy Yushchinskyi, a Christian child, and using his blood to make matzos. He was acquitted by an all-Christian jury after a sensational trial in 1913.

In 1928, the Jews of Massena, New York were falsely accused of kidnapping and killing a Christian girl in the Massena blood libel.

Jews were frequently accused of the ritual murder of Christians for their blood in Der Stürmer, an antisemitic newspaper which was published in Nazi Germany. The infamous May 1934 issue of the paper was later banned by the Nazi authorities, because it went so far as to compare alleged Jewish ritual murder with the Christian rite of communion.

In Tattarisuo case, where several severed heads, arms and other body parts were discovered in a spring, the far-right media in Finland blamed the case on Jewish ritual murder.

In 1938 the British fascist politician and veterinarian Arnold Leese published an antisemitic booklet in defense of the Blood Libel which he titled My Irrelevant Defence: Meditations inside Gaol and Out on Jewish Ritual Murder.

The 1944–1946 anti-Jewish violence in Poland, which according to some estimates killed as many as 1,000–2,000 Jews (237 documented cases), involved, among other elements, accusations of blood libel, especially in the case of the 1946 Kielce pogrom.

Views of the Catholic Church

The attitude of the Catholic Church towards these accusations and the cults venerating children supposedly killed by Jews has varied over time. The Papacy generally opposed them, although it had problems in enforcing its opposition.

In 1911, the Dictionnaire apologétique de la foi catholique, an important French Catholic encyclopedia, published an analysis of the blood libel accusations. This may be taken as being broadly representative of educated Catholic opinion in continental Europe at that time. The article noted that the popes had generally refrained from endorsing the blood libel, and it concluded that the accusations were unproven in a general sense, but it left open the possibility that some Jews had committed ritual murders of Christians. Other contemporary Catholic sources (notably the Jesuit periodical La Civiltà Cattolica) promoted the blood libel as truth.

Today, the accusations are rarer in Catholic circles. While Simon of Trent's local status as a saint was removed in 1965, several towns in Spain still commemorate the blood libel.

Papal pronouncements

Pope Innocent IV took action against the blood libel: "5 July 1247 Mandate to the prelates of Germany and France to annul all measures adopted against the Jews on account of the ritual murder libel, and to prevent the accusation of Arabs on similar charges" (The Apostolic See and the Jews, Documents: 492–1404; Simonsohn, Shlomo, pp. 188–189, 193–195, 208). In 1247, he wrote also that "Certain of the clergy, and princes, nobles and great lords of your cities and dioceses have falsely devised certain godless plans against the Jews, unjustly depriving them by force of their property, and appropriating it themselves;... they falsely charge them with dividing up among themselves on the Passover the heart of a murdered boy...In their malice, they ascribe every murder, wherever it chance to occur, to the Jews. And on the ground of these and other fabrications, they are filled with rage against them, rob them of their possessions without any formal accusation, without confession, and without legal trial and conviction, contrary to the privileges granted to them by the Apostolic See... Since it is our pleasure that they shall not be disturbed,... we ordain that ye behave towards them in a friendly and kind manner. Whenever any unjust attacks upon them come under your notice, redress their injuries, and do not suffer them to be visited in the future by similar tribulations."

Pope Gregory X (1271–1276) issued a letter which criticized the practice of blood libels and forbade arrests and persecution of Jews based on a blood libel, ... unless — which we do not believe — they be caught in the commission of the crime.

Pope Benedict XIV wrote the bull Beatus Andreas (22 February 1755) in response to an application for the formal canonization of the 15th-century Andreas Oxner, a folk saint alleged to have been murdered by Jews "out of hatred for the Christian faith". Benedict did not dispute the claim that Jews murdered Christian children, and in anticipating that further cases on this basis would be brought appears to have accepted it as accurate, but decreed that in such cases beatification or canonization would be inappropriate.

Blood libels in the Islamic world

In late 1553 or 1554, Suleiman the Magnificent, the reigning sultan of the Ottoman Empire, issued a firman (royal decree) which formally denounced blood libels against the Jews.

In 1840, following the Western outrage arising from the Damascus affair, British politician and leader of the British Jewish community, Sir Moses Montefiore, backed by other influential westerners including Britain's Lord Palmerston and Damascus consul Charles Henry Churchill, the French lawyer Adolphe Crémieux, Austrian consul Giovanni Gasparo Merlato, Danish missionary John Nicolayson, and Solomon Munk, persuaded Sultan Abdulmejid I in Constantinople, to issue a firman on 6 November 1840 intended to halt the spread of blood libel accusations in the Ottoman Empire. The edict declared that blood libel accusations were a slander against Jews and they would be prohibited throughout the Ottoman Empire, and read in part:

... and for the love we bear to our subjects, we cannot permit the Jewish nation, whose innocence for the crime alleged against them is evident, to be worried and tormented as a consequence of accusations which have not the least foundation in truth...

In the remainder of the 19th century and into the 20th century, there were many instances of the blood libel in Ottoman lands, such as the 1881 Fornaraki affair. However the libel almost always came from the Christian community, sometimes with the connivance of Greek or French diplomats. The Jews could usually count on the goodwill of the Ottoman authorities and increasingly on the support of British, Prussian and Austrian representatives.

In the 1910 Shiraz blood libel, the Jews of Shiraz, Iran, were falsely accused of murdering a Muslim girl. The entire Jewish quarter was pillaged, with the pogrom leaving 12 Jews dead and about 50 injured.

In 1983, Mustafa Tlass, the Syrian Minister of Defense, wrote and published The Matzah of Zion, which is a treatment of the Damascus affair of 1840 that repeats the ancient "blood libel", that Jews use the blood of murdered non-Jews in religious rituals such as baking Matza bread. In this book, he argues that the true religious beliefs of Jews are "black hatred against all humans and religions", and no Arab country should ever sign a peace treaty with Israel. Tlass re-printed the book several times. Following the book's publication, Tlass told Der Spiegel, that this accusation against Jews was valid and he also claimed that his book is "an historical study ... based on documents from France, Vienna and the American University in Beirut."