This lie, otherwise is called “blood libel”, historically is the one which most often was used to cause harm to Jews. The claim is that Jews ritually kill babies or children in order to use their blood for baking bread. The claim originate in 12th century and the later part of the claim was added in 16th or 17th century.

There has never been any evidence supporting the lie – actually Torah forbid human sacrifice, and no blood is allowed to be consumed. In many cases later investigation refuted the accusation. Still more than 150 pogroms resulted from the blood libel, almost always causing murder of Jews (often including women and children).

So far, to my knowledge, the last time the blood libel incited a full scale pogrom was Kielce pogrom of 1946, which resulted in murder of 42 Jews and was initiated by a boy who claimed that Jews have kidnapped him, while in reality he spent a few days in a neighboring village. It may happen that the situation was engineered by secret service.

Nowadays the lie is well and thriving, with hardly any anti-semitic/anti-Istrael gathering going on without a slogan depicturing Jews/Israeli as “murders of children”.

There are three main rationalization the people who use the appellation bring up:

1. During the wars Israel conducted during the time of its existence some children were killed. While every death of a child is a tragedy, in every war civilian population, including children are killed. The figures show that the proportion of children between killed in the wars led by Israel is at least twice as little as the proportion of children in the population, which would not be the case if the Israeli military would purposely target children or even acting indiscriminate.
2. One can point to a number of minors held at Israeli prisons. On the one hand, being detained is very far from being murdered. On the other hand, the minors held in the Israeli prisons are detained for activity which is criminal in Israel. There is hardly any country in the world which does not hold some underage criminals in detention.
3. In many cases the Palestinian Arabs organisations encourage minors to conduct acts of terror against Israelis. Sometimes, in attempt to prevent or mitigate consequences of such an attack the terrorist is killed. In the case when the terrorist was minor, this is often presented by media as a case of “killing a child”. It is quite clear that those cases should be equated to the death of a child solder, in which responsibility falls to the party which recruited the child, i.e. to the terrorist organisation.

The lie of the statement in the title is obvious to anybody how have met a Jew, or even have seen a picture (which by now would include most of the worlds population).

By some sources the claim arose in early middle ages, due to some canonical way of depicturing profets in the church paintings (some of them were drawn with a crescent on their heads, which were easily mistaken for horns).

While initially born of ignorance, the lie is very dangerous, as it clearly dehumanize Jews and their descendents.

In the modern days an appellation “sons of pigs and monkeys” used for Jews in many muslim communities is a close cousin to the old lie and, while usually whitewashed as not being literally meant, does encourage view of Jews as being deficient humans.

Even more common is this lie in application to the state of Israel when it is called a Nazi or apartheid state. People who use this appellation often claim it to be a part of legitimate critic of Israel policies. In reality, this is going far beyond the bounds of normal political criticism and is not applied to similar behavior in other states. One can compare those “critics” to a man who yells to a woman in a short dress “prostitute” and loudly encourage others to rape her, while excusing own behavior as a legitimate criticism of her choice of the dress.

I want to start here a serie of posts about anti-semitism. Anti-semitism is holding, spreading and acting on certain lies about Jews.

There is a difference between anti-semitism and a general prejudice based on belonging to a group. While usually prejudices tend to be either denigrating: “all Irish are lazy” (which, by the way, is a lie), or neutral “all Swedes are blond” (also not true), or even positive “all Italians can sing” (unfortunately, also not 100% true), antisemitic claims present Jews as dangerous and dehumanize them.

To begin with, one should consider how the antisemitic claims are applied.

Historically antisemitic claims arose in the time when Jews were defined only by religion (before 16’th century). So, the first “support” to antisemitic claims were speculations about Jewish holy texts and practices. As there is no support to those claims in actual sources, antisemitism was usually not supported by the educated people at that time.

In the end of 16’th century in Spain and later in Italy a major forceful conversion of Jews to Christianity took place. The newly converted Jews were though still considered with suspicion and were discriminated against on the basis of their ancestry. This most likely is an indication to the fact that at that time in Europe people started to identify themselves not only as adherents of a certain religion, but also as members of certain ethnic group. Antisemitic claims started to be applied also to the descendants of Jews, and were “supported” by newly invented “science of inheritance”. As those arguments are more difficult to verify they started to be more acceptable even to educated people. The gradual grow in both amount of people espousing antisemitic views and in severity of the views accepted, was what led to the Holocaust in 20’th century.

At the present time, after the creation of the state of Israel, along with the two old applications, the traditional antisemitic lies started to be applied to Israel as a state with the purpose to delegitimize the existence of Israel (more about this in the corresponding posts later).