The blood libel

What it is

The blood libel is the accusation that Jews murder non-Jews, usually Christian children, to use their blood in religious ritual, most often tied to Passover. ³ It is false in every version, and it has been repeated for nearly nine hundred years. ¹

The first documented European case was in Norwich, England, in 1144. ¹ A boy named William was found stabbed to death in woods near the town, and local Jews were accused of having "tortured him with all the tortures wherewith our Lord was tortured, and on Long Friday hanged him on a rood." ¹ The accusation was written up and promoted by a monk named Thomas of Monmouth, who charged the Jews of Norwich with killing the boy in mockery of the crucifixion of Jesus. ² Plenty of townspeople doubted the story at the time. ² It spread anyway, a veneration cult grew up around the boy, and out of it came the further claim that Jewish leaders selected a Christian victim for murder every year. ²

From Norwich the charge traveled. Cases followed in Gloucester in 1168, Blois in 1171, Saragossa in 1182, Bristol in 1183, Fulda in 1235, Lincoln in 1255, and Munich in 1286. ¹ Scholars count roughly one hundred blood libels between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries, and many of them were followed by massacres. ² In Trent, Italy, in 1475, a two-year-old boy named Simon disappeared and the entire local Jewish community was arrested, tortured, sentenced to death, and burned at the stake. ¹

Church authority was on record against the charge early, and it did not help much. In 1247 Pope Innocent IV declared that Christians charge falsely "that [the Jews] hold a communion rite … with the heart of a murdered child." ³ Neither the pope nor the emperor was heeded. ³ The gap between official doctrine and popular belief stayed open for centuries: the Catholic Church did not formally repudiate the Trent case until 1965, when Simon of Trent was removed from its list of saints. ¹

By the nineteenth century the accusation had moved beyond Christian Europe. On February 5, 1840, a Capuchin friar named Thomas and his Muslim servant, Ibrahim Amara, disappeared in Damascus, and the Capuchins claimed Jews had murdered them for blood to use at Passover. ⁴ A Jewish barber, Solomon Negrin, was arrested and tortured until he confessed and named seven other Jews. ⁴ Two of the accused died under torture and one converted to Islam to escape punishment. ⁴ Sixty-three Jewish children were seized so that their mothers could be pressed for information about where the victims' blood had gone. ⁴ The torture stopped on April 25, 1840, after the Austrian consul intervened. ⁴ A delegation including Moses Montefiore, Louis Loewe, Adolphe Cremieux, and Solomon Munk traveled to Egypt to petition Muhammad Ali for the case to be moved or judged by Europeans. ⁴ The surviving prisoners were freed on August 28, 1840, and the Ottoman sultan issued a firman declaring blood libels false and prohibiting trials based on them. ⁴ The affair also produced an institution: the Alliance Israelite Universelle was founded in its wake as a vehicle for Jewish cooperation across borders. ⁴

The accusation kept surfacing in states with courts and newspapers. In Kyiv, Menahem Mendel Beilis was tried in 1913 for the ritual murder of a Christian child, and although he was acquitted, Russian intellectuals and scholars testified at the trial that Jews attacked Christians and used their blood in rituals. ² In Massena, New York, in 1928, a four-year-old girl went missing and rumors circulated that Jews had kidnapped her for ritual murder before she was found alive. ²

Then came Kielce. On July 1, 1946, a nine-year-old Polish boy named Henryk Blaszczyk disappeared from home in the Polish city. ⁵ He returned on July 3 and told his parents and the police that he had been kidnapped and held in the basement of the local Jewish Committee building, a story he made up to avoid punishment for wandering off. ⁵ The building had no basement, and the account came apart quickly, but the rumor, drawing on the old charge that Jews used the blood of Christian children, had already spread. ⁵ On July 4, 1946, Polish soldiers, police officers, and civilians, including roughly a thousand workers from a local steel mill, attacked the Jews of Kielce. ⁵ At least 42 Jews were killed and more than 40 wounded. ⁵ Two non-Jewish Poles also died, killed either by Jewish residents inside the building or by other Poles for offering help. ⁵ Nine of the attackers were executed on July 14, while senior police and security officials received light sentences or none. ⁵ The victims were Holocaust survivors, and the massacre convinced many Polish Jews that they had no future in Poland. ⁵

Why it still matters

The blood libel is the oldest continuously recycled antisemitic conspiracy theory. The alleged crime is secret by definition, so no evidence is ever required to sustain the charge, and anyone who denies it can be folded into the plot. What it does in practice is take the most frightening thing that can happen in a town, a child gone missing, and convert it into a standing accusation against the neighbors. That is why a charge a pope formally denied in 1247 could still set off a massacre of Holocaust survivors in 1946. ^{3 5}

It also explains why the charge kept finding new hosts. It began as a Christian accusation about the crucifixion, moved into Ottoman Damascus as a tool in the struggle among Western powers for influence in the Near East, ran through a Russian courtroom in 1913, and turned up in a New York village in 1928. ^{3 2} The content stayed the same while the politics around it changed.

Modern repetitions are documented and specific. In October 2000, Egyptian state media published an article titled "Jewish Matzah Made from Arab Blood." ³ A Syrian and Lebanese television series broadcast in 2003 depicted Jews practicing ritual murder to bake matzah. ¹ Networks including al-Jazeera and Hezbollah's Al-Manar have broadcast similar allegations. ³ In November 2015, a Hamas official repeated the accusation on Gaza news networks. ³

Our judgment, not a sourced claim: "Blood libel" has become a phrase people reach for whenever an accusation against Jews or against Israel strikes them as unfair, and the term loses its meaning when it is used that way. The historical charge is narrow and identifiable: Jews kill non-Jews and use the blood in ritual. Criticism of an Israeli government policy is not that, and calling it that makes the real thing harder to name when it appears. The Egyptian headline about matzah and Arab blood is the real thing. ³

The words you'll hear

Blood libel. The allegation that Jews murder non-Jews, especially Christian children, to obtain blood for Passover or other rituals. ³

William of Norwich. The 1144 English case, in which a boy found dead near Norwich was said to have been tortured and killed by Jews, generally treated as the first documented medieval blood libel. ¹

Simon of Trent. The two-year-old whose 1475 disappearance in Trent led to the arrest, torture, and execution of the town's Jewish community; the Catholic Church removed him from its list of saints in 1965. ¹

The Damascus affair. The 1840 case in which Damascus Jews were tortured over the disappearance of a Capuchin friar, ending with the prisoners freed on August 28 and an Ottoman firman declaring such accusations false. ⁴

The Beilis trial. The 1913 Russian prosecution of Menahem Mendel Beilis for ritual murder in Kyiv, which ended in acquittal after scholars testified in court that Jews used Christian blood in rituals. ²

Kielce. The July 4, 1946, pogrom in Poland, set off by a nine-year-old's invented kidnapping story, in which at least 42 Jewish Holocaust survivors were killed. ⁵