A British writer of comic fiction named Howard Jacobson complains in The Guardian that media outlets reporting on the record-setting rates of child casualties among Israel’s civilian victims in Gaza invokes the antisemitic “blood libel” of the medieval era:
It says something for the conscience of the Church of England that, in 1955, it put up a plaque alongside the former shrine of Little Hugh in Lincoln Cathedral, apologising for the harm it had done by falsely accusing Jews of the ritual slaughter of the boy in 1255.
That Jews habitually murdered gentile children for blood with which to make Passover matzoh, was a popular superstition throughout Britain and Europe in the middle ages. “These fictions cost many innocent Jews their lives,” the plaque reads, “[and] do not redound to the credit of Christendom, and so we pray: Lord, forgive what we have been, amend what we are, and direct what we shall be.”
God forgives, Jews do not. That would be leaving money on the table.
That it took the Church of England 700 years to amend “what [it] had been” should not detract from the honesty of that amendment, particularly if we remember that the “blood libel”, as it has become known, was still alive and kicking in the modern era, with occurrences of it recorded in Russia and even America as recently as 1928.
In 1928 in Massena, New York a four year-old girl went missing overnight two days before Yom Kippur. A Greek immigrant suggested she might have been taken by the town’s Jews for use in a blood ritual. Police questioned two Jewish men, one said to be mentally retarded who gave confusing and suspicious answers; another (described in Jewish accounts of the incident as a marginal figure and non-practicing Jew) lent credence to the blood ritual legends in his desperate claims of innocence. It appears the original white protestant residents of Massena (experiencing a recent influx of immigration at the time) were previously ignorant of the old legends.
So over a period of less than 24 hours, before the girl wandered out of the woods back into town the next day, the rumor swept through town. Jewish accounts of the incident portray the local rabbi turning police away from his door, and later marching into the police station to berate them for lending credence to the libel and leaving them “abashed”. At one point a crowd gathered at the police station, or not; this was disputed by another Jew recollecting the affair. A Jewish businessman said the police searched his cellar. People in back alleys were said to have shined flashlights into the windows of other Jewish businesses. Things were tense. As soon as the girl returned, things returned to normal.
In the years since some Jews have criticized local civic and religious leaders for not submitting the town to a series of struggle sessions over the affair. And that is the great Massena blood libel case by which America is to be tethered to the grand “blood libel” millstone, per Jacobson.
Jacobson continues:
Ask wherein the appeal of this libel lies and the answer has to be the necessity for Christians not just to defame Jews and make a clear distinction between Old and New Testament morality, but to set the Jews apart from the entire human family; depraved, accomplices of the devil. And, of course, to justify hunting them down and massacring them.
Jacobson, having asserted Jews are victimized by reports of the IDF killing Palestinian children because of the blood libel, hints that journalists reporting atrocities are impelled by the same age-old gentile “necessity” to “set the Jews apart” as prelude to “massacring them.” About the considerable number of Jews calling out IDF atrocities he has nothing to say.
It has been said often enough that there could hardly have been a more unlikely crime to charge Jews with, given the strict taboo on blood sacrifice and the extreme laws against blood contact and consumption laid down in the Torah. But there lies the further efficacy of the libel – it denies Jews their beliefs, their culture and their nature. It is hateful to be accused of what you haven’t done, but more hateful still to be accused of what you would never dream of doing and what you cannot bear to see done.
It is not in the Jew’s nature to consume human blood. Okay, is it in his nature to kill innocent children, as it has been unfortunately proven at times throughout history to be in the “nature” of any given people at war? Is this yet another example of Jews being excepted from a negative aspect of human nature (as asserted by a Jew)? Because in this century the average Israeli, maybe even the average Jew worldwide with many loud and notable exceptions, doesn’t just bear the savagery of Israel’s past year, he celebrates it.
Speaking of antisemitic slurs, “the Jew cries out in pain as he strikes you” comes to mind. Jacobson, having set us up (or so he thinks) to conflate medieval mythology with the documented present, hints at an argument too ridiculous to make explicit: the blood libel myth was unforgivable for the pain caused to Jews, ergo documentation of the bloody present is unforgivable for the pain it causes Jews. Another variation of “the Jew cries out in pain…” line comes to mind, Golda Meir’s wretchedly dishonest “we will perhaps in time be able to forgive the Arabs for killing our sons, but it will be harder for us to forgive them for having forced us to kill their sons.” Shamelessness is a superpower that you don’t have, mortal. Jacobson has it (if only he’d use it for good):
Hence the hurt, the anger and the fear that Jewish people have been experiencing in the year since Hamas’s barbaric massacre of Israelis on 7 October and the no less barbaric denials, not to mention celebrations of it, as night after night our televisions have told the story of the war in Gaza through the death of Palestinian children. Night after night, a recital of the numbers dead. Night after night, the unbearable footage of their parents’ agony. The savagery of war. The savagery of the Israeli onslaught. But for many, writing or marching against Israeli action, the savagery of the Jews as told for hundreds of years in literature and art and church sermons.
What Jacobson appears to be trying to do above is establish a Jewish right to “savagery” now, for the libelous claims of Jewish savagery before. But he can’t say that directly; he has to try to plant this gaslighting furtively. If Jacobson had an argument he would make it. As it is he has only the guilt with which you’ve been conditioned from birth, guilt about antisemitism. If Christian calumnies about the Jews conditioned our forebears to fear and hate them, Jewish calumnies about our forebears in the present condition us to fear hating them.
What calumny do Jews level at Christian-descended Europeans? That we are inferior to them, because we have hated them. Our inferiority as proven by our hatred of them is cherished by Jews and masochistic gentiles alike. Under this mind-twisting tyranny of psychological manipulation we fear even the appearance of hating them (in large part lest we confirm that inferiority) as individuals, and this we confirm by acknowledging an ancestral hatred. I do not hate them, but we do. Each individual distinguished by his condemnation of the whole and split off from it. That’s power–though it is looking increasingly precarious, in no small part because of the savagery of the IDF now and the familiar, long-tiresome bullying of which Jacobson’s rant here is an example; bullying that always leaps into action to act as bodyguard for Israeli misbehavior. Bullying that every Western gentile living now has known from the cradle. Bullying that grows increasingly shrill as its interlocutors sense its faltering grip.
Jacobson continues with his impeccable logic; the medieval blood libel was not true, ergo the present infanticide in Palestine is not true:
Here we were again, the same merciless infanticides inscribed in the imaginations of medieval Christians. Only this time, instead of operating on the midnight streets of Lincoln and Norwich, they target Palestinian schools, the paediatric wards of hospitals, the tiny fragile bodies of children themselves. Even when there are other explanations for the devastation, no one really believes them. Reporters whose reports are proved wrong see no reason to apologise. No amendment of their calumnies. What is there to apologise for? It could have been true.
Indeed, you should be ashamed for noticing the bodies of children in Gaza just as you should be ashamed of your forebears believing in superstitious Jewish cruelty. But I can’t help seeing superstitious Jewish cruelty in the long war to expel the Palestinians, based as it is on its own religious myth unsupported by history or archeology, of an ancient Jewish claim to the land.
Ask how Israel is able to target innocent children with such deadly accuracy and no one can tell you. Ask why they would want to target innocent children and make themselves despised among the nations of the Earth and no one can tell you that either. Hate on this scale seeks no rational explanation. Hate feeds off the superstitions that fed it last time round. The narrative of these events requires a heartless villainy and who more heartlessly villainous than those who severed the arteries of Little Hugh of Lincoln?
Who said anything about “deadly accuracy” being a necessity for killing great numbers of children? Quite the opposite: it’s the routine practice of the IDF taking out whole buildings and entire city blocks that is killing all those women and children. As for why they would want to target innocent children, that is not our problem to solve. They have offered an explanation for it, for what they characterize as the unfortunate but wholly necessary collateral killing: Israelis (and as Jacobson asserts, all Jews, suffering under history) are defending themselves after the “genocidal” attacks of October 7. That and something about “human shields”. It is for Jacobson, who has made a career out of being promiscuously Jewish (he’s been flattered as “the British Philip Roth”) in his writing, I am told, to explain how they, how anyone, could be capable of it.
Needless to say Jacobson conveniently forgets a certain lie, but not the only such lie, about October 7, every bit as lurid as the old blood libel, a deliberate lie told to clear the way for the current child-killing, the legend of the “40 beheaded babies”. As yet not officially corrected by Israel; as Jacobson says above, it could have been true.
So how many children have the Israelis killed in the last year? From Oxfam:
More women and children have been killed in Gaza by the Israeli military over the past year than the equivalent period of any other conflict over the past two decades, new Oxfam analysis has found.
As hostilities and tragic loss of life spread in Lebanon and the West Bank – including East Jerusalem – the regional escalation underscores the urgent need for an immediate and permanent ceasefire.
Conservative figures show that more than 6,000 women and 11,000 children were killed in Gaza by the Israeli military over the last 12 months. Data from 2004-2021 on direct conflict deaths from the Small Arms Survey, estimates that the highest number of women killed in a single year was over 2,600 in Iraq in 2016.
I have no knowledge of Jacobson or his work, and the thumbnail sketch derived from a half-hour’s internet investigation suggests I’m no worse off for it. As I mentioned above he’s apparently a secular Jew who’s made a career fetishizing his Jewishness. In other words an increasingly tiresome cliche that is rapidly, and mercifully, fading into the untenable as the public becomes jaded–one hopes–to self-celebrating Jewish kitsch against our daily backdrop of Israeli savagery and Jewish malice. In a letter to The Sunday Times he joined with Simon Schama to help cancel Jeremy Corbyn for antisemitism, using an argument similar to that for censoring reporting on the killing of children in Gaza–Corbyn was carrying on an historical libeling of Jews:
Although anti-Zionists claim innocence of any antisemitic [sic] intent, anti-Zionism frequently borrows the libels of classical Jew-hating…Accusations of international Jewish conspiracy and control of the media have resurfaced to support false equations of Zionism with colonialism and imperialism, and the promotion of vicious, fictitious parallels with genocide and Nazism.
The “blood libel” obviously has no bearing on the killing of children in Gaza, despite Jacobson’s tortured stretch here. But since he brings it up we should consider–if for no other reason than it is in our interests to fight back (because Jacobson isn’t just out to justify killing Palestinian kids, but also to keep us in our place), dare I say, how false? By that I mean just how unreasonable was it for medieval peasants to believe in Jewish blood rituals? Or, was it at all unreasonable? Was it, as we’re told, mere “hate”, that deliberately vague but all-damning word-concept that only ever seems to apply to us and not to our enemies?
There are no genuine certainties after all, only degrees of probability. Beyond that I suggest to you, if you are not Jewish, to make yourself impervious to the various condemnations of such as Jacobson, to liberate yourself from caring. Me I start with the death star of Jewish dominance in our time, the Holocaust. Whether it was indeed history’s greatest crime or an utter and complete hoax, I don’t care: I, we, deserve to live. It’s not an ignoble impulse by which you recoil from that proposition, but it is a deadly one. If it helps you should consider what I think is self-evident: Jacobson et al are not outraged that the blood libel happened and they are not outraged the Holocaust happened. They are outraged these things happened to them. And they very often betray a lust for vengeance.
So we should at least recognize Jacobson and ilk are enemies of a sort, and no true lovers of either universal morality or the truth. We can ask at least, no we are obliged to ask, as our existence depends on it: who in fact has been libeled? Us or them? Here’s a start, and it’s offered by a very different sort of Jew than Jacobson, the sort who seems as unable to resist the truth as Jacobson is unwilling to respect it. Dr Ariel Toaff was an accomplished historian who came to contrary conclusions regarding the blood libel and the extremely superstitious and sanguinary history of Judaism we never hear about:
Dr Toaff is the son of the Rabbi of Rome and a professor in the Jewish University of Bar Ilan, not far from Tel Aviv. He made a name for himself by his deep study of medieval Jewry. His three-volumed Love, Work, and Death (subtitled Jewish Life in Medieval Umbria) is an encyclopaedia of this admittedly narrow area. While studying his subject he discovered that the medieval Ashkenazi Jewish communities of North Italy practiced a particularly horrible form of human sacrifice. Their wizards and adepts stole and crucified Christian babies, obtained their blood and used it for magical rituals evoking the Spirit of Vengeance against the hated Goyim.
In particular, he dwelt on the case of St Simon of Trent. This two-year old child from the Italian town of Trent was kidnapped by a few Ashkenazi Jews from his home on the eve of Passover 1475 AD. At night, the kidnappers murdered the child; drew his blood, pierced his flesh with needles, crucified him head down calling “So may all Christians by land and sea perish”, and thus they celebrated their Passover, an archaic ritual of outpouring blood and killed babies, in the most literal form, without usual metaphoric “blood-wine” shift.
The killers were apprehended, confessed and were found guilty by the Bishop of Trent. Immediately, the Jews took their protest to the Pope and he had sent the bishop of Ventimiglia to investigate. He allegedly accepted a hefty bribe from the Jews and concluded that the child was murdered by a Hamas mine in order to besmirch Israel, as there was no Tsahal ordnance found on the beach of Trent. “Simon had been killed by Christians with the intention of ruining the Jews”, said the pre-war Jewish Encyclopedia, in a clear case of premonition: the same argument was used by Jews in 2006 while explaining away the mass murder of children in Kafr Qana.
However, in 15th century the Jews were influential, yes, but all-powerful, no. They could not deal with the world like they did in 2002 after their massacre of Jenin by ordering everybody to buzz off. They had no American veto in the Security Council. They could not bomb Rome, and the word “antisemitism” was invented 400 years later. They were given a fair deal which is much worse than preferred treatment: Pope Sixtus IV assembled a commission of six cardinals chaired by the best legal mind of that time, for retrial; and this Supreme Court found the murderers guilty. See more for a Catholic version and a Jewish version of the events. The records of the trial have survived centuries and are still available in Vatican.
In 1965, the Roman Catholic Church entered a perestroika [i]. These were the halcyon days of the Vatican II when the modernizers uprooted the foundations of tradition hoping to update the faith and to fit it into the new Jewish-friendly narrative of modernity; in plain prose, the bishops wanted to be loved by the liberal press.
The ever-watchful Jews used the opportunity and pushed the bishops to decommission St Simon of Trent. They were happy to oblige: already in bizarre ritual, the Church leaders had found the Jews free from guilt for Crucifixion of Christ while admitting the Church’s guilt for persecution of Jews; the crucifixion of an Italian baby was a small matter compared with this reversal. In a hasty decision, the bishops ruled that the confessions of the killers were unacceptable because obtained under torture, and thus the accused were innocent, while the young martyr was anything but. His cult was discontinued and forbidden, and the remains of the martyred child were removed and dumped in a secret place to avoid resumption of pilgrimage.
And now we come back to Dr Ariel Toaff. While going through the papers of the trial, he made a staggering discovery: instead of being dictated by the zealous investigators under torture, the confessions of the killers contained material totally unknown to the Italian churchmen or police. The killers belonged to the small and withdrawn Ashkenazi community, they practiced their own rites, quite different from those used by the native Italian Jews; these rites were faithfully reproduced in their confessions, though they were not known to the Crime Squad of the day. “These liturgical formulas in Hebrew with a strong anti-Christian tone cannot be projections of the judges who could not know these prayers, which didn’t even belong to Italian rites but to the Ashkenazi tradition,” Toaff wrote. A confession is of value only if it contains some true and verifiable details of the crime the police did not know of. This iron rule of criminal investigation was observed in Trent trials.
To give one thankfully final look at Jacobson, he ends his article with this sentence:
Maybe the Church of England was wrong to apologise.
Indeed.
untethered 
.
A great point.
What allowed one group of foreigners within the West to achieve this? To get their ethnocentric activism and their specific grievances and ‘narratives’ and agenda to become so ‘hegemonic’ in our culture? To place themselves at the center of a host-culture? Thinking as a martian anthropologist on his first day observing Earth-societies, it just makes no sense.
Chronologically, it seems this thing is clearly enough a product of the mid-20th century: it is not really present in the early-20th century; and it definitely present in the late-20th century. So something happened, or a Rubicon was crossed, in the mid-20th century and we are still living with it. That simplified timeline overlaps with the ‘Holocaust.’ of course, in chronological terms.
OTOH, the ‘Holocaust’ as the kind of mega-amplified packaged-narrative, as great taboo, as replacement-religion at the center of Western culture (making Jews the center of world-history), really only begins in the late 1970s and consolidates strong in the 1980s. People between the late-1940s and mid-1970s had heard of concentration camps, ghettos, yellow-stars, expulsions, maybe some lingering legends about “gas chambers,” from old World War II talk. But it absolutely was not the hegemonic thing it was.
It’s been proposed that the ‘Holocaust’-narrative is an effect and not a cause (hence the intense focus on it only emerging by ca.1980 rather than in the 1950s, say, when ‘it’ was, in effect, ignored). Even so, within the exercise of grappling with HOW this successful subversion happened, the Holocaust ought not be ignored. Open inquiry in the best Western tradition is a good antidote, whenever the guardians of respectable opinion finally allow its discussion.
None of the above answers the question of why the ‘Holocaust’ (and similar Judeocentric framings of everything) succeeded in being made hegemonic in Western culture. The simple explanation, too broad to be useful maybe, is that it’s a function of Jewish power and Western naivete. This kind of back-and-forth has probably led to bad results for White-Europeans off-and-on for centuries and centuries and centuries, wherever, and whenever, Semitic arrivals or other similar sorts of arrivals carrying diasporic-ethics show up among a Western host-population arrive and get to work.
The ‘Holocaust’-narrative of the late-20th century was an industrial-scale version of the thing that’s probably happened in too many iterations to count since Roman Empire times. The Big-H narrative came at a time when the Jews were at the height of their power and influence, a number of generations having flowed under the bridge since they started arriving from Eastern Europe in the mid-1880s. At some point, there, we can posit that they reached threshold-points within many elite-systems and influence-networks, as they usually try to do.
One answer to my own question probably deals with something as mundane as those population-thresholds. The Jews in the USA, sometime in the early-20th century, reached a national 25:1 ratio vis-a-vis the core-host population of White-Christians, with the latter being divided on ethnic-religious tradition lines and therefore diluted in that sense (certainly so in the earlier part of the 20th-century). We could posit that a 250:1 ratio is definitely not enough for the usual bad results to flow forth. But that a 25:1 ratio is more than enough, if other conditions align. In that case, one only need give it enough time and the usual results start to happen. I don’t know, those are just placeholder numbers. I don’t know what the true threshold-numbers are.
Conditions that needs to ‘align’ would be: they (be allowed to) accumulate themselves in leading urban-centers, they are able to start ingratiating themselves with elites and influence-networks, and they start cornering economic markets through their usual business practices. And: they have a high-trust host-population which. for any reason. is unable to organize a movement to fight them off or get them to move along down the trail.
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Most people don’t know now that for a long time following WWII there was no “Holocaust” mythos at all. Tony Judt in his history of Europe after WWII “Postwar” wrote that it was considered somewhat shameful even to have been a “Holocaust survivor”.
I think I’ve read somewhere the mini-series “Holocaust”(1978) was our introduction to this now quasi-religion. I know growing up in the Seventies Holocaust kitsch and remembrance was not a thing. At some point in the late seventies/early eighties it became common.
I think it’s in everyone’s interest to resist it. What the current generation cannot question by virtue of its ubiquity the next generation rejects violently. Gen Z senses from the start this is a sort of psychological tyranny, and rebels instinctively.
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The Diary of Anne Frank (1959) was a major Hollywood film.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0052738/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_8_nm_0_in_0_q_The%2520Diary%2520of%2520Ann%2520Frank
But there was also Hogan’s Heroes which mostly mocked Germans rather than deified Jewish victims.
I think the Cold War tamped down the idea of Jews as sacred victims because the US wanted to win over Germans and other Europeans in the fight against communism.
Now, it’s DEI and gay pride which means many, not all, Jews are caught between a rock and a hard place. They fear the Aryans more than anything else but are finding little support from liberals and the sacred-victim, entitled parasite culture they helped create.
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Yes and “Judgement at Nurenburg” was nominated for 11 Academy Awards in 1961. But my recollection of growing up was the image of Germans was split between evil Nazis (not necessarily “antisemitic Nazis”) and brilliant scientist Germans. There was even a hint of admiration for what they almost accomplished (“taking over the world”, bs though it may be).
At this point I’m so tired of “evil Nazi” and “Holocaust” propaganda I feel like revolting just on aesthetic grounds. To hear them talk of “killing Germans” in well-produced kitsch like Band of Brothers makes me sick. And they’re still cranking this shit out, at as high a pace as ever. A friend praised “Zone of Interest” on Twitter, talking about the moral lesson therein, and he’s lucky he lives in another country. I haven’t seen it. Won’t see it. I don’t care if a work of art is well made if it’s of this genre. All the worse.
Google’s ngram viewer has the word “Holocaust” starting to rise as early as 1940 and peaking sharply around 1980, falling considerably in the late 1990s and actually sloping down from late oughts to the present.
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I remember seeing on YouTube a “Roast” telecast in the early 70s for some Hollywood type and Don Rickles, while doing his “roast,” actually turned and said to some black guy sitting at the speakers’ or celeb table, you need us but we don’t need you. [meaning he identified as white.] Everybody laughed. How times have changed.
I think Jews began to identify as non-white in stages, but probably very rapidly after Obama was elected. They now openly speak of Aryans, not just neo-Nazis. I can understand that. If white men are so weak and stupid that they give quotas to blacks, women and now everybody else and destroy their own institutions, well, I’d jump ship too if I could finesse it.
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Re: the supposed rise in usage as early as 1940 of the word ‘holocaust’ (a historical Biblical-Greek term):
Until 1978, there was no strong association in general-literature, general understanding by White-Christians, or the general cultural discourse between Jewish deaths (of any and all causes) in the 1940s and the word “holocaust” without any modifying words. And the word was ALWAYS lower-case; check the N-gram results by year.
It is truly a seminal example of Jewish power that so many decades later they maneuvered a monopolization and capitalization of the word, with the quasi-honorifics of the definite-article and a capital-letter (i.e., “The Holocaust”). The successful monopolization of the term to refer only to Jews is actually a kind of world-historical blood-libel of its own, in that it minimizes every other thing in world history in addition to systematically vilifying Germans or White-Europeans generally. (A sub-mythology about some lesser number of non-Jews supposedly also put to death in gas-chambers or the like, was eventually tacked on later for marketing purposes).
The rise of the “Holocaust” as a monopolized, politicized term mostly totally dispossessed the word of it of its former, neutral, general meaning (a great catastrophe, though the phrase “a nuclear holocaust” is a weak exception, note that worries about ‘megadeaths’ from nuclear war long predates the late-1970s). If anyone uses “the “holocaust” in neutral, lower-case form, to a pair of well-trained Western ears it inevitably conjures images of the “Big-H” Holocaust of Jews by the central villains of history, the White-Christian European.
Example: If I were talking about the Thirty Years War and the famous ‘Sack of Magdeburg’ event, and I wrote: “The holocaust of Magdeburg was a shocking event in German history,” almost every reader will assume I refer to something in the 1940s and not the 1630s. That minority that picks up, be it from context or whatever, that I mean the 1630s, a large share will get uncomfortable and annoyed that I am equating White-Christian victims of the burning of a city with the sacred status of Jews in the 1940s. This is what I mean, in part, by it being a blood-libel.
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I just realized that my first ngram search was non-capitalized, “holocaust”, without the definite article. That explains it showing up at all before 1960; searching “the Holocaust” shows virtually no usage before then, then a steep climb to 2000. Apparently we’ve been on a downward trend since 2011. I suspect the remarkable spike and all-time high point in 1984 was helped along by the success and promotion of the miniseries starting in 1978. Of course this doesn’t measure the countless times the phrase is spoken in various public contexts.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=the+Holocaust&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=holocaust&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3
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Interestingly “racism” started out modest in the late thirties then takes off like a rocket around 1960, just like “the Holocaust”.
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