Blood libel
Blood libel is an antisemitic trope that falsely accuses Jews of murdering Christians to use their blood in religious rituals. It is also called ritual murder libel. In 1144, a boy named William was found dead in the woods, his body marked by stab wounds. The Jews of Norwich were blamed. The charge that followed did not stay in England. It moved into France and Germany, then across Europe, and it became a major theme in the persecution of Jews from that period down to modern times. Again and again the trigger was the unexplained death of a child. Some of the dead were venerated as martyrs, while living Jews were tortured, executed, expelled or killed by mobs. This documentary asks where the accusation came from and who gave it power. It asks who tried to stop it, and why it still surfaces in the twenty-first century.
The Greco-Egyptian author Apion told of a Greek captive found in the temple at Jerusalem, held there to be fattened for sacrifice. In his telling, Antiochus Epiphanes entered the temple and met the prisoner, who explained his fate. Every year, Apion claimed, the Jews sacrificed a Greek and ate his flesh while swearing eternal hatred of the Greeks. Posidonius and Apollonius Molon made similar claims in the 1st century BCE, so Apion probably echoed attitudes already in circulation.
Socrates Scholasticus, who lived in the 5th century, reported a different story. In a drunken frolic, he wrote, some Jews bound a Christian child to a cross. They mocked the death of Christ and scourged the boy until he died. Even so, aimed at Jews, the charge was rarely attested in antiquity.
Tertullian recorded that the accusation first emerged in late antiquity against members of the early Christian community of the Roman Empire. Once that charge was dismissed, it was revived a millennium later as a Christian slander against Jews.
The Crusades helped drive increasingly hostile talk about Jews in the 12th century. The Church council known as Lateran IV later reinforced that hostility. It mandated the segregation of Christian and Jewish society and built an apparatus of enforcement across Europe. In England, church rivalry may also have played a part, because competing saintly cults brought in income from veneration.
The historian Israel Yuval proposed another source, tied to the First Crusade. Some Jews killed their own children, and themselves, rather than see the children forcibly converted to Christianity. Yuval suggested that Christians may have reasoned that people who could kill their own children could also kill Christian ones.
The earliest medieval versions had Jews crucifying Christian children at Easter or Passover, and they said nothing of blood in matzo. That motive developed later. The crucifixion story rested on a supposed prophecy, and the prophecy would soon be given a country and a council by William's hagiographer, Thomas of Monmouth.
Thomas of Monmouth, who wrote the saint's life of William of Norwich, claimed that Jews held an international council every year. At that council, he said, they chose the country where a Christian child would be killed during Easter. He asserted that a Jewish prophecy promised the yearly killing would ensure their restoration to the Holy Land. According to Monmouth, England was chosen in 1144, and the Jews of Norwich were delegated to carry it out. He alleged that they abducted and crucified William. All of this was false.
Similar accusations followed in Gloucester in 1168, Bury St Edmunds in 1181 and Bristol in 1183. In 1189, a Jewish deputation attending the coronation of Richard the Lionheart was attacked by the crowd. Massacres of Jews in London and York soon followed. On the 16th of March 1190, 150 Jews were attacked in York and then massacred after taking refuge in the royal castle, where Clifford's Tower now stands. Some died by suicide rather than fall into the hands of the mob.
A well in Norwich holds a physical trace of this era. It contained the remains of 17 bodies thrown in between the 12th and 13th century. DNA testing showed that five were likely members of a single Jewish family. They were very possibly killed in one of these pogroms.
The eight-year-old Hugh disappeared at Lincoln on the 31st of July 1255. His body was probably found on the 29th of August, in a well. A Jew named Copin, or Koppin, confessed to John of Lexington, a servant of the crown and a relative of the Bishop of Lincoln. He said the Jews had assembled at Lincoln and crucified the boy. King Henry III reached Lincoln at the beginning of October. He had Copin executed and 91 Lincoln Jews seized and sent to London, where 18 were executed. The rest were pardoned after the Franciscans or Dominicans intervened.
The case was described by Matthew Paris and later by Chaucer, and it formed the basis of the Sir Hugh ballads, which have circulated to the present day. Its notoriety sprang from the intervention of the Crown. It was the first time an accusation of ritual killing had been given royal credibility.
Jews were expelled from all of England in 1290 and were not allowed to return until 1657. After the expulsion, Edward I renovated the shrine of Little Saint Hugh and decorated it with his royal insignia, as part of his effort to justify his actions. The historian Stacey wrote: "A more explicit identification of the crown with the ritual crucifixion charge can hardly be imagined."
The first known case outside England came in Blois, France, in 1171. A Christian servant reported that a Jew named Isaac had put a murdered Christian into the Loire. The child's body was never found. The count had about 40 adult Jews arrested, and between 31 and 33 of them were burned to death on the 29th of May, which was the 20th of Sivan of 4931. Seventeen of the dead were women. The survivors and their holy texts were ransomed, and a surviving letter shows moves to win protection from King Louis VII. Rabbenu Tam declared the Twentieth of Sivan a fast day. In Blois, the claim that Jews needed Christian blood had not yet been proclaimed.
Around 1260, Thomas of Cantimpré wrote: "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." He also believed that since the Jews called out to Pontius Pilate, "His blood be on us, and on our children", they had suffered hemorrhages. He said a learned Jewish convert told him that a prophet had promised relief only through Christian blood. Thomas added that the Jews had misread the prophet, who meant the blood of Jesus.
Thomas did not name his informant, but it may have been Nicholas Donin of La Rochelle, whom Thomas knew personally. In 1240, Donin held a disputation on the Talmud with Yechiel of Paris, and in 1242 he caused the burning of numerous Talmudic manuscripts in Paris. Donin and another convert, Theobald of Cambridge, are widely credited with bringing the blood libel myth into European belief.
On Christmas Day in 1235, the bodies of five boys were found in Fulda. The townspeople claimed that Jews had killed them for their blood, and with the help of assembled Crusaders they burned 34 Jews to death. Emperor Frederick II investigated and cleared the Jews of wrongdoing. Accusations in Germany persisted regardless.
At Oberwesel, near Easter of 1287, alleged miracles were the only evidence. The corpse of 16-year-old Werner, called Good Werner, was said to have landed at Bacharach and to have worked cures and given off light. Jews in Oberwesel and many nearby places were severely persecuted in the years 1286-89. Rudolph of Habsburg, whom the Jews had asked for protection, had the archbishop of Mainz declare that a great wrong had been done to them. The declaration had very limited effect.
A chronicle by Konrad Justinger, dated 1423, states that Jews in Bern tortured and murdered a boy called Rudolph in 1293 or 1294. The penalties included torture, execution, expulsion and steep fines. In 1888, Jakob Stammler, a pastor of Bern, demonstrated that the story was historically impossible.
Scholars have offered several explanations for why such accusations spread. One argument is that the economic and political interests of leaders kept the myths alive. Another points out that human blood and other body products were used for medicine and magic in medieval Europe. In 1507, Franciscans even ascribed illegal ways of getting such materials to Dominicans, while others blamed sorcerers and devil worshippers as well as Jews.
Ravensburg in 1430 shows how a trial could end a community. The body of Ludwig Ettelin, aged 13, was found hanging from a tree in the Haßlach forest, heavily scavenged. Suspicion fell on a wealthy Jewish merchant named Eleazarus, said to have plotted with two other prominent Jews to kill the boy at his daughter's wedding three months earlier. Under severe torture, Eleazarus confessed. The town's remaining Jews were burned alive on the 3rd of July as co-conspirators, and their property went to Sigismund, the Holy Roman Emperor. The next year the town barred Jews from entering, and the decree stood until the early nineteenth century.
In Trnava, in modern Slovakia, forced confessions in 1494 came from women and children who preferred death to more torture. They admitted to everything they were asked. They even said that Jewish men menstruated and drank Christian blood as a remedy.
Pezinok, also in Slovakia, saw a case in 1529 in which thirty Jews confessed that they had bled a nine-year-old boy to death. They were publicly burned. The truth emerged later, when the boy was found alive in Vienna. His accuser, Count Wolf of Bazin, had taken him there to be rid of his Jewish creditors.
Raphael Levy, a member of the Jewish community of Metz, was executed on the 17th of January 1670. He was charged with the ritual murder of a peasant child who had gone missing in the woods outside the village of Glatigny on the 25th of September 1669, the eve of Rosh Hashanah.
Sandomierz, in Poland, saw several such cases. In 1698, a mother deposited the corpse of her two-year-old daughter Małgorzata in a church mortuary and accused a Jew, Aleksander Berek, under torture. Both were executed. In 1710 the body of a boy, Jerzy Krasnowski, was found. A local rabbi was accused, and he and several other Jews died in prison while the case proceeded. Three more Jews were sentenced and executed.
Pilgrims carried offerings to the church at Norwich after William was declared a martyr. His cult set a pattern. The alleged victims of Jewish murder were sometimes venerated as Christian martyrs, and many became objects of local cults. William, Little Saint Hugh and Simon of Trent were the most prominent.
Simon of Trent was two years old when he disappeared in 1475. His father alleged that the local Jewish community had kidnapped and murdered him. Fifteen local Jews were sentenced to death and burned. Simon was regarded locally as a saint, and although he was never canonized, his veneration was added to the General Roman Calendar. Pope Paul VI removed him from the Roman Martyrology in 1965. Several towns in Spain still commemorate the blood libel.
In 1490, a four-year-old boy named Christopher of Toledo, also called the Holy Child of La Guardia, was supposedly murdered by two Jews and three conversos, who were converts to Christianity. Eight men were executed in total. It is now believed that the Spanish Inquisition constructed this case to help justify expelling the Jews from Spain.
A boy named Andreas Oxner, also known as Anderl von Rinn, was said in 1492 to have been bought by traveling merchants and murdered in a forest near Rinn. The charge of draining his blood, without murder, was not made until the beginning of the 17th century, when his cult was founded. An inscription of 1575 in the church at Rinn is full of embellishments. It says the money paid to the boy's godfather turned into leaves and that a lily blossomed on his grave. The cult continued until the Bishop of Innsbruck officially prohibited it in 1994.
Gabriel of Białystok, known in Russian as Gavriil Belostoksky, was a six-year-old from the village of Zverki. According to the legend backed by the Russian Orthodox Church, he was kidnapped during Passover while his parents were away. A Jew from Białystok named Shutko was accused of piercing him and draining his blood for nine days. The boy was canonized in 1820, and his relics are still a place of pilgrimage. On the 27th of July 1997, Belarusian state television showed a film alleging the story was true. International human rights reports cited the revival of his cult in Belarus as a dangerous expression of antisemitism.
On the 5th of July 1247, Pope Innocent IV ordered the prelates of Germany and France to annul every measure taken against Jews because of the ritual murder libel. He wrote that some clergy and nobles had falsely devised plans against the Jews in order to seize their property. In his words: "In their malice, they ascribe every murder, wherever it chance to occur, to the Jews." He asked that the Jews be treated in a friendly and kind manner. Pope Gregory X later issued a letter that criticized the practice and forbade arrests and persecution of Jews on the basis of the libel.
The papacy generally opposed the accusations, though it had trouble enforcing its opposition. Pope Benedict XIV issued the bull Beatus Andreas on the 22nd of February 1755. It answered an application to canonize Andreas Oxner, who was alleged to have been murdered by Jews out of hatred for the Christian faith. Benedict did not dispute that Jews murdered Christian children, and he appears to have accepted it as true. He decreed that beatification or canonization would be inappropriate in such cases.
In 1911, the French Dictionnaire apologétique de la foi catholique published an analysis of the accusations. It noted that the popes had generally refrained from endorsing them and concluded they were unproven in a general sense. It still left open the possibility that some Jews had committed ritual murders. Other Catholic sources, notably the Jesuit periodical La Civiltà Cattolica, promoted the blood libel as truth.
In late 1553 or 1554, Suleiman the Magnificent, sultan of the Ottoman Empire, issued a firman, or royal decree, that formally denounced blood libels against the Jews. Centuries later, in February 1840, a Catholic monk named Father Thomas and his servant disappeared in Damascus. The Jewish community of Damascus was accused of ritual murder. In the same year, the Jews of Rhodes were accused of murdering a Greek Christian boy. The local governor and European consuls supported the charge. Several Jews were arrested and tortured, and the Jewish quarter was blockaded for twelve days. The central Ottoman government investigated and found the Jews innocent.
The outrage in the West over Damascus drew in Sir Moses Montefiore, the leader of the British Jewish community. He was backed by Lord Palmerston, the French lawyer Adolphe Crémieux, Solomon Munk and several consuls. Together they persuaded Sultan Abdulmejid I to issue a firman on the 6th of November 1840. It declared that blood libel accusations were slander and prohibited them throughout the empire. The sultan wrote that he could not permit the Jewish nation to be "worried and tormented as a consequence of accusations which have not the least foundation in truth".
The libel did not disappear from Ottoman lands, as the 1881 Fornaraki affair shows. It 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 Ottoman authorities and, increasingly, on British, Prussian and Austrian representatives.
In 1823, a Christian child was found murdered outside the small Russian town of Velizh. Accusations by a drunk prostitute led to the imprisonment of many local Jews, and some were not released until 1835. From 1851 to 1853, seven Jewish men in Surami, Georgia, then part of the Russian Empire, were accused of killing a Georgian boy for ritual purposes. Scholars agree that the Russian state, especially Viceroy Mikhail Vorontsov, was heavily involved and manipulated the case to ensure a conviction. The men were convicted and exiled to remote provinces.
That conviction greatly influenced the Kutaisi case of 1878-80. In March 1879, nine Jewish men from the village of Sachkhere were brought to Kutaisi to stand trial for the kidnapping and murder of a Christian girl. Some periodicals expressed amazement that medieval prejudice had found a place in a modern judiciary, while New Times hinted darkly at strange Jewish sects. The trial ended in acquittal, and the orientalist Daniel Chwolson published a refutation of the blood libel.
On the 25th of June 1855, in Badia in the Lombardo-Venetian Kingdom, a 21-year-old peasant woman named Giuditta Castilliero returned after eight days missing. She claimed she had escaped a ritual murder and showed wounds on her arms as evidence of bloodletting. She named Caliman Ravenna, a wealthy merchant and moneylender, who was taken into custody. Then she was arrested for a theft in Legnago that took place during the days she was supposedly missing. Ravenna was released on the 14th of July and welcomed back by his community. Castilliero was charged with slander and sentenced to six years of hard labor.
In 1882, the Jews of Tiszaeszlár, Hungary, were accused of the ritual murder of a fourteen-year-old Christian girl, Eszter Solymosi. The case was one of the main causes of the rise of antisemitism in Hungary. The accused were eventually acquitted.
Leopold Hilsner, a Czech Jewish vagabond, was accused in 1899 of murdering Anežka Hrůzová, a nineteen-year-old Christian woman. Despite the absurdity of the charge and the relatively progressive nature of society in Austria-Hungary, he was convicted and sentenced to death. His sentence was commuted to life imprisonment in 1901. Tomáš Masaryk, a philosophy professor and future president of Czechoslovakia, spearheaded his defense, and Czech media later blamed him for it. Emperor Charles I pardoned Hilsner in March 1918. He was never exonerated, and the true guilty parties were never found.
The 1903 Kishinev pogrom began after an antisemitic newspaper wrote that a Christian Russian boy, Mikhail Rybachenko, had been found murdered in Dubossary. The paper alleged that Jews killed him to use his blood for matzo. Around 49 Jews were killed and hundreds were wounded, and over 700 houses were looted and destroyed. In Shiraz, Iran, in 1910, Jews were falsely accused of murdering a Muslim girl. The entire Jewish quarter was pillaged, leaving 12 Jews dead and about 50 injured.
Menahem Mendel Beilis, a Jewish factory manager in Kiev, was accused of murdering 13-year-old Andriy Yushchinskyi and using his blood to make matzo. After a sensational trial in 1913, an all-Christian jury acquitted him. In 1928, the Jews of Massena, New York, were falsely accused of kidnapping and killing a Christian girl.
Der Stürmer, an antisemitic newspaper published in Nazi Germany, frequently accused Jews of ritual murder. Its May 1934 issue went so far as to compare alleged Jewish ritual murder with the Christian rite of communion. Even the Nazi authorities banned that issue. Violence against Jews in Poland from 1944 to 1946 killed as many as 1,000-2,000 by some estimates, with 237 documented cases, and blood libel accusations featured in it, especially at the 1946 Kielce pogrom.
The Syrian Defense Minister Mustafa Tlass wrote The Matzah of Zion in the 1980s, a book that revisits the 1840 Damascus affair and repeats the ancient accusation. Tlass told Der Spiegel that the charge was valid. By 2002 the book was reported to be in its eighth reprinting, and a delegate cited it at a United Nations conference in 1991. In 2003, a private Syrian company produced a 29-part series, Ash-Shatat, or The Diaspora, which aired in Lebanon and was later broadcast by Al-Manar. It presented Jews as people who murder Christian children and use their blood to bake matzo.
Some voices pushed back. In 2003, Osama El-Baz, a senior adviser to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, wrote in Al-Ahram that the blood libel was a myth originating in Europe and urged people not to believe it. In April 2013, the Palestinian non-profit MIFTAH apologized for an article that said the Jews used Christian blood at Passover. It expressed its sincerest regret.
In early January 2005, some 20 members of the Russian State Duma made a public blood libel accusation. They demanded that the Prosecutor General ban all Jewish organizations, accusing them of practices that included ritual murders. The demand, known as the Letter of Five Hundred, drew strong criticism, and the group retracted it before the month ended. Later that year, after five boys aged 9 to 12 disappeared in Krasnoyarsk, some Russian nationalist groups claimed a Jewish sect had murdered them for a ritual.
On the 27th of April 2019, John Earnest entered a synagogue in Poway, California, killed one woman and injured three people, including the rabbi. In a manifesto attributed to him, he wrote that he was avenging the martyrdom of Simon of Trent. In March 2020, the Italian painter Giovanni Gasparro unveiled a painting of the martyrdom of Simon of Trent. The Italian Jewish community and the Simon Wiesenthal Center, among others, condemned it. In February 2022, a sculpture of Simon of Trent depicting the blood libel was used to promote the adrenochrome conspiracy theory associated with QAnon, which holds that elites harvest the chemical from children.
The term blood libel has also been used for any damaging false accusation, and so it has taken on a broader metaphorical meaning. That wider usage remains controversial. In Jewish lore, the blood libels were the spur for the creation of the Golem of Prague by Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel in the 16th century.
In the 2000s, Polish anthropologists and sociologists studied the myth in Sandomierz, where a painting depicting the blood libel hangs in the cathedral, and among Orthodox villagers near Białystok. They found the belief persisting among some Catholic and Orthodox Christians. Yet during the Holocaust, the local bishop ordered that Jews be saved, and they hid in that same cathedral. That history led to hopes of making Sandomierz a symbol of hope for Polish-Jewish relations.
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Common questions
What is blood libel?
Blood libel is an antisemitic trope that falsely accuses Jews of murdering Christians to use their blood in religious rituals. It is also called ritual murder libel, and it often claims the blood is needed to bake matzo for Passover.
When did the medieval blood libel begin?
The first medieval blood libel examples emerged in the Kingdom of England in the 1140s. The case of William of Norwich in 1144 came first, and the accusation then spread into France and Germany.
Did the popes support the blood libel?
The papacy generally opposed the blood libel. Pope Innocent IV ordered measures against Jews over the libel annulled on the 5th of July 1247, and Gregory X also criticized it. Benedict XIV's bull Beatus Andreas of 1755 did not dispute that Jews murdered Christian children, but ruled canonization inappropriate.
What was the Damascus affair of 1840 in the history of blood libel?
In February 1840, a Catholic monk named Father Thomas and his servant disappeared in Damascus, and the Jewish community was accused of ritual murder. After Western outrage, Sultan Abdulmejid I issued a firman on the 6th of November 1840 prohibiting blood libel accusations in the Ottoman Empire.
Why was Simon of Trent removed from the Roman Martyrology?
Pope Paul VI removed Simon of Trent from the Roman Martyrology in 1965. Simon was a two-year-old who disappeared in 1475, and fifteen local Jews were sentenced to death and burned over the accusation.
Is blood libel still used today?
Blood libel claims still appear in the twenty-first century. They have surfaced in a 2003 Syrian television series, a 2005 Russian Duma letter and the QAnon adrenochrome theory, and the 2019 Poway synagogue attacker cited Simon of Trent in his manifesto.
All sources
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- 121As shown by David Kertzer in The Popes Against the Jews (New York, 2001), pp. 161–163.
- 125Marina Caffiero, Forced Baptisms: Histories of Jews, Christians, and Converts in Papal Rome, translated by Lydia G. Cochrane (University of California Press, 2012), pp. 34–36.
- 126BookConstantinople: City of the World's Desire, 1453–1924Philip Mansel — St. Martin's Griffin — 1998
- 127BookThe Origins of Christian Zionism: Lord Shaftesbury And Evangelical Support for a Jewish HomelandDonald Lewis — Cambridge University Press — 2014
- 128BookThe Jews of IslamLewis, Bernard — Princeton University Press — 1984
- 129This Day in Jewish History 1910: A Pogrom in Shiraz, IranDavid B. Green — 30 October 2012
- 133Al-Ahram Weekly Online, 2–8 January 2003 (Issue No. 619)Osama El-Baz — Weekly.ahram.org.eg
- 138Death of a Monk, by Alon Hilu, trans Evan FallenbergMoris Farhi — 22 September 2006
- 139BookThe Medieval State: Essays Presented to James CampbellRobert Stacey — The Hambledon Press — 2001
- 140BookMedieval Art and Architecture at Lincoln CathedralDavid Stocker — British Archaeological Association — 1986