When the toll of murdered Palestinian children rose into the hundreds and began to attract attention of international organisations, the spirit of the blood libel was promptly ushered forth as the ultimate defence for the killers. It helped, even though the head of Shabak, the Israeli Secret Service, wondered in a prime-time TV interview why so many children were being gratuitously murdered by Israeli soldiers.

The scaring expression can be used against disobedient Jews as well. When Edward Herman, the author of [1] Manufacturing Consent , wrote of “the powerful pro-Israel lobby in the United States, which advances Israeli interests by pushing for U.S. aid and protection to Israel, and, currently, by pressing for a war against Iraq, which again will serve Israeli interests.

Now you have recovered your breath. Now you are relaxed. It’s Blacks who commit ritual murders, not Jews. Who cares? In Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely, a news-hawk enters the scene of a crime literally awash in blood, learns from a policeman that the carve-up was done by Harlem dwellers, exclaims: ‘aw, hell, shines’, and drives away. For some reason an accusation of ritual murder by Blacks is not called ‘Blood Libel’, just as genocide of Blacks or Armenians is no ‘Holocaust’.

"If Palestinians were black, Israel would be a pariah state subject to economic sanctions led by the United States," The Observer editorialized after the outbreak of the Second Intifada. Oh no, if Palestinians were black (and only some are), slavery would be re-established in the United States, and the great Jewish sage Maimonides’ maxim [2] ‘Blacks are less than human’ would be embossed in gold on the US dollar. Indeed, Afro-American ‘Israel’, Liberia, for 160 years of its existence received less US aid than the Jewish ‘Liberia’, Israel, in a month.

Why accusation of Blacks in ritual murder is taken so easily, while accusation of a Jew creates waves in the conscience? Can we deal with the accusation of Jews in the same straightforward, unattached and businesslike manner The Observer and the Scotland Yard dealt with similar accusation of Blacks? For if not, our self-declared anti-racism is not worth a penny.

Jews do not mind some blood-libelling. Palestinian parents are habitually blamed by Jewish scribes of ritually sacrificing their own children by exposing them to the justifiable fury of Israeli soldiers. In an article called Child Sacrifice, Palestinian Style a Reuven Koret (Capitalism Magazine, November 13, 2002) marks: [3] “the Palestinians started sacrificing their own sons and daughters as a matter of policy, as a sacred ritual” The Jerusalem Post wrote of Palestinian [4] “parents and leaders who proudly send children to die in attacks against Israel and resort to targeting Israeli children as well” , while the singularly malicious Cynthia Ozick wrote: ‘But the most ingeniously barbarous Palestinian societal invention, surpassing any other in imaginative novelty, is the recruiting of children to blow themselves up with the aim of destroying as many Jews as possible in the most crowded sites accessible’.

However, it is the belief in Jewish (not Palestinian) ritual child murders that was widespread and persistent. The old Jewish Encyclopaedia, Vol. III, 266, lists the following cases, beginning with William of Norwich: 5 other cases given for the twelfth century, 15 for the thirteenth, 10 for the fourteenth, 16 for the fifteenth, 13 for the sixteenth, 8 for the seventeenth, 15 for the eighteenth, and 39 for the nineteenth, going right up to the year 1900 (total 113). There have been more cases in the [6] 20th century . What is the reason for this belief? Was there a world-wide and centuries-spanning conspiracy to implicate innocent Jews in heinous crime or is there a crime behind accusations?

This question was tackled by fearless Professor Israel Yuval of Hebrew University in Jerusalem in his seminal [7] book , available in Hebrew. Its English translation was supposed to appear a few years ago in California University Press, but for variety of reasons this has not happened yet. It is certainly sheer coincidence that some American Jewish scholars objected to this book being published and called to ‘erase it from public conscience’

Yuval discovered actual irrefutable child murder beyond the Blood Libel. During the First Crusade, impatient folk tried to forcibly baptise Jews of Rein Valley in order to save their souls from the satanic cult of hate, as they saw it. Their refusal to be baptised was seen as stubborn adherence to Satan: for the pre-modern people, our present religious indifference was unacceptable. They saw a direct connection between faith and behaviour, and felt the need for communal worship, for unifying communion. A Jew permanently residing in a Christian land created a complicated situation: he was free from duty of brotherly love and could (and often did) act in anti-social way, for instance he practiced usury and sorcery. The Christians were particularly worried by the well-attended Jewish custom of cursing Gentiles. Every day Jews asked God to kill, destroy, humiliate, exterminate, defame, starve, impale Christians, to usher in Divine Vengeance and to cover God’s mantle with blood of goyim. Israel Yuval’s book offers its reader a good selection of bloodcurdling curses.

However, the Jews did not take the attempt to bring them into New Israel lightly. Whenever the ‘danger’ of baptism became imminent, many of them murdered their own children and committed suicide. It is not deniable: Jewish and Christian chroniclers of the period describe these events at length, with Jews glorifying this Waco-like behaviour, and Christians condemning it. Did they murder the children in order to save them from Christ? Well, not exactly. That would be bad, but the reality was worse. The murder was performed as ritual slaughter followed by victim’s blood libation, for the Ashkenazi Jews believed that spilled Jewish blood has a magic effect of calling down Divine Vengeance on the heads of the Gentiles. Others used the victim’s blood for atonement. In Mainz, Yitzhak b. David, the community leader, brought his small children into the synagogue, slaughtered them and poured their blood on the Arc, proclaiming ‘Let this blood of innocent lamb be my atonement for my sins’. It happened two days after the confrontation with Christians, when the danger passed by. 

The picture of Jews slaughtering children for cultic reasons exerted huge impact on the Christian peoples of Europe. This behaviour was not comparable to Christian martyrdom. While Christian martyrs allowed others to kill them for their faith, they never committed suicide, and certainly never murdered their (or anybody else’s) children for such purpose. It enforced an image of Jewish cruelty and ruthlessness. Over the years, the actual circumstances of the child murders were forgotten, but the picture of a Jew slaughtering children remained imprinted in the European matrix. (Yuval uses the thesis of Robert Graves, who explained many traditions of the Church by its misreading of old images.) This was the source of the idea that Jews murder Christian children, while in fact, Jews murdered their own children, writes Professor Yuval.

Indeed, Blood Libel accusations appeared soon after the murder of children in Germany. Yuval speaks with horror about these accusations, completely missing the point: a ritual murder of a child is a ritual murder of a child. If some Jews committed this heinous crime in Mainz and Worms, and other Jews exalted this crime as exemplary behaviour even in Israeli historical books written in 1950s, is there any place left for indignation and horror concerning similar accusations in Norwich or Blois, or indeed in Damascus or Kiev? If Yuval thinks that a Jew can use only Jewish blood for libation to wake up af Adonai (the fury of Yahweh), in some cases, the kidnapped child was circumcised before being murdered, i.e. ‘made a Jewish child’. And for atonement, even lamb’s blood will do.

 
A woodcraft from the Diocesan Museum of Trent representing a group of Jews inflicting tortures on St. Simon of Trent. Numerous medieval stories about Jews killing their children for visiting a church or for considering baptism do not surprise. Parents and relatives of converts went into full mourning for converts. Even in the 20th century, gentle Tevye the Milkman, an ideal hero of Sholem Aleichem’s Fiddler on the Roof, mourned his baptised daughter. The mourning rite for a person alive is a traditional magic means to kill the person. Greater believers in the power of magic probably died of it, as Frazer tells us in his enormous collection of lore. If you try to kill somebody by magic means why restrain yourself from more mundane killing?

Over a period of eight hundred years Jews were convicted in more than hundred cases of ritual murder and blood sacrifice Jews were found guilty of. It is a reasonable amount if we think in terms of religious maniacs. Probably any religious community of similar size would produce similar amount of deviants like [the 15th-century marshal of France] Gilles de Rais or Comorre the Cursed [a 6th-century Breton chief]. It would be strange if all the cases were ‘libel’. The concept of the magic powers of blood was embedded in the Jewish thinking. Blood was used for atonement libation. Yes, it was lamb’s blood, but in the Mainz case, it was children’s blood that served in its place. In the Christian world, there were people who practiced black magic and human sacrifices in a perverted ‘Christian’ ritual. They would substitute human blood for wine of communion that is the blood of Christ that is the blood of Paschal Lamb. Is it reasonable to think that the Jews never ever produced magicians and sorcerers who would use human blood to wash off sins or to hasten Salvation?

The question of ritual murders divides mankind, but it is not a division of Jews versus Gentiles. The real division is equally sharp: on one side, philosemites, Jews and Gentiles who a priori exclude a possibility of a Jewish guilt. If they find a dead body and a Jew with knife next to it, they would exclaim, ‘Not another blood libel!’ On the other hand, normal people, Jews and Gentiles who are ready to consider all circumstances of each case, without prejudice, as proposed by Alexander Etkind. A philosemite a priori excludes a possibility that a cruel or ritual murder was committed by a Jew; he is a naïve racist, at best. Mr Aaronovitch has no knowledge of the Damascus case. The murder occurred in 1840, a long time ago. He just presumes a Jew can’t be guilty, full stop.

The Damascus suspects were tortured, and therefore their confession is invalid, writes Aaronovitch. Torture is evil, but in Israel, suspects of ‘terrorist crimes’ are invariably tortured. According to Amnesty International and other Human Rights Watch bodies, tens of thousands of Palestinians, including children, have been tortured in the cellars of Shabak. However, Aaronovitch never tried to doubt any Israeli conclusions achieved by torture.

The murder victim was a priest, and it pushes Aaronovitch to classify the case as ‘antisemitic blood libel’. But priests, nuns and monks were killed by Jews. Hundreds were slaughtered in Antioch in 610, and thousands in Jerusalem in 614. Monks and priests are being killed even now in Israel. For instance, a few years ago, a settler Asher Rabo killed a few monks with an axe and splashed their blood on the walls. He was apprehended by a monk from the Jacob’s Well monastery, and was found insane by an Israeli court. Later, two Russian nuns were murdered with an axe in the St John the Baptist monastery. Practically all murderers of priests and desecrators of churches and mosques were found insane by Israeli judges, but there was a system to their insanity.

Aaronovitch presents the Damascus case as ‘libel against all Jews’. But it was just one person who was accused of the murder. At the same time, Farhi, a Jew of Damascus, had ‘more money than the Bank of England’, (wrote a travelling Englishman) and managed the treasury of St Jean d’Acre. If an accusation against one Jew is an accusation against all Jews, there is no way to correct small errors by small measures.

Indeed, the philosemites of Aaronovitch ilk brought incredible calamities to mankind and to Jews. They excluded a priori the possible guilt of Captain Dreyfus or Beyliss. Instead of standing aside and allowing the justice to take its due course, they created mass hysteria in France and Russia, thus obtaining acquittals but also undermining popular belief in the judicial system. After Dreyfus and Beyliss trials, Jews rose above the law. This caused the backlash of the 1930s, and the back-backlash of our days, and will probably cause a back-back-backlash of tomorrow.

In a better world, Dreyfusards and Beylissists would be sentenced for contempt of court; for their unspoken axiom was ‘a Gentile may not judge a Jew’. One should not believe or disbelieve ritual murders. The ability of men to commit crimes is well known, and there can be monsters like Dr Hannibal Lector of The Silence of the Lambs. Some of them are led by their peculiar interpretation of the Holy Bible. In our days the president of a superpower sent his shock troops to attack a small and weak country and killed thousands of men, women and children for he believed God wants it. (Yes, this God was Mammon, as the witty Polish [14] philosopher noted.) He would have done better to quietly sip the blood of babies.

Jews of our days rarely know they are supposed to eat matzo on Passover, let alone afikoman. They are blissfully unaware of the troublesome legacy of medieval Jewry. But a few things have survived from those times.

In other words, a philosemite who rejects the very idea of a crime committed by a Jew is a potential accessory to murder. Let us look again at the cutting from the Observer. Why did it cause no spurts of indignation? Does it mean 'we can't compare Jews and Schwartzes'? Or does it mean the Blacks have no sick and depraved need to stand up for every other [16] Black regardless of the gravity of the crime?

And now it is the time to disclose the real crime behind the allegations, for this crime is still with us. Hundreds of Jews knew of the satanic plan by the ‘Avengers’ led by Abba Kovner to poison millions of innocent German civilians, men, women and children – and not even one reported it to the police, let alone tried to stop it. On a minor note, just today the leader of the German Jewish community expressed his ‘wholehearted support’ for repulsive Michael Friedman, ‘the man who turned his Jewishness into useful tool’, in the words of Haaretz’ [17] Benny Zipper and was found sniffing coke in the company of Ukrainian whores. This inner quasi-criminal solidarity of Jews - standing up for Sharon, standing up for Mark Rich, standing up for Michael Friedman, and harbouring every evildoer if he happens to be a Jew or to be good for Jews, - that is the real crime behind the Blood Libel, for it has caused the murder of hundreds of Palestinian children, with the silent approval of philosemites.

Paradoxically, Jews tend to harbour criminals because their world view is so different from the Christian one. The deepest chasm between Christianity and Judaism is not located in the murky area of sacrifices. Jews believe in collective salvation, guilt and innocence, Christians – in individual salvation, guilt and innocence. That is why a sin committed by a Christian has no bearing for the rest of Christians. A Christian is free of guilt by virtue of Christ’s incarnation, death and resurrection, by virtue of his own baptism and communion. But Jews also bear no collective guilt in Christian eyes.

For a Jew, the admitted guilt of one Jew would turn all Jews into guilty ones. That is why for Jews, all Christians (or all Germans, all Palestinians etc) are guilty for an offence committed by some of them. That is why non-Jews are always guilty in Jewish eyes. Americans are guilty because their fathers did not collect all the Jews to their bosom in 1930s. Christians are guilty because their ancestors did not like to be cursed and occasionally mistreated the cursers. Germans and Palestinians, Russians and French – everybody is guilty towards Jews in Jewish eyes.

This Jewish idea of collective responsibility spreads nowadays into Christendom. The Germans are obsessed by their feeling of guilt, and in masochistic apotheosis buy the Goldhagen’s spew. The Catholic Church even asked forgiveness of the Jews. It is good for a wrongdoer to ask forgiveness from a wronged person. But acceptance of the Jewish paradigm of collective guilt is an error of judgement, as well as a theological error. We are free from guilt. The Church is free from guilt. And Jews – modern Jews – are free from guilt for whatever their ancestors did. Even if medieval Jews harboured a murderous child-killing sect, Jews - our contemporaries – are free of guilt.

Now, when the talk of the Blood Libel is used to induce guilt feelings in modern Europeans, one has to admit: the Christians were rather wonderful to this hateful group of my ancestors: they were always ready to receive them as equals, as beloved brothers and sisters. Just think of it: the Jews daily wished the Christians to drop dead, while the Christians wanted the Jews to join them and be saved. The generosity of the Church was fabulous - even Jews who committed cruel murder could save themselves through baptism.

I think of it when I read Goldhagen’s attacks on the Church, or other Jewish writing condemning the Church for its ‘antisemitism leading to the holocaust’. Gratitude is not a strong point within the system of Jewish moral values. In 1916 Weitzman promised to the British the eternal gratitude of the Jews, and they sent their soldiers to die in Gaza, Beersheba, Jerusalem and Megiddo for the Jewish national home. By 1940 the eternity was over, and Jews began to hunt and kill British soldiers. In the World War Two, the Russians took in all Jewish refugees, lost millions of their soldiers and saved the Jews. Instead of gratitude, they compared Stalin to Hitler, spoke of Russian pogroms, and demanded (successfully) to introduce sanctions against Russia. Lebanese Maronites allied themselves with Israel, only to be dropped like a hot brick at the time of withdrawal. But ingratitude to the Church was the most extreme case.

Christians perceived the Jews as people possessed by a demon, and they were indeed possessed by a demon of hate. It was not racial, but an ideological and theological group, and by giving up the ideas of hate a Jew could join mankind. The Jews were treated like Neo-Nazis in modern society: repulsive and hateful creatures to be kept at arm’s length but to be fully forgiven if they forsook their errors. Many Jews were received in the Church, and some became saints, like St Teresa, and some became bishops, and some became nobles, and some became teachers and scholars. But the most important thing they received from the Church was full release from the spirit of hate. They were released from doubt that people love them and they went on to love people – not only the chosen ones, but everybody.

However, we can offer another and more important reading of the ‘blood libel’. The pre-modern people were naturally Jungian: they used myth in order to convey their thoughts. Medieval Jews were harbingers of capitalism and globalisation, the tendencies that were to prove perilous for children and for the future of ordinary men. They were usurers, and usurers ‘suck the lifeblood’ of their debtors even in modern usage. Thus, an accusation of blood sacrifice was a powerful ‘scarecrow’, a metaphoric warning to potential borrowers to stay away from the usurers, and to be suspicious of burgeoning capitalism.

We use metaphoric scarecrows now, too. The government could say ‘do not use marijuana, for we are heavily invested in wine and liquors, and besides, we want you to relax by shopping and not by smoking pot’. But they scare the public with pictures of heroin addiction: destitute families, health hazards and social consequences. Marijuana is not heroin, but without frighteners people won’t heed the warning, the campaigners think.

Poor people of the pre-modern days had no teachings of Marx, and they used the language of myth. Indeed, all victims of ritual murder belonged to the working classes, and belief in the Jewish ritual murder was widespread among the poor who were the first to suffer from the advent of capitalism. On the other hand, the royalty and upper classes were usually supportive of Jews and punished those who complained of ritual murders. In some countries, the complainers were punished by death, while in Russia, the Tsar forbade even considering the possibility of ritual murder by a Statute of 1817 [18]. Indeed, the ruling classes were not afraid of capitalism and usury.

However, this warning scheme worked until Christians succumbed to the temptation of usury in the age of religious tolerance and ‘blood-sucking’ stopped being an exclusively Jewish occupation. Mme Bovary, this charming and all-too-human character of Flaubert, was ruined by a French usurer who trapped her by allaying her fears with soothing ‘I am not a Jew’. Then, the old frightening myth was put in abeyance for it ceased to be relevant.

The world became civilised, whole communities and countries became indebted, while citizens have gotten trapped into mortgage repayments and consumer credit. With the victory of capitalism and spread of globalisation, the chances for ordinary children of growing up, finding good satisfying work and living peacefully in their own home and community as their parents did, took a nosedive. The great danger to our children is not a marginal Jew on the fringes of society, but the very structure of society; and it calls for an altogether different cautioning myth.