England gave the world many great gifts. It gave us the Magna Carta, parliamentary democracy, Shakespeare, Newton, and George Orwell, whose 1984 warned of the terrifying inversion of truth into falsehood.
Yet England also exported one of Europe’s darkest ideas: the blood libel against the Jewish people. Beginning in 12th-century England with the accusation against the Jews of Norwich in 1144, false allegations that Jews murdered Christian children for ritual purposes spread throughout Europe.
These libels, often promoted or legitimized by influential churchmen, fueled massacres, dispossession, and ultimately the expulsion of every Jew from England in 1290. The consequences were measured not merely in prejudice but in Jewish lives.
History teaches that lies about Jews kill. Today, at a moment when Jews face levels of hatred unseen since the Holocaust, history demands extraordinary moral clarity.
Instead, the Church of England’s General Synod chose in July to give prominence to “A Moment of Truth: Faith in a Time of Genocide,” referred to as Kairos II, a document that accuses Israel of genocide, portrays Zionism as an inherently colonial and exclusionary ideology, frames Israel as a settler-colonial enterprise imposed on an indigenous people, and urges churches to rethink engagement with “Zionist voices.”
Whether intended or not, such rhetoric echoes some of history’s oldest patterns of anti-Jewish demonization.
The new blood libel
The medieval blood libel claimed that Jews murdered Christian children. The modern blood libel claims that the Jewish state commits genocide. Both portray Jews as uniquely evil.
The accusation of genocide is particularly grotesque.
Israel is a tiny country surrounded for decades by organizations and regimes that have openly declared their desire to eliminate it.
On October 7, Hamas invaded Israeli communities, massacring more than 1,200 people, Jews and Arabs alike, in the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust. They deliberately targeted families, children, the elderly, and young people at a music festival. Many of my own students, friends, neighbors, and members of their families were murdered that day. Others have fallen in the war that followed.
The suffering of innocent Palestinians in Gaza is real and deserves profound compassion. Every civilian death is a tragedy. But tragedy is not genocide.
One may criticize Israeli policies, military decisions, or governments. Democracies invite such criticism. Yet to label Israel’s war against Hamas as genocide empties the word of its meaning and transforms it into a weapon against the descendants of the victims for whom the Genocide Convention was largely written.
Orwell warned of political language that turns lies into truth, and murder into respectability.
Calling the Jewish national liberation movement “settler colonialism” is precisely such an inversion. The Jewish people are indigenous to the Land of Israel. Jewish civilization, language, religion, and national identity were born there over three thousand years ago. Long before the rise of Islam or Christianity, Jerusalem was the heart of Jewish life.
One of history’s remarkable stories of decolonization was the restoration of Jewish sovereignty after centuries of exile.
On July 22-23, Jews around the world will observe Tisha B’Av, the saddest day on the Jewish calendar, mourning the destruction of Jerusalem, the exile of the Jewish people from Israel, and centuries of persecution that followed.
Indeed, part of Rome’s attempt to erase Judaism was to rename Judea as “Syria Palaestina.” Erasing Jewish history from its homeland is not a modern innovation; it is an ancient imperial project.
When modern discourse presents Jesus as a “Palestinian” while erasing his Jewish identity and the Jewish world in which he lived, it continues that same historical erasure.
Feeding the fire
Documents such as Kairos II may claim to seek justice. Yet ideas have consequences. Around the world, Jews are increasingly attacked, threatened, and forced to hide their identity. Synagogues require unprecedented security. Jewish students fear wearing visible signs of their faith. Jews have been murdered not only in Israel but on the streets of Europe and even on the beaches of countries once under British rule, such as Australia.
The obsession with portraying Israel as uniquely evil fuels this atmosphere. It also harms Palestinians. For decades, maximalist dreams of eliminating the Jewish state have repeatedly triumphed over opportunities for coexistence. Israel withdrew every Jew from Gaza in 2005, creating what many hoped could become the foundation of peaceful coexistence. Instead, Hamas transformed Gaza into a launching pad for terror and rockets, culminating in October 7.
The global obsession to demonize Israel reinforces the fantasy that its very existence is illegitimate, prolonging rather than resolving the conflict.
Lessons from history
The Church has been here before. During the Dreyfus affair, patently false charges of treason against Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a loyal Jewish officer in the French Army, were embraced and amplified by many influential Catholic voices. The lies inflamed anti-Jewish hatred, provoked riots, and corrupted France’s institutions before they were finally exposed.
France eventually confronted that disgrace. The Church, too, spent generations repenting for the role Christian anti-Judaism played in preparing the soil for such injustices.
One hopes today’s Church of England will not require another historical reckoning before recognizing the consequences of lending ecclesiastical authority to narratives that portray the Jewish state as uniquely monstrous.
Condemning antisemitism while promoting rhetoric that many Jews experience as its contemporary expression is not enough. Pious declarations against antisemitism ring hollow if they are accompanied by language that fuels the very hatred they claim to oppose.
A different Christian witness
Fortunately, this is not the only Christian voice. Countless Christian leaders have stood courageously with the Jewish people during this painful time. They have defended truth even when doing so has brought criticism from colleagues, activists, and social media mobs.
For their friendship, courage, and moral integrity, the Jewish people owe them deep gratitude.
Their willingness to stand with an unpopular truth recalls the words of Jesus to his disciples: “Everyone will hate you because of me, but the one who stands firm to the end will be saved” (Mark 13:13).
Standing against hatred has never been easy. It was not easy in medieval England. It was not easy during the Dreyfus affair. It is not easy today.
But history teaches that truth matters, because lies about Jews have never remained merely words. Too often, they have ended in blood.
The writer is the president of the Jerusalem Interfaith Center.