A photograph of Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky is displayed outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., May 29. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
An antisemitic charge traced back to medieval Europe seems today to be on the tongue of nearly every right-wing Israeli politician and pundit: That of blood libel.
The awful killing of Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., a few weeks ago? The result of “blood libels spread against Israel,” said Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar. The terror attack in Boulder, Colorado, in which a man hoping to “kill all Zionist people” burned marchers peacefully calling for the release of the hostages in Gaza? “A direct result of blood libels against the Jewish state and people,” said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
This phenomenon isn’t precisely new. Netanyahu has a habit of decrying those who criticize his war policy, including his political rival Yair Golan and French President Emmanuel Macron, of spreading “blood libels.” Way back in 2019, he said that claims that he had profited off the sale of submarines were themselves a kind of “blood libel.”
As attacks on Jews have escalated, the phrase has reached new prominence as a catch-all term to refer to antisemitic acts, or claims of antisemitism. Assaults like those in D.C. and Boulder do contain some similarities to the historic outcomes of blood libel — namely, innocent Jews facing terrible violence. But indiscriminate use of the term risks stripping it of all meaning, and undermines our ability to call out actual lies about Jews and Israel.
A conspiracy theory with a murderous legacy
Jews faced accusations of murdering Christian children in the 12th century, most famously in the case of William of Norwich, an English boy whose killing in 1144 was blamed on local Jews. But the idea that such murders were committed for ritual purposes — the central concept behind the blood libel — was first fully articulated after a miller and his wife went to church in the small German town of Fulda on Christmas Day in 1235, and came back to find their five sons dead.
Rumors quickly spread that the Jews of Fulda were responsible for killing the boys and drawing their blood into bags. Accounts from the time did not definitively explain why the Jews might have wanted the blood. But despite the lack of clarity, the image stuck, and the consequences were swift. Within three days, the town’s 34 Jews had all been murdered
“The term blood libel, as it’s conventionally been used, describes the accusation that Jews are murdering children, usually Christian children, in order to use their blood for ritual purposes,” said Rowan Dorin, a professor of history at Stanford University.
That’s part of why the contemporary charges — which label antisemitic violence tied to criticism of Israel as a product of “blood libels” — aren’t quite accurate. There’s no ritual element in most of what Jews are accused of — which turns out to be quite important.
‘A way to sanitize Christian concerns’
The charge of Jewish ritual murder germinated at a time when Catholic Europe was increasingly focused on the need for everyone to take communion, a practice that involves seeing the Eucharist as the literal blood and body of Christ.
“As you might imagine, there are many people for whom the idea of consuming blood — even Jesus’s blood, in its transubstantiated form — is a bit uncomfortable,” Dorin said. “The blood libel ends up emerging as a way to sort of sanitize Christian concerns about their own theology.”
Accusing Jews of using Christian blood for ritual purposes was a way to separate good uses of blood, such as communion, from bad uses of blood, such as Jews allegedly using it to make matzah.
Jewish communities naturally disputed the charges, emphasizing prohibitions around the usage of blood. The Torah forbids blood sacrifices, and Jewish dietary laws do not permit the consumption of blood, hence the need to drain animals’ blood to make meat kosher. Many high-level figures in medieval Christendom also denounced false claims against Jews.
And yet blood libels continued to spread around the globe through subsequent centuries, resulting in instances of mob justice, pogroms, sham trials, confessions extracted under torture, expulsion and executions.
A ‘cultural preoccupation’
There’s one essential idea that helps explain false charges against Jews: “In the history of antisemitism, accusations made against Jews tend to reflect the cultural preoccupations of majority society,” Dorin said.
In other words, antisemitism is more about the mentality of the accusers than anything the accused have actually done. The focus on blood at a time when the practice of taking communion gained dominance is a perfect example.
In that way, the recent attacks in Boulder and D.C. do fit the mold of the blood libel. Both assailants expressed that they saw their violence as a way to fight for Palestinians: whose cause has long attracted significant attention, in part because of a strong recent cultural focus on ideas of anti-imperialism and liberation of the oppressed. And in both Boulder and D.C., those targeted had as little to do with the plight of Gazans as Jews in medieval Europe did with the disappearance of Christian children.
But while it’s true that there is an endless stream of vitriol being directed at Jews and Israelis these days, broadly speaking, almost none of it fits the bill of actual blood libel, which is about supposed Jewish ritual murder for the purposes of using blood for religious practice. And while conspiracy theories shapeshift to meet new eras, Dorin worries that “using the term blood libel in a very loose sense does an injustice to the very specific fears and very specific sort of horrors that that particular historical accusation had for Jewish communities in the past,” he said.
Specificity is important in part because the blood libel continues to pop up today, though with less mainstream purchase than it once had. Alleged Jewish ritual murder has been invoked by the QAnon conspiracy theory; was cited by a shooter as the motivation for his 2019 attack on a California synagogue, which killed one person; and has been regularly revived in the Middle East.
A catch-all defense
The specific question of blood isn’t the only or even the most important reason to be wary of the current usage of the term. It’s essential that we also consider the mentality of those claiming that others are spreading a blood libel.
In Netanyahu’s case, he deploys the charge of a blood libel as a rhetorical defense meant to implode all incoming attacks. In some ways, the submarine affair proved that he doesn’t use the term in good faith: After all, he cried “blood libel” in response to claims by other Jews that he engaged in corruption. By “blood libel,” Netanyahu appears to be saying “wrongly accused.”
Recent claims that media outlets are promoting a “blood libel” against Israel reflect a similar mentality of being unfairly maligned. Just this past week, The Jerusalem Post’s editorial board, as well as Honest Reporting, a pro-Israel watchdog, accused media outlets of spreading blood libels in claiming that the IDF killed hungry Gazans awaiting aid distribution. In fact, a growing wave of evidence and testimony suggests the IDF was likely responsible.
This doesn’t mean that claims of a blood libel are always produced in bad faith. Or that media organizations have been perfect in their coverage of Israel. But while accusations of Jewish ritual blood murder are categorically false, at least some of the criticisms of Israel being pegged as “blood libels” by Netanyahu and others may have their roots in truth. The idea of a blood libel has become a convenient way to push back against claims that make Israel or its politicians look bad, regardless of their veracity.
When blood libel emerged, it didn’t suggest that some Jews sometimes killed children, but rather “that this is something that one had to do to be faithfully Jewish,” Dorin said.
In other words, there was a perception of an unbreakable tie between the Jewish faith and ritual murder. We can see belief in a version of such a tie reemerging today, as a growing cadre of observers sees the existence of a Jewish state as inherently requiring violence against Palestinians.
There are plenty of people watching Israel’s far-right government oversee a war of annihilation that is killing tens of thousands of Palestinians, with no end in sight. They are deluged with photos and news reports of starving Gazans, or nine siblings killed in a single airstrike. People who may not have once thought that a haven for the Jewish people necessitated Palestinian suffering but are witnessing a far-right government draw the two into an ever-closer entanglement.
That is not to excuse the attackers in D.C. and Boulder. There is no justification for them or for anyone who contorts the concept of Palestinian liberation to harass and target Jews.
But, as Dorin said, antisemitism is a mirror that reflects the preoccupations of the day. And the brutality of this war has made Israel, and Jews, an even bigger preoccupation than they already were.
We may never be able to stop antisemites from finding reasons to target innocent Jews. But we can realize how political rage fuels conspiracies and bigotry, and work to better combat attacks against Jews by being more careful about which terms we attach to antisemitism.
