The Blood Libel

This chapter investigates the long-standing myth of Jewish ritual murder from a perspective that combines the sociology of knowledge and historical contextualization. It proceeds from a consideration of the paradigms produced in medieval Christian societies regarding Jewish guilt and criminality and balances these images against concrete social interactions of Jews and Christians in specific settings and in the context of changing social, political, and historical circumstances. Prominent blood libel cases, stretching from twelfth-and thirteenth-century England and France, and reaching into twentieth-century Central Europe and Russia, reveal that the accusation in fact comprised a discontinuous phenomenon. The surprising number of ritual murder trials that took place in Europe at the turn of the twentieth century, for example, functioned as a rhetorical assault on the recently completed emancipation of Jews. They constituted not so much a return to “medieval superstition” as prosecutions that could only be articulated through the language and procedures of modern, forensic science.