Supposedly there was a blood libel last week at University of California, Berkeley. After Alan Dershowitz spoke at the law school, the student newspaper ran a cartoon that provoked numerous complaints about anti-Semitism, including letters by University of California Chancellor Carol Christ and Dershowitz himself, who wrote that there was “little doubt that this abhorrent…
JERUSALEM — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas of spreading a blood libel in his address Thursday to the European Parliament in Brussels. In the speech, which earned a standing ovation from parliament representatives, Abbas alleged that Israeli rabbis called this week for the poisoning of Palestinian water, a medieval anti-Semitic libel…
PRAGUE — Two far-right Czech politicians have been charged with incitement to hatred and defamation over a note they wrote supporting a 19th century blood libel. The police launched criminal proceedings against the men on December 20, and the charges were confirmed to JTA on Tuesday. Adam Bartos, chairman of National Democracy, a far-right Czech…
In “The Murder of William of Norwich: The Origins of the Blood Libel in Medieval Europe,” Emily Rose, a historian who has taught at Johns Hopkins, Princeton and Baruch, among other universities, explores long-standing false accusations that Jews murdered Christian children to use their blood in ritual ceremonies. From the Middle Ages to the present,…
Some years ago, an obsession with Polish poetry led me to two ideas: First, that I should visit Poland, and second, that someone else should pay for it. So I wrangled a Fulbright fellowship and spent a year traveling in Poland. (I mention the Fulbright not to brag, but because it bugs me when travel…
● A Child of Christian Blood: Murder and Conspiracy in Tsarist Russia: The Beilis Blood Libel By Edmund Levin Schocken, 362 pages, $28.95 A little more than 100 years ago, an innocent man was about to go on trial. His alleged crime: the murder of a 13-year-old boy two years earlier, found dead of multiple…
The leader of Poznan’s Jewish community has accused Catholic clergymen of perpetuating a local blood libel. Alicja Kobus, chairwoman of the western city’s Jewish community, made the accusation on Jan. 26 in an interview with the Gazeta Wyborcza daily about a fresco which depicts an anti-Semitic blood libel and which adorns Poznan’s Sacred Blood of…
Nearly 350 years after his wrongful execution, a French Jew who had been convicted of a blood libel was exonerated and declared a martyr. The village of Glatigny in the eastern district of Moselle set the record straight Sunday on the wrongful conviction of Raphael Levy in 1670 for murder. Levy, a simple merchant, was…
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