The Long and Terrifying History of the Blood Libel

From The Nation - review by David Nirenberg:

Among the more unpleasant mythemes that one group of humans has devised about another is the blood libel: the claim that Jews murder Christian children, often around Easter, and use their blood in Passover rituals. Bits and pieces of this myth date back to ancient times. 

But the specific ingredients of the blood libel—innocent children murdered by conspiratorial Jews for blood rituals—were not baked into narrative until a child’s corpse was discovered in 12th century England and an enterprising monk accused the local Jewish community of murder. That first accusation sputtered out, but others soon followed in France and Germany that sometimes resulted in the execution of entire communities. With the invention of the printing press, the myth spread even more widely, throughout Eastern Europe and, with colonialism, into the Middle East and beyond. 

Magda Teter’s terrifying and learned new book, Blood Libel: On the Trail of an Antisemitic Myth, examines some of the long history of this pernicious idea. Her focus is firmly on the past and especially on the death in 1473 of one toddler, Simon of Trent. Teter sets out to document how the information about Simon’s death circulated during and after the trial and how it eventually flowed into Eastern Europe, where the myth put down some of its deepest and cruelest roots. She certainly succeeds in that historical task. While her claims are specific and circumspect, her book can be read more broadly as an allegory for our age, a story about how technological change, religious beliefs, struggles for power, and a politics of demonization can produce memes capable of transmitting the potential for violence across vast amounts of time and space.

read more here @ The Nation