Book Description: Johnson, Hannah R., Blood Libel: The Ritual Murder Accusation at the Limit of Jewish History

Blood Libel: The Ritual Murder Accusation at the Limit of Jewish History

Professor Hannah R. Johnson is a historian who studies antisemitism. She teaches at the University of Pittsburgh. Her book focuses on recent historiographic developments in the research and publications of several scholars related to the medieval blood libels against the Jews. The Blood Libel was the myth promulgated primarily in Europe that Jews would slaughter Christian children and use their blood in Passover rituals. For Johnson, the medieval blood libel is what she calls a “limit case.” She sees limit cases where the usual tools of historical research do not provide a sufficient factual basis to understand the myth, its creation, and development.

Johnson focuses much of the book on research about the killing of a child, William of Norwich, in 1144 in England. A monk, Thomas of Monmouth, published an account several decades later. Thomas purported to describe the crime, but even in his day, local church and civil authorities did not view his work as convincing. Professor Johnson shows how our contemporary discussion of events like this often takes the shape of a juridical discourse, establishing guilt or innocence. That is what happened in the work of Thomas of Monmouth himself, where he sought to implicate the Jews. It is also the form of discourse among his contemporaries and ours, who attacked his account for its unreliability. She points to the tension inherent between this discursive paradigm and other goals of the historical investigation. For example, the discussion of Thomas’ work can be relevant to the discussion of the existence of cultural interaction between the majority Christians and minority Jews that led to changes in the thinking of both groups. She examines the ethical questions this can raise when the research occurs against the background of undeniable bigotry and violence by that majority toward the minority, and the paucity of clear evidence, (as exemplified in the instance of the murder of young William of Norwich. She describes this contradiction between the desire to research and understand, and the paucity of evidence, by the term “indeterminacy.” Through in-depth analysis of the work of the historians Gavin Langmuir, Israel Yuval, and Ariel Toaff, she establishes a discussion of the ethics that creates a kind of spectrum. Langmuir was suspicious of the potential damage of such work and argued against its ethical basis. Langmuir lived and worked in the United States.
Yuval and Toaff are Israelis. Johnson expresses the belief that the last two were deeply influenced by the intellectual environment of Israel over the years since the Oslo process, the work of the “New Historians,” post-Zionism, and responses to it. Yuval (and others) are more open to research and reasonable speculation as a necessary pursuit in the study of history while expressing awareness that bigots can misuse their findings. She quotes Yuval: “Ought we to convert our historical studies into a broadsheet for propaganda because of the distortions of anti-Semites (sic)?” Johnson brings Toaff’s work to illustrate an example where she sees an ethical line crossed. Toaff chose to base his work on records of Jewish victims of torture. An academic consensus is that he made methodologically weak use of sources in general. He developed an idea that there may have been small, extreme Jewish sects who used blood in rituals and that here and there, one might have found Jews who could have murdered to get blood for that purpose. Johnson points out that ideological commitment against extremism in Judaism dominates Toaff’s thinking. That commitment overrode the paucity of evidence supporting his claim. It caused him to interpret the little available in a tendentious and incautious manner that antisemites have exploited for their purposes.

Interestingly, Johnson discusses the September 2000 case of the killing of Mohammad Al-Dura to show how the core elements of the blood libel continue to resonate. She describes the near-hysterical global reaction to his death and the evidence that the Israeli troops could not have killed him because he was shielded from their angle of fire. The blood libel, it seems, remains a potent cultural paradigm.

Johnson’s book is deep and requires the investment of intellectual energy to read and understand. Her writing has the weakness of much academic work in our day. It uses a specialized vocabulary and tends toward rather long, convoluted sentences. Given that style and the complex ideas with which it wrestles, it is thought-provoking and intellectually courageous.

Blood Libel will be an important book to use at the graduate level. Covering intellectual ground at the nexus of the study of history and philosophy, it will probably not be all that useful in the academic teaching of undergraduates or high school students. However, the questions Johnson raises are critically important in discussing the ethics of academic research of history. This book will make a very productive text around which to construct a graduate-level study of those questions.

Bibliographic Information
Johnson, Hannah R., Blood Libel: The Ritual Murder Accusation at the Limit of Jewish History (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2012)
ISBN: 978-0-472-02843-6