For centuries, Jews have been accused of something called "blood libel" or "ritual murder": the killing of non-Jews, often children, to use their blood in bizarre religious ceremonies or to make food. For centuries, this has been denied by Jews. But in fact there may be some truth to such claims after all.

For centuries, there have been rumors that various Jewish groups or individuals engaged in human sacrifices or ritual murder for religious purposes. This book analyzes the cultural and historical background to a notorious 1475 murder trial in Italy. A group of Jews were accused of murdering a young boy, later known as Simon of Trent, and using his blood for Passover rites. The accused were tortured and confessed to killing the boy, who was informally venerated as a saint by the Roman Catholic Church until the 1960s. Here for the first time in several decades the reader is presented this infamous case in a scholarly manner that aims to draw out facts and leave speculation behind. The use of a medieval case study helps to illuminate much needed scholarly scrutiny on a topic that has for too long been obfuscated or dismissed out of hand without serious inquiry. Students of Renaissance Italy, medieval Jewish history, and the Catholic Church will be well served by this book.

A landmark history of the antisemitic blood libel myth—how it took root in Europe, spread with the invention of the printing press, and persists today. Accusations that Jews ritually killed Christian children emerged in the mid-twelfth century, following the death of twelve-year-old William of Norwich, England, in 1144. Later, continental Europeans added a destructive twist: Jews murdered Christian children to use their blood. While charges that Jews poisoned wells and desecrated the communion host waned over the years, the blood libel survived. Initially blood libel stories were confined to monastic chronicles and local lore. But the development of the printing press in the mid-fifteenth century expanded the audience and crystallized the vocabulary, images, and “facts” of the blood libel, providing a lasting template for hate. Tales of Jews killing Christians—notably Simon of Trent, a toddler whose body was found under a Jewish house in 1475—were widely disseminated using the new technology. Following the paper trail across Europe, from England to Italy to Poland, Magda Teter shows how the blood libel was internalized and how Jews and Christians dealt with the repercussions. The pattern established in early modern Europe still plays out today. In 2014 the Anti-Defamation League appealed to Facebook to take down a page titled “Jewish Ritual Murder.” The following year white supremacists gathered in England to honor Little Hugh of Lincoln as a sacrificial victim of the Jews. Based on sources in eight countries and ten languages, Blood Libel captures the long shadow of a pernicious myth.

This translation was performed free of charge to protest an injustice - the destruction by the ADL of Ariel Toaff's ""Blood Passover"" on Jewish ritual murder. The author is the son of the Chief Rabbi of Rome, and a professor of Jewish Renaissance and Medieval History at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, just outside Tel Aviv. Dr. Toaff is uniquely qualified to write this book, being thoroughly familiar with the derivative literature in English, French, German and Italian, as well as the original documentary sources in Latin, Medieval Italian, Hebrew and Yiddish. This is not something he worked on in secret. If it had been published in Israel, in Hebrew, no one would have cared. There are large bodies of literature in Hebrew that Jews do not wish Gentiles to know about. But Dr. Toaff's announcement of its publication in Italy, in Italian, raised a worldwide firestorm of fury. Under unbearable pressure, the book was withdrawn.