Two weeks ago I did a lo-o-ong diary on the IHRA “working definition” of antisemitism and what it means for the left, and — to my amazement — it hit the rec list and started what was mostly a fruitful discussion. There was some on-point criticism, though. While gentle, it more or less tracked what an anonymous colonel says to Clevinger, on trial early in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22:
You're a windy son of a bitch, aren't you?
I’ll take the hint. Let’s try a series of smaller diaries, a topic at a time, that I'll call Antisemitism 102.
And here we go.
One of the IHRA examples of what could be considered antisemitism:
Using the symbols and images associated with classic antisemitism (e.g., claims of Jews killing Jesus or blood libel) to characterize Israel or Israelis.
By far, the two biggest and most tenacious lies about the Jews in history are:
- The Jews killed Jesus.
- The Jews kidnap and ritually murder Christian children to consume their blood.
The blood libel — as harebrained as it sounds — isn’t just a bit of fringe weirdness at the edges of the chat at the coffee shop. This shit got Jews killed, whole Jewish communities wiped out, burned en masse or collectively thrown down wells (some of the bodies only now, a thousand years later, being discovered).
As you’d expect about lie #2 on the greatest hits chart of antisemitism, there are lots and lots of examples I could give. So let’s let James Joyce pick one.
Stephen Dedalus is Arguably Being an a Bit of an Asshole Here
Happy centennial, Ulysses.
We've followed Bloom and Dedalus separately for most of the day, and now it's nightfall. The two meet and take a rambling evening walk with rambling conversation. The topic turns to music. Like James Joyce, Stephen's a tenor in a country that takes tenor balladeers seriously, and so he sings a song. He picks "The Ballad of Little Sir Hugh."
You know, a song that just happens to be about probably the most famous blood libel case in UK history. Stephen sings the song, but he’s aware of the horrible shadows it contains — the accusation of ritual murder, the blood libel, and the price the medieval Jewish community paid.
Stephen’s actually very good on the topic of antisemitism. There. I said it. He’s insufferable in a thousand ways, but antisemitism isn’t one of his insufferabilities.
Here's a less overtly antisemitic rendering of the song, from the wonderful Steeleye Span. Notice how much of it is about blood.
Little Sir Hugh
So here we are in 1255.
(In case you’re wondering, there are two Hughs of Lincoln, the other one being a grown-up, so we’re talking the little one, Little Sir Hugh.)
A boy disappears. His body is found — he’s been murdered. By whom? The satanic Jews, obviously. Remember, we’re partying like it’s 1255.
Sufficient to say that it was all bullshit. But by the time that the Bishop of Lexington was done torturing various Jews into confession — confessing the murder for a whole stack of shocking and nefarious but mutually contradictory reasons, including demonic magic spells requiring gentile body organs and, of course, to mock the divinity of Christ — and by the time that eighteen Jews were hanged for refusing to go along with an ecclesiastical trial without a single Jew on the jury, and that seventy-one Jews were sentenced by that gang of upstanding Christians to death (but later reprieved in one of those WTF-are-we-doing moments too rare in history), … well, by the time all this has happened, townsfolk were starting to attribute miracles to the dead Hugh. He posthumously grazed but missed sainthood. And Henry III, apparently a bit of a weasel who would by law have effectively inherited the property of all the dead Jews, had to settle for the property of only eighteen dead Jews, which must have ruined his whole afternoon.
Among the folks who heard this particular ritual murder story was Geoffrey Chaucer — you know, the guy played by Paul Bettany in the really delightful “A Knight’s Tale” — who puts a similar thing into the Canterbury Tales, with a nod at Hugh of Lincoln. It’s meant either as an example of Jewish perfidy or, if we want to give Chaucer the benefit of the doubt, as a prime cautionary example of the dumb shit some well-brought-up people believe.
(Now I’m gonna have to reread that just to see whether Chaucer’s being ironic. That’s a topic of a diary in and of itself — what happens as a Jew when an artist or writer you admire greatly turns out to also be a crap-assed antisemite? . . . But enough about Roger Waters.)
Escaped from the Middle Ages
It’s a medieval claim, but it didn’t die with the Dark Ages. It was still the button to push when you couldn’t push deicide.
Some nasty business in Kiev in 1913.
The Nazis got mileage out of the blood libel too, as shown by the issue of Der Stürmer from 1939 I’m using as the main illustration. Big red print: “Ritual Murder.” They know this is a big goddamned hate-the-Jew button molded into the European mind by a thousand years of institutionalized antisemitism, and they’re not afraid to exploit it.
And now in the key of Q
Now we know better, of course. Blood libel, full on, is too nuts to get any serious traction (I hope). But that doesn’t mean it’s gone. Like the poll tax, the blood libel simply changed form. We’re no longer called children of Satan, but we still get called satanic, because the myth of the satanic Jew just scratches the itch too well to go away completely.
What itch? The incomprehensibility of the world. Things happen, and most of them don’t have a clear why. Especially when those things are bad — like, say, a coronavirus pandemic that kills a million Americans — there are those who’ll gladly stretch the facts past the breaking point if it allows them to place blame. In medieval times, nothing can be random, and if a boy in the village drowns, it’s because The Jews drowned him. Because if you’ve given evil a locus, you’ve given yourself the hope that some day evil will be defeated … if you kill enough Jews. Perversely, antisemitism offers a feeling of understanding, and maybe even hope, although both the hope and understanding are false.
Are things any better today? Lies don’t die, they disguise themselves in other lies.
It’s hard not to hear it in the stream of blecch from QAnon, where satanic “Hollywood elites” (who on earth could that be a code for?) are accused of harvesting adrenochrome from children’s blood attained via, natch, ritual murder. How strong an echo is this, how blood-libel-adjacent? They used a statue about the blood libel to make their case.
And yes, of course that sets Jewish spidey-sense (to borrow a word from Stan Lee) a-tingle. We’ve seen how that story ends. It’s not an over-sensitivity if you’ve spent literally a thousand years learning it by, among other pragmatic mnemonic methodologies, getting thrown down wells.
Goyburgers
Well, yeah, QAnon is nuttier than a pecan tree, and we already knew that.
What about the left though? Surely the blood libel motif doesn’t appear on the left? Surely the left is too careful?
I offer this image from the BDS movement in the UK, in the form of a mock ad for McDonald’s.
“For just 99p you can help us kill Palestinian children!”
Ka-YUCK-YUCK-YUCK!
So witty. So transgressive!
Not “Palestinians,” note — “Palestinian children.” That’s a flyer about eating what we’re specifically told is not just human blood but the blood of deliberately murdered children.
[Edit, an aside] Those of you super-Kos-annuated enough might remember an unmissed guy named Shergald, who posted very general soft lefty stuff until, apparently, the very moment he achieved TU status, when he instantly switched over to a daily Here's Why You Should Hate Hate Hate Israel post. Every day. Every goddamned day. He was finally shuffled off the Kos Koil for defending the claim that Israel turned Palestinians into dog biscuits. Hey, it's all in fun!
An academic take
Rather than my own blather, here's a great bit about a similar poster from David Hirsh's book Contemporary Left Antisemitism, 2018 (page 207, if you're wise enough to have it). Hirsh is a senior lecturer in sociology at Goldsmiths University, London, and he was one of the first voices to call out — and call out from the left — the ascent of left antisemitism in the UK, even before Corbyn hit the national scene. He gave us the phrase “the Livingstone formulation” which I’ll get into if I do a diary on Ken Livingstone, trailblazer in Labour antisemitism. (Hirsh’s also, pre-academia, a lorry driver.)
A poster for the boycott campaign shows a wholesome Jaffa orange, cut in half, out of which blood is dripping. The slogan reads: 'Boycott Israeli goods: don't squeeze a Jaffa, crush the occupation.' The combination of Jews, food, and non-Jewish blood creates a graphic, emotive, and powerful image. If you eat the Jaffa oranges that the Zionists are trying to sell you, you will metaphorically be drinking the blood of their victims.
How does such an image get produced with its loud echoes of the blood libel? There are three possible kinds of explanations. The first is that the similarity with the old themes is purely coincidental. We can discount this possibility because of the frequency with which this occurs. The second possible explanation for the 'blood orange' is that the designer is a conscious antisemite who is consciously drawing on antisemitic tradition. This is unlikely and of course is strenuously denied. 'Antiracist' antizionists who campaign for a boycott of Israel say quite clearly that they are not antisemites. They do not appear to be conscious Jew-haters, and they are not knowingly drawing on older antisemitic themes.
The third possible kind of explanation is that there is some sense in which antisemitic themes are deeply embedded in the culture, and elements present themselves unconsciously to people looking for emotive images which can drive us to act against Israel. The mechanism of this cultural unconscious, how and why it works, how and why it is so often repeated, is one element of the relationship between hostility toward Israel and antisemitism which requires further research and thought. But many antizionists are not prepared to think it through. Frequently, the response to the observation that that some of their imagery mirrors old antisemitic themes is disdainful denial followed by a counter-allegation of bad faith.
All I can add to that is: nailed it.
And it brings me back to a recurrent theme of this putative series — that I’d love to be able to have grown-up conversations with others on the left about Israel and Jewish support for it, but not if I am expected, as a price of admission, to have to simply take it on the chin from someone flinging obvious variations on the blood libel. The problem isn’t that people like me (and Hirsh) object to posters like that, or that they’re a sure way to slam shut even the possibility of dialogue. The problem is there are posters like that.
Is there a Jeremy Corbyn angle?
Inevitably.
And that other guy, Shakespeare?
And, right, there’s Shylock, Shakespeare’s Jew, usually illustrated as he’s about to more or less ritually murder Antonio. Whatta coincidence! Thereby hangeth another diary.
Throw the Jew Down the Well
Throwing Jews down the well — where have we heard that phrase before?
It’s the very pointed historical context for a very pointed song. Sacha Baron Cohen knows exactly what he’s doing. But that context is lost on an American audience. It is a test his audience fails in more ways than one.
A helpful reminder, incidentally, that you could take all the copper ever mined in the entire state of Arizona, add all the zinc ever mined in the entire state of Arizona, hire the best metallurgists in the hemisphere and give them the most powerful furnaces known to twenty-first century technology, and you still couldn’t smelt one quarter of the brass that’s in Sasha Baron Cohen’s trousers.
Wrapping it up
Clevinger’s trial in Catch-22 ends with this:
Yossarian had done his best to warn him the night before. “You haven’t got a chance, kid,” he told him glumly. “They hate Jews.”
“But I’m not Jewish,” answered Clevinger.
“It will make no difference,” Yossarian promised, and he was right.
Dedication — this one’s for H*A*R*L*A*N, a central figure in my eh-jew-cation on the blood libel.