Antisemitism in European Folklore

Two main legendary traditions depicted Jews in an extremely negative light: the blood libel legend and the legend of the Wandering Jew, Ahasver. In the first, the belief was promulgated that Jews committed the ritual murder of a Christian, usually a boy, in the week before Easter to collect his blood for religious purposes, usually to be baked in the unleavened bread (matzo) eaten at Passover. The first occurrence of this accusation followed the unsolved murder of a boy named William in Norwich in 1144. In the years following his death, a cult gradually grew around him, and eventually he was canonized as St. William of Norwich. A rash of similar tales spread throughout Europe, first in England but soon also in France, Spain, Germany, and eventually also in Poland and beyond.

The last widely publicized case was in Massena, New York, in 1928. The legend of the Wandering Jew tells that a Jewish man was punished for unkindness to Christ on the way to Calgary by being damned to wander the earth until Judgment Day. It is important to note that a legend is a tale that is or has been believed to be true by at least some people. Because of this, the nature of these two tales is far from harmless. Both depict Jews as cast out by (the Christian) God and worthy of the cruelest punishment, for this tradition ascribes to all Jews, even those living much later, the guilt for the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. They disseminate stereotypes about Jews that have been extremely difficult to eradicate: that they are malignant, avaricious, and deceitful, that they are little better than vermin, that they are a diseased and somehow “unmanly” race, and that they deserve to be killed. Accusations of blood libel almost always led to loss of property and loss of life: nineteen people were executed in the case of St. or Sir Hugh of Lincoln, in 1255, for example, and the king confiscated the property even of those Jews whom he in the end chose not to kill. Pogroms continued until the twentieth century, incited by the ideas found in these and other similar tales.

Here one can see the great power of folklore by way of a negative example. Belief in blood libel confounded the most reasoned attempts to disprove it. Sometimes a pogrom took place even when there was no body found: an entirely empty accusation was enough to spark a riot. Evidence that not a single blood libel case can be proved, and that the Jewish religion prohibits the ingestion of even animal blood, has not prevented even some recent writers on the topic from asserting there must be a basis in the actions of at least some Jews.