Engulfed in a full-blown fiasco after a speaker invoked archaic antisemitic tropes at an event hosted by UCL Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), the administration swiftly moved to contain the damage, barring the speaker from campus and suspending SJP.
The incident went viral on social media after some attendees leaked audio where the speaker claimed that the “Feast of Tabernacles” is a holiday where it is customary for Jews to kill non-Jews and collect their blood to “make…special pancakes”.
In the same talk, she alleged that Jews “pretty much controlled the financial structure” in the Napoleonic era, insisted that “a lot of the material that you are reading is…Zionist-controlled” before hinting at nebulous ties between Britain and “the wealthy Jews” and even misconstruing the infamous Dreyfus Affair, the mid-1890s case in which a French-Jewish officer was framed and imprisoned for espionage, while omitting Dreyfus’ since fully established innocence.
The event devolved into an unequivocally antisemitic tirade that vilified Jews, distorted their history, and trivialised their suffering, minimising episodes like the Dreyfus Affair and the many episodes of oppression of Jews in the Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphates and later under regional dynasties such as the Fatimids, Ayyubids and Mamluks as well as the Ottomans. On social media, outrage was particularly directed at the speaker’s mention of the alleged practices involved in the “Feast of Tabernacles.” From a Greek author’s 1st-century allegation that Jews sacrificed a Greek victim annually, to medieval blood-libel myths accusing Jews of abducting and murdering Christian children, the canard has a long, bloody legacy.
In 1144, William of Norwich, a young English boy, was found dead. A monk, named Thomas of Monmouth, alleged that the boy’s death resulted from a supposed annual gathering of Jews who chose a Christian child to murder before Passover, invoking a fabricated prophecy that such killings would hasten the Jewish return to the Land of Israel. William became the first martyr of a myth that would define antisemitic propaganda to this day.
The charge spread rapidly; in 1171, in Blois, France, 31 Jews were burned at the stake after being accused of dumping a Christian child’s body in a river. Blood libel cases mushroomed throughout the Middle Ages. King Henry II notoriously ordered the execution of dozens of Jews falsely accused of crucifying a child in the 13th century and by 1290, England had expelled its Jewish communities entirely. When the Black Death ravaged Europe, rulers and clergy revived the trope again, claiming Jews had poisoned the wells to unleash the plague.
The trope endured into the 18th and 19th centuries, reshaped to suit Enlightenment-era codes. Its previously religious framing paved the way for nationalistic claims that Jews obstructed national greatness. Racial antisemitism and eugenics also emerged: the formerly “blood-snatching” Jews thus became the “disease-bearing” and “parasitic” Jews. The fixation on blood transmuted into a racial and pseudo-scientific scholarly obsession.
In her diatribe, the speaker misleadingly recounts one of the most infamous cases. As she recalled, the story began in Damascus in 1840 when Father Thomas, a Capuchin monk, and his Muslim servant vanished. Local leaders and French consular officials baselessly accused the city’s Jews of murdering the monk to use his blood for ritual purposes.
What happened next is crucial and yet where the speaker prevaricated: first of all, the story was entirely fabricated. This claimed “custom” does not exist: Jewish law strictly and expressly forbids both the consumption of any blood, including animal blood, and murder.
The speaker recounted the story as though it was rooted in any truth when, actually, it is and always has been a ludicrous, thoroughly debunked sham.
She further mendaciously contended that the monk’s body was found; in truth, the fate of Father Thomas is unknown to this day and no body was ever found. Eventually, Ottoman authorities declared the accusations against the Jewish community unfounded and untrue and the surviving prisoners were freed.
The fabricated story served as pretence for authorities to incite against local Jewish communities, undertake repressive and oppressive measures and fed into an endless, convoluted web of propaganda that spanned centuries and, evidently, continues to punctuate much of the antisemitic narrative to this day.
Perhaps even more astounding in this incident was the reaction from the audience and, more specifically, the lack thereof. It could reasonably be expected from students at UCL to be able to recognise basic conspiratorial and bigoted language, yet the academic’s preposterous claims went largely unchallenged. Apathy in the face of hate is the most potent way to endorse and espouse, even if unwittingly, hate speech and the proliferation of bigotry on campus. While the administration promptly disavowed these statements and took swift action, as noted by the Hebrew and Jewish Studies Department, combating hate on campus must go hand in hand with the advocacy and participation of students, who shape our spaces, experiences and expectations.
