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

Introduction: Writing with Blood

1 Introduction Writing with Blood In the first half of the twentieth century, stories circulated throughout East Africa that firemen and policemen had kidnapped Africans, draining blood from them to treat Europeans with blood diseases.1 Here was the confluence of African folk traditions with Western medicine and superstition in colonial contexts. Here, too, was a classic instance of the way blood inhabits the imagination as both substance and symbol. For these Africans, the firemen and the policemen extracted real blood from their victims, blood that could go on to serve an actual medical need. But this blood was also symbolic of the more general extraction of wealth from the African colonies: the blood stood for much more than itself precisely because of its inherent physiological power. Even if these Africans had little concept of the function of blood in terms of Western medicine, seeing it rather as synonymous with sexual fluids,2 they still shared the universal human intuition that blood means life and therefore contains extraordinary symbolic power. These “vampire stories” from East Africa may be understood as complex responses to colonial rule, but myriad other kinds of beliefs have also circulated around the theft of blood. In Europe, vampires, witches, Gypsies, and other real and imagined outsiders might take the place of the firemen and policemen in East Africa. Such beings were hardly colonial rulers, however, but quite the opposite: they were on the margins , and their imputed extraordinary power was in inverse proportion to its actuality. These cases have been called “reverse colonization,” 2 Introduction where it is the dominant power that feels endangered and projects its fears on those held to secretly conspire in the taking of blood.3 The first widespread instance of such charges was by pagans against Christians in late antiquity, an early illustration of how an empire believing itself in danger projects its fears on a secretive minority.4 Since the Middle Ages, the Jews have been the outsiders most persistently accused of blood theft. The “blood libel”—that Jews need Christian blood for their rituals—goes back in European history to the thirteenth century (the first ritual-murder accusation in Norwich, England, in 1144, does not mention the need for blood), and it has continued in remarkably similar forms to the present day. But is the language of empire and colonialism appropriate to understanding the blood accusations against the Jews? There is a contemporary fashion of applying postcolonial theory to the Jews, referring to them as Europe’s “internally colonized Others.” The terminology is, however, imprecise. The Jews were not native peoples colonized by foreigners, but the opposite: foreigners who became longtime residents in European states. To their enemies, the Jews represented a foreign body in Europe, invaders of sorts. Yet, they were invaders of a special kind: the return of the “living dead,” the religion, according to Christianity, that had been superseded and turned into a fossil, yet remained stubbornly alive. Indeed, the blood libel cannot be severed from the larger, complex relationship between Judaism and Christianity, in which the younger religion labored under what it believed to be the continued, accusatory presence of the religion it claimed to transplant. Since the Jews represented a dead religion, one superseded by verus Israel, they were thought to suck the blood of the living, as a vampire might, in order to bring themselves back from the dead. This violation of Christian bodies by transfusing the blood of the one into the body of the other became a metaphor for the general threat that Jews were thought to pose: the return of the repressed, to use Freud’s language, to violate the sacred order established by God’s new chosen people. Put differently, the blood libel suggests a deep anxiety about Christian identity, since the theft of blood might be understood as a theft of the very essence of the Christian by the one who denies his religion. By sucking Christian blood, the “dead religion” of Israel seeks to drag the “living religion” back into its ghostly realm. Whether or not one sees the Jews as a colonized group on the European continent, the accusation that they stole the blood of Christians was surely a case of reversal in which the majority culture projected its fears upon a minority. As Alan Dundes provocatively argued, these were projections based on what Christians actually do, that is, consume the blood of...