The blood libel legend, in which Jews are accused of ritually murdering Christian children in order to use their blood in religio-magical rituals, is perhaps best known through its literary adaptation as a miracle story told by Chaucer’s prioress. Folklorists may be familiar with the legend through its presence in a widespread Child ballad (no. 155) or Alan Dundes’s 1991 casebook on the subject. The legend, as well as its messages of anti-Semitism, has stubbornly persisted into the modern day and continues to have a very real impact on Jewish communities throughout the world.
Despite its title, Blood Libel: The Ritual Murder Accusation at the Limit of Jewish History, scarcely discusses the legend itself. Its author, Hannah R. Johnson, discusses William of Norwich briefly in her first chapter, and returns to his case infrequently in other chapters. Johnson spares little mention of subsequent blood libels that were more widely known in the medieval and early modern period, such as those at Lincoln, Blois, and Trent. Rather, Johnson takes a historiographical approach to the topic, analyzing primarily the work of three contemporary historians: Gavin Langmuir, Israel Yuval, and Ariel Toaff. Johnson’s goal is to demonstrate how the methodology of these historians is influenced by their own ideologies, politics, and ethical motivations. Consequently, Johnson situates their work in the context of post-World War II scholarship, post-Zionism, and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.
The first main chapter provides a very brief overview of the earliest blood libel account, the twelfth-century case of William of Norwich. (An 1896 English translation by Augustus Jessop and M. R. James is freely available in the public domain, published as The Life and Miracles of Sir William of Norwich.) In 1144, the corpse of twelve-year-old William was found in the woods under unusual circumstances. William’s family implicates the Jews in the boy’s death, but the local authorities decline to investigate, presumably due to the lack of evidence. Around 1150, Thomas of Monmouth joins the Benedictine priory at Norwich and quickly takes up William’s cause. Thomas investigates the cold case, uncovers evidence that was missed during the initial allegations, and proclaims William a martyred saint. However, Thomas’s colleagues expressed considerable doubts concerning the boy’s sanctity and William’s cult was short-lived.
Johnson states that the lack of scholarly attention to Thomas’s rhetorical strategies and to the doubts expressed by his own contemporaries indicates a “critical amnesia” that results in a “forgotten counternarrative” of skepticism to anti-Jewish propaganda (33). Johnson, of course, relays this disregarded narrative. She writes: “But if we attend to [Thomas’s] rhetoric carefully, we can just hear, at the very margin of our historical perception, the contrary voices of Thomas’s twelfth-century critics.” Thomas is hardly a subtle hagiographer, and even the most cursory reading of his work suggests that he was regarded as something of a desperate, even pathetic, figure by his colleagues, who never seem to have fully accepted Thomas’s cause. Rather than occupying the margins of historical perception, the skeptical arguments of Thomas’s detractors constitute an entire book of his hagiography, so that he may rebut each of their claims. Johnson’s claims overreach, unfortunately not for the last time.
Johnson argues that the legalistic framework introduced by William’s hagiography, in which Thomas attempts to prove the guilt of the Jewish people, shapes subsequent historical treatments of the blood libel legend. In chapter 2, Johnson critiques what she sees as Langmuir’s moralization of history through his unwillingness to consider any actions by medieval Jews that may have associated them with ritual murder. According to Johnson, Langmuir’s scholarship offers a simplistic mirror image of Thomas’s “juridical judgment” by implicating Christians in a collective plot to murder completely innocent Jews through false accusations of ritual murder. In contrast, Israel Yuval, whose controversial work is the subject of chapter 3, treats medieval Jews as active agents rather than passive victims in the conflicts between Christians and Jews that occur throughout the Middle Ages. Yuval points to instances in which medieval Jews responded to negative treatment in Christian Europe with their own hostile acts that may have led to accusations of ritual murder, although Yuval categorically denies that there is any truth behind the accusations. Johnson ends her study with a chapter examining the controversy that followed in the wake of the publication of Ariel Toaff’s 2007 study, Pasque di sangue, which suggested that the ritual murder accusation in the fifteenth-century Trent case may have been, in fact, true. The work had an explosive impact in both popular and academic circles. Historians almost uniformly denounced Toaff’s methods, activist groups called for his resignation, pundits debated the limits of academic freedom, and anti-Semitic organizations rallied around the work’s conclusions.
Johnson’s attention to the contexts of blood libel historiography is at times compelling, particularly her chapter on Toaff, and may have made for a robust journal article aimed at specialists. As a monograph, however, Johnson’s narrative bloats under a convoluted theoretical framework, questionably relevant tangents, strained conclusions, and jargon-laden prose. It is difficult to determine what audience may be envisioned for a highly theoretical historiography on the work of three historians concerning a narrowly defined topic. But considering the work’s various shortcomings and its limited treatment of the legends themselves, Blood Libel is unlikely to be of significant interest to folklorists.
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[Review length: 875 words • Review posted on April 8, 2015]