The Lie About a Dead Boy in Norwich That Wouldn't Die

In March 1144, a twelve-year-old apprentice named William was found dead in Thorpe Wood, outside Norwich, England. Nobody was ever tried for it. Nobody knew who did it.

A few years later a monk named Thomas of Monmouth arrived at the cathedral priory, heard the local talk, and wrote a book. In it, the Jews of Norwich had murdered the boy in a mockery of Christian ritual. Thomas had no witnesses worth the name. He had a story, and the priory had a dead child who could be turned into a saint and a pilgrimage, which meant income.

It was the first known blood libel in that form. It wouldn't be the last.

An older lie in a newer costume

The charge itself was far older. The Jewish historian Josephus, writing around 94 AD, recorded a claim by an Alexandrian scholar named Apion: that the Jews kidnapped a Greek each year, fattened him in the Temple, and killed him in a secret rite. Josephus took the trouble to answer it in print. Nobody in Alexandria needed the evidence. Mobs there had already attacked the Jewish quarter in 38 AD, and the Jewish philosopher Philo wrote down what the Roman governor allowed.

What Norwich added was a calendar and a cult. The accusation got a martyr, a feast day and a shrine.

And it traveled. Gloucester in 1168. Blois in 1171, where thirty-one Jews were burned. Fulda in 1235, where thirty-four were killed. Lincoln in 1255, where King Henry III had around eighteen Jews hanged over the death of a boy known as "Little Saint Hugh." Trent in 1475, where a toddler's death led to torture and executions, and a local cult that the Vatican didn't formally suppress until 1965.

The ones who said no

The record isn't only horror. In Norwich, according to Thomas of Monmouth himself, the sheriff, John de Chesney, refused to hand the Jews over to the bishop's court and sheltered them in the castle. The man writing the accusation recorded the man who blocked it.

In 1236, after Fulda, Emperor Frederick II summoned scholars from across Europe to examine the charge. They found nothing to support it. In 1247 Pope Innocent IV wrote that it was false and ordered it stopped. Popes kept having to repeat the order, which tells you how well the order worked.

Honesty requires both halves. The Church sometimes sheltered Jews and sometimes drove the mobs. In 1096, as the First Crusade's armies crossed the Rhineland, crusader bands massacred Jewish communities at Speyer, Worms and Mainz. The bishop of Speyer took Jews into his own protection and saved many. Elsewhere bishops tried and failed.

Plague, expulsion and a famous pamphlet

When the Black Death arrived in 1348, Europe wanted someone to blame, and rumors of well-poisoning pointed at Jews. In Strasbourg on February 14, 1349, the chronicles say about two thousand were burned. Pope Clement VI had already issued a bull pointing out that Jews were dying of the plague too, and forbidding anyone to kill them without trial. Many towns ignored him.

Governments had their own method. England expelled its Jews in 1290. France did it repeatedly. Spain's Alhambra Decree of 1492 gave Jews until the end of July to convert or leave, and tens of thousands left, by most estimates.

In 1543 Martin Luther, the man who broke the Western church apart, published On the Jews and Their Lies, urging that synagogues be burned. Four centuries later, Julius Streicher, publisher of the Nazi tabloid Der Stürmer, quoted it at his Nuremberg trial and said Luther should be sitting in the dock beside him. Great men can write ugly things. The honest response is to say so.

What America did differently

In August 1790, President Washington visited Newport, Rhode Island. The Hebrew congregation there, through a warden named Moses Seixas, welcomed him with a letter. Washington wrote back that the government of the United States "gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance," and that Jews who lived under its protection were as good as any other citizens. (He's the same man who slept in a tent until his soldiers had roofs. He understood that leaders go first.)

It wasn't a perfect record. In 1915, a Jewish factory manager named Leo Frank was lynched in Georgia, two years after a conviction resting on shaky testimony. Governor John Slaton had commuted his sentence, knowing it would end his political career. It did. Georgia pardoned Frank in 1986.

The word, the forgery and the trial

By the 1800s the hatred had changed clothes. A German journalist, Wilhelm Marr, coined "antisemitism" in 1879, as a supposedly scientific term. Religion was out and race was in, which meant conversion no longer offered an escape.

In Russia, pogroms followed the assassination of Alexander II in 1881. In Kishinev, over Easter 1903, forty-nine Jews were killed and the world read about it. That same year a Russian paper published the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a forgery claiming a Jewish plot for world control. In 1921 a Times of London correspondent, Philip Graves, showed that large sections were lifted from an 1864 French satire about Napoleon III, which had never mentioned Jews. The forgery kept circulating anyway. Henry Ford's Dearborn Independent ran material from it in the early 1920s. Ford formally retracted in 1927, facing a libel suit.

Then came France, 1894. Captain Alfred Dreyfus, the army's only Jewish general-staff officer, was convicted of treason on forged evidence and sent to Devil's Island. A colonel named Georges Picquart found proof that the real traitor was someone else. He told his superiors. They jailed him. Émile Zola published his open letter "J'accuse" in January 1898 and was convicted for it. Dreyfus wasn't fully exonerated until 1906. A Viennese journalist who'd covered the case in Paris, Theodor Herzl, concluded that Jews needed a state of their own.

The twentieth century does what the old lie always wanted

The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 stripped German Jews of citizenship. On November 9 and 10, 1938, Kristallnacht, synagogues burned across Germany and Austria, and about thirty thousand Jewish men were hauled off to camps. By 1945, six million Jews were dead.

It wasn't confined to Europe. In June 1941 in Baghdad, a two-day riot called the Farhud killed at least 180 Jews by the official count, and more by others. The hatred had many addresses.

Opinion: The pattern should keep us honest. This hatred changes its excuse every century: religion, then race, then politics. The target doesn't change. Whenever a movement tells you one small people secretly runs the world, check where that sentence has ended before. It's worth remembering that the Jewish state exists because the answer, in the twentieth century, was six million graves. Anyone who treats that as a footnote is playing with a fire that's already burned too many.

The people who hid them

Denmark's story is the one to memorize. In October 1943, with word out that the Germans planned to round up Danish Jews, ordinary Danes (fishermen, doctors, neighbors) ferried more than seven thousand of them across the water to neutral Sweden in a few weeks. Nearly the entire community survived.

In Budapest in 1944, a Swedish diplomat named Raoul Wallenberg issued protective passes and rented buildings under Swedish flags to shelter thousands. The Soviets arrested him in January 1945. He was never seen free again.

In Warsaw, a Polish social worker named Irena Sendler smuggled about 2,500 Jewish children out of the ghetto. The Gestapo arrested her in October 1943 and broke her legs and feet in interrogation. She wouldn't give up a name. She had written the children's real identities on slips of paper and buried them in jars under an apple tree, so that someday somebody could find the families.

The libel was a story with no evidence, told for centuries to people who didn't want to check. Her answer was a record.

The Americans who liberated the camps came out of the generation that answered Pearl Harbor. They saw what the lie had finally built, and they never forgot it. Neither should you.