The Bloody History of Antisemitism

Antisemitism is so hard to both quantify and fight, due to its amorphous and metastatic nature. If one looks for commonalities throughout 2000 years of anti-Jewish sentiment and iconography, however, there is one through line: blood. In the last 12 months, this imagery has surrounded us. Netanyahu as Nosferatu. Bloody hands plastered across the world, even on the statue of Anne Frank in Amsterdam. Bloody hands ceasefire pins. Candace Owens ranting about how the Blood Libel on her platforms, being even more unhinged than normal. From the Christian Bible, through the Blood Libel, from notions of vampirism to the “stab-in-the-back” theory, the imagery of the Jew with blood on his hands is the ultimate commonality. 

One could make an argument that this history is tied to a single passage in the Christian Bible, the so called “blood curse” from the book of Matthew, wherein Jews apparently ‘forced the hand’ of Pontius Pilate in killing Jesus. So when Pilate saw that he was gaining nothing, but rather that a riot was beginning, he took water and washed his hands before the crowd, saying “I am innocent of this man’s blood, see to it yourselves.” And all the people answered “his blood be on us and on our children.” (Matthew 27:24-25). For 2000 years, we have wandered the earth cursed by this passage, eternally perceived as having the blood of Jesus Christ on our hands, legitimizing any and all violence against us. 

The irony, of course, is that blood is deeply unkosher. Kosher meats are ones that have been salted and soaked, to remove all blood from touching it. The cuts of what is kosher versus not are defined by the amount of blood traditionally found in the tissue. Menstrual blood is also deeply stigmatized, with the laws of Niddah being created to ensure its avoidance. We are a people who live in revulsion of that which apparently stains us. Despite — or perhaps, because of — this, Jews were regularly pictured as spilling Christian blood. The Blood Libel, which originated in Norwich, England, depicts Jews as annually collecting the blood of Christian babies in order to create matzo. In church-led imagery of this barbarous imagined act, Jews are seen bleeding a child from his hands, feet and genitals, as he wears a crown of thorns, an apparent reincarnation of Jesus’ death. The Blood Libel has proved to be the most pervasive accusation against the Jews, with the last directly-inspired pogrom happening in 1946 in Kielce Poland. Hamas leadership from Qatar has spoken out on it being a verifiable fact, and even Candace Owens came out recently saying that it was true. The notion that Jews are so bloodthirsty and hedonistic is apparently more pervasive than logic would dictate. 

Throughout Medieval Europe, this obsessive correlation also found expression in defining literature, from the “pound of flesh” demanded by Shylock through to the Jewish characteristics of Dracula in Bram Stoker’s Victorian epic. From descriptions of Dracula’s housing as being such a hovel that “yer might have smelled ole Jerusalem in it,” to his being represented as a foreigner, a stranger, with a hooked nose, dark haired and pale-skinned, full of blood lust and degenerate values, the connections are far from subtle. In this, the Jew is framed as overly sexualized, degenerate and destructive, there to literally destroy the host it feeds off of — not functionally dissimilar to how they would come to be represented in Nazi literature as well. 

Antisemitic propaganda in the 20th century often represented Jews and blood together; Nazi notions of the Jewish “stab in the back” theory (wherein Jews were seen as responsible for “betraying” the German army in World War One) pictured Jews with small knives covered in blood. 

But for all of the strides Jews have made in being assimilated and accepted into other societies, the imagery of Jews with bloody hands has clearly remained pervasive. The Sunday Times published a political cartoon involving Netanyahu building a fence using Palestinian blood as mortar. A Montreal newspaper created a cartoon of Netanyahu labelling him “Nosferatu” instead, a throw back to the 1922 eponymous silent film, “en route to Rafah.” As if the fact that Hamas was attacking from Rafah, that Sinwar was there, that the hostages were there, were irrelevant — he was merely yet another vampire with a blood lust that needed satisfying. The most common antizionist protest image is that of blood red hands plastered all over Jewish institutions, Holocaust memorials, and synagogues. Protestors in governmental buildings the Western world over show up with painted red hands, as if the blood of innocents has been purposefully spilled by Jews for the sake of bloodletting. Even the so-called “artists4ceasefire” proudly sported a red hand, which while described as not related to anything violent, immediately evoked the proud image of the 2000 Ramallah massacre, in which a Palestinian man showed his hands soaked in Jewish blood to a crowd who screamed with glee in response. 

Why of course is this imagery so pervasive? Because it is the ultimate image of innocence being destroyed by bloodlust, by a people hungry for power and conquest, who secretly control the world while “playing a victim card” in order to enable more violence poised against the eternally innocent. Jesus Christ, William of Norwich, Christian babies all over Europe, Palestinian babies today. They are always seen in opposition to each other: the puppet-master controlling Jew, the eternally blameless killed for his virtue. This convenient symbol, applied to the modern day Arab-Israeli conflict, plays heavily into this perception of Jewish bloodlust. Framed thus, complexity is irrelevant, Palestinian or Arab actions that prompted violence ignored, the intentions of the Israeli state demonized. There is no fundamental difference between our Jewish ancestors who once cowered under the weight of accusations that we killed Christian babies in the name of religion and us, increasingly defenseless against an onslaught of those who accuse us of killing Palestinian babies in the name of sovereignty.  Of course many believe that we are committing genocide: the image of the Jew with blood on his hands is systemic in Western society. It’s a short step from one to the other.