The Murder of William of Norwich: The Origins of the Blood Libel in Medieval Europe by E. M. Rose (review)

The likely origin of the blood libel may be glimpsed within a late twelfth-century text—the hagiography that Thomas of Monmouth composed for a boy named William who was murdered just outside Norwich in 1144. A Benedictine monk at a cathedral that attempted repeatedly to foster a cult around the dead youth, Thomas is notorious for disseminating a narrative that was to cost hundreds of Jews their lives. Rose has carefully re-evaluated Thomas’ story, contextualizing its events in light of East Anglia’s contemporary social and economic perturbations. Combining literary techniques (close reading and persuasive story telling) with history’s demand for diligent archival work, Rose argues that the ritual murder plot was invented by Bishop William Turbe during his legal defense of a knight in his service.

Having murdered a Jewish banker, Simon de Novers hoped to free himself of debt incurred to finance participation in the disastrous Second Crusade. Thomas’ text contains an imagined account of Turbe defending Novers in front of the king, in which the bishop declares that William was tortured to death by local Jews. This innovative argument, Rose writes, worked to prevent Simon from being held accountable for killing the banker, unleashing a pernicious narrative that would in other cities and later times accomplish great harm. The blood libel was deployed thereafter for varied political and economic gain. Whereas other scholars have emphasized affective piety and the catalytic power of hatred, culpability in Novers’ case and the boy-martyr cases to follow (in Gloucester, Blois, Bury St. Edmunds, and Paris) resides squarely with scheming elites who did not possess any great animus against Jews.

Ritual-murder narratives have mainly been studied as part of Jewish history. For Rose, they are part of a Christian Middle Ages full of a careful, and deadly, strategy. Financial and political constriction led repeatedly and logically to violence, even mass murder. Yet because her archive does not contain the actual details of such calculation, sometimes Rose must take the truth of Thomas’ assertions on faith; sometimes she has to discount what he describes; and sometimes she has to imagine scenes that seem as though they are drawn from his vivid text. In one vignette, Novers is described as sitting by a peat fire in damp Norwich after his return from the failed crusade, realizing that murdering his Jewish banker will improve his sorry lot. No extant document actually ties Simon to participation in the Second Crusade, but combined with a carefully constructed portrait of contemporary aristocratic life and the decline of the Novers family, the scene works affectively as well as intellectually.

Rose depicts a world that turns against Jews through decisions described as “lucid,” “cogent,” “rational,” “thoughtful,” and “debated,” vis à vis the “irrational,” “bizarre,” “literary,” and “mob” fervors that have elsewhere been invoked to explain anti-Jewish violence. Hers is not an account of emotions, xenophobia, or transhistorical phenomena. Rose deliberately chooses never to use the terms “anti-Semitism” and “anti-Judaism.” Yet the question remains whether faith, passion, and hate are not more a part of the story than she allows. To explain the origin of the blood libel as the result of an unfailingly rational economic calculus that strove to maximize monetary considerations without regard to the victims removes emotion (specifically, hate) as a catalyst to human violence. Only the common people—who do not make much of an appearance in this book—are motivated by affect. The elite actors whom Rose describes are shrewd and pragmatic manipulators, coldly indifferent to Jews, rather than people who might take irrational pleasure in the destruction of non-Christians. Readers may well be left wondering why the notion of a blood libel persisted so passionately, long after the Jews had been expelled from England.

The Murder of William of Norwich is a well-written, carefully researched, provocative, and supremely important book, offering a...