Blood Libel: On the Trail of an Antisemitic Myth by Magda Teter

Abstract

Reviewed by: Blood Libel: On the Trail of an Antisemitic Myth by Magda Teter Edward Berenson Blood Libel: On the Trail of an Antisemitic Myth. By Magda Teter. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2020. 539 pages. $39.95 (cloth). Although there is a great deal of research on the history of the blood libel, much of it recent, Magda Teter's book is one of the rare works to focus extensively on the early modern period (1450–1790s). She does so with impressive erudition, working in multiple languages and in the archives of eight countries. The product is a dazzling intellectual history, a foray into hundreds of well-known and little-known sources that, examined together, provide a comprehensive picture of the creation, dissemination, and reception of this stubbornly persistent antisemitic myth. Medievalists such as Gavin I. Langmuir, John M. McCulloh, and Israel Yuval have examined the infamous early cases—William of Norwich, Hugh of Lincoln, and the Fulda blood libel of [End Page 196] 1235—while historians of modern European antisemitism have homed in on the explosion of ritual murder accusations in the long nineteenth century, especially those between 1880 and the Great War. But there has been less attention given to the early modern stories save for the widely-known tale of Simon of Trent (1475). It is these stories, however, and the extensive commentary they generated that have informed medievalists about the earlier cases and provided the backdrop and context for the modern ones. The pre-modern cases have perhaps received less attention than their medieval and modern counterparts because few historians possess Teter's linguistic firepower, capable as she is of working with sources in Latin, Italian, German, Polish, French, Russian, Hebrew, Yiddish, and Spanish. In arguing for the centrality of the early modern tales of ritual murder, Teter shows that the medieval stories had a mostly local resonance and affected Western culture much less than historians have thought. The case of William of Norwich (1144), generally considered the founding instance of the ritual murder accusation, "survived only in a few mentions in monastic chronicles" (7). The now-famous narrative of William's death, Thomas of Monmouth's The Life and Passion of William of Norwich (volumes issued between 1150 and 1172), "lay forgotten until the nineteenth century, when it was rediscovered and printed" (7). The limited resonance of this affair stemmed in part from the lack of judicial proceedings—the supposed Jewish culprits never stood trial—which kept it from generating much of a paper trail. A narrative by John of Tynemouth published in English and Latin in 1516 was the first full account of William's tale to become somewhat widely known. The death of Hugh of Lincoln in 1255, the first English case to result in the execution of Jews, resonated further, but that was mainly because it entered the English literary canon nearly a century and a half later as the basis of Geoffrey Chaucer's story "The Prioress's Tale." Several continental cases achieved greater notoriety largely because they produced reactions from the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II and Pope Innocent IV who both condemned the notion that Jews consume human blood, which in the [End Page 197] thirteenth century became the core of the accusation against Jews. In December 1235, 34 Jewish men and women were brutally killed in Fulda (central Germany) following accusations that they killed five young boys and collected their blood. In an imperial decree of 1236, Frederick pronounced "the Jews absolved of the grave crime" and forbade his subjects to issue accusations like the one at Fulda (34). Eleven years later, several Jews in Valréas, France were tortured and burned at the stake following the death of a Christian girl. Pope Innocent IV responded by issuing a similar, if more strongly worded, injunction against the blood accusation. In his Sicut Iudaeis, the Pope forbade Catholics to "accuse [Jews] of using human blood in their religious rites since in the Old Testament they are instructed not to use blood of any kind, let alone human blood" (35). Innocent IV diluted this apparently strong statement by adding, however, that "only those be fortified by this our protection who...