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|Title=Blood Libels | |||
|Footnote=Magda Teter, Blood Libel. On the Trail of an Antisemitic Myth (Harvard University Press, 2020), pp. 18-27. | |||
|Content=The blood libel was a false accusation of Jewish ritual murder, which held that Jews kidnapped and murdered innocent young Christians, particularly boys, in order to re-enact the crucifixion and death of Jesus, and – from the 13th century on – to use the blood of the victims for different ritual and medical purposes. Although it appeared earlier, the blood libel was closely connected to another false accusation, the desecration of the Host, which imputed that Jews steal or buy (usually from Christian women they had bribed) consecrated Eucharist wafers representing the body of Christ, and then pierce them in order to torture the body of Christ and obtain his blood. Those charges were linked to the Christian doctrine of transubstantiation and were used to reinforce its validity first when it became official church dogma (1215) and Pope Urban IV established the Feast of Corpus Christi (1264), and later when it was challenged by the Protestant Reformation. Both anti-Jewish false accusations were closely related to the belief in the salvific power of Christ’s blood and the alleged Jewish plot against Christendom. | |||
The earliest blood libel took place in Norwich (England) in 1144, when Jews were accused of killing a twelve-year-old boy named William. The local community was not harmed but rumors started to circulate, and new accusations emerged in other places in England accompanied by shrines and narratives of dead children. Even before Jews were expelled from England the accusations reached the European continent. The first case occurred in 1235 in Fulda (Germany), where in addition to the charge of murder the motive of using blood appeared for the first time. The first recorded accusation of Host desecration was made in 1243 at Beelitz near Berlin. Although in Eastern Europe there are no court records of anti-Jewish accusations before the sixteenth century, the trails of their social presence can be found in princely and royal privileges to the Jews (e.g. the statute of Kalisz, 1264), contemporary legends, and literary works. In the first half of the sixteenth century, the anti-Jewish incidents and accusations in Germany, as well as multiple echoes of the most notorious blood libel of Simon of Trent ( 1475), influenced the atmosphere in western Poland to the extent that king Sigismund the Old forbade accusations of ritual murder in the region (1531) and a protective papal bull was issued for the first time for Jews living in Polish territories (1540). Regarding future Galician territories, the first mention of ritual murder accusation can be found in the famous Chronicles by Jan Długosz (1415-1480), who writes about a blood libel in Cracow in 1407, of which no official evidence remains. | |||
While blood libels declined in western Europe after the Reformation, their number and frequency rose in Poland-Lithuania with the Counter-Reformation. There, the first accusation of ritual murder attested to in the archival court sources was made in Rawa Mazowiecka in 1547. Shortly after, the allegations spread throughout Poland in both larger cities with a strong merchant class and sizable Jewish community and in small villages with fewer Jewish inhabitants. The first confirmed trial for ritual murder in Red Rus (in the district of Chełm) was in Sawin in 1595. In many cases economic conflicts and fear of Jewish economic competition formed the background for accusations. Although in the second half of the sixteenth century blood libels usually ended in the release of alleged perpetrators, they still inflamed the anti-Jewish atmosphere and excesses already fueled by anti-Jewish printed materials. Works such as “Lives of the Saints”(“Żywoty świętych”, Wilno, 1579) by Piotr Skarga, which told the story of St. Simon of Trent and saw ten editions from 1575 to 1650, Przecław Mojecki’s book titled “Jewish Cruelties, Murders, and Superstitions,” (Żydowskie okrucieństwa, mordy i zabobony, Kraków, 1598) or Sebastian Klonowic’s “Judas’s sack” (Worek Judaszów, Kraków, 1600) disseminated stories of blood libels and other anti-Jewish ideas, thus strengthening anti-Jewish antagonism, and serving as a source of inspiration. | |||
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Revision as of 08:23, 13 July 2025
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