On Jewish Apostates Who Affirmed the Blood Libel

And some other historical miscellany

First, I’m curious:

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I felt like rounding out the blood libel stuff by recapping a bit, as well as providing some relevant information that didn’t make it in. One of the main points of the series was fairly obvious: as the coating of post-War philosemitism finally wears off, this kind of questioning or inverting of previously-held historical narratives will only grow. Everyone’s already familiar with this tendency in mainstream but especially right-wing discourse, if only from the spectacle of Darryl Cooper’s appearance on the JRE, and to my mind it’s only epitomized by the attempted rehabilitation of the very charge that’s become a generic stand-in for discredited, malicious slanders. That being the case, I’ve always thought it important to engage in the kind of “juridical discourse” about these narratives that Hannah Johnson writes about in her book, something so characteristic of the pre-War era but effectively absent from today’s mainstream strategies for combatting antisemitism; where this is even attempted nowadays it’s usually way too apologetic or just inaccurate to be taken seriously.

As for the blood libel itself, there really aren’t any adequate historical assessments, owing to modern historiography’s lack of interest as seen in the generally pithy treatments given to Toaff, as well as to the insufficiencies of older works like those of Strack, Trachtenberg, Chwolson, Osiander, Wagenseil, Levinsohn, etc. Thus my third essay provides a critical account of the rumor that actually deals with the question of historicity at length, having gone in with no prior assumptions on this point. While the history is also fascinating in its own right, the post demonstrates how we observe in the blood libel basically all that’s expected of a myth: dissemination, malleability, predictability, etc. It was a rumor that was more or less characteristic of pre-modernity, and the question that to some degree remains is how it managed to sustain itself centuries after people stopped believing Jewish men were cursed to menstruate or stink and host desecrations basically died out.

“Purim and the Legacy of Jewish Violence”

To clarify: to say the blood libel was a Christian myth isn’t to say there weren’t any strange Jewish rituals, anti-Christian resentments, or lashings-out at the majority. But it’s also just true that, as Yuval argues, “Jews in the Middle Ages were reluctant to use violence in acts of revenge.” This wasn’t even due to a lack of desire on the part of medieval Jews, but rather that they held that such violence “should be deferred until the messianic age. When recalling the names of those Jews who had died at the hands of a non-Jew, Ashkenazic Jews would commonly add: ‘God will revenge his blood’: God will take revenge, not man.” Expressions of contempt as such were mostly confined to private curses and liturgy, partly for the aforementioned innate theological reasons but more broadly due to their vulnerable position amid a far stronger majority that was easily provoked and didn’t hesitate toward destructive retaliation, something the Jews knew all too well. Indeed the Legacy of Jewish Violence explored in Elliott Horowitz’s Reckless Rites is mostly a matter of scattered acts, harshly punished, in medieval Europe, nothing one could call systematic let alone ritualized.

As Horowitz demonstrates, this also isn’t a matter of Jews being uniquely benevolent or pacifistic, as is occasionally argued. Where they had more wiggle room, or where the shadow of retaliation didn’t loom so dark, they were very much capable of the same kind of violence as Christians, as seen in the Jewish role in the massacre of thousands of Christians at the Mamilla reservoir in AD 614. This may also have been the case at Inmestar, Syria in AD 415, the year during which Socrates Scholasticus alleges a group of drunken Jews tied a Christian boy to a cross and abused him so severely he actually died. This is the only allegation of its kind prior to the ritual murder charge, though it apparently occurred during the festival of Purim rather than Passover and no ritual element was involved:

At Inmestar, a place so-called, which lies between Chalcis and Antioch in Syria, the Jews were in the habit of celebrating certain sports among themselves: and, whereas they habitually did many foolish actions in the course of their sports, they were put beyond themselves [on this occasion] by drunkenness, and began deriding Christians and even Christ himself in their games. They derided the Cross and those who hoped in the Crucified, and they hit upon this plan. They took a Christian child and bound him to a cross and hung him up; and to begin with they mocked and derided him for some time; but after a short space they lost control of themselves, and so ill-treated the child that they killed him.

Obviously this is historically unverifiable, but due to its undeniable parallels with The Life and Passion of St William some scholars have plausibly suggested the account, preserved for Christian writers through the Middle Ages in the Historia Tripartita, was actually the inspiration for the “Jewish crucifixion” narrative that would emerge at Norwich. After all Thomas does suggest the Jews had bound William’s un-pierced side to the cross.¹

Purim precedes Easter, and did not coincide with William’s abduction, but the holidays can actually come quite close.² It celebrates a particularly violent episode in the Jewish historical tradition, usually involving a mock hanging of a Haman effigy and plenty of alcohol. A few years before the Inmestar incident, Theodosius II issued an edict to “prohibit the Jews from setting fire to Aman … made to resemble the saint cross in contempt of the Christian faith,” and this kind of anti-Christian imagery would continue, suppressed, through the Middle Ages in Europe. So it’s easy to see why Cecil Roth suggested this nearby, occasionally anti-Christian rowdiness gave rise to the blood libel altogether, especially recalling that William was found hanged like Haman. When the boy’s uncle-in-law is recorded formally accusing the Jews at the annual synod, he lays out his case as follows:

And you yourselves can conclude that it is so, firstly from what by custom the Jews have been obliged to do on these days, and then from the manner of the pains inflicted and the type of wounds, as well as from the manifold agreements of many circumstances. To these and many other highly convincing proofs of arguments, Leviva, the maternal aunt of the boy in question, is added with her most valid forewarning, as is his lamentable mother, in tears, who complained of the crafty frauds of the cunning messenger of the Jews, who cheated her and led her astray and abducted her son.

Granted these are pretty ambiguous “proofs,” but assuming it’s an accurate-enough report of what was said, Roth argues this mysterious “custom the Jews have been obliged to do on these days” may in fact have been a reference to Purim. Quite compelling, but again, we’ll never know for sure.

The initial accusation was evidently the result of simple prejudice: when the forester finds the body he observes “no Christian but only a Jew would have taken it upon himself to kill the innocent in this way with such rash daring.” And when news reached the city, “it was already claimed by many that only the Jews could do such things, especially at that time” and the “zeal of pious fervour incited everyone towards the destruction of the Jews.” After the ball got rolling, Leviva introduced her own “most valid forewarning” in the form of a dream she’d had the night before Palm Sunday:

I saw myself, perchance in the middle of the marketplace, when suddenly the Jews charged at me from everywhere; running they surrounded me as I escaped and caught me as I was encircled. And as they seized me, they broke my right leg with a club and tore it off the rest of my body and without delay escaped, and they seemed to be taking it away with them. Oh, what a true foretelling in a true vision! Oh, how truly happy I would be had the dream I dreamt not been true!

Jews-on-the-brain can do crazy things to people, and one can only assume this kind of paranoid thinking was typical of those non-skeptical Norwich residents.

Theobald’s Confession

But the most sensational evidence put forth in The Life comes from of a certain Theobald, a former Jew who converted to Christianity upon hearing of the “glorious greatness of miracles which by divine virtue happened through the merits of the blessed martyr William.” Apparently imputing to the Jews a Christian understanding of their exile and humiliation, he eerily explains how

in the ancient writings of their ancestors it was written that Jews could not achieve their freedom or ever return to the lands of their fathers without the shedding of human blood. Hence it was decided by them a long time ago that every year, to the shame and affront of Christ, a Christian somewhere on earth be sacrificed to the highest God, and so they take revenge for the injuries of Him, whose death is the reason for their exclusion from their fatherland and their exile as slaves in foreign lands.

Theobald goes on to describe exactly how this is carried out: through an annual meeting of Spanish rabbis in Narbonne (“where the seed of kings and their glory flourishes greatly”), convened to decide which Jewish community would host that year’s ritual sacrifice by way of casting lots, possibly another Purim tie-in; in 1144, it happened to fall on the English Jews, who then collectively decided on Norwich. The Jews were thus universally complicit in the systematic murder of Christian children, an ancient practice which until then had apparently gone unnoticed.

Now obviously, the same “miracles” that purportedly converted Theobald were hardly sufficient to persuade even Norwich’s Christians. And rather than occurring at random, as would be expected with the casting of lots, we’ve already seen how ritual murder allegations recur in the same general region for the first few decades, and almost entirely in the Ashkenazic areas. Toaff relates Theobald’s narrative surprisingly straightforwardly, even though it explicitly implicates the Sephardim, “the leaders and rabbis of the Jews who dwell in Spain” rather than “the representatives of the Jewish communities, headed by their local rabbis” as he misleadingly puts it.³ Nevertheless, Theobald’s quite Protocolsian story spread widely, being hinted at by Thomas of Cantimpré in reference to Pforzheim (1267), as well as by the Jewish defendants at Valréas (1247) and elsewhere.

Some historians have doubted the very existence of Theobald, seeing him as part of the “conversion of stubborn Jews” motif common to medieval miracle stories. Others, namely Gavin Langmuir and Joseph Jacobs, have claimed his implied knowledge of the so-called Nasi of Narbonne indicates the figure possessed information available only to Jews. But this isn’t true. Rose points out that the Nasi was far from unknown in Christian circles:

William of Malmesbury, writing in the 1130s, made reference to the Nasi in the legend of the “Jewish Pope” of Narbonne (summum papam) and hints of a Jewish conspiracy. Peter the Venerable testified to a general knowledge among Christians of the contemporary Nasi of Narbonne in his work “Against Jews” (Adversus Judaeorum, ca. 1148) and derided his importance. “I do not propose to accept that the king be one that some of you confess is from the city of Narbonne in Gaul, or others confess is at Rouen, which is ridiculous. ... I will not accept any Jew as king of the Jews except one who lives and rules in the kingdom of the Jews.” The existence of the Nasi of Narbonne was an important element in crusade theology and of as much concern to Christians as to Jews in the years when the Life and Passion was composed. It was not an obscure office, unfamiliar to educated Christians.

Thus, the alleged testimony doesn’t really offer unique Jewish perspectives. Rose again:

The words and explanations that Brother Thomas put into the mouth of the convert Theobald reflect Christian views of Jewish behavior, not familiarity with actual Jewish practice.

Of course if we relied on the expert readings of the Ritualmord investigators elsewhere on this website, or more prominently on X, we would somehow reach the exact opposite conclusion: that “Rose however does point out that Theobold must have had significant jewish learning because he was aware of the Nasi (i.e., Prince of the jews) in Narbonne in the twelfth century.” The writer, “Karl Radl,” regularly comes away with the opposite views of the scholars he cites. He goes on to do this with Gavin Langmuir, who he says frames Norwich as a mere plagiarism of the rumors of antiquity when Langmuir in fact spends the opening pages of his Norwich essay ruling out that exact theory, as mentioned in the first footnote below. It’s puzzling.

The Jig… Is It Up?

Real or invented, Theobald would not be the only Jewish apostate recorded as affirming the blood libel to Christians. It’s a little known fact of history that even the most notorious of apostates, Nicholas Donin, seems to have done so. We have one reference to this in a letter of ​​Rabbi Jacob ben Elijah of Venice:

Have you not heard what befell Donin the apostate, who rejected the laws of God and His Torah, and also did not believe in the religion of Rome . . . and he lost all faith.⁴ And became an evil root sprouting wormwood. This apostate went before the king, who was superior to all kings in name and honor, and spoke lies and made false accusations that on Passover nights we slaughter young boys still accustomed to their mothers’ breasts, and that the Jews had accepted this upon themselves, and that the hands of merciful women cooked the children and we eat their flesh and drink their blood. And those who believed this slander, the hand of the Lord was upon them to confound them until they were destroyed. This wicked man sought to destroy us, and gave a sword into the hand of the king to kill us. He lied to him. But God returned to him double his iniquity, and cut him off and destroyed him. . . . And the honored king, in his piety and cleanness of hands, did not believe his words, and paid no heed to him, knowing that they are folly and nonsense and vanity.

This is a very interesting passage as it suggests, at least to the minds of Yuval and those he cites, that Donin was one of the converts called upon by Frederick II, which could also explain why the Talmud was at issue even then. Further, in his debates with Rabbi Yehiel, Cardinal Odo of Chateauroux is recorded as stating the following: “You (Jews) eat the blood of the uncircumcised (Gentiles). For thus did Balaam prophesy: And drinks the blood of the slain.” In the context of the Fulda spectacle only a few years prior, the meaning here is obvious, yet the blood libel doesn’t otherwise seem to have been one of the major issues of the Disputation of Paris. I’d still imagine this is something the online blood libel people would bring up all the time if they actually read books.

Even at Trent, there’s the reputed testimony of the convert Giovanni da Feltre, who alleged his own father had participated in the murder of a Christian child to collect his blood for use in Passover rituals⁵; since he was currently a prisoner, this statement was considered infamis and couldn’t legally be used in the subsequent trial. Then there were the allegations of August Briman (real name: Aron Isidor), Rohling’s intellectual accomplice, albeit thoroughly discredited by the efforts of Franz Delitsch. Or consider the former Moldavian rabbi discussed by Horowitz who went around claiming Christian blood was used for hamantashen jelly. As we’ve already seen, Rudolf von Schlettstadt claimed certain Jews had told him they required Christian blood to ameliorate their curse of menstruation, and Thomas of Cantimpré similarly reported the following:

it has been assuredly discovered that every year in every province they cast lots to determine which province or town should hand over Christian blood to the other cities. Indeed it is certain from the Holy Gospel that when Pilate washed his hands and said, “I am innocent of the blood of this man,” the most ungodly Jews cried out: “May his blood be upon us and upon our children!” The most blessed Augustine appears to allude to this in a discourse, which begins “In cruce,” that in consequence of the curses upon their fathers, the criminal disposition is even now transmitted to the children by the taint in the blood so that godless posterity suffers torment inexpiably through its violent coursing through their veins

He continues:

Besides, I heard that a learned Jew, who was converted to the faith of our times, said that a man, who was reverenced among them as a prophet, had prophesied to the Jews at the end of his life: “You may be firmly convinced, that you can only be cured by Christian blood of this shameful torment, with which you are punished.” This utterance was caught at by the ever-blind and godless Jews, and they hit upon the plan that every year Christian blood should be shed in every province, so that they might be healed by such blood. And he added: “They all interpreted the utterance badly by understanding the blood to be that of any Christian whatever; whilst yet that blood was meant, which is daily poured on the altar for the forgiveness of sins; everyone of our people who, converted to belief in Christ, receives this, as is proper, is soon healed of the curse inherited from his fathers.”

Yet, assuming these people even existed, they were the rare exceptions among Jewish converts to Christianity and contributed to a long tradition of spiteful apostates lashing out at their former communities. (If this animosity wasn’t the cause of their conversion in the first place, they surely didn’t feel too welcome afterward.) The fact is that most converts either had nothing to say on the matter or publicly denounced the blood accusation as fiction; Strack compiles a number of such testimonies in Ch. 14 of The Jew and Human Sacrifice. Even extremely vocal and hostile converts like Johannes Pfefferkorn, who made all sorts of accusations, denied the blood libel. In his “Speculum Adhortationis Judaicae ad Christum” from 1507, Pfefferkorn writes,

I should here like to refute a wide-spread, but worthless piece of gossip against the Jews, in order that we Christians may not in consequence become ridiculous. It is commonly said among Christians, that the Jews have need to use Christian blood as a means of cure, and therefore kill little Christian children. Dear Christians! Believe it not! It is contrary to the Holy Scriptures and the law of Nature and reason. Therefore I must defend the Jews in this matter, but with one limitation. It is conceivable that Jews are found, and perhaps may hereafter be found, who secretly persecute Christian children even to their death, nevertheless not on account of any necessity for having their blood, but out of hatred, and in order to revenge themselves on the Christians, even as they once, when they had more power than they have now, publicly persecuted Christ, the Apostles and his pupils, and followers. Therefore do not be disquieted about it! … Flee from and avoid accordingly this ludicrous, mendacious talk which, if you wish to consider it closely, contributes no little to casting contempt on the Christians. Abide by the truth, whilst abandoning such delusions, oh Christians! We do not want to invent anything that is false and brings us no honour!

It seems to me that if we have a mixed bag of converts, some of whom allege variations of the blood libel were true but most of whom allege it was false despite the incentives otherwise, it’s safe to assume not ignorance on the part of the latter camp but malice on the part of the former.

Were Host Desecrations Real?

Finally I thought I should clarify some things about the accusation of Host desecration. I was asked whether I genuinely thought this one was just as mythic as the blood libel, and certainly it seems a lot less far-fetched. Even Horowitz appears open to the idea, claiming that “in recent decades Jewish historians have been more open to the possibility that such acts of desecration, not necessarily always premeditated, could indeed have taken place from time to time.” He quotes David Berger, who wrote, “I have little doubt that if … a Jew had found himself in possession of this idolatrous object symbolizing the faith of his oppressors, it would not have fared very well in his hands,” and I can only agree. But there’s a big difference between the isolated act here or there and the systematic persecution of the Host attributed to the Jews, starting sometime in the mid-to-late 1200s.

Scholars pair Host desecration with the blood libel not just because of their concurrence but also because of their shared objective in the minds of medieval Christians: the reliving of the deicide. But the thematic similarities are even greater than that. In Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews, Miri Rubin characterizes the reports as follows:

An encounter between a Jew and a Christian willing to hand over a consecrated host in return for money or favours. The accomplice is most frequently a woman, often a debtor and sometimes a maid employed by Jews. The abuse—at home, in a synagogue, in a secret room—includes piercing, cutting, cooking, boiling, all of which initially bring forth bleeding [miraculously, of the bread], and then some secondary form of miraculous transformation of the host into a child or into a crucifix. Occasionally this miraculous change so terrifies the Jew(s) that attempts are made to dispose of the host (by burial, by throwing it into water or into a place of filth). Once hidden, the host begins to produce signs which reveal its location (lights, voices) and lead to discovery.

As we can see, in a very real sense the Host desecration was merely another form of the blood libel: the Jews secretly gather to stab the Host wafer and make it bleed, after which there’s often a miraculous discovery. This is made all the more blatant given the medieval “linking of Christ Child and consecrated host.” (When Bertold of Regensburg was explaining why only the appearance of the transubstantiated bread remains unaltered, he famously asked, “Who would want to bite off a little child, its head or its hand, or its foot?”) Even the timing of the accusations would often align, with Easter “considered to be the favoured time for Jewish eucharistic abuse, close as it is to the Jewish Passover.” Other scholars like Yuval have in fact suggested certain medieval Passover traditions like the nailing of the afikomen to the synagogue wall have had their influence; in Brandenburg (1510), a tortured Jew actually “confessed under duress that he had hung the Host on the wall of the synagogue—where a piece of matzah was indeed found.”

One of the most well-known instances of Host desecration was at Passau (1478), when a Christian servant caught pilfering a Host implicated the local Jews.⁶ Hsia summarizes:

The Passau magistrates arrested and tortured many Jews; and, although their testimonies conflicted, the magistrates concluded that the chanter Mandel had secretly smuggled the Hosts into the synagogue, where two men, Veidl and Vetterl, stabbed Christ’s Body with a knife until blood flowed and the Eucharist turned itself into a young boy. The Jews then allegedly threw the Hosts into an oven from which two angels and doves flew out of the flames. ... On 10 March 1478 all purported participants in the Host desecration were condemned to death: four Jews accepted baptism to die a quicker death of decapitation; Veidl and Vetterl, the accused torturers of the Hosts, were themselves tormented with glowing pincers and then burnt, an excruciating form of execution shared by their accusor, Eisengreishamer [a Christian]. Altogether, forty Jews and their families accepted baptism; the rest were expelled. The synagogue was razed in 1479; on its site, the Church of Our Savior was completed in 1484.

It’s worth noting that the rejection of Church dogmas of the Host is something both Jews and many of the heretics had in common. For the latter, this deviation was portrayed as really a secret, radical contempt for the Eucharist, hence all the questionably pornographic stories of heretics mixing in blood as well as semen or the ashes of children produced from ritual orgies. Langmuir’s remark is worth reflecting on:

In the ninth century, Radbertus and Ratramnus had debated as to whether believers actually partook of the historical blood of Christ, but it was only in the eleventh century that the denials of heretics and the theses of Berengar of Tours provoked widespread discussion and debate about the reality of the blood. And only then were those considered heretics accused of engaging in a literal form of ritual cannibalism.

As for the charges against the Jews: yes, one can’t rule out the possibility that behind all the miracle gloss lay at least a few true occasions of spiteful Jews desecrating the Host; the desecration of sacred objects apart from the Host, Horowitz notes, “was not reported exclusively by Christian sources.” Yet the Host as the literal body of Christ was the most vigorously protected item in Christian society. About his above-cited comment, David Berger in a brief reply to Horowitz says he stands by it, but points to the line right before: “Obtaining a consecrated host was no simple matter, and there is no reason to believe that any medieval Jew bothered to take the risk.” (Certainly not once the burnings and expulsions started up.) I also find it striking that out of all the centuries in which Hosts were revered by Christians—and the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist as a doctrine dates back to the early Church—Jews apparently never thought to desecrate one up until that consequential 13th century. In all likelihood I think these allegations, too, are more strongly explained by the beliefs and attitudes of contemporary Christians: that their Jewish neighbors lusted not just for the perpetual death of Christ but for his actual body and blood, reenacted through both the Host and the most innocent members of Christendom.

1. Many scholars, including Horowitz, mention the incident, though I rely on Langmuir (214–216) here. While Langmuir tries to argue accusations from antiquity had no impact on Norwich, his argument actually isn't too compelling when it comes to Inmestar; also see O'Brien, 113.

2. In the linked essay, Cecil Roth claimed the two holidays will occasionally even coincide, but Yuval has since corrected him: “such a conjunction could only occur after the introduction of the Gregorian calendar in 1582. During the Middle Ages, these two festivals never fell on the same day. At the latest, Purim fell during Lent.”

3. “i rappresentanti delle comunità ebraiche, con in testa i loro rabbini”

4. Donin was not in fact motivated out of a newfound faith in Christ as some would have it but mainly seems to have been disgruntled with his former community.

5. Toaff claims this accusation of Landshut (1440) is “precisely confirmed by the extant contemporary historical documentation,” citing Hsia, but Hsia actually appears to say nothing of the sort.

6. Non-Jews would also occasionally steal Hosts for use in popular magick and love potions, providing all the more reason for their safekeeping. I’d imagine a number of host desecration incidents were the result of these types falsely implicating Jews after getting caught.