The earliest versions of the accusations involving Jews supposedly crucifying Christian children on
Easter/Passover is said to be because of a prophecy. There is no reference to the use of blood in unleavened matzo bread at this time yet, which develops later as a major motivation for the crime.
Possible precursors The earliest known antecedent is tenth century, from Damocritus (not
Democritus the philosopher) mentioned in the
Suda, who alleged that "every seven years the Jews captured a stranger, brought him to the temple in
Jerusalem, and sacrificed him, cutting his flesh into bits." The Greco-Egyptian author
Apion claimed that the Jews sacrificed Greek victims in
their temple. Here, the writer states that when
Antiochus Epiphanes entered the temple in Jerusalem, he discovered a Greek captive, who told him that he was being fattened for sacrifice. Every year, Apion claimed, the Jews would sacrifice a Greek and consume his flesh, at the same time swearing eternal hatred towards the Greeks. Apion's claim likely reflects already circulating attitudes towards Jews as similar claims are made by
Posidonius and
Apollonius Molon in the 1st century BCE. This idea is exampled later in history, when
Socrates Scholasticus ( 5th century) reported that in a drunken frolic, a group of Jews bound a Christian child to a cross in mockery of the death of Christ and scourged him until he died.
Medieval context The blood libels emerged at a time when the church and particularly the Crusades were driving increasingly anti-Judaic discourses. These were later reinforced through the Church council
Lateran IV which mandated the segregation of Christian and Jewish society, and built an apparatus of enforcement across Europe . At a local context, many of the English examples may have included an element of church competition for saintly cults, with the income that veneration produced.
Israel Yuval proposed that the blood libel may have originated in the 12th century due to Christian views on Jewish behavior during the
First Crusade. Some Jews committed suicide and killed their own children rather than exposing them to
forced conversion to Christianity. Yuval wrote that Christians may have argued that if Jews could kill their own children, they could also kill Christian children.
Origins in England in Holy Trinity church,
Loddon, Norfolk In England, in 1144, the Jews of
Norwich were falsely accused of
ritual murder after a boy,
William of Norwich, was found dead in the woods with stab wounds. William's
hagiographer,
Thomas of Monmouth, falsely claimed that every year there is an international council of Jews at which they choose the country in which a child will be killed during Easter, because of a Jewish prophecy that states that the killing of a Christian child each year will ensure that the Jews will be restored to the Holy Land. According to Monmouth, England was chosen in 1144, and the leaders of the Jewish community delegated the Jews of Norwich to perform the killing, after which they abducted and crucified William. The legend was turned into a cult, with William acquiring the status of a martyr and pilgrims bringing offerings to the local church. This was followed by similar accusations in
Gloucester (1168),
Bury St Edmunds (1181) and Bristol (1183). In 1189, the Jewish deputation attending the coronation of
Richard the Lionheart was attacked by the crowd.
Massacres of Jews at London and York soon followed. In 1190, on 16 March, 150 Jews were attacked in York and then massacred when they took refuge in the royal castle, where Clifford's Tower now stands, with some committing suicide rather than being taken by the mob. The remains of 17 bodies thrown in a well in Norwich between the 12th and 13th century (five that were shown by DNA testing to likely be members of a single Jewish family) were very possibly killed as part of one of these
pogroms. After the death of
Little Saint Hugh of Lincoln, there were trials and executions of Jews. The case was described by
Matthew Paris and later by
Chaucer, and formed the basis of the
Sir Hugh ballads which have circulated to the present day. Its notoriety sprang from the intervention of the Crown, the first time an accusation of ritual killing had been given royal credibility. The eight-year-old Hugh disappeared at
Lincoln on 31 July 1255. His body was probably discovered on 29 August, in a well. A Jew named Copin or Koppin confessed to involvement. He confessed to
John of Lexington, a servant of the crown, and relative of the Bishop of Lincoln. He confessed that the boy had been crucified by the Jews, who had assembled at Lincoln for that purpose.
King Henry III, who had reached Lincoln at the beginning of October, had Copin executed and 91 of the Jews of Lincoln seized and sent up to London, where 18 of them were executed. The rest were pardoned at the intercession of the Franciscans or Dominicans. Within a few decades, Jews would be
expelled from all of England in 1290 and not allowed to return until 1657. After the expulsion,
Edward I renovated "Little Saint Hugh's" shrine and decorated it with his Royal insignia, as part of his efforts to justify his actions. As Stacey notes: "A more explicit identification of the crown with the ritual crucifixion charge can hardly be imagined."
Continental Europe blood libel. Illustration in Hartmann Schedel's Weltchronik, 1493 Much like the blood libel of England, the history of blood libel in continental Europe consists of unsubstantiated claims made about the corpses of Christian children. There were frequently associated supernatural events speculated about these discoveries and corpses, events which were often attributed by contemporaries to miracles. Also, just as in England, these accusations in continental Europe typically resulted in the execution of numerous Jews – sometimes even all, or close to all, the Jews in one town. These accusations and their effects also, in some cases, led to royal interference on behalf of the Jews. Thomas of Monmouth's story of the annual Jewish meeting to decide which local community would kill a Christian child also quickly spread to the continent. An early version appears in
Bonum Universale de Apibus ii. 29, § 23, by
Thomas of Cantimpré (a monastery near Cambray). Thomas wrote, in around 1260, "It is quite certain that the Jews of every province annually decide by lot which congregation or city is to send Christian blood to the other congregations." Thomas of Cantimpré also believed that since the time when the Jews called out to
Pontius Pilate, "His blood be on us, and on our children" (), they have been afflicted with hemorrhages, a condition equated with male menstruation: A very learned Jew, who in our day has been converted to the (Christian) faith, informs us that one enjoying the reputation of a prophet among them, toward the close of his life, made the following prediction: 'Be assured that relief from this secret ailment, to which you are exposed, can only be obtained through Christian blood ("
solo sanguine Christiano").' This suggestion was followed by the ever-blind and impious Jews, who instituted the custom of annually shedding Christian blood in every province, in order that they might recover from their malady. Thomas added that the Jews had misunderstood the words of their prophet, who by his expression "
solo sanguine Christiano" had meant not the blood of any Christian, but that of Jesus the only true remedy for all physical and spiritual suffering. Thomas did not mention the name of the "very learned" proselyte, but it may have been
Nicholas Donin of
La Rochelle, who, in 1240, had a disputation on the
Talmud with
Yechiel of Paris, and who in 1242 caused the burning of numerous Talmudic manuscripts in Paris. It is known that Thomas was personally acquainted with Nicholas. Nicholas Donin and another Jewish convert, Theobald of Cambridge, are greatly credited with the adoption and the belief of the blood libel myth in Europe. The first known case outside England was in
Blois, France, in 1171. This was the site of a blood libel accusation against the town's entire Jewish community that led to around 31–33 Jews (with 17 women making up this total being burned to death on 29 May of that year, or the 20th of Sivan of 4931. The child's body was never found. The count had about 40 adult Blois Jews arrested and they were eventually to be burned. The surviving members of the Blois Jewish community, as well as surviving holy texts, were ransomed. As a result of this case, the Jews garnered new promises from the king. The burned bodies of the sentenced Jews were supposedly maintained unblemished through the burning, a claim which is a well-known miracle, martyr myth for both Jews and Christians. Responding to the mass execution, the
Twentieth of Sivan was declared a fast day by
Rabbenu Tam. In this case in Blois, there was not yet the myth proclaimed that Jews needed the blood of Christians. At
Pforzheim,
Baden, in 1267, a woman supposedly sold a girl to Jews who, according to the myth, then cut her open and dumped her in the
Enz River, where boatmen found her; the girl cried for vengeance, and then died. The body was said to have bled as the Jews were brought to it. The woman and the Jews allegedly confessed and were subsequently killed. That a judicial execution was summarily committed in consequence of the accusation is evident from the manner in which the
Nuremberg "Memorbuch" and the synagogal poems refer to the incident. In 1270, at
Weissenburg, of
Alsace, a supposed miracle alone decided the charge against the Jews. A child's body had shown up in the
Lauter River; it was claimed that Jews had cut into the child to acquire his blood, and that the child continued bleeding for five days. alleged miracles again constituted the only evidence against the Jews. In this case, it was claimed that the corpse of the 16-year-old
Werner of Oberwesel (also referred to as "Good Werner") landed at
Bacharach and the body performed miracles, particularly medicinal miracles. Light was also said to have been emitted by the body. Reportedly, the child was hung upside down, forced to throw up the host and was cut open.
Rudolph of Habsburg, to whom the Jews had appealed for protection, in order to manage the miracle story, had the archbishop of Mainz declare great wrong had been done to the Jew. This apparent declaration was very limited in effectiveness. or 1294 the Jews tortured and murdered a boy called Rudolph (sometimes also referred to as Ruff, or Ruof). The body was reportedly found by the house of Jöly, a Jew. The Jewish community was then implicated. The penalties imposed upon the Jews included torture, execution, expulsion, and steep financial fines. Justinger argued Jews were out to harm Christianity. There have been several explanations put forth as to why these blood libel accusations were made and perpetuated. For example, it has been argued Thomas of Monmouth's account and other similar false accusations, as well as their perpetuation, largely had to do with the economic and political interests of leaders perpetuating these myths. The use of blood and other human products for medicinal or magical purposes was an established concept in medieval Europe. As such illegal ways of accessing these item were ascribed (in 1507) by Franciscans to Dominicans, by others to sorcerers and devil worshippers as well as Jews. In 1475, Simon of Trent, aged two, disappeared and his father alleged that he had been kidnapped and murdered by the local Jewish community. Fifteen local Jews were sentenced to death and burned. Simon was regarded locally as a saint, although he was never canonised by the church of Rome. He was removed from the Roman Martyrology in 1965 by
Pope Paul VI. In 1490, a four-year-old Christian boy named Christopher of Toledo, also known as Christopher of La Guardia or "the
Holy Child of La Guardia", was supposedly murdered by two Jews and three
conversos (converts to Christianity). In total, eight men were executed. It is now believed that this case was constructed by the
Spanish Inquisition to facilitate the
expulsion of Jews from Spain. In 1494 a case at
Trnava, Slovakia, the impossible
forced confessions from women and children shows that the accused preferred death as a means of escape from the torture, and admitted everything that was asked of them. They even said that Jewish men menstruated and practiced the drinking of Christian blood as a remedy. At
Pezinok, Slovakia in 1529, it was charged that a nine-year-old boy had been bled to death, suffering cruel torture; thirty Jews confessed to the crime and were publicly burned. The true facts of the case were disclosed later when the child was found alive in Vienna. He had been taken there by the accuser, Count Wolf of Bazin, as a means of ridding himself of his Jewish creditors at Bazin. In
Rinn in 1492, a boy named
Andreas Oxner (also known as Anderl von Rinn) was said to have been bought by traveling merchants and cruelly murdered by them in a forest near the city, his blood being carefully collected in vessels. The accusation of drawing off the blood (without murder) was not made until the beginning of the 17th century when his cult was founded. The older inscription in the church of Rinn, dating from 1575, is distorted by fabulous embellishments for example, that the money paid for the boy to his godfather turned into leaves, and that a lily blossomed upon his grave. The cult continued until officially prohibited in 1994 by the Bishop of Innsbruck. On 17 January 1670,
Raphael Levy, a member of the Jewish community of
Metz, was executed on charges of the ritual murder of a peasant child who had gone missing in the woods outside the village of
Glatigny on 25 September 1669, the eve of
Rosh Hashanah.
Sandomierz, a city in
Poland, has been the venue of a number of blood libel cases, leading to the torture and execution of several people. One such case from 1698 involved Małgorzata, a dead two-year-old Christian girl whose corpse was deposited in a church mortuary by her mother, and the Jew she accused under torture, Aleksander Berek. The revival of the cult in
Belarus was cited as a dangerous expression of antisemitism in international reports on human rights and religious freedoms which were passed to the
UNHCR. • 1821
Odessa pogroms: in the aftermath of the
Greek War of Independence and killing of
Gregory V of Constantinople by the Ottomans, Jews were blamed and accused of using Christian blood for ritual purposes and again in 1859, of ritually murdering a Christian child. Ritual murder accusations appeared again around the 1881 pogrom after the
assassination of Alexander II of Russia. • 1823–35
Velizh blood libel: After a Christian child was found murdered outside of this small Russian town in 1823, accusations by a drunk prostitute led to the imprisonment of many local Jews. Some were not released until 1835. • 1840
Damascus affair: In February, at Damascus, a Catholic monk named Father Thomas and his servant disappeared. The accusation of ritual murder was brought against members of the Jewish community of Damascus. • 1840
Rhodes blood libel: The Jews of
Rhodes, under the
Ottoman Empire, were accused of murdering a
Greek Christian boy. The libel was supported by the local governor and the European consuls posted to Rhodes. Several Jews were arrested and tortured, and the entire Jewish quarter was blockaded for twelve days. An investigation carried out by the central Ottoman government found the Jews to be innocent. • In 1844,
David Paul Drach, the son of the Head Rabbi of
Paris and a convert to Christianity, wrote in his book ''De L'harmonie Entre L'eglise et la Synagogue'', that a Catholic priest in Damascus had been ritually killed and the murder covered up by powerful Jews in Europe; referring to the 1840 Damascus affair [See above] • In 1851–53, a case of blood libel took place in
Surami,
Georgia (then part of the Russian Empire): seven Jewish men, all versed in religious matters, were falsely accused of the murder of a Christian (Georgian) boy for ritual purposes. Local investigators pressed the case for three years before the
Governing Senate in St Petersburg, the Russian Empire's highest judicial organ, convicted and exiled the accused to remote provinces. Soviet, Israeli and Georgian scholars agree that the Russian imperial state, especially
Viceroy Mikhail Vorontsov, was heavily involved, even manipulated the case to ensure a conviction. This conviction greatly influenced the Kutaisi case (1878–80, see below). • In March 1879, nine Jewish men from the village of
Sachkhere were brought to
Kutaisi,
Georgia to stand trial for the alleged kidnapping and murder of a Christian girl. The case attracted a great deal of attention in the Russian Empire (of which Georgia was then a part): "While periodicals as diverse in tendency as
Herald of Europe and
Saint Petersburg Notices expressed their amazement that medieval prejudice should have found a place in the modern judiciary of a civilized state,
New Times hinted darkly of strange Jewish sects with unknown practices." The trial ended in acquittal, and the orientalist
Daniel Chwolson published a refutation of the blood libel. • 1882
Tiszaeszlár blood libel: The Jews of the village of
Tiszaeszlár, Hungary were accused of the ritual murder of a fourteen-year-old Christian girl, Eszter Solymosi. The case was one of the main causes of the rise of antisemitism in the country. The accused persons were eventually acquitted. • In 1899,
Hilsner Affair: Leopold Hilsner, a
Czech Jewish vagabond, was accused of murdering a nineteen-year-old Christian woman, Anežka Hrůzová, with a slash to the throat. Despite the absurdity of the charge and the relatively progressive nature of society in
Austria-Hungary, Hilsner was convicted and sentenced to death. He was later convicted of an additional unsolved murder, also involving a Christian woman. In 1901, the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.
Tomáš Masaryk, a prominent Austro-Czech philosophy professor and future president of
Czechoslovakia, spearheaded Hilsner's defense. He was later blamed by Czech media because of this. In March 1918, Hilsner was pardoned by Austrian emperor
Charles I. He was never exonerated, and the true guilty parties were never found.
20th and 21st centuries of 1903, caused by a blood libel • The 1903
Kishinev pogrom, an anti-Jewish revolt, started when an anti-Semitic newspaper wrote that a Christian Russian boy, Mikhail Rybachenko, was found murdered in the town of
Dubossary, alleging that the Jews killed him in order to use the blood in preparation of matzo. Around 49 Jews were killed and hundreds were wounded, with over 700 houses being looted and destroyed. • In the
1910 Shiraz blood libel, the Jews of
Shiraz,
Iran, were falsely accused of murdering a Muslim girl. The entire Jewish quarter was pillaged; the pogrom left 12 Jews dead and about 50 injured. in the 1910s with a picture of the dead Yushchinskyi, issued some time during the trial of Beilis, that read: "Christians, take care of your children!!! It will be the Jews' Passover on 17 March." • In
Kiev, a Jewish factory manager,
Menahem Mendel Beilis, was accused of murdering 13-year-old Andriy Yushchinskyi, a Christian child, and using his blood to make matzos. He was acquitted by an all-Christian jury after a sensational trial in 1913. • In 1928, the Jews of
Massena,
New York were falsely accused of kidnapping and killing a Christian girl in the
Massena blood libel. • Jews were frequently accused of the ritual murder of Christians for their blood in
Der Stürmer, an antisemitic newspaper which was published in
Nazi Germany. The infamous May 1934 issue of the paper was later banned by the Nazi authorities, because it went so far as to compare alleged Jewish ritual murder with the Christian
rite of
communion. • In
Tattarisuo case, where several severed heads, arms and other body parts were discovered in a spring, the
far-right media in Finland blamed the case on Jewish ritual murder. • In 1938 the British fascist politician and veterinarian
Arnold Leese published an antisemitic booklet in defense of the Blood Libel which he titled
My Irrelevant Defence: Meditations inside Gaol and Out on Jewish Ritual Murder. • The
1944–1946 anti-Jewish violence in Poland, which according to some estimates killed as many as 1,000–2,000 Jews (237 documented cases), involved, among other elements, accusations of blood libel, especially in the case of the
1946 Kielce pogrom. •
King Faisal of
Saudi Arabia (r. 1964–1975) made accusations against Parisian Jews that took the form of a blood libel. •
The Matzah of Zion was written by the
Syrian Defense Minister,
Mustafa Tlass in 1986. The book concentrates on two issues: renewed ritual murder accusations against the Jews in the
Damascus affair of 1840, and
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The book was cited at a
United Nations conference in 1991 by a Syrian delegate. On 21 October 2002, the London-based Arabic paper
Al-Hayat reported that the book
The Matzah of Zion was undergoing its eighth reprinting and it was also being translated into English, French and Italian. Egyptian filmmaker Munir Radhi has announced plans to adapt the book into a film. • In 2003, a private Syrian film company created a 29-part television series
Ash-Shatat ("The Diaspora"). This series originally aired in
Lebanon in late 2003 and it was subsequently broadcast by
Al-Manar, a satellite television network owned by
Hezbollah. This TV series, based on the antisemitic forgery
The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, shows the Jewish people engaging in a conspiracy to rule the world, and it also presents Jews as people who murder the children of Christians, drain their blood and use it to bake
matzah. • In early January 2005, some 20 members of the Russian
State Duma publicly made a blood libel accusation against the Jewish people. They approached the Prosecutor General's Office and demanded that Russia "ban all Jewish organizations." They accused all Jewish groups of being extremist, "anti-Christian and inhumane, and even accused them of practices that include ritual murders." Alluding to previous antisemitic Russian court decrees that accused the Jews of ritual murder, they wrote that "Many facts of such religious extremism were proven in courts." The accusation included traditional
antisemitic canards, such as the claim that "the whole democratic world today is under the financial and political control of international Jewry. And we do not want our Russia to be among such unfree countries". This demand was published as an open letter to the prosecutor general, in
Rus Pravoslavnaya (, "Orthodox Russia"), a national-conservative newspaper. This group consisted of members of the ultra-nationalist
Liberal Democrats, the
Communist faction, and the nationalist
Motherland party, with some 500 supporters. The mentioned document is known as "
The Letter of Five Hundred" ("Письмо пятисот"). Their supporters included editors of nationalist newspapers as well as journalists. By the end of the month, this group was strongly criticized, and it retracted its demand in response. • At the end of April 2005, five boys, ages 9 to 12, in
Krasnoyarsk (Russia) disappeared. In May 2005, their burnt bodies were found in the city sewage. The crime was not disclosed, and in August 2007 the investigation was extended until 18 November 2007. Some Russian nationalist groups claimed that the children were murdered by a Jewish sect with a ritual purpose. Nationalist M. Nazarov, one of the authors of "The Letter of Five Hundred" alleges "the existence of a '
Hasidic sect', whose members kill children before Passover to collect their blood", using the Beilis case mentioned above as evidence. M.Nazarov also alleges that "the ritual murder requires throwing the body away rather than its concealing". "The Union of the Russian People" demanded officials thoroughly investigate the Jews, not stopping at the search in synagogues,
Matzah bakeries and their offices. • During a speech in 2007,
Raed Salah, the leader of the northern branch of the
Islamic Movement in Israel, referred to Jews in Europe having in the past used children's blood to bake holy bread. "We have never allowed ourselves to knead [the dough for] the bread that breaks the fast in the holy month of
Ramadan with children's blood", he said. "Whoever wants a more thorough explanation, let him ask what used to happen to some children in Europe, whose blood was mixed in with the dough of the [Jewish] holy bread." • In the 2000s, a team of Polish anthropologists and sociologists investigated the currency of the blood libel myth in
Sandomierz where a painting depicting the blood libel adorns the Cathedral, and Orthodox faithful in villages near
Białystok, and they discovered that these beliefs persist among some Catholic and Orthodox Christians. The fact that local Jews were saved by orders from the bishop, who saw them hide in the very same cathedral during the
Holocaust, gave rise to hopes of transforming Sandomierz into a symbol of hope for the checkered historical
Polish-Jewish relations. and described in 2005 as "one of America's most noted Muslim scholars", alleged that Jews kidnap Christians and others in order to slaughter them and use their blood for making matzos. Sultan, who is currently a lecturer on Muslim jurisprudence at
Cairo University stated that: "The Zionists kidnap several non-Muslims Christians and others... this happened in a Jewish neighborhood in Damascus. They killed the French doctor, Toma, who used to treat the Jews and others for free, in order to spread Christianity. Even though he was their friend and they benefited from him the most, they took him on one of these holidays and slaughtered him, along with the nurse. Then they kneaded the matzos with the blood of Dr. Toma and his nurse. They do this every year. The world must know these facts about the Zionist entity and its terrible corrupt creed. The world should know this." (Translation by the
Middle East Media Research Institute) • During an interview which aired on
Rotana Khalijiya TV on 13 August 2012, Saudi Cleric Salman Al-Odeh stated (as translated by
MEMRI) that "It is well known that the Jews celebrate several holidays, one of which is the Passover, or the Matzos Holiday. I read once about a doctor who was working in a laboratory. This doctor lived with a Jewish family. One day, they said to him: 'We want blood. Get us some human blood.' He was confused. He didn't know what this was all about. Of course, he couldn't betray his work ethics in such a way, but he began inquiring, and he found that they were making matzos with human blood." Al-Odeh also stated that "[Jews] eat it, believing that this brings them close to their false god,
Yahweh" and that "They would lure a child in order to sacrifice him in the religious rite that they perform during that holiday." • In April 2013, the Palestinian non-profit organization MIFTAH, founded by
Hanan Ashrawi apologized for publishing an article which criticized US President
Barack Obama for holding a
Passover Seder in the
White House by saying "Does Obama, in fact, know the relationship, for example, between 'Passover' and 'Christian blood'...?! Or 'Passover' and 'Jewish blood rituals?!' Much of the chatter and gossip about historical Jewish blood rituals in Europe is real and not fake as they claim; the Jews used the blood of Christians in the Jewish Passover." MIFTAH's apology expressed its "sincerest regret". • In an interview which aired on
Al-Hafez TV on 12 May 2013, Khaled Al-Zaafrani of the Egyptian Justice and Progress Party, stated (as translated by
MEMRI): "It's well known that during the Passover, they [the Jews] make matzos called the 'Blood of Zion.' They take a Christian child, slit his throat and slaughter him. Then they take his blood and make their [matzos]. This is a very important rite for the Jews, which they never forgo... They slice it and fight over who gets to eat Christian blood." In the same interview, Al-Zaafrani stated that "The French kings and the Russian czars discovered this in the Jewish quarters. All the massacring of Jews that occurred in those countries were because they discovered that the Jews had kidnapped and slaughtered children, in order to make the Passover matzos." • In an interview which aired on the
Al-Quds TV channel on 28 July 2014 (as translated by
MEMRI),
Osama Hamdan, the top representative of
Hamas in
Lebanon, stated that "we all remember how the Jews used to slaughter Christians, in order to mix their blood in their holy matzos. This is not a figment of imagination or something taken from a film. It is a fact, acknowledged by their own books and by historical evidence." In a subsequent interview with CNN's
Wolf Blitzer, Hamdan defended his comments, stating that he "has Jewish friends". • In a sermon broadcast on the official
Jordanian TV channel on 22 August 2014, Sheik Bassam Ammoush, a former Minister of Administrative Development who was appointed to Jordan's
House of Senate ("Majlis al-Aayan") in 2011, stated (as translated by
MEMRI): "In [the
Gaza Strip] we are dealing with the enemies of
Allah, who believe that the matzos that they bake on their holidays must be kneaded with blood. When the Jews were in the
diaspora, they would murder children in England, in Europe, and in America. They would slaughter them and use their blood to make their matzos... They believe that they are
God's chosen people. They believe that the killing of any human being is a form of worship and a means to draw near their god." •
Accusations of genocide against Palestinians by Israel have been alleged to be a form of "blood libel" by some supporters of Israel and by various Israeli governments. In contrast, dismissing the
Gaza genocide as a blood libel has been described as
Gaza genocide denial. • In April 27, 2019, John Earnest entered
Poway synagogue in
Poway, California and fatally shot one woman and injured three other people, including the synagogue's
rabbi. In the
manifesto that is attributed to him, he wrote that he was avenging the martyrdom of
Simon of Trent: "You are not forgotten Simon of Trent, the horror that you and countless children have endured at the hands of the Jews will never be forgiven". • In March 2020, Italian painter Giovanni Gasparro unveiled a painting of the martyrdom of
Simon of Trent, titled "
Martirio di San Simonino da Trento (Simone Unverdorben), per omicidio rituale ebraico (The Martyrdom of St. Simon of Trento in accordance with Jewish ritual murder)". The painting was condemned by the Italian Jewish community and the
Simon Wiesenthal Center, among others. • The
QAnon conspiracy theory has been accused of advancing blood libel tropes through its belief that Hollywood elites
are harvesting adrenochrome from children through
Satanic ritual abuse in order to become
immortal. In February 2022, a sculpture of Simon of Trent depicting the blood libel was used to promote the adrenochrome-harvesting conspiracy theory. • In 2025, a former fixed-term academic at
University College London claimed the
Damascus affair blood libel to have been accurate in a lecture on
Zionism. ==Views of the Catholic Church==