ANTI-SEMITIC PREJUDICE IN SOME EUROPEAN LEGENDS

The legends concerning the prodigious transformation of the consecrated host into the flesh and blood of Jesus Christ are extremely widespread in Christian Europe. In the Abruzzi region (central Italy), several miracle legends regard the bleeding of the host. Comparing these local legends with some European parallels enables an anthropological analysis which enables to deepen the study of the “blood libel” feature and to fight against anti-Semitic prejudice in contemporary societies.
This essay tries to extend Alan Dundes analyses on the “blood libel” (Dundes 1991), without however trying to give an exhaustive overview of all the works concerning this folkloric feature. In the preface to his important work on anti-Semitic folklore, the “blood libel” (1991), Dundes warns us about the unpleasant and even “bizarre and dangerous” aspects of the blood libel legends, accusing Jews to kill Christian infants to perform their Easter rituals. In this set of legends, Jews mix the victim’s blood with their matzah, which brings together blood and food in a way which is in many ways comparable with the desecration of the host legends we will speak about. Dundes considers these legends as a sordid story which has caused great grief to countless numbers and generations of Jews (Dundes, 1991). He shows their relationship with the larger category of “ritual murder accusations”, which places them on the same ground as other accusations of human sacrifices or cannibalism, usually the expression of ethnocentrism and of contempt for other cultures (Lévi-Strauss, 1962; Arens, 1979).