Anti-Israel blood libels and their medieval origins

The banners brandished at marches around the world call for an end to genocide, and if there’s a genocide happening, I think we can all agree it should stop. But what if, as Israel maintains, claims that the IDF is fundamentally bloodthirsty and on a killing spree in Gaza are false? Looking back through history, there’s a straight line between the blood libels that began back in the Middle Ages and the outrage against Israel we see today.

The barbarism and ignorance rampant in the Middle Ages are something many snigger about today as ridiculous. And rightly so. It was believed that washing was bad for the health, that wombs moved around the body, affecting moods, and that a chicken’s rear end could extract infection from an open wound.

The foolishness of women being burned as witches on spurious charges and animals sentenced to death for their supposed crimes has provided a lot of comedy material, now that we’re comfortably many centuries older and wiser. They were wild times as we look back with hindsight. 

Amid the madness of the Middle Ages was the idea that Jewish people stole and killed Christian children to use their blood for Passover or other Jewish holidays – a particularly absurd notion given the fact that consuming blood is contrary to Jewish law. The whole idea would be laughable if it weren’t for the thousands of Jewish people who were killed over these claims.

These nonsensical charges were first levied against Jewish people in 12th-century England and started the phenomenon known as “blood libel.” I’d love to tell you that it’s all a thing of the past, but I can’t. Blood libels against the Jewish people somehow stubbornly persist.

At almost any pro-Palestinian march in the world, it’s not long before you see someone screaming about Zionists deliberately killing children. The charge is no truer today than it was in the Middle Ages, but here we are. Mud sticks.

Looking into the origins of blood libels helps us understand more about the false accusation that Jews are deliberately killing children.

According to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the first recorded case of blood libel took place in 1144, when a boy named William was found stabbed to death in the woods near the town of Norwich, England. A man named Thomas of Monmouth accused the Jewish community of torturing the boy and murdering him in mockery of the crucifixion of Jesus. 

The ADL explains, “Although many townspeople did not believe this claim, a cult venerating the boy eventually sprang up. At this time, the myth began to circulate that each year, Jewish leaders around the world met to choose a country and a town from which a Christian would be apprehended and murdered.” 

As is so often the case, the lie had run amok before truth could get its boots on, and the blood libel spread far and wide, beyond the United Kingdom. Whenever Christian children went missing, it was automatically assumed that Jewish people had stolen and killed them. It was not uncommon for Jews to be forced to confess to these fabricated stories under duress, often using torture. 

Some believed that Jews drank blood at Passover, or mixed it in with the traditional hamantaschen pastries of Purim. Others apparently claimed that Jews would use Christian blood as a medicine or as an aphrodisiac.  

About 100 cases of libel between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries have been documented by scholars according to the ADL, and many of these instances resulted in a massacre of the Jewish community. Even when two popes denounced the claims as false, the lies stubbornly stuck.

Eerily familiar cases of blood libel have also happened more recently. In 1913, a Jewish Ukrainian man named Menahem Mendel Beilis was charged with the murder of a Christian child. The boy’s body was discovered near a local brick factory near Kiev, leading to a dramatic trial. Multiple Russian intellectuals and scholars testified that Jews attacked Christians and used their blood in obscene rituals, but of course, it was all false.

Beilis was eventually found innocent, but it was too late – the damage was done. Horrific antisemitic lies had already ricocheted throughout Russia.

Another incident occurred in New York in 1928, when a 4-year-old girl went missing. Rumors quickly spread that local Jews were responsible for her abduction and murder. The town’s rabbi was summoned to the Massena police station to be questioned about human sacrifices and blood in Jewish rituals by the state trooper while crowds gathered outside. The girl was later found alive, totally unharmed.

In 1940, Jewish people in Damascus were also accused of kidnapping and killing a Christian, this time a priest. “Several notable Jews from Damascus were tortured to extract confessions, and an angry mob destroyed a synagogue and its Torah scrolls. Jews were massacred repeatedly in the Muslim world, partly as a result of this libel, which had been imported from Christian society,” the ADL reported.

All kinds of lies and conspiracy theories are thrown around about Jewish people to this day, including the famous “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” – a plagiarized French novel, crafted to suggest the Jewish people are plotting to take over the world. Whether it’s the accusation that Israel is killing people to steal their organs or committing genocide in Gaza, the slander against God’s people doesn’t stop. Posters of Bibi Netanyahu, blood dripping from fanged teeth, can be seen at pro-Palestine protests all over the world.

The lies come thick and fast that Israel is intentionally killing Palestinian children and innocents in Gaza, eliciting fury in gullible people around the world who have been told the lie so often they believe it. British politician Diane Abbott posted on 𝕏, “Beyond horrific that the Jewish Defence Force is gunning down Palestinians as they queue for food #GazaGenocide” in response to another post accusing the IDF of murdering children for sport. Note she described the army as Jewish, not Israeli. 

Meanwhile, military experts, including Richard Kempe, John Spencer and Andrew Fox, continue to testify that the IDF is operating under international law and that the rate of combatant to civilian death is astonishingly low compared to other conflicts. With Hamas hiding behind human shields and spending aid money on tunnels for terrorists rather than trying to protect their own people, it’s remarkable how low the death count is. Civilians are not killed on purpose, yet the world continues to believe the lies. 

The enduring nature of blood libels against the Jewish people indicates that they scratch an itch. They seem to satisfy a desire that stretches across ages and continents – many people want to believe that Jews are evil, and don’t take much convincing. This is antisemitism, and the reasons for it are deeply spiritual.

Murdering children is about as immoral and inhumane a crime as one can imagine. Of course, the IDF avoids killing children as much as is realistically possible given the extreme circumstances. The determination to keep believing the blood libel that Jews deliberately kill children in the end says more about the people clinging to the lie than it does about the people of Israel, who cannot convince a world that doesn’t want to be convinced of the truth.

The question I would like to ask is, why do people prefer the lie?