Journal for the Study of Antisemitism

2009] WHEN FAIRY TALES KILL 195
must travel forever throughout the world!” With that he left, but a short
time later he returned and asked again for a bite of bread. I immediately
said to myself, “Today you have seen the lost Jew,” but to make sure I
asked the preacher. He listened to my story and said that he could not
prove it, but that the belief was there. This answer only strengthened the
woman’s opinion, which was further verified through an innkeeper’s wife
from a neighboring village, where the Jew had stayed overnight. She
reported that he had eaten nothing and that he had not slept. She had
prepared a place for him to lie down, but he paced back and forth in the
sitting room the entire night. Even in her old age, the woman who told
this story took great pleasure that she had had the good fortune to have
seen the lost Jew.
2. Blood Libel (Ritual murders/Symbolic killing of innocents/Jesus)
In his collection of scholarly essays on the subject of the Blood Libel,
folklorist Alan Dundes calls the legend
an assemblage of essays all treating one of the most bizarre and dangerous
legends ever created by the human imagination: the blood libel legend.
According to this legend, which goes back to at least the twelfth
century in Europe, Jews murder an innocent Christian infant or child for
the ritual purpose of mixing the victim’s blood with their matzo around
Easter time. Strange though this legend may sound to anyone who has not
encountered it previously, it has a sordid history, which has caused great
grief to countless numbers and generations of Jews. It continues to be
believed as true even in the twentieth century, and it has had a demonstrable
effect on the perpetuation of the worst kind of antisemitism, that
is, antisemitic behavior which has caused the death of Jews. (2007, vii)
Others suggest that the first recorded instance of a blood libel against
Jews is evident in the writings of Apion, who claimed that the Jews sacrificed
Greek victims in the Temple of Jerusalem. With various revisions, the
blood libel myth was revived throughout history. The most famous version,
called “Little William of Norwich,” occurred in northern England. Another
famous tale is the Damascus blood libel, perhaps because it contained a
Capuchin monk kidnapped and killed by The Jews. Though the kidnapped
monk was never identified or found, fifty-five Jewish children were murdered
in retributive justice for a fairy tale.
Reality rarely seems to be taken into account against the tide of superstition
and folklore. Supported by popular literature, for example in Geoffrey
Chaucer’s “The Prioress’s Tale” in The Canterbury Tales, and in the
nineteenth-century Jesuit Papal journal Civilta Cattolica, the alleged victims
were martyred and beatified, and in some instances sainthood was