England’s Overlooked Calumny
The Blood Libel should not be erased from the national memory
There is a Wikipedia page that lists everything ever invented or discovered in England. Among the dozens of entries are the steam engine, television, cricket, bone china, the flying shuttle, radio, the pencil, the internet, the world’s first football club and penicillin. There are similar lists on Google, in encyclopaedias and many other places. They all however omit one item. None of them say that England is where the blood libel was conceived.
The blood libel is the accusation that Jews murder Christian children to use their blood when baking matzah, the unleavened bread eaten at Passover. Passover frequently coincides with Easter, the anniversary of the Crucifixion for which the medieval church held Jews responsible. It is not surprising therefore that this time of year, the period leading up to Easter and Passover, is when in ages past the blood libel was most likely to surface.
The first recorded case of blood libel was in 1144. It was Easter Saturday, 24th March, when a Christian child named William was found stabbed to death in the woods of Norwich, a town with a small but prominent Jewish community. The last sighting of the child before the discovery of his body was when he left his aunt Liviva’s house accompanied by a man who said he was the cook for the Archdeacon of Norwich. Liviva’s daughter watched them leave and claimed to have seen them enter the house of a Jew. As a result the town’s Jews were blamed for his murder and summoned to appear before the Bishop where they would undergo a trial by ordeal. The town’s Sherriff objected, telling the Bishop that he had no jurisdiction over Jews since they were the property of the King. The Sherriff protected the Jews by taking them into the castle where they stayed until the danger had passed.
The Benedictine monk, Thomas of Monmouth, believed that he knew why William had been martyred. He had an informant, a monk in Cambridge named Theobald, who had converted to Christianity from Judaism. Theobald told Thomas that it was written in the ancient Jewish books that Jews could neither obtain their freedom nor return to their homeland without shedding human blood. So they had decreed long ago that every year they had to sacrifice a Christian child. Therefore, he said, the rabbis and Jewish leaders in Spain meet annually at Narbonne where they cast lots to decide which country would be the site of that year’s sacrifice. In 1144 the lot had fallen upon England.
Satisfied that William’s death was no casual murder, Thomas of Monmouth fantasised a biography of the slain boy’s life, proclaiming him a martyr, attributing miraculous powers to him and explaining why he had been made a Saint:
“The Jews of Norwich brought a Christian child before Easter and tortured him with all the torture that our Lord was tortured with and on Good Friday hanged him on a cross on account of our Lord and then buried him. They expected it would be concealed, but our Lord made it plain that he was a holy martyr, and the monks took him and buried him with ceremony in the monastery, and through our Lord he works wonderful and varied miracles, and he is called St William.”
A painting in a church in Norwich, which survived the wholesale destruction of religious imagery during the Reformation, shows William of Norwich stretched out on two wooden uprights, surrounded by Jews who are drawing off his blood. The painting probably dates from the early 15th century, long after the calumnies started to circulate.
William of Norwich’s alleged martyrdom was followed by that of Harold of Gloucester in 1168, Robert of Bury St Edmunds in 1181 and other unknown children in Bristol in 1183 and Winchester in 1192. The first accusations of ritual child murder all originated in England; it was a particularly English manifestation of antisemitism.
Accusations of ritual child murder soon spread from England into Europe. Cases were recorded in Blois in France in 1171 and Saragossa in Spain in 1182. Following the accusation in Blois, 32 of the 40 members of the local Jewish community were slaughtered. The other eight saved themselves by converting to Christianity.
Up to this time none of the alleged ritual murders were accompanied by the allegation that the Jews required the blood of a Christian child to bake into the Passover unleavened bread. It took another 50 years before that charge surfaced in the German town of Fulda where, in December 1235, a miller and his wife went to church, leaving their five children alone at home. When they came back they found that the mill had burnt down and their children were dead. The Jews of Fulda were accused of having murdered the children to use their blood and of having set fire to the mill to cover up what they had done. Thirty-four Jews were slaughtered in revenge.
As in England, Jews were under the protection of the local monarch, in this case the Holy Roman Emperor. Outraged by their slaughter he organised a commission of leading churchmen and Jewish converts to answer the question of whether Jews required Christian blood. The Commission reported that since the Torah forbade the drinking of animal blood it was absurd to imagine that Jews could consume human blood. As a result the Emperor issued an edict absolving the Jewish community of any guilt. Not that it helped the thirty-four Jews already slaughtered.
Probably the most famous instance of blood libel was the case of Simon of Trent, an Italian toddler who went missing on the day before Good Friday in 1475. The townspeople, including the three local Jewish families, conducted an extensive search of the city. His drowned body was eventually found in a ditch near the property of one of the Jewish families. A baptised Jew who happened to be in the local prison earned his own release by claiming that Jews were responsible because they use Christian blood when baking their matzah at Passover. All the members of the Jewish community, including the children, were arrested and tortured for weeks. Eight Jewish men were burnt at the stake.
The incident created an outrage in the church. The Pope, Sixtus IV, sent an emissary to investigate. The emissary declared that the Jews were innocent and that the boy had been killed by Christians who had wanted to incriminate the town’s Jews. He identified the alleged murderer and took him to Rome. As soon as he left town with his prisoner the Bishop of Trent resumed his attack on the Jews, killing another seven. Despite the emissary telling the Pope that the whole affair had been orchestrated by the Bishop of Trent in order to seize Jewish property, the murdered boy was canonised a century later as a martyr. In 1965, however, his canonisation was annulled by the then Archbishop of Trent.
The accusations of ritual murder and use of Christian blood finally came to an end - one hopes- with the trial of Mendel Beilis in Kyiv in 1913. The mutilated body of a 12 year old boy had been found just before Easter. The press rounded on the town’s Jews, saying they had used his blood for ritual purposes. The police identified a gang of thieves as the murderers but the anti-Semitic Minister of Justice, egged on by racist and nationalist public opinion, treated the boy’s death as a ritual murder. A 39 year old, father of five, Mendel Beilis, was arrested on the false testimony of just one man and sent to prison where he spent two years awaiting trial. While he languished in gaol, an international outcry took place. Protests were held across America and Europe. Public figures like H.G. Wells, Thomas Mann, Arthur Conan Doyle, Anatole France and the Archbishop of Canterbury rallied to Beilis’s defence. The New York Times proclaimed: “The Czar on Trial.”
The trial itself was a farce. A Catholic priest testified that the murder had all the hallmarks of a Jewish ritual; the prosecutor made anti-Jewish statements in his closing address and the witness who had framed Beilis now claimed to know nothing. Ask to rule on two questions, the jury first found that the victim had been killed on Jewish premises with the wounds resulting “in the almost complete loss of blood”. There was no mention of ritual murder but the implication was clear enough. The second question related to Beilis’s guilt. The jury acquitted him. Beilis was free but the accusation of ritual murder still hung in the Kyiv air.
Of all the accusations hurled at Jews throughout the centuries the blood libel is the most pernicious. For the sake of historical accuracy, at very least, it should not be erased from England’s national memory.
The phrase about washing hands originally comes from Deuteronomy 21,6-7 which discusses what to do if an unknown murdered body is found in a field. Clearly suspicion would initially fall on the local people. In order to declare their innocence they performed a sacrificial ritual that involved hand washing. They would say "Our hands have not shed this blood and our eyes did not see it " It is where we get the phrase "I wash my hands of it" from.
In the gospels when Pontius Pilate washed his hands before the Crucifixion he was implying that he wasn't responsible. This may be a late addition to the text to deflect guilt from Rome.
I don't know whether scholars have definitive answers to these questions. The Canaanite languages are semitic, like Hebrew Arabic and Aramaic. You would need to discuss the question of origins with a scholar of these languages.