The Blood Libel

Powerful insight into some of the deeper determinants of Western political rationality and its stigmatizing, inferiorizing, and racializing dynamics.

The Blood Libel explores the archival traces of the 1840 Damascus affair, an anti-Semitic accusation of ritual murder. We follow in detail how the death of a Catholic missionary monk in a foreign country is transformed into a racist myth that depends on the figure of the “savage”—more precisely, on the image of the Jew as a masked inner enemy, who, as Jesi writes, “has hypocritically and externally civilized himself—and who has thus been able to continue to satisfy his blood-thirsty instincts within the very fabric of ‘civilized’ societies.” This study is contrasted by a fascinating analysis of modernity’s fears as projected onto the figure of the vampire throughout Germany’s nineteenth century.

The Blood Libel deploys Furio Jesi's conception of the “mythological machine” to anatomize the multiple entanglements of myth within nationalist, fascist, and right-wing culture.

Written in 1973 amidst the criminalization campaigns by the Italian state against anarchists and other “inner enemies,” The Blood Libel offers us powerful insight into some of the deeper determinants of Western political rationality and its stigmatizing, inferiorizing, and racializing dynamics.

Introduced and translated into English for the first time by Alberto Toscano.