“Chimerical antisemitism,” coined by historian Gavin Langmuir to describe anti-Jewish accusations with no basis at all in fact is illustrated no more urgently than by the charge of blood libel, the most dangerous manifestation of such hatred. In a collection of essays drawn from papers presented at a 2014 University of Illinois conference, the persistence of the canard, its adaptive capacity over time and changing circumstance are at the core of this first-rate book.

Among the more memorable examples offered is by literary historian Gennady Estraikh in a tale from the grim streets of Moscow of the early 1920s. It is the story of hapless Meir Gindin, or Hindin, who worked as a synagogue sexton supporting himself by delivering corpses to Moscow's Jewish cemetery at a time when Moscow's Jewish population had doubled to some 5.6%, which in the minds of some remade the ancient capital into a veritable Jewish kingdom.

In March 1922, Gindin was hired to transport the body of a dead eight-year old Jewish boy for burial after his body had been mutilated in the morgue by rats. Carrying him wrapped in a bed sheet and blanket, Gindin, then in his mid-seventies, stumbled as he sought to enter a tram, dropping the boy. Passersby enraged by the prospect of witnessing up-close preparation for a ritual murder called the police, who quickly discovered that the dead boy was circumcised. Yet, astonishingly, Gindin surfaced a year later, this time trying to save tram fare—300,000 rubles in a bizarrely inflated early Soviet Russia—and while carrying still another dead body, this time an eleven-month old boy, several miles to the cemetery. He is accosted and accused once again of ritual murder. A furious group surrounds him, the loudest of whom is a well-dressed woman, born a Jew, whose father is buried in Moscow's Jewish cemetery.

From its origins in early modern Europe—and in contrast to the accusations leveled against witches, as Michael Ostling demonstrates—charges of ritual murder garnered widespread attention: “…public documents, nearly silent about witchcraft, are replete with stories of ritual murder” (19). Demonization, he suggests, operates differently when the target is a distinctly recognizable group. Hence, Jewry's distinctive appearance, its language, and its concentration in trade and commerce stoked prejudices that nonetheless rarely gained traction without support from a local elite. It was only when officials openly embraced anti-Jewish myths, as Darius Staliunas argues, that claims of Jewish perfidy turned into public displays. True, everyday interaction between Christians and Jews indicate that it is inconceivable that Christians believed all Jews to be complicit and yet when provided with official sanction, the dense, readily accessible collection of tales describing Jews as predators could gain traction. Magda Teter's essay on the famed Sandomierz paintings illustrates the workings of these dark dynamics brilliantly.

“The mundane, everyday world is shattered by the unexpected death of a child,” write the book's editors in the introduction (14). And, of course, such deaths were by no means rare. Eugene M. Avrutin, drawing on his recent excellent monograph, The Velizh Affair: Blood Libel in a Russian Town (Oxford, 2018), explains how the most typical reasons for infant mortality in early nineteenth century Russia were neglect, lack of proper medical care, and the complications of pregnancy. Alternatively, “mothers suffocated, drowned, or strangled infants; or on more than infrequent occasions the babies were eaten alive by pigs and various wild animals… . The disappearance of a little boy was not an unusual event” (59).

Still, the Velizh episode was but one of a dozen imperial Russian ritual murder investigations in the first half of the nineteenth century. As Hillel Kieval observes, throughout the region these were less and less a rural or small town phenomenon with these accusations increasingly urban-based and shorn of religious symbolism. Moreover, they would now spike in frequency—some 128 between 1881 and 1900, as compared with forty-four in the previous six hundred years. Robert Weinberg analyzes how in the Mendel Beilis trial, the most infamous of modernity's ritual libel escapades, featured testimony of how the murdered boy's wounds were designed to maximize the flow of blood with the contention that five Hebrew letters had been etched onto the head of the murdered. Forensic medicine and science would be utilized as prime proof-texts with the empiricism wielded by antisemites trumpeted in stark contrast to the dark practices of the Jews, whose own Hebrew tongue hid away the vocalization of vowels: further evidence of Judaism's countless, unspeakable secrets.

A witness for the prosecution in the 1913 Beilis trial in Kiev, Ivan Sikorskii, taught a course about the method used by Jews to murder Christian children at Kiev's St. Vladimir University. Vasili Rozanov, one of late imperial Russia's leading literary figures, managed in a then-well-known work, “The Secret Writing of the Jews,” to mesh the mohel, or circumciser, with the ancient sacrificial practices of the Temple of Jerusalem, as Harriet Murav demonstrates: “[T]he mohel who cuts the infant's foreskin, extracts as much blood as possible from the penis—using his fingernails for the purpose—and sucks the blood with his mouth, allowing the blood to drip into a bowl, so that he and those participating in the ceremony can wash their faces with a mixture of this blood, wine, and narcotics” (162).

Both Elissa Bemporad and Jeffrey Veidlinger persuasively track the resonance of these beliefs in wartime Soviet Russia well into the twentieth century and beyond. Shorn now of even a hint of religious terminology, wartime accusations secularized belief in the Jewish use of gentile blood, describing Jews as using Christian body parts not for Passover but to make soup in behavior that was cannibalistic and without ritual. In perhaps the book's most innovative chapter, Jeffrey Veidlinger teases out of Stalin's “Doctors’ Plot” an interplay of doubts regarding Jewish loyalty to Russia, the mystery of Jewish healers, and the notion that Jews are intent on polluting Christians with incurable diseases as crucial ingredients.

The insights of the late Gavin Langmuir, arguably the most influential student of antisemitism of the late twentieth century, fruitfully pollinate this volume. Veidlinger quotes him in explaining how a 600-year old canard helped capture the imagination of the post-war Soviet Union “motivated and explicitly justified by irrational fantasies of paranoid people whose internal frontiers of faith were threatened by doubts they did not admit” (248). Eerily flexible in its capacity to adapt to new circumstances, stitched together increasingly with scientific inference, made of ingredients as basic and terrifying as blood and childhood death, ritual murder's inner-workings are superbly sketched in this well-edited, intelligently conceived collection.