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ZAKHORIUM
PTEN

From Norwich (1144) to 1370

Date

1144CE

1144–1370

From 1144 charges of ritual murder arose, then of using blood (1235) and of desecrating the host (1243): fabrications that led to violence, executions and expulsions.

Antisemitism and persecutionReligious history52.6304°N 1.3000°E
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Under the Cross: each bar is an event of the period; this one is in coral.

Sourced narrative

Each block is a verifiable statement. The number opens the cited page; amber or coral blocks flag tradition or contested interpretation.

8 statements

01From ritual murder to blood libel

01

In 1144 the Jews of Norwich, England, confronted a bizarre charge: when the corpse of a Christian boy named William turned up in the woods, rumor said the town's Jews had kidnapped, tormented and ritually murdered him, as their forebears supposedly did to Jesus. The 1144 accusation was probably the first of its sort and was soon echoed at Blois in 1171. At Norwich the local sheriff looked into it and ruled the charge false.

05

A ritual murder charge in the French town of Blois in 1171 led to the trial and execution of over 30 Jews.

02

In 1235 at Fulda, in Germany, a further accusation emerged: that Jews had not just slain a Christian child but also used his blood in ritual. Thus was born the blood libel, and Jews all over Europe found themselves exposed, dozens of times, to similarly absurd charges.

06

Most of the time, a blood libel set off mob violence against the accused community. Sometimes the authorities stepped in to defend the Jews; at other times they appeared to credit the libel. Given the strict ban on consuming even the blood of kosher animals, anyone acquainted with Jewish law and custom could see that the libel had to be an invention. Several kings, emperors and popes declared the charges false, to no avail: the libel endured, was exploited by the Nazis and still turns up in antisemitic and anti-Zionist propaganda in the Middle East.

02Fantasies of blood

The link between Jews and blood fed other medieval fantasies: Christian blood was said to work as a miracle remedy for Jews (a blind Jew who smeared monks' blood on his eyes would see again; the leprous Constantine was said to have been told by his Jewish doctor to wash himself in Christian children's blood; Richard the Lionheart was told much the same), and Jewish men were believed to menstruate, a view voiced by the Italian astrologer Cecco d'Ascoli.

03The host

The host-desecration accusation followed a similar course. Its trigger was the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, which officially affirmed transubstantiation. Some Christians held that Jews, accepting the doctrine themselves, pierced and maimed the host in a re-enactment of the crucifixion, supposedly making it bleed. The first known case came in 1243; typically a cult arose at the site and townspeople sought revenge on local Jews, many of whom were tried and executed. In 1290 a Jewish moneylender in Paris was charged with desecrating the host, an episode marked by a chapel built on the spot and probably one trigger of the 1306 expulsion of Jews from France. Another charge, in 1370, brought about the virtual end of the Jewish community of medieval Belgium. The final Jew executed for the supposed 'crime' of desecrating the host died in the 1600s.

Context

The Fourth Lateran Council, which Innocent III called in 1215, dealt among much else with the Jews' place in Christian society. It condemned 'immoderate usury' (lending at excessive interest), restated the old ban on Jews holding positions of authority and stressed social segregation: in every Christian province, Jews and Saracens of either sex were to be visibly set apart from other peoples through their clothing.

§ 01Geography

Where it happened

Gazetteer coordinates (Pleiades for ancient places; Natural Earth and Wikidata for modern ones) over modern physical geography (Natural Earth). Coastlines and the Dead Sea have changed since antiquity.
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§ 04Network

Connections

§ 05Bibliography

Further reading

  • Joshua Trachtenberg, The Devil and the Jews: The Medieval Conception of the Jew and Its Relation to Modern Anti-Semitism (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1943).

    The medieval conception of the Jew and modern antisemitism · recommended in Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 212

  • David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).

    Persecution of minorities in the Middle Ages · recommended in Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 212

§ 06Apparatus

Sources on this page

  1. 01Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 200; Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 200inspect
  2. 02Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 200; Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 200inspect
  3. 03Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 200; Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 200inspect
  4. 04Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 200; Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 200inspect
  5. 05Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 199inspect
  6. 06Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 200; Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 200inspect
  7. 07Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 200; Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 200inspect
  8. 08Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 189; Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 189inspect
  • Documented evidenceAttested by contemporary evidence: texts, inscriptions, coins, papyri or archaeology.
  • Scholarly reconstructionHistorians' inference from indirect evidence.
  • Tradition or narrativeA literary, traditional or religious account; significant in itself, but not independently verified.
  • Contested interpretationScholars explicitly disagree; see the positions in the debate.
  • Illustrative reconstructionA hypothesis or visual scheme to guide reading; not a historical claim.