In an address following the tragic shootings in Tucson earlier this month, Sarah Palin’s use of the phrase “blood libel” to describe the intentions of those linking the violence to political rhetoric drew swift criticism. Many took exception to her loose use of a term that refers to a very specific accusation against Jews that has a long history of painful employment. We asked Magda Teter, a professor of History and of Jewish Studies at Wesleyan University, to explain the history invoked by the term “blood libel.”  Teter is the author of the forthcoming Sinners on Trial: Jews and Sacrilege after the Reformation. Her piece, below, gives much-needed historical context to this modern political moment. 

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When Sarah Palin used the term “blood libel” in response to the shooting in Arizona that left six people dead and severely injured others, including Democratic Representative Gabrielle Giffords, she stirred a controversy. To defend herself in the midst of the controversy, Palin defined the term “blood libel” very broadly as “being falsely accused of having blood on your hands.” Despite her broad definition, blood libel is a term that refers very specifically to the historical accusation that Jews killed Christian children to obtain their blood. A false accusation, to be sure, but one with a long and painful history, marking centuries of Jewish-Christian relations.

As an anti-Jewish accusation, the blood libel emerged in the Middle Ages, first in the twelfth century following the massacres of the First Crusade, when Jews were accused of an act of “ritual murder”: crucifying a Christian in enmity of Christianity and reenactment of the Passion of Jesus. But in the thirteenth century, “ritual murder” accusations turned into the “blood libel,” perhaps because of the increasing centrality of blood imagery in Christian ritual and worship at the time. In 1236, Jews in Fulda, Germany, were accused of killing several Christian children in order to collect their blood for medicinal purposes. Emperor Frederick II ordered an inquiry, which, of course, found no Jewish need for blood.

Still, many more such accusations took place, resulting in 1247 in a papal bull condemning “the unpraiseworthy zeal” and “detestable cruelty on the part of Christians” who had launched such accusations. The bull prohibited any similar charges against Jews under “ecclesiastical punishment without appeal.” Despite such strong condemnations, the accusation against Jews became an enduring transnational phenomenon, which lasted for over eight hundred years, from the twelfth to the twentieth centuries, and, as the Sarah Palin incident suggests, still has a resonance in the twenty-first. Other medieval anti-Jewish tales waned, such as that of the desecration of the host or poisoning of wells, but the blood libel adapted to changing cultural climates.

Indeed, Sarah Palin is not the first to use “blood libel” in a political context. Despite being condemned by popes and monarchs alike, “blood libels” against Jews can, in fact, be barometers of the reach and limits of the power and authority of European rulers, certainly in the premodern era, and can reflect cultural and political transformations of the society at large, since the efficacy of condemnations of such accusations were related to the power and influence of the individuals who issued them. Similarly, the way in which blood libels were used illustrates political aspirations of those who raised the charges.