Today I want to talk about the blood libel. I don’t mean a blood libel, generically, but THE blood libel, the true article. There once was such a thing.
What I’ll discuss below is taken from Benzion Netanyahu’s The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteen Century Spain. In the book, almost as an aside, the distinguished father of Israel’s prime minister explains the blood libel.
The blood libel was excellent propaganda. Somebody, somewhere, usually a fringe cleric, would accuse the Jews of murdering a boy and drinking his blood in a gruesome Passover ritual. A coalition of the urban nobility “homes buenos”, and the urban poor would agitate against the Jews, demanding some thing or another. The Jews in question, quite reasonably, would ask for the body of the murdered boy, witnesses to the deed, anything that would qualify as evidence in a court of law.
But there was never a dead boy. Or witnesses. Or anything. Usually, courts could only find hearsay; “I heard from a friend of a cousin that the Jews murdered a saintly boy and drank his blood.”
Notice that in the blood libel, it was always a boy. In fifteen century Spain, Christians slightly valued little boys over little girls, so the blood libel fantasy always featured a boy. In 21st century America, we slightly value girls over boys, so in a modern blood libel the genders would be reversed.
The Jews would reasonably try to defend themselves, and did so with vigor, but it didn’t matter. The point of the blood libel was to incite the urban poor to riot against the Jews. At some point, weeks or months after the accusation was made, some responsible person in authority would conclude that there was no corpse, and there was no crime. But the rioting had already taken place. A few Jews had been murdered. The records at the Town Hall had been burned—this was crucial, since the town hall recorded the debt owed by Christians to Jewish money lenders. “Burning the town hall” was the whole purpose of the anti-Jewish riots.
The blood libel was an unspeakable injustice. It rightly belongs in its own category. I’m glad we live in a more enlightened era.
I mean, we would never condemn a man for defiling a young girl (remember, we value girls more than we value boys) without evidence.
We would demand records, witnesses, something of the sort. Hearsay would be rightly discarded. Fuzzy memories would be discarded too—memory, it’s a funny thing, not at all reliable. The presumption of innocence would be granted to the accused.
As I said, I’m glad we live in an enlightened era. Blood libels are a thing of the past, never to be repeated. We live in 21st century America. We would never, ever act like 15th century Spaniards, prejudiced against a class of people, and condemning them because they are the wrong sort.
