English crusaders turned to Jewish moneylenders to raise funds. In 1149, one decided to kill his creditor.
Of all the calumnies leveled at the Jews down the centuries, none has been as lethal as the blood libel. This infamia, which “branded the Jews as bloodthirsty ‘others’ who deserved to be killed,” as the late, revered historian Robert Wistrich explained it, has appeared in a dizzying range of locations. From the 12th-century kingdoms of England and France, the blood libel, which accused entire Jewish communities of murdering Christian children for ritual purposes, spread to other territories and cultures, among them Poland and Lithuania in the 17th century, Damascus in the 19th century, and Kiev as recently as 1913.
“The Murder of William of Norwich,” by the Princeton academic E.M. Rose, is a landmark of historical research into the grotesque 800-year history of blood-libel accusations. The book traces in forensic detail—Ms. Rose calls it microhistory—the circumstances around the emergence of the first recorded blood libel in history and in so doing demonstrates how the libel was used as a tool in wider Christian struggles over power, money and territory, in which the Jews became all too convenient pawns.
The story of an apprentice boy named William, who would eventually be canonized as St. William of Norwich, begins in eastern England in 1144, less than a century after the Norman Conquest. As Ms. Rose demonstrates in her mesmerizing study, it was a dark time for England. Violent civil war raged between King Stephen, the grandson of William the Conqueror, and his cousin Matilda, who challenged him to the throne. The situation was considered so dire that, in the words of one chronicler of the time, it was as if “Christ and his saints were asleep.”
