on the subject of "blood libel"

[rm]

Someone else on my friends list did a poll, and I realized that I was also curious and have enough people here to get a large sample even if it's not a scientific one.

Since my big discovery of today was that lots of people didn't realize that the "blood libel" thing was a totally anti-semitic thing to say and I was surprised by that, the question becomes is this one of those things _every_ Jewish person knows but non-Jews may not have encountered?

ETA: Comments filled with fascinating anecdata. Have fun.

For those of you who still haven't caught up with this, Boing Boing explains.

Poll below.

[Poll #1667388]

Comments

[gwyd.livejournal.com]

To be fair, I have a Medieval history MA and I've been a plague watcher since Primary school. This likely makes me more aware of the horrific brutal crap that got rained down on the heads of European Jews in the middle ages than the average gentile.

[neadods.livejournal.com]

*points upwards* History BA with an emphasis on medieval; if you know that period of history, you know what the term means and how it was used as a club.

[lizblackdog.livejournal.com]

I had to stop and think about it before I could remember what it referred to, but I did know it.

[airspaniel.livejournal.com]

I answered that I did not know, though it's likely I used to and had forgotten until this debacle. It felt more honest than saying I did.

[airspaniel.livejournal.com]

Also, I think it's likely that Palin had no idea what it meant, just that adding the word "blood" to a word as awful as "libel" would make it some kind of super awful, using that lovely violent style of rhetoric she's so fond of.

I know that Alaska is not the same as where I grew up in the midwest, but on a number of fronts they're similar in terms of voting trends, population and education, and I know that no one else in my family would know that "blood libel" carried such a connotation.

[crowgirl13.livejournal.com]

While I was aware of the horror stories whipped up about the Jews during the middle ages, I wasn't aware there was a term attached to that crap.

[fmanalyst.livejournal.com]

Me too. I hadn't heard of the particular phrase, but I recognized what it referred to, once I saw it defined.

[klwalton.livejournal.com]

To be fair, my dad is a self-taught WWII scholar, and I learned a lot about Jewish culture and the history of anti-Semitism by virtue of what my dad would talk about.

[missysedai.livejournal.com]

I'm in a similar situation. My Opa was a Buchenwald liberator. We talked a lot about WWII and Jewish culture and history as well, and he nudged me towards independent research.

(Getting him to talk often involved several drinks.)

[brewsternorth.livejournal.com]

Studied history at BA level; also, am from a family of historians. I was, possibly naively, shocked that the specific definition of this term was something people weren't taught and didn't otherwise pick up.

[easter.livejournal.com]

Not Jewish, but a medievalist, so...

[rm.livejournal.com]

I'm starting to feel like I should have pulled the medievalists out of the poll somehow too. Because if I take you all out of it (there are a few) the level of awareness of the term amongst non-Jews answering this is really not particularly high. This makes me feel much more patient with the coworkers I had to explain this stuff to today.

[goseaward.livejournal.com]

From a Jewish bg (my dad & his family), but I actually know the phrase not through them but through my medieval history class in college--our teacher specialized in the interreligious relationships at that point in history, so it was a whole class on Christians in the Muslim world and Muslims in the Christian world and Jews all over. I've had more direct use for that class than any other not-related-to-my-major course.

[maryling.livejournal.com]

FWIW my mom didn't know it either. Non-Jewish.

[cpolk.livejournal.com]

I knew about the assertion that blood libel describes, but I didn't know there was a name for it.

[kalmn.livejournal.com]

me too.

[pantryslut.livejournal.com]

My partner is Jewish, however, and my father apparently seriously considered converting for a while.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

I knew what it meant, but I'm Jewish. I'm surprised it's that well known to your flist, but I consider it totally implausible that Palin had the foggiest idea of what it meant.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I can't decide if she had no clue or if it was a dog-whistle to extremists. It could really go either way.

[tenacious-snail.livejournal.com]

I also have a BA in history. And I went to Tulane, which has a large Jewish population. My grandmother's family was Jewish. I'm fairly culturally aware for a shiksa. I didn't know.

[laughingacademy.livejournal.com]

I'm not positive, but I think I first encountered the term while reading about the Golem of Prague during one of my periodic folklore sprees.

ETA: Not Jewish, but grew up in Miami and NYC.

[lilacsigil.livejournal.com]

That's where I picked it up, too.

[redstapler.livejournal.com]

I can't recall when or how I learned what "blood libel" meant, but it's definitely something I could have been taught any number of times or contexts.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Are these numbers astounding you?

[dsmoen.livejournal.com]

None of the four answers quite works for my context.

I knew the second meaning of the term on the BoingBoing page but not the usage of the first.

I'm halachically Jewish, but came from a non-Jewish family (Episcopalian, actually); my mother's mother was born to a Jewish woman and adopted into an anti-Semitic Christian family (we got better). I went through a brief period of studying Judaism as a teenager, but I can't say I absorbed enough to consider that I'm from a Jewish background. Or not. Sort of in the middle. :)

Most of my study of Judaism in history has been in Venice in the 16th and 17th centuries, where Venice told the Vatican off and the papal interdict of 1606 over Venice's refusal, among other things, to treat their Jewish population badly (also civil trials of Catholic priests didn't go over too well). Anyhow, Venice was imperfect but more enlightened than most.

[rm.livejournal.com]

This comment is 100% a reminder of why I still love LJ.

[wesleysgirl.livejournal.com]

I voted did not know/am not Jewish, but I did have a vague notion that it was anti-semitic even though I didn't know exactly WHY.

[xtricks.livejournal.com]

I knew the term, then again, I was the only white gentile in my school and neighborhood and lived quite close to a Hassid community.

[amberite.livejournal.com]

There should also be a "I knew it had something vaguely to do with anti-Semitism but not the exact reference" option, which is me - Jewish background, lots of reading and some forgetting. (Clicked "knew the meaning of the term" because that was closest, but...)

[hoyland54.livejournal.com]

This is my answer is as well. (Well, pretty much. Without the Jewish background. I'm probably skewing the sample a bit. Though not a medievalist, I have more medieval background than the average person and have close friends whose research interests flirt with Jewish Studies.)

'blood libel' pings as something that Sarah Palin shouldn't be throwing about and something to do with anti-Semitism, but I don't connect immediately it to the killing babies thing. I don't have the biblical reference at all, which was getting me really confused when that was the reference being given in various articles. I kept thinking, "I should know this. I do know this somewhere and that's not it."

[valarltd.livejournal.com]

I knew and I'm neither a medievalist nor Jewish. The last in my family was about 7 generations back, a peddler named Gingrich in the late 19th century.

I do, however, read widely and am interested in Jewish folklore.

[shoiryu.livejournal.com]

...Though I am NOT Jewish, I went to a Jewish day camp for several years when I was little and had a lot of exposure to the local Jewish communities.

[upstart-crow.livejournal.com]

I am not Jewish, but my stepmother is Jewish and she had a very big part in raising me, so I think option 2 would best fit me.

[upstart-crow.livejournal.com]

oops. Make that option 3.

[rikibeth.livejournal.com]

Jewish, but while I'd heard the substance of the libel in the general category of "things people believed about us that weren't so," it wasn't nearly as much a feature of my everyday life as the "Jews killed Christ" misconception, which was still not entirely out of common use in the decade after Vatican II, so THAT was one I had to learn to debunk on the playground. I didn't really get a sense of the SCOPE of the blood libel until I ran up against the Prioress's Tale.

I agree, the poll would be even more interesting if it called out the medievalists.

[kadairk.livejournal.com]

Reading the comments and encountering references to New York made me want to throw my story in here ... I didn't know the term at all until today. I grew up in the south, and didn't actually meet anyone Jewish until I went to college (in the south). It wouldn't be right to say I grew up as an anti-Semite, that was a term I'd heard, but didn't understand until college. I just grew up ... unaware.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I think that's totally fair. When you live in NYC (which has more Jews than Israel, I always hear) you forget that most people in the US have never, to their knowledge seen a Jewish person.