86 Popes and Jews, 1095–1291
and to bleed anally.109 According to one popular tradition this was God’s punish-
ment for Judas who according to the New Testament Gospels had betrayed christ
to the romans.110 When Judas hanged himself in remorse, his belly exploded, yet
because he had betrayed christ with a kiss, when at death his soul needed to escape
his body, it could not do so through the mouth but only anally. Psalms 77: 66: ‘he
smote his enemies in their posteriors, he set them in everlasting shame’ was cited
as exegetical proof of the idea of such Jewish flux, while the popular motif found in
late antiquity and throughout the Middle Ages that ‘the bad man was punished by
God with a bleeding anus’ was also based on christian canonical texts.111
Some medieval writers believed that Matthew 27: 25, ‘his blood be upon us and
upon our children’, showed not only that Jews were devoid of purified blood but
that Jewish males in particular required pure blood from another source; hence
the need for a christian child. So, according to the thirteenth-century anatomist
Thomas of cantimpré, Jews ‘customarily spill christian blood’, because they
mistakenly believed it would heal their affliction and achieve salvation.112 The
thirteenth-century Dialogue of Miracles recorded a story in which it was claimed
that on the friday before easter (‘Good friday’) Jews lost ‘a flux of blood’ (‘fluxus
sanguinis’), possibly because, according to legends, Jewish men were regarded as
‘inframen’ who suffered from monthly menstruation like women.113 it was at
easter and in particular on Good friday when Jews suffered in this way—the time
at which they were accused of crucifying christian children—and the association
with blood must stem from a connection between Jews generally and Judas.114 As
we shall see, easter, close to the Jewish Passover, was considered the time of choice
for Jewish abuse of the eucharist.115
Whatever their origins, charges of blood libel became more frequent in france
following the burning at Blois in 1171 of more than thirty Jews convicted of mur-
dering a christian child, purportedly to use his blood for Passover rites.116 Then,
109 david Katz, ‘Shylock’s Gender: Jewish Male Menstruation in early Modern england’, The
Review of English Studies 50 (1999), 452.
110 irvene resnick, Marks of Distinction, pp.181–8.
111 The Life and Miracles of St William of Norwich by Thomas of Monmouth, ed. and trans. Jessop and
James, pp.111–12; Willis Johnson, ‘The Myth of Jewish Male Menses’, Journal of Medieval History
24/3 (1998), 275; 281.
112 resnick, Marks of Distinction, pp.199–201. See p.200, n.99: ‘... i udaei secundum consuetudi-
nem,... christianum sanguinem fundant’.
113 There is a huge historiography on this subject which cannot be detailed here. See for example,
Leon Poliakov, The History of Anti-Semitism, Vol. 4: From Mohamed to the Marranos, trans. N. Gerardi,
Vol. 2 (London, 1974), p.145; Katz, ‘Shylock’s Gender’, 448; Johnson, ‘The Myth of Jewish Male
Menses’, 286–8.
114 Johnson, ‘The Myth of Jewish Male Menses’, 287.
115 rubin, Gentile Tales, p.72.
116 richard dobson, The Jews of Medieval York and the Massacre of March 1190 (York, 1974), p.19;
Gavin Langmuir, Toward a Definition of Anti-Semitism (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, 1996), p.307;
robert Stacey, ‘crusades, Martyrdom and the Jews of Norman england 1096–1190’, in Juden und
Christen zur Zeit der Kreuzzüge Vorträge und Forschungen 47, Konstanzer Arbeitkreis für mittelalterliche
Geschichte, ed. A. haverkamp (Sigmaringen, 1999), p.236; Kenneth Stow, The ‘1007 Anonymous’ and
Papal Sovereignty: Jewish Perceptions of the Papacy and Papal Policy in the High Middle Ages (cincinnati,
1984), p.23; Christendom and its Discontents, ed. Waugh, diehl, p.221; robert chazan, In the Year
1096: The First Crusade and the Jews (Philadelphia, 1996), p.2.