My book report: There will always be blood
Edward Berenson, The Accusation: Blood Libel In an American Town, W.W. Norton & Co., 2019
Some of the most gripping histories I have read were not written by professional historians -- David McCullough, Erik Larson, Garry Wills, Max Hastings and David Grann come to mind. Edward Berenson is a historian and though his prose tends toward the workmanlike, he relates a compelling story about a forgotten chapter -- really a paragraph -- in American history, grounding it in a deep history that lives on.
Berenson begins with the story of a missing child in an upstate New York town, Massena, which is not resolved until page 181. (No spoiler here.) In the intervening chapters he blends the history of his own family, of the town of Massena, of the growth of American industrialism -- maybe a little too much about refining aluminum, but the man is thorough -- of immigration, the Ku Klux Klan, the sulphurous presidential election of 1928, and above all the infamous "blood libel" which has followed Jews through the centuries. I had a rough sense of what it entailed from reading about the murder trial of Mendel Beilis in 1913 Kiev, but I didn't know it originated in twelfth-century England. Nor did I know that in North America it seems to have flourished only in French-speaking (and Catholic) Quebec -- no sightings in Latin America, apparently. Berenson fills in the gaps and explains how the myth arrived here with the high tide of Catholic immigration from Italy, Poland and Hungary. When the Klan targets Catholics much more than Jews (too small a group and largely urban) or African Americans (constrained by Jim Crow laws), you almost don't know who to root for.
It is a fact that anti-Catholic hatred climaxed in 1928 because of the Smith-Hoover election. Weirdly prefiguring the Islamophobia to come, Evangelicals warned that a Smith victory would lead to the imposition of "canon law" on the United States, and even that Catholics were stockpiling weapons in their churches. But when Barbara Griffiths went missing weeks before the election, somebody -- never identified but described as "a foreigner" -- knew just where to look: the synagogue, where she must have been ritually murdered. It didn't take much more to assemble a mob, especially when the rabbi was invited to police headquarters for questioning. By chance it was the eve of Yom Kippur. Had it been Passover, there might have been violence.
The blood libel is unkillable, having found a home in Islamic countries where apparently it is now Muslim children whose blood is required for matzo and Jews continue to plot world domination. The Russian Orthodox Church has called the killing of Nicholas II and his family "ritual murder" because the leader of the firing squad was a Jew. And a Bolshevik, of course, though the Putin regime now blames Jews for destroying the Soviet Union. If Jews did not exist, demagogues would have had to invent them, as Oceania (it is hinted) invented Emanuel Goldstein to star in the Two Minutes' Hate. It's more like two millennia. Berenson notes on the last page that St. Lawrence county, New York, voted for Trump, but he never mentions the "very fine people" who marched through Charlottesville chanting "Jews will not replace us." Books have to end somewhere. I wonder if this pernicious myth ever will.
Some of the most gripping histories I have read were not written by professional historians -- David McCullough, Erik Larson, Garry Wills, Max Hastings and David Grann come to mind. Edward Berenson is a historian and though his prose tends toward the workmanlike, he relates a compelling story about a forgotten chapter -- really a paragraph -- in American history, grounding it in a deep history that lives on.
Berenson begins with the story of a missing child in an upstate New York town, Massena, which is not resolved until page 181. (No spoiler here.) In the intervening chapters he blends the history of his own family, of the town of Massena, of the growth of American industrialism -- maybe a little too much about refining aluminum, but the man is thorough -- of immigration, the Ku Klux Klan, the sulphurous presidential election of 1928, and above all the infamous "blood libel" which has followed Jews through the centuries. I had a rough sense of what it entailed from reading about the murder trial of Mendel Beilis in 1913 Kiev, but I didn't know it originated in twelfth-century England. Nor did I know that in North America it seems to have flourished only in French-speaking (and Catholic) Quebec -- no sightings in Latin America, apparently. Berenson fills in the gaps and explains how the myth arrived here with the high tide of Catholic immigration from Italy, Poland and Hungary. When the Klan targets Catholics much more than Jews (too small a group and largely urban) or African Americans (constrained by Jim Crow laws), you almost don't know who to root for.
It is a fact that anti-Catholic hatred climaxed in 1928 because of the Smith-Hoover election. Weirdly prefiguring the Islamophobia to come, Evangelicals warned that a Smith victory would lead to the imposition of "canon law" on the United States, and even that Catholics were stockpiling weapons in their churches. But when Barbara Griffiths went missing weeks before the election, somebody -- never identified but described as "a foreigner" -- knew just where to look: the synagogue, where she must have been ritually murdered. It didn't take much more to assemble a mob, especially when the rabbi was invited to police headquarters for questioning. By chance it was the eve of Yom Kippur. Had it been Passover, there might have been violence.
The blood libel is unkillable, having found a home in Islamic countries where apparently it is now Muslim children whose blood is required for matzo and Jews continue to plot world domination. The Russian Orthodox Church has called the killing of Nicholas II and his family "ritual murder" because the leader of the firing squad was a Jew. And a Bolshevik, of course, though the Putin regime now blames Jews for destroying the Soviet Union. If Jews did not exist, demagogues would have had to invent them, as Oceania (it is hinted) invented Emanuel Goldstein to star in the Two Minutes' Hate. It's more like two millennia. Berenson notes on the last page that St. Lawrence county, New York, voted for Trump, but he never mentions the "very fine people" who marched through Charlottesville chanting "Jews will not replace us." Books have to end somewhere. I wonder if this pernicious myth ever will.
posted by Buttermilk Sky at 1:00 PM
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