Blood Libel: the Ritual Murder Accusation at the Limit of Jewish History
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Johnson, Hannah. Blood Libel: The Ritual Murder Accusation At the Limit of Jewish History. E-book, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2012, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.4499528. Downloaded on behalf of Unknown Institution blood libel Johnson, Hannah. Blood Libel: The Ritual Murder Accusation At the Limit of Jewish History. E-book, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2012, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.4499528. Downloaded on behalf of Unknown Institution Johnson, Hannah. Blood Libel: The Ritual Murder Accusation At the Limit of Jewish History. E-book, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2012, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.4499528. Downloaded on behalf of Unknown Institution Blood Libel The Ritual Murder Accusation at the Limit of Jewish History Hannah R. Johnson The University of Michigan Press / Ann Arbor Johnson, Hannah. Blood Libel: The Ritual Murder Accusation At the Limit of Jewish History. E-book, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2012, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.4499528. Downloaded on behalf of Unknown Institution Copyright © by the University of Michigan 2012 All rights reserved This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publisher. Published in the United States of America by The University of Michigan Press Manufactured in the United States of America c Printed on acid-free paper 2015 2014 2013 2012 4 3 2 1 A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Johnson, Hannah R., 1974– Blood libel : the ritual murder accusation at the limit of Jewish history / Hannah R. Johnson. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-472-11835-9 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-472-02843-6 (e-book) 1. Blood accusation—Europe—History. 2. Jews—Persecutions—Europe—History. 3. Antisemitism—Europe—History. 4. Christianity and antisemitism. 5. Judaism—Relations—Christianity. 6. Christianity and other religions—Judaism. I. Title. BM585.2.J64 2012 305.892'4009—dc23 2012005027 Johnson, Hannah. Blood Libel: The Ritual Murder Accusation At the Limit of Jewish History. E-book, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2012, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.4499528. Downloaded on behalf of Unknown Institution For Lynna, who talked to me like a writer, & for my mother, Patricia, who abides Johnson, Hannah. Blood Libel: The Ritual Murder Accusation At the Limit of Jewish History. E-book, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2012, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.4499528. Downloaded on behalf of Unknown Institution Johnson, Hannah. Blood Libel: The Ritual Murder Accusation At the Limit of Jewish History. E-book, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2012, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.4499528. Downloaded on behalf of Unknown Institution Contents Acknowledgments ix introduction The Ethical Dimensions of Historical Interpretation: The Blood Libel as Limit Case 1 chapter 1 Thomas of Monmouth and the Juridical Discourse of Ritual Murder 30 chapter 2 Moralization and Method in Gavin Langmuir’s History of Antisemitism 59 chapter 3 On Being Implicated: Israel Yuval and the New History of Medieval Jewish-Christian Relations 91 chapter 4 Beyond Implication: The Ariel Toaff Affair and the Question of Complicity 129 Notes 165 Bibliography 215 Index 235 Johnson, Hannah. Blood Libel: The Ritual Murder Accusation At the Limit of Jewish History. E-book, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2012, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.4499528. Downloaded on behalf of Unknown Institution Johnson, Hannah. Blood Libel: The Ritual Murder Accusation At the Limit of Jewish History. E-book, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2012, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.4499528. Downloaded on behalf of Unknown Institution Acknowledgments i am grateful to the University of Pittsburgh for supporting my re- search in numerous ways, through the Central Research Development Fund, the University Center for International Studies, and an Arts & Sci- ences Faculty Research Grant, as well as a sabbatical leave. My thanks also go to the Pitt Humanities Center, and its director, Jonathan Arac, for a stimulating and productive semester there. I am incredibly fortunate to work in such a supportive professional environment. I also want to ac- knowledge my graduate institution, Princeton University, where the earli- est seeds of this project began to germinate, and where I bene‹ted from rigorous training as well as incredible resources. I owe a special debt of gratitude to my early mentors, D. Vance Smith, Kathleen Davis, and Michael Wood, who saw potential in my independent cast of mind and have continued to offer much-needed advice and support in the early stages of my professional career. John Fleming, Esther Schor, Uli Knoep›emacher, Bill Jordan, and Elaine Showalter also helped guide me along the way. This book was completed under dif‹cult circumstances, and I am thankful beyond words to my friends and colleagues for their encourage- ment and advice, in personal as well as professional matters, during that time. Johnny and Amy Twyning, Phil and Susan Smith, Dan Morgan, Jen Waldron and Benoni Outerbridge, Marah Gubar and Kieran Setiya, Mark Kemp and Geeta Kothari, Nancy Glazener, Gayle Rogers, Kellie Robert- son, Don and Sue Bialostosky, and Eileen Joy made time for me in their lives and offered friendly readings and constructive criticism during the writing process. Dan Morgan, Jonathan Arac, Paul Bové, Alex Orbach, Johnson, Hannah. Blood Libel: The Ritual Murder Accusation At the Limit of Jewish History. E-book, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2012, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.4499528. Downloaded on behalf of Unknown Institution x Acknowledgments and Adam Shear offered generous suggestions at vital moments of revision. Heather Blurton and Kathy Lavezzo have been wonderful interlocutors— patient, questioning, and rigorous—and I hope we can continue to be writing buddies for a long time to come. I would also like to thank Jake Ricci, Shlomit Har-El, Jeff Aziz, Dennis Looney, Melissa Demos, and Ka- trin Mascha for their help with translations. Melissa and Dennis also stepped in at different moments as readers of a critical chapter, for which I am grateful. Any mistakes, of course, are entirely my own. Many thanks to the journal New Medieval Literatures, which published part of my ‹rst chapter in article form, as “Rhetoric’s Work: Thomas of Monmouth and the History of Forgetting” (vol. 9 [2007]: 63–92), and extends permission for me to include that material here in modi‹ed form. I’d like to extend my heartfelt thanks to Tom Dwyer, at the University of Michigan Press, who has been a consistent and enthusiastic advocate for the book and was more understanding about the pressures on academic authors than I had dared hope an editor could be. I also want to acknowl- edge, with gratitude, my anonymous readers, for all their generous advice. Additionally, I am grateful to Elliott Horowitz, who inadvertently set me on this course some time ago during a conversation he may have long since forgotten. Last, but far from least, I want to thank Stu Braun, for so much more than a year. “One of these mornings, you’re gonna rise up singing.” Note: The following abbreviations are used throughout—GA = Judith But- ler, Giving an Account of Oneself; HRA = Gavin Langmuir, History, Religion, and Antisemitism; TDA = Gavin Langmuir, Toward a Definition of Anti- semitism. Johnson, Hannah. Blood Libel: The Ritual Murder Accusation At the Limit of Jewish History. E-book, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2012, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.4499528. Downloaded on behalf of Unknown Institution —introduction— The Ethical Dimensions of Historical Interpretation: The Blood Libel as Limit Case the story begins with the discovery of a child’s body. Most commonly it is a boy, though occasionally it could be more than one child, or a girl. The body might be discovered in a sewer drainage ditch, perhaps in a wood. The setting is generally a medieval town. The child is a Christian and he is young. He could be two years old or twelve. He might have been missing for days, or just overnight. But the body’s discovery is only the be- ginning. What happens afterward hinges on religious hostility and the misunderstandings it has often fed between Christian and Jewish com- munities. The Jews are accused of murdering the boy for obscure ritual purposes, and what begins as dark rumor might end in anti-Jewish vio- lence, or perhaps a judicial inquiry involving the possibility of torture and execution. The many endings of this story, and the precise details of its es- calation, vary over the course of the European Middle Ages, but its be- ginning becomes stereotyped in a script that plays out many times, ex- tending beyond the medieval period to be revived as needed through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Once taken up for propaganda pur- poses by Hitler’s Nazi regime, the notorious claim that Jews murder chil- dren has even now been reanimated in antisemitic discourse in the Mus- lim world.1 The ritual murder story is a critical ingredient in a speci‹c genre of ma- licious myths about Jews, generally described by the phrase blood libel. A Johnson, Hannah. Blood Libel: The Ritual Murder Accusation At the Limit of Jewish History. E-book, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2012, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.4499528. Downloaded on behalf of Unknown Institution 2 blood libel broad array of claims fall under this rubric, which describes the medieval belief that Jews needed Christian blood, for ritual purposes such as baking matzah for Passover, or else to satisfy some strange medicoreligious need, like healing the circumcision cut.