Contemporary Jewish Enmity—Murder

Blood Libel, Schedel Weltchronik, 1493
In popular circles, the notion took hold that Jewish enmity went beyond blasphemy against Christianity, that Jews were committed to inflicting physical harm upon their Christian contemporaries. The notion of groundless Jewish murder took hold in public imagination in many areas of western Christendom, especially in northern Europe, where the Jewish presence was quite new. Discovery of a body, especially the corpse of a Christian youngster, would regularly elicit the claim that the Jews had committed murder, for no other reason than simply the Christian identity of the victim. The authorities of church and state regularly rejected the allegations and by and large protected the Jews effectively, but the notion of groundless Jewish murder made inroads into folk thinking during the twelfth century.
The notion of groundless Jewish murder held the potential for embellishments of all kinds. During the middle decades of the twelfth century, the first of these embellishments suggested that the purported Jewish murders were carried out in a symbolic manner, i.e. through crucifixion of the purported Christian victim. By the middle of the thirteenth century, the embellishment of the claim of Jewish murderousness took yet another turn, into the allegation that the murders were rooted in Jewish ritual, that Jews required Christian blood for their Passover ceremonies. The combination of the new claim of Jewish murderousness with the centrality of blood in the biblical account of the exodus from Egypt fostered this new turn. The blood libel was destined for a long history, which stretches from the thirteenth century down into the twentieth and twenty- first centuries, despite lengthy and carefully documented denials by major figures in ecclesiastical and lay hierarchies.
Images
Primary Texts
- Worms, 1096, Mainz Anonymous
- Wurzburg, 1147, Ephraim of Bonn
- Blois, 1171, Contemporary Letter
- Boppard, 1180, Ephraim of Bonn
- Neuss, 1186, Ephraim of Bonn
- Pope Innocent III, 1205 Papal Letter
- Norwich, 1144, Thomas of Montmouth’s The Life and Miracles of St. William of Norwich
- Pope Innocent IV, 1247 Papal Letter
- Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales
Secondary Literature
- R. Chazan, Medieval Stereotypes and Modern Antisemitism (Berkeley- University of California Press, 1997), 58-85.
- R. Chazan,“The Blois Incident of 1171- A Study in Jewish Intercommunal Organization.” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 36 (1968)- 13-31.
- R. Chazan, “Ephraim ben Jacob’s Compilation of Twelfth-Century Persecutions,” Jewish Quarterly Review 84 (1993-94)- 397-416.
- G. Langmuir, “Thomas of Monmouth- Detector of Ritual Murder.” Speculum 59 (1984)- 822-846.
- R. Po-Chia Hsia, Trent 1475- Stories of a Ritual Murder Trial (New Haven- Yale University Press, 1992)
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