This newspaper clip reflects a horrific story about the only anti-Semitic blood libel to occur in American history.
Blood libels against Jews began in the Middle Ages. Totally unfounded in any degree of fact, they falsely accused people who were Jewish of killing Christian children and using their blood for Passover food rituals. The horror that this idea inspired in Christian Europeans elicited widespread hostility against Jewish communities for hundreds of years.
In the fall of 1928 in the town of Massena in upstate New York, 4-year old Barbara Griffiths (shown on the left here) walked into some local woodlands and disappeared. Within several hours, local police and the town mayor started searching for the little girl. It didn’t take even a day before a rumor began that some people in Massena who were Jewish had kidnapped Barbara for ritual purposes in the upcoming Yom Kippur holiday.
There were only 20 Jewish families in Massena, but when police started questioning members of their community, they grew terrified that they might be victims of a pogrom: such attacks had resulted in the deaths of thousands of Jewish people in Europe from the Middle Ages onward. The town mayor and police even commanded that Berel Brennglass, the local rabbi, come to the police headquarters for questioning (photo on the right).
What caused these ridiculous accusations of blood libel? The 1920s was a particularly xenophobic time in American history — three decades of immigration by Eastern Europeans of Catholic and Jewish origin threatened the Protestant majority. Anti-Semitism was inflamed with bombastic racist journalism, such as that spearheaded by the extremely popular Henry Ford, who ran a newspaper more widely read than _The New York Times_ which featured a series called “The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem”. Organizations such as the KKK were also active in Massena at the time.
Within 24 hours, Barbara resurfaced. She had fallen asleep in the forest, completely unharmed. This didn’t stop many town inhabitants from continuing to believe the ridiculous charges, even after the mayor and police chief issued public apologies to Massena’s Jewish families.
Source: www.nyu.edu, “The story of America’s first – and only – Blood Libel,” Niv Sultan, Sept 10, 2019. Interview with historian Edward Berenson on his book _The Accusation: Blood Libel in an American Town_. Image from Library of Congress cited in _Tablet_ “American Blood Libel,” Robert Rockaway, Sept 20, 2021
