Blood Ritual: An Investigative Report Examining a Certain Series of Cultic Murder Cases

On April 1, 1899, the body of 19-year-old Agnes Hurza, a Christian young woman, was found in a woods near Polna, Bohemia, then a part of Austria-Hungary. Her throat had been slashed so badly that she was nearly decapitated. Her wounds revealed that she had been held upside down until her body had been emptied of blood. As this blood was not found at the crime scene, it must have been collected and carried away. For most of history, belief in Jewish ritual murder was acceptable and widely accepted. Naturally, the Jews aren't the only group who have practiced (and might still practice) ritual murder. Historically, it is fairly common: the Aztecs, numerous African tribes, and the ancient Carthagians come to mind. But since WW2, with the rise of Jewish ownership of the mass media, has come the politically-correct "Doctrine of the Never-Guilty Jews." Every accusation of Jewish ritual murder, no matter how well proved it might have been in its time, has become a "blood libel" in today's media, a phrase that explicitly frames each case as a malicious falsehood, without an examination of the facts. Probably, not every accusation is true. But it is also unlikely that all of them are false. Philip de Vier has made a thorough survey of the known evidence in about 200 cases of ritual murder in ancient, medieval, renaissance and modern times. Adopting the approach of a detective investigating a murder, de Vier invites his readers to sift the relevant facts from history and to see that they point toward the existence of a transgenerational ritual murder cult within the larger body of Judaic tradition. The evidence is persuasive, but, says de Vier, the final verdict is ours to make.