Christian blood-libel fantasies stem from anxiety about the Eucharist.

Evidence

The demonisation of aspects of religious practice has its roots in what civil society will tolerate and what it will not, what it considers to be decorous and what is unacceptable as a social practice. Why it will not tolerate something is, of course, central to the story. Thus, Alan Dundes argued a decade ago that the anxiety about meanings associated with the consumption of the body and blood of Christ in the Christian Mass shaped the fantasy of the Jews as slaughtering Christian children for their blood. Yet it is equally present in the anger in secular Europe more recently directed towards Jewish ritual practices such as the mutilation of children’s bodies (infant male circumcision and, for some Muslims, infant female genital cutting). — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 893 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

People in the ancient world often used animals as a tangible locus of their death anxiety. For example, on the ancient Hebrew Day of Atonement, two goats were chosen by lot: “the Lord’s Goat” was offered as the blood sacrifice for the sins of Israel, and the second, “Azazel,” or scapegoat, was cast out into the wilderness bearing the sins of God’s people. In ancient Greece, the scapegoat was not an animal but a person. When a community was in the grip of an infectious disease or famine, the pharmakos, or human scapegoat, was the object of the village’s scorn. — Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, The Worm at the Core, 508 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Medieval poetry parodied the Eucharist through a cannibalistic Jewish mother; Christian eucharistic anxiety generated the blood-libel fantasy against Jews — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in…, 893; Blood-libel imagery linked Jews and Muslims eating Christian children. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 232 (+6 more)

Broader Connections

• Christian eucharistic anxiety generated the blood-libel fantasy against Jews #corroborates (1.00) — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 893
• Scapegoating rituals transferred communal death-anxiety onto a sacrificial other #complicates (0.73) — Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, The Worm at the Core, 508