Gentiles have been imagining Jews seated together at a ritual table sipping gentile blood for millennia. The Greco-Egyptian scholar Apion, living in Egypt in the first century CE, recorded an instance of Jews kidnapping a Greek to fatten, slaughter, and then devour him while swearing an oath of hostility to the Greeks. This was the oldest recorded instance of a blood libel, and in the time between Apion’s writing and the ascent of Christianity, the myth morphed and became linked with the image of the Jew as Christ-killer. In Norwich in 1144 a tale spread that Jews had kidnapped a Christian child shortly before Easter and “tortured him with all the tortures wherewith our Lord was tortured, and on Long Friday hanged him on a rood in hatred of Our Lord.”
Even after the blood libel myth was Christianised it remained laced with paganistic imagery of sadistic sorcery. Christians whispered that Jews were monsters who required gentile blood to disguise their bestial bodies in human-like flesh. The Jewish victims of this myth were conscious that their gentile neighbours stoked their Jew-hatred with lies about Jewish inhumanity and Jewish sadism. The dirges written by an anonymous Jewish poet to commemorate the massacres spurred by a blood libel and perpetrated in Munich in 1286 offer fictional quotes ascribed to the Christian murderers which articulate this gross caricature: “these unhappy Jews are sinning, they kill Christian children, they torture them in all their limbs, take their blood cruelly to drink.”
As the blood libel developed and metastasized from one country to another, gentiles also began to repeat that Jewish communities the world over were bound by a nefarious, mystical chain of communication, and that each year one Jewish community was selected to be responsible for the ritual slaughter of innocent Christian children on behalf of the whole. According to this mutation of the myth, Jews were linked in a global cabal (the word “cabal” is itself etymologically related to “cabala”, the Jewish mystical sect) which was bound to harm gentiles and, among other things, drink their blood. In Trnava near Bratislava in 1494 the gentile community explained that: the Jews “had an ancient but secret ordinance by which they are under obligation to shed Christian blood in honour of God, in daily sacrifices in some spot or other… the lot for the present year had fallen on Trnava Jews.” As a result of this libel 16 Jews were burned at the stake.
The world-spanning cruel inhumanity of the Jew in this ancient myth rhymes with another: the Jew as member of a secret, all powerful entity which manipulates global politics. This metaphor seeped into international culture and, like so many prejudices, remained vital whether or not Jews were living within hating-distance of the local population. Chaucer penned “The Prioress’s Tale”, itself an example of a Jewish blood libel which was adapted to high art, a century after the Jews were expelled from England in 1290. As in all blood libels, the figure of the Jew in Chaucer’s tale is metaphorical, not human. This is true also of the child the Jews are accused of slaughtering—the child is symbolic of purity and the Jew is symbolic of a worldwide evil force which is devoted to the destruction of goodness.
On Thursday, 20th November 2025, a table was set up inside Union Station, the main train station in Washington, DC, over which a tablecloth formed of Israeli flags was laid. Upon the cloth a banquet of plastic human limbs and bloody plastic organs was set before a group of four people wearing freakish masks and identified by name cards as Secretary of State Marco Rubio; President Trump; former President Joe Biden; former Secretary of State Antony Blinken; and, at the centre, “Mileikowsky”.
The “Mileikowsky” card was meant to raise eyebrows and link the public protest art with old-world antisemitism: Mileikowsky was the name of Benjamin Netanyahu’s father in Europe before he moved to Israel and, like many holocaust survivors, he changed it. A large placard next to the table read: “The Meal, starter: Gaza children’s limbs, main: Stolen Organs, Dessert: illegally harvested skin, Drink: Gaza’s spilled blood.” While the macabre “meal” was being “eaten” the Mileikowsky figure at one point stood and placed his hands on top of the heads of the men on either side of him, presidents Trump and Biden. A tale as old as time: the European Jew as blood-dripping puppeteer of the men we mistake for the most powerful in the world.
The historical associations are obvious, but the display was reminiscent of another highly public manifestation of conspiratorial antisemitism which also occurred recently on American soil. A month earlier, in one of a number of repugnant acts of antisemitism on the ascendent Maga right, Tucker Carlson reminded the millions watching Charlie Kirk’s funeral of another ancient myth. He said: “So, it’s about 2,000 years ago in Jerusalem, and Jesus shows up and he starts talking about the people in power, and he starts doing the worst thing that you can do, which is telling the truth about people, and they hate it… and I can just picture the scene in a lamp-lit room with a bunch of guys sitting around eating hummus, thinking about—what do we do about this guy telling the truth about us? We must make him stop talking. And there’s always one guy with the bright idea, and I can just hear him say ‘I’ve got an idea. Why don’t we just kill him?’”
The United States is both incomprehensibly powerful and also insulated from the violence and vulnerability which attends many of the countries over which its power has immense impact. Thus, the people across the globe who are materially affected by American action, among them both Israelis and Palestinians, are reduced to little more than symbolic flourishes in US political discourse. The plastic limbs on the table were no more human than the plastic masks pretending to consume them, Charlie Kirk was no more Jesus than the Jews were Pontius Pilate. One of the marks of the new American political reality is that the gutter of American politics on both right and left meet at the extreme end of the circle and jointly invoke the same prejudices to stoke the same libidinal hatred in their followers.
Grotesque prejudice is an increasingly ordinary aspect of contemporary life. Our prejudices—across the political spectrum—are new in form but not in content, and they rely on the public’s inherited prejudices to inflame existent hatreds. It is our responsibility to know how we are being manipulated.
