Blood Libel and Its Derivatives

The Scourge of Anti-Semitism

Raphael Israeli

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351297189
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Religiöse Intoleranz, Verfolgung & Konflikt

At the doorstep of the twenty-first century, one would expect that medieval concepts such as blood libel—the accusation that Jews kill children to use their blood in religious ritual—would have been discarded by any civilized human being. Certainly in the Christian world, where the story originated and endured for centuries, modern attitudes have nearly erased these barbaric accusations. But in Arab and Islamic worlds, where enmity towards Israel and Zionism has conditioned beliefs, attitudes, positions, and fantasies, blood libel and similar charges are still part of life.

Most people are unaware of the history of blood libel and do not perceive links between it and many of the false accusations currently hurled against the state of Israel. Raphael Israeli argues that individuals and organizations guilty of human rights crimes project crimes onto Israel to avoid awareness of their own guilt. Certainly when countries ruled by dictators set the agenda of the UN Council for human rights, Israel is consistently censured and condemned.

Accusations of "apartheid" and charges of discrimination against Muslims are frequently made. Israel is accused of plots against Muslims in order to harm their productive sectors, of using weapons of mass destruction to commit "genocide" against Arabs, of injecting poisonous substances into Palestinian children, of poisoning Arab lands under the guise of "agricultural aid, " and of laying siege to peaceful citizens. All of these charges are derivatives of blood libel and have been adopted by Middle East Jihadists in their struggle against Israel. This volume aims to explain the origins of the charge of blood libel and define the ways its derivatives have achieved acceptance in certain parts of the world today.

1

A Historical Survey of the Phenomenon

When one scans the media in the contemporary West, where the blood libel was invented and diffused since the Middle Ages, one is stunned by the persistence and recurrence of the “Jews is news” theme, whereby anything that has to do with Israel, Jews, or Zionism anywhere in the world and at any time in history, immediately captures headlines and universal attention. Thousands of Muslims in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan are killed by terrorism, or in Bangladesh and Pakistan are annihilated by floods and the elements, and they hardly merit a brief mention as if they were a boring and routine recurrence that hardly needs anyone’s attention. In other words, what is newsworthy is not the killing of Muslims, something they do profusely to each other, but who kills them. If the killing has anything to do with Israel, for example, an incident on its borders, it immediately draws headlines in the media in the quality and volume of “breaking news.” Clashes between Israel and Arabs attract the same attention, for instance, the Palestinian issue, not because Palestinians are more deserving than other Arabs, but because they come into daily and dangerous friction with Israelis. As a Palestinian negotiator put it, he felt fortunate that his nation’s enemies are the Israelis/Jews, for otherwise no one would bother to do anything to assist the Palestinian cause. The Kurds, for example, who are more numerous, deserving of nationhood and self-determination no less than Palestinians, and have recorded a longer history of struggle for independence than their Palestinian counterparts, are ignored by the world, as are the Africans of Darfur, the Copts of Egypt, and the numerous other minorities oppressed and decimated throughout the Arab and Islamic world, because their enemies are other Arabs and Muslims whom outsiders do not care about or simply fear. One has to know how to choose one’s enemies.

Historically, Jews were eliminated and expelled by Christendom and by Islamdom, when not forced to convert. After they were annihilated, not one moment before, some voices of pity, compassion, or even of repentance were voiced about them by a minority of the perpetrators whose human remorse tormented them, and by others who had stood cross-handed during the act but found themselves in the position of occupying the moral high ground while celebrating their own schadenfreude at the defeat of the murderers. But since the Jews attained independence after they established the very successful Jewish state of Israel, and proved that they can defend themselves valiantly, while inevitably inflicting defeats on their enemies, the schadenfreude of the armchair moralists have turned against the new victors, and the mood shifts in favor of the Arabs and Palestinians, those “poor victims” of Israel’s intransigence, aggression, etc. What a pleasure to erase the heavy burden of the European anti-Semitic past by claiming now that Israel is the “Nazi” and its “oppression” of the Palestinians is the equivalent to what the Jews suffered in Auschwitz. So, Israel’s calumniators find their past sins absolved once the wrongs of their fathers have been overtaken by the Jews, the victims of yesteryear. Therefore, paradoxically, the anti-Jewish blood libel, and even more so its modern derivatives, which were lamented by some decent moralists before, are being reinforced among the anti-Semites today, precisely after the Jews have moved in their majority from their previous position of victims, to Israel where they live independent and free, though they acquired the image of the “oppressors” against whom the new manifestations of the blood libel are profusely hurled.

The irrationality of anti-Semitism in general and of the blood libel in particular continues into the twenty-first century, with the ancient Ancient Library of Alexandria, which was restored by UNESCO funds, still exhibiting the fake Protocols of the Elders of Zion as authentic documents, though they were thrice condemned as a hoax in three courts of law in Europe and South Africa. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, considered the era of reason and modernity, the original blood libels have tapered off as no longer in vogue in the democratic West—with the horrific exception of the authoritarian Nazi interregnum when they were revived—to be replaced by the more “digestible” and acceptable to the Western press derivatives of the blood libel, such as poisoning of Arab populations, injection of HIV-positive blood to Palestinians, “genocide,” “apartheid,” and the “killing of children” of Palestinians. This is yet another calumniation repeated by the Islamic prime minister of Turkey, Erdogan, in the context of the Gaza War (2008–09), and in his subsequent onslaughts against Israel, despite the heavy burden of history that he carries for the massacre of the Armenians and the annihilation of thousands of his Kurdish citizens. More new hoaxes, hurled at the Jews and Israel, began to emerge. But to the great disappointment of anyone naïve enough to believe that the Western investigative press would not allow new libels to pass, it turns out that when it concerns Jews, Zionism, or Israel, ideology, bias, and prejudice still dominate the scene in Europe and take precedence over truth and fact. As we shall illustrate and document in the case of the fake “poisoning” in the West Bank in 1983, it was every bit like a classic blood libel, for even after the total exoneration of Israel, when it was conclusively found that it was a case of mass hysteria, not poisoning, the world bodies and media refrained from apologizing for their libelous onslaught against the integrity of Jews and Israel, much less amend their faulty publications or offer compensation for the damage they caused. Typical of a blood libel was that after the storm caused by such an alleged case had receded, expectation grew that the next would not be too distant to come. For even when Jews are shown not to have done anything evil right now, they could have done it, or they are prone to do it sometime in the future, rather sooner than later. That alone provides the basis to suspect them and accuse them in perpetuity.

Professor Benjamin Aktzin, a prominent political scientist of Hebrew University, remarked during the West Bank poison affair¹ that in the US, while public opinion was persuaded that the Israeli government had not been involved in any poisoning, rumors and suspicions persisted that, perhaps, some extremist Jews may have perpetrated the crime. Aktzin invoked a discussion he had held some sixty years earlier, in which a Russian had told him that he was sure that not all the Jews killed Christian boys during Passover for their matza, but “perhaps, it was possible that some fanatic Jewish sect, as the Hassidim, did engage in such practices.”² No such suspicion had been raised in any one of the other worldwide cases of mass hysteria studied and publicized,³ from Africa to Malaysia and from Taiwan to Templeton in the US. In all those places there had been a search for individual criminals who might have triggered the affair, but only until the events were diagnosed as mass hysteria. But in the West Bank (1983) it was an entire community, a whole nation that was placed on the culprit bench, and very few cared to exonerate it when the hoax was revealed. Namely, while other individuals were assumed innocent unless they were indicted, the Jews were assumed collectively guilty unless proved otherwise. This is the essence of the blood libel and other anti-Semitic stereotypes.

The source of this special, “preferential” treatment meted out to Jews merits then to be explored, if only due to current concerns of Jews in Israel and worldwide about the revival of the specter of the blood libel and other manifestations of crude anti-Semitism. The calumniations against Israel in the world arena, all part of the Arab/Islamic efforts to demonize the Jews and delegitimize Israel, though the Jewish state by far excels over its calumniators by any yardstick, have certainly heightened sensitivities among Jews to this kind of unwarranted eruption of hatred. So much so, even unrelated events which have nothing to do with Israel, such as the domestic issue of racist MP Pauline Hanson of Australia, have been found relevant to calumniate Israel. Hanson, who represented Queensland in parliament, was elected on a platform of hatred towards aborigines and Asian immigrants, and has aroused a national debate which ultimately cost her removal from the federal parliament in Canberra. Professor Colin Tatz, the Director of Comparative Studies Center at Macquarie University in Sydney, had this to say about that “unrelated” debate:

What surprises me is that in Pauline Hanson’s aspersions about the “lesser peoples” in general, the untermenschen, she has refrained so far from targeting the Jews. Surprising too that her assertions about aboriginal cannibalism have been allowed to become a debate in the context of aboriginal rights.

The oldest libel against people is the blood libel against the Jews, beginning in the first Century BC. It is the accusation, often with fatal consequences, that Jews abduct and murder Christian children in order to make matzah, the unleavened bread of Passover, from their blood. The calumny of the blood libel has become part of Western history and Western civilization, a weapon in the hands of those who want to demonize the Jews and demarcate them from the rest of humanity. It is something the Jews have to live with.

The Hanson vilification about cannibalism is not of the same magnitude or consequence, but it is very much of the same genre…. In my view the evidence—and I have read most of it—is fragmentary and inconclusive. The fact is that we do not have a single eyewitness account of aboriginal cannibalism. Everyone heard it from someone else…. At best, information about infanticide and cannibalism was, and is, hearsay.⁴

What is interesting, relevant, and repulsive to our story here is that Tatz, who found it necessary to compare the bi-millennial calumniation of the Jews, which was repeatedly and consistently proven as false, and carried with it the dire consequence of hundreds of pogroms against Jews, and tens of thousands of victims in history, counsels Jews “to live with it”; namely, he despairs from trying to fight it and shows no proclivity to stand up and denounce the hoax in his own society and in his community of scholars. At the same time, in the aborigine case, which remained “inconclusive” to his mind and concerned only a few who were calumniated by a single individual who was, after all, excluded from politics, he dismissed the accusation as mere “hearsay” and mobilized public opinion to combat it. Are Jews then the only people who are asked to bear the calumny forever, to live with it instead of fighting it? The fact is that blood libel has persisted as the oldest accusation against the Jews, either in its blunt original form of draining Christian children’s blood for matza, its absurdity notwithstanding, or in its newest form of purposely channeling their bloodthirstiness to “killing Arab children.” And the fact that Israeli and diaspora Jews invoked the blood libel when discussing the West Bank poison hoax is not devoid of significance. The accusation was fully operational during the first Crusade in the tenth century, as a renewal of a more ancient claim advanced by the Romans against the first Christians. It was subsequently condemned by four popes as a sinful slander, but it kept creeping up again and again, with attending massacres of entire Jewish communities. The nineteenth century was particularly rich in such accusations, which extended from Damascus (1840) to Hungary (1882), all these cases being initiated by mobs or local authorities. Yet already from the seventeenth century on, these slanders gradually wandered eastwards to Eastern Europe and Russia, where the bulk of Jewish populations had shifted the center of gravity of Jewry from Western Europe, where many Jewish communities had been annihilated or whence Jews had been expelled, to Poland, Lithuania, the Ukraine, and Russia.

When the West Bank poison affair broke into the open the eve of Passover 1983, many bewildered Israeli writers and columnists immediately harked back to the history of blood libel and the accusation of well-poisoning hurled against the Jews. One of them Michael Ohad, made the point that logical arguments did not suffice to fight against the blood libel, and invoked the Barber of Seville to back himself up. He enumerated the countless accusations mounted against the Jews throughout the generations: the crucifixion of the Messiah, the slaughtering of Christian children, the spread of the plague which annihilated one third of the European population, the selling of the secrets of the host countries to their enemies, and the scheming to take over the world. One wonders how the world could believe such absurdities even in the Middle Ages, let alone in our days, but since the powerless Jews were stateless and spread all over Europe, there was nothing they could do. On the contrary, their meek protests were taken as “proof” of their culpability. The author emphasized that the “dark age” has turned out to be less dark than our days, even though human psychology has remained unchanged during the past 2,000 years. He remarked that while in medieval Europe entire families could ride brooms, in our days multitudes of people believe in UFOs, flying saucers, and extra-terrestrials coming to visit our planet. One might add today that even the marvelous classic but realistic novel of Kazakh writer Chinghiz Aimatov, One Day is a Hundred Years (published twenty years after the poison affair) talks concretely of extra-terrestrials who kidnapped terrestrial astronauts from their joint American–Russian spaceship.⁵

Ohad insisted that while we operate computers and advance the frontier of science to its outer limit, the instincts and prejudices of people do not change. He talked about a play he had seen in London which spoke of the unusual wave of cold sweeping northern Europe in those days, where the old watchman, a character in the play, accused the Russians of blowing that cold (cold war or not?) in England’s direction. Thus the absurdity of the blood libel was not without parallel, for the more absurd the accusation and the paranoia of others’ misdeeds, the more enthusiastic their propagators and the more it becomes difficult to convince intelligent people of the truth. He reminisced the first anti-Nazi movie he saw in his childhood where a priest was beaten in a concentration camp, but someone else who was watching the same movie with him remarked that she did not believe one word of it because it was all propaganda. He reminded his readers that when Nero was accused of burning Rome, he laid the blame on the persecuted first Christians, who were a very small minority, merely thirty-four years after the passion of Christ. But the accusation caught up, the “culprits” were arrested and either thrown to the beasts or dipped in asphalt and set afire to light Nero’s gardens at night.

The writer recounted that the most ancient libel against the Jews had been concocted in Alexandria during the Second Jewish Commonwealth during the second half of the first millennium BC, where a Jewish community had settled down and raised the envy of its enemies who could not countenance its economic success. (What else is new?) It was then said by the local Egyptians and Greeks, who were guided by Hellenistic culture in the days that preceded the Arab/Muslim occupation by close to a millennium, that the ancient Hebrews had been evicted from their land because they were infected with leprosy, or they did not worship God but a donkey in their Jerusalem Temple, which was the reason that only their high priests could have access to their sanctuary. More lies were spread against the Jews then, but the most horrible one, which also drew the most attention and stuck in the minds of anti-Semites in the subsequent two millennia, was that the Jews kidnapped a young Greek boy and sacrificed him to their donkey-god. Josephus Flavius, the renowned Jewish historian who witnessed the destruction of the Second Temple, wrote a treatise against that libel and explained that not only did Jewish law prohibited human sacrifice but it also cultivated the abhorrence of animal blood. But in those days, there was no court of law before which one could bring a case of blood libel, or any libel for that matter. One had to rely on human decency and intellectual honesty, which were always in short supply, to defend, protect, and preserve one’s reputation and good name.

Over time, when Christianity took over Europe, the Greek boy became a Christian one, whose blood was drained by the Jews for their Passover Seder. Thus the blood libel emerged, first in eleventh century England, then in France and Germany, and triggered large-scale massacres against Jews. Shortly thereafter, three Christian boys disappeared in Vienna on the eve of Jewish Passover, which occasioned the slaughter of the Jewish community via the burning alive of three hundred members of the Jewish community there. Only when the frozen waters of the Danube thawed in the next spring were the bodies of the three boys found still in their ice-skating attire. But the destruction of the Jewish community had been completed, and no one apologized for that. Heinrich Heine described in one of his novels Rabbi Abraham and his wife Sarah (symbolic names for the successive generations of Jews that were decimated on account of the blood libel). The Rabbi and his family were sitting at their home for the Seder when two strangers, wearing wide and loose garbs came in and asked to participate, as it has been Jewish wont to host any guest who wished to join. But suddenly, the young and wealthy rabbi pulled his wife to him for a fake dance and ran away with her, telling her that he had seen the guests dropping under the table the body of a slain boy from under their cloth, in order to accuse him and inherit his wealth. The hapless rabbi in Heine’s story did not even try to defend himself, so hopeless that was given the prejudice of the time; he and his wife simply ran for their lives.

The Middle Ages in general were an age of barbarism and physical force. It was a time of great religious fervor and of priestcraft. The blood libel against Jews was probably born in the minds of the low clergy, since there is absolutely not one shred of evidence that Jews ever killed Christian children for ritual purposes. As part of this religious fervor, medieval Christianity was obsessed with blood, particularly the blood of the Savior. Long sermons, lasting for many hours, told of how Jesus sweated real blood while he prayed before being betrayed; gruesome details of children’s suffering and torture before they were murdered by Jews were also included in these preachings. Thus, the image of Jews as it evolved in those days characterized them not only as heretics and Christ-killers, devilish poisoners and sorcerers, and despised money...