The Blood Libel

The canard

“Jews murder non-Jewish children to use their blood in religious rituals or to bake Passover matzah.”

The receipts

The "blood libel" is a medieval fabrication: a ritual-murder accusation first leveled at Jews in Norwich, England, in 1144, onto which 13th-century Europe grafted the lie that Jews need Christian blood for their rituals or Passover matzah. Jewish law strictly forbids consuming any blood, popes and rulers repeatedly ruled the charge false, and yet it still recurs today.

1. 1

   It was invented, not observed. The accusation traces to Norwich, England, in 1144, when a monk, Thomas of Monmouth, wrote - years after the boy's death - that local Jews had tortured and killed a boy named William in mockery of the Crucifixion. That was the first medieval ritual-murder charge; the specifically 'blood' element, that Jews supposedly needed Christian blood, was a later 13th-century embellishment (notably after the Fulda case of 1235). Historians treat the whole genre as a textual fabrication that the printing press later mass-produced.[1][2][3][6][7]

2. 2

   It contradicts the most basic rule of kosher eating. The Torah forbids consuming any blood, human or animal, with the core text at Leviticus 17:10-14 ('the life of the flesh is in the blood'). Observant Jews drain and salt (melihah) meat precisely to remove every trace of blood - and murder is, needless to say, independently forbidden. A religion that scrubs blood out of a steak is not baking it into bread.[8][2][1][4]

3. 3

   Popes and emperors investigated it and ruled it false. After the 1235 Fulda accusation, Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II convened scholars and Jewish converts who concluded in 1236 that Jews 'guard against the intake of all blood,' and he absolved the Jews of Germany. In 1247 Pope Innocent IV condemned the charge in his bull Lacrimabilem Judaeorum, declaring Jews innocent of using Christian blood. Centuries later, Cardinal Lorenzo Ganganelli (the future Pope Clement XIV) found, in his 1759 report, that the blood libel was groundless as a general charge - even if Church politics led him to stop short on two already-canonized cult cases, Simon of Trent and Andreas of Rinn.[5][4][9][10]

4. 4

   Being refuted never stopped the killing. Despite the rebuttals, the libel was used over centuries to justify torture, execution and pogroms: the Jews of Trent were tortured and executed after the 1475 'Simon of Trent' case (whose cult the Catholic Church finally suppressed only in 1965); later flashpoints include the Damascus Affair (1840), Tiszaeszlar in Hungary (1882), and the Beilis trial in Kyiv (1911-1913), where Menahem Mendel Beilis was jailed for over two years before a jury acquitted him.[1][4][2]

5. 5

   It still circulates today, recycled by extremists across cultures. The Nazis splashed it across Der Sturmer; in the 21st century it resurfaced in a Syrian/Lebanese TV drama (2003) and in Syrian Defense Minister Mustafa Tlass's book 'The Matzah of Zion' (1983), which revived the 1840 Damascus libel and was reprinted and translated for decades. It also animates the Western far right: the gunman who attacked a synagogue in Poway, California, in 2019 invoked the medieval 'Simon of Trent' blood libel in his manifesto, and crude 'blood-drinking' imagery still spreads online. A 12th-century fabrication keeps finding new targets.[1][3][2][4]

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