It says something for the conscience of the Church of England that, in 1955, it put up a plaque alongside the former shrine of Little Hugh in Lincoln Cathedral, apologising for the harm it had done by falsely accusing Jews of the ritual slaughter of the boy in 1255.
That Jews habitually murdered gentile children for blood with which to make Passover matzoh, was a popular superstition throughout Britain and Europe in the middle ages. “These fictions cost many innocent Jews their lives,” the plaque reads, “[and] do not redound to the credit of Christendom, and so we pray: Lord, forgive what we have been, amend what we are, and direct what we shall be.”
That it took the Church of England 700 years to amend “what [it] had been” should not detract from the honesty of that amendment, particularly if we remember that the “blood libel”, as it has become known, was still alive and kicking in the modern era, with occurrences of it recorded in Russia and even America as recently as 1928.
Ask wherein the appeal of this libel lies and the answer has to be the necessity for Christians not just to defame Jews and make a clear distinction between Old and New Testament morality, but to set the Jews apart from the entire human family; depraved, accomplices of the devil. And, of course, to justify hunting them down and massacring them.
It has been said often enough that there could hardly have been a more unlikely crime to charge Jews with, given the strict taboo on blood sacrifice and the extreme laws against blood contact and consumption laid down in the Torah. But there lies the further efficacy of the libel – it denies Jews their beliefs, their culture and their nature. It is hateful to be accused of what you haven’t done, but more hateful still to be accused of what you would never dream of doing and what you cannot bear to see done.
Hence the hurt, the anger and the fear that Jewish people have been experiencing in the year since Hamas’s barbaric massacre of Israelis on 7 October and the no less barbaric denials, not to mention celebrations of it, as night after night our televisions have told the story of the war in Gaza through the death of Palestinian children. Night after night, a recital of the numbers dead. Night after night, the unbearable footage of their parents’ agony. The savagery of war. The savagery of the Israeli onslaught. But for many, writing or marching against Israeli action, the savagery of the Jews as told for hundreds of years in literature and art and church sermons.
Here we were again, the same merciless infanticides inscribed in the imaginations of medieval Christians. Only this time, instead of operating on the midnight streets of Lincoln and Norwich, they target Palestinian schools, the paediatric wards of hospitals, the tiny fragile bodies of children themselves. Even when there are other explanations for the devastation, no one really believes them. Reporters whose reports are proved wrong see no reason to apologise. No amendment of their calumnies. What is there to apologise for? It could have been true.
Ask how Israel is able to target innocent children with such deadly accuracy and no one can tell you. Ask why they would want to target innocent children and make themselves despised among the nations of the Earth and no one can tell you that either. Hate on this scale seeks no rational explanation. Hate feeds off the superstitions that fed it last time round. The narrative of these events requires a heartless villainy and who more heartlessly villainous than those who severed the arteries of Little Hugh of Lincoln?
I don’t accuse the BBC and other news outlets of wilfully stirring race-memory of the child-killing Jew of the middle ages. But we don’t have to mean harm to do it. We can wreak havoc just as well by being lazy, by letting our unconscious do the work of thought, by dipping into the communal pile of prejudice and superstition and letting it pepper up our reports.
Events don’t make it on to television through a camera lens alone. What we see is only what an editor chooses for us to see. Yes, somewhere under the rubble is a truth, but closer to the surface is drama.
And if the aim of editors has been to horrify, they have succeeded. Who has been able to watch the evening news on television three nights running without wanting to scream? Scream for those beautiful and broken children, the innocent victims of war, maimed, orphaned, wandering lost through their ruined cities. Scream if you’re a Palestinian, scream if you’re a Christian, scream if you’re a Jew.
A mistake or misascription here, an over-credulousness there, do not a conspiracy make. And I do not minimise the tragedy that has befallen Palestinian children. But when television becomes another mourner by their graveside it can feel as much like propaganda as news. Only compare reporting from Gaza with reporting from Ukraine. Bombs have fallen there, too, but how often is the burial of Ukrainian children the lead story?
Such bias as I have described – conscious or not – has contributed not just to the anxiety level of Jews but to the atmosphere of hostility and fear in which they now live. If you are one of those who believe there is no smoke without fire – Roald Dahl, remember, said there had to be some reason no one liked the Jews – these pictures from Gaza will confirm your conviction that Jews are the devil’s confederates. The litany of dead children corroborates all those stories of their insatiable lust for blood. Maybe the Church of England was wrong to apologise.
• Howard Jacobson is a novelist, broadcaster and university lecturer
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 250 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at observer.letters@observer.co.uk
