The Accusation: Blood Libel in an American Town by Edward Berenson (review)

When four-year-old Barbara Griffiths disappeared in the woods outside the upstate New York town of Massena on September 22, 1928, a rumor spread that she had been kidnapped by Jews intent on ritual murder. There is something mercifully anticlimactic about the recent book on the incident by Edward Berenson, a distinguished professor of history at New York University. The case drew national attention for a bit more than a week, occasioned widespread national support for the town's Jews among their co-ethnics and non-Jews alike, and has been mostly forgotten except by the area's dwindling Jewish population and their descendants, of whom Berenson is one. Perhaps most remarkable is that the accusation was leveled at all: it is the only known case of blood libel in American history.

Given the uniqueness of the case, Berenson focuses mainly on explaining the historical circumstances giving rise to the Massena accusation. This requires a deep dive. Relying heavily on the work of Israel Yuval and David Nirenberg, he ably explores the genesis and significance of the blood libel in medieval Europe in the context of the Catholic Church's new (in 1215, that is) dogma of transubstantiation, the claim that the bread and wine of the Eucharist are literally—not merely metaphorically—the body and blood of Christ. Fascination with blood in that era, and the widely held notion that Jews engaged in satanic rituals involving cannibalism, also played a role.

The miracles of Mary took on new importance in this era, with Jesus widely depicted as an infant in stories, paintings, and sculpture. This contributed to the notion that Jews sacrificed Christian children as a symbolic means of killing Christ. Moreover, Jews' supposed propensity for the ritual murder of children was, in Christian eyes, given credence by reports of Jewish fathers who killed their own children to prevent them from conversion at the hands of Crusaders in the eleventh century. In some of these accounts, the murders were said to have taken the form of ritual sacrifice to atone for sins. While Jewish interpreters saw these as praiseworthy acts of martyrdom (many of these men were reported to have committed suicide after killing their children), they also disposed many Christians to believe Jews capable of murdering children.

From these origins, Berenson traces blood libel and the anti-Jewish violence it generated through the modernera and, in an epilogue, to our ownday.

The idea of blood libel never took root in America. Berenson attributes this to the dominance of Protestantism, which lacks a belief in transubstantiation, never developed a cult of Mary and baby Jesus, and, of course, postdates the Crusades. The author takes great pains to recount the antisemitism plaguing nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American society. However, antisemitism did not, by and large, result in anti-Jewish violence. When violence did occur, such as the lynching of Leo Frank, it did not take the form of blood libel.

So why Massena? And who was behind the accusation? Here Berenson's account is swift, succinct, and convincing. He provides a brief history of the town's rise as an industrial center near the Canadian border, relying on mostly Catholic immigrant labor from Europe and, especially, Quebec. There is no hard evidence as to who actually started the rumor that Barbara Griffiths had been kidnapped by Jews for ritual murder, but many townspeople credited (or later blamed) an unnamed French Canadian immigrant. Others claimed that volunteer firefighters associated with the Ku Klux Klan, which was experiencing a revival in the area (and nationally), had spread the rumor.

Timing here is everything. Berenson makes a case that Quebecois workers likely were behind the accusation. Quebec had, for decades and at that very moment, an active antisemitic press with clear connections to European antisemitism, which was ascendant on the Continent. Moreover, the United States was in the midst of a divisive presidential campaign. Drawing on decades of antagonism toward Catholic and Jewish immigrants...