Christian eucharistic anxiety generated the blood-libel fantasy against Jews

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

Categorization

• XREF: Directly extends the decorum/toleration theme from the book’s opening framing on what civil society tolerates; resonates with Freud’s totem-feast analysis of ritual. — connects to: The ancient blood libel remains actively cited into the twenty-first century — Anna Merlan, Republic of Lies, 275
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: when did circumcision shift from tolerated Jewish practice to a civil-society abomination in Enlightenment thought? Kant and the 1750 Berlin debate come to mind.