Sarah Palin and "Blood Libel"

I wasn't sure where Palin was going when I heard her use that term. It is one of those terms where you have heard of the use but forgot where it came from or as in my case never had the intellectual curiosity to check it out.


Fordham University has a post:

Medieval Sourcebook:
A Blood Libel Cult:
Anderl von Rinn, d. 1462

The Image The illustration on the right, located at the cult-church of Anderl von Rinn until recently, portrays the "martyrdom" of Anderl, a three year-old boy who became the focus of a blood-libel cult in the seventeenth-century. Anderl is the child being held down and having his throat slit. The killers are clearly marked as Jews by their clothes and turbans (one form of the "special mark" Jews were forced to carry by Church decree).  The third, lower, figure is collecting the child's blood in a bowl. The myth of the blood libel was that the blood of a Christian child was used to make Passover matzohs.  Note that, as Prof. Schafer recounts below, this cult was allowed to continue in Austria until the 1990s, when Bishop Reinhold Stecher had the images removed.  The text of the motto reads: "Sie schneiden dem Marterer, die Gurgl ab und nemen alles Blut von Ihm", literally "they cut throat of the martyr and take all blood from him" or in other words, "They cut the martyr's throat and drain all his blood."