From: Jo Miller djm8@cornell.edu(NOSPAM)
To: Multiple recipients of the History of Antisemitism List <H-ANTIS@UICVM.CC.UIC.EDU>
Subject: All great Neptune's ocean: from Jo Miller
Date: Mon, 11 Dec 1995 18:01:49 -1000
When I first read about the anti-Muslim libels in Bosnia, it was 1991 and I had just spent a year writing about earliest ritual murder accusations against European Jews. Upon seeing the 1992 Montreal Gazette article re-posted on this list in September, I undertook an extended interlinear commentary. My message had soon swollen to about 25K, however, and I mercifully elected to scupper it. Now that Dan Leeson has revived the discussion by posting his interesting and characteristically well-written article on blood, I would like to beg your patience and address a few points. If the discussion of historiography bores you, skip to the end. (Much of the following is adapted from my 1990-1 study.)
Let me say at the outset that I believe the the "thousand-year-plus" figure is bandied about far too much when this very month marks the 760th anniversary of what we know as the blood libel. My own work on the 1235 Fulda accusation has been superseded by that of Gavin Langmuir, and I would refer anyone interested in the specifics of the case to the "Ritual Cannibalism" article in his Towards a Definition of Antisemitism (Berkeley, 1990).
When we collect and examine all known ritual murder cases of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, distinct patterns emerge, and it becomes clear that during this period not one, but at least two separate fantasies about Jewish ritual murder arose among Christians in various regions of Europe. The legend which was created in Norwich around 1150 and had spread to much of England and parts of northern France by 1200 centered around the Jews' alleged practice of ritually killing a Christian child out of contempt for Christ, usually in the Easter season and by crucifixion. The fantasy, initiated by monks, resulted in several shrines to 'martyred innocents' but did NOT precipitate popular violence and only rarely led to official persecution. A second fantasy, the blood libel, arose independently among German burghers in 1235 and spread rapidly, sparking riots and quasi-legal executions almost everywhere it appeared despite repeated warnings and refutations from pope and emperor. The blood libel drew credibility and momentum from existing beliefs about Jews--that they hated Christians and secretly murdered them at any opportunity, that they were involved in an international conspiracy to re-enact the crucifixion of Jesus on a proxy,that they dabbled in sorcery--but it was nevertheless something new and distinct in European history, a remarkably virulent and tenacious fantasy whose psychological origins and appeal have yet to be fully explored. The blood libel so familiar to all of us does not trace its roots to Josephus or to patristic writings, or even to England.
To date, the blood libel--the belief that Jews secretly murder Christian children in order to collect their blood (and, more rarely, internal organs) for various purposes--has received such a vast preponderance of scholarly attention that other versions of the ritual murder accusation have been all but eclipsed. But 'ritual murder accusation' and 'blood libel' are not, despite historians' common usage, interchangeable terms.
The conflation is somewhat understandable given the conditions which have shaped historiography on the subject. The first enquiries into the medieval origins of ritual murder accusations were undertaken, not out of detached intellectual curiosity, but out of a real and pressing need to defend Judaism from a volley of similar slanders in the nineteenth century. To refute current antisemitic propaganda, such dedicated and meticulous scholars as Hermann L. Strack, Daniel Chwolson and Moritz Stern enlisted the tools of historiography.* Because these men were writing in the context of an ongoing debate over the veracity of ritual murder accusations, their outstanding works were necessarily polemical in nature and were conditioned by the form of ritual murder accusation prevalent in Eastern Europe, Russia and Germany at the time: the blood libel. Hence, if scholars in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries concerned themselves only with blood libels and their origins, that is not to say that they thought blood libels were the only ritual murder charges ever to have been brought against Jews. Strack, for instance, knew and pointed out the existence of twelfth-century crucifixion accusations, but he chose to leave investigation of that subject to others.
Few if any general works of history treat the subject of ritual murder fantasies in great depth, and their authors are generally content to take their information either from Strack or from other secondary works which were themselves based on the nineteenth-century defences. Hence the impression transmitted by most twentieth century historiography is that all ritual murder accusations have been blood libels, everywhere and in every age the same. Too little attention is paid to the specific circumstances in which each charge arose.
There is no entry for 'ritual murder accusation' in either the Jewish Encyclopedia or Encyclopaedia Judaica; one must look under 'blood accusation' or 'blood libel.' The article in the older Jewish Encyclopedia is by far the better of the two, having been written by Professor Strack, but it contains little that cannot be found in his longer work and is equally coloured by the atmosphere in which it was written. H. H. Ben-Sasson, acutely conscious of the Nazi revival of the blood libel in the 1930s, is even more polemical than Strack; furthermore, his entry for 'blood libel' in the Encyclopaedia Judaica is marred by numerous inaccuracies and careless oversimplifications. Thus after narrowly defining his topic as 'the allegation that Jews murder non-Jews, especially Christians, in order to obtain blood for the Passover or other rituals,' he goes on to assert that 'the first distinct case of the blood libel against Jews in the Middle Ages [was] that of Norwich in 1144.' (The case at Norwich did not in fact involve a blood libel, nor did any of the other twelfth-century cases mentioned in the EJ.) The EJ, to its credit, does contain a rather instructive piece on modern Russian blood libels.
We look at the past in the light of the present, and we are driven to probe the origins of a medieval myth mainly because it has survived to affect our own modern world. The dangers of looking at the entire European Jewish past through the lens of the Holocaust are by now well known, of course; the 1992 article makes me reflect, though, that if we are not careful we can also distort the present by interpreting it too much in the light of the past.
The piece about Bosnia spun us into a most interesting discussion about blood libels in Jewish history. Did anyone notice, I wonder, that neither Savka nor the commandant ever mentioned blood-collection or cannibalism?
>> Savka obviously thought there was nothing whatever to explain. Didn't the >>English journalist know that the Muslims crucified Christian children, >>decapitated them and sent the corpses floating down the Drina?.... >> The commandant, Marko Kovac, replied, as if it were a fact beyond necessity >>of proof, that Muslims "kill Serbian babies and drown them in the River Drina. >>They sexually assault Serbian children aged between 9 and 12 and they cut off >>Serbian men's penises."
Savka's claims do, I believe, put her firmly in the old European tradition of a ritual murder legend first formulated by an East Anglian monk eight hundred and forty-five years ago--namely, that of ritual crucifixion. (It is perhaps worth noting that without Savka's revealing remarks, we would not recognize that the commander's accusations represented anything more than standard wartime atrocity charge of the common babies-on-bayonets variety.)
Fine, you say, so what? The two traditions of blood libel and "martyred innocent" arose separately and were associated with markedly different behavior patterns on the part of the accusors, but in subsequent centuries elements from both traditions became intertwined so that such disctinctions no longer mattered. Are my remarks, then, nothing more than the carping pedantry of a specialist? Well, perhaps so, but there is a point to be made about the way we read:
In the middle ages, chroniclers, historians, and balladeurs would take the news and rumors they heard and re-shape them to fit a recognizable narrative pattern, filling in the gaps and tailoring the account according to what they thought they already "knew" about their world and aboutt Jewish behavior. Thus when Matthew Paris heard that Jews in Norwich had circumcised a Christian boy in 1235, he presumed that they must have been preparing to crucify the boy--hearing "Jews" and "Christian child" (and perhaps "Norwich") was enough to suggest to him the familiar story already associated with several English shrines to martyred innocents. And that is how he reported the incident: as a botched ritual murder. (Court records reveal that in fact this Norwich case was nothing of the sort, but rather a dispute, which began in 1230, over the faith of a child of mixed marriage.) Chroniclers repeatedly interpolated ritual murder accusations to explain arrests and persecutions of Jews. Laymen likewise found it easy to supply the 'missing' bits of a contemporary account from the patterns and legends already stored in their heads--by the 1280s the blood libel was so familiar that German townspeople seemed to treat nearly every child disappearance or death as obvious and sufficient evidence of a Jewish crime. This tendency to interpret new information so that it fits with what is already "known" is how we get most of our ritual murder accounts in the first place.
Do we not fall into the same mental habits as the medieval monks
and burghers when, upon reading the words "Muslim," "Christian child" and
"crucify," we supply the "blood libel" for which there is no evidence and
launch immediately into a riff on alleged Jewish cannibalism and the
properties of blood? When we read, do we see what we expect to see rather
than what is there? If you imagine we do not, go back and read the
Prioress's Tale and its numerous analogues, and tell me where
blood-collection for nefarious purposes is mentioned.**
Jo Miller djm8@cornell.edu(nospam)
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"The English language is an arsenal of weapons. If you are going to brandish
them without checking to see whether or not they are loaded, you must
expect to have them explode in your face from time to time." -Trefusis
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*H. L. Strack's Der Blutaberglaube in der Menschheit: Blutmorde und Blutritus, first published in 1892 and translated into English from the eighth edition by the Cambridge scholar Henry Blanchamp as The Jew and Human Sacrifice (Human Blood and Jewish Ritual) (London, 1909), is still indispensable. Strack, a professor of theology at Berlin University, concentrated on beliefs held by Christians and Jews at various times throughout history regarding the properties of blood, then followed with a refutation of the antisemitic slanders spread by his contemporary Canon Rohling and a scrutiny of the purported historical 'evidence' for the practice of human sacrifice among Jews. D. Chwolson's Die Blutanklage und sonstige mittelalterliche Beschuldigungen der Juden: Eine historische Untersuchung nach den Quellen (Frankfurt, 1901), written amidst a wave of new ritual murder accusations against Jews in Russia in the 1870s, was likewise aimed at discrediting current myths with the aid of historiography. M. Stern searched the Vatican registers to find past papal letters condemning blood libels, which he collected and edited as Die päpstlichen Bullen über die Blutbeschuldigung (Berlin, 1893).Back to main text.
**The word "blood" is used but twice in the Prioress's Tale, once to denote heredity, and once as an allusion to the Cain and Abel story, meaning "murder will out." The Jews in the story kill the child out of rage and hatred at his singing of the Alma redemptoris, not to collect his blood for magic or matzah. As this is my current area of research I would welcome any off-list correspondence on the subject. Back up.
Note: Much of this article was drawn, directly or indirectly, from work in progress and from
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