BLOOD LIBEL is a myth created by people to reason killing an expelling Jews in Europe. It has been proven completly false.
It is next to impossible to explain the accusations that were hurled at the Jews during this time. Jews were persecuted not only for being "Christ-killers" but as "baby-killers."
The first such accusation -- better known as a "blood libel" -- was leveled in 1144 in Norwich, England. There, Jews were charged with kidnapping a Christian baby and draining the baby of blood. The charge became so popular it would sweep, in various forms, through Europe and then spread to other parts of the world.
Now why did Jews need blood in Christian opinion? This is a multiple-choice question:
- Jews suffered from hemorrhoids as a punishment for killing Jesus and drinking blood was the best cure for hemorrhoids at the time.
- All Jewish men menstruate and need a monthly blood transfusion.
- Jewish men, when they're circumcised, lose so much blood because of that surgical procedure that they need to drink Christian babies' blood.
- It's the chief ingredient in matzah, and therefore prior to every Passover Jews would be requiring a large supply.
- All of the above.
What do you think the correct answer is? Shockingly, it's (e) -- all of the above.
This is a very important lesson in anti-Semitism. You can say anything about the Jews and people will believe it.
It's ironic that Jews, who are prohibited by Jewish law of consuming any blood whatsoever (kosher meat is carefully washed and salted to remove all traces of blood) were precisely the people accused of drinking blood.
The blood libel makes even less sense when you consider that in the 13th century the Church adopted the doctrine of transubstantiation. This is a mystical idea which maintains that when the priest says mass over the wafer and wine, these objects mystically change into the body and blood of Jesus. Christians who consume the wafer and drink the wine are said to be mystically eating the flesh of Jesus and drinking his blood.
It's ironic that the Christian world, while engaged in the ritual of "drinking the blood of Jesus" would accuse the Jews -- who are forbidden to drink blood -- of this totally fabricated hideous crime.
Then the accusations got even more wild.
But then the accusations got even more wild.
Starting in Switzerland and Germany in the 13th century, Jews were accused of kidnapping communion wafers from churches. Why would the Jews do this in Christian view?
To torture it.
Medieval documents tell stories describing how a Jew (usually called Abraham) steals a wafer from a church, sticks a knife in it, and blood starts pouring out. And then he cuts it up into pieces and sends it to different Jews who all torture it.
This would be funny, if not for a fact that thousands of Jews were slaughtered as a result of such stories. For example, the entire Jewish community of Berlitz, near Berlin in Germany, was all burned alive based on the accusation of torturing a wafer!
(To read more about this subject see
The Devil and the Jew by Joshua Trachtenburg or
"Why the Jews?" by Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin.)
JEW TAXES
Throughout this time, the Jews were physically marginalized -- beaten, burned, raped. And they were economically marginalized -- pillaged, robbed, taxed nearly to death. Indeed, their money was one of the reasons they were tolerated at all. Jews were a good source of income to the crown. They were specially taxed with special punitive "Jew taxes."
We will see later in Germany that 38 special taxes were imposed on the Jews. There was a tax to be born, a tax to die, a tax to wear a kippah, a tax to be married, a tax to be circumcised, a tax to buy Shabbat candles, a tax to exempt you from the German army in which you were not allowed to serve anyway because you were a Jew. If you want to know why Jews are so good at evading taxes and why so many Jews are into accounting, it comes from literally 1,500 years of trying to stay alive not being taxed to death by their enemies.
And what would happen eventually, once Jews were drained of their money they would be expelled.
This is what happened in England where heavy taxng of the Jewish population of 5,000 people supplied the crown with 20% of all of its income.
In 1290 -- on the 9th day of Av, which is the same day that the Temple in Jerusalem was twice destroyed, and which is therefore the worst day in Jewish history -- the Jews were expelled from England and not permitted to return for almost four centuries.
Other countries would soon follow suit, but first would come another twist in the persecution of the Jews.