“They love killing kids.” After four children were killed during an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) air strike on southern Lebanon, a British Member of Parliament named Zarah Sultana chimed in on social media with what has become an all-too-familiar refrain, particularly since October 7, 2023. One commenter quickly responded: “This is a blood libel.”

This back and forth has become rather common since October 7, as critics of Israel tend to single out any military that involves children — and responders allege a “blood libel.” It has become perhaps the most-used tool in the fight against antisemitism — wielded sometimes expertly but often as a blunt instrument, too.

So what does “blood libel” mean? And where does this charge actually come from? While the Blood Libel is typically considered to be a medieval construct, its roots go back significantly longer — ushering in what has become a tragic, extended tradition of libel and slander of Jews dating back to the Roman period.

As we see in the case of today’s antisemitic and antizionist rhetoric, the ancient soul of these violent allegations has remained unchanged, albeit manifested in different contexts and varying environments. While it is not clear if Medieval proponents of the Blood Libel were influenced by their ancient forebears, their own use is evidence of a repetitive pattern (if not a continuous chain) of philosophically similar behavior.

But the Blood Libel’s survival has also led to its modern overuse, with many modern critics lumping in a number of broader forms of antisemitic or antizionist behavior under the “Blood Libel” umbrella.

This is what merits an examination of its ancient and medieval progenitors.

The First “Blood Libel”?

The 1st century CE writer Flavius Josephus is perhaps most famous for his two major publications: The Antiquities of the Jews, an attempt at a history of the Jewish people dating back to Genesis; and The Jewish War, the only extant account of the First war between Rome and the Jews.

It is in one of his lesser-known works, Against Apion, that we discover what seems to be the first major example of what might be construed as a “blood libel.” Against Apion, written at the very end of the first century, is a response to an Egyptian grammarian named Apion who had apparently made a series of large-scale, Anti-Jewish allegations against the Jews — Josephus describes most of these allegations as “pure buffoonery,” —but serious enough that Josephus saw fit to respond in kind with this treatise.

We actually have no record of Apion’s writings. The allegations themselves only survive within Josephus’ rebuttal. They are wide-ranging, from Apion’s insinuation in his History of Egypt (also not extant) that Moses was a native of Heliopolis, and that he had erected a boat-shaped temple alongside a sundial; to the suggestion that the word Sabbath comes from the Egyptian term for disease of the groin. These allegations are Anti-Jewish, to be sure — and certainly robust fodder for an entire examination of Anti-Jewish tendencies in the Roman Empire. But the most pernicious allegation comes in the second book of Against Apion.

Josephus tells us that Apion relates a story “of Greek origin” which is a “malicious slander upon us from beginning to end.” The date within the story seems to be from the Hasmonean period, when the Seleucid King Antioch IV entered the Jerusalem temple to plunder it. When he arrived in the Temple, he found a man before a well-laden table of food. The man claimed he had been kidnapped and brought to the temple and, for some period of time, “fattened up.” The story related that it was the law of the Jews that every year “they would kidnap a Greek foreigner, fatten him up for a year, and then convey him to a wood, where they slew him,........

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