The blood libel is often called the ‘master libel’ of antisemitism. (1) It falsely claims that Jews harbour murderous intentions toward non-Jews and Jewish law allows or encourages this. The libel is rooted in the charge of deicide (i.e., killing God), which accuses Jews of being collectively responsible for the death of Jesus. This was used for centuries to justify the torture and murder of Jews, and only formally condemned by the Catholic Church in 1965 in the Second Vatican Council’s Nostra aetate.

Over time, the accusation of deicide led to other derivative libels. In medieval Europe, Jews were often falsely accused of murdering Christian children to use their blood in religious rituals, including for baking matzah, the unleavened bread eaten at Passover. The first recorded case occurred in 1144 in Norwich, England, after a 12-year-old boy named William was found dead. Local Jews were blamed and accused of torturing and killing William at Easter in a re-enactment of Jesus’ crucifixion. This libel of ritual child murder, framed as a Jewish conspiracy driven by hatred of Christianity, quickly spread across Europe. It led to the massacre of thousands of Jews, often through mob violence and sometimes after trials based on torture. (2) During the Black Death, this evolved further into accusations that Jews were poisoning wells to spread the plague. It also became a key theme in European literature, including Chaucer’s The Canterbury Talesand Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, taken for granted as popular folklore. (3)

It is tempting to dismiss the blood libel as a medieval superstition, but it continues to incite hatred and murder. There were more recorded instances of the libel between 1870 and 1940 than the preceding seven centuries. It also appeared in the Middle East in an Islamic version from the nineteenth century, with libels recorded in Syria, Egypt, Iran and Turkey, and was a key feature of Nazi propaganda. (4) Today, often deployed in cartoons, the blood libel has acquired an explicitly anti-Zionist character.

The resources below explore how the blood libel began, how it spread, and why it still matters today.

1. Julius, A. (2010) Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England Oxford University Press
2. Laqueur, W. (2006) The changing face of antisemitism: from ancient times to the present day. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
3. Julius, A. (2010) Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England Oxford University Press
4. Rich, D. (2023 [2019]) Everyday hate: how antisemitism is built into our world. London: Biteback Publishing.

The economic libel accuses Jews of financially exploiting non-Jews. Like the blood libel, it has reinvented itself over time: from Fagin in Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist, the “crafty old Jew” who exploits hungry orphans for profit, to the popular ‘Happy Merchant’ internet meme, a caricature of a greedy religious Jew sneering and rubbing his hands together.

The association of Jews with money can be traced to the Christian narrative of Judas betraying Jesus for 30 pieces of silver. This suggests Jews will do anything, even betray God, for material gain. More significantly, the libel originates in the historic role Jews were forced to play as moneylenders in medieval societies. Discriminatory laws banned Jews from most professions, while Christian doctrine condemned usury as sinful, leaving moneylending as one of few occupations available to Jews. The later rise of powerful investment banks founded by Jewish families in nineteenth century Europe is often misused as conspiratorial ‘evidence’ that Jews control the financial system. This narrative ignores the fact that the same period was marked by widespread Jewish poverty, and that Jewish wealth offered no protection from persecution.

The economic libel does not simply claim that Jews are good with money but also that Jews are inherently greedy and pursue wealth through deceitful and exploitative means. As the Nazi children’s book Der Giftpilz [The Poisonous Mushroom], published in 1935, put it: “Money is the God of the Jews. He commits the greatest crimes to earn money.” (1) In reality, like any other group of people, there are wealthy Jews and there are poor Jews. There is no trait of greed or financial aptitude that is inherently Jewish.

The resources below explore what the economic libel is, how it spread and why it still matters today.

1. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (no date) Collections search: PA1069730. Available here (Accessed: 4 February 2026)

The conspiracy libel claims that Jews secretly work together to advance a shared Jewish agenda that harms and manipulates non-Jews. It assumes that behind every perceived evil, as Nazi Minister of Propaganda Dr Paul Joseph Goebbels stated in 1933, ‘the Jews are to blame’. (1)

This libel is most notoriously expressed in The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, first published in 1903. Pretending to be the leaked minutes of secret meetings in which Jewish leaders plotted world domination, the Protocolswas in fact invented by agents of the Russian secret police. Despite being repeatedly exposed as a hoax, the text continues to have enormous influence. It shaped Nazi ideology, was written into the 1988 charter of the terrorist organisation Hamas and has been used to accuse Jews of orchestrating events ranging from the Covid-19 pandemic to the 9/11 attacks. (2)

The myth of excessive Jewish power promoted by the conspiracy libel also underpins other contemporary conspiracies, including the so-called ‘Great Replacement Theory’. The history of persecution, expulsion and genocide faced by Jews makes clear how absurd claims that Jews are all-powerful are. Jews are an incredibly diverse group of people and do not act as a single group to pursue a shared agenda.

The resources below explore what the conspiracy libel is, how it spread and why it still matters today.

1. Rothman, L. (2018) ‘It’s not that the story was buried: What Americans in the 1930s really knew about what was happening in Germany’, TIME, 10 July. Available here (Accessed: 4 February 2026)
2. Ben-Itto, H. (2020) The lie that will not die: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. 2nd edn. London: Vallentine Mitchell.

The racial libel holds that Jews are a distinct and inferior race, and that the alleged moral corruption attributed to Jews in the blood, economic and conspiracy libels is inherent to their nature. Jews have been subject to unfair racialisations for centuries, with antisemitic depictions of Jews with exaggerated noses dating to at least the thirteenth century. The racial libel emerged in a more systematic form in the nineteenth century, drawing on pseudo-scientific theories that classified people into inferior and superior races on the basis of supposed biological ‘science’. (1) Jews therefore came to be defined more prominently as a race than a religion. This was central to the antisemitic ideology of the Nazis. The 1935 Nuremberg Race Laws, for example, legally defined Jews as a race, stripping them of their German citizenship and banning sexual relations between Jews and so-called Aryans to prevent ‘racial pollution’.

The racial libel casts Jews as perpetual outsiders who are disloyal to the nations in which they live. The most famous example of this logic is the Dreyfus Affair. In 1894, the French Jewish army officer Captain Alfred Dreyfus was arrested, falsely accused and found guilty of spying for Germany, and imprisoned. Dreyfus was only acquitted and reinstated to the French Army in 1906, despite clear evidence of his innocence. This political scandal found later resonance in Hitler’s claim that Jewish soldiers had betrayed Germany and caused its defeat in World War I.

Toward the end of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, this libel has continued to echo in accusations that Jews are more loyal to the interests of Israel or a supposed ‘Zionist agenda’ than to their fellow citizens or nation-states. In reality, Jews cannot be neatly categorised as a race, religion, ethnicity, or nationality. There is no single way to look Jewish or to be Jewish, and individuals define their Jewishness differently. Many Jews are loyal citizens of the countries in which they live, while also feeling a connection to Israel for a range of historical, cultural, familial and religious religions.

The resources below explore what the racial libel is, how it spread and why it still matters today.

1. Lipton, S. (2014) ‘The invention of the Jewish nose’, The New York Review of Books, 14 November. Available here (Accessed: 4 February 2026)