a false allegation of murder; the term refers specifically to a recurring rumor from 12th century Europe that Jews were kidnapping
Christian children and using their
blood for ritual purposes. A famous example of the
blood libel is recounted in the "Nun Prioress's Tale" from Chaucer's *Canterbury Tales*. In this and other versions of the story, the events are absurd and feature perverse miracles.
Frequently occurrences of the
blood libel were accompanied by a wave of mass murder of Jewish residents of the city. In many cases, the zealots would force the authorities to try
random Jews for the alleged crime; these trials were, naturally, travesties.
The last case of a
blood libel resulting in murder was the Kielce pogrom of 1946. 200 Jewish survivors of the Final Solution were being transported back to Poland when a boy (who had disappeared for a couple of days) told the
police he had been kidnapped by Jews. The
police went to a hostel where returning Holocaust survivors were staying, and massacred 37 of them.
Sometimes the phrase "blood libel" is used to refer to similar allegations against primarily non-Jewish groups; for example, many nationalities have been accused of kidnapping children to harvest their organs and sell them to rich patients in the developed world.
