Scholarship and the Blood Libel: Past and present

Abstract

Twenty years ago, I presented a paper entitled “From Crusades to Blood Libels to Expulsions: Some New Approaches to Medieval Antisemitism.”¹ Part of that essay attempted to assess significant recent scholarship on the blood libel by distinguished medievalists, notably Gavin Langmuir and Israel Yuval. Here I would like to expand that discussion in multiple ways: by examining how earlier scholars attempted to refute the libel, by discussing scholarship published after 1997, by assessing scholarly efforts to reveal and analyze genuinely problematic Jewish attitudes and behavior despite the danger of providing aid and comfort to antisemites, and by wrestling with the challenges of scholarly confrontation with contemporary falsehoods that Jews reflexively and often properly see as new blood libels.