From: Jo Miller djm8@cornell.edu(NOSPAM)
To: Multiple recipients of the History of Antisemitism List <H-ANTIS@UICVM.CC.UIC.EDU>
Subject: Blood Libel Redux: from Jo Miller
Date: Mon, 11 Dec 1995 18:04:05 -1000
A bit of the commentary that I never posted in September (quoted text is from the July 25, 1992 Montreal Gazette article on Bosnia):
>> Argument and reason are all but powerless before these fantasies. Why >>powerless? For more than a thousand years, Jews have been accused of ritual >>murder and crucifixion in European courts,
Approximately 800 years. This may sound like nit-picking, but the cause of eradicating tenacious libels is not well served by vagueness as to their historical origins and evolution.
>> If early Christians were originally the victims of the fantasies they later >>turned upon the Jews, we can only conclude that the basic structure of the >>fantasy - the murder of innocents, the consumption of human blood - is always >>independent of its target.
Quite so (though of course cannibalism is not always a component of the ritual infanticide charge). Ritual murder accusations have been levelled against such disparate groups as Christian missionaries to China and Central American Indians (the manifest illogic of Spanish conquerors charging the Yucatan Maya with ritual crucifixion at Easter time deserves pondering and suggests much about the mentality of the accusers). Margaret Schultz has referred to what she believes is a "psychological nexus" between persecution and blood libels, which is a compelling notion, since blood libels do seem to crop up in settings where casual violence is prevalent and persecution already an established pattern.
>> It remains free to attach itself to whatever victims a neurotic and >>inflamed imagination decides upon. It can always re-invent itself, find new >>victims when old ones have been exterminated.
Is Savka, then, a neurotic extremist in the guise of a "fat, kind woman of 60"? Were the editors of the Oxford and Cambridge review in the grip of collective madness when they failed to condemn roundly the ritual murder charge in 1913? If the only people who believed and acted upon ritual murder myth were frothing, unbalanced lunatics then the task of rooting it out of our cuture would be far easier. The actions of the unhinged and hate-filled accusers amount to something only in the context of a complicit and receptive culture, and it is the Savkas that defy easy categorization--the people who, from an unfathomable combination of personal motives and cultural predispositions, choose to accept without question what their culture tells them about certain victim groups. In any case, hyperbole is not the most desirable quality in journalism.
>> From the Congress of Vienna to World War I, enlightened Jews and Gentiles >>alike believed that Europe had put such medieval delusions behind it.
In fact the debate was raging strong, albeit on a "civilized" level of words.
>> After 1945, once again, Europeans thought such structures of fantasy were >>disgraced forever. Just like our benighted liberal ancestors from the age of >>the railway, we believed, once again, that we lived within a narrative of >>progress.
Which Europeans? The enlightened, the literate, the genteel, perhaps--theirs was a different brand of antisemitism. And it is true that the idea of a Jew being brought to trial in London or Berlin on trumped-up ritual infanticide charges would probably have been inconceivable at that time. Nevertheless, the fact that medieval fantasies could be so easily revived by the likes of Jules Streicher or some Serbian thug points to the fact that libels behave much like a virus. After an outbreak, the virus will go underground, continuing to cycle in some host somewhere until the conditions are favorable for another outbreak. In this case, the cycling would take place in the generations of children who grow up hearing nursery tales about dehumanized and diabolical Jews (or Muslims). It would consist, too, of the repetition of the legends associated with ritual murder shrines, not just in remote mountain strongholds of an atavistic brand of Catholicism, but in places like Lincoln and Saint Louis. Sooner or later the virus breaks out again in a population predisposed to belief, or with an immune system weakened by severe economic insecurity or nationalistic bombast (nota bene). When five years ago a nutty, doddering member of the English aristocracy began passing out leaflets in London accusing Jews of ritual murder, it was treated as something of a sad and embarrassing joke; the social organism was immune to such lunatic ravings. I wonder, though, given the ugly and vindictive tenor of American political discourse at the moment, what would happen if illegal aliens in the southwest were accused of plotting to kidnap and murder American children. Just a thought.
>> Now we know differently. A few hours flying time from here, there are some >>old women and some Serbian warlords who, without knowing it, have transferred >>the most vicious myth in Europe from the Jews to the Muslims.
Is it so hard to believe, when for instance in the Austrian Tyrol the tiny, opulently bedecked skeleton of little Saint so-and-so, "victim" of Jewish ritual murder, is still paraded out for annual celebrations? Or when some children in Tokyo are still brought up with the belief that, among other things, Jews are more intelligent that other "races" [sic] because they murder their mentally retarded offspring?...
Well, that's enough blood from me. Having tipped my hand utterly, I shall sink back into the woodwork, sparing you my speculations on the "cutting off of the penis" element.
Jo Miller djm8@cornell.edu(nospam)
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"It's certainly easy to mock _some_ things. Oddly enough, I've never
found it easy to mock anything of value, only things that are
tawdry and fatuous. Maybe it's just me." -Trefusis
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