Baseless allegations that Jews have murdered gentiles for ritual or other purposes have been used for centuries to justify the torture, expulsion, and murder of Jews. Aside from the obvious offense, these claims are deeply ironic when one understands that Jewish religious law [Halacha] forbids the consumption of any human or animal blood.

One of the earliest recorded anti-Jewish conspiracy myths claims that the Jews kidnapped a Greek, held him captive in the Temple in Jerusalem, sacrificed him, and ate him. This was the forerunner of the blood libel, which comes from a twelfth-century allegation from the English town of Norwich.

A little over 100 years later, more than 90 Jews in Lincoln, a cathedral city in the English Midlands, were arrested and hanged when the body of a young boy was found in a well. Centuries later, magistrates in the northern Italian town of Trent alleged that Jews had killed a 2-year-old named Simon and used his blood to make matzah. Members of Trent’s Jewish community were tortured in order to elicit their confessions. Some were burned at the stake; two were forced to convert to Christianity and then beheaded. In Spain, Jews were criticized by the Inquisition for allegedly forcing a child to relive the trials of Christ’s Passion.

The blood libel trope has been perpetuated across the world and throughout generations. In more recent times, on 5 February 1840, a Catholic Capuchin friar, Father Thomas, and his Muslim servant, Ibrahim Amara, disappeared in Damascus. While disappearance was likely connected to Thomas’ business dealings, a rumor began to circulate among the residents of Damascus that the city’s Jewish Community had murdered the two men and was using their blood to make matzah.

That rumor became one of the most famous blood libels in history, the Damascus Blood Libel.  After a short and inadequate investigation, a barber named Solomon Negrin was tortured until he confessed to the crime and implicated several other innocent Jews. Two of them were tortured to death; one converted to Islam to be spared, and the others confessed after being tortured. Sixty-three Jewish children were also taken hostage in a hasty attempt to force confessions.

The Nazis also used the blood libel trope to make the case that Jews were a threat to German society. For instance, the Nazi tabloid Der Stürmer frequently used imagery of ritual murder in its antisemitic propaganda, most infamously in May 1934 when it featured the headline “Jewish Murder Plan against Gentile Humanity Revealed.”

Even after the Holocaust, the trope remained prevalent. The Kielce pogrom occurred several days after nine-year-old Henryk Blaszczyk went missing. When he returned on 3 July 1946, in a bid to avoid punishment for running away from home, he told his parents and the police that he had been kidnapped and detained in the basement of the local Jewish Committee building. Police showed up at the building, which sheltered up to 180 Jews and housed various Jewish institutions operating in Kielce, to investigate. Despite the questionable credibility of the boy’s account, a large crowd of angry Poles gathered outside the building and word quickly spread that the Jews had attempted to extract his blood for ritual purposes.

Eventually, Polish soldiers and policemen entered and disarmed the Jewish residents. In the ensuing chaos, several Jews inside the building were killed. While many attempted to flee, the angry crowd outside began to beat, stone, and shoot them. At the end of the day, Polish civilians, soldiers, and police had killed 42 Jews and injured 40 others. Three days later, surviving Jews and local residents buried the victims in a mass grave in the Jewish cemetery.

This conspiracy myth has also appeared in Christian works of art in which Jews were depicted as the devil—with horns, cloven feet, tails, and a goat’s beard—and were seen to be using the blood of children in ritual ceremonies.