History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

One anti-Semitic tale was that all Jews suffered from haemorrhoids ever since they had called out to Pilate, ‘His blood be upon us and upon our children!’ They had been told by their sages that they could be cured only through ‘the blood of Christ’–that is, by embracing Christianity–but they took the advice literally. To get the necessary blood, with which to make their curative Passover bread, they had to kill a Christ-substitute every year. One Theobald of Cambridge, a convert from Judaism, married this tale to the murder of William and alleged that a congress of Jews in Spain picked out by lot, every year, the town where the ritual murder must take place and that in 1144 the lot fell on Norwich.89 Thus from this one crime flowed two distinct, but intermingled, accusations against the Jews–the ritual murder charge and the blood libel.