The Worst Story Ever Told
From claims that Jews kill children to make matzo, to accusations that immigrants in Ohio are devouring neighbors’ pets, the myth of the blood libel is a nightmare that never ends.
By Ákos Szegőfi
“Destruction of the Temple” by Francesco Hayez, 1867. Suspicion of Jews as non-believers inspired a myth that they kill children and drink their blood. Versions of this “blood libel” have been directed at many other outside groups over the centuries. (Source: public domain)
You’re at a cocktail party, surrounded by impeccably dressed people who are chatting over tall glasses, laughing, exchanging stories. You catch fragments of conversations, as if multiple soundtracks are playing at once. Suddenly, one of the guests – a retired doctor – raises his voice, and within minutes, all other conversations come to a halt. The room becomes attentive, silent, with eyes fixed on the speaker. The tale is outrageous yet captivating. It feels like an announcement of an official emergency.
What is the story that wins over all other stories?
In a serious, almost sentimental voice, the doctor describes a new group of immigrants who have recently arrived in the country. Many came because of natural disaster and civil war in their homeland. These immigrants have different customs, religious beliefs, and appearances. Most have settled in an outer district of the city. They prepare foods in ways that are unusual and speak a language understood only by them.
According to the doctor’s story, a young boy from your group has gone missing in the last few days. There's no conclusive evidence, only suspicion: the boy may have been kidnapped and sold into the illegal organ trade. "Kidneys, liver, heart, blood," the retired doctor reminds the group with a thick air of confidence, "are valuable commodities on the black market." But for whom? There is a video – he claims – in which a group of influential politicians and businessman appear to be drinking a glass of thick, red liquid. The footage then features a collage of how these people show no sign of aging over the years. As a doctor, he finds this peculiar. The video also identifies politicians who have been suspiciously active in allowing immigration. Almost apologetically, the doctor mentions that the immigrant group has a history of questionable behavior. Their sacred books condone violence toward outsiders, he explains. The doctor concludes with a solemn warning: Take care of your children!
There are skeptics in the room, but their skepticism is met with bewilderment: “Hold on, don’t you want our children to be safe?” A few days later, violent protests erupt against the suspect new arrivals and politicians, both. The boy remains missing, perhaps. Some journalists conclude that no one actually went missing, but their reports make little difference. Rioting and arson target the immigrant district, while the police hold back. Many of the cocktail party guests, normally outspoken champions of human rights, go silent. Some have stopped talking with neighbors in the immigrant community; siding with them feels like betraying their own. Others quietly say they feel the immigrants – and the politicians – deserve what’s happening.
Most of those who participate in the protests satisfy their anger by hurling insults offline and online. But by the law of big numbers, there will be at least one individual in the crowd whose unfortunate personal circumstances mix with the social unrest in a way that results in a tragedy. Months earlier, a young man from the city hit a young child with his car. Although it was an accident, the event was traumatizing. Now, he wants to prove to himself and his community – where he also lost his job – that he is a good person who cares for others, especially the innocent. He goes to a protest against child-kidnappers brandishing an assault rifle. Meanwhile, the retired doctor announces his plan to run for office. He touts an ambitious program: taking back all the power from evil elites, and deporting immigrants from the city.
I’m willing to bet that every one of us has heard a variation of this incendiary tale. Perhaps not as extreme, perhaps not with such overt violence, but nevertheless rooted in suspicion, fear, and hatred toward outsiders.
One of the oldest and most widespread versions of the story is told about Jews, especially how they kill Christian children and use their blood for religious rituals, hence the name for this vicious myth: “blood libel.” Medieval blood libel stories often included evil Jews kidnapping young boys or virgin women around Easter. The tale spread so widely that it inspired its own cultural traditions, including religious paintings, shrines dedicated to the martyrs supposedly murdered by the Jews, and the Prioress’ Prologue in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. Stories eerily similar to blood libels turn up over and over, and not just against Jews, in cultures worldwide. I've heard them in modern Hungary, where I live.
A blood libel-like narrative typically describes a horrific wrongdoing towards the most innocent members of our own group: women and children. The accusations involve gore, bodily-fluids, and suggests inhuman, almost demonic intents from the perpetrators – who inevitably belong to another group. In many occasions, a direct call to violence or exclusionary behavior is inherent to the tale.
We are all familiar with these stories in their sanitized forms: As a child, I was horrified by the tales of the Brothers Grimm, where the evil witch kidnaps, fattens, and devours children. Unfortunately, we are also familiar with such stories in their raw form, as modern variants on the blood libel continue to draw rapt listeners around the world, from Asia to the Middle East to small-town Ohio.
These types of stories – kidnapping, desecrating, and murdering the innocents – are astonishingly durable. If I had lived in imperial Rome some 2,000 years ago, I would have heard rumor of a new sect that call themselves Disciples, also known as Christians. They were in the business of kidnapping and eating infants, the story went, just like the barbaric Gauls, and also some North African tribes living on the edges of the empire.
Jews were ideal targets for accusations in medieval Europe and in early modernity, given their different traditions, religious beliefs, and professions separating them from the Gentiles. But when the Reformation introduced a schism among the Gentiles themselves, they did what had been done to them under the Roman Empire: The newly formed Christian sects were at each other’s throats, trading accusations of infanticide.
The story never ends. In 18th-century Eastern Europe, I might have believed (as many still do) that Countess Elizabeth Báthory, who converted from Catholic to Protestant, bathed in the blood of kidnapped virgins. As a settler in the New World, I’d be reading pamphlets and almanacs charging Native Americans with kidnapping and scalping infants by the thousands. In India, I might have thought Muslims took Hindu women and raped them in mosques, or believed that mythical Thuggee highwaymen were kidnapping innocent travelers to draw their blood in honor of Kali, their deity.
The 20th century history of the blood libel is well documented, starting with Nazis rewarming the story and printing it in their newspapers. In France in 1969, mostly-Jewish shopkeepers in Orléans were accused of kidnapping teenaged girls from malls using trapdoors. The motif inspired the 1970s urban legend of “The Castrated Boy” who supposedly entered a shopping mall restroom to be mutilated by a gang. That legend, in turn, inspired the 1980s rumor that Colombian and Costa Rican children were being sold for organs in the U.S.
In present-day India, the same kinds of rumors sweep through social media. In Africa, viral WhatsApp messages describe foreign child snatchers in nearby villages. And in the U.S, supporters of QAnon have relentlessly promoted the idea that Democrats secretly run a child-kidnapping pedophile ring for harvesting adrenochrome (a chemical byproduct of adrenaline with no proven use, but mythologized as a youth elixir) from children's blood.
Although the stories take many forms, the archetype remains remarkably consistent across time periods and continents. I usually refer them collectively as “blood libels,” because its Jewish-themed history is the one that is most researched. But once we know what to look for, it becomes easy to spot, regardless of its specific details and targets.
Sometimes the tales include women, and so the wrongdoings involve rape and murder. This is particularly true in India, where mass group lynchings are often preceded by rumors of Muslim virgin-kidnappings. During the Gujarat riots in 2002, one of the instigating pieces of fake news circulated among Hindus claimed that Hindu women are kidnapped and raped inside mosques; the Hindu rioters took the life of almost 2,000 people.
The accusations often involve blood, but not always; even in medieval blood libel tales, blood was not inherent to the accusations. On many occasions, the use of organs or even cannibalism are mentioned. Whatever the accusation, the stories function to draw strong in-group and out-group lines that preserve power and expel outsiders. In one recent variant of the old tale, a group of Haitian immigrants in Ohio were accused of kidnapping and eating our beloved pets.
In my opening, fictionalized story, I had the accusation made by a doctor because that is typical of how actual blood-libel stories spread. A prestigious-seeming source gives the story credibility. Surely, doctors would know all there is to know about illegal organ trade, right? High-ranking members of society are often responsible for making blood libels go viral. They are the superspreaders.
This was true in Europe, where members of the nobility – and sometimes the clergy – popularized the tale against Jews. It’s true today with QAnon, which claims to draw information from an anonymous government insider (“Q”) who has top-level security clearance. In the case of QAnon, the rumors have often traveled alongside President Trump’s MAGA (Make America Great Again) movement and were amplified by fringe, far-right journalists. In India, where the rumors still tend to take an explicitly religious form, the accusations are often made against Muslims by extremist Hindu priests. As in my story, superspreaders of the libels often end up running for office, giving their views a veneer of mainstream acceptability.
Still, something about the phenomenon can feel "off": If a group of people fears losing money and social status, why not simply talk about losing money and social status? Poverty and lack of power are easy enough for anyone to understand. Why the elaborate stories of kidnapped children?
The reason may be that shrewd communicators intuitively figured out this strategy millennia ago. I say "intuitively" because the storytellers didn’t have an in-depth understanding of complicated psychological notions like the role of moral outrage behind message virality. They simply tested various tales by trial and error, and the archetype of the blood libel story was the one that captured the attention of audiences the most.
In short, the blood libel story is the worst thing to tell to a group of imaginative animals living in unusually large cooperative groups. Over generations of retelling, the best recipe for this story has been concocted. In its time-tested form, the blood libel is more potent than all the rational arguments we might throw against it.
Most of the world now has mandatory education (including history lessons) and all of the information on the internet under our fingertips. But that is still not enough. Blood libel-like stories simply put on the carnival mask of rationality and enlightenment to meet this new age. From kosher butchers, rogue rabbis, and magical highwaymen, the perpetrators morph into organ traffickers, Hollywood elites, and opposition politicians. These adaptations keep the ancient tale relevant and believable.
After all, conspiracy theories have a tendency to mimic genuine scientific inquiry, adopting their own faux jargon and methodology. Modern blood libel stories are no exception. They come with tedious biological ramblings, whether it's adrenochrome harvesting, or spike proteins from vaccines crossing children’s blood-brain barriers.
And no matter what the details, the stories usually seem to broadcast political messaging, especially during a crisis, when the unvarnished truth can be an ineffective tool.If you truthfully present a balanced, nuanced picture of the situation, you invite a variety of opinions, arguments, and solutions. Your people won’t be unified. They will deliberate, and argue, and hesitate. However, if you make grandiose claims that the other group is violating the worst imaginable social taboo – committing violence against the innocent – suddenly everyone feels the same way about what needs to be done. Blood accusations and child-kidnapping stories illustrate the tendency of political messaging to stray further and further away from the truth.
It’s rare to find a tale that is so universal across so many different cultures. After all, there are countless potential horror stories that could be told to demonize the groups we dislike. Why is it that the blood libel, a story of kidnapping and violence against the innocent, keeps coming back?
The first thing that might come to mind upon viewing the pictures above, is how disgusting the stories are. They almost universally involve gore. Bodily fluids, organs, dead infants – things that make us sick. Disgust commands attention; we instinctively want to avoid danger and infection. We want to protect those closest to us too.
Disgust is a recurring element in many modern pieces of fake news and internet rumors, but in blood libels the disgust is applied in a particular way: There is also violence and threat. What makes these stories especially compelling is that the violence is committed against those who should be exempt from it, children, young women, and our adorable pets. This is a heavy taboo across cultures. Scientists interested in the virality of stories refer to this combination of emotions – disgust and anger elicited by the violation of a taboo – as moral outrage.
The blood libel also gains power from its own long history. Because each version of the story echoes other accusations – sometimes against other groups – going back thousands of years, it creates its own references, which provides credibility to contemporary tales.
Psychologists call such selective awareness confirmation bias. The repetition of such tales across generations – in print, paintings, poems, woodcuts, political leaflets, newspapers, online forums, and digital memes – makes them all the more persuasive. The story becomes canonized. What begins as a simple lie in one generation becomes a reference point for the next.
Bad things inevitably happen in the world, and the blood libel provides a narrative and trope for seeing random events as confirmation of evil behavior by the out group. Indeed, it makes sense that the first requirement for a successful blood-libel rumor is having a competing group living nearby. But that’s not enough. Accusations are also tied to times of crisis, when they serve to express existing fears and hates and anxieties. These stories often emerge when the social status quo is threatened, whether due to an election, an economic crisis, or some other policy that redistributes power, money, or prestige.
One of the earliest Jewish blood libel accusations involved the death of Hugh, a nine-year-old found dead in a well in Lincoln, England in 1255. The accusation that he was killed by Jews was supported by the crown, and partly motivated by King Henry III’s desire to seize Jewish businesses. Wherever Jews went, the stories followed. In late 19th-century Europe, the plague-like spread of blood libels from East to West were closely tied to new Jewish rights, including the ability to purchase land, seen as a threat by impoverished members of the nobility.
Right after World War II, blood libel accusations resurfaced in Poland and Hungary, targeting Jewish survivors returning from death camps. At that time, Gentiles feared that Holocaust survivors would reclaim confiscated property or testify against them in court. Likewise, the recent rise of QAnon – a cluster of conspiracy beliefs centered around a blood accusation — peaked during the COVID-19 pandemic, a time of widespread fear about losing jobs and social privileges.
The blood libel is not just a tool of extremists on the fringe. These counterculture narratives have long been wielded by the conservative establishment. Russian disinformation strategists have effectively weaponized these narratives both domestically and internationally. The practice goes back to the days of the Russian Empire, when the Tsarist administration used the tale to stir hatred and exploit ethnic tensions against Jews in Kutaisi, Georgia between 1878 and 1880. In the interwar period, the Bolsheviks officially denounced these accusations, only for them to reemerge under Stalin’s regime in what’s known as the Doctors’ Plot between 1951 and 1953.
Dogged by rumors, Jewish pediatricians were accused of injecting Soviet children with cancer and nine prominent Jewish doctors were arrested for conspiring in the killing of high-ranking members of the Soviet leadership. In short, Soviet secret services closely monitored narratives that could be used for domestic crowd control, and built up a show trial on the back of a blood libel. Eventually, they realized the tales could be turned into tools of information warfare abroad.
After the Cold War, the lessons learned by the Soviets were passed on. A version of the blood accusation resurfaced in 2014 during the annexation of Crimea, when Ukrainian forces were accused by Russian sources of crucifying a 3-year-old Russian boy on a billboard. By this point, the original Jewish theme had been lost, and the narrative was stripped down to its bare essentials: a young, innocent victim used to mobilize the public against the satanic violence of the out-group. In an effort to destabilize the West, these kinds of accusations have appeared worldwide. Russia accused a volunteer medical organization, the White Helmets, of selling the organs of wounded Syrian children. And since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the E.U. watchdog agency, EUvsDisinfo, has documented 28 instances in which Ukrainians were accused of organ-harvesting, often amplified by Russian state media.
One of the most notorious examples was the Lisa case in Germany in 2016, when Middle Eastern refugees were accused of kidnapping, raping, and murdering a 13-year-old Russian-German girl. The goal was to stoke discontent among Russian immigrants, and to provide fuel for EU-skeptic far-right parties in Germany. The effort culminated in a protest march to the German Chancellery, with Russia's foreign minister Sergei Lavrov fanning the flames.
Now that we’ve established the deep psychological and political forces supporting the blood libel, we can fight back. A society resistant to this kind of manipulation has learned to live with its own diversity. Donald Horowitz, a leading researcher on ethnic rioting, along with his colleagues, has shown through a series of studies that shared work and living spaces between culturally different groups – think of labor unions, inter-ethnic political parties, unsegregated housing – help build resistance to malicious rumors. When people have first-hand experience with one another’s differences, they come to understand that even if the other group’s traditions may seem unusual, they don’t pose a threat. Working together towards common goals eventually leads to friendships and love affairs that cut across traditional group boundaries. Whenever there is a new crisis (and there always will be) people with diverse identities are going to be the most effective intermediaries.
The best antidote to the spread of low-quality, incendiary information is the design of open, inclusive spaces that promote cooperation between people of different cultures. As the world faces another mass migration period due to wars and global warming, such conspiracy theories including, but not exclusive to the blood libel will continue to arise. Another helpful solution lies in smart urban design. It’s no wonder that prominent conspiracy theorists go into frenzy and are so fervent in attacking modern architectural concepts like smart cities; such designs have a great potential to reduce their audiences and consequently, their prestige and revenue.
Open spaces also need narratives around them – narratives featuring success stories, problems solved together in cooperation, and problems unsolved that require attention. The need for better stories brings us to another antidote against virulent conspiracy theories: local news. Local journalism is slowly dying in front of our eyes, while the larger society is becoming more polarized. These are not unrelated processes. Heavily polarized societies are excellent grounds for conspiracy theories to spread. This is because polarization destroys the presumption that people on the other side, people who happen to disagree with us, are acting in good faith. Once this presumption is gone, we become prone to believe the worst things about them.
Another, more personal weapon against blood libel stories and the fear they incite is humor. It helps ease tensions and, if done properly, allows people to reflect on their mistaken beliefs without feeling humiliated. Take Donald Trump’s accusation that immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were eating cats and dogs, which is a spin-off the blood libel meme – and not just because it likely stems from a neo-Nazi group called Blood Tribe. In post-industrial societies, pets are very often seen as part of the family. They are treated like furry children. Arguably, they are innocent too. And then, some outsiders – in this case, Haitian immigrants – are accused of committing gory, taboo-breaking violence against them.
Right after the “pet libel” story, the internet exploded with voiceovers, music videos, and memes satirizing Trump’s rant. An artist called the Kiffness even wrote a song about it. Pet owners showed the clip to their animals and shared their pets’ startled reactions. People parodied the accusations and its source in ways that robbed the story of its hateful power.
Although Trump won the election, I still believe that this was, and is, the right way to approach the problem of blood libels and related myths. Create open spaces to cooperate, then community-focused narratives about these spaces soaked in a good amount of humor. Perhaps it is more important now than ever. Fact-checks and serious, official dismissals are important – especially if they influence official acts, such as police behavior – but ridiculing accusations is a particularly strong strategy that each of us, individually, can utilize.
Fearmongers can be many things: overly serious, melodramatic, authoritative, sentimental, and yes, sometimes charismatic. But precisely because their rhetoric is based on angst, dismay, and terror mixed with some syrupy longing towards a “Golden Age”, they have to sweat twice as hard to be funny. Hungarians and people in many other Eastern European countries have learned this lesson well. We have seen that humor is devastating when aimed against dramatic strongmen. The last laugh, that tool, is always in our hands.
This story was published in part through a grant from the Science Literacy Foundation.
February 8, 2025
Editor’s Note
The blood libel —the outrageous lie that Jews are murdering Christian children, then using their blood for rituals—has been stoking antisemitism through the centuries. But as this essay points out, the same accusations found in the blood libel have found their way to other outsider groups, causing violence and ostracism worldwide. In this essay, we take a deep dive into the origins of the blood libel and explore how the same tactics have been used to damage groups from Muslims in India to Haitian immigrants in Springfield, IL. This vile tale as old as time has become a viral, destructive trope, and we unpack it here.
Pamela Weintraub, co-editor, OpenMind