Blood Libels Old and New
Trump, Vance, Williamson and the Dehumanization of Haitians
The painting above depicts a mob murdering and cannibalizing a Christian child. It is an illustration of what came to be known as the “blood libel.” The child was named Simon1, also known as Simon of Trent. He was later canonized as St. Simon of Trento.
Simon died in 1475. His murderers were supposed to be Jews, who took him as a human sacrifice, and consumed his blood. In consequence, members of the Trento Jewish community were gruesomely tortured by the Christian authorities, and fifteen Jewish men were burned at the stake.
You can tell from its style that this painting does not date from the 15th century. And although it is executed in the style of Carravagio, it doesn’t date from the 16th or 17th century either. It was created just four years ago by the Italian “revivalist” artist Giovanni Gasparro. It is titled “The Martyrdom of St. Simon of Trento for Jewish ritual murder,” and was unveiled on what was St. Simon’s feast day before the Church de-canonized him in 1965 in an effort to address the vicious racist history of Roman Catholicism.
I begin this essay with a reference to the charge of human sacrifice and cannibalism that has been leveled agains Jewish people because it is relevant to recent accusations against Haitian immigrants.
Donald Trump claimed in his debate with Kamala Harris, “In Springfield [Ohio], they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people who live there.” Trump was referring to Haitian immigrants residing there, amplifying a baseless assertion by J. D. Vance. Conservative agitator Christopher Rufo also stoked the flames, claiming that African migrants were grilling cats in nearby Dayton.
Not to be bested by members of the opposition party, Democratic presidential wannabe Marianne Williamson chipped in, “Haitian voodoo is in fact real, and to dismiss the story out-of-hand rather than listen to the citizens of Springfield. Ohio confirms in the minds of many voters the stereotype of Democrats as smug elite jerks who think they’re too smart to listen to anyone outside their own silo.”
Such words are sure to elicit threats of violence. The Ku Klux Klan has posted notices in Springfield calling Haitians “beasts of the field” and demanding their mass deportation. Proud Boys and the neo-Nazi Blood Tribe mounted demonstrations. And at last count there have been 33 bomb threats, with Sprinfield schools and hospitals going on lockdown. Haitian families have been bullied and threatened, and their homes have been vandalized.
What does this have to do with a medieval conspiracy theory about ritual murder and cannibalism? Quite a lot. Talia Lavin put it well in a recent substack essay. “All of this is part of the same story,” she wrote, “the same threat: you have harbored those we find abominable, about whom we have told a violent lie, and we will follow our imagined violence with real violence.”
Linking anti-Haitian rhetoric to an antisemitic conspiracy theory may sound far fetched, but I want to demonstrate that these anti-Haitian slurs resonate powerfully with the medieval blood libel and its afterlife in the 20th and 21st centuries.
The recent attack on Haitian immigrants inherits several streams of dehumanizing dogma. The first and most obvious is the image of Africans and people of African descent as primitive savages. This image is deeply entrenched in American culture. During my childhood in the 1950s it was common for Euro-Americans to think of Africans as cannibals. On Saturday mornings my brother and I would watch cartoons on TV. Many of these cartoons were explicitly racist, and some depicted Africans as cannibals devouring hapless White missionaries. Along the same lines, my family owned a recording by Allan Sherman2, a Jewish comedian whose schtick was parody songs. One of the tracks contained the following lyrics, sung to the tune of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody: “See the Mau Maus/Underneath the jungle sky/Jolly Mau Maus/Eating missionary pie.”
This was all considered unremarkable.
Ever since the Haitian revolution of 1791 to 1804, a stunning victory that sent shock waves through the slaveholding nations of the Atlantic world, Haitians have been vilified as the most savage of savages, the most barbarous of barbarians. Haitians are also represented in popular culture as practitioners of the black arts. Recall Williamson’s comment that voodoo is real, implying that household pets were abducted by Haitians who consumed their flesh as part of occult rituals.
For the record. Vaudoun (“voodoo”) is a syncretic diasporic religion with West and Central African roots, with Roman Catholic elements. It has nothing to do with eating cats. It is true that some Vaudoun rites include the ritual sacrifice animals, but this practice is also found in Christianity (kourbania), Islam (qurban), and other religious traditions. Here I can speak from experience. As a young man, I was initiated into Briyumba, an Afro-Cuban cousin of Vaudoun, in a ceremony where a chicken was sacrificed to a deity named Siente Rios. The act was performed with the solemnity that one would expect in any religious ceremony.
So, what’s the connection between the belief that Haitian immigrants abduct and eat cats and dogs in mysterious occult ceremonies and the centuries-old blood libel against Jews?
The first step is to recognize the significance of the charge that Haitians kidnap and sacrifice pets. Mira Fox’s comments are right on the money.
The lie has echoes of another conspiracy theory: blood libel….No, pets aren’t children, but today we often treat them as members of the family. In our society, eating a pet is an act of huge trespass, the likes of which, it’s understood, would only be done by someone despicable and nearly inhuman.
Pets like dogs and cats are quasi-children. Stealing, sacrificing, and consuming a companion animal is like kidnapping, murdering, and eating a child. Once we take this step, the resonance with the blood libel myth becomes clear.
Jewish people have been accused of stealing and cannibalizing Christian children for at least 800 years. It began with the charge of ritual murder, but soon morphed to incorporate cannibalism: Christians began to claim that Jews consumed the murdered child’s blood, mixing it into matzah meal to be eaten on Passover. Jews were charged with ritual murder in Europe up until the early 20th century (a man named Mendel Bellis was prosecuted for ritual murder in Kiev in 1913—fictionalized in Bernard Malamud’s 1966 novel The Fixer), and there was a ritual murder scare in Massena, New York, in 1928.
Blood libel was a feature of Nazi antisemitism, is today cherished by neo-Nazis, and was reborn in the QAnon conspiracy theory. And it is very much alive in some sectors of the Muslim world. In 2013 Egyptian politician Khaled Zaafrani said in an interview, “it is well-known that during Passover they make matzos called the ‘Blood of Zion.’ They take a Christian child, slit his throat, and slaughter him…they never forgo this rite.”
Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula—the mother of all vampire fiction—contains powerful undertones of antisemitic sentiment. During the late 19th century, when the novel was written, the Jewish population of Great Britain swelled with immigrants from Eastern Europe. Jews became the paradigmatic racialized immigrants. Judith Halbertston writes in her classic essay “Technologies of monstrosity: Bram Stoker’s Dracula”:
Dracula, then, resembles the Jew of anti-Semitic discourse in several ways: appearance, his relation to money and gold, his parasitism, his degeneracy, his impermanency or lack of allegiance to a fatherland, and his femininity. Dracula's physiognomy is a particularly clear cipher for the specificity of his ethnic monstrosity. When Jonathan Harker meets the Count at Castle Dracula in Transylvania, he describes Dracula in terms of a "very marked physiognomy": he notes an aquiline nose with "peculiarly arched nostrils, massive eyebrows and "bushy hair," a cruel mouth and "peculiarly sharp white teeth," pale ears which were "extremely pointed at the top," and a general aspect of "extraordinary pallor.” This description of Dracula, however changes at various points in the novel. When he is spotted in London Jonathan and Mina, Dracula is "a tall thin man with a beaky nose and black moustache and pointed beard" (180); similarly, the zookeeper whose wolf disappears after a visit by Dracula to the zoological gardens, described the Count as "a tall thin chap with a 'ook nose and a pointed beard" (145)
It’s unlikely that these seemingly antisemitic tropes are accidental. When a series of grisly murders occurred in East London in 1888, many assumed that the perpetrator, “Jack the Ripper,” was an immigrant Jew.
A well circulated sketch endowed him with stereotypical Jewish features. Antisemitism scholar Sander Gilman writes in a fascinating essay on “The Jewish murderer”:
What is striking is that the image of “Jack”…is the caricature of the Eastern Jew. Indeed the official description of “Jack” was of a man “age 37, rather dark beard and moustashe, dark jacket and trousers, black felt hat, spoke with a foreign accent.” There appeared scrawled on the wall in Goulston Street near where a blood-stained apron was discovered the cryptic message: “The Juwes are The men That Will not be Blamed for nothing. The image of Jews as sexually different3, the Other even in the killing of the Other, led to the arrest of John Pizer…a Polish-Jewish shoemaker. Pizer was eventually cleared and released, but a high proportion of the 130 men questioned in the Ripper case were Jews.
The discovery of the body of another victim nearly led to mob violence against the Jewish community in East London. “Jack’ then wrote to the chief of Criminal Investigation at Scotland Yard, asying “I’m not a butcher, I’m not a Yid/ Nor yet a foreign skipper./ But I’m your own light-hearted friend,/ Yours truly, Jack the Ripper.” The first line states “I’m not a butcher” to contradict the theory that the murderer was a sochet—a Jewish ritual butcher.
There were several more murders, extending into 1891, that may have been committed by Jack, and the horrific crimes through the early 1890s. In Germany. newspapers claimed not only that Jack was a Jew, but that he was part of an international Jewish conspiracy.
Bram Stoker began working on Dracula around 1890, during the panic surrounding the Ripper murders, and scholars have speculated that they influenced the story. Several newspaper articles associated Jack the Ripper with vampires and the supernatural. For example an anonymous piece splattered across the front page of the East London Advertiser in October, 1888 titled “A thirst for blood” stated “It is so impossible to account, on any ordinary hypothesis, for these revolting acts of blood, that the mind turns as it were instinctively to some theory of occult force, and the myths of the Dark Ages arise before the imagination. Ghouls, vampires, bloodsuckers… take form and seize control of the excited fancy.”
The “myths of the dark ages” to which the author refers presumably pertain to the blood libel.
The first cinematic treatment of Stoker’s novel was Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), which continued and embellished the dogwhistles in Stoker’s original (including giving the actor playing the Count a huge head, prominent ears, a rat-like visage, and large prosthetic nose). Whatever the director’s intentions, this movie was undoubtedly consumed as an antisemitic parable by it’s Weimar Republic audience.4
The next cinematic treatment of the novel was the 1931 Hollywood movie Dracula, starring the Hungarian-American actor Bela Lugosi. In the movie, the eponymous Count sported a pendant resembling a Star of David.
In 1987 Dracula’s Star of David reappeared on the box of Count Chocula—a children’s breakfast cereal—sparking protests by American Jewish groups.
Not long after the release of Nosferatu, the rising Nazi party (including Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf) described and represented Jewish people as vampires and resurrected the blood libel myth. Der Stürmer even ran a special issue on the topic of Jewish ritual murder.
We can now take stock, returning to my claim that a connection between recent fantasies about Haitians and the blood libel is not far-fetched. Trump, Vance, and Williamson’s rhetoric echo the blood libel in these ways:
Jews supposedly abducted Christian children and ate their blood. Haitians supposedly steal quasi-children and consume their flesh.
Both were thought to practice sinister occult rituals (Williamson’s “voodoo”) involving the sacrifice of victims.5
In both cases the supposed perpetrators are racialized foreigners regarded as having criminal proclivities.
I am not claiming that the denigration of Haitians is derived from fantasies about Jews. The themes that I’ve listed are fairly common elements of dehumanizing belief systems, and are generated to some extent by the logic of dehumanization itself. That said, there very close relationship between anti-Jewish and anti-Black racism—the degree that they have bled into one another— is greatly underestimated.6 That will be a topic for a future posting here on Dehumanization Matters..
For encyclopedic detail about this event, see Magda Teter’s Blood Libel: On the Trail of an Antisemitic Myth
A shanda far di Goyim.
Sexual and gender deviance is a longstanding antisemitic trope. During the medieval period the idea emerged that Jewish men menstruated, a notion brilliantly portrayed in Malamud’s The Fixer. Nazis portrayed Jewish men as rapists, pedophiles, pornographers, and perverts. One memorable illustration in Der Stürmer titled “Natural and unnatural” contrasted a wholesome Aryan couple enjoying the countryside with a predatory Jewish man forcing is racially pure victim to watch pornography.
It is often claimed the Julius Streicher, editor of Der Stürmer, attended the lavish Berlin premier of Nosferatu, but this is both evidentially unsupported and unlikely (Randall Bytwerk, personal communication). It makes a good story, though.
For the claim that Jews practice black magic, see Joshua Trachtenberg’s The Devil and the Jews.
For starters, see Tudor Parfit’s Hybrid Hate: Conflations of Antisemitism & Anti-Black Racism from the Renaissance to the Third Reich.