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, written in 1973 by the Italian scholar of myth and radical critic Furio Jesi, 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 Ottoman Syria is transformed into a racist myth that depends on the figure of the “savage”—more precisely, on the paranoid projection 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 profound analysis of modernity’s fears articulated in the figure of the vampire that circulated through Germany’s nineteenth century. 

Written amidst the criminalization campaigns by the Italian state against anarchists and other “inner enemies,” The Blood Libel deploys Jesi’s conception of the “mythological machine” to anatomize the multiple entanglements of myth with the politics of exclusion and domination. A heterodox and uniquely incisive model of ideology critique, Jesi’s work offers us a powerful insight into some of the deeper determinants of Western political rationality and its stigmatizing, inferiorizing, and racializing dynamics.