Volume 4 No 2 - Journal for the Study of Antisemitism

830 JOURNAL FOR THE STUDY OF ANTISEMITISM [ VOL. 4:829far from being too short, as the reviewer asserts, contain previously uncitedand unexplored facts evidencing the use of the blood libel by a successionof high-ranking Nazi officials, including Rosenberg, Himmler, and Dietrich.These facts were unfortunately missed by Raul Hilberg, Gerald Fleming,and Max Weinreich in their writings referencing some of this material.They also appear to have been missed by Bale.New documents and new analysis can necessitate new terminology andnew commentary, and sometimes force refinement of definitions. Anti-Jewismis an ugly term for what was and remains an ugly reality. I claim norights to its invention. Conor Cruise O’Brien coined the term many yearsago, and I do not use it with his intended meaning in my work; Jews werehated by some because they were Jews. Bale correctly indicates that anti-Jewism was never a medieval word. Nor was antisemitism, blood libel, orritual murder. Studies such as mine point to the problems of definition, asthey should. There was no blood libel in England before 1290, when Jewswere expelled from that country. Why do authors persist in saying otherwise?The blood libel allegation did not start there. The allegation of crucifixionmurder was not leveled against Jews in Germany before 1286, almost150 years after it was raised in England and France. Is this important ornot? My work attempts to explain the differences and why. New facts pointto a literary tradition underscoring Monmouth’s account of the crucifixionmurder of William of Norwich. The Catholic mystery of transubstantiationshould be removed from the list of possible motivational origins for thecharge. Continued use of the term “ritual murder” to explain such conceptsis extremely problematic. The new book by Hannah Johnson remainsenmeshed in non-factual definition.An account of the older scholarship on blood libel—Abulafia, Yuval,Rubin included (plus Saperstein, Stacey, McCulloh, Langmuir, andmore)—is amply incorporated in The Pinnacle of Hatred. Rather thanlament its omission, Bale only had to turn to the book’s index to find thenames of these scholars he claims were not referred to in my work. A carefulreading of my work would have spelled out how my interpretation differedor affirmed those authors’ views. I learned much from them over theyears I spent working on The Pinnacle of Hatred and I continue to do sowith their more recent work. I make no claim that I have all the answers.“Exposing” blood libelers is very different from judging them, as Baleasserts. That was my point in using the term “exposing” in my book. ThePinnacle of Hatred is a study of specific places and times where lies weretaken and used as justification for murder. This was not “fascinating imaginativeviolence.” It was very real. The lists of dead victims of anti-Jewishviolence derived from memory books and included in English translationfor the first time in my collection of documents attest to this reality.