The Blood Libel Across Two Millennia
“They love killing kids.” After four children were killed during an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) air strike on southern Lebanon, a British Member of Parliament named Zarah Sultana chimed in on social media with what has become an all-too-familiar refrain, particularly since October 7, 2023. One commenter quickly responded: “This is a blood libel.”
This back and forth has become rather common since October 7, as critics of Israel tend to single out any military that involves children — and responders allege a “blood libel.” It has become perhaps the most-used tool in the fight against antisemitism — wielded sometimes expertly but often as a blunt instrument, too.
So what does “blood libel” mean? And where does this charge actually come from? While the Blood Libel is typically considered to be a medieval construct, its roots go back significantly longer — ushering in what has become a tragic, extended tradition of libel and slander of Jews dating back to the Roman period.
As we see in the case of today’s antisemitic and antizionist rhetoric, the ancient soul of these violent allegations has remained unchanged, albeit manifested in different contexts and varying environments. While it is not clear if Medieval proponents of the Blood Libel were influenced by their ancient forebears, their own use is evidence of a repetitive pattern (if not a continuous chain) of philosophically similar behavior.
But the Blood Libel’s survival has also led to its modern overuse, with many modern critics lumping in a number of broader forms of antisemitic or antizionist behavior under the “Blood Libel” umbrella.
This is what merits an examination of its ancient and medieval progenitors.
The First “Blood Libel”?
The 1st century CE writer Flavius Josephus is perhaps most famous for his two major publications: The Antiquities of the Jews, an attempt at a history of the Jewish people dating back to Genesis; and The Jewish War, the only extant account of the First war between Rome and the Jews.
It is in one of his lesser-known works, Against Apion, that we discover what seems to be the first major example of what might be construed as a “blood libel.” Against Apion, written at the very end of the first century, is a response to an Egyptian grammarian named Apion who had apparently made a series of large-scale, Anti-Jewish allegations against the Jews — Josephus describes most of these allegations as “pure buffoonery,” —but serious enough that Josephus saw fit to respond in kind with this treatise.
We actually have no record of Apion’s writings. The allegations themselves only survive within Josephus’ rebuttal. They are wide-ranging, from Apion’s insinuation in his History of Egypt (also not extant) that Moses was a native of Heliopolis, and that he had erected a boat-shaped temple alongside a sundial; to the suggestion that the word Sabbath comes from the Egyptian term for disease of the groin. These allegations are Anti-Jewish, to be sure — and certainly robust fodder for an entire examination of Anti-Jewish tendencies in the Roman Empire. But the most pernicious allegation comes in the second book of Against Apion.
Josephus tells us that Apion relates a story “of Greek origin” which is a “malicious slander upon us from beginning to end.” The date within the story seems to be from the Hasmonean period, when the Seleucid King Antioch IV entered the Jerusalem temple to plunder it. When he arrived in the Temple, he found a man before a well-laden table of food. The man claimed he had been kidnapped and brought to the temple and, for some period of time, “fattened up.” The story related that it was the law of the Jews that every year “they would kidnap a Greek foreigner, fatten him up for a year, and then convey him to a wood, where they slew him, sacrificed his body with their customary ritual, partook of his flesh and, while immolating the Greek, swore an oath of hostility to the Greeks.” They would then throw the victim’s remains into a pit. It is a story, Josephus writes, “packed with all the horrors of a tragedy.”
This is the first example we find in history of such a “malicious slander” of Jews. It was significant enough for Josephus to respond to it — with the presumption that it was sufficiently well known. Ironically, of course, by responding with his treatise, Josephus unwittingly preserved the tale for posterity.
The story did not begin with Apion, however. Some have suggested that the ritual murder allegation from this period comes from Posidonius, who said that the fate of the fattened Greek was something far more frequent: every seven years, the Jews would kidnap a Greek, fatten him up, eat parts of his body, and then take an oath against the Greeks, in a slightly different, but equally fantastical manifestation of the allegation.
Interestingly, the story is not repeated by any Roman writer. Nor is it referred to by those who quote Josephus extensively, such as Eusebius. The only medieval Latin author that refers to Josephus’ recounting is Sicard of Cremona in the 13th century.
This first instance of a “Blood Slander” is distinct from its later forebears in at least one major category: the victim is an adult man, not a child. But as we will see, over the next two millennia, this apocryphal Greek tale will evolve into a deeper, more provocative allegation that preserves the content of ritual murder — but turns it to children.
The Medieval Blood Libel
It is in the Medieval period that we see the emergence of a successor to Apion’s blood “slander,” if you will, in two parts. The first, and more pervasive, is found in 1144, in the case of a young boy named William of Norwich. Williams’ apparently tragic end is retold by a monk named Thomas of Monmouth, who wrote a work called “The Life and Passion of William of Norwich.”
As Miri Rubin notes in her introduction to the Penguin edition of the Life and Passion of William of Norwich, Thomas’ work is a “novel interpretation of the character of contemporary Jews, drawing on traditional stories about ancient Jews, as conveyed in liturgy, biblical exegesis and preaching.” In other words, while there’s no evidence that Thomas read Josephus, the gist of the Apion slander seems to have lived on in Christian tradition. Thomas makes the link “between Jews past and present,” something “never before so boldly been attempted.”
In short, a young boy named William, who had been working with Jews in the skinning industry, was abducted from his home by a man posing as the cook of the Archbishop of Norwich and eventually taken to the “house of a certain Jew.” What unfolds is a graphic, violent recounting of the manner in which a group of Jews proceeds to torture the boy — which Thomas calls “this unheard of type of torture” — and then crucify him. The motive? A “spirit of evil,” according to Thomas, and a defining mission: “Just as we have condemned Christ to a most shameful death, so we condemn a Christian, so that we punish both the Lord and his servant in the punishment of reproach.” The group of Jews, according to the account, left the body, shaven and pierced by myriad cuts, at the foot of an oak tree in a forest.
While Thomas does not explicitly accuse the Jews of sacrificing William, he does note that the deed was done on the day of “their pascha,” or Passover. The implication is strong: this was an act of ritual murder. It is, for Jeremy Cohen, the introduction of a character that will be well-known in the Christian world: “the Jew whose murderous hands provoke an unceasing flow of Christian blood.”
But was Thomas the architect of this myth? Or was this first major publication of a longer-held belief already prevalent in parts of Europe?
Another writer, Israel Yuval, controversially alleged that, during the First Crusade, Jews who were confronted with the choice of converting to Christianity or dying chose to “kill their children and wives and then commit suicide.” This, in turn, created the perception of Jews and their capacity to kill children. According to Yuval, the charge of ritual murder came during the Second Crusade — and argued that Thomas “employed a conception of ritual murder imported from continental Europe.”
What is not clear, according to present scholarship, is whether Thomas himself was the originator of the “myth that Jews murdered Christians for ritualistic purposes” Indeed, the idea that Jews ritually kill Christian children is “one of the most enduring contributions of the Middle Ages to the history of Western intolerance.” It is a moment that scholars consider the watershed in the shift from Anti-Judaism to Anti-Semitism.
William’s story is not alone in the unfortunate history of blood libel accounts. The second, just as if not more notable, is that of “Little Saint Hugh” (note that he was never actually canonized). It is a story that is actually memorialized in Chaucer’s Prioress’ Tale:
O yonge Hugh of Lincoln, slayn also
With cursed Jews, as it is notable,
For it nis but a litel whyle ago;
Pray eek for us, we sinful folk unstable
That, of his mercy, god so merciable
On us his grete mercy multiplye,
For reverence of his moder Marye. Amen.
The Prioress’ Tale itself begins with a different tale of Jewish murder; of a young choirboy killed by Jews because he was walking through the Jewish quarter singing the hymn “Kind Mother of the Redeemer.”
When the Prioress finishes her story, she includes the above poem, referring to what an earlier account of a young boy killed by Jews. There are varying accounts of this murder, which allegedly occurred in 1255, where the body of a young boy was found to have been thrown own into a well. The allegation soon emerged that the Jews had tortured and crucified the boy to sacrifice him.
The account by the chronicler Matthew Paris relates that the Jews of the town of Lincoln, also in England, “stole a boy of eight years of age … fed him on milk and other childish nourishment … and summoned some of their sect from each city to be present at a sacrifice to take place at Lincoln.”
The commonalities are clear: a young boy, a kidnapping, a ritualistic murder involving torture and crucifixion.
The Apion story shares elements with each; of course, having been invented before the advent of Christianity, the crucifixion is naturally absent. (Interestingly, the Apion story and William of Norwich both see their victims’ bodies taken to a forest.) Even so, we begin to see a clear pattern emerge in these major moments in the history of Jewish mistreatment.
Blood Libels in the Ancient and Medieval World
Did the Apion story influence the accounts of William of Norwich and Hugh? Or did they develop independently?
For some, there is no reason to believe that either Thomas or the authors of the Hugh story were aware of Against Apion. He does not seem to want to show any connection between the Apion story and Thomas, arguing that copies of Against Apion were rare, noting the absence of any allusions to the work by Medieval authors, and calling it a “complete discontinuity between the first accusation against Jews in antiquity and the first medieval accusation.”
But it is hard to ignore the spiritual bond between them (and, for William’s story, the taking of a body to a wood). Regardless, whether they were familiar with the story or not, they were nevertheless continuing — or reviving — an ancient philosophical tradition — that is, the ritual murder of non-Jews by Jews.
The William of Norwich account resumes that charge — and makes it dramatically more graphic reshaping the victim from a grown man into an innocent, saintly child — making the alleged crime unimaginably worse. Whether Thomas was himself aware of the Posidonius or Apion versions of the story is irrelevant — regardless of its provenance, the same core allegation — Jewish ritual murder — re-emerges.
The question, then, is not about continuity, but about repetition. Even if one did not directly influence the others, they belong to a pattern of behavior.
The Blood Libel Today
As seen in the case of Zarah Sultana’s post — and its immediate responses on X — similar allegations exist in the modern world, albeit with two major distinctions. There is not always a religious element — that is, there is not typically an allegation that Jews or, as is usually the accused, the State of Israel – are committing any murders ritualistically. Second, the victims are not always children, with critics usually alleging some form of wanton, indiscriminate murder by the government.
On the other hand, it the use of the term “blood libel” has proliferated, to the point where even a broad interpretation of its meaning can sometimes be lost. Sultana’s allegation, “they kill kids,” seems to be a spiritual heir of the blood libel claim. Israel, and, by extension, Jews, are again killing kids, or so the thinking goes.
But when a Rabbi discussed protests of Israel’s participation in Eurovision this year, claiming they were endangering Jews, he suggested that. “It’s blood libel with glitter.” That reading seems to transcend even a broad definition of the blood libel. Arguing against protests of Israel is not unreasonable; but to allege that the protests themselves amount to the ritualistic killing of children seems hyperbolic. Here, the use of the term blood libel has, in some ways, become a kind of metonymic descriptor for antisemitism itself.
A recent Op-Ed by Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times alleged, among other radical charges, that Israel had trained dogs to rape Palestinian prisoners, leading to threats of a lawsuit by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, calling the charges “a blood libel.” These allegations were, to be sure, some fantastical enough to feel as to have been conceived by Apion himself. Indeed, it is easy to imagine Josephus himself describing Kristof as he did Apion, wondering “what might have been had Apion “had he not himself been gifted with the mind of an ass and the impudence of the dog.”
But does it fall into line with the historical direction of the Blood Libel? Not quite. Sensational and grotesque? Certainly. But ritualistic killing, particularly of children? Not quite. Not all allegations of repugnant behavior by Jews necessarily amounts to a Blood Libel.
The blood libel is one of the more pernicious and dangerous charges in the history of Anti-Judaism and Antisemitism, beginning with its roots in the Apion story, continuing to its popular dissemination in Medieval Europe, and surviving to its employment both by antisemites and malicious critics of Israel. But not all antisemitic behavior is a blood libel, however grotesque. The danger is that its overuse could devalue the very term, and weaken the case against an extremely serious allegation very much worthy of response.
To be sure, the Blood Libel does persist in certain forms — even, it seems, from Members of Parliament — a troubling development that should not be lost in the overuse — and potential depreciation — of the term.
