(Jewish Group) The Blood Libel Accusation That Inflamed America

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On September 22, 1928, a four-year-old girl, Barbara Griffiths, got lost in the woods around Massena, a small town in upstate New York. Hundreds of townspeople joined in the search. Hours later, someone (to this day, no one knows who) suggested that the child might have been the victim of a ritual murder committed by members of Massena’s Jewish community – and the authorities took the accusation seriously.

The so-called blood libel – the scurrilous notion that Jews used the blood of Christian children for rituals – originated in medieval Europe. But, according to Edward Berenson, a professor of history at New York University, the Massena case was unique in the United States, and therefore deeply threatening to both Jewish residents and national Jewish leaders.

Berenson says his great-grandparents, who emigrated to Massena from Eastern Europe in 1898, may have been the town’s first Jewish settlers. He himself was born there, giving him a strong emotional connection to the story. As it happens, there’s not much to the Griffiths incident: The girl was found alive, Massena’s mayor apologized to the Jewish community, and life went on. Berenson’s achievement in “The Accusation” is to contextualize the Massena blood libel in multiple provocative ways.

Berenson offers a concise history of the origins of the blood libel in Europe, as well as its modern recurrences. He surveys both anti-Semitism and anti-Catholic sentiment in the United States, noting the divisiveness of the 1928 presidential election. And he uses the social and economic history of Massena to try to fathom why this grotesque charge should have emerged there, of all places.

The idea of ritual murder, Berenson tells us, originated with the 12th-century treatise of an English monk, Thomas of Monmouth, who credited his account to the questionable testimony of a disillusioned Jew. The slur would acquire a literary patina in the 15th century in one of Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales.”

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