Two Nations in Your Womb

"Well this is a translation of Yuval’s Hebrew book, which in turn is a translation of a long article that he published many years ago in Israel. It caused a tremendous scandal. Even made the daily press. Very seldom that an historical journal article makes the daily press, but this did. And Yuval said—before I tell you what he wrote about—Yuval said that his article could only have been written once the Jewish state had been established. Because what he’s talking about there is Jewish fantasies of revenge against their Christian neighbours. He discovers this and once he points it out you see it everywhere. These elaborate fantasies of revenge on the part of the powerless. They are fantasies. They are powerless. We’re talking about Christian Western Europe not Muslim Spain, so it’s a totally different power relation. You don’t have Jewish commanders of the army or anything like that. So in their situation of powerlessness you get these very elaborate visions of what will be done to the Christians at the end of days. Yuval talks about Jewish Messianism, the Messianism of vengeance and on the other hand the Messianism of conversion—that’s to say that everybody will see the light and convert to Judaism. What caused the scandal was this: in 1096, during the first crusade, the Jews, once they were trapped, committed suicide and murdered their families rather than see them convert. So you have infanticide. Jewish infanticide. Now Yuval claims that what this is about is the Messianism. That they had a tradition, which is a real tradition, that once enough blood is shed God will take vengeance. And he says that the Jews were murdering their children to bring about the Messianic age, to force God’s hand to take vengeance. I don’t buy that, but that’s what he said. So that’s bad enough. But what he says next is that the Christians, beholding this ‘devilish behaviour’—began to think, ‘if the Jews are willing to kill their own children then they’re probably willing to kill ours’. And this is the beginning of accusations of ritual murder, ‘blood libel.’ Well that’s Yuval’s argument. That’s what caused the fuss. He was attacked from all sides for saying this. I don’t think you need the behaviour of the Jews in 1096 to explain the blood libel. After all, the first blood libel was in Norwich a few years later…. Yes. William of Norwich. It’s just a story, but a monk recorded, just after William died, that this twelve-year-old Christian boy had been murdered as part of a kind of world Jewish conspiracy. Every year they picked a town, murdered a Christian child and were kind of reenacting the crucifixion. And this monk—Thomas of Monmouth—claimed to have had a former Jew who told him all this. Now Yuval had a problem, because these crusade attacks that happened in 1096 did not touch England or English Jewry. There’s no connection. So he tries to deal with that but it’s kind of thin. But in any case the beginnings of the doctrine of the Christ Child and the Christian Mass—the notion of eating God, or of God somehow living and dying at the same time—really begin in that period. The New Testament itself pictures the Jews as responsible for theicide. I don’t think you need 1096 to explain the blood libel. What we have are several Hebrew chronicles written a generation later by the survivors. And we have some Christian chronicles that mention this as well. So it’s reasonable to assume this happened. How widespread it was is a different story. There may have been two cases or five or seven, we don’t know. But I’m not skeptical that it happened. The chronicler actually puts it like this. He says, “We are actually greater than Abraham. We actually did sacrifice our sons.” And he pictures the killing as a temple ritual. They behaved like temple priests slaughtering animals and that sort of language is used. It’s a rhetorical gesture. They’re saying, “We are greater than you in our piety and our faith.” That’s what they’re saying to their attackers."