The Blood Libel

Why this Chapter exists

How one false accusation links the medieval world to the modern one.

The blood libel links the Christian world of the Middle Ages to the forged conspiracy theories of the modern age.

The accusation appears in the records of the Middle Ages and of the modern era alike. Its wording shifted over time, while its core charge stayed the same. The record runs from the first Norwich case in 1144, through its spread across Europe and its rejection by popes beginning in 1247, into the twenty-first century.

Misconceptions

What the historical record corrects.

What the accusation was

In plain terms.

The blood libel was the accusation that Jews murdered Christian children and used their blood in Jewish religious rituals. The killings were typically said to happen around the Christian Easter period, sometimes in mimicry of the Christian theological narrative of the crucifixion. The blood was most commonly said to go into the preparation of matzah, the flat unleavened bread eaten during Passover, the spring festival that usually falls near Easter. Every part of the accusation was false. Jewish law prohibits consuming blood, a prohibition rooted in the biblical dietary code and elaborated in later halakhic (Jewish religious) law. Jewish ritual practice uses no blood, at Passover or in any other ritual. Kosher slaughter (shechita) is also designed to drain blood from meat before it can be eaten.

The accusation attached blood to a tradition whose law strictly forbids consuming it. Scholars of the libel return to that contradiction. The standard scholarly treatments are Gavin Langmuir’s Toward a Definition of Antisemitism (University of California Press, 1990) and Magda Teter’s Blood Libel: On the Trail of an Antisemitic Myth (Harvard University Press, 2020). For the law itself, see a plain-language account from Conservative Judaism’s The Observant Life, which quotes the biblical scholar Edward L. Greenstein calling the blood ban “the most basic eating rule in the Torah.”

William of Norwich · 1144

The emergence.

The accusation took its specific form at Norwich, in eastern England, in 1144. A twelve-year-old apprentice tanner named William was found dead in Thorpe Wood, outside the town, on Holy Saturday, the day before Easter. Local Christians accused Norwich’s Jews of killing him as part of a religious rite. The sheriff, John de Caineto, gave the Jewish community refuge in Norwich Castle, which protected them from immediate violence.

The William of Norwich case became the founding blood libel narrative through the work of Thomas of Monmouth, a monk of the Norwich Cathedral priory writing to celebrate William as a saint. Thomas composed his Vita et Passio Sancti Willelmi Martyris Norwicensis (“The Life and Passion of Saint William the Martyr of Norwich”) across about 1149–1173, beginning to write five years after the original events. Thomas’s text articulated the specific accusation, in its developed form, that the Jewish community had carried out a ritual murder of William in mimicry of the Passion, the Gospel account of Jesus’ suffering and death. The story it told became the template for subsequent blood libel narratives across the medieval period. Scholars caution, however, against treating Norwich as the sole point of origin. John M. McCulloh, writing in Speculum (1997), argues that word of William’s supposed martyrdom had already reached southern Germany before Thomas completed his account. McCulloh also points to a separate accusation at Würzburg in 1147. Other historians, among them Israel Yuval, trace antecedents to the massacres of Jews in the Rhineland, in western Germany, during the First Crusade in 1096, and to still earlier tales. On this view, Thomas gave the charge its first fully written-out form.

The scholarly literature on the emergence of the blood libel at Norwich is extensive. The principal references include E. M. Rose’s The Murder of William of Norwich: The Origins of the Blood Libel in Medieval Europe (Oxford University Press, 2015) and the engagement in Magda Teter’s Blood Libel (2020) cited above. Most scholars treat the Norwich case as the first full ritual-murder accusation. The further claim, that Jews used Christian blood, first appears at Fulda in 1235. General anti-Jewish theological hostility was many centuries old. The specific story of ritual child murder is attested from 1144 onward, as a distinct charge.

The medieval pattern

The spread across Christian Europe.

Across the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the blood libel accusation spread across Christian Europe. The cases came quickly:

• Gloucester (1168), Bury St. Edmunds (1181), and Bristol (1183): English cases in the immediate aftermath of the Norwich narrative’s dissemination. English Jewish communities bore the brunt of these years.
• Blois (1171): the accusation at Blois, in France, ended in a mass execution. More than thirty members of the Jewish community, men, women, and children, were burned at the stake on the orders of Count Theobald of Blois. Rabbeinu Tam (Yaakov ben Meir) was a grandson of Rashi, the eleventh-century commentator on the Bible and Talmud. He declared the day of the burning, the 20th of the Hebrew month of Sivan, a fast day for the Jews of France, England, and the Rhineland. The rabbinic literature preserves detailed records of the Blois events, including piyyutim (liturgical poems) composed by Rabbi Ephraim of Bonn and others.
• Pontoise (1179) and Fulda (1235): cases across the broader continental European Christian world.
• Lincoln (1255): “Little Saint Hugh”: the English case at Lincoln in 1255 put royal power behind the accusation and fixed it in English culture for centuries. A nine-year-old boy named Hugh was found dead in a well, and the Lincoln Jewish community was accused of ritual murder. Roughly nineteen Jewish men were executed on the orders of King Henry III. Later Christian culture retold the story (Geoffrey Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale, c. 1390, refers to “Little Saint Hugh” in articulating the blood libel narrative). The shrine to “Little Saint Hugh” at Lincoln Cathedral was destroyed at the Reformation, but the site and the legend persisted, and in the twentieth century the cathedral placed a disclaiming plaque by the shrine’s remains.
• Trent (1475): Simon of Trent: the Trent case, treated in its own section below, carried the blood libel into the age of print.

The medieval pattern is traced across a large scholarly literature. Key studies include Joshua Trachtenberg’s The Devil and the Jews (Yale University Press, 1943), Gavin Langmuir’s Toward a Definition of Antisemitism (1990), R. Po-chia Hsia’s The Myth of Ritual Murder (Yale University Press, 1988), and Miri Rubin’s Gentile Tales (Yale University Press, 1999).

A related accusation · host desecration

The same logic, fitted to Christian theology.

The blood libel did not travel alone. Medieval Europe produced related accusations that ran on the same underlying logic, the fabricated charge that Jews secretly attacked Christians or what Christians held sacred, refitted to different circumstances.

The host desecration accusation depended entirely on a specifically Christian belief. The Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 had affirmed, using the word transubstantiation, the teaching that in the Mass the consecrated host, the communion wafer, becomes the literal body of Christ. Once the wafer was understood to be Christ, a new accusation became possible: that Jews obtained consecrated hosts and stabbed, pierced, or burned them to attack Christ a second time, re-enacting the crucifixion.

The narratives followed a fixed script. A Jew was said to acquire a host by theft or bribery and to torture it. The host, the stories claimed, would then bleed, cry out, or rise into the air, exposing the crime. The accused were executed, their communities often expelled, and a church or shrine was frequently raised on the site of the supposed miracle, drawing pilgrims for centuries. In April 1298, in the small Franconian town of Röttingen, a knight named Rindfleisch raised a mob to avenge an alleged host desecration, and 21 Jews were killed. He went on from town to town with a mob hungry for plunder, and that year thousands of Jews were massacred in 146 places across southern and central Germany, 728 of them in Nuremberg. The best-documented cases include Paris (1290), Brussels (1370), Passau (1478), and Sternberg (1492). The alleged Brussels “Sacrament of Miracle” was commemorated in the stained glass of the city’s cathedral into the twentieth century. The accusation generated its own visual culture: altarpieces and predella panels (Paolo Uccello’s Profanation of the Host, c. 1465–1469, is a well-known example), reliquaries built to house the “surviving” hosts, and illuminated manuscripts. Miri Rubin’s Gentile Tales (Yale University Press, 1999) is the standard study.

Host desecration was a separate charge from the blood libel. It made no claim about children or about blood in Jewish ritual, and it depended on Catholic sacramental theology that the blood libel did not. It followed the same course: an invented accusation of a secret Jewish attack on the sacred, “proven” by a claimed miracle, punished by death, and remembered in devotion.

A related accusation · well poisoning

The same logic, fitted to a catastrophe.

Where host desecration fitted the accusation to a point of doctrine, the well-poisoning charge fitted it to a crisis. Between 1347 and 1351 the Black Death killed perhaps a third of Europe’s population. No one at the time understood how the plague spread. In town after town, Jews were accused of poisoning the wells and rivers to destroy Christendom.

“Confessions” were extracted under torture, most influentially at Chillon, in Savoy, in 1348, where the tortured testimony was copied and circulated to other towns as if it were proof. Massacres followed across the Rhineland and beyond: Strasbourg, where, by a chronicler’s count, some two thousand Jews were burned on February 14, 1349. Massacres also struck Basel, Mainz, Erfurt, and Cologne. In all, the killings and expulsions reached about 300 Jewish communities. In many towns the Jews were killed before the plague had even reached them. Samuel K. Cohn’s “The Black Death and the Burning of Jews” (Past & Present, 2007) traces the pattern.

As with the blood libel, the institutional Church condemned the charge. Pope Clement VI issued two bulls (formal papal decrees) in 1348. They noted that Jews were dying of the plague alongside Christians and that it spread in places where no Jews lived. The local massacres continued despite the papal condemnation. The next section traces the same gap between papal policy and local practice.

The Church repudiations

A record across eight centuries.

In the centuries since the blood libel emerged, the Catholic Church has issued a series of repudiations of the accusation. In the medieval period, the popes’ official position was more critical of the libel than the conduct of many local Christians and some local clergy. Popes also allowed local churches to keep honoring two boys, Simon of Trent and Andreas of Rinn, as martyrs, though their deaths had been falsely blamed on Jews. The major repudiations:

• Pope Innocent IV · Lachrymabilem Judaeorum · July 1247. The papal bull issued at Lyon, addressed to the prelates of Germany, with a parallel text sent to France, that rejected the blood libel accusation. The bull stated that the accusation was false and that Jewish law forbade such acts, citing the commandment “You shall not kill” and the rule against touching the dead at Passover. It added that the accusations were producing unjust persecution of Jewish communities. In 1253 Innocent IV also renewed Sicut Judaeis, the standing papal bull of protection for Jews, and later popes repeated the condemnation.
• Pope Gregory X · Sicut Judaeis renewal · October 7, 1272. A renewal of the standing bull of papal protection for Jews, issued at Orvieto and elaborating the position further. Gregory X’s text decreed that “Christians need not be obeyed against Jews in a case or situation of this type,” and ordered Jews seized on the “silly pretext” freed. It also required that Christian testimony against Jews be corroborated by a Jewish witness, a rule that, where courts applied it, made blood libel accusations harder to pursue. His text also cited the biblical prohibition on consuming blood. The Sicut Judaeis tradition was renewed by about twenty subsequent popes across the medieval period.
• Pope Martin V (1422), Pope Nicholas V (1447), Pope Sixtus IV (1475): additional medieval papal interventions, with varying degrees of force.
• Pope Benedict XIV · 1755. The record here is mixed. In Beatus Andreas (1755), Benedict XIV confirmed the local veneration of Andreas of Rinn, a child whose death had been blamed on Jews, while declining to canonize him, which left the ritual-murder story in that case standing.
• Lorenzo Ganganelli · 1758–1759. The Ganganelli Report, a Holy Office consultation approved in December 1759 but never issued as a papal decree, is treated in its own section below.

The accusations continued despite the repeated repudiations.

Simon of Trent · 1475

The early-modern intensification.

The Trent case of 1475 came as printing was rapidly expanding the reach of texts, in Hebrew and in the languages of Christian Europe. (The first dated printed Hebrew book had appeared in February 1475 at Reggio di Calabria, as the Rashi Chapter recounts.) The Trent case became the first blood libel narrative to circulate across Christian Europe in print.

Trent was an Alpine city ruled by its own prince-bishop within the Holy Roman Empire, the German-centered empire of central Europe. In late March 1475, a two-year-old Christian boy named Simon was found dead in a cellar near the Jewish quarter. The Trent Jewish community was accused of ritual murder. Some fifteen members of the community were tortured under judicial procedure and executed. The bishop of Trent, Johannes IV Hinderbach, promoted the cult of “Little Saint Simon,” an organized devotion to the boy as a saint.

Pope Sixtus IV intervened. The papal investigation under Sixtus IV’s commission (the investigation by Battista de’ Giudici, bishop of Ventimiglia and the pope’s commissioner) concluded that the Trent proceedings had been deeply irregular and that the Trent community had been treated unjustly. The pope, however, did not adopt his own commissioner’s finding. His bull Facit nos pietas (June 20, 1478) declared the Trent proceedings properly conducted, while restating the standing papal prohibition on the blood libel accusation and on harm to Jews. The bull did not stop the local cult of “Little Saint Simon.”

Printed works about Trent followed quickly: illustrated broadsheets, pamphlets in Latin and German, and the account in Hartmann Schedel’s Nuremberg Chronicle (1493). They carried the story to a far larger audience than earlier accusations had reached.

Object Spotlight

The Trent woodcut, Nuremberg Chronicle, 1493.

A small child lies in the center of the picture. Around him stand grown men in dark robes, leaning in, their hands at his body. Above each man, in careful lettering, is a name: Samuel, Tobias, Mayir, Seligman. The scene is drawn as the record of a real event.

The event it shows did not happen. This is a woodcut, a picture carved into a block of wood, inked, and pressed onto a page so it can be printed again and again. It was made in 1493 for a giant illustrated history book called the Nuremberg Chronicle, by two leading Nuremberg print-shop artists, Michael Wolgemut and Wilhelm Pleydenwurff. The scene it shows is the city of Trent, in the Alps, in 1475, where a Christian toddler named Simon had been found dead and the town’s Jews were accused of killing him for his blood. There was no evidence. Roughly fifteen Jewish men were tortured until they “confessed,” and they were executed in 1475 and 1476.

For three centuries the blood libel had spread by word of mouth, from preachers to crowds and from town to town with travelers. A woodcut could be printed thousands of times, identical every time. This one was bound into a large illustrated chronicle sold across Europe, so the story reached readers in print, presented as fact.

The names lettered over the figures belonged to real men, the men the Trent court had already executed. A reader in another country, who would never meet anyone from Trent, could now read their names beside the crime the picture assigned to them.

The local cult of “Little Saint Simon” drew pilgrims to Trent for centuries. The Catholic Church formally ended the cult in 1965, nearly five hundred years after Simon’s death, in the year of Nostra Aetate.

The Ganganelli Report · 1758–1759

The most thorough pre-modern Catholic investigation.

The Ganganelli Report is a detailed eighteenth-century Vatican investigation of the blood libel. During the 1750s, a series of blood libel accusations had swept across Poland. The Polish-Jewish community appealed to the Vatican for protection. In 1758 the Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office, the Vatican office charged with guarding doctrine, took up the appeal and assigned the cases to Lorenzo Ganganelli, then one of its consultors, created cardinal in 1759. Ganganelli would go on to become Pope Clement XIV in 1769.

Ganganelli’s report, presented in 1758 and approved by the Holy Office in December 1759, set out a wide-ranging review of the historical record of blood libel accusations. The report is preserved in the Vatican archives. It lay unpublished for about 130 years. The first printings came in the late nineteenth century, and the standard English edition appeared in 1935. His findings:

• The review of past papal positions. Ganganelli examined the prior papal interventions (Innocent IV 1247, Gregory X 1272, the broader record) and confirmed that the Church’s official position had been critical of the blood libel accusation across the centuries.
• The examination of the specific Polish cases. Ganganelli reviewed the specific Polish blood libel cases of the 1750s, concluded that the evidence for the accusations was insufficient, and urged that papal intervention be directed toward protecting the Polish Jewish community from further persecution.
• The acknowledgment of two contested cases. Ganganelli accepted as real martyrdoms the two cases the Church had permitted cults for, Andreas of Rinn (1462) and Simon of Trent (1475), even as he rejected the accusation as a general charge. Later scholars treat that concession as the report’s chief limitation. The Simon of Trent cult was suppressed in 1965. Veneration of Andreas of Rinn was formally banned only in 1994.

The standard English edition is Cecil Roth’s (The Ritual Murder Libel and the Jew: The Report by Cardinal Lorenzo Ganganelli (Pope Clement XIV), Woburn Press, 1935, with much later scholarship building on it).

Damascus Affair · 1840

The translation of the medieval accusation into the modern Western press.

For centuries the blood libel had stayed mostly inside local Christian European contexts. The Damascus Affair of 1840 carried the medieval accusation into the Western press and the consular-diplomatic record of the modern period. In February 1840, a Capuchin friar named Father Thomas and his Muslim servant disappeared in Damascus. The French consul in the city, Ulysse de Ratti-Menton, promoted the accusation that the Damascus Jewish community had ritually murdered Father Thomas. Ratti-Menton and the governor of Damascus, Sherif Pasha, ran the investigation together. Leading members of the community were arrested and tortured. Two of them died, one converted to Islam to make it stop, and confessions were forced from others.

The case drew international attention. Sir Moses Montefiore of the United Kingdom and Adolphe Crémieux of France led a Jewish diplomatic mission, joined by the French scholar Salomon Munk. They appealed to the Ottoman Sultan Abdulmejid I and to Muhammad Ali of Egypt (then the ruler of Damascus). The mission succeeded. On November 6, 1840, an Ottoman firman, a formal decree of the empire that then ruled Damascus, repudiated the blood libel accusation in formal Ottoman state terms. It declared the Jewish community innocent of a charge without foundation, and ordered them protected, calling the accusation, in the standard English rendering, a calumny.

Damascus was not alone. In the same months, on the Ottoman island of Rhodes, the Greek Orthodox community accused the island’s Jews of murdering a Christian boy who had gone missing. Jews were arrested and tortured, the Jewish quarter was blockaded for twelve days, and several European consuls initially backed the charge. The Ottoman central government investigated and established the community’s innocence in July 1840, and the November firman that closed the Damascus case spoke for Rhodes too: protection for the empire’s Jews as a whole. The accusation kept returning across the Ottoman East for the rest of the century, in ports and towns from the Aegean to Egypt, usually beginning inside local Christian communities and often with a European consul involved. The libel had come from Christian Europe, and local accusers and European consuls carried it.

For the first time, the blood libel accusation was widely covered in the liberal and conservative European press alike, which put it before the broader Western public. The response was sharply divided. Much of Western public opinion rejected the accusation, while some writers repeated it. The study by Jonathan Frankel cited below follows how the affair shaped Jewish politics in Europe.

The reference scholarly work on the Damascus Affair is Jonathan Frankel’s The Damascus Affair: “Ritual Murder,” Politics, and the Jews in 1840 (Cambridge University Press, 1997).

The Beilis Trial · 1911–1913

The modern blood libel case.

The Beilis Trial in Kiev, from 1911 to 1913, drew attention around the world. In March 1911, a Christian boy named Andrei Yushchinsky was found murdered in a cave near a brick factory in Kiev, in the Russian Empire. The Russian state accused Menahem Mendel Beilis, a Jewish manager at the brick factory, of murdering Yushchinsky for ritual purposes, the charge of the medieval blood libel. Behind the charge stood political pressure aligned with the Black Hundreds, ultranationalist and violently antisemitic Russian movements, and the anti-Jewish climate of the late Russian Imperial period. A police investigation had linked the killing to a criminal gang, and the investigators in charge were dismissed.

The trial itself, from September 25 to October 28, 1913, was a major international event. The Russian Imperial state poured resources into the prosecution. The Jewish defense mobilized international support: Western European and American Jewish figures, liberal Russian figures, and much of the international press. The Russian state produced “expert” testimony from a Catholic priest, Justinas Pranaitis, who testified that the Jewish religious tradition required the ritual use of Christian blood. Under cross-examination, the defense dismantled that testimony. The trial drew protests across Western Europe and North America. Archival records show that officials manipulated the case.

On October 28, 1913 (November 10 in the Western calendar), the verdict came in: Mendel Beilis was acquitted. The Russian Imperial jury, made up mostly of conservative non-Jewish Russian peasants and townspeople, cleared him of the specific charge of having killed Yushchinsky. The verdict, however, cut two ways. The jury also affirmed the prosecution’s description of the crime scene, in terms that left the ritual-murder theory standing even as the specific defendant went free.

The Beilis Trial is the subject of a large historical literature. Key references include Robert Weinberg’s Blood Libel in Late Imperial Russia: The Ritual Murder Trial of Mendel Beilis (Indiana University Press, 2014). Another is Edmund Levin’s A Child of Christian Blood: Murder and Conspiracy in Tsarist Russia: The Beilis Blood Libel (Schocken, 2014). Beilis himself later emigrated to the United States. He published his memoir, The Story of My Sufferings, in Yiddish in 1925 and in English in 1926, and died in New York in 1934.

The twentieth century

The persistence into the modern period.

The blood libel accusation persisted into the twentieth century. The major cases:

• Massena, New York · 1928. An American blood libel case. A four-year-old child went missing in the upstate New York town of Massena on September 22, 1928, days before Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year. A rumor spread that the town’s Jews had abducted the child for ritual purposes, and it found believers among townspeople and officials, including the mayor. The New York state police questioned the local rabbi about Jewish religious practices. The child was found the following day, unharmed, having become lost in the woods. American Jewish organizations protested, among them the American Jewish Committee, and Massena’s civic leaders apologized formally.
• Nazi Germany · 1934. Julius Streicher’s antisemitic weekly Der Stürmer, founded in 1923, used the blood libel often. Its May 1934 issue was devoted entirely to the charge, under the headline “Jewish Murder Plan against Gentile Humanity Revealed.” The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum records that the Nazis “made effective use of the blood libel charge in their antisemitic propaganda.”
• Kielce, Poland · July 4, 1946. The post-Holocaust Kielce pogrom, an organized outbreak of mob violence against Jews, was precipitated by a blood libel accusation. An eight-year-old Christian boy named Henryk Błaszczyk had been missing for two days and returned home claiming that Jews had kidnapped him. The story spread through the town as a blood libel rumor. The result was a pogrom: Polish soldiers, police, and townspeople killed 42 Jews, most of them Holocaust survivors who had come back to Kielce, and wounded about 40 more. The pogrom came the year after the war ended in Europe, in a country where about nine in ten of the prewar Jews had been murdered.
• Damascus, retold by a state · 1983 and 2003. In 1983 Syria’s defense minister, Mustafa Tlass, published The Matzah of Zion, a book presenting the 1840 Damascus accusation as true. He remained in office for another two decades. In 2003 a Syrian-produced television series, Ash-Shatat, put the libel on screen, a Christian child murdered for his blood, and Al-Manar, the television network of the Lebanese group Hezbollah, broadcast it across the region during Ramadan, the Islamic holy month. Protests over these broadcasts were part of the case that led France’s Conseil d’État, its highest administrative court, to order the satellite operator Eutelsat to stop carrying Al-Manar in December 2004.

Nostra Aetate and beyond

The postwar church reckoning.

After the Second World War, the Catholic Church and other churches confronted the blood libel inheritance. The major moments:

• The Lincoln Cathedral plaque. Lincoln Cathedral, a Church of England cathedral, installed a plaque at the site of the former shrine. It reads: “Trumped up stories of ‘ritual murders’ of Christian boys by Jewish communities were common throughout Europe during the Middle Ages and even much later. These fictions cost many innocent Jews their lives. Lincoln had its own legend and the alleged victim was buried in the Cathedral in the year 1255. Such stories do not redound to the credit of Christendom, and so we pray: ‘Lord, forgive what we have been, amend what we are, and direct what we shall be.’”
• Nostra Aetate · October 28, 1965. Treated in the Nostra Aetate Chapter. The Second Vatican Council declared that Jesus’ passion “cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today.” That rejected the deicide charge, the claim that Jews collectively killed Jesus. The document also “decries hatred, persecutions, displays of anti-Semitism, directed against Jews at any time and by anyone.” It does not mention the blood libel by name.
• The 1965 suppression of the “Little Saint Simon” cult at Trent. In 1965, the year of Nostra Aetate, the Catholic Church formally suppressed the Trent cult that had operated since 1475. The Archbishop of Trent, Alessandro Maria Gottardi, declared the cult invalid and removed the Simon shrine.

The contemporary persistence

The record into the present.

The blood libel accusation still circulates in the contemporary record. That record includes:

• Monitoring: the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), an American organization that tracks antisemitism, documents blood-libel themes in present-day media and online.
• The contemporary scholarly engagement: Magda Teter’s Blood Libel: On the Trail of an Antisemitic Myth (Harvard University Press, 2020) is a recent scholarly synthesis. Teter’s study traces the persistence of the blood libel accusation across the centuries, including its reappearance in contemporary forms, and the question of why such accusations have proven so resistant to repudiation.
• The contemporary political-discourse record: blood libel-derived political rhetoric in several regions, tracked by ADL, by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, and by the academic literature on contemporary antisemitism. The ADL traces the claims of QAnon, an American conspiracy movement that accuses a hidden elite of ritually sacrificing children, to the antisemitic trope of the blood libel.

The papal letters of 1247 and 1272 and the Ottoman decree of 1840 rejected the accusation. A Kiev jury acquitted Mendel Beilis in 1913, and in 1965 the Church suppressed the cult at Trent. Why it still appears today is a central question in the scholarship on antisemitism, including Teter’s study.

Read the documents

The record itself.

• Document. Thomas of Monmouth’s Life and Passion of William of Norwich: the 1896 Cambridge edition of the earliest full written account of the accusation. Cited only, not linked.
• Document. The Ganganelli Report, 1758: the Vatican inquiry that rejected the ritual-murder charge in general while accepting two cases, in Cecil Roth’s edition. Internet Archive ↗

Discussion questions

Working from the evidence.

Classroom Connections

Where this Chapter fits.

Teaching Connections

• Medieval European History: the blood libel as a documented medieval phenomenon, and how the Adversus Judaeos theological tradition translated into one specific accusation.
• Early-Modern History: Trent (1475) at the moment of the print revolution, which carried the medieval inheritance into the early-modern world.
• Modern European & Russian History: the Damascus Affair (1840) and the Beilis Trial (1911–1913) as modern recurrences of the medieval charge.
• Historical Thinking & Source Analysis: the blood-libel record (medieval sources, trial transcripts, modern scholarship) as primary-source material, and keeping the accusation, official institutional responses, and local actions distinct.
• Pairs with Adversus Judaeos and the Protocols: the theological tradition, the medieval-to-modern phenomenon, and the modern conspiratorial framework.

Standards Alignment

• NYS Global History & Geography: 9.6 (social and cultural conflict in medieval Europe: the blood libel as a documented medieval phenomenon).
• Common Core ELA-Literacy: RH.11–12.6 and RH.11–12.9 (source perspective and the integration of multiple complex sources).

Further Teaching Resources

• Fordham Internet History Sourcebook, original medieval documents on the persecution of Jews.
• USHMM · “Blood Libel”, the Holocaust Encyclopedia’s article on the accusation and its modern afterlife.
• ADL · explainer video, a short classroom introduction to the blood libel.