A Short History of the Lie of the Blood Libel

The lie known as the blood libel is the ugliest expression of antisemitism. It accuses Jews of kidnapping and murdering Christians to obtain their blood for magic, medicine, or matzoh-making. The victims—typically small boys—were not merely bled, they were ritually tortured to death in blasphemous parody of the Crucifixion. These atrocities were carried out at the command of a worldwide blood-gathering Jewish conspiracy. Not content to kill Christian children as images of Christ, some Jews even stole Hosts to torment the Eucharistic presence of Christ himself.

The origins

The terms “blood libel” and “the myth of ritual murder” are largely interchangeable. The essential element is that Jews killed Christians, especially children, for their blood. This horrendous form of Jew-hatred coalesced in the Middle Ages, the work of Catholics who claimed to be acting out of zeal for the Faith. Popes did oppose these vile accusations. For example, 1247 Pope Innocent IV (1243-1254) denounced covetous elites in Germany and France for oppressing Jews: “. . . they falsely charge them with dividing up among themselves on the Passover the heart of a murdered boy. . . . In their malice, they ascribe every murder, wherever it chance to occur, to the Jews. . . . Since it is our pleasure that they shall not be disturbed, . . . we ordain that ye behave towards them in a friendly and kind manner.”ⁱ

Pope Gregory X (1271-1276) had condemn the blood libel again in 1271 in response to a French incident: “Most falsely do these Christians claim that Jews have secretly and furtively carried away these children and killed them, and that the Jews offer sacrifice from the heart and blood of these children, since their law in this manner precisely and expressly forbids Jews to sacrifice, eat, or drink the blood, or to eat the flesh of animals having claws.”ⁱⁱ

Despite opposition from authorities, these pernicious ideas spread like a virus across Europe, all the way to the Orthodox and Muslim East. A very conservative tally lists 100 such accusations against Jews before 1600, 53 of these in German-speaking territories.ⁱⁱⁱ Incidents peaked in Poland during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In 1913, the last European blood libel trial in (then) Kiev, Russia ended in an acquittal.

The deadly infection has persisted as a routine component of antisemitism down to modern times. It remains a deeply rooted folk belief in some Western circles and is featured in official propaganda in Islamic lands. The casualties directly caused by these bloody lies—Jews defamed, imprisoned, tortured, executed, despoiled, or exiled—number in the thousands rather than the Holocaust’s millions. Yet hatred sprung from medieval fantasies fed the Final Solution.^iv

This essay will concentrate on the medieval roots of the blood libel and the myth of ritual murder. Developments during the Reformation and afterward are a story for another time.

Why the Middle Ages?

Why would the Middle Ages, an era that made so many marvelous contributions to Western Civilization, also leave this particular legacy of anti-Jewish hatred? Tensions between Christians and Jews are already evident in the New Testament. But although some Church Fathers such as St. John Chrysostom railed against Jews, none launched the blood libel. St. Augustine’s view prevailed: Jews were to be left unmolested as witnesses to the Old Testament matrix of Christianity and in anticipation of their conversion at the end of the world.

There is no one explanation of why Western attitudes towards Jews turned more hostile starting in the twelfth century, a time cultural flowering, and expressed that hostility in the enduring myth of ritual murder. Here are some that scholars have suggested. The Middle Ages saw the return of a money economy, accompanied by worries over usury. Not all Jews were moneylenders, nor all moneylenders Jews, but the leech-like stereotype fastened on Jews–permanently. When rulers, dependent on borrowed cash, demanded tolerance towards Jews, assertive local governments sometimes reacted with pogroms and expulsions to express their independence.

Religious considerations were surely more significant. Eucharistic piety was burgeoning in the High Middle Ages with Host miracles, the Feast of Corpus Christi, fasting female saints and so forth. (Yet the Council Lateran IV, which defined transubstantiation to describe the real presence of Jesus, also commanded Jews to wear identifying marks on their clothing.) Spirituality grew more emotional, emphasizing the humanity and sufferings of Christ. Devotion to the Holy Innocents grew, for they had died in place of the Infant Jesus. Passion relics were cherished and the Stations of the Cross were invented. (But fiery preaching by the new mendicant orders sometimes roused mobs to attack Jews.)

The very sublimity of the Mass as the sacrifice of God’s Body and Blood made it seem “magical” to some clouded minds. And if wicked Christians made superstitious use of stolen Hosts, what might perfidious Jews do? After all, Jewish magicians had been famous since antiquity. When Christians began projecting blasphemous fantasies of blood and death on Jews, some people found it advantageous to feed such delusions. The myth of ritual murder was slowly becoming thinkable.

Specific cases and a master narrative

Europe’s earliest case of ritual murder happened during a civil war for the throne of England. When a twelve-year-old apprentice named William died on Good Friday of 1144 in Norwich, his relatives claimed that he had been killed by Jews. Although the local sheriff declined to bring charges, his victim status earned him burial in the Cathedral Priory’s cemetery.

But his death affected the outcome for another one five years later, following the failed Second Crusade. (Like other Crusades, that one had slaughtered Jews on the way to fighting Muslims.) An impoverished Norman crusader had his rich Jewish creditor, leader of Norwich’s Jews, killed. Local Jews accused the knight, who went on trial before King Stephen. But the Bishop of Norwich, acting for the defense, argued that the murder was justifiable revenge for Jews’ earlier, unprosecuted killing of young William. Moreover, William had been ritually murdered in imitation of Christ’s death. A converted Jew turned monk claimed that this fulfilled international Jewry’s need for Christian blood, collected each year in a city chosen by lot. Unwilling to rule on either homicide, the king adjourned the trial. Neither the knight nor the Jews of Norwich were punished.

But the story did not end there. Despite a lack of interest among local townspeople, the bishop and monks of Norwich were beginning to promote William as a miracle-working martyr and potential city patron. His remains were translated to a chapel in the cathedral in 1154. His story was turned in a hagiographic epic by a monk of the Norwich priory named Thomas of Monmouth. The Life and Passion of William of Norwich, begun in 1150 and completed in 1173, presents a tender portrait of the young innocent lured to his death by crafty, murderous Jews and records miraculous healings at his shrine. Mixing fact and fancy with rhetorical flair, Thomas built on the bishop’s clever trial strategy to create “the master narrative of Jewish ritual murder.”^v

News of William’s martyrdom filtered out of Norwich even before Thomas finished his Vita. Jews were accused of child-murder at Gloucester (1168), Bury St. Edmunds (1181), and Bristol (1183). In Blois, France (1171), when a Christian servant reported a Jew for killing a Christian boy, it was treated as a communal crime. Although no victim was found, more than 30 Jews, including pregnant women and infants, were locked in a building that was set on fire. In addition, three young Jews were burned publicly, a punishment previously reserved for heretics. The money and status that the impoverished Count of Blois gained by manipulating charges against Jews set an ominous precedent for other rulers.

For example, the count’s nephew, King Philip Augustus of France, used the allegation that Jews in Paris had crucified a boy to confiscate Jewish property and expel them from royal territory in 1182. Not only did Philip’s plunder buy the loyalty of his subordinates, it funded substantial infrastructure improvements to the capital, such as new city walls. Furthermore, promoting the cult of the Jew’s victim and turning former synagogues into churches enhanced the king’s reputation for piety.

Money was also a factor in the most famous English ritual murder, the case of an eight-year-old boy known as Little St. Hugh of Lincoln. In the summer of 1255, the child drowned in a cesspit by the home of a wealthy Jew named Copin (or Jopin). His body was not found until a month later, the day after the wedding of a distinguished rabbi’s daughter that had drawn leading Jews from all over England to Lincoln. The Jews panicked and tried to hide the corpse in a well, but it was soon discovered. Hugh’s grieving mother demanded justice from King Henry III, who happened to be traveling in the area.

Copin, the obvious suspect, was arrested and questioned by the Bishop of Lincoln’s brother. After a false offer of immunity if he would implicate others, Copin confessed. He spun a gruesome fable detailing the agonies inflicted on Hugh, point for point matching the Passion of Christ. (There was even a stand-in for Pontius Pilate to judge the boy.) Copin was put to death anyway, tied to a horse’s tail and dragged around the town to be hanged.

King Henry had 91 Jews arrested. Although he had sold his royal privilege of taxing Jews to his brother, Richard of Cornwall, he would still acquire the property of any Jews executed. Eighteen prisoners were hanged, two released, and the remaining 71 condemned to death after a quick trial. Friars begged the king for mercy without avail. But the king’s brother, realizing that dead Jews would not be paying him taxes, managed to get the condemned Jews set free. Even so, King Henry’s intervention signaled royal approval for the myth of ritual murder.

Although never officially canonized, Little St. Hugh was given a shrine in Lincoln Cathedral that drew pilgrims until its destruction during the Reformation. His pathetic death inspired “The Prioress’s Tale” in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales as well as a popular English ballad “Sir Hugh, or the Jew’s daughter” collected in many variations by eighteenth and nineteenth century scholars.

Persistence of a deadly delusion

Three late medieval cases of ritual murder demonstrate persistence of the deadly delusion. The most famous of these happened in the Prince-Bishopric of Trent, then ruled by the Holy Roman Empire, now Trento, Italy. Simon of Trent was only two and a half years old when he disappeared on Holy Thursday of 1475. His father accused the Jews of taking him, triggering a city-wide search. The public mood may have been affected by a Franciscan preacher’s Lenten sermons attacking Jews.

On Easter Sunday, Samuel, head of the tiny local Jewish community, reported finding Simon’s body on his property. For his honesty, he and all the other Jews were arrested and tortured into confessing that they had ritually murdered Simon for his blood. Samuel and fourteen other men were burnt at the stake. The real murderer probably was a man from Switzerland, who had framed Samuel because of a grudge but Trent’s authorities were interested only in punishing Jews.

Pope Sixtus IV intervened to release for the Jewish women. He ordered a new trial and sent an Italian bishop to preside. But the bishop of Trent obstructed this inquiry and used his Curial connections to ensure that a third trial in Rome cleared him of wrongdoing. The pope allowed that judgment to stand but pointedly did not conclude that Jews had killed Simon of Trent. He condemned ritual murder trials and reiterated papal protection for Jews. This did not prevent Simon’s story from triggering new waves of anti-Jewish violence in regions neighboring Trent. His martyrdom was celebrated in polemical poems, songs, pictures, and broadsheets. He merited coverage, complete with grisly illustration, in Hartmann Schedel’s prestigious Nuremberg Chronicle (1493). Ritual murder was certified as history.

Popular piety also ignored the papal decree, abetted by the Bishop of Trent. A hundred miracles were attributed to Simon and the Holy Roman Emperor promoted his cause. The Council of Trent (1545-63) was a vector for spreading the local saint’s fame. Simon’s name entered the Roman Martyrology in 1583. Five years later, Pope Sixtus V approved his local veneration plus a plenary indulgence for pilgrims. But Truth, Daughter of Time, eventually erased Simon of Trent from the catalog of saints. In 1965, on the day that Nostra Aetate, Vatican II’s “Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions” was published in Rome, the Bishop of Trent suppressed Simon’s cult.

Although Andreas of Rinn perished more than a decade before than Simon, his martyrdom might never have been recognized without Simon’s fame. After the corpse of three-year-old Andreas Oxner was found hanging from a tree near Innsbruck, Austria in 1462, oral tradition named Jews as little Anderl’s killers. He was reburied in the parish church and the village changed its name from Rinn to Judenstein (“Jew-stone”), in honor of the spot where he had been slain.

A century and a half later, these legends were collected and written down by an antiquarian named Hippolytus Guarinoni. A church was dedicated to Andreas in 1670, a folk festival launched, and pilgrimages begun. Pope Benedict XIV authorized a breviary entry and Mass text for Andreas (1753) then a plenary indulgence for visiting his shrine on his feast day (1754) but refused to canonize him (1755). His sad tale was even included in Deutsche Sagen by the Brothers Grimm (1816/18). The bishop of Innsbruck ordered the cult suppressed in 1984 but this was not accomplished for another ten years due to stubborn resistance by local people. Radical traditionalists still honor Anderl.

Although obscure, our final example of a ritual murder accusation did greater immediate harm to Jews than all the others mentioned previously. The legendary Holy Child of La Guardia is supposed to have been a young Christian boy kidnapped from Toledo by a group of Jews and Jewish converts (conversos) in 1489. They tormented, bled, and crucified him on Good Friday in a cave in La Guardia as part of a plot to destroy Christendom through black magic using his heart and a stolen consecrated Host. Their motive was revenge for the cruelties of the Inquisition.

But the Host glowed in one conspirator’s possession, leading to his arrest and confession after torture that exposed the others. Tomás de Torquemada, the Inquisitor General, took a personal interest in the case and appointed a special tribunal whose conclusions were reviewed by two separate juries. Testimonies of the accused, obtained through torture, coercion, and trickery, failed to agree on the name or age of the child or the site of the murder. No corpse was found nor and any missing person report. Such evidence was not even sought. Nevertheless, six conversos and three Jews were condemned to death. They were burnt in Avila on 16 November, 1491, the conversos mercifully strangled first.

Despite flaws in the judicial process, Torquemada exploited the incident to argue for the expulsion of all Jews from Spain to spare conversos the temptation to revert to their natal faith. Distress over the martyred boy’s fate helped persuade Queen Isabella of Castile to sign the decree of expulsion on 31 March, 1492. Four months later, some 80,000 Jews who refused to convert were driven from a land their people had occupied for centuries.

Many historians outside of Spain now doubt that the Holy Child of La Guardia—sometimes called Cristóbal (Christopher)—ever existed.^vi Nevertheless, he became a favorite Spanish folk saint.^vii A century after his alleged death, he inspired a play by Lope de Vega, Spain’s greatest dramatist, entitled El niño innocente de La Guardia (The Innocent Child of La Guardia.) An annual festival continues to celebrate his martyrdom in La Guardia and the official website of the Archdiocese of Madrid still carries a tearful account of his legend presented as factual.^viii But at least a Spanish tourism site promoting Toledo posts a strong disclaimer before discussing the Child.^ix

Facing ancestral sins

What has been the point of revealing these old atrocities? Jew-hating myths made in the Middle Ages have wrought immeasurable harm across the centuries. In this time of surging antisemitism, we need to face ancestral sins for the purification of communal memory, lest we repeat such wrongs in the future. In response to the Holocaust, a plaque was installed in Lincoln Cathedral where the medieval shrine of Little St. Hugh once stood. After acknowledging the falsehood of his cult, it ends with this prayer:

Lord, forgive what we have been,
amend what we are,
and direct what we shall be.^x

Endnotes:

Bibliography:

The Blood Libel Legend: A Casebook in Anti-Semitic Folklore. Ed. Alan Dundes. Madison WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991.

Phyllis Goldstein, A Convenient Hatred: The History of Antisemitism. Brookline MA: Facing History and Ourselves, 2012.

Key Concepts in the Study of Antisemitism. Eds. Sol Goldberg, Scott Ury, Kalman Weiser. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021.

R. Po-chia Hsia, The Myth of Ritual Murder: Jews and Magic in Reformation Germany. New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 1988.

E. M. Rose. The Murder of William of Norwich: The Origins of the Blood Libel in Medieval Europe. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.

Thomas of Monmouth, The Life and Passion of William of Norwich. Ed. And Trans. Miri Rubin. London: Penguin Books, 2014.

Catholic World Report