On Words and Silences and What They Teach Us About the History and Memory of the Blood Libel

Just a month or so before I sat down to write this piece, I came across an article in a local Ukrainian paper about the blood libel.¹ The case involved Father Tadeusz Guz, a Professor of Philosophy at John Paul II Catholic University in Lublin, who "confirmed" that Jews killed Christian children for ritual purposes during a public lecture in Warsaw three years ago. The Polish Council of Christians and Jews (Polska Rada Chrześcijan i Żyd), a small organization based in Warsaw dedicated to fostering mutual understanding between Jews and Christians, filed a complaint against the professor. The grievance then led to the establishment of an ethics commission at the university in Lublin, which, after dragging out the verdict for three years, eventually ruled not to take any disciplinary action against Guz for his 2018 speech. Leaving aside the fact that Father Guz has made antisemitic comments in other contexts too, what is pertinent here is the way in which the professor presented the legitimacy of his claims about the blood accusation. During his public lecture, he apparently asserted the validity of the accusation as follows: "[w]e know, ladies and gentlemen, that the facts of ritual murder cannot be erased from history. Why? Because we, the Polish state, in our archives, in the surviving documents, have evidence spread across centuries when Jews lived together with our Polish nation."² Guz appealed, thus, to the authority of the written word, and to its most sacred repository, the archives, to provide the irrefutable evidence that Jews had indeed practiced ritual murder in the past. He confirmed the veracity of his statements by turning to the "knowledge" accumulated and disseminated over the course of centuries, a knowledge that, as Teter argues in her book, made eradicating the blood libel very difficult. The paper trail in the Polish archives could be used to bear witness that Jews were put on trial and incriminated for the alleged murder of Christian children.

To understand the dynamics at play in Guz's misappropriation of the written word, and to fully grasp the origin, evolution, and manipulation of the blood libel's narrative from the twelfth century to the eighteenth century in Christian Europe, one must read Teter's monumental book. And while it might be wishful thinking on my part to hope that Guz might become enlightened by reading Teter's words, Blood Libel elucidates for most of us the ways in which a paper trail of books, documents, tales, investigative records, reports, chronicles, and the images therein appended, spread, validated, and at times even served to counter, the false accusation of ritual murder against the Jews of Europe. It is the recorded words of political and religious leaders, of legal and medical experts, that made the story of Jewish infanticide so plausible, so real. However, in Teter's book, the written word does not take center stage alone. "Silences," as she writes in the epilogue, referring to the Holy See's refusal to publicly condemn ritual murder accusations against Jews, "are heard too."³ At different times and places and for different reasons, royal and ecclesiastical authorities chose silence, thus ignoring the pleas of the Jewish communities that came under fire, torture, and death in the wake of a ritual murder accusation. By choosing silence, they not only corroborated the false accusations, but also became implicated in the crimes committed against the Jews falsely accused of infanticide. Although the Jews in Poland are presently not at risk of being put on trial or convicted of the false crime, the members of the disciplinary committee at the university in Lublin who considered the Guz case chose silence, and thereby validated, at least for some, the professor's allegations.

Teter's book stands out in the literature on ritual murder for two reasons. First of all, by dissecting tens of blood libel cases, with the ensuing arrests, trials, and executions, the book allows readers to actually experience the emotional logic behind the allegation (which the author achieves without...