By Yakov Nagen, Jerusalem Post
These libels, often promoted or legitimized by influential churchmen, fueled massacres, dispossession, and ultimately the expulsion of every Jew from England in 1290.
England gave the world many great gifts. It gave us the Magna Carta, parliamentary democracy, Shakespeare, Newton, and George Orwell, whose 1984 warned of the terrifying inversion of truth into falsehood.
Yet England also exported one of Europe’s darkest ideas: the blood libel against the Jewish people. Beginning in 12th-century England with the accusation against the Jews of Norwich in 1144, false allegations that Jews murdered Christian children for ritual purposes spread throughout Europe.
These libels, often promoted or legitimized by influential churchmen, fueled massacres, dispossession, and ultimately the expulsion of every Jew from England in 1290. The consequences were measured not merely in prejudice but in Jewish lives.
History teaches that lies about Jews kill. Today, at a moment when Jews face levels of hatred unseen since the Holocaust, history demands extraordinary moral clarity.
Instead, the Church of England’s General Synod chose in July to give prominence to “A Moment of Truth: Faith in a Time of Genocide,” referred to as Kairos II, a document that accuses Israel of genocide, portrays Zionism as an inherently colonial and exclusionary ideology, frames Israel as a settler-colonial enterprise imposed on an indigenous people, and urges churches to rethink engagement with “Zionist voices.”
Whether intended or not, such rhetoric echoes some of history’s oldest patterns of anti-Jewish demonization.
(Hat Tip: Anglican Ink)