Christians slandered Jews, claiming they added Christian blood to matzah and wine for Passover. The first "blood libel" originated in England in the 12th century. In Russia, the Beilis affair, a blood libel from 1911-1913, became infamous.
The Jewish publicist and philosopher Asher Ginzberg (1856-1927) wrote in his article "Blood Libel": A Russian writer innocently asked me the other day: "If the whole world hates the Jews, is it possible that the whole world is wrong, and only the Jews are right?"
The same question creeps into the minds of some Jews: "How can we claim that all those evil qualities and deeds that the whole world attributes to the Jews are nothing more than nonsense?"
We must, therefore, find some way to free ourselves from the influence of "common opinion" regarding the qualities and moral worth of Jews, so that we are not ashamed of ourselves and do not think that we are truly the worst in the world, that we have not, over time, become what someone else's imagination sees us as.
This method is "common opinion" itself in the form of the "blood libel." This libel is the only one among all others about which no "common consensus" can make us doubt: is it possible that the whole world is wrong, and we alone are right? This libel is based on an absolute lie, and it has not the slightest chance of citing any "false generalization." Every Jew who was raised among his people knows beyond a doubt and certainty that among all Jews, not a single one consumes blood to please God. It is this firm conviction of ours in the fallacy of "common opinion" that we must firmly cherish in our memory, and it will help us root out from our souls the tendency to submit to the authority of "the whole world" in everything else. Let the whole world say what it will about our moral shortcomings, but we know that all this "agreement" is based on a massive lack of logic.
For who knows the Jew as well as the Jews do, as he truly is? Who will weigh Jews against non-Jews who are similar to them in all other respects—merchants against merchants, persecuted against persecuted, hungry against hungry, and so on—who has weighed them all in the scales of reason and determined that the scales tip in one direction or another?
Could it be that only the Jews are right? It very well may be, and the "blood libel" is the best proof. After all, here the Jews are pure and innocent, like the angels themselves. Jews and blood! Is there anything in the world that contradicts each other so much as these two concepts?