ABSTRACT
While anti-Semitism, together with the blood libel and its derivatives, had become a worldwide phenomenon in the medieval world and spread together with Christianity to the Americas and the far corners of the universe, the non-Christian world had remained more or less immune to it until the modern era, when it was embraced by Islamic and Asian cultures, even where there were almost no Jews. The traditional accusation of the blood libel was based on the assumption that Jewish doctrine, as it transpires in the Talmud, legitimizes murder of Christians and consumption of their blood, i.e., the criminality of the Jews and their innate cannibalism. In the contemporary twenty-first-century world, the map of blood libel in general, and more precisely the spread of blood libel derivatives, follows closely the international map of anti-Israeli sentiment and anti-Semitism.
