Are Blood Accusations against Christians and Muslims Evidence against Jewish Ritual Murder?

Sometimes I see comments and/or replies from people – largely well-meaning but also sometimes just desperate to find a way to attack and undermine the historical validity of jewish ritual murder (aka the ‘blood libel’) – where they bring up the fact that the early Christians were accused of blood sacrifice and cannibalism by Roman writers of the day and then they seek to imply that such accusations are in effect ‘clearly untrue’ because ‘some are untrue’.

The problem with this narrative is that it is both engaging in creating a strawman and attacking that, but also of false equivalence.

What do I mean by that?

Think about it this way just because a Christian or Muslim was once accused of murder and was either clearly innocent or was found on further investigate to be then does it mean that thus all jews are innocent of murder?

No because - like anyone sane - they’d suggest that there is no reason to assume that because a Christian or a Muslim was falsely accused once that therefore jews have never committed murder.

This argument is a form of that offered in an anonymous pamphlet by Catholic theologian and philo-Semite Andreas Osiander sometime between 1529 and 1540 where he argued that ‘because jewish religious law forbade something’ that there religious jews couldn’t do it – which is nonsensical because that hasn’t stopped say religious Christians committing murder – (1) but also offered this general objection – although only referencing the anti-Christian accusations – to it as point 14 in his pamphlet. (2)

The problem with this is that it is assumes that jews always follow their explicit rules which is clearly nonsensical because then jews wouldn’t engage in murder, sodomy and so on.

This is therefore a strawman argument because no one has ever argued that every jew has committed – or is aware that some jews have committed – jewish ritual murder, but rather it is almost always understood as a unique cult or series of cults within Judaism that some jews are aware of and others are not.

The false equivalence is trying to equate claims of blood sacrifice and cannibalism attributed to Christians and/or Muslims if all untrue would somehow ‘disprove’ jewish ritual murder en toto as these statements do not follow; just because Christians didn’t commit ritual murder doesn’t mean that therefore jews did not.

As it happens even Howe – commenting on Tertullian’s ‘Ad Nationes’ – points out that:

‘The Christians conducted their worship in secrecy. This practice was associated with cults that had something to hide. Third, there were various Christian splinter groups that were remotely Christian, partially Christian, or just nominally Christian.’ (3)

His point is simple enough: just because what we think of as Orthodox Christians didn’t do it historically there were plenty of groups that called themselves Christian at the time and whose practices could have been mistaken for all Christianity’s practices. Thus the assumption Christians didn’t commit such practices is unfounded, because it is perfectly possible that they – who remember did include substantial numbers of jewish converts – commit such acts as part of some offshoot, sect and/or cult that called itself Christian.

In other words: we can’t just assume self-described Christians – who may have well been jews who called themselves Christians – didn’t commit the acts attributed to them if we have specific evidence to the contrary and we have to – like jewish ritual murder – take it on a case-by-case basis not just dismiss it en toto because it challenges our assumptions and how we would like to view history.

Therefore we can see that bringing up the blood accusations made against Christians by the Roman is simply not an argument for dismissing jewish ritual murder as a ‘fabrication’ or a ‘myth’.

References

(1) Ronnie Po-chia Hsia, 1988, ‘The Myth of Ritual Murder: Jews and Magic in Reformation Germany’, 1st Edition, Yale University Press: New Haven, p. 138

(2) Ibid., p. 139

(3) https://www.tertullian.org/articles/howe_adnationes1.htm