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Many of the false charges leveled against Israel over Gaza have their roots in ancient blood libels against the Jews. One of the most notorious of these originated in twelfth-century England, where “the perfidious Jews” (as they were styled in the Roman Catholic Church’s liturgy for Good Friday) were said to have sacrificed a child, a pure and innocent Christian baby, in order to demonstrate their supposed hatred for God and his Christ and to satisfy the requirements of their blood rituals.
As Antisemitism: History and Myth details, the first and largest hole in this narrative is the fact that the Jews have no such rituals. The blood libel stories most commonly involve the Jews draining the blood from their victim in order to mix it into their Passover matzohs. The Torah, however, clearly forbids the consumption of blood: “For the life of the flesh is in the blood; and I have given it for you upon the altar to make atonement for your souls; for it is the blood that makes atonement, by reason of the life. Therefore I have said to the people of Israel, No person among you shall eat blood, neither shall any stranger who sojourns among you eat blood.” (Leviticus 17:11-12)
Many modern purveyors of Jew-hatred, however, insist that it doesn’t matter what the Torah says, for as we have seen, they maintain that Jews, after the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem, don’t follow the Torah anyway. They insist that the religion of the rabbis, the Judaism of the Talmud, is quite different from the Judaism of the Torah. Yet this argument gets them nowhere closer to their goal, for the Talmud, like the Torah, nowhere allows for blood sacrifice of any kind, much less human sacrifice.
Even opponents of contemporary Judaism agree: Eitan Bar writes that in the absence of the temple, the rabbis replaced the system of animal sacrifice that the Torah delineates not with some new system of blood sacrifice, but with their teachings: “if the Sinai covenant was based on the blood of the sacrifices, the rabbis’ ‘new covenant’ was established upon the rabbis and their traditions.” Not on new blood sacrifices.
Rabbi Chananya Weissman notes in reference to the Torah passage that “Tanach (the written Torah, what you call the Bible or Old Testament) clearly forbids eating blood in the strongest of terms.”
In fact,
“there is not a single statement to the contrary anywhere in the Talmud or rabbinic literature (in fact, those who accuse Jews of eating the blood of gentiles provide no source, and claim it is hidden, while still claiming the Talmud somehow justifies it). It is quite clear from the Torah that the sum total of the ingredients of matza are flour and water. Jews were eating matza on Pesach long before Christians and Muslims even existed. The laws of matza (and the puzzling absence of any reddish color that could resemble blood) have never changed, and cannot change. No one has the power to change them.”
Even a seventeenth-century convert from Judaism to Christianity, Friedrich Albrecht Christiani, affirmed the same thing at a time when such charges were all too common:
“Although there is indeed a general slander against the Jews, that they follow after Christian children, and when they have got hold of them, stab them horribly, extract the blood from them, using it with certain ceremonies as a remedy… I am able, as a born Jew (who without boasting, know well all their customs, having myself practised, or at any rate seen with my eyes, most of them) to asseverate by God, that the whole time I was connected with Judaism, I never heard among them of such dealings with Christian children, much less that they had ever had Christian blood or had ever used it in the aforesaid manner.”
Also, in virtually every case, there was no evidence adduced to support them, or that evidence consisted of confessions obtained under torture. Yet it is also true that no members of any religious group have ever followed the teachings of their religion with one-hundred-percent fidelity; however, if some group of Jews at some point were found actually to have killed a Christian child, this would not mean what the European Christians in the twelfth century and thereafter took it to mean, that the killers were acting in accord with the actual teachings of Judaism and that the Jews as a whole were guilty and thus deserved collective punishment. It would, instead, be the act of a group of criminals. Such an act would carry no larger significance than any other criminal act; people who commit such acts can be found among every group on the planet.
It cannot be honestly maintained that any form of Judaism allows for human sacrifice or for the ingestion of the blood of the victim. Nevertheless, there was intense hostility between Jews and Christians, which is understandable in light of the rhetoric of John Chrysostom,
Augustine, and others and the license to plunder and kill Jews that the words of Ambrose of Milan and, much later, Martin Luther, once again among others, provided. This made for an environment in medieval Europe in which Jews frequently served as convenient scapegoats, and pretexts to brutalize them were all too readily found.
