The Blood Libel

In the spring of 1144, the body of a young apprentice named William was found in a wood outside Norwich. At first his death drew little attention. Some years later a monk of Norwich Cathedral priory, Thomas of Monmouth, began writing an account of William’s life and miracles in which he claimed that the city’s Jews had killed the boy in mockery of Christ’s Passion. Thomas’s evidence consisted of rumours, dreams and the story of a convert. Historians such as Gavin Langmuir and E. M. Rose have shown how the tale served local interests, including the promotion of a new saint’s cult.

The accusation drew on older Christian hostility that held Jews collectively responsible for the death of Jesus. In the following decades similar charges appeared at Gloucester in 1168 and at Blois in France in 1171, where around thirty Jews were burned even though no body had been found. By the thirteenth century a new element had been added: the claim that Jews needed Christian blood for their rituals. At Fulda in 1235, after five children died in a fire, Jews were accused of taking their blood, and dozens were killed by a mob.

The pattern repeated itself. A child disappeared or was found dead; suspicion fell on the Jewish community; suspects were arrested and tortured; their confessions were taken as proof. At Lincoln in 1255, after the death of a boy named Hugh, King Henry III ordered the execution of nineteen Jews. Such cases often brought financial and political gain to accusers, rulers or towns, as Jewish property was confiscated or debts cancelled.

Jewish communities answered as best they could. They appealed to kings, bishops and popes, paid for protection, and recorded the names of the dead in memorial books and liturgical poems that were read in synagogues for generations. Jewish chroniclers described the accusations as what they were: slanders used to justify robbery and murder. Their records, alongside Christian sources, allow historians today to reconstruct both what happened and how the victims understood it.

The charge was challenged from the start. In 1236 Emperor Frederick II asked scholars, including converts from Judaism, to examine it, and then declared that Jews were forbidden by their own law from consuming blood. In 1247 Pope Innocent IV wrote that Jews were being falsely accused and persecuted so that their goods could be seized. Gregory X repeated the condemnation in 1272, and later popes did so again. In the eighteenth century Cardinal Lorenzo Ganganelli, later Pope Clement XIV, investigated accusations in Poland and found them baseless.

These official statements did not stop local accusations. The most famous case took place at Trent, in northern Italy, in 1475. When a two-year-old boy, Simon, was found dead in a ditch near a Jewish household during Holy Week, the local prince-bishop, Johannes Hinderbach, had the town’s Jewish men arrested. Under torture they confessed to a ritual murder. Several were executed, the community was destroyed, and women and children were forced to convert. A papal commissioner sent to review the case raised serious doubts, but Hinderbach promoted Simon as a martyr, and printed pamphlets and woodcuts spread the story across Europe.

Simon became the object of a popular local cult that lasted for centuries, while similar accusations followed in places such as Regensburg in Germany and La Guardia in Spain. Historians such as Ronnie Po-chia Hsia have reconstructed these trials from their records, showing how the confessions echoed the questions of the interrogators rather than any real event.

The accusation did not disappear with the Middle Ages. In 1840 Jews in Damascus were arrested and tortured after the disappearance of a Capuchin friar, a case that prompted international protests from Jewish and non-Jewish leaders. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, ritual murder trials took place in Tiszaeszlár in Hungary in 1882–1883, in Polná in Bohemia in 1899, and in Kyiv, where Mendel Beilis, a Jewish factory clerk, was tried in 1913. Beilis was acquitted by a jury after a trial that drew condemnation from scientists, writers and clergy across Europe.

In the twentieth century the Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer revived the blood libel as propaganda, and after the Second World War a false rumour of a kidnapping helped trigger the deadly pogrom at Kielce in Poland in 1946. Variants of the accusation still circulate in antisemitic propaganda and online conspiracy theories. Historians and religious leaders are united in stating that every version of the charge is false.

Scholars have also studied how the accusation worked as a story. The folklorist Alan Dundes noted that it reversed real Christian beliefs about the body and blood of Christ in the Eucharist, projecting them onto a minority. Related falsehoods accused Jews of stealing and abusing consecrated hosts or of poisoning wells during the Black Death of 1348–1351, when many communities were massacred despite a papal bull by Clement VI declaring them innocent. All these accusations shared a structure: a frightening event, an outsider to blame and a confession taken as proof.

The Catholic Church has formally rejected the cults built on the blood libel. In 1965, after a historical investigation, the Church in Trent ended the veneration of Simon and removed his relics from public display. At Lincoln Cathedral, a plaque placed near the former shrine of Hugh states that such stories were fabrications that cost many innocent Jewish lives. The Second Vatican Council’s declaration Nostra Aetate in 1965 rejected the charge that Jews collectively bore guilt for the death of Jesus, the old idea that underlay the libel.

Historians now study the blood libel as a case of how a false story can spread, attach itself to real tragedies, and be used to justify violence. The victims were ordinary Jewish families, merchants, scholars and children, who lost their lives or homes because of a lie. Their memory is kept today in museums, scholarship and interfaith work.