The Blood Libel and Historical Revisionism
Things aren't as simple as you think: Part I of III
I’d originally planned on posting something about the blood libel on Passover… of 2024. Needless to say what follows has been long in the making, as its length should make clear, and presents basically all I’ve learned over however many months of scattered research. This is the first of three posts and lays out the purpose of the series; the second presents a critique of Ariel Toaff’s Pasque di sangue and the third makes a historical argument. Going forward blog posts should be much briefer, and hopefully MR will become a more regular blog, in both senses of the word.
If you didn’t know any better, you might think “blood libels” were a fact of everyday life. To the extent the term lives on, its definition has been stretched beyond recognition and the actual meaning nearly lost. But it’s not quite dead. The original blood libel is still remembered and, thanks to the Internet, occasionally reemerges to greet us. That surreal “tunnels” episode back in January, 2024, for example, which should have remained an obscure local dispute but immediately generated bizarre fever dreams that dominated social media for days. To some, this was somehow the latest discovery in an ancient history of covert Jewish blood rituals. Posts about Simon of Trent racked up tens of thousands of likes on X; calls to “remember the tunnels” still echo.
This was undoubtedly the case for Candace Owens, though she wasn’t yet ready to say so. In “Old Myths Don’t Die” from last July I noted a hint at this in her insinuation that Leo Frank hadn’t merely killed Mary Phagan but had done so on Passover for a reason. As deranged as this was I still couldn’t have foreseen what she’d unveil by the end of the month: an earnest conviction that the world was being secretly run by Satanic Jews of the Frankist cult.
Relevant portion from 30:00+
It still baffles me. As with Stalin being a crypto-Jew, these aren’t merely antisemitic ideas—they’re ideas that are fringe even among antisemites. As Candace conceives of things, basically every anti-Jewish rumor is true yet perpetrated by “the Frankists,” including, of course, the blood libel. Thus she implores her followers to
Learn about the Damascus Affair of 1840. Learn about what happened to Eszter Solymosi in Austria[-Hungary] in 1880 [1882] thereafter. There were Christians that kept going missing on holidays.
About the (Leo) Frankist murder covered in my previous post:
During Passover of 1913 he viciously raped and murdered a young Catholic [she was Protestant] girl named Mary Phagan. … They are still trying to shift the blame of this horrific murder—which I believe was a ritualistic murder that took place because I believe he was a Frankist, he descended from Jacob Frank
On an impromptu X Space she summarized her views:
Catholics and Christians were going missing on Passover, and they would find bodies across Europe, and they were able to trace them back to Jews—blood libel! They weren’t Jews, okay? These were Frankists. And so just like Leo Frank killed Mary Phagan on Passover back in 1913 or 1914—I can’t remember the exact date—he did it on Passover for a reason. This Frankist cult which is masquerading behind Jews still participates in this shit to this day, okay?
One shouldn’t bother wondering how she could be unaware the blood libel predates Frankism by centuries. This is the just kind of person who’s hopelessly oblivious to their lack of critical faculties and will continue rattling off their “ideas” as forbidden truths into the future. But Candace isn’t the only political influencer who takes the blood libel seriously, and while I have little doubt she’s genuine others are clearly more cynical. On the day that clips of anxious Hasidic men crawling out of the sewers started going viral, Nick Fuentes actually tweeted “[t]he best thing we can do is capitalize on social media when that window is open, like it is now, by amplifying & creating ‘propaganda.’” He frequently promotes Ron Unz’s lamentable “Oddities of the Jewish Religion” piece to that end.
Nevertheless, the blood libel is not by itself some dangerous topic in need of immediate debunking; as sensational as the claim is, those who believe in its historical or even present reality don’t seem to take it all that seriously. But it does serve as an interesting case study reflecting the growing revisionist assault on mainstream understandings of history in general and Jewish history in particular, a force prepared to touch even those things as widely regarded as absurd and discredited as itself. Indeed the association of the libel with backward medieval superstitions among polite society is something that goes back well before the post-War era. In his closing remarks in the Solymosi case mentioned by Candace—which notably ended up acquitting the Jewish defendants—the embarrassed public prosecutor decried “this absurd offspring of medieval superstition, this stupid subject of fairy tales and the conversation of old village women. … In the name of national justice, I solemnly protest against the fact that superstition has been smuggled into its majestic circle.” It was even lost on Wilhelm Marr, the founder of modern “anti-Semitism” himself, who tried his best in the 1870s to dissociate his new-and-improved ideology from its crude, ignorant forebears. The fact that the blood libel is so widely recognized as the archetype of “peasant antisemitism” explains the widespread, irresponsible usage of the term that continues to annoy many scholars today.
Yet revisionism toward Jewish history and the blood libel specifically is not in fact the exclusive domain of the Internet. Two decades ago saw the publication of Pasque di sangue. Ebrei d'Europa e omicidi rituali (“Passovers of Blood: The Jews of Europe and Ritual Murders”) by Dr. Ariel Toaff, an Italian-Israeli professor at Bar-Ilan and the son of the former Chief Rabbi of Rome. Despite Toaff’s later volte-face after facing backlash, the book does indeed advance an argument for historical child murders perpetrated by Ashkenazic “extremists” for the purpose of heterodox Passover blood rites. Shocking, but in reality this was just the most radical addition to a spate of revisionist works published in the aughts, including most prominently Elliott Horowitz’s Reckless Rites (2006), Israel Yuval’s Two Nations in Your Womb (Eng. ed. 2006; originally an essay from 2000), perhaps even Israel Shahak’s Jewish History, Jewish Religion (2008) if he were a historian. All of these figures are, or were, members of the Israeli Left, and it’s no coincidence this was hot on the heels of the New Historians phenomenon. Following in the footsteps of the critics of what Salo Baron famously termed the lachrymose conception of Jewish history, they feel they’re combatting the apologetic tendencies of prior Jewish historiography, a legacy of the conditions of antisemitism, and restoring agency and normalcy to Jews as historical actors. In the blood libel Toaff is right to see an area where taboo and stigma continue to haunt the activities of scholars—where “[m]ost researchers simply set out in search of more or less convincing confirmation of previously developed theories” as he says in the Preface—but does his thesis actually have any validity, or was it just an overreaction?1
The Dilemma
The blood libel was a bizarre yet highly specific accusation that somehow managed to circulate among Christians for centuries. Naturally this should raise a number of interesting historical questions. Why was it so pervasive and enduring? Where exactly did it come from? Indeed, what precisely is our certainty of its historical falsity based on? How do we actually know the blood libel was in fact libelous? These last two questions are generally not directly addressed in modern works of history, which take the common conclusion for granted. To my own disappointment when first looking into the subject, I’ve still yet to come across any such book or journal article that provides a fully satisfying answer. Where you might expect to find one, as in Hsia’s The Myth of Ritual Murder, you instead find justifications for its absence:
Writing about the blood libel is hazardous. There is always the temptation to begin a dialogue with the past, the impulse to refute the historical accusations against victims of a past age. But at issue is not the veracity of ritual murder—that was thoroughly discredited in the late nineteenth century by scholars who set out to refute the renewed charges of ritual murder in a time of heightened anti-Semitism—rather, the task for historians is to reconstruct and interpret the elusive reality, the motives and functions behind these fantastic fabrications of ritual murder.
As indicated, this was not always the case. Prior to WWII with its lasting cultural impact, Jewish historians and laymen along with their non-Jewish defenders2 found themselves with no recourse but to vigorously debate the anti-Semitic narratives and arguments gaining a foothold in the public conversation, as with the resurgent interest in Ritualmord at the fin de siècle. As Anna Foa relates in her review of Pasque di sangue, “if at the end of the nineteenth century, more precisely in 1891, Hermann Strack could still feel the need in his book [The Jew and Human Sacrifice] … to clearly affirm the innocence of the Jews, later historiography had taken these premises absolutely for granted and instead investigated the construction of the myth of blood in history. No historian worthy of the name had so far taken seriously the question of whether the Jews could in some way have practiced ritual sacrifices.” (No historian, of course, until Toaff.) This may well be a justified impulse, but drowning the substance of history in oceans of meta-commentary becomes risky when the revisionists appear.
I think to most who know what the term even means, the blood libel is easily filed away as another medieval hysteria, something self-evidently absurd because it involves religious Jews doing two things expressly (and prominently3) forbidden by Jewish law: committing human sacrifice and consuming blood. But the history is somewhat more complicated than that. As EM Rose points out, “[a]lthough the ritual murder accusation is perceived as medieval, it spread most widely during the modern period … more in the nineteenth century than in all preceding centuries combined.” Additionally, interpretations of the Law were not always so simple and do not necessarily rule out the potentially unconventional beliefs and actions of fanatics. While it would be enough to dismiss the views of the cruder Ritualmord popularizers like Henri Desportes—for whom the libel involved “national and lawful crimes, observed and practiced by all the Jewish people”—the more slippery revisionism has invariably implicated only a fringe of Ashkenazic Jewry since at least the time of Strack’s rival, August Rohling.
Hayyim Schauss’ popular book, The Lifetime of a Jew, points to the habit in Jewish history in which local customs, often influenced by “the impact of the superstitious non-Jewish environment,” would sneak their way into practice and become cemented to the point where “the protests of the rabbis were in vain. The folk would not discard any customs that appealed to the popular mind.” In Ch. 15 of his aforementioned work, Strack surveys four typical seforim of practical superstition, finding a number of formulas that indeed made use of animal or menstrual blood. Such were of course popular ingredients in medieval magic across the board, and Strack notes “a considerable amount of the practices here alluded to are of non-Jewish origin.” This by itself should be enough to dispel the notion that blood was just too culturally reviled to have ever been utilized,4 though he specifies that in none of the recipes he reviewed was it the case that the blood “should be drunk or swallowed dry for superstitious purposes.” But Toaff, for his part, cites a wealth of support for even the occasional ingestion of blood among Jews—medieval segullot; local, anomalous circumcision rituals; even, and most compellingly, two rabbinical responsa—although the nature of such evidence makes it difficult to assess just how widespread this truly was.5 Further, the anti-blood injunction in Leviticus 17 is given in the specific context of kosher animal slaughter, and although the Talmud and later halakhic codes like the Mishneh Torah and Shulkhan Aruch extend it to human blood as well Toaff argues this was always a weaker ruling, even claiming the Tosafists basically disregarded it altogether.6
But if not this, then again: what precisely is our certainty of the blood libel’s historical falsity based on? How can we be so sure that Jews were universally innocent of this kind of violent fanatical act at a time when violent fanaticism was so rampant in Europe? The argument has occasionally been made, semi-apologetically, that even if there were some basis in truth to the legend it would implicate the Jews as a whole no more than the acts of radical Christians, far more devastating, would implicate modern Christendom. Marr himself made this point in his manifesto, penned right before the blood libel’s reemergence in Germany:
Yes! If individual fanatical Jews had really slaughtered Christian children during the Passover festival in the Middle Ages, if such insane incidents had occurred, which cannot be proven historically, then these would be no more abominations than crimes in general, and would not justify a general religious hatred. Just as little as the slander of certain pietistic sects against Christianity could do this.
For those uninterested in the history itself it might be tempting to simply agree with Mr. Anti-Semitism. It’s true, every people has its freaks, and if anything this would constitute a mere drop in the bucket of the senseless religious violence of the Middle Ages, the far greater part of which undoubtedly flowed from majority to minority, from Christian to Jew; it’s only to the antisemite that Jewish crimes are uniquely sinister and generalizable. But for those of us who are interested in the actual history, this miserable status quo might be worth further investigating for its insights into the Jewish side of things.
Two Nations in Your Womb
One curiosity of the blood libel is the marked disparity of accusations levied against the Ashkenazic and Sephardic communities. The late medievalist Gavin Langmuir proposed one explanation for this phenomenon in an essay, noting that “[i]n 1096, most of the Jews lived in mediterranean Europe, and the greatest number of Crusaders came from the South, but the only great massacres of Jews took place in the North, as well as during the Second and Third Crusades.” This reflects a “contrast between the religious or ideological fanaticism of Northern Europe and the relatively humane treatment of Jews in Mediterranean Europe,” something resulting, in Langmuir’s opinion, in the greatest share of blood libels occurring in the predominantly Ashkenazic regions. For whatever reason, the Christians in these areas were just more receptive to anti-Jewish myths.
But this outsize hostility was also present in the theology of these Jewish communities themselves. A core insight of Two Nations is the nature of what Israel Yuval terms the “vengeful redemption” anticipated by the Ashkenazim. While Jewish eschatologies have always necessitated the downfall of the oppressors—epitomized by Edom, or Esau, which came to refer to the Holy Roman Empire or Christendom at large—Yuval argues the Ashkenazic view was uniquely punitive, emphasizing God’s collective punishment and even annihilation of the nations in the messianic age. One thinks of Isaiah 63’s personification of God, garments stained red after stomping in the bloody winepress of his enemies on the day of vengeance, a motif echoed in the Book of Revelation (14:19, 19:15). This is contrasted with the “proselytizing redemption” carried by the Sephardim and others, which Yuval likens to the Augustinian view: only the wicked non-Jews will be destroyed, but righteous “members of the other faith will be kept alive so that they will be able to witness the true faith when the time comes.”7
The idea was further that the more Jewish bodies pile up under the persecutions of Edom, the closer this vengeance was to being exacted. Yuval discusses the concept of the heavenly Porphyrion, God’s holy white garment stained with the blood of martyrs in a twist on Isaiah 63, each stain serving as a reminder or celestial tally of sorts. As the Yalkut Shimoni puts it:
For every single soul of Israel that Esau killed, the Holy One blessed be He took from their blood and dipped in it His porphyrion until it was the color of blood; and when the Day of Judgment comes and He sits upon the dais to judge him [Esau], He will wear that porphyrion and show him the body of every righteous person that is recorded on it, as it is said, “He will execute judgment among the nations, filling them with corpses.”
These messianic aspirations would probably peak during Passover, a holiday “addressed to the future deliverance no less than it is to preserving the memory of the historical Exodus”—next year in Jerusalem. Indeed the entire end times scenario was conceived of as mirroring the Exodus narrative, beginning with the plagues cast upon Egypt–Edom; e.g., he points to the Talmudic discussion in Pesahim 5a according to which the ritual burning of chametz symbolizes the future destruction of Esau. Of course this exegesis was common to all Jews, but a special Ashkenazic bitterness may be seen in the fact that “Pour out Thy Wrath” of the Passover Haggadah8 was of medieval Franco-German composition, reflective of a whole suite of anti-Christian curses they’d developed.
And this animosity would only be intensified by the First Crusade. The Rhineland massacres of 1096 have long been thought to symbolize an inflection point in the history of Christian-Jewish relations, destroying the basic modus vivendi of the preceding millennium and introducing the rise of a distinct “chimerical antisemitism” in the High Middle Ages, to use Langmuir’s term. As Salo Baron wrote:
In many ways 1096 marked a turning point in Jewish history. ... Alienage and insecurity, theretofore mainly theoretical concepts which affected the lives of individual Jews to but a limited extent, now became the overpowering concerns of all thinking persons on both sides.
But even darker than the scale of the tragedy itself were the circumstances of many of the deaths, namely the occurrence of corporate suicides: Jewish adults taking their own lives before they were butchered, killing their children before they could be kidnapped and baptized. Such acts, while technically forbidden by Jewish Law and mostly disapproved of, would primarily have been motivated by the idea of kiddush Hashem (“sanctification of God’s name”). But Yuval stresses another potential aspect, one yet more disturbing: a number of laments describe these killings in sacrificial terms, as if their purpose was greater than to simply prevent apostasy at all costs.
He [Abraham] with his one [son] made haste and [punishment] was deferred to his sons on the holiday of holidays although there were many that slaughtered their children . . . they prepared to slaughter the children and said the blessing over the sacrifice with intent . . . For the sanctification of His name we were killed our women and children to fall by the sword
The father overcomes his mercies so as to sacrifice his children, like one preparing sheep for the slaughter he prepared his sons for the slaughter. They declare to their mothers, behold we are slaughtered and killed like one sanctified for an offering . . . Women, [weep over] their fruit, their beloved infants: Who will hear and not shed tears?
And the father weeping and wailing kissed his suckling son and sanctified his head like the one bound at Moriah and the mother hid her face so as not to see the death of her child for her compassion was stirred up for her child and her tear was upon her cheek.
The other major point of scholarly controversy upon the release of Yuval’s original article was exactly what to make of these sentiments: are they authentic? do they express the actual beliefs and actions of the victims? or were they rather poetically crafted by later writers in commemoration, attempting to theologically justify the forbidden acts? Yuval’s contention in his book is that, either way, the ritual language resonated an important theological point among an element of the Ashkenazim: that God would see the blood of the innocent Jewish victims and be roused to vengeance, the more blood the sooner. It was only in the wake of the People’s Crusade that the Porphyrion, “rare and peripheral in the Midrash became a cornerstone of religious thought and action in Ashkenaz”—confidence that their day will come was the dominant theme, defining most of the post-Crusade laments. Yet it was also a theme that was virtually absent from the Sephardic laments written after the similarly destructive 1391 massacres, which hoped for deliverance more than revenge.
There is no way of knowing if these acts took place as written or whether that was merely how they were recounted in the generation after 1096. We are interested here in understanding the ideology of the text, of the narrator, and of the society he was addressing. … The narrators were full participants in the excitement and atmosphere of 1096. The death of the martyrs was a fact, and it was now possible to invoke it to arouse the divine wrath against the enemies of Israel. The stories selected were those that would most arouse God’s wrath and thus were interlaced with repeated pleas for vengeance.
But if these were indeed real instances of Jews killing their children with religious undertones, then “[t]he only [major] difference between the ritual murder libel and martyrdom lies in the question of whom the Jews kill: their own children or those of the Christians.” In the two most extreme accounts, which Yuval draws from the Crusade chronicles9 and are far too graphic and lengthy for me to quote in full, we even find specific descriptions of the “sprinkling of the blood” as befits an atonement sacrifice, as was allegedly the case with the leader of the Mainz community who killed his family after the Crusaders had already left to repent for his conversion. These are certainly harder to write off as invented than the poems, though to my mind they more clearly reflect the isolated actions of those deranged from trauma than the systematic theology Yuval attempts to harmonize them with. Regardless it’s impossible to ignore the fact that all this occurred mere decades before the emergence of the ritual murder accusation in 1144, a charge often linked to the messianism of Passover. To Yuval this is clear evidence of inspiration: “The connection between martyrdom and ritual murder libel may be explained as a process of projection, whereby Christians extrapolated conclusions from Jewish behavior toward Jews to Jewish behavior toward Christians.” We know from Christian and Jewish sources alike that the local gentiles witnessed these events in horror, and it seems inevitable this would have cultural reverberations.
It’s an incredibly dark book, but that’s not the only reason it was so incendiary. What Yuval does is invert the traditional historical interpretation of the blood libel from something best understood as a product of the milieu of the accusers into something to be understood with respect to the accused. Yet under this logic it’s quite possible to simply disagree with his ultimate conclusions and take things even further, interpreting ritual murder rather as a form of radical Jewish messianism gone awry. And indeed as we’ll see, just a year after Two Nations in Your Womb was published, Pasque di sangue would do just that. ✦
Continue to Part II, “Ariel Toaff on Simon of Trent.”
Main Sources
(Style guides are a joke.)
Ariel Toaff’s Pasque di sangue. Ebrei d'Europa e omicidi rituali; an unofficial English translation can be found on the Internet Archive
EM Rose’s The Murder of William of Norwich: The Origins of the Blood Libel in Medieval Europe
Hannah Johnson’s Blood Libel: The Ritual Murder Accusation at the Limit of Jewish History
Hermann Strack’s The Jew and Human Sacrifice: An Historical and Sociological Inquiry
Israel Yuval’s Two Nations in Your Womb: Perceptions of Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages
Ronnie Po-chia Hsia’s The Myth of Ritual Murder: Jews and Magic in Reformation Germany
Hannah Johnson's (2012) Blood Libel: The Ritual Murder Accusation at the Limit of Jewish History discusses how various modern scholars have treated the blood libel and identifies this subject as a “limit case,” an area of historical uncertainties in which “cultural meaning and scholarly method surface in tight relation to one another … where historians’ psychological and political investments are rendered provocatively visible, and finally, where limits—of interpretation, representation, and meaning—are always being negotiated against a background of cultural debate.” She adds “[s]cholars who write about the blood libel are no less aware than their counterparts in Holocaust studies of shadow discourses of antisemitism that haunt their work.” It's an interesting book and discusses Toaff in the final chapter, though some of the academic gibberish can be worth skipping over.
Most often Protestants involved in Oriental studies or proselytizing efforts. Hermann Strack, following in the footsteps of JC Wagenseil and Andreas Osiander, described himself as follows: “I am not a ‘Philo-semite’ in the now generally accepted sense of the word. I have even been slandered as an ‘Anti-semite.’ As a Christian theologian, I wish simply to serve the truth, for the sake of my Lord, who is ‘the way, the truth, and the life.’”
These were distinctive features of the Israelite religion. According to the Encyclopedia Judaica, the prohibition of the consumption of blood is “not found anywhere else in the ancient Near East.” Acts 15:20 indicates it was also observed by early Christians.
David Berger has two commentaries on related issues that are worth reading. Nevertheless he describes the 13th-century Nizzahon Vetus' argument against the blood libel as “in the narrow sense incorrect” because the Biblical prohibition applies to animal blood, apparently not realizing that this was extended to blood generally. But he says the Vetus’ argument is still correct because “on an emotional, psychic level, the sense of revulsion toward blood triggered by the prohibition in question and reinforced by rabbinic law certainly led to undifferentiated abhorrence.”
Chapter six, “Magical and Therapeutic Uses of Blood.” The responsa are R’ Reischer’s Shevut Yakov II, #70 and R’ Grodzinski’s She’elot ve’Teshuvot Achiezer III, pp. 66–8 ¶ 31. The contradictions are puzzling and I'm open to learned critiques here, but to me his evidence appears solid.
In his Afterword to the book's second edition, Toaff cites the tosfos for Keritot 21b. I cannot personally verify if his interpretation is adequate, and again I'm open to critiques here since this isn't an area I'm able to scrutinize with any competency.
Some of Yuval’s colleagues have criticized how sharply he draws this distinction. In one Hebrew-language exchange with Avraham Grossman, summarized by David Berger, the two settled on “a conclusion apparently acceptable to both scholars: although the emphasis on vengeance was much stronger in Ashkenaz, even there the avenging redemption was considered only the first stage of the eschatological process; the second stage is that of the conversionary redemption.”
“Pour out thy wrath upon the nations that did not know You … pursue them with anger and eradicate them from under the skies of the Lord.” The text contains a collection of such statements from the Hebrew Bible.
144–145, 157–158.
A fascinating and well-written series.
Thank you for your essential work here, Will.