In his seminal work, History of the Jews in Russia and Poland, the great Jewish historian Simon Dubnow recounted at length the murderous pogroms of the Middle Ages that were fueled by antisemitic libels. The one most people remember today is the “blood libel”: the accusation that Jews abducted and murdered Christian children in order to use their blood in the ritual baking of Passover matzah.
But the blood libel was not the most convenient mechanism for inciting violence against Jews. After all, one had to wait for a Christian child to disappear. Waiting is tedious.
A far more practical libel, especially in medieval Poland, was the “desecration of hosts.”
The story was simple. A Christian “witnessed” a horrifying scene inside a church at night. A Jew had supposedly snuck into the church, stolen communion wafers—“hosts” representing the Body of Christ—and pierced them with a knife. Immediately, blood gushed from the desecrated hosts. And to atone for this crime, Jewish blood had to flow.
The standard ingredient in the atrocities that followed was the same as in every age: systematic antisemitic incitement by local clergy and authorities.
There were skeptics, however. Dubnow quotes Polish King Sigismund Augustus declaring that he was “not sufficiently devoid of common sense to believe that there could be any blood in the host.” Dubnow also refers to correspondence between bishops expressing frustration with the inability of the masses to grasp the obvious fact that bread wafers do not bleed.
But both the king and the bishops missed the deeper point entirely.
The problem was never a lack of education or lack of common sense. The issue involved ordinary, universally experienced natural phenomena.
Every Sunday, Polish Catholics placed these wafers into their mouths during communion. Crushing the wafer between one’s teeth never caused one’s mouth to fill with Christ’s blood. The inability of bread wafers to bleed was, therefore, not an abstract theological proposition. It was a weekly, directly observed fact of ordinary life.
And yet, Jewish blood flowed after every alleged “witnessing” of host desecration.
Why? Because hatred of Jews had already progressed beyond the point where even minimal plausibility was required. Someone claiming to have witnessed a Jew flying over the church roof while breathing fire would likely have been equally sufficient to trigger a pogrom.
Which brings us to Nicholas Kristof’s May 11 column in The New York Times.
The newspaper has spent decades cultivating a readership conditioned to accept increasingly grotesque narratives about Jews and the Jewish state. It has done so fully aware of the historical consequences of systematic demonization.
Classical blood libel, grotesque as it was, at least remained within the boundaries of commonly understood natural possibility. The accusation itself did not require people to suspend their ordinary understanding of how the physical world operates. Its falsehood lay not in the violation of natural law, but in the fabrication itself.
The same was true of the modern libels directed against Jews and Israel that The New York Times had promoted up to this point: false as a matter of fact, but not requiring readers to suspend their instinctive understanding of the physical world around them.
Kristof’s story crosses a different threshold entirely, because—like the “desecration of hosts” libel—it requires the reader to suspend not merely morality or fairness but ordinary experiential understanding of reality itself.
Everybody understands what dogs are and how they behave. Even people who don’t own dogs are surrounded by friends, relatives, neighbors and co-workers who do. Dogs can be trained to bark, attack, retrieve objects, roll over or give a paw.
But there are also obvious natural limits to what these animals can do. A dog cannot be trained to carry out complex human acts requiring specifically human cognition, intention and sexuality. This is as self-evident as the inability of bread wafers to bleed.
The fact that Kristof wrote such a story—and that the Times published it—marks a new threshold in the evolution of modern Jew-hatred.
Natural plausibility is no longer required. The readership has been conditioned to consume accusations at the level of the “desecration of hosts” libel.
The so-called “newspaper of record” has now descended into a form of antisemitism intellectually and morally indistinguishable from that of the medieval mob.
