- Person
- Sholem Aleichem
- Lived
- 1859–1916
- Field
- Yiddish literature
- From
- Russian-Ukrainian
The story
The blood libel is the false accusation that Jews murder Christians, especially children, to use their blood in religious rituals. It spread in medieval Europe and persisted into modern times. In the Russian Empire of Sholem Aleichem's day it still endangered Jewish lives. In 1903 an antisemitic newspaper's claim that a murdered boy had been killed by Jews for his blood helped spark the Kishinev pogrom, in which dozens of Jews were killed.
The most notorious modern case was the Beilis affair, which began in Kyiv in 1911, when a Jewish man, Menahem Mendel Beilis, was accused of the ritual murder of a Christian boy. While the affair was still unfolding, Sholem Aleichem, by then the most popular Yiddish writer of his time, wrote a novel in response: Der blutiker shpas, The Bloody Hoax. It was serialised in 1912 in the Warsaw Yiddish daily Haynt and published in book form in 1915, with a complete Russian translation appearing in 1914.
The novel borrows its premise from Mark Twain's The Prince and the Pauper. Two school friends, a Russian named Grigory "Grisha" Popov and a Jew named Hershel "Hershke" Rabinovich, decide to swap identities and live each other's lives for a year. The surnames are a joke in themselves: Popov comes from the Russian word for priest, Rabinovich from rabbi. The twist that gives the book its title is that Grisha, living as a Jew, is accused of killing a Christian child and experiences the blood libel from the inside.
By placing a Christian in the position of the accused, Sholem Aleichem invited readers to see prejudice through the eyes of its victims and to recognise the absurdity of the charge. Humour and tragedy sit side by side in the book, as they do throughout his work. The novel was written quickly, and many critics judged it weaker than his best fiction, but it later came to be valued for its historical and social interest.
The book has found new readers in translation, including a Hebrew version in 1985 and Aliza Shevrin's English translation in 1991. It also inspired a Russian silent film in 1918. It stands as a reminder that the writer best known for gentle comedy also used his art to confront hatred directly.
Why it matters
The Bloody Hoax used storytelling to expose the cruelty and absurdity of the blood libel, encouraging empathy across religious lines.
About Sholem Aleichem
The great humorist of Yiddish literature, creator of Tevye the Dairyman, Menakhem-Mendl and Motl, whose stories became the basis for Fiddler on the Roof.
More about Sholem Aleichem
- Sholem Aleichem's last novel told an immigrant boy's storySholem Aleichem's last novel, Motl, Peysi the Cantor's Son, follows a boy not quite nine from a poor shtetl to a new life in New York. It was unfinished at his death in 1916.
- Sholem Aleichem's Tevye stories gave the world FiddlerSholem Aleichem, often called 'the Jewish Mark Twain', created Tevye the Dairyman, whose stories became Fiddler on the Roof, performed from Broadway to Tokyo.
Sources
- Sholem Aleichem Wikipedia
- The Bloody Hoax Wikipedia
- Kishinev pogrom Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.