The medical murder myth was embraced by church elites, not just peasants

Evidence

In both Spain and Portugal, the fears generated by the myth of medical murder by judeoconversos reached new paroxysms of fantasy during the seventeenth century. Far from being confined to uneducated peasants and the populace, it found ready acceptance within the ecclesiastical hierarchy. As we have already seen, as early as the 1580s bishop Andrés de Noronha felt moved to petition King Philip II urgently to take action against the judioconversos. Similarly, a gathering of Portuguese bishops and ecclesiastics, assembled in the town of Tomar in the spring and summer of 1629 to find a ‘remedy against Judaism’ (remédio do Judaismo), alluded to the danger posed by judeoconverso doctors in their report to the Crown. They demanded an immediate ban on the practice of medicine and pharmacy by judeoconversos. — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 398

Categorization

• XREF: Confirms the pattern from Milgrom/Shapiro on institutions and from other antisemitism scholarship: elites weaponizing conspiracy myths to justify exclusion — echoes how moral panics are often elite-driven.