Blood and Belief: The Circulation of a Symbol between Jews and Christians

5. From Blood Libel to Blood Community: Self-Defense and Self-Assertion in Modern Jewish Culture

162 chapter 5 From Blood Libel to Blood Community Self-Defense and Self-Assertion in Modern Jewish Culture The onslaught of modern anti-Semitism made it impossible for Jews to ignore the symbolism of blood, whether in the form of the ritual-murder accusation or in the pseudoscientific language of race. A literature of self-defense emerged in the nineteenth century to counter the modern revival of the blood libel, a literature that was much more extensive than anything produced in medieval polemics. But even as Jews were vigorously rejecting the claim that human blood played a role in their rituals, some adopted the blood language of modern nationalism. If Jews had to insist that they did not steal blood from Christians, they also came to insist on conserving their own blood for national survival. It is, of course, no surprise that Jewish nationalists might use blood in much the same ways as their non-Jewish counterparts. It was altogether common among many nationalist movements to speak of a “blood community,” at least before the Nazis. A discourse that appears in hindsight to lead ineluctably to genocide was not necessarily understood in such terms before the Holocaust. That modern Jewish identity owes much to the interaction between Jews and their neighbors should also not surprise us. Jean-Paul Sartre may have gone too far in his famous essay Antisemite and Jew,1 in claiming that the anti-Semite defines the Jew, but it is nonetheless true that Jews often shaped their identities in reaction to the way the majority cultures understood them. This dynamic in identity formation was true for all periods of Jewish history, especially when Jews were a minority From Blood Libel to Blood Community 163 people, but it was perhaps most true when modernity radically destabilized both Jewish identity and the place of Jews in society.2 Medieval polemics against the Jews and against Judaism, which reflected religious enmity, took on very different meaning when they persisted into the modern period. Whereas the Jews were presumed by others as well as by themselves to be different in the Middle Ages, the new principles of equality and religious toleration assumed—at least theoretically—that they were now the same as Christians. The recurrence of the blood libel in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries seemed to challenge the assumption of equality by arguing that the Jews really were different from their neighbors. The kinds of responses the Jews fashioned were therefore new, both reflecting and shaping new, modern identities. In this chapter we will look first at some responses to the blood libel and then turn to the way Jews incorporated the language of blood into what became one of the main responses to modern anti-Semitism, namely, Jewish nationalism. Although, on the face of it, these two themes may seem as unrelated as the two types of anti-Semitic blood accusations discussed in chapter 4, I want to claim that they, too, are linked both historically and conceptually. no blood! The defense against the blood libel was anything but a modern invention . In the later Middle Ages and the early modern period, Jews, Jewish converts to Christianity, and Christians were all involved in countering the claims that Jews needed blood for their rituals.3 A tradition of scholarly defense began during the Reformation and continued as part of the German Enlightenment. The arguments developed in this tradition did not change substantially in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Throughout this literature, one finds the Jews and their defenders showing that the proponents of the blood libel have either misinterpreted , distorted, or fabricated passages from the Talmud and, on occasion, the Kabbalah. The modern arguments often borrowed directly from the earlier literature , but they did differ importantly in nuance and framing. I do not propose to provide here a thorough history of the modern defense against the blood libel, but instead to offer a few examples that illustrate what might be considered new and different about it. In particular , the arguments against the blood libel were at times embedded in narratives that were peculiarly modern. Since it has been argued that 164 From Blood Libel to Blood Community the blood libel itself followed a narrative or narratives,4 the defense against it can be seen in terms of counternarratives, some of which also featured “Orientalist” elements. To project the ritual-murder accusation...